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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Journal of a Disappointed Man, by Wilhelm Nero Pilate Barbellion
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: The Journal of a Disappointed Man
+
+Author: Wilhelm Nero Pilate Barbellion
+
+Release Date: April 30, 2012 [eBook #39585]
+[Most recently updated: April 28, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Marc D’Hooghe
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE JOURNAL OF A DISAPPOINTED MAN ***
+
+
+
+
+THE JOURNAL OF A DISAPPOINTED MAN
+
+BY
+
+W.N.P. BARBELLION
+
+
+
+WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY H.G. WELLS
+
+
+
+NEW YORK
+
+GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
+
+1919
+
+
+"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift,
+nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet
+riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time
+and chance happeneth to them all.
+
+"For man also knoweth not his time; as the fishes that are taken in an
+evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons
+of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them."
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+By H.G. WELLS
+
+Your egoist, like the solitary beasts, lives only for himself; your
+altruist declares that he lives only for others; for either there may be
+success or failure but for neither can there be tragedy. For even if the
+altruist meets nothing but ingratitude, what has he to complain of? His
+premises abolish his grounds of complaint. But both egoist and altruist
+are philosophical abstractions. The human being by nature and necessity
+is neither egoist nor altruist; he trims a difficult course between the
+two; for the most part we are, within the limits of our powers of
+expression, _egotists_, and our desire is to think and if possible talk
+and write about this marvellous experiment of ourselves, with all the
+world--or as much as we can conveniently assemble--for audience. There
+is variety in our styles. Some drape the central figure; some let it
+rather appear than call attention to it; some affect a needless
+frankness: "_I_ am an egotist, mind you, and I pretend nothing else";
+some by adopting a pose with accessories do at least develop so great
+and passionate an interest in the accessories as to generalise and
+escape more or less completely from self. An egotism like an eggshell is
+a thing from which to escape; the art of life is that escape. The
+fundamental art of life is to recover the sense of that great
+self-forgetful continuous life from which we have individually budded
+off. Many people have done this through religion, which begins with a
+tremendous clamour to some saviour god or other to recognise us and ends
+in our recognition of him; or through science, when your egotist begins
+with: "Behold me! I, I your humble servant, am a scientific man, devoted
+to the clear statement of truth," and ends with so passionate a
+statement of truth that self is forgotten altogether.
+
+In this diary of an intensely egotistical young naturalist, tragically
+caught by the creeping approach of death, we have one of the most moving
+records of the youthful aspects of our universal struggle. We begin with
+one of those bright schoolboys that most of us like to fancy we once
+were, that many of us have come to love as sons or nephews or younger
+brothers, and this youngster is attracted by natural science, by the
+employments of the naturalist and by the thought of being himself some
+day a naturalist. From the very beginning we find in this diary the
+three qualities, from the narrowest to broadest. "Observe me," he says
+to himself, "I am observing nature." There is the self-conscious,
+self-centred boy. But he also says "I am observing nature!" And at
+moments comes the clear light. He forgets himself in the twilight cave
+with the bats or watching the starlings in the evening sky, he becomes
+just you and I and the mind of mankind gathering knowledge. And the
+diary, as the keen edge of untimely fate cuts down into the sensitive
+tissue, shows us presently, after outcries and sorrow and darkness of
+spirit, the habits of the observer rising to the occasion. Not for him,
+he realises, are the long life, the honours of science, the Croonian
+lecture, the listening Royal Society, one's memory embalmed in specific
+or generic names, the sure place in the temple of fame, that once filled
+his boyish dreams. But here is something close at hand to go on
+observing manfully to the end, in which self may be forgotten, and that
+is his own tormented self, with desire still great and power and hope
+receding. "I will go on with this diary," I read between the lines. "You
+shall have at least one specimen, carefully displayed and labelled. Here
+is a recorded unhappiness. When you talk about life and the rewards of
+life and the justice of life and its penalties, what you say must square
+with this."
+
+Such is what we have here. It will be going beyond the necessities of
+this preface to expatiate upon a certain thread of unpremeditated and
+exquisite beauty that runs through the story this diary tells. To all
+sensitive readers it will be plain enough, and those who cannot see it
+plain do not deserve to have it underlined for them, that, still
+unseeing, they may pretend to see. Nor need we dilate upon the
+development of the quality of this diary from the rather fussy egotism
+of the earlier half. But it may be well to add a few explanatory facts
+that the opening chapters rather take for granted. Barbellion began life
+at a material as well as a physical disadvantage; neither of his parents
+were sturdy people, his mother died at last of constitutional heart
+weakness, and his father belonged to that most unfortunate class, the
+poor educated, who live lives of worry in straitened circumstances.
+Barbellion's father was a newspaper reporter in a west country town, his
+income rarely exceeded a couple of hundred pounds a year; the
+educational facilities of the place were poor, and young Barbellion had
+to get such learning as he could as a day boy at a small private school,
+his father supplementing this meagre training and presently taking him
+on as an apprentice reporter. How the passion for natural science arose
+does not appear in this diary; we already find the naturalist formed in
+the first schoolboy entries. An uncle, a chemist, seems to have
+encouraged the tendency, and to have given him textbooks and other help.
+Somehow at any rate he acquired a considerable amount of knowledge; by
+the time he was eighteen he was already publishing quite excellent
+observations of his own in such periodicals as the _Zoologist_, and by
+the time he was twenty he could secure an appointment as assistant
+naturalist to the director of a well-known marine biological station. It
+was a success, as the reader will learn, gained only to be renounced.
+His father was ill and he had to stand by his family; our economical
+country cannot afford to make biologists out of men who can earn a
+living as hack reporters. Poverty and science are sisters wherever the
+flag of Britain waves; for how could the rich live if we wasted money on
+that sort of thing? But the dream was not altogether abandoned, and in
+1911 Barbellion got a post, one of the dozen or so of rare and coveted
+opportunities to toil in a scientific atmosphere that our Empire
+affords; he secured an assistantship at the Natural History Museum,
+South Kensington, to which a living wage was attached, a fair equivalent
+to a reporter's earnings. The rest of the story needs no helping out.
+Let me only add that since 1911 Barbellion, in spite of his steadily
+diminishing strength, has published articles in both British and
+American periodicals, that entirely justify the statement that in him
+biological science loses one of the most promising of its recent
+recruits. His scientific work is not only full and exact but it has
+those literary qualities, the grace, the power of handling, the breadth
+of reference, which have always distinguished the best English
+biological work, and which mark off at once the true scientific man from
+the mere collector and recorder of items. With this much introduction
+Barbellion may be left to tell the tragedy of his hopes and of the dark,
+unforeseen, unforeseeable, and inexplicable fate that has overtaken
+him.
+
+
+
+
+PART I--THE JOURNAL BEGINS WHEN ITS AUTHOR IS A LITTLE OVER 13 YEARS
+OLD.
+
+_[The Following are Selected Entries.]_
+
+
+
+
+1903
+
+
+_January_ 3.
+
+Am writing an essay on the life-history of insects and have abandoned
+the idea of writing on "How Cats Spend their Time."
+
+_January_ 17.
+
+Went with L---- out catapult shooting. While walking down the main road
+saw a Goldfinch, but very indistinctly--it might not have been one. Had
+some wonderful shots at a tree creeper in the hedge about a foot away
+from me. While near a stream, L---- spotted what he thought to be some
+Wild Duck and brought one down, hitting it right in the head. He is a
+splendid shot. We discovered on examining it that it was _not_ Wild Duck
+at all but an ordinary tame Wild Duck--a hen. We ran away, and to-night
+L---- tells me he saw the Farmer enter the poulterer's shop with the
+bird in his hand.
+
+_January_ 19.
+
+Went to A---- Wood with S---- and L----. Saw a Barn Owl (_Strix
+flammea_) flying in broad daylight. At A---- Woods, be it known, there
+is a steep cliff where we were all out climbing to inspect and find all
+the likely places for birds to build in, next spring. S---- and I got along
+all right, but L----, being a bit too careless, let go his hold on a
+tree and fell headlong down. He turned over and over and seemed to us to
+pitch on the back of his neck. However, he got up as cheerfully as ever,
+saying, "I don't like that--a bit of a nasty knock."
+
+_February_ 8.
+
+Joe became the mother of one kitten to-day. It was born at 1.20. It is
+a tiny little thing. One would almost call it deformed. It is gray.
+
+_March_ 18.
+
+Our Goldfinch roosts at 5.30. Joe's kitten is a very small one. "Magpie"
+is its name.
+
+_March_ 28.
+
+Went our usual ramble. But we were unfortunate from the very beginning.
+First, when we reached the "Nightjar Field," we found there were two men
+at the bottom of it cutting the hedge, so we decided not to venture on,
+as Gimbo and Bounce were with us, and it would look like poaching. Later
+on, we came to a splendid wood, but had to withdraw hastily from it, an
+old farmer giving us a severe chase. There were innumerable rabbits in
+the wood, so, of course, the dogs barked hard. I gave them a sound
+beating when we got back out of danger, The old farmer is known as "Bale
+the Bell-hanger."
+
+_April_ 2.
+
+I was glad yesterday to see the egg season so well in. I shall have to
+get blow-pipes and egg drills. Spring has really arrived and even the
+grasshoppers are beginning to stridulate, yet Burke describes these
+little creatures as being "loud and troublesome" and the chirp
+unpleasant. Like Samuel Johnson, he must have preferred brick walls to
+green hedges. Many people go for a walk and yet are unable to admire
+Nature simply because their power of observation is untrained. Of course
+some are not suited to the study at all and do not trouble themselves
+about it. In that case they should not talk of what they do not
+understand.... I might have noticed that I have used the term "Study of
+Nature." But it cannot be called a _study_. It _is_ a pastime of sheer
+delight, with naught but beautiful dreams and lovely thoughts, where we
+are urged forward by the fact that we are in God's world which He made
+for us to be our comfort in time of trouble.... Language cannot express
+the joy and happy forgetfulness during a ramble in the country. I do
+not mean that all the ins and outs and exact knowledge of a naturalist
+are necessary to produce such delight, but merely the common
+objects--Sun, Thrush, Grasshopper, Primrose, and Dew.
+
+_April_ 21.
+
+S---- and I have made a little hut in the woods out of a large natural
+hole in the ground by a big tree. We have pulled down branches all
+around it and stuck in upright sticks as a paling. We are training ivy
+to grow over the sticks. We smoke "Pioneer" cigarettes here and hide the
+packets in a hole under the roots of the tree. It's like a sort of
+cupboard.
+
+_August_ 6.
+
+In the evening, S---- and I cycled to S----, and when it was dark we
+went down on the rocks and lit a fire which crackled and burnt in the
+dusk of the evening.... Intend to do a bit to Beetles these hols. Rev.
+J. Wood in the _B.O.P_. has incited me to take them up, and it is really
+time, for at present I am as ignorant as I can hang together of the
+Coleoptera.
+
+_December_ 24.
+
+Went out with L---- to try to see the squirrels again. We could not find
+one and were just wondering if we should draw blank when L---- noticed
+one clinging to the bark of a tree with a nut in its mouth. We gave it a
+good chase, but it escaped into the thickest part of the fir tree, still
+carrying the nut, and we gave up firing at it. Later on, L---- got
+foolishly mischievous--owing, I suppose, to our lack of sport--and
+unhinged a gate which he carried two yards into a copse, and threw it on
+the ground. Just then, he saw the Squirrel again and jumped over the
+hedge into the copse, chasing it from tree to tree with his catty.
+Having lost it, he climbed a fir tree into a Squirrel's drey at the top
+and sat there on the tree top, and I, below, was just going to lift the
+gate back when I looked up and saw a farmer watching me, menacing and
+silent. I promptly dropped the gate and fled. L---- from his Squirrel's
+drey, not knowing what had happened, called out to me about the
+nest--that there was nothing in it. The man looked up and asked him who
+he was and who I was. L---- would not say and would not come down. The
+farmer said he would come up. L---- answered that if he did he would
+"gob" [_i.e_. spit] on him. Eventually L---- climbed down and asked the
+farmer for a glass of cider. The latter gave him his boot and L---- ran
+away.
+
+
+
+
+1904
+
+
+_January_ 23.
+
+Went to the meet of the Stag hounds. Saw a hind in the stream at
+L----with not a horse, hound, or man in sight. It looked quite
+unconcerned and did not seem to have been hunted. I tried to head it,
+but a confounded sheep-dog got there before me and drove it off in the
+wrong direction. I _was_ mad, because if I had succeeded in heading it
+and had there been a kill, I should have got a slot. Got home at 6.30,
+after running and walking fifteen miles--tired out.
+
+_April_ 5.
+
+Just read _Stalky & Co_. Of Stalky, Beetle, and McTurk, I like Beetle
+best.
+
+_April_ 14.
+
+Won the School Gymnasium championship (under fifteen).
+
+_August_ 25.
+
+Had quite an adventure to-day. D---- and I cycled to the Lighthouse at
+----. On the way, in crossing the sands near the Hospital Ship we espied
+a lame Curlew which could hardly fly. I gave chase, but it managed to
+scramble over a gut full of water about two yards wide. D---- took off
+his boots and stockings and carried me over on his back, and we both
+raced across the sands to where the Curlew lay in an exhausted state. I
+picked him up and carried him off under my arm, like the boy with the
+Goose that laid the golden eggs. All the time, the bird screamed loudly,
+opening its enormously long bill and struggling to escape. Arrived at
+the gut again, we found that the incoming tide had made the gut wider
+and deeper so that we were cut off from the mainland, and found it
+necessary to wade across at once before it got deeper. As I had to carry
+a pair of field-glasses as well as my boots and stockings, I handed over
+the struggling bird to D----. While wading across, I suddenly sank to my
+waist in a sandpit. This frightened me, and I was glad to reach the
+other side in safety. But on arrival I found D----, but no Curlew. In
+wading across the current, he grew flurried and let it go. The tide
+swept it upstream, and the poor bird, I fear, perished by drowning....
+Knocked up my friend P----, who is skipper of the ship _N_---- and asked
+him if he had a fire so that I could dry myself. He replied that they
+had no fire but that his "missus" would look out a pair of pants for me.
+Before falling in with this plan unconditionally, I thought it best to
+inspect the garment. However, it was quite clean--a pair of blue serge
+seaman's trousers, very baggy in the seat and far too long. But I turned
+up the bottoms and hid the baggy part underneath my overcoat. So, I got
+back home!
+
+_September_ 8.
+
+Wet all day. Toothache.
+
+_September_ 9.
+
+Toothache.
+
+_September_ 10.
+
+Toothache.
+
+_September_ 11.
+
+Toothache.
+
+_Xmas Day._
+
+Mother and Dad wanted to give me one of G.A. Henty's, but, fearing lest
+I did not want it, they did not put my name in it, so that if I wished I
+could change it. Intend doing this. Am reading the _Origin of Species_.
+It requires careful study, but I understand it so far and shall go on.
+
+_December_ 26.
+
+I have caught nothing in my traps yet. A little while ago I set a
+springe and two horse-hair nooses in the reed bed for water rails. I
+have bought a book on practical trapping.
+
+
+
+
+1905
+
+
+_January_ 15.
+
+I am thinking that on the whole I am a most discontented mortal. I get
+fits of what I call "What's the good of anything" mania. I keep asking
+myself incessantly till the question wears me out: "What's the good of
+going into the country _naturalising_? what's the good of studying so
+hard? where is it going to end? will it lead anywhere?"
+
+_February_ 17.
+
+When I can get hold of any one interested in Natural History I talk away
+in the most garrulous manner and afterwards feel ashamed of myself for
+doing it.
+
+_May_ 15.
+
+_The Captain_, in answer to my letter, advises me to join one of the
+ordinary professions and then follow up Nat. History as a recreation, or
+else join Science Classes at S. Kensington, or else by influence get a
+post in the Natural History Museum. But I shall see.
+
+_June_ 9.
+
+During dinner hour, between morning and afternoon school, went out on
+the S---- B---- River Bank, and found another Sedge Warbler's nest. This
+is the fifth I have found this year. People who live opposite on the
+T---- V---- hear them sing at night and think they are Nightingales!
+
+_June_ 27.
+
+On reviewing the past egg-season, I find in all I have discovered 232
+nests belonging to forty-four species. I only hope I shall be as
+successful with the beetle-season.
+
+_August_ 15.
+
+A hot, sultry afternoon, during most of which I was stretched out on the
+grass beside an upturned stone where a battle royal was fought between
+Yellow and Black Ants. The victory went to the hardy little Yellows....
+By the way, I held a Newt by the tail to-day and it emitted a squeak! So
+that the Newt has a voice after all.
+
+_August_ 26.
+
+In bed with a feverish cold. I am afraid I have very few Nat. His.
+observations to make. It is hard to observe anything at all when lying
+in bed in a dull bedroom with one small window. Gulls and Starlings
+pass, steam engines whistle, horses' feet clatter down the street, and
+sometimes the voice of a passer-by reaches me, and often the loud laugh
+that speaks the vacant mind. I can also hear my own cough echoing
+through my head, and, by the evening, the few pages of Lubbock's _Ants,
+Bees, and Wasps_ which I struggled to get through during the day rattle
+through my brain till I am disgusted to find I have them by heart. The
+clock strikes midnight and I wait for the morning. Oh! what a weary
+world.
+
+_October_ 13.
+
+Down with another cold. Feeling pretty useless. It's a wonder I don't
+develop melancholia.
+
+_November_ 6.
+
+By 7 a.m. H---- and I were down on the mudflats of the River with
+field-glasses, watching Waders. Ringed Plover in great numbers.
+
+
+
+
+1906
+
+_January_ 13.
+
+I have always had one ambition to be a great naturalist. That is, I
+suppose, a child's fancy, and I can see my folly in hoping for such
+great things. Still, there is no reason why I should not become a
+_learned_ naturalist if I study hard. I hope that whatever I do I shall
+do in the hope of increasing knowledge of truth and not for my own fame.
+This entry may suggest that I am horribly conceited. But really I am as
+humble as possible. I know I have advanced beyond many others, and I
+know I shall advance further, but why be conceited?... What a short life
+we have, and what heaps of glorious work to be done! Supper bell--so I
+am off.... This reads like Isaac Walton's funny mixtures of the sublime
+with the ridiculous. He discusses abstract happiness and the best salmon
+sauce all in one breath.
+
+_February_ 26.
+
+Although it is a grand achievement to have added but one jot or tittle
+to the sum of human knowledge it is grander still to have added a
+thought. It is best for a man to try to be both poet and naturalist--not
+to be too much of a naturalist and so overlook the beauty of things, or
+too much of a poet and so fail to understand them or even perceive those
+hidden beauties only revealed by close observation.
+
+_March_ 17.
+
+Woke up this morning covered with spots, chest inflamed, and bad cough.
+H---- carted me down from the Attic to the Lower Bedroom, and when the
+Dr. came he confirmed the general opinion that I had measles. It is
+simply disgusting, I have somewhere near 10,000 spots on me.
+
+_April_ 27.
+
+Went to A---- Woods, where, strange to say, I again saw Mary. But she
+had a tribe of friends with her, so did not speak, but watched her from
+a distance through my field-glasses.
+
+_May_ 8.
+
+On interviewing my old friend Dr. H----, found I had chickenpox. This
+instead of being a Diary of a Naturalist's observations[1] will be one
+of infectious diseases.
+
+_May_ 28.
+
+[Letter from Editor of _Countryside_ to my brother saying that if the
+_Countryside_ grew he might be able to offer me a billet. "Meanwhile he
+will be able to get along with his pen ... he will soon make a living
+and in time too a name."] This is a bit of all right. I shall always be
+on the look-out for a job on a N.H. Journal.
+
+_December_ 7.
+
+Went to F---- Duckponds. Flocks of Wigeon and Teal on the water. Taking
+advantage of a dip in the land managed to stalk them splendidly, and for
+quite a long time I lay among the long grass watching them through my
+field-glasses. But during the day Wild Duck are not particularly lively
+or interesting birds. They just rest serenely on the water like floating
+corks on a sheet of glass. Occasionally one will paddle around lazily.
+But for the most part they show a great ennui and seem so sleepy and
+tired that one would almost think to be able to approach and feed them
+out of the hand. But I moved one hand carelessly and the whole flock was
+up in a minute and whizzing across the river. Afterwards, at dusk, on
+returning to the ponds, they had come back; but now that the sun was
+down, those dozy, flapdoodle creatures of the afternoon were transformed
+into quacking, quarrelsome, blustering birds that squabbled and chivvied
+each other, every moment seizing the chance of a luxurious dip, flinging
+the ice-cold water off their backs with a shake of the tail that seemed
+to indicate the keenest-edged delight.
+
+It was now quite dark. A Snipe rose at my feet and disappeared into the
+darkness. Coots and Moorhens clekked, and a Little Grebe grew bold and
+began to dive and fish quite close to me, methodically working its way
+upstream and so quartering out its feeding area.
+
+A happy half-hour! Alas! I enjoy these moments the more as they recede.
+Not often do I realise the living present. That is always difficult. It
+is the mere shades--the ghosts of the dead days--that are dearest to me.
+
+Spent my last day at school. De Quincey says (or was it Johnson?) that
+whenever we do anything for the last time, provided we have done it
+regularly for years before, we are a little melancholy, even though it
+has been distasteful to us.... True.
+
+_December_ 14.
+
+Signed my Death Warrant, _i.e._, my articles apprenticing me to
+journalism for five years. By Jove! I shall work frantically during the
+next five years so as to be ready at the end of them to take up a
+Natural History appointment.
+
+
+[1] Up to 1911, the Journal is mainly devoted to records of observations
+in general Natural History and latterly in Zoology alone.
+
+
+
+
+1907
+
+
+_March_ 1.
+
+As long as he has good health, a man need never despair. Without good
+health, I _might_ keep a long while in the race, yet as the goal of my
+ambition grew more and more unattainable I should surely remember the
+words of Keats and give up: "There is no fiercer Hell than the failure
+of a great ambition."
+
+_March_ 14.
+
+Have been reading through the Chemistry Course in the Harmsworth
+_Self-Educator_ and learning all the latest facts and ideas about
+radium. I would rather have a clear comprehension of the atom as a solar
+system than a private income of £100 a year. If only I had eyes to go on
+reading without a stop!
+
+_May_ 1.
+
+Met an old gentleman in E----, a naturalist with a great contempt for
+the Book of Genesis. He wanted to know how the Kangaroo leapt from
+Australia to Palestine and how Noah fed the animals in the Ark. He
+rejects the Old T. theogony and advised me to read "Darwin and J.G.
+Wood!" Silly old man!
+
+_May_ 22.
+
+To Challacombe and then walked across Exmoor. This is the first time I
+have been on Exmoor. My first experience of the Moors came bursting in
+on me with a flood of ideas, impressions, and delights. I cannot write
+out the history of to-day. It would take too long and my mind is a
+palpitating tangle. I have so many things to record that I cannot record
+one of them. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to draw up an
+inventory of things seen and heard and trust to my memory to fill in the
+details when in the future I revert to this date. Too much joy, like too
+much pain, simply makes me prostrate. It wounds the organism. It is too
+much. I shall try to forget it all as quickly as possible so as to be
+able to return to egg-collecting and bird-watching the sooner as a calm
+and dispassionate observer. Yet these dear old hills. How I love them. I
+cannot leave them without one friendly word. I wish I were a shepherd!
+
+At the "Ring of Bells" had a long yarn with the landlord, who, as he
+told us the story of his life, was constantly interrupted but never
+disconcerted by the exuberant loyalty and devotion of his wife--a stout,
+florid, creamy woman, who capped every story with: "Ees quite honest,
+sir; no 'arm at all in old Joshua."
+
+_June_ 5.
+
+A half-an-hour of to-day I spent in a punt under a copper beech out of
+the pouring rain listening to Lady ----'s gamekeeper at A---- talk about
+beasts and local politics--just after a visit of inspection to the
+Heronry in the firs on the island in the middle of the Lake. It was
+delightful to hear him describing a Heron killing an Eel with "a dap on
+the niddick," helping out the figure with a pat on the nape of his thick
+bull neck.
+
+_July_ 22.
+
+Am reading Huxley's _Crayfish_. H---- brought me in that magnificent
+aculeate _Chrysis ignita_.
+
+_August_ 15.
+
+Met _her_ in the market with M----. I just lifted my hat and passed on.
+She has the most marvellous brown eyes I have ever seen. She is
+perfectly self-possessed. A bad sign this.
+
+_August_ 18.
+
+When I feel ill, cinema pictures of the circumstances of my death flit
+across my mind's eye. I cannot prevent them. I consider the nature of
+the disease and all I said before I died--something heroic, of course!
+
+_August_ 31.
+
+She is a ripping girl. Her eyes are magnificent. I have never seen any
+one better looking.
+
+_October_ 1.
+
+In the afternoon dissected a Frog, following Milnes Marshall's Book. Am
+studying Chemistry and attending classes at the Evening School and
+reading Physiology (Foster's). Am also teaching myself German. I wish I
+had a microscope.
+
+_October_ 3.
+
+What heaps of things to be done! How short the time to do them in! An
+appetite for knowledge is apt to rush one off one's feet, like any other
+appetite if not curbed. I often stand in the centre of the Library here
+and think despairingly how impossible it is ever to become possessed of
+all the wealth of facts and ideas contained in the books surrounding me
+on every hand. I pull out one volume from its place and feel as if I
+were no more than giving one dig with a pick in an enormous quarry. The
+Porter spends his days in the Library keeping strict vigil over this
+catacomb of books, passing along between the shelves and yet never
+paying heed to the almost audible susurrus of desire--the desire every
+book has to be taken down and read, to live, to come into being in
+somebody's mind. He even hands the volumes over the counter, seeks them
+out in their proper places or returns them there without once realising
+that a Book is a Person and not a Thing. It makes me shudder to think of
+Lamb's _Essays_ being carted about as if they were fardels.
+
+_October_ 16.
+
+Dissected an Eel. Cassell's _Natural History_ says the Air-bladder is
+divided. This is not so in the one I opened. Found what I believe to be
+the lymphatic heart in the tail beneath the vent.
+
+
+
+
+1908
+
+
+_March_ 10.
+
+Am working frantically so as to keep up my own work with the daily
+business of reporting. Shorthand, type-writing, German, Chemistry
+classes, Electricity lectures, Zoology (including dissections) and field
+work. Am reading Mosenthal's _Muscle and Nerve_.
+
+_April_ 7.
+
+Sectioned a leech. H---- has lent me a hand microtome and I have
+borrowed an old razor. My table in the Attic is now fitted up quite like
+a Laboratory. I get up every morning at 6 a.m. to dissect. Have worked
+at the Anatomy of _Dytiscus, Lumbricus_, another Leech, and _Petromyzon
+fluviatilis_ all collected by myself. The "branchial basket" of
+_Petromyzon_ interested me vastly. But it's a brute to dissect.[1]
+
+_May_ 1.
+
+Cycled to the Lighthouse at the mouth of the Estuary. Underneath some
+telegraph wires, picked up a Landrail in excellent condition. The colour
+of the wings is a beautiful warm chestnut. While sweeping the sandhills
+with my field-glasses in search of Ring Plover, which nest there in the
+shingle beaches, I espied a Shelduck (_Tadorna_) squatting on a piece of
+level ground. On walking up cautiously, found it was dead--a Drake in
+splendid plumage and quite fresh and uninjured. Put him in my poacher's
+pocket, alongside of the Landrail. My coat looked rather bulgy, for a
+Shelduck is nearly as big as a Goose. Heard a Grasshopper Warbler--a
+rare bird in North ----. Later, after much patient watching, saw the
+bird in a bramble bush, creeping about like a mouse.
+
+On the sea-shore picked up a number of Sea Mice (_Aphrodite_) and
+bottled them in my jar of 70 per cent., as they will come in useful for
+dissection. Also found the cranium of a _Scyllium_, which I will
+describe later on.
+
+Near the Lighthouse watched some fishermen bring in a large Salmon in a
+seine net worked from the shore. It was most exciting. Cycled down three
+miles of hard sand with the wind behind me to the village where I had
+tea and--as if nothing could stay to-day's good luck--met Margaret ----.
+I showed her one by one all my treasures--Rail, Duck, Skull, Sea Mice,
+etc., and felt like Thomas Edward, beloved of Samuel Smiles. To her I
+must have appeared a very ridiculous person.
+
+"How do you know it's the skull of a dog-fish?" she asked, incredulous.
+
+"How do I know anything?" I said, a little piqued.
+
+On arriving home found T---- awaiting me with the news that he had
+discovered a Woodpecker's nest. When will the luck cease? I have never
+had such a flawless ten hours in _le grand air_. These summer days eat
+into my being. The sea has been roaring into my ears and the sun blazing
+down so that even the backs of my hands are sunburnt. And then: those
+coal-black eyes. Ah! me, she _is_ pretty.
+
+_May_ 2.
+
+Dissected the Sheldrake. Very entertained to discover the extraordinary
+asymmetry of the syrinx....
+
+_May_ 3.
+
+Dissected Corncrake, examining carefully the pessulus, bronchidesmus
+(incomplete), _tympani-form and semi-lunar_ membranes of a very
+interesting syrinx....
+
+_May_ 6.
+
+Dissected one of the Sea Mice. It has a remarkable series of hepatic
+ducts running into the alimentary canal as in Nudibranchs....
+
+_May_ 9.
+
+_Spring in the Woods_
+
+Among the Oak Saplings we seemed enveloped in a cloud of green. The tall
+green grasses threw up a green light against the young green of the
+Oaks, and the sun managed to trickle through only here and there. Bevies
+of swinging bluebells grew in patches among the grass. Overhead in the
+oaks I heard secret leaf whispers--those little noiseless noises. Birds
+and trees and flowers were secretive and mysterious like expectant
+motherhood. All the live things plotted together, having the same big
+business in hand. Out in the sunlit meadows, there was a different
+influence abroad. Here everything was gay, lively, irresponsible. The
+brook prattled like an inconsequential schoolgirl. The Marsh Marigolds
+in flamboyant yellow sunbonnets played ring-a-ring-a-roses.
+
+An Oak Sapling should make an elderly man avuncular. There are so many
+tremendous possibilities about a well-behaved young oak that it is
+tempting to put a hand upon its shoulder and give some seasoned,
+timberly advice.
+
+_June_ 1.
+
+_A Small Red Viper_
+
+Went to L---- Sessions. After the Court rose, I transcribed my notes
+quickly and walked out to the famous Valley of Rocks which Southey
+described as the ribs of the old Earth poking through. At the bottom of
+one of the hills saw a snake, a Red Viper. Put my boot on him quickly so
+that he couldn't get away and then recognised him as a specimen of what
+I consider to be the fourth species of British Serpent--_Vipera rubra_.
+The difficulty was to know how to secure him. This species is more
+ferocious than the ordinary _V. bera_, and I did not like the idea of
+putting my hand down to seize him by the neck. I stood for some time
+with my foot so firmly pressed down on its back that my leg ached and I
+began to wonder if I had been bitten. I held on and presently hailed a
+baker's cart coming along the road. The man got out and ran across the
+grass to where I stood. I showed him what I had beneath my boot and he
+produced a piece of string which I fastened around the snake's tail and
+so gently hauled the little brute up. It already appeared moribund, but
+I squashed its head on the grass with my heel to make certain. After
+parting with the baker, to whom all thanks be given, I remember that
+Adders are tenacious of life and so I continue to carry him at string's
+length and occasionally wallop him against a stone. As he was lifeless I
+wrapped him in paper and put him in my pocket--though to make assurance
+doubly sure I left the string on and let its end hang out over my
+pocket. So home by a two hours' railway journey with the adder in the
+pocket of my overcoat and the overcoat on the rack over my head. Settled
+down to the reading of a book on Spinoza's _Ethics_. At home it proved
+to be quite alive, and, on being pulled out by the string, coiled up on
+the drawing-room floor and hissed in a fury, to my infinite surprise.
+Finished him off with the poker and so spoilt the skin.
+
+_July_ 18.
+
+Have had toothache for a week. Too much of a coward to have it out.
+Started for P---- early in the morning to report Mr. Duke, K.C. After a
+week's pain, felt a little dicky. All the way in the train kept
+hardening myself to the task in front of me by recollecting the example
+of Zola, who killed pain with work. So all day to-day I have endeavoured
+to act as if I had no pain--the worst of all pains--toothache. By the
+time I got home I was rather done up, but the pain was actually less.
+This gave me a furious joy, and, after days of morose silence, to-night
+at supper I made them all laugh by bursting out violently with, "I don't
+know whether you know it but I've had a horrible day to-day." I
+explained at length and received the healing ointment of much sympathy.
+Went to bed happy with tooth still aching. I fear it was scarcely
+playing the strict Zolaesque game to divulge the story of my
+sufferings.... No, I am not a martyr or a saint. Just an ordinary devil
+who's having a rough time.
+
+_August_ 17.
+
+_Prawning_
+
+Had a glorious time on the rocks at low tide prawning. Caught some
+Five-Bearded Rocklings and a large _Cottus bubalis_. The sun did not
+simply shine to-day--it came rushing down from the sky in a cataract and
+flooded the sands with light. Sitting on a rock, with prawning net over
+my knees I looked along three miles of flat hard and yellow sands. The
+sun poured down on them so heavily that it seemed to raise a luminous
+golden yellow dust for about three feet high.
+
+On the rocks was a pretty flapper in a pink sunbonnet--also prawning in
+company of S----, the artist, who has sent her picture to the Royal
+Academy. They saw I was a naturalist, so my services were secured to
+pronounce my judgment on a "fish" she had caught. It was a Squid, "an
+odd little beast," in truth, as she said. "The same class of animal," I
+volunteered, "as the Cuttlefish and Octopus."
+
+"Does it sting?"
+
+"Oh, no!"
+
+"Well, it ought to with a face like that." She laughed merrily, and the
+bearded but youthful artist laughed too.
+
+"I don't know anything about these things," he said hopelessly.
+
+"Nor I," said the naturalist modestly. "I study fish."
+
+This was puzzling. "Fish?" What was a Squid then?
+
+... The artist would stop now and then and raise his glasses at a
+passing ship, and Maud's face occasionally disappeared in the pink
+sunbonnet as she stooped over a pool to examine a seaweed or crab.
+
+She's a dear--and she gave me the Squid. What a merry little cuss!
+
+_September_ 1.
+
+Went with Uncle to see a Wesleyan minister whose fame as a microscopist,
+according to Uncle, made it worth my while to visit him. As I expected,
+he was just a silly old man, a diatomaniac fond of pretty-pretty slides
+and not a scientific man at all. He lectures Bands of Hope on the
+Butterfly's Life History and hates his next-door neighbour, who is also
+a microscopist and incidentally a scientific man, because he interests
+himself in "parasites and those beastly things."
+
+I remarked that his friend next door had shown me an Amphioxus.
+
+"Oh! I expect that's some beastly bacteria thing," he said petulantly.
+"I can't understand Wilkinson. He's a pervert."
+
+I told him what _Amphioxus_ was and laughed up my sleeve. He likes to
+think of Zoology as a series of pretty pictures illustrating beautiful
+moral truths. The old fellow's saving grace was enthusiasm.... Having
+focused an object for us, he would stand by, breathless, while we
+squinted down his gas-tube, and gave vent to tremendous expletives of
+surprise such as "Heavens," or "Jupiter." His eyes would twinkle with
+delight and straightway another miracle is selected for us to view.
+"They are all miracles," he said.
+
+"Those are the valves"--washing his hands with invisible soap--"no one
+has yet been able to solve the problem of the Diatom's valves. No one
+knows what they are--no, nor ever will know--why?--why can't we see
+behind the valves?--because God is behind the valves--that is why!"
+Amen.
+
+_October_ 1.
+
+Telegraphed 1,000 words of Lord ----'s speech at T----.
+
+Spent the night at a comfortable country inn and read Moore's lyrics.
+"Row gently here, my Gondolier," ran through my head continuously. The
+Inn is an old one with a long narrow passage that leads straight from
+front door to back with wainscoted smoke room and parlours on each side.
+China dogs, bran on the floor, and the picture of Derby Day with horses
+galloping incredibly, the drone of an old crony in the bar, and a
+pleasant barmy smell. Slept in a remarkable bedroom full of massive
+furniture, draped with cloth and covered with trinkets. The bed had a
+tremendous hood over it like a catafalque, and lying in it made me think
+I was an effigy. Read Moore till the small hours and then found I had
+left my handbag downstairs. Lit a candle and went on a voyage of
+discovery. Made a considerable noise, but roused no one. Entered
+drawing-room, kitchen, pantries, parlour, bar--everywhere looking for my
+bag and dropping candle grease everywhere! Slept in my day shirt. Tired
+out and slept like a top.
+
+_November_ 3.
+
+_Aristotle's Lantern_
+
+Dissected the Sea Urchin (_Echinus esculentus_). Very excited over my
+first view of Aristotle's Lantern. These complicated pieces of animal
+mechanism never smell of musty age--after æons of evolution. When I open
+a Sea Urchin and see the Lantern, or dissect a Lamprey and cast eyes on
+the branchial basket, such structures strike me as being as finished and
+exquisite as if they had just a moment before been tossed me fresh from
+the hands of the Creator. They are fresh, young, they smell _new_.
+
+_December_ 3.
+
+Hard at work dissecting a Dogfish. Ruridecanal Conference in the
+afternoon. I enjoy this double life I lead. It amazes me to be laying
+bare the brain of a dogfish in the morning and in the afternoon to be
+taking down in shorthand what the Bishop says on Mission Work.
+
+_December_ 4.
+
+Went to the Veterinary Surgeon and begged of him the skull of a horse.
+Carried the trophy home under my arm--bare to the public view. "Why,
+Lor', 'tis an ole 'orse's jib," M---- said when I got back.
+
+
+[1] There are numerous drawings of dissections scattered through the
+Journal about this period.
+
+
+
+
+1909
+
+
+_March_ 7.
+
+My programme of work is: (1) Continue German. (2) Sectioning embryo of
+(_a_) Fowl, (_b_) Newt. (3) Paper on Arterial System of Newts. (4)
+Psychology of Newts. (5) General Zoological Reading.
+
+_May_ 2.
+
+To C---- Hill. Too much taken with the beauty of the Woods to be able to
+do any nesting. Here are some of the things I saw: the bark on several
+of the trees in the mazzard orchards rubbed into a beautifully smooth,
+polished surface by the Red Devon Cows when scratching where it itched;
+I put my hand on the smooth almost cherry-red patch of bark and felt
+delighted and grateful that cows had fleas: the young shoots of the
+whortle-berry plants on the hill were red tipped with the gold of an
+almost horizontal sun. I caught a little lizard which slipped across my
+path.... Afar off down in the valley I had come through, in a convenient
+break in a holly bush, I could just see a Cow sitting on her matronly
+haunches in a field. She flicked her ears and two starlings settled on
+her back. A Rabbit swept out of a sweet-brier bush, and a Magpie flew
+out of the hedge on my right.
+
+In another direction I could see a field full of luscious, tall, green
+grass. Every stalk was so full of sap that had I cut one I am sure it
+would have bled great green drops. In the field some lambs were
+sleeping; one woke up and looked at me with the back of its head to the
+low sun, which shone through its two small ears and gave them a
+transparent pink appearance.
+
+No sooner am I rebaptized in the sun than I have to be turning home
+again. No sooner do "the sudden lilies push between the loosening fibres
+of the heart" than I am whisked back into the old groove--the daily
+round. If only I had more time!--more time in which to think, to love,
+to observe, to frame my disposition, to direct as far as in me lies the
+development and unfolding of my character, if only I could direct all my
+energies to the great and difficult profession of life, of being man
+instead of trifling with one profession that bores me and dabbling in
+another.
+
+_June_ 5.
+
+_On Lundy Island_
+
+Frankie is blowing Seagulls' eggs in the scullery. His father, after a
+day's work at the farm, is at his supper very hungry, yet immensely
+interested, and calls out occasionally,--
+
+"'Ow you're getting on, Foreman?"
+
+"All right, Capt.," says Frankie affectionately, and the unpleasant
+asthmatic, wheezy noise of the egg-blowing goes on.... There are three
+dogs asleep under the kitchen table; all three belong to different
+owners and neither one to A----.
+
+_June_ 6.
+
+Our egg-collecting with the Lighthouse Keepers. They walk about the
+cliffs as surefooted as cats, and feed their dogs on birds' eggs
+collected in a little bag at the end of a long pole. One dog ate three
+right off in as many minutes, putting his teeth through and cracking the
+shell, then lapping up the contents. Crab for tea.
+
+_June_ 7.
+
+After a glorious day at the N. end of the Island with the Puffins, was
+forced to-night to take another walk, as the smell of Albert's tobacco,
+together with that of his stockinged feet and his boots removed, was
+asphyxiating.
+
+_June_ 9.
+
+The governess is an awfully pretty girl. We have been talking together
+to-day and she asked me if I were a naturalist. I said "Yes." She said,
+"Well, I found a funny little beetle yesterday and Mr. S---- said I
+ought to have given it to you." Later, I felt she was looking at me, so
+I looked at her, across the beach. Yes! it was true. When our eyes met
+she gave me one of the most provokingly pretty smiles, then turned and
+went up the cliff path and so out of my life--to my everlasting regret.
+
+Return to-night in a cattle steamer.
+
+_June_ 18.
+
+Dr.----, M.A., F.R.S., D.C.L., LL.D., called in the office to-day, and
+seeing Dad typing, said, "Are you Mr. Barbellion?" Dad replied in the
+affirmative, whereupon the Doctor handed him his card, and Dad said he
+thought it was his son he wanted to see. He is an old gentleman aged
+eighty or thereabouts, with elastic-sided boots, an umbrella, and a
+guardian nephew--a youngster of about sixty. But I paid him due
+reverence as a celebrated zoologist and at his invitation [and to my
+infinite pride] accompanied him on an excursion to the coast, where he
+wanted to see _Philoscia Couchii_, which I readily turned up for him.
+
+I chanced to remark that I thought torsion in gastropods one of the most
+fascinating and difficult problems in Zoology. Why should a snail be
+twisted round?
+
+"Humph," said he, "why do we stand upright?" I was not such a fool as to
+argue with him, so pretended his reply was a knock-out. But it enabled
+me to size him up intellectually.
+
+In the evening dined with him at his hotel.... He knows Wallace and
+Haeckel personally, and I sat at his feet with my tongue out listening
+to personal reminiscences of these great men. However, he seemed never
+to have heard of Gaskell's Theory on the Origin of Vertebrates.
+
+_June_ 27.
+
+Walked to V----. As usual, Nature with clockwork regularity had all her
+taps turned on--larks singing, cherries ripening, and bees humming. It
+all bored me a little. Why doesn't she vary it a little?
+
+_August_ 8.
+
+A cold note from Dr. ---- saying that he cannot undertake the
+responsibility of advising me to give up journalism for zoology.
+
+A hellish cold in the head. Also a swingeing inflammation of the eyes.
+Just heard them singing in the Chapel over the way: "God shall wipe away
+all tears from their eyes." Hope so, I'm sure.
+
+_August_ 9.
+
+A transformation. After a long series of drab experiences in Sheffield,
+etc., the last being the climax of yesterday, an anti-cyclone arrived
+this morning and I sailed like an Eagle into cloudless, windless
+weather! _The Academy_ has published my article, my cold is suddenly
+better, and going down by the sea this afternoon met Mary ----!
+
+_August_ 20.
+
+Had an amusing letter from my maiden-aunt F----, who does not like "the
+agnostic atmosphere" in my _Academy_ article. Poor dear! She is sorry if
+I really feel like that, and, if I do, what a pity to put it into print.
+Then a Bible reference to the Epistle to the Romans.
+
+_Xmas Day_.
+
+Feeling ill--like a sloppy Tadpole. My will is paralysed. I visit the
+Doctor regularly to be stethoscoped, ramble about the streets, idly scan
+magazines in the Library and occasionally rink--with palpitation of the
+heart as a consequence. In view of the shortness, bitterness, and
+uncertainty of life, all scientific labour for me seems futile.
+
+
+
+
+1910
+
+
+_January_ 10.
+
+Better, but still very dicky: a pallid animal: a weevil in a nut. I have
+a weak heart, an enervated nervous system; I suffer from lack of funds
+with which to carry on my studies; I hate
+newspaper-reporting--particularly some skinny-witted speaker like ----;
+and last, but not least, there are women; all these worries fight over
+my body like jackals over carrion. Yet Zoology is all I want. Why won't
+Life leave me alone?
+
+_January_ 15.
+
+Reading Hardy's novels. He is altogether delightful in the subtlety with
+which he lets you perceive the first tiny love presentiments between his
+heroes and heroines--the casual touch of the hands, the peep of a foot
+or ankle underneath the skirt--all these in Hardy signify the cloud no
+bigger than a man's hand. They are the susurrus of the breeze before the
+storm, and you await what is to follow with palpitating heart.
+
+_February_ 3.
+
+For days past have been living in a state of mental ebullition. All
+kinds of pictures of Love, Life, and Death have been passing through my
+mind. Now I am too indolent and nerveless to set them down. Physically I
+am such a wreck that to carry out the least intention, such as putting
+on my boots, I have to flog my will like an Arab with a slave "in a sand
+of Ayaman." Three months ago when I got up before breakfast to dissect
+rabbits, dogfish, frogs, newts, etc., this would have seemed impossible.
+
+_February_ 6.
+
+Still visit Dr. ----'s surgery each week. I have two dull spots at the
+bottom of each lung. What a fine expressive word is _gloom_. Let me
+write it: GLOOM....
+
+One evening coming home in the train from L---- County Sessions I
+noticed a horrible, wheezy sound whenever I breathed deep. I was scared
+out of my life, and at once thought of consumption. Went to the Doctor's
+next day, and he sounded me and reassured me. I was afraid to tell him
+of the little wheezy sound at the apex of each lung, and I believed he
+overlooked it. So next day, very harassed, I went back to him again and
+told him. He _hadn't_ noticed it and looked glum. Have to keep out of
+doors as much as possible.
+
+The intense internal life I lead, worrying about my health, reading
+(eternally reading), reflecting, observing, feeling, loving and
+hating--with no outlet for superfluous steam, cramped and confined on
+every side, without any friends or influence of any sort, without even
+any acquaintances excepting my colleagues in journalism (whom I
+contemn)--all this will turn me into the most self-conscious, conceited,
+mawkish, gauche creature in existence.
+
+_March_ 6.
+
+The facts are undeniable: Life is pain. No sophistry can win me over to
+any other view. And yet years ago I set out so hopefully and
+healthfully--what are birds' eggs to me _now_? My ambition is enormous
+but vague. I am too distributed in my abilities ever to achieve
+distinction.
+
+_March_ 22.
+
+Had a letter from the Keeper of Zoology at the British Museum, advising
+me of three vacancies in his Dept., and asking me if I would like to
+try, etc.... So that Dr. ----'s visit to me bore some fruit.[1] Spent
+the morning day-dreaming.... Perhaps this is the flood tide at last! I
+shall work like a drayhorse to pull through if I am nominated.... I
+await developments in a frightfully turbulent state of mind. I have a
+frantic desire to control the factors which are going to affect my
+future so permanently. And this ferocious desire, of course, collides
+with a crash all day long with the fact that however much I desire there
+will still remain the unalterable logic of events.
+
+_April_ 7.
+
+... How delicious all this seemed! To be alive--thinking, seeing,
+enjoying, walking, eating--all quite apart from the amount of money in
+your purse or the prospects of a career. I revelled in the sensuous
+enjoyment of my animal existence.
+
+_June_ 2.
+
+Up to now my life has been one of great internal strife and
+struggle--the struggle with a great ambition and a weak will--unequal to
+the task of coping with it. I have planned on too big a scale, perhaps.
+I have put too great a strain on my talents, I have whipped a flagging
+will, I have been for ever cogitating, worrying, devising means of
+escape. Meanwhile, the moments have gone by unheeded and unenjoyed.
+
+_June_ 10.
+
+Legginess is bad enough in a woman, but bandy legginess is impossible.
+
+Solitude is good for the soul. After an hour of it, I feel as lofty and
+imperial as Marcus Aurelius.
+
+The best girl in the best dress immediately looks disreputable if her
+stockings be downgyved.
+
+Some old people on reaching a certain age go on living out of habit--a
+bad habit too.
+
+How much I can learn of a stranger by his laugh.
+
+Bees, Poppies, and Swallows!--and all they mean to him who really knows
+them! Or a White Gull on a piece of floating timber, or a troop of shiny
+Rooks close on the heels of a ploughman on a sunny autumn day.
+
+_June_ 30.
+
+My egoism appals me. Likewise the extreme intensification of the
+consciousness of myself. Whenever I walk down the High Street on a
+market day, my self-consciousness magnifies my proportions to the size
+of a Gulliver--so that it is grievous to reflect that in spite of that
+the townsfolk see me only as an insignificant bourgeois youth who
+reports meetings in shorthand.
+
+_July_ 17.
+
+We sang to-night in Church, "But when I know Thee as Thou art, I'll
+praise Thee as I ought." Exactly! Till then, farewell. We are a great
+little people, we humans. If there be no next world, still the Spirit of
+Man will have lived and uttered its protest.
+
+_July_ 22.
+
+_Our Simian Ancestry_
+
+How I hate the man who talks about the "brute creation," with an ugly
+emphasis on _brute_. Only Christians are capable of it. As for me, I am
+proud of my close kinship with other animals. I take a jealous pride in
+my Simian ancestry. I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy
+fellow living in the trees and that my frame has come down through
+geological time _via_ sea jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish,
+Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in
+the Garden of Eden?
+
+_August_ 9.
+
+I do not ever like going to bed. For me each day ends in a little
+sorrow. I hate the time when it comes to put my books away, to knock out
+my pipe and say "Good-night," exchanging the vivid pleasures of the day
+for the darkness of sleep and oblivion.
+
+_August_ 23.
+
+Spent the afternoon and evening till ten in the woods with Mary ----.
+Had tea in the Haunted House, and after sat in the Green Arbor until
+dark, when I kissed her. "Achilles was not the worse warrior for his
+probation in petticoats."
+
+_September_ 1.
+
+I hope to goodness she doesn't think I want to marry her. In the Park in
+the dark, kissing her. I was testing and experimenting with a new
+experience.
+
+_September_ 4.
+
+Last evening, after much mellifluous cajolery, induced her to _kiss me_.
+My private opinion about this whole affair is that all the time I have
+been at least twenty degrees below real love heat. In any case I am
+constitutionally and emotionally unfaithful. I said things which I did
+not believe just because it was dark and she was charming.
+
+_September_ 5.
+
+Read Thomas à Kempis in the train. It made me so angry I nearly flung it
+out of the window. "Meddle not with things that be too deep for thee,"
+he says, "but read such things as yield compunction to the heart rather
+than elevation to the head." Forsooth! Can't you see me?
+
+_September_ 15.
+
+A puzzling afternoon: weather perfect, the earth green and humming like
+a top, yet a web of dream overlaid the great hill, and at certain
+moments, which recurred in a kind of pulsation, accompanied by
+subjective feelings of vague strife and effort, I easily succeeded in
+letting all I saw--the field and the blackberry bush, the whole valley
+and the apple orchards--change into something unreal, flimsy, gauzelike,
+immaterial, and totally unexperienced. Suddenly when the impression was
+most vivid, the whole of this mysterious tapestry would vanish away and
+I was back where 2 and 2 make 4. Oh! Earth! how jealously you guard your
+secrets!
+
+_October_ 4.
+
+Sat at the Civil Service Commission in Burlington House for the exam,
+for the vacancy in the B.M. No luck at all with the papers. The whole of
+my nine months' assiduous preparation helped me in only two questions.
+In fine, I have not succeeded, I shall not obtain the appointment, and
+in a few weeks I shall be back in the wilds of
+
+N---- again under the old regime, reporting platitudes from greasy
+guardians of the poor, and receiving condolences from people not
+altogether displeased at some one else's misfortune.
+
+_October_ 14.
+
+Returned home from London. Felt horribly defeated in crossing the
+threshold. It was so obviously _returning_ after an unsuccessful flight.
+
+_October_ 22.
+
+Dissected a _Squilla_ for which I paid 2s. 6d. to the Plymouth Marine
+Laboratory.
+
+_October_ 23.
+
+_Ambition_
+
+Am attempting to feel after some practical philosophy of
+living--something that will enable me to accept disappointment with
+equanimity and Town Council meetings with a broad and tolerant smile. At
+present, ambition consumes me. I was ambitious before I was breeched. I
+can remember wondering as a child if I were a young Macaulay or Ruskin
+and secretly deciding that I was. My infant mind even was bitter with
+those who insisted on regarding me as a normal child and not as a
+prodigy. Since then I have struggled with this canker for many a day,
+and as success fails to arrive it becomes more gnawing.
+
+_October_ 24.
+
+In the morning a Town Council and in the afternoon a Rural Council. With
+this abominable trash in my notebook waiting to be written up and turned
+into "copy," and with the dream pictures of a quiet studious life in
+Cromwell Road not yet faded from my mind, where can I turn for
+consolation? That I have done my best? That's only a mother's saying to
+her child.
+
+Perhaps after all it is a narrow life--this diving and delving among
+charming little secrets, plying diligently scalpel and microscope and
+then weaving the facts obtained into theoretic finespun. It is all
+vastly entertaining to the naturalist but it leaves the world unmoved. I
+sometimes envy the zealot with a definite mission in life. Life without
+one seems void. The monotonous pursuit of our daily vocations--the
+soldier, sailor, candlestick-maker--so they go on, never living but only
+working, never thinking but only hypnotising themselves by the routine
+and punctuality of their lives into just so many mechanical toys
+warranted to go for so long and then stop when Death takes them.... It
+amazes me that men must spend their precious days of existence for the
+most part in slaving for food and clothing and the bare necessaries of
+existence.
+
+To sum up my despondency, what's the good of such a life? Where does it
+lead? Where am I going? Why should I work? What means this procession of
+nights and days wherein we are all seen moving along intent and stern as
+if we had some purpose or a goal?... Of course to the man who believes
+in the next world and a personal God, it is quite another matter. The
+Christian is the Egoist _par excellence_. He does not mind annihilation
+by arduous labour in this world if in the next he shall have won eternal
+life.... He is reckless of to-day, extravagant in the expenditure of his
+life. This intolerable fellow will be cheerful in a dungeon. For he
+flatters himself that God Almighty up in Heaven is all the time watching
+through the keyhole and marking him down for eternal life.
+
+_October_ 26.
+
+The nose-snuffling, cynical man who studies La Rochefoucauld, and prides
+himself on a knowledge of human motives, is pleased to point out that
+every action and every motive is selfish, from the philanthropist who
+advertises himself by his charities to the fanatic who lays down his
+life for a cause. Even secret charities, for they give pleasure to the
+doer. So your cynic thinks he has thus, with one stroke of his
+psychological scalpel, laid human nature bare in all its depravities.
+All he has done really is to reclassify motives--instead of grouping
+them as selfish and unselfish (which is more convenient) he lumps them
+together as selfish, a method by which even he is forced to recognise
+different grades of selfishness. For example, the selfishness of a
+wife-beater is lower than the selfishness of a man who gives up his life
+for another.
+
+_October_ 28.
+
+The result arrived. As I thought, I have failed, being fourth with only
+three vacancies.
+
+_November_ 7.
+
+It is useless to bewail the course of fortune. It cannot be much credit
+to possess--though we may covet--those precious things, to possess which
+depends on circumstances outside our control.
+
+_November_ 9.
+
+Dined at the Devonshire Club in St. James's Street, W., with Dr.
+H----and Mr. ----, the latter showing the grave symptomatic phenomena of
+a monocle and spats. A dinner of eight courses. Only made one mistake
+--put my salad on my dish instead of on the side dish. Horribly nervous
+and reticent. I was apparently expected to give an account of myself and
+my abilities--and with that end in view, they gave me a few pokes in my
+cranial ribs. But I am a peculiar animal, and, before unbosoming myself,
+I would require a happier _mise-en-scène_ than a West End Club, and a
+more tactful method of approach than ogling by two professors, who
+seemed to think I was a simple penny-in-the-slot machine. I froze from
+sheer nervousness and nothing resulted.
+
+_November_ 11.
+
+Returned home and found a letter awaiting me from Dr. A---- offering me
+£60 a year for a temporary job as assistant at the Plymouth Marine
+Laboratory.
+
+Left London horribly depressed. They evidently intend to shuffle me off.
+
+Read Geo. Gissing's novel, _Born in Exile_. Godwin Peak, with his
+intense pride of individuality, self-torturing capacities, and
+sentimental languishment, reminds me of myself.
+
+_November_ 20.
+
+A purulent cold in the nose. My heart is weak. Palpitation after the
+least exertion. But I shall soon be swinging my cudgels in the battle of
+life, so it won't do to be hypochondriacal.... Let all the powers of the
+world and the Devil attack me, yet I will win in the end--though the
+conquest may very well be one which no one but myself will view.
+
+Have accepted the Plymouth appointment.
+
+_November_ 30.
+
+Struggling in the depths again within the past few days with heart
+attacks. Am slowly getting better of them and trying to forget as soon
+as may be visions of sudden death, coffins, and obituary notices.
+
+_December_ 2.
+
+_Death_
+
+At first, when we are very young, Death arouses our curiosity, as it did
+Cain in the beginning.[2] It is a strange and very rare phenomenon which
+we cannot comprehend, and every time we hear of some one's death, we try
+to recall that person's appearance in life and are disappointed if we
+can't. The endeavour is to discover what it is, this Death, to compare
+two things, the idea of the person alive and the idea of him dead. At
+last some one we know well dies--and that is the first shock.... I shall
+never forget when our Matron died at the D---- School.... As the years
+roll on, we get used to the man with the scythe and an acquaintance's
+death is only a bit of gossip.
+
+Suppose the Hellfire of the orthodox really existed! We have no
+assurance that it does not! It seems incredible, but many incredible
+things are true. We do not _know_ that God is not as cruel as a Spanish
+inquisitor. Suppose, then, He is! If, after Death, we wicked ones were
+shovelled into a furnace of fire--we should have to burn. There would be
+no redress. It would simply be the Divine Order of things. It is
+outrageous that we should be so helpless and so dependent on any
+one--even God.
+
+_December_ 9.
+
+Sometimes I think I am going mad. I live for days in the mystery and
+tears of things so that the commonest object, the most familiar
+face--even my own--become ghostly, unreal, enigmatic. I get into an
+attitude of almost total scepticism, nescience, solipsism even, in a
+world of dumb, sphinx-like things that cannot explain themselves. The
+discovery of how I am situated--a sentient being on a globe in space
+overshadows me. I wish I were just nothing.
+
+_Later_: While at a public meeting, the office-boy approached me and
+immediately whispered without hesitation,--
+
+"Just had a telephone message to say that your father is at the
+T----Railway Station, lying senseless. He has evidently had an
+apoplectic fit."
+
+(How those brutal words, "lying senseless," banged and bullied and
+knocked me down. Mother was waiting for me at the door in a dreadful
+state and expecting the worst.)
+
+Met the train with the Doctor, and took him home in the cab--still
+alive, thank God, but helpless. He was brave enough to smile and shake
+me by the hand--with his left, though he was speechless and the right
+side of his body helpless. A porter discovered him at the railway
+terminus lying on the floor of a second-class carriage.
+
+_December_ 10.
+
+He is a trifle better. It is fifteen years since he had the first
+paralytic stroke.
+
+Am taking over all his work and have written at once resigning the
+Plymouth appointment.
+
+_December_ 23.
+
+It really did require an effort to go upstairs to-day to his bedroom and
+say cheerfully I was not going to P. after all, and that the matter was
+of no consequence to me. I laughed gaily and Dad was relieved. A
+thundering good joke. What annoys me is that other folk--the brainless,
+heartless mob, as Schopenhauer remarks, still continue to regard me as
+one of themselves.... I had nearly escaped into a seaside laboratory,
+and now suddenly to be flung back into the dirt and sweat of the
+newspaper world seems very hard, and it _is_ very hard.
+
+_December_ 26.
+
+_Windy Ash_
+
+With the dog for a walk around Windy Ash. It was a beautiful winter's
+morning--a low sun giving out a pale light but no warmth--a luminant,
+not a fire--the hedgerows bare and well trimmed, an Elm lopped close
+showing white stumps which glistened liquidly in the sun, a Curlew
+whistling overhead, a deeply cut lane washed hard and clean by the
+winter rains, a gunshot from a distant cover, a creeping Wren, silent
+and tame, in a bramble bush, and over the five-barred gate the granite
+roller with vacant shafts. I leaned on the gate and saw the great whisps
+of cloud in the sky like comets' tails. Everything cold, crystalline.
+
+
+[1] He had spoken about me to the Museum authorities, and it was his
+influence which got me the nomination to sit for the examination.
+
+[2] In Byron's poem.
+
+1911
+
+
+_January_ 2.
+
+As a young man--a _very_ young man--my purpose was to plough up all
+obstacles, brook no delays, and without let or hindrance win through to
+an almost immediate success! But witness 1910! "My career" so far has
+been like the White Knight's, who fell off behind when the horse
+started, in front when it stopped, and sideways occasionally to vary the
+monotony.
+
+_January_ 30.
+
+Feeling ill and suffering from attacks of faintness. My ill health has
+produced a change in my attitude towards work. As soon as I begin to
+feel the least bit down, I am bound to stop at once as the idea of
+bending over a desk or a dissecting dish, of reading or studying,
+nauseates me when I think that perhaps to-morrow or next day or next
+week, next month, next year I may be dead. What a waste of life it seems
+to work! Zoology is repugnant and philosophy superfluous beside the
+bliss of sheer living--out in the cold polar air or indoors in a chair
+before a roaring fire with hands clasped, watching the bustling,
+soothing activity of the flames.
+
+Then, as soon as I am well again, I forget all this, grow discontented
+with doing nothing and work like a Tiger.
+
+_February_ 11.
+
+Walked in the country. Coming home, terrified by a really violent attack
+of palpitation. Almost every one I met I thought would be the
+unfortunate person who would have to pick me up. As each one in the
+street approached me, I weighed him in the balance and considered if he
+had presence of mind and how he would render first aid. After my friend,
+P.C. ----, had passed, I felt sorry that the tragedy had not already
+happened, for he knows me and where I live. At length, after sundry
+leanings over the river wall, arrived at the Library, which I entered,
+and sat down, when the full force of the palpitation was immediately
+felt. My face burned with the hot blood, my hand holding the paper shook
+with the angry pulse, and my heart went bang! bang! bang! and I could
+feel its beat in the carotids of the neck and up along the Torcular
+herophili and big vessels in the occipital region of the head. Drew in
+each breath very gently for fear of aggravating the fiend. Got home
+(don't know how) and had some sal volatile. Am better now but very
+demoralised.
+
+_February_ 13.
+
+Feel like a piece of drawn threadwork, or an undeveloped negative, or a
+jelly fish on stilts, or a sloppy tadpole, or a weevil in a nut, or a
+spitchcocked eel. In other words and in short--ill.
+
+_February_ 16.
+
+After some days with the vision of sudden death constantly before me,
+have come to the conclusion that it's a long way to go to die. Am coming
+back anyhow. Yet these are a few terrible pages in my history.
+
+_March_ 4.
+
+... The Doctor's orders "Cease Work" have brought on in an aggravated
+form my infatuation for zoological research. I lie in bed and
+manufacture rolling periods in praise of it, I get dithyrambic over the
+zoologists themselves--Huxley, Wallace, Brooks, Lankester. I chortle to
+reflect that in zoology there are no stock exchange ambitions, there is
+no mention of slum life, Tariff Reform is not included. In the repose of
+the spacious laboratory by the seaside or in the halls of some great
+Museum, life with its vulgar struggles, its hustle and obscenity,
+scarcely penetrates. Behind those doors, life flows slowly, deeply. I am
+ascetic and long for the monastic seclusion of a student's life.
+
+_March_ 5.
+
+_From One Maiden Lady to Another_. (_Authentic_)
+
+"My dear Sister,--You have been expecting to hear from me I know, I have
+had inflammation to my eyes twice in 3 weeks so I thought I had better
+let the Doctor see and he says it is catarrh of the eyes and windpipe. I
+am inhaling and taking lozenges and medicine. You will be sorry to learn
+Leonora Mims has been taken to a Sanatorium with Diptheria, we heard
+yesterday, she is better, poor Mrs. Mims herself quite an invalid, she
+has to walk with a stick, I believe you know she has had to have her
+breast cut off, they keep a servant as she can't do anything, old Mrs.
+Point is 87 I think it is so they too have a lot of trouble, Fred Mims
+has just got married....
+
+"Poor old Mrs. Seemsoe is just the same, she doesn't know anybody but
+she talks, the nurse put a grape in her mouth but she didn't know what
+to do with it, I think it is very sad. She was taken about a fortnight
+before Easter. Will you tell me dear if this is right receipt for
+clothes 1/2 oz. carbolic in 1/2 pint of rose water. Harry Gammon's 2
+little children have measles, poor Maisie has gone with her Aunt Susan,
+poor old Joe Gammon they say had very little to leave, we don't know
+where Robert gets his money from. I dare say you saw that Tom Sagg has
+married another of Ned Smith's daughters and we hear these Smith girls
+are rare housekeepers and this girl that has married Tom Sagg has made
+all her own linen. Mrs. Wilkins, the butcher's wife is going to have a
+little one after 15 years, our Vicar has been laid up with an abscess,
+he told us about his brother the other day, he says as brothers they
+love each other very much. We have 3 very sad cases of men ill in the
+village. We had 4 but one man died of cancer.
+
+"Yr loving Sister Amy."
+
+Voilà!
+
+_March_ 7.
+
+If I die I should like to be buried in the cherry orchards at V----.
+
+How the beastly mob loves a tragedy! The sudden death of the Bank
+Manager is simply thrilling the town, and the newspapers sell like hot
+cakes. Scarcely before the body is cold the coincidence of his death on
+the anniversary of his birth is discussed in every household; every one
+tells everybody else where they saw him last "he looked all right then."
+The policeman and the housemaid, the Mayor and the Town Clerk, the
+cabman and the billposter, stand and discuss the deceased gentleman's
+last words or what the widow's left with. "Ah! well, it is very sad,"
+they remark to one another with no emotion and continue on their way.
+
+_March_ 10.
+
+On coming downstairs in the evening played Ludo with H----. At one stage
+I laughed so much in conjunction with that harlequin H---- that I got
+cramp in the abdominal muscles and the tears trickled down my face.
+
+_March_ 13.
+
+H---- and I play Ludo incessantly. We've developed the gambling fever,
+and our pent-up excitement every now and then explodes in fiendish
+cackles, and Mother looks up over her spectacles and says, "William,
+William, they'll hear in the street presently."
+
+_A Character_
+
+For this world's unfortunates, his is the ripe sympathy of a
+well-developed nature, standing in strong contrast with the rest of his
+personality, which is wholly self-centred, a little ungenerous, and what
+strong men of impeccable character call "weak." If you are ill he is
+delightful, if you are robust or successful he can be very
+objectionable. To an influenza victim he goes out of his way to carry a
+book, but if you tell him with gusto you have passed your exam, he says,
+"Oh, but there's not much behind it, is there?" "Oh! no," I answer,
+comforting him, "it is really a misfortune to be a success." And so only
+the bankrupts, dipsos (as he calls them), ne'er-do-weels, and sudden
+deaths ever touch his heart or tap his sympathy. He is a short, queery,
+dressy little fellow, always spruce and clean. His joy consists in a
+glass of beer, a full stomach, a good cigar, or a pretty girl to flirt
+with. He frequents drinking saloons and billiard rooms, goes to dances
+and likes to be thought a lady's man. "Urn," he will say, with the air
+of a connoisseur, "a little too broad in the beam," as some attractive
+damsel walks down the street. Any day about twelve you can see both of
+us, "the long and the short of it" (he is only half my height and I call
+him .5), walking together in the Park, and engaged in the most heated
+discussion over some entirely trivial matter, such as whether he would
+marry a woman with sore eyes, etc., etc. More than once we have caught
+cabmen idle on the cab-rank or policemen on point duty jerking their
+thumbs backward at us and expressing some facetious remarks which we
+longed to overhear. I usually walk in the gutter to bring my height down
+a bit.
+
+A good raconteur himself, he does not willingly suffer a story from
+another. The varmint on occasion finishes your joke off for you, which
+is his delicate way of intimating that he has heard it before. He is a
+first-class mimic, and sends every one into a thousand fits while he
+gives you in succession the Mayor and all the Corporation. He also
+delights me at times by mimicking me. His mind is receptive rather than
+creative: it picks up all sorts of gaudy ideas by the wayside like a
+magpie, and I sometimes enjoy the exquisite sensation of hearing some of
+these petty pilferings (which he has filched from me) laid at my feet as
+if they were his own. The ideas which are his own are always
+unmistakable.
+
+His favourite poems are Omar and the Ballad of Reading Jail, his
+favourite drinks Medoc or a Cherry Mixture. Me he describes as
+_serpentilous_ with _Gibbon-like arms,_ pinheaded, and so on. He amuses
+me. In fact I love him.
+
+_March_ 16.
+
+No one will ever understand without personal experience that an
+exceedingly self-conscious creature like myself driven in on himself to
+consume himself is the unhappiest of men. I have come to loathe myself:
+my finicking, hypersensitive, morbid nature, always thinking, talking,
+writing about myself for all the world as if the world beyond did not
+exist! I am rings within rings, circles concentric and intersecting, a
+maze, a tangle: watching myself behave or misbehave, always reflecting
+on what impression I am making on others or what they think of me.
+Introduce me to a stranger and I swell out as big as Alice.
+Self-consciousness makes me pneumatic, and consequently so awkward and
+clumsy and swollen that I don't know how to converse--and God help the
+other fellow.
+
+_Later_: Youth is an intoxication without wine, some one says. Life is
+an intoxication. The only sober man is the melancholiac, who,
+disenchanted, looks at life, sees it as it really is, and cuts his
+throat. If this be so, I want to be very drunk. The great thing is to
+live, to clutch at our existence and race away with it in some great
+and enthralling pursuit. Above all, I must beware of all ultimate
+questions--they are too maddeningly unanswerable--let me eschew
+philosophy and burn Omar.
+
+In this week's _T.P.'s Weekly_ a youth advertises:--"Young thinkers
+interested in philosophy, religion, social reform, the future of
+humanity, and all freethought, please communicate with 'Evolution,' aged
+21!" All right for 21.
+
+_Later_: I have in mind some work on the vascular system of larval
+newts. In the autumn I see a large piece of work to be done in animal
+psychology--namely, frequency of stimulus and its relation to habit
+formation. Yet the doctor advises long rest and the office work remains
+to be done. I must hack my way through somehow. I sit trying to
+disentangle these knots; then some one plays a dreamy waltz and all my
+fine edifices of the will vanish in mist. Is it worth while? Why not
+float with the tide? But I soon throw off these temptations. If I live,
+I shall play a fine game! I am determined. A lame-dog life is of no use.
+
+_April_ 17.
+
+_Railway Travel_
+
+A journey in a railway train makes me sentimental. If I enter the
+compartment a robust-minded, cheerful youth, fresh and whistling from a
+walk by the sea, yet, as soon as I am settled down in one corner and the
+train is rattling along past fields, woods, towns, and painted stations,
+I find myself indulging in a saccharine sadness--very toothsome and
+jolly. I pull a long face and gaze out of the window wistfully and look
+sad. But I am really happy--and incredibly sentimental.
+
+The effect is produced, I suppose, by the quickly changing panoramic
+view of the country, and as I see everything sliding swiftly by, and
+feel myself being hurtled forward willy-nilly, I am sub-conscious of the
+flight of Time, of the eternal flux, of the trajectory of my own
+life.... Timid folk, of course, want some Rock of Ages, something
+static. They want life a mill pond rather than the torrent which it is,
+a homely affair of teacups and tabby cats rather than a dangerous
+expedition.
+
+_April_ 22.
+
+Who will rid me of the body of this death? My body is chained to me--a
+dead weight. It is my warder. I can do nothing without first consulting
+it and seeking its permission. I jeer at its grotesqueness. I chafe at
+the thongs it binds on me. On this bully I am dependent for everything
+the world can give me. How can I preserve my _amour propre_ when I must
+needs be for ever wheedling and cajoling a despot with delicate meats
+and soft couches?--I who am proud, ambitious, and full of energy! In the
+end, too, I know it intends to carry me off.... I should like though to
+have the last kick and, copying De Quincey, arrange to hand it over for
+dissection to the medical men--out of revenge.
+
+"Hope thou not much; fear thou not at all"--my motto of late.
+
+_April_ 30.
+
+I can well imagine looking back on these entries later on and blushing
+at the pettiness of my soul herein revealed.... Only be charitable, kind
+reader. There are three Johns, and I am much mistaken if in these pages
+there will not be found something of the John known to himself, and an
+inkling, perhaps, of the man as he is known to his Creator. As a timid
+showman afraid that unless he emphasises the feature of his exhibit,
+they will be overlooked, let me, hat in hand, point out that I know I am
+an ass, that I am still hoping (in spite of ill health) that I am an
+enthusiast.
+
+_May_ 2.
+
+Maeterlinck's _Wisdom and Destiny_ is distilled Marcus Aurelius. I am
+rather tired of these comfortable philosophers. If a man be harassed by
+Fate with a red rag and a picador let him turn and rend him--or try to,
+anyway.
+
+_May_ 8.
+
+_Staying by the Sea_
+
+I have been living out of doors a lot lately and am getting sunburnt. It
+gives me infinite pleasure to be sunburnt--to appear the man of the open
+air, the open road, and the wild life. The sun intoxicates me to-day.
+The sea is not big enough to hold me nor the sky for me to breathe in. I
+feel I should like to be swaying with all the passions, throbbing with
+life and a vast activity of heart and sinew--to live magnificently--with
+an unquenchable thirst to drink to the lees, to plumb the depth of every
+joy and every sorrow, to see my life flash in the heat. Ah! Youth!
+Youth! Youth!!! In these moments of ecstasy my happiness is torrential.
+I have the soul of the poppy flaming in me then. I am rather like the
+poppy in many ways.... It is peculiarly appropriate. It must be my
+flower! I am the poppy!!
+
+_May_ 9.
+
+L---- was digging up the ground in his garden to-day and one shovelful
+came up thick and shapely. He laid the sod on its back gently without
+breaking it and said simply, "Doesn't it come up nice?" His face was
+radiant!--Real happiness lies in the little things, in a bit of garden
+work, in the rattle of the teacups in the next room, in the last chapter
+of a book.
+
+_May_ 14.
+
+Returned home. I hate living in this little town. If some one dies, he
+is sure to be some one you had a joke with the night before. A
+suicide--ten to one--implicates your bosom friend, or else the little
+man at the bookshop cut him down. There have been three deaths since I
+came home--I knew them all. It depresses me. The town seems a mortuary
+with all these dead bodies lying in it. Lucky for you, if you're a fat,
+rubicund, unimaginative physician.
+
+_May_ 16.
+
+Two more people dead--one a school friend. Sat on a seat on the river
+bank and read the _Journal of Animal Behaviour_. It made me long to be
+at work. I foamed at the mouth to be sitting there perforce in an
+overcoat on a seat doing nothing like a pet dove. A weak heart makes
+crossing a road an adventure and turns each day into a dangerous
+expedition.
+
+_May_ 18.
+
+A dirty ragamuffin on the river's bank held up a tin can to me with the
+softly persuasive words,--
+
+"'Ere, Mister, BAIT."
+
+"What are you going to do with it?"
+
+"Fish."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Salmon."
+
+We have all tried to catch salmon with a bent pin. No matter though if
+no salmon be caught. Richard Jefferies said, "If there be no immortality
+still we shall have had the glory of that thought."
+
+_May_ 19.
+
+_Old Diaries_
+
+Spent some happy time reading over old diaries. I was grieved and
+surprised to find how much I had forgotten. To forget the past so easily
+seems scarcely loyal to oneself. I am so selfishly absorbed in my
+present self that I have grown not to care a damn about that ever
+increasing collection of past selves--those dear, dead gentlemen who one
+after the other have tenanted the temple of this flesh and handed on the
+torch of my life and personal identity before creeping away silently and
+modestly to rest.
+
+_June_ 6.
+
+Brilliantly fine and warm. Unable to resist the sun, so I caught the ten
+train to S---- and walked across the meadow (buttercups,
+forget-me-nots, ragged robins) to the Dipper stream and the ivy bridge.
+Read ardently in Geology till twelve. Then took off my boots and socks,
+and waded underneath the right arch of the bridge in deep water, and
+eventually sat on a dry stone at the top of the masonry just where the
+water drops into the green salmon pool in a solid bar. Next I waded
+upstream to a big slab of rock tilted at a comfortable angle. I lay flat
+on this with my nether extremities in water up to my knees. The sun
+bathed my face and dragon flies chased up and down intent on murder. But
+I cared not a tinker's Demetrius about Nature red in tooth and claw. I
+was quite satisfied with Nature under a June sun in the cool atmosphere
+of a Dipper stream. I lay on the slab completely relaxed, and the cool
+water ran strongly between my toes. Surely I was never again going to be
+miserable. The voices of children playing in the wood made me extra
+happy. As a rule I loathe children. I am too much of a youth still. But
+not this morning. For these were fairy voices ringing through enchanted
+woods.
+
+_June_ 8.
+
+Brilliantly fine and warm. Went by train to C---- Woods. Took
+first-class return on account of the heat. Crossed the meadow and up the
+hill to the mill leat, where we bathed our feet and read. Ate a powerful
+lunch and made several unsuccessful grabs at Caddie flies. I want one to
+examine the mouth parts. After lunch we sat on the foot-bridge over the
+stream, and I rested on it flat in the face of the sun. The sun seemed
+to burn into my very bones, purging away everything that may be dark or
+threatening there. The physical sensation of the blood flow beneath the
+skin was good to feel, and the heat made every tissue glow with a
+radiant well-being. When I got up and opened my eyes all the colours of
+the landscape vanished under the silvery whiteness of the intense
+sunlight.
+
+We put on our boots and socks (our feet seemed to have swollen to a very
+large size) and wandered downstream to a little white house, a
+gamekeeper's cottage, where the old woman gave us cream and milk and
+home-made bread in her beautiful old kitchen with open hearth. China
+dogs, of course, and on the wall an old painting representing the person
+of a page boy (so she said) who was once employed up at the squire's. An
+unwholesome atmosphere of pigs pervaded the garden, but as this is not
+pretty I ought to leave it out....
+
+_June_ 14.
+
+Brilliantly fine. Went by the early train to S----. Walked to the ivy
+bridge and then waded upstream to the great slab of rock where I spread
+myself in the sun as before. The experiment was so delightful it is
+worth repeating a hundred times. In this position I read of the decline
+and fall of Trilobites, of the Stratigraphy of the Lias and so on.
+Geology is a very crushing science, yet I enjoyed my existence this
+morning with the other flies about that stream.
+
+_June_ 20.
+
+Sat at Liverpool University for the practical exam. Zoology, Board of
+Education.
+
+At the close the other students left but I went on working. Prof.
+Herdman asked me if I had finished. I said "No," so he gave me a little
+more time. Later he came up again, and again I said "No," but he replied
+that he was afraid I must stop. "What could you do further?" he asked,
+picking up a dish of plankton. I pointed out a _Sagitta_, an
+_Oikopleura_, and a _Noctiluca_, and he replied, "Of course I put in
+more than you were expected to identify in the time, so as to make a
+choice possible." Then he complimented me on my written papers which
+were sent in some weeks ago, and looking at my practical work he added,
+"And this, too, seems to be quite excellent."
+
+I thanked him from the bottom of a greedy and grateful heart, and he
+went on, "I see you describe yourself in your papers as a journalist,
+but can you tell me exactly what has been your career in Zoology?" I
+answered of course rather proudly that I had had _no_ career in Zoology.
+
+"But what school or college have you worked at?" he persisted.
+
+"None," I said a little doggedly. "What I know I have taught myself."
+
+"So you've had no training in Zoology at all?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Well, if you've taught yourself all you know, you've done remarkably
+well."
+
+He still seemed a little incredulous, and when I explained how I got a
+great many of my marine animals for dissection and study at the Plymouth
+Marine Laboratory, he immediately asked me suspiciously if I had ever
+worked there. We shook hands, and he wished me all success in the
+future, to which I to myself devoutly said Amen.
+
+Came home very elated at having impressed some one at last.
+
+Now for Dublin.
+
+_June_ 30.
+
+Oeconomic biology may be very useful but I am not interested in it. Give
+me the pure science. I don't want to be worrying my head over remedies
+for potato disease nor cures for fleas in fowls. Heaven preserve me from
+ever becoming a County Council lecturer or a Government
+Entomologist![1]... Give me the recluse life of a scholar or
+investigator, full of leisure, culture, and delicate skill. I would
+rather know Bergson than be able to stay at the Ritz Hotel. I would
+rather be able to dissect a star-fish's water-vascular system than know
+the price of Consols. I should make a most industrious country gentleman
+with £5,000 a year and a deer park.... My idea is to withdraw from the
+_mobile vulgus_ and spend laborious days in the library or laboratory.
+The world is too much with us. I long for the monotony of monastic life!
+Father Wasmann and the Abbé Spallanzani are the type. Let me set my
+face towards them. Such lives afford poor material for novelists or
+dramatists, but so much the better. Hamlet makes fine reading, but I
+don't want to be Hamlet myself.
+
+_July_ 6.
+
+In the afternoon went out dredging in fifteen fathoms off the pier at
+I----, but without much success.... Got a large number of interesting
+things, however, in the tow net, including some advanced eggs of
+_Loligo_ and a _Tomopteris_....
+
+_July_ 7.
+
+Went to the trout stream again. After stretching a muslin net crosswise
+on the water for insects floating down, sat on the footbridge and read
+Geology for the Dublin Examination. Later, waded downstream to a hazel
+bush on the right bank beneath a shady oak. Squatted right down on the
+bush, which supported me like an arm-chair--and, with legs dangling in
+the cool water, opened a Meredith and enjoyed myself.
+
+_July_ 28.
+
+Had to write backing out of the Dublin Examination for which I am
+nominated to sit. I am simply not fit for the racket of such a journey
+in my present state of health. My chances of success, too, are not such
+as to warrant my drawing on Dad for the money. He is still ill, and
+secretly agitated, I fear, because I am so bent on giving up his work.
+It looks, however, as if newspaper journalism is to be my fate. It was
+the refinement of torture having to write.
+
+_July_ 31.
+
+Had a letter from Dr. S---- enough to wring tears from a monument.
+
+Sat like a valetudinarian in the Park all day getting fresh air--among
+the imbeciles, invalids, and children. Who cares? "But, gentlemen, you
+_shall_ hear."
+
+_August_ 4.
+
+Still another chance--quite unexpectedly received a second nomination
+this morning to sit for another exam, for two vacancies in the British
+Museum. Good luck this.
+
+_August_ 11.
+
+Very hot, so went to S----, and bathed in the salmon pool. Stretched
+myself out in the water, delighted to find that I had at last got to the
+very heart of the countryside. I was not just watching from the
+outside--on the bank. I was in it, and plunging in it, too, up to my
+armpits. What did I care about the British Museum or Zoology then? All
+but the last enemy and object of conquest I had overcome--for the moment
+perhaps even Death himself was under heel--I was immortal--in that
+minute I was always prostrate in the stream--sunk deep in the bosom of
+old Mother Earth who cannot die!
+
+_August_ 14.
+
+At 4 p.m. to the Salmon Pool for a bathe. 87.3 in the shade. The meadow
+was delicious in the sunshine. It made me want to hop, flirt my tail,
+sing. I felt ever such a bright-eyed wily bird!
+
+_August_ 17.
+
+Caught the afternoon train to C----, but unfortunately forgot to take
+with me either watch or tubes (for insects). So I applied to the
+station-master, a youth of about eighteen, who is also signalman,
+porter, ticket-collector, and indeed very factotal--even to the extent
+of providing me with empty match boxes. I agreed with him to be called
+by three halloos from the viaduct just before the evening train came in.
+Then I went up to the leat, set up my muslin net in it for insects
+floating down, and then went across to the stream and bathed.
+Afterwards, went back and boxed the insects caught, and returned to the
+little station, with its creepers on the walls and over the roof, all
+as delightfully quiet as ever, and the station youth as delightfully
+silly. Then the little train came around the bend of the line--green
+puffing engine and red coaches, like a crawling caterpillar of gay
+colour.
+
+_August_ 20.
+
+A trapper killed a specimen of _Tropidonotus natrix_ and brought it to
+me. I gave him sixpence for it and am just going to dissect it.
+
+_August_ 21.
+
+There are folk who notice nothing. (Witness Capt. McWhirr in Conrad's
+_Typhoon_.) They live side by side with genius or tragedy as innocent as
+babies; there are heaps of people who live on a mountain, a volcano,
+even, without knowing it. If the stars of Heaven fell and the Moon were
+turned into blood some one would have to direct their attention to
+it.... Perhaps after all, the most obvious things are the most difficult
+to see. We all recognise Keats now, but suppose he was only "the boy
+next door"--why should I read his verses?
+
+_August_ 27.
+
+_Preparing a Snake's Skull_
+
+Prepared the skull of grass snake. I fancy I scooped out the eyes with
+patent delight--I suppose symbolically, as though, on behalf of the rest
+of suffering humanity, I were wiping off the old score against the beast
+for its behaviour in the Garden of Eden.
+
+_September_ 5.
+
+At 2.30 Dad had three separate "strokes" of paralysis in as many
+minutes, the third leaving him helpless. They sent for me in the
+Library, where I was reading, and I hurried home. Just as I entered the
+bedroom where he and Mother were another attack came on, and it was with
+the utmost difficulty that with her help I managed to get him from the
+chair to the bed. He struggled with his left arm and leg and made
+inarticulate noises which sounded as if they might be groans. I don't
+know if he was in pain. Dear Mother.
+
+_September_ 14.
+
+Dad cannot live long. Mother bears up wonderfully well. Tried to do some
+examination work but failed utterly. A---- is watching in the sick-room
+with Mother who will not leave.
+
+8.30. The nurse says he will not live through the night.
+
+8.45. Telegraphed for A---- to come.
+
+11.00. A---- came downstairs and had a little supper.
+
+12.00. Went to bed. H---- and the others lit a fire and we have all sat
+around it silent, listening to its murmur. Every one felt cold. Dad has
+been unconscious for over an hour.
+
+1.45 a.m. Heard a noise, then heard Mother coming downstairs past my
+bedroom door with some one--sobbing. I knew it must be all over.
+H----was helping her down. Waited in my bedroom in the dark for three
+parts of an hour, when H---- came up, opened the door slowly and said,
+"He's gone, old man." It was a tremendous relief to know that since he
+had to die his sufferings and cruel plight were over. Fell asleep from
+sheer exhaustion and slept soundly.
+
+_September_ 18.
+
+The funeral. _It is not death but the dreadful possibilities of life
+which are so depressing_.[2]
+
+_September_ 21.
+
+_A Day in Autumn_
+
+A cool, breezy autumn day. The beach was covered with patches of soapy
+foam that shook tremulously in the wind--all the rocks and everything
+were drenched with water, and the spray came off the breaking waves like
+steam. A red sun went lower and lower and the shadows cast by the rocks
+grew very long and grotesque. Underneath the breaking waves, the hollows
+were green and dark like sea caverns. Herring gulls played about in the
+air balancing themselves as they faced the breeze, then sweeping
+suddenly around and downwards with the wind behind them. We all sat down
+on the rocks and were very quiet, almost monosyllabic. We pointed out a
+passing vessel to one another or chucked a bit of shingle into the sea.
+You would have said we were bored. Yet deep down in ourselves we were
+astir and all around us we could hear the rumours of divine passage,
+soft and mysterious as the flight of birds migrating in the dark.
+
+The wind rose and tapped the line against the flag-staff at the
+Coastguard Station. It roared through my hair and past my ears for an
+hour on end till I felt quite windswept and bleak. On the way home we
+saw the wind darting hither and thither over the long grass like a
+lunatic snake. The wind! Oh! the wind--I have an enormous faith in the
+curative properties of the wind. I feel better already.
+
+_October_ 17.
+
+Staying in Surrey. Exam. over and I feel fairly confident--after an
+agony for a few days before on account of the development of a cold
+which threatened to snatch the last chance out of my hands.
+
+_Justifiable Mendacity_
+
+Sitting on a gate on the N. Downs I saw a long way below me in the
+valley a man standing in a chalk pit and wielding a stick vigorously.
+For some reason or another the idea came to me that it would be
+interesting if he were in the act of killing a Snake--he so far away
+below and I above and unnoticed quietly watching him. At dinner
+to-night, this revised version of the story came out quite pat and
+natural and obviously interested the assembly. I added graphically that
+the man was too far away from me to be able to say what _species_ of
+Snake it was he was killing. I possess the qualifications of an
+artistic liar. Yet I can't regard such a story as a lie--it was rather a
+justifiable emendation of an otherwise uninteresting incident.
+
+_October_ 24.
+
+_Une Caractère_
+
+... She is a tiny little old lady, very frail and very delicate, with a
+tiny voice like the noise of a fretsaw. She talks incessantly about
+things which do not interest you, until your face gets stiff with
+forcing a polite smile, and your voice cracked and your throat dry with
+saying, "Yes," and "Really."
+
+To-night I attend the Zoological Society to read my first paper, so I am
+really in a fluster and want to be quiet. Therefore to prevent her from
+talking I write two letters which I represent as urgent. At 6.15
+desperate, so went out for a walk in the dark London streets. Returned
+to supper and to Her. After the wife, the husband is intellectual
+pyrotechnics. Referring to the Museum,--
+
+"Would you have there, I suppose, any insects, in a case like, what you
+might say to study to yourself when no one is by?" he inquired.
+
+6.40. It is now one hour before I need leave for the meeting, and
+whether I sigh, cough, smoke, or read the paper, she goes on. She even
+refuses to allow me to scan the lines below photos in the _Illustrated
+London News._ I write this as the last sole resource to escape her
+devastating prattle and the ceaseless hum of her tiny gnat-like mind.
+She thinks (because I told her so) that I am preparing notes for the
+evening meeting.
+
+_Later_: Spent an absolutely damnable day. Am sick, tired, bored,
+frantic with her voice which I have been able to share with no one
+except the intellectual giant, her husband, at tea time. In order to
+break the flow of chatter, I would rudely interrupt and go on talking,
+by this means keeping my end up for as long as I could, and enjoying a
+short respite from the fret-sawing voice. But I tired of this and it was
+of no permanent value. When I broke in, she still went on for a few
+sentences unable to stop, and lo! here was the spectacle of two persons
+alone together in a room both talking at the same time and neither
+listening. I persisted though--and she had to stop. Once started, I was
+afraid to stop--scared at the certain fact of the voice beginning to saw
+again. After a while the fountain of my artificial garrulity dried up,
+and the Voice at once leaped into the breach, resuming--amazing and
+incredible as it seems--at the precise point where it had left off. At 7
+I am quite exhausted and sit on the opposite side of the hearth, staring
+with glassy eyes, arms drooping at my sides and mouth druling. At 7.05
+her cough increases, and she has to stop to attend to it. With a
+fiendish smile I push back my chair, and quietly watch her cough.... She
+coughs continuously now and can talk no longer. Thank God! 8 p.m., left
+for the meeting, where I read my paper in a state of awful
+nervousness.... I read out all I had to say and kept them amused for
+about ten minutes. I was very excited when Dr. ---- got up and praised
+the paper,[3] saying it was interesting, and hoping I should continue
+the experiments. The chairman, Sir John Rose Bradford, asked a question,
+I answered it and then sat down. After the meeting we went upstairs to
+the library, had tea and chatted with some of the big people.... Zoology
+is certainly delightful, yet it seems to me the Zoologists are much as
+other people. I like Zoology. I wish I could do without Zoologists....
+
+_October_ 30.
+
+Home once more. The Natural History Museum impressed me enormously. It
+is a magnificent building--too magnificent to work there--to follow
+one's profession in a building like that seems an altogether too
+grandiose manner of life. A pious zoologist might go up to pray in
+it--but not to earn his daily bread there.
+
+_October_ 31.
+
+I'm in, in, in!!!!!!!!! being first with 141 marks to spare. Old
+M----[the servant] rushes up to my sister's bedroom with the news just
+after 7 a.m., and she says, "Fine, fine," and comes down in her
+nightgown to my bedroom, where we drink our morning cup of tea
+together--and talk! I'm delighted. What a magnificent obstacle race it
+has been! Still one ditch--the medical exam! Wired to friends.
+
+_November_ 1.
+
+This is the sort of letter which is balm to me:--"My darling W----,--I
+need hardly tell you how absolutely delighted we were at the grand news
+of this morning. You must be feeling a huge glow of satisfaction with
+the knowledge of your object attained through untold difficulties. I
+don't wish to butter you up, or to gush, but I must honestly say that I
+feel tip-top proud of my old Beano. I admire your brains more than ever,
+and also your indomitable pluck and grit, and your quiet bravery in
+disappointment and difficulty...."
+
+_November_ 14.
+
+The three most fascinating books in Science that I have so far read are
+(easily):--1. Darwin's _Expression of the Emotions_. 2. Gaskell's
+_Origin of Vertebrates_. 3. Bergson's _Le Rire_.
+
+Went to the dentist in the afternoon. Evening chiefly occupied in
+reading _Le Rire_. By my halidom, it is an extraordinarily interesting
+book!
+
+_November_ 29.
+
+... I am always looking out for new friends--assaying for friendship....
+There is no more delightful adventure than an expedition into a rich,
+many-sided personality. Gradually over a long probation--for deep minds
+are naturally reticent--piece after piece is added to the geography of
+your friend's mind, and each piece pleases or entertains, while in
+return you let him steal away piece after piece of your own territory,
+perhaps saving a bit up here and there--such as an enthusiasm for
+Francis Thompson's poetry--and then letting it go unexpectedly. It's a
+delightful reciprocity.
+
+I dream of "the honeyed ease of the Civil Servant's working day"
+(Peacock). Yet the French say _Songes sont mensonges_.
+
+_December_ 13.
+
+In the Park it was very dark and she said,--
+
+"If I lose you I shan't be able to find my way home."
+
+"Oh! I'll look after you," I said.
+
+Both being of the same mind at the same time we sat down on a seat
+together when a fortunate thing happened. It began to rain. So I offered
+her part of my overcoat. She nestled in under my arm and I kissed her
+out of hand. _Voilà_! A very pretty little girl, 'pon my word.
+
+_December_ 20.
+
+The thing is obsessing me. After an early supper called and found my
+lady ready to receive me. No one else at home. So walked into the
+oak-panelled room with the red-curtained windows, took off my coat and
+scarf. She followed and switched off the light. There was a roaring fire
+in the grate. She is very amorous and I am not Hippolytus, so we were
+soon closely engaged in the large chair before the fire. As we sailed
+thus, close hauled to the wind, with double entendres and she trembled
+in the storm (and I was at the helm) the garden gate slammed and both of
+us got up quickly. I next heard a key turn in the lock and a foot in the
+passage: "Mr. ----" she said....
+
+She switched on the light, went out swiftly into the passage, and
+meeting him conducted him to her office, while I as swiftly put on
+overcoat and scarf, and slipped out through the open door, stumbling
+over his bicycle, but of course not stopping to pick it up. Later she
+telephoned to say it was all right. Very relieved!... She recalls
+Richepin's _La Glu_.
+
+_December_ 21.
+
+She is a fine sedative. Her movements are a pleasant adagio, her voice
+piano to pianissimo, her conversation breaks off in thrilling
+aposiopoeses.
+
+An awful comedy this morning--for as soon as I was securely "gagged" the
+dentist went out of the room. She approached, leered at me helpless, and
+said provokingly, "Oh! you do look funny." Minx. On returning he said to
+her, "Would you like to hold his hand?"
+
+She: "Oh! not just now."
+
+And they grinned at one another and at me waiting to be tortured.
+
+_December_ 23.
+
+... On the Station waited for an hour for the train. Gave her a box of
+sweets and the _Bystander_. We walked up the platform to extreme end in
+the dark and kissed! But it was very windy and cold. (I noticed that!)
+So we entered an empty luggage guard's van on rail beside platform left
+there by shunters. Here we were out of the wind and far better off. But
+a shunter came along and turned us out. She gave me a silver match-box.
+But I believe for various reasons that it is one of her own and not a
+new one. Said "Good-bye."
+
+_December_ 28.
+
+At R----. Played the negligent _flaneur_, reclining on the Chesterfield,
+leaning against the grand piano, or measuring my length on the mat
+before the fire.
+
+_December_ 31.
+
+To-morrow I begin duties at the British Museum of Natural History. I
+cannot quite imagine myself a Museum assistant. Before I get there I
+know I shall be the strangest assistant on the staff. It will be
+singing my song in a Strange land and weeping--I hope not too
+bitterly--down by the waters of a very queer Babylon.
+
+Still, I have burnt my bridges like Cæsar--or burnt my ships like
+Cortez. So forward!
+
+
+[1] See entry for October 8, 1913.
+
+[2] Italics added 1917.
+
+[3] The paper was "Distant Orientation in Batrachia"--detailing
+experiments on the homing faculty in newts.
+
+
+
+
+PART II--IN LONDON
+
+
+
+
+1912
+
+
+_January_ 21.
+
+Am at last beginning to get more content with the work at the Museum, so
+that I muse on Bernard Shaw's saying, "Get what you like or you'll grow
+to like what you get." I have a terrible suspicion that the security of
+tenure here is like the lion's den in the fable--_Nulla vestiga
+retrorsum_. Of course I am wonderfully proud of being at the Museum,
+although I am disappointed and write as if I were quite blasé.
+
+_January_ 25.
+
+I should be disappointed if at the end of my career (if I live to see it
+through) I do not win the F.R.S. I should very much like it.... My
+nature is very mixed--ambitious above all things and yet soon giddy with
+the audacity of my aspirations. The B.M. and my colleagues make me feel
+most inferior in fact, but in theory--in the secrecy of my own
+bedchamber--I feel that there are few men there my equal.
+
+_April_ 26.
+
+Down with influenza. A boarding-house with the 'flue!
+
+_May_ 8.
+
+Went home to recuperate, a beef jelly in one pocket and sal volatile in
+the other. On arrival, my blanched appearance frightened Mother and the
+others, so went to bed at once. "Fate's a fiddler, life's a dance."
+
+_May_ 12.
+
+Weak enough to sit down before dressing-table while I shave and brush my
+hair. Dyspepsia appalling. The Doctor in Kensington seemed to think me
+an awful wreck and asked if I were concealing----
+
+Reading Baudelaire and Verlaine.
+
+_May_ 24.
+
+_Bathing_
+
+Sat on a seat overlooking the sand-hills with stick between my legs like
+an old man, and watched a buxom wench aet. 25 run down the path pursued
+by "Rough" and two little girls in blue. Later they emerged from a
+striped bathing tent in the glory of blue bathing dresses. It made me
+feel quite an old man to see the girl galloping out over the hard level
+sands to the breakers, a child clinging to each hand. Legs and arms
+twinkled in the sun which shone with brilliance. If life were as level
+as those sands and as beautiful as that trio of girls!
+
+_May_ 26.
+
+_Two Young Men Talking_
+
+With H---- in his garden. He is a great enthusiast.
+
+"I disapprove entirely of your taste in gardening," I said. "You object
+to the 'ragged wilderness' style, I like it. You like lawns laid out for
+croquet and your privet hedges pruned into 'God Save the King' or 'Dieu
+et mon droit.' My dear boy, if you saw Mr. ----'s wilderness at
+----you'd be so shocked you'd cut and run, and I imagine there'd be an
+affecting reunion between you and your beloved geraniums. For my part, I
+don't like geraniums: they're suburban, and all of a piece with
+antimacassars and stuffed birds under glass bells. The colour of your
+specimens, moreover," I rapped out, "is vulgar--like the muddied
+petticoats of old market women."
+
+H----, quite unmoved, replied slowly, "Well, here are some like the
+beautiful white cambric of a lady of fashion. You've got no taste in
+flowers--you're just six feet of grief and patience." We roared with
+laughing.
+
+"Do stop watering those damned plants," I exclaimed at last. But he
+went on. I exclaimed again and out of sheer ridiculousness, in reply he
+proceeded to water the cabbages, the gravel path, the oak tree--and me!
+While I writhed with laughing.
+
+_May_ 27.
+
+_By the Sea_
+
+Sat upon a comfortable jetty of rock and watched the waves without a
+glimmer of an idea in my mind about anything--though to outward view I
+might have been a philosopher in cerebral parturition with thoughts as
+big as babies. Instead, little rustling dead leaves of thoughts stirred
+and fluttered in the brain--the pimple _e.g._ I recollected on my Aunt's
+nose, or the boyishness of Dr. ----'s handwriting, or Swinburne's lines:
+"If the golden-crested wren Were a nightingale--why, then Something seen
+and heard of men Might be half as sweet as when Laughs a child of
+seven."
+
+I continued in this pleasurable coma all the afternoon and went home
+refreshed.
+
+_May_ 29.
+
+Have returned to London and the B.M. My first day at the M. Sat at my
+table in a state of awful apathy.
+
+At least temporarily, I am quite disenchanted of Zoology. I work--God
+save the mark--in the Insect Room!
+
+On the way home, purchased:--
+
+Peroxide of hydrogen (pyorrhœa threatened). One bottle of physic (for
+my appalling dyspepsia).
+
+One flask of brandy for emergencies (as my heart is intermittent again).
+
+Prussic acid next.
+
+Must have been near pneumonia at R----. Auntie was nervous, and came in
+during the night to see how I was.
+
+_June_ 20.
+
+It caused me anguish to see my article returned from the _Fortnightly_
+and lying in a big envelope on the table when I returned home this
+evening. I can't do any work because of it, and in desperation rushed
+off to the stately pleasure domes of the White City, and systematically
+went through all the thrills--from the Mountain Railway to the Wiggle
+Woggle and the 'Witching Waves.
+
+_June_ 21.
+
+To-day I am easier. The cut worm forgives the plough. But how restless
+this disappointment has made me.... I have no plans for recuperation and
+cannot settle down to work.
+
+_July_ 6.
+
+On my doctor's advice, went to see Dr. P----, a lung specialist.
+M----found a dull spot on one of my lungs, and, not feeling very sure,
+and without telling me the nature of his suspicion, he arranged for Dr.
+P---- to see me, allowing me to suppose he was a stomach authority as my
+dyspepsia is bad.
+
+Well: it is _not_ consumption, but my lungs and physique are such that
+consumption might easily supervene. As soon as Dr. P---- had gone,
+M----appended the following lugubrious yarn:--
+
+Whenever I catch cold, I must go and be treated at once, all my leisure
+must be spent out of doors, I must take cream and milk in prodigious
+quantities and get fat at all costs. There is even a question of my
+giving up work.
+
+_July_ 10.
+
+A young but fat woman sitting in the sun and oozing moisture is as nasty
+as anything in Baudelaire.
+
+_July_ 14.
+
+_A "Brilliant Career"_
+
+My old head master once prophesied for me "a brilliant career." That was
+when I was in the Third Form. Now I have more than a suspicion that I am
+one of those who, as he once pointed out, grow sometimes out of a
+brilliant boyhood into very commonplace men. This continuous ill health
+is having a very obvious effect on my work and activities. With what
+courage I possess I have to face the fact that to-day I am unable to
+think or express myself as well as when I was a boy in my teens--witness
+this Journal!
+
+I intend to go on however. I have decided that my death shall be
+disputed all the way.
+
+Oh! it is so humiliating to die! I writhe to think of being overcome by
+so unfair an enemy before I have demonstrated myself to maiden aunts who
+mistrust me, to colleagues who scorn me, and even to brothers and
+sisters who believe in me.
+
+As an Egotist I hate death because I should cease to be I.
+
+Most folk, when sick unto death, gain a little consolation over the
+notoriety gained by the fact of their decease. Criminals enjoy the pomp
+and circumstance of their execution. Voltaire said of Rousseau that he
+wouldn't mind being hanged if they'd stick his name on the gibbet. But
+my own death would be so mean and insignificant. Guy de Maupassant died
+in a grand manner--a man of intellect and splendid physique who became
+insane. Tusitala's death in the South Seas reads like a romance. Heine,
+after a life of sorrow, died with a sparkling witticism on his lips;
+Vespasian with a jest.
+
+But I cannot for the life of me rake up any excitement over my own
+immediate decease--an unobtrusive passing away of a rancorous,
+disappointed, morbid, and self-assertive entomologist in a West
+Kensington Boarding House--what a mean little tragedy! It is hard not to
+be somebody even in death.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A sing-song to-night in the drawing-room; all the boarding-house present
+in full muster. There was a German, Schulz, who sat and leered at his
+inamorata--a sensual-looking, pasty-faced girl--while she gave us
+daggers-and-moonlight recitations with the most unwarranted
+self-assurance (she boasts of a walking-on part at one of the theatres);
+there was Miss M---- listening to her fiancé, Capt. O---- (home from
+India), singing Indian Love Songs at her; there was Miss T----, a sour
+old maid, who knitted and snorted, not fully conscious of this young
+blood coursing around her; Mrs. Barclay Woods pursued her usual
+avocation of imposing on us all the great weight of her immense social
+superiority, clucking, in between, to her one chick--a fluffy girl of 18
+or 19, who was sitting now in the draught, now too close to a "common"
+musician of the Covent Garden Opera; finally our hostess, a divorcee,
+who hated all males, even Tom-cats. We were a pathetic little
+company--so motley, ill-assorted--who had come together not from love or
+regard but because man is a gregarious animal. In fact, we sat secretly
+criticising and contemning one another ... yet outside there were so
+many millions of people unknown, and overhead the multitude of the stars
+was equally comfortless.
+
+_Later_: ... Zoology on occasion still fires my ambition! Surely I
+cannot be dying yet.
+
+Whatever misfortune befalls me I do hope I shall be able to meet it
+unflinchingly. I do not fear ill-health in itself, but I do fear its
+possible effect on my mind and character.... Already I am slowly
+altering, as the Lord liveth. Already for example my sympathy with
+myself is maudlin.
+
+Whenever the blow shall fall, some sort of a reaction _must_ be given.
+Heine flamed into song. Beethoven wrote the 5th Symphony. So what shall
+I do when my time comes? I don't think I have any lyrics or symphonies
+to write, so I shall just have to grin and bear it--like a dumb
+animal.... As long as I have spirit and buoyancy I don't care what
+happens--for I know that or so long I cannot be accounted a failure. The
+only _real_ failure is one in which the victim is left spiritless,
+dazed, dejected with blackness all around, and within, a knife slowly
+and unrelentingly cutting the strings of his heart.
+
+My head whirls with conflicting emotions, struggling, desperate ideas,
+and a flood of impressions of all sorts of things that are never
+sufficiently sifted and arranged to be caught down on paper. I am
+brought into this world, hustled along it and then hustled out of it,
+with no time for anything. I want to be on a great hill and square up
+affairs.
+
+_August_ 28.
+
+... After tea, we all three walked in Kensington Gardens and sat on a
+seat by the Round Pond. My umbrella fell to the ground, and I left it
+there with its nose poking up in a cynical manner, as She remarked.
+
+"It's not cynical," I said, "only a little knowing. Won't you let yours
+fall down to keep it company? Yours is a lady umbrella and a
+good-looking one--they might flirt together."
+
+"Mine doesn't want to flirt," she answered stiffly.
+
+_September_ 13.
+
+_At C----, a tiny little village by the sea in N----._
+
+Looking up from a rockpool, where I had been watching Gobies, I saw
+three children racing across the sands to bathe, I saw a man dive from a
+boat, and I saw a horse-man gallop his mare down to the beach and plunge
+about in the line of breakers. The waters thundered, the mare whinnied,
+the children shouted to one another, and I turned my head down again to
+the rockpool with a great thumping heart of happiness: it was so lovely
+to be conscious of the fact that out there this beautiful picture was
+awaiting me whenever and as often as I chose to lift my head. I
+purposely kept my head down, for the picture was so beautiful I did not
+want to hurt it by breathing on it, and I kept my head down out of a
+playful self-cheating delight; I decided not to indulge myself.
+
+_September_ 16.
+
+Out in the Bay dredging for Echinoderms with "Carrots." Brilliantly
+fine. The haul was a failure, but, being out in a boat on a waveless sea
+under a cloudless sky, I was scarcely depressed at this! We cruised
+along from one little bay to another, past smugglers' caves and white
+pebble beaches, the dredge all the while growling along the sea bottom,
+and "Carrots" and I lying listless in the bows. I was _immensely happy_.
+My mercury was positively ringing the bell.
+
+Who, then, is "Carrots"? He is a fine brawny boat-man who jumps over the
+rocks like a Chamois, swims like a Fish, pulls like an Ox, snorts like a
+Grampus--a sort of compound zoological perfection, built eclectically.
+
+_September_ 18.
+
+_Early Boughies_
+
+Up the village, Mrs. Beavan keeps a tiny little shop and runs a very
+large garden. She showed us all about the garden, and introduced us to
+her husband, whom we discovered in an apple tree--an old man, aged 76,
+very hard of hearing, and with an impediment in his speech. He at once
+began to move his mouth, and I caught odd jingles of sound that sounded
+like nothing at all--at first, but which gradually resolved themselves
+on close attention to such familiar landmarks as "Early Boughies,"
+"Stubbits," "Ribstone Pippins" into a discourse on Apples.
+
+The following curious conversation took place between me and the deaf
+gaffer, aged 76, standing in the apple tree,--
+
+"These be all appulls from Kent--I got 'em all from Kent."
+
+"How long have you lived in C----?"
+
+"Bunyard & Son--that's the firm--they live just outside the town of
+Maidstone."
+
+"Do you keep Bees here?"
+
+"One of these yer appulls is called Bunyard after the firm--a fine fruit
+too."
+
+"Your good wife must be of great assistance to you in your work."
+
+"Little stalks maybe, but a large juishy appull for all that."
+
+Just then I heard Mrs. B---- saying to E----,--
+
+"Aw yes, he's very active for 76. A little deaf, but he manages the
+garden all 'eesulf, I bolsters 'un up wi' meat and drink--little and
+often as they zay for children.... Now there's a bootifull tree, me
+dear, that 'as almost beared itself to death, as you may say."
+
+She picked an apple off it shouting to poor Tom still aloft,--
+
+"Tom what's the name of this one?"
+
+"You should come a bit earlier, zir," replied T. "'Tis late a bit now
+doan't 'ee zee?"
+
+"No--what's its name I want," shouted his spouse.
+
+"Yes, yes, give the lady one to take home--there's plenty for all," he
+said.
+
+"What is the NAME? THE NAME OF THIS YER APPULL," screamed Mrs. B., and
+old Tom moving his bones slowly down from the tree answered quite
+unmoved,--
+
+"Aw the name? Why, 'tis a common kind of appull--there's a nice tree of
+'em up there."
+
+"Oh! never mind, 'tis a Gladstone," said Mrs. B., turning to us.
+
+"A very fine Appull," droned the old boy.
+
+_September_ 28.
+
+Back in town again. Wandered about in a somnambulistic way all the
+afternoon till I found myself taking tea in Kew Gardens. I enjoyed the
+wind in my face and hair. Otherwise there is nothing to be said--a
+colourless day.
+
+_October_ 10.
+
+Came across the following arresting sentence: "Pale, anæmic, cadaverous,
+bad teeth and disordered digestion and a morbid egotism." Yes, but my
+teeth are _not_ bad.
+
+_October_ 20.
+
+_On the N. Downs_
+
+Under the oak where I sat the ground was covered with dead leaves. I
+kicked them, and I beat them with my stick, because I was angry that
+they were dead. In the coppice, leaves were quietly and majestically
+floating earthwards in the pomp of death. It was very thrilling to
+observe them.
+
+It was a curious sensation to realise that since the last time I sat
+under the old oak I had been right up to the N. of England, then right
+down to the S.W., and back once more to London town. I bragged about my
+kinetic activity to the stationary oak and I scoffed at the old hill for
+having to remain always in the same place.
+
+It gave me a pleasing sense of infinite superiority to _come back_ and
+see everything the same as before, to sit on the same old seat under the
+same old oak. Even that same old hurdle was lying in the same position
+among the bracken. How sorry I was for it! Poor wretch--unable to
+move--to go to Whitby, to go to C----, to be totally ignorant of the
+great country of London....
+
+Day dreamed. My own life as it unrolls day by day is a source of
+constant amazement, delight, and pain. I can think of no more
+interesting volume than a detailed, intimate, psychological history of
+my own life. I want a perfect comprehension at least of myself....
+
+We are all such egotists that a sorrow or hardship--provided it is great
+enough--flatters our self-importance. We feel that a calamity by
+overtaking us has distinguished us above our fellows. A man likes not to
+be ignored even by a railway accident. A man with a grievance is always
+happy.
+
+_October_ 23.
+
+Over to see E----. Came away disillusioned.
+
+_October_ 25.
+
+Met her in Smith's book shop looking quite bewitching. Hang it all, I
+thought I had finished. Went home with her, watched her make a pudding
+in the kitchen, then we sat by the firelight in the drawing-room and had
+supper. Scrumptious (not the supper).
+
+_October_ 27.
+
+Quarrelled with D----! The atmosphere is changed at the flat--my
+character is ruined. D---- has told them I'm a loose fellow. I've always
+contrived to give him that impression--I liked to be cutting my
+throat--and now it's cut!
+
+_November_ 1.
+
+D---- came and carried me off to the flat, where they asked why I hadn't
+been over--which, of course, pleased me immensely.
+
+_November_ 6.
+
+Doctor M---- is very gloomy about my health and talks of S. Africa,
+Labrador, and so on. I'm not responding to his treatment as I should.
+
+_November_ 11.
+
+Met her this evening in Kensington Road. "I timed this well," said she,
+"I thought I should meet you." Good Heavens, I am getting embroiled.
+Returned to the flat with her and after supper called her "The Lady of
+Shalott."
+
+"I don't think you know what you're talking about"--this stiffly.
+
+"Perhaps not," I answered. "I leave it to you."
+
+"Oh! but it rests with you," she said.
+
+Am I in love? God knows--but I don't suppose God cares.
+
+_November_ 15.
+
+On M----'s advice went to see a stomach specialist--Dr. Hawkins. As I
+got there a little too early walked up the street--Portland Place--on
+the opposite side (from shyness) past an interminable and nauseating
+series of night bells and brass plates, then down again on the right
+side till I got to No. 66 which made me flutter--for ten doors ahead I
+mused is the house I must call at. It made me shiver a little.
+
+The specialist took copious notes of my evidence and after examining me
+retired to consult with M----. What a parade of ceremony! On coming
+back, the jury returned a verdict of "Not proven." I was told I ought to
+go out and live on the prairies--and in two years I should be a _giant_!
+But where are the prairies? What 'bus? If I get worse, I must take
+several months' leave. I think it will come to this.
+
+_November_ 16.
+
+Arthur came down for the week end. He likes the Lady of Shalott. She is
+"not handsome, but arresting, striking" and "capable of tragedy." That I
+believe she has achieved already.... If she were a bit more gloomy and a
+bit more beautiful, she'd be irresistible.
+
+_November_ 22.
+
+He: "Have a cigarette? I enjoy lighting your cigarettes."
+
+She: "I don't know how to smoke properly."
+
+He: "You smoke only as _you_ could."
+
+She: "How's that?"
+
+H.: "Gracefully, of course."
+
+S.: "Do you think I like pretty things being said to me?"
+
+H.: "Why not, if they are true. Flattery is when you tell an ugly woman
+she is beautiful. Have you so poor an opinion of yourself to think all I
+say of you is flattery?"
+
+S.: "Yes. I am only four bare walls,--with nothing inside."
+
+H.: "What a deliciously empty feeling that must be. ... But I don't
+think you're so simple as all that. You bewilder me sometimes."
+
+S.: "Why?"
+
+H.: "I feel like Sindbad the Sailor."
+
+S.: "Why?"
+
+H.: "Because I'm not George Meredith." The title of "husband" frightens
+me.
+
+_December_ 9.
+
+It's a fearful strain to go on endeavouring to live up to time with a
+carefully laid-out time-table of future achievements. I am hurrying on
+with my study of Italian in order to read the Life of Spallanzani in
+order to include him in my book--to be finished by the end of next year;
+I am also subsidising Jenkinson's embryological lectures at University
+College with the more detailed account of practical and experimental
+work in his text-book; I have also started a lengthy research upon the
+Trichoptera--all with a horrible sense of time fleeing swiftly and
+opportunities for work too few ever to be squandered, and, in the
+background, behind all this feverish activity, the black shadow that I
+might die suddenly with nothing done--next year, next month, next week,
+to-morrow, now!
+
+Then sometimes, as to-night, I have misgivings. Shall I do these things
+so well now as I might once have done them? Has not my ill-health
+seriously affected my mental powers? Surely the boy of 1908-10 was
+almost a genius or--seen at this distance--a very remarkable youth in
+the fanatical zeal with which he sought to pursue, and succeeded in
+gaining, his own end of a zoological education for himself.
+
+It is a terrible suspicion to cross the mind of an ambitious youth that
+perhaps, after all, he is a very commonplace mortal--that his life,
+whether comedy or tragedy, or both, or neither, is any way
+insignificant, of no account.
+
+It is still more devastating for him to have to consider whether the
+laurel wreath was not once within his grasp, and whether he must not
+ascribe his own incalculable loss to his stomach simply.
+
+_December_ 15.
+
+A very bad heart attack. As I write it intermits every three or four
+beats. Who knows if I shall live thro' to-night?
+
+_December_ 16.
+
+Here I am once more. A passable night. After breakfast the intermittency
+recommenced--it is better now, with a dropped beat only about once per
+half-hour, so that I am almost happy after yesterday, which was Hell.
+The world is too good to give up without remonstrance at the beck of a
+weak heart.
+
+Before I went to sleep last night, my watch stopped--I at once observed
+the cessation of its tick and wondered if it were an omen. I was
+genuinely surprised to find myself still ticking when I awoke this
+morning. A moment ago a hearse passed down the street.... Yes, but I'm
+damned if I haven't a right to be morbid after yesterday. To be ill like
+this in a boarding-house! I'd marry to-morrow if I had the chance.
+
+_December_ 22.
+
+_Sollas's "Ancient Hunters"_
+
+Read Sollas's book _Ancient Hunters_--very thrilling--mind full of the
+Aurignacians, Mousterians, Magdalenians! I have been peering down such
+tremendous vistas of time and change that my own troubles have been
+eclipsed into ridiculous insignificance. It has been really a Pillar of
+Strength to me--a splendid tonic. Palæontology has its comfortable words
+too. I have revelled in my littleness and irresponsibility. It has
+relieved me of the harassing desire to live, I feel content to live
+dangerously, indifferent to my fate; I have discovered I am a fly, that
+we are all flies, that nothing matters. It's a great load off my life,
+for I don't mind being such a micro-organism--to me the honour is
+sufficient of belonging to the universe--such a great universe, so grand
+a scheme of things. Not even Death can rob me of that honour. For
+nothing can alter the fact that I _have_ lived; _I have been I_, if for
+ever so short a time. And when I am dead, the matter which composes my
+body is indestructible--and eternal, so that come what may to my "Soul,"
+my dust will always be going on, each separate atom of me playing its
+separate part--I shall still have some sort of a finger in the Pie.
+When I am dead, you can boil me, burn me, drown me, scatter me--but you
+cannot destroy me: my little atoms would merely deride such heavy
+vengeance. Death can do no more than kill you.
+
+_December_ 27.
+
+"It is a pleasure to note the success attending the career of Mr. W.N.P.
+Barbellion now engaged in scientific work on the staff of the Natural
+History Museum ..." etc., etc.
+
+This is a cutting from the local paper--one of many that from time to
+time I once delightedly pasted in the pages of the Journal. Not so now.
+
+... At 23, I am a different being. Surrounded by all the stimulating
+environment of scientific research, I am cold and disdainful. I keep up
+the old appearances but underneath it is quite different. I am a
+_hypocrite_. I have to wear the mask and cothornoi, finding the part
+daily more difficult to bear. I am living on my immense initial
+momentum--while the machinery gradually slows up. My career! Gadzooks.
+
+
+
+
+1913
+
+
+_January_ 3.
+
+From the drawing-room window I see pass almost daily an old gentleman
+with white hair, a firm step, broad shoulders, healthy pink skin, a
+sunny smile--always singing to himself as he goes--a happy, rosy-cheeked
+old fellow, with a rosy-cheeked mind.... I should like to throw mud at
+him. By Jove, how I hate him. He makes me wince with my own pain. It is
+heartless, indecently so, for an _old_ man to be so blithe. Life has, I
+suppose, never lain in wait for him. The Great Anarchist has spared him
+a bomb.
+
+_January_ 19.
+
+My Aunt, aged 75, who has apparently concluded from my constant absences
+from Church that my spiritual life is in a parlous way, to-day read me
+her portion from a large book with a broad purple-tasseled bookmark. I
+looked up from "_I Promessi Sposi_" and said "Very nice." It was about
+someone whose soul was not saved and who would not answer the door when
+it was knocked. It is jolly to be regarded as a wicked, libidinous youth
+by an aged maiden Aunt.
+
+_January_ 22.
+
+This Diary reads for all the world as if I were not living in mighty
+London. The truth is I live in a bigger, dirtier city--ill-health.
+Ill-health, when chronic, is like a permanent ligature around one's
+life. What a fine fellow I'd be if I were perfectly well. My energy for
+one thing would lift the roof off....
+
+We conversed around the text: "To travel hopefully is better than to
+arrive and true success is to labour." She is--well, so graceful. My
+God! I love her, I love her, I love her!!!
+
+_February_ 3.
+
+_A Confession_
+
+H---- B---- invited me to tea to meet his fiancée.
+
+Rather pleased with the invitation--I don't know why, for my idea of
+myself is greater than my idea of him and probably greater than his idea
+of himself.
+
+Yet I went and got shaved, and even thought of buying a new pair of
+gloves, but poverty proved greater than vanity, so I went with naked
+hands. On arriving at Turnham Green, I removed my spectacles (well
+knowing how much they damage my personal appearance). However, the
+beauty of the thing was that, tho' I waited as agreed, he never turned
+up, and so I returned home again, crestfallen--and, with my spectacles
+on again.
+
+_February_ 9.
+
+... "Now, W----, talk to me prettily," she said as soon as the door was
+closed on them.
+
+"Oh! make him read a book," whined her sister, but we talked of marriage
+instead--in all its aspects. Bless their hearts, I found these two dear
+young things simply sodden with the idea of it.
+
+In the middle I did a knee-jerk which made them scream with
+laughing--the patellar reflex was new to them, so I seized a brush from
+the grate, crossed to Her and gently tapped: out shot her foot, and
+----cried: "Oh, do do it to me as well." It was rare fun.
+
+     "Oh! pretty knee, what do I see?
+     And he stooped and he tied up my garter for me."
+
+_February_ 10.
+
+News of Scott's great adventure! Scott dead a year ago!! The news, when
+I saw it to-night in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ gave me cold thrills. I
+could have wept.... What splendid people we humans are! If there be no
+loving God to watch us, it's a pity for His sake as much as for our own.
+
+_February_ 15.
+
+Tried to kiss her in a taxi-cab on the way home from the Savoy--the
+taxi-cab danger is very present with us--but she rejected me quietly,
+sombrely. I apologised on the steps of the Flats and said I feared I had
+greatly annoyed her. "I'm not annoyed," she said, "only surprised"--in
+a thoughtful, chilly voice.
+
+We had had supper in Soho, and I took some wine, and she looked so
+bewitching it sent me in a fever, thrumming my fingers on the seat of
+the cab while she sat beside me impassive. Her shoulders are exquisitely
+modelled and a beautiful head is carried poised on a tiny neck.
+
+_February_ 16.
+
+Walking up the steps to her flat to-night made me pose to H---- (who was
+with me) as Sydney Carton in the picture in _A Tale of Two Cities_ on
+the steps of the scaffold. He laughed boisterously, as he is delighted
+to know of my last evening's misadventure.
+
+At supper, a story was told of a man who knocked at the door of his
+lady's heart four times and at last was admitted. I remarked that the
+last part of the romance was weak. She disagreed. H---- exclaimed, "Oh!
+but this man has no sentiment at all!"
+
+"So much the worse for him," chimed in the others.
+
+"He was 66 years of age," added Mrs.----.
+
+"Too old," said P. "What do you think the best age for a man to marry?"
+
+H.: "Thirty for a man, twenty-five for a woman."
+
+She: "That's right: it still gives me a little time."
+
+P.: "What do _you_ think?" (to me).
+
+I replied sardonically,--
+
+"A young man may not yet and an old man not at all."
+
+"That's right, old wet blanket," chirruped P----.
+
+"You know," I continued, delighted to seize the opportunity to assume
+the role of youthful cynic, "Cupid and Death once met at an Inn and
+exchanged arrows, since when young men have died and old men have
+doted."
+
+H---- was charming enough to opine that it was impossible to fix a time
+for love. Love simply came.
+
+We warned him to be careful on the boat going out.
+
+"Yes, I know," said H---- (who is in love with P----).
+
+"My brother had a dose of moonlight on board a boat when he sailed and
+he's been happy ever since."
+
+P.: "How romantic!"
+
+H.: "A great passion!"
+
+"The only difference," I interjected in a sombre monotone, "between a
+passion and a caprice is that the caprice lasts a little longer."
+
+"Sounds like a book," She said in contempt.
+
+It was--Oscar Wilde!
+
+P---- insisted on my taking a biscuit. "Don't mind me," she said. "Just
+think I'm a waitress and take no notice at all."
+
+H.: "Humph! I never see him taking no notice of a waitress."
+
+(Sneers and Curtain.)
+
+_February_ 24.
+
+H---- came home last night and told me that she said as he came away,
+"Tell W---- I hate him." So it's all right. I shall go over to-morrow
+again--Hurrah! My absence has been felt then.
+
+_March_ 7.
+
+Came home, lay on my bed, still dressed, and ruminated....
+
+First a suspicion then a conviction came to me that I was a cad--a
+callous, selfish, sensation-hunting cad.... For the time being the
+bottom was knocked out of my smug self-satisfaction. For several long
+half-hours I found myself drifting without compass or stars. I was quite
+disorientated, temporarily thrown off the balance of my _amour propre_.
+Then I got up, lit the gas and looking at myself in the mirror, found it
+was really true,--I was a mean creature, wholly absorbed in self.
+
+As an act of contrition, I ought to have gone out into the garden and
+eaten worms. But the mirror brought back my self-consciousness and I
+began to crawl back into my recently discarded skin--I began to be less
+loathesome to myself. For as soon as I felt interested or amused or
+curious over the fact that I had been really loathesome to myself I
+began to regain my equilibrium. _Now_, I and myself are on comparatively
+easy terms with one another. I am settled on the old swivel.... I take a
+lot of knocking off it and if shot off soon return.
+
+To-day, she was silent and melancholy but wonderfully fascinating. One
+day I am desperate and the next cold and apathetic. Am I in love? God
+knows! She came to the door to say "Good night," and I deliberately
+strangled my desire to say something.
+
+_March_ 9.
+
+In bed till 12.30 reading Bergson and the O.T.
+
+Over to the flat to supper. E---- was cold and silent. She spurned me.
+No wonder. I talked volubly and quite brilliantly with the definite
+purpose of showing up J----'s somnolence. I also pulled his leg. He
+hates me. No wonder. After supper, he went in to her studio and remained
+there alone with her while she worked. At 11 p.m. he was still there
+when I came away in a whirlwind of jealousy, regrets, and rage. G----
+said he was going to stay on until he saw "the blighter off the
+premises." Neither of us would go in to turn him out.
+
+I love her deeply and once my heart jumped when I thought I heard her
+coming into the room. But it was only P----. Did not see her again--even
+to say "Good-night."
+
+_March_ 10.
+
+Work in the evening in our bedroom--two poor miserable bachelors--H----
+reading Equity Law, a rug around his legs before an empty grate, while I
+am sitting at the table in top-coat, with collar up, and writing my
+_magnum opus,_ which is to bring me fame, fortune and--E----!
+
+H---- says that this morning I was putting on my shoes when he pointed
+out a large hole in the heel of my sock.
+
+"Damn! I shall have to wear boots," I said--at least he says I said it,
+and I am quite ready to believe him. Such unconsciousness of self is
+rare with me.
+
+_March_ 15.
+
+[At a public dinner at the Holborn Restaurant] J----replied to the toast
+of the Ladies. Feeble! H---- and I stood and had a silent toast to E----
+and N---- by just winking one eye at each other. He sat opposite me.
+
+If I had been asked to reply to this toast I should have said with the
+greatest gusto, something as follows,--
+
+[Here follows the imaginary speech in full, composed the same night
+before going to sleep.]
+
+Yet I am taken for a soft fool! My manner is soft, self-conscious, shy.
+What a lot of self-glorification I lose thereby! What a lot of
+self-torture I gain in its stead!
+
+_March_ 17.
+
+To-day went to the B.M. but did very little work. Thought over the
+matter carefully and decided to ask E---- to marry me. Relief to be able
+to decide. I was happy too.
+
+Yesterday P---- came in to us from E----'s studio and said,--
+
+"E---- sends her love."
+
+"To whom?" H---- inquired.
+
+"I don't know," P---- replied, smiling at me.
+
+_March_ 18.
+
+Had a long conversation with H---- last night. He says all E----
+intended to convey was that the quarrel was over.... I felt relieved,
+because I have no money, but--a large ambition. Then I am selfish, and
+have not forgotten that I want to spend my holidays in the Jura, and
+next year three weeks at the Plymouth Laboratory.
+
+_March_ 19.
+
+Went over to see E----. We had an awkward half-an-hour alone together.
+She was looking bewitching! I am plunging more and more into love. Had
+it on the tip of my tongue once. I am dreadfully fond of her.
+
+"I have a most profound gloom over me," I said.
+
+"Why don't you try and get rid of it?" she asked.
+
+"I can't until Zeus has pity and rolls away the clouds."
+
+_April_ 21.
+
+We are sitting up in our beds which are side by side in a room on the
+top story of a boarding house in ---- Road.
+
+It is 11.30 p.m. and I am leaning over one one side lighting the oil
+lamp so as to boil the kettle to make Ovaltine before going to sleep.
+
+"Whom have I seduced?" I screamed. "You rotter, don't you know that a
+dead passion full of regrets is as terrible as a dead body full of
+worms? There, I talk literature, my boy, if you were only Boswell
+enough to take it down.... As for K----, I shall never invite him to
+dinner again. He comes to me and whines that nobody loves him, and so I
+say, 'Oh! poor lad, never mind, if you're bored, why, come to my rooms
+of an evening and hear me talk--you'll have the time of your life.' And
+now he's cheeky."
+
+H. (sipping his drink and very much preoccupied with it) replied
+abstractedly, "When you die you'll go to Hell." (I liked his Homeric
+simplicity.) "You ought to be buried in a fireproof safe."
+
+Silence.
+
+H. (returning to the attack), "I hope she turns you down."
+
+"Thank you," I said.
+
+"As for P----," he resumed, "she's double-Dutch to me."
+
+"Go to the Berlitz School," I suggested, "and learn the language."
+
+"You bally fool.... All you do is to sit there and smile like a
+sanguinary cat. Nothing I say ever rouses you. I believe if I came to
+you and said, 'Here, Professor, is a Beetle with 99 legs that has lived
+on granite in the middle of the Sahara for 40 days and 40 nights,' you'd
+simply answer, 'Yes, and that reminds me I've forgotten to blow my
+nose.'"
+
+The two pyjamaed figures shake with laughing, the light goes out and the
+sanguinary conversation continues on similar lines until we fall asleep.
+
+_April_ 26.
+
+_Two Months' Sick Leave_
+
+In a horrible panic--the last few days--I believe I am developing
+locomotor ataxy. One leg, one arm, and my speech are affected, _i.e._
+the right side and my speech centre. M---- is serious.... I hope the
+disease, whatever it is, will be sufficiently lingering to enable me to
+complete my book.
+
+R---- is a dear man. I shall not easily forget his kindness during this
+terrible week.... Can the Fates have the audacity?... Who can say?
+
+_April_ 27.
+
+I believe there can be no doubt that I have had a slight partial
+paralysis of my right side (like Dad). I stutter a little in my speech
+when excited, I cannot write properly (look at this handwriting), and my
+right leg is rocky at the knee. My head swims.
+
+It is too inconceivably horrible to be buried in the Earth in such
+splendid spring weather. Who can tell me what is in store for me?...
+Life opens to me, I catch a glimpse of a vision, and the doors clang to
+again noiselessly. It is dark. That will be my history. Am developing a
+passionate belief in my book and a fever of haste to complete it before
+the _congé définitif_.
+
+_April_ 29.
+
+Saw M---- again, who said my symptoms were alarming certainly, but he
+was sure no definite diagnosis could be made.
+
+_April_ 30.
+
+Went with M---- to see a well-known nerve specialist--Dr. H----. He
+could find no symptoms of a definite disease, tho' he asked me
+suspiciously if I had ever been with women.
+
+Ordered two months' complete rest in the country. H---- chased me round
+his consulting room with a drum-stick, tapping my nerves and cunningly
+working my reflexes. Then he tickled the soles of my feet and pricked me
+with a pin--all of which I stood like a man. He wears a soft black hat,
+looks like a Quaker, and reads the _Verhandlungen d. Gesellschaft d.
+Nervenarzten_.
+
+M---- is religious and after I had disclosed my physique to him
+yesterday (for the 99th time) he remained on his knees by the couch in
+his consulting room (after working my reflexes) for a moment or two in
+the attitude of prayer. When the Doctor prays for you--better call in
+the undertaker. My epitaph "He played Ludo well." The game anyhow
+requires moral stamina--ask H----.
+
+_May_ 5.
+
+At R----. Mugged about all day. Put on a gramophone record--then crawled
+up into a corner of the large, empty drawing room and ate my heart out.
+Heart has a bitter taste--if it's your own.
+
+_May_ 6.
+
+Sat in the "morning room" feeling ill. In the chair opposite sat Aunt
+Fanny, aged 86, knitting. I listened to the click of her needles, while
+out in the garden a thrush sang, and there was a red sunset.
+
+_May_ 8.
+
+Before I left R----, A---- [My brother] had written to Uncle enclosing
+my doctor's letter. I don't know the details except that Dr. M----
+emphasised the seriousness and yet held out hope that two months' rest
+would allay the symptoms.
+
+_May_ 11.
+
+_At Home_
+
+I made some offensive remark to H---- whom I met in the street. This set
+him off.
+
+"You blighter, I hope you marry a loose woman. May your children be all
+bandy-legged and squint-eyed, may your teeth drop out, and your toes
+have bunions," and so on in his usual lengthy commination.
+
+I turned to the third man.
+
+"Bob--this!--after all I've done for that young man! I have even gone
+out of my Way to cultivate in him a taste for poetry--until he is now,
+in fact, quite wrapped up in it--indeed, so much so, that for a time he
+was nothing but a brown paper parcel labelled Poetry."
+
+H. (doggedly): "When are you going to die?"
+
+"That Master H----," I answered menacingly, "is on the knees of the
+Gods."
+
+H.: "I shan't believe you're dead till I see your tombstone. I shall
+then say to the Sexton, 'Is he really dead, then?' and the Sexton will
+say, 'Well, 'ee's buried onny way.'"
+
+Bob was not quite in sympathy with our boisterous spirits.
+
+_May_ 15.
+
+_Gardening_
+
+Sought out H---- as he was watering his petunias in the garden. He
+informed me he was going to London on Monday.
+
+H.: "Mother is coming too."
+
+B.: "Why?"
+
+H.: "Oh! I'm buying my kit--shirts and things. I sail at the beginning
+of July."
+
+B.: "I suppose shirts are difficult to buy. You wouldn't know what to do
+with one if you had one. Your mother will lead you by the hand into a
+shop and say, 'H----, dear, this is a shirt,' and you'll reply with
+pathos, 'Mother what are the wild shirts saying?'"
+
+H.: "You're a B.F." (goes on watering).
+
+"I wonder what you'd do if you were let loose in a big garden," I began.
+
+H.: "I should be as happy as a bird. I should hop about, chirrup and lay
+eggs. You should have seen my tomato plants last year--one was as tall
+as father."
+
+B.: "Now tell me of the Gooseberry as big as Mother."
+
+Mutual execrations. Then we grinned and cackled at each other, emitting
+weird and ferocious cachinnations. Several times a day in confidential,
+serious tones--after one of these explosions--we say, "I really believe
+we're mad." You never heard such extraordinary caterwaulings. Our snappy
+conversations are interrupted with them every minute or so!
+
+_Stagnancy_
+
+A stagnant day. Lay still in the Park all day with just sufficient
+energy to observe. The Park was almost empty. Every one but me at work.
+Nothing is more dreary than a pleasure ground on workdays. There was one
+man a little way off throwing a ball to a clever dog. Behind me on the
+path, some one came along wheeling a pram. I listened in a kind of coma
+to the scrunching of the gravel in the distance a long time after the
+pram was out of sight. Far away--the tinkle of Church bells in a village
+across the river, and, in front, the man still throwing the ball to his
+clever dog.
+
+_May_ 25.
+
+_Death_
+
+... I suppose the truth is I am at last broken to the idea of Death. Once
+it terrified me and once I hated it. But now it only annoys me. Having
+lived with the Bogey for so long, and broken bread with him so often, I
+am used to his ugliness, tho' his persistent attentions bore me. Why
+doesn't he do it and have done with me? Why this deference, why does he
+pass me everything but the poison? Why am I such an unconscionably long
+time dying?
+
+What embitters me is the humiliation of having to die, to have to be
+pouring out the precious juices of my life into the dull Earth, to be no
+longer conscious of what goes on, no longer moving abroad upon the Earth
+creating attraction and repulsions, pouring out one's ego in a stream.
+To think that the women I have loved will be marrying and forget, and
+that the men I have hated will continue on their way and forget I ever
+hated them--the ignominy of being dead! What voluble talker likes his
+mouth to be stopped with earth, who relishes the idea of the carrion
+worm mining in the seat of the intellect?
+
+_May_ 29.
+
+_Renunciation_
+
+Staying at the King's Hotel, ----. Giddiness very bad. Death seems
+unavoidable. A tumour on the brain?
+
+Coming down here in the train, sat in corner of the compartment, twined
+one leg around the other, rested my elbow on the window ledge, and gazed
+out helplessly at the exuberant green fields, green woods, and green
+hedgerows. The weather was perfect, the sun blazed down.
+
+Certainly, I was rather sorry for myself at the thought of leaving it
+all. But I girded up my loins and wrapped around me for a while the
+mantle of a nobler sentiment; _i.e._ I felt sorry for the others as
+well--for the two brown carters in the road ambling along with a timber
+waggon, for the two old maids in the same compartment with me knitting
+bedsocks, for the beautiful Swallows darting over the stream, for the
+rabbit that lopped into the fern just as we passed--they too were all
+leaving it.
+
+The extent of my benign compassion startled me--it was so unexpected.
+Perhaps for the first time in my life I forgot all about my own
+miserable ambitions--I forgave the successful, the time-servers, the
+self-satisfied, the overweening, the gracious and condescending--all, in
+fact, who hitherto have been thorns in my flesh and innocently enough
+have goaded me to still fiercer efforts to win thro'. "Poor people," I
+said. "Leave them alone. Let them be happy if they can." With a
+submissive heart, I was ready to sit down in the rows of this world's
+failures and never have thought one bitter word about success. To all
+those persons who in one way or another had foiled my purposes I
+extended a pardon with Olympian gravity, and, strangest of all, I could
+have melted such frosty moral rectitudes with a genuine interest in the
+careers of my struggling contemporaries. With perfect self-abnegation, I
+held out my hand to them and wished them all "God Speed."
+
+It was a strange metempsychosis. Yet of a truth it is no use being
+niggardly over our lives. We are all of us "shelling out." And we can
+afford to be generous, for we shall all--some early, some late--be
+bankrupt in the end. For my part, I've had a short and boisterous voyage
+and shan't be sorry to get into port. I give up all my plans, all my
+hopes, all my loves and enthusiasms without remonstrance. I renounce
+all--I myself am already really dead.
+
+_May_ 30.
+
+Last night the sea was as flat as a pavement, a pretty barque with all
+her sails out to catch the smallest puff of wind--the tiniest
+inspiration--was nevertheless without motion--a painted ship on a
+tapestry of violet. H---- Hill was an immense angular mass of indigo
+blue. Even rowing boats made little progress and the water came off the
+languid paddles in syrupy clots. Everything was utterly still, the air
+thick--like cottonwool to the touch and very stifling; vitality in
+living things leaked away under a sensuous lotus influence.
+Intermittently after the darkness had come, Bullpoint Lighthouse shone
+like the wink of a lascivious eye.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Pottering about all day on the Pier and Front, listening to other
+people's talk, catching snippets of conversation--not edifying. If there
+were seven wise men in the town, I would not save it. Damn the place!
+
+_May_ 31.
+
+... I espied her first in the distance and turned my head away quickly
+and looked out to sea. A moment after, I began to turn my head round
+again slowly with the cautiousness and air of suspicion of a Tortoise
+poking its head out from underneath his shell. I was terrified to
+discover that in the meantime she had come and sat down on the seat
+immediately behind me with her back to mine. We sat like this back to
+back for some time and I enjoyed the novel experience and the tension. A
+few years ago, the bare sight of her gave me palpitation of the heart,
+and, on the first occasion that I had the courage to stop to speak, I
+felt livid and the skin on my face twitched uncontrollably.
+
+Presently I got up and walked past--in the knowledge that she must now
+be conscious of my presence after a disappearance of three years. Later
+we met face to face and I broke the ice. She's a pretty girl.... So too
+is her sister.
+
+Few people, except my barber, know how amorous I am. He has to shave my
+sinuous lips.
+
+_June_ 3.
+
+Spent many dreadful hours cogitating whether to accept their invitation
+to dinner.... I wanted to go for several reasons. I wanted to see her in
+a home-setting for the first time, and I wanted to spend the evening
+with three pretty girls. I also had the idea of displaying myself to the
+scrutinising gaze of the family as the hero of the old romance: and of
+showing Her how much I had progressed since last we met and what a
+treasure she had lost.
+
+On the other hand, I was afraid that the invitation was only a casual
+one, I feared a snuffy reception, a frosty smile and a rigid hand. Could
+I go up and partake of meat at their board, among brothers and sisters
+taking me for an ogre of a jilt, and she herself perhaps opposite me
+making me blush perpetually to recall our one-time passionate kisses,
+our love letters and our execrable verses to each other! There seemed
+dreadful possibilities in such an adventure. Yet I badly wanted to
+experience the piquant situation.
+
+At 7 p.m., half an hour before I was due, decided on strong measures. I
+entered a pub and took a stiff whisky and soda, and then set off with a
+stout heart to take the icy family by storm--and if need be live down my
+evil reputation by my amiability and urbanity!
+
+I went--and of course everything passed off in the most normal manner.
+She is a very pretty girl--like velvet. Before dinner, we walked in the
+garden--and talked only of flowers.
+
+_June_ 4.
+
+On the Hill, this morning, felt the thrill of the news of my own Death:
+I mean I imagined I heard the words,--
+
+"You've heard the news about B----?"
+
+Second Voice: "No, what?"
+
+"He's dead."
+
+Silence.
+
+Won't all this seem piffle if I don't die after all! As an artist in
+life I _ought_ to die; it is the only artistic ending --and I ought to
+die now or the Third Act will fizzle out in a long doctor's bill.
+
+_June_ 5.
+
+_A New Pile in the Pier_
+
+Watched some men put a new pile in the pier. There was all the usual
+paraphernalia of chains, pulleys, cranes, and ropes, with a massive
+wooden pile swinging over the water at the end of a long wire hawser.
+Everything was in the massive style--even the men--very powerful men,
+slow, ruminative, silent men.
+
+Nothing very relevant could be gathered from casual remarks. The
+conversation was without exception monosyllabic: "Let go," or "Stand
+fast." But by close attention to certain obscure movements of the man on
+the ladder near the water's edge, it gradually came thro' to my
+consciousness that all these powerful, silent men were up against some
+bitter difficulty. I cannot say what it was. The burly monsters were
+silent about the matter.... In fact they appeared almost
+indifferent--and tired, oh! so very tired of the whole business. The
+attitude of the man nearest me was that for all he cared the pile could
+go on swinging in mid-air to the crack of Doom.
+
+They continued slow, laborious efforts to overcome the secret
+difficulty. But these gradually slackened and finally ceased. One
+massive man after another abandoned his post in order to lean over the
+rails and gaze like a mystic into the depths of the sea. No one spoke.
+No one saw anything not even in the depths of the sea. One spat, and
+with round, sad eyes contemplated the trajectory of his brown bolus (he
+had been chewing) in its descent into the water.
+
+The foreman, an original thinker, lit a cigarette, which relieved the
+tension. Then, slowly and with majesty, he turned on his heel, and
+walked away. With the sudden eclipse of the foreman's interest, the
+incident closed. I should have been scarcely surprised to find him
+behind the Harbour-master's Office playing "Shove-ha'penny" or skittles
+with the pile still swinging in mid-air.... After all it was only a
+bloody pile.
+
+_June_ 11.
+
+_Depression_
+
+Suffering from depression.... The melancholy fit fell very suddenly. All
+the colour went out of my life, the world was dirty gray. On the way
+back to my hotel caught sight of H----, jumping into a cab, after a
+visit to S---- Sands. But the sight of him aroused no desire in me to
+shout or wave. I merely wondered how on earth he could have spent a
+happy day at such a Sandy place.
+
+On arriving at ----, sank deeper into my morass. It suffocated me to
+find the old familiar landmarks coming into view ... the holiday-makers
+along the streets how I hated them--the Peg Top Hill how desolate--all
+as before--how dull. The very fact that they were all there as before in
+the morning nauseated me. The sea-coast here is magnificent, the town is
+pretty--I know that, of course. But all looked dreary and
+cheerless--just the sort of feeling one gets on entering an empty house
+with no fire on a winter's day and nowhere to sit down.... I felt as
+lonely and desolate as a man suddenly fallen from the clouds into an
+unknown town on the Antarctic Continent built of ice and inhabited by
+Penguins. Who are these people? I asked myself irritably. There perhaps
+on the other side of the street was my own brother. But I was not even
+faintly interested and told the cabman to drive on. The spray from the
+sea fogged my spectacles and made me weary.
+
+_June_ 14.
+
+_The Restlessness of the Sea_
+
+The restlessness of the sea acts as a soporific on jangled nerves. You
+gaze at its incessant activities, unwillingly at first because they
+distract your attention from your own cherished worries and griefs,--but
+later you watch with complete self-abandon--it wrenches you out of
+yourself--and eventually with a kind of stupid hypnotic stare.
+
+_Dr. Spurgeon_
+
+The day has been overcast, but to-night a soft breeze sprang up and
+swept the sky clear as softly as a mop. The sun coming out shone upon a
+white sail far out in the channel, scarcely another vessel hove in
+sight. The white sail glittered like a piece of silver paper whenever
+the mainsail swung round as the vessel tacked. Its solitariness and
+whiteness in a desert of marine blue attracted the attention and held it
+till at last I could look at nothing else. The sight of it--so clean and
+white and fair--set me yearning for all the rarest and most exquisite
+things my imagination could conjure up--a beautiful girl, with fair and
+sunburnt skin, brown eyes, dark eyebrows, and small pretty feet; a
+dewdrop in a violet's face; an orange-tip butterfly swinging on an umbel
+of a flower.
+
+The sail went on twinkling and began to exert an almost moral influence
+over me. It drew out all the good in me. I longed to follow it on white
+wings--an angel I suppose--to quit this husk of a body "as raiment put
+away," and pursue Truth and Beauty across the sea to the horizon, and
+beyond the horizon up the sky itself to its last tenuous confines, no
+doubt with a still small voice summoning me and the rest of the elect to
+an Agapemone, with Dr. Spurgeon at the door distributing tracts.
+
+I can scoff like this now. But at the time my exaltation was very real.
+My soul strained in the leash. I was full of a desire for unattainable
+spiritual beauty. I wanted something. But I don't know what I want.
+
+_June_ 16.
+
+_My Sense of Touch_
+
+My sense of touch has always been morbidly acute. I like to feel a
+cigarette locked in the extreme corner of my mouth. When I remove it
+from my mouth then I hold it probably up in the fork between two
+fingers. If I am waiting for a meal I finger the cool knives and forks.
+If I am in the country I plunge my hands with outspread fingers into a
+mass of large-topped grasses, then close my fingers, crush and
+decapitate the lot.
+
+_June_ 27.
+
+_Camping Out at S---- Sands_
+
+A brilliant summer day. Up early, breakfasted, and, clad in sweater and
+trousers, walked up the sands to the boathouse with bare feet.
+
+Everything was wonderful! I strode along over the level sands infatuated
+with the sheer ability to put one leg in front of the other and walk. I
+loved to feel the muscles of my thighs working, and to swing my arms in
+rhythm with the stride. The stiff breeze had blown the sky clear, and
+was rushing through my long hair, and bellowing into each ear. I strode
+as Alexander must have done!
+
+Then I stretched my whole length out along a flat plank on the sands,
+which was as dry as a bone and warm. There was not a soul on the sands.
+Everything was bare, clean, windswept. My plank had been washed clean
+and white. The sands--3 miles of it--were hard and purified, level. My
+eye raced along in every direction--there was nothing--not a bird or a
+man--to stop it. In that immense windswept space nothing was present
+save me and the wind and the sea--a flattering moment for the egotist.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the foot of the cliffs on the return journey met an old man gathering
+sticks. As he ambled along dropping sticks into a long sack he called
+out casually, "Do you believe in Jesus Christ?" in the tone of voice in
+which one would say, "I think we shall have some rain before night."
+"Aye, aye," came the answer without hesitation from a boy lying on his
+back in the sands a few yards distant, "and that He died to save me."
+
+Life is full of surprises like this. The only other sounds I have heard
+to-day were the Herring Gull's cackle. Your own gardener will one day
+look over his rake and give you the correct chemical formula for
+carbonic acid gas. I met a postman once reading Shelley as he walked his
+rounds.
+
+_June_ 28.
+
+I am writing this by the lamp in the cabin among the sandhills waiting
+for H---- to arrive from town with provisions. I wear a pair of bags, a
+dirty sweater, and go without hat or shoes and stockings. There is a
+"Deadwood Dick" atmosphere here. I'm a sort of bronco-breaker or rancher
+off duty writing home. In a minute I haven't the slightest doubt, H----
+will gallop into the compound, tether his colt and come in "raising
+Cain" for a belly-full of red meat.... If I am going to live after all
+(touch wood) I shall go abroad and be in the open.
+
+I eat greedily, am getting very sunburnt, am growing hairy (that means
+strength!), and utter portentous oaths. If I stayed here much longer I
+should grow a tail and climb trees.
+
+After a supper of fried eggs and fried bread done to a nicety, turned in
+at ten, and both of us lay warm and comfortable in bed, smoking
+cigarettes and listening to Hoffmann's Barcarolle on the gramophone. We
+put the lamp out, and it pleased us to watch the glow of each other's
+cigarettes in the dark.... Neither of us spoke.... Went to sleep at
+midnight. Awoke at sunrise to hear an Owl still hooting, a Lark singing,
+and several Jackdaws clattering on our tin roof with their claws as they
+walked.
+
+_July_ 1.
+
+_In London Again_
+
+Returned to London very depressed. Am not so well as I was three weeks
+ago. The sight of one eye is affected, and I am haunted by the
+possibility of blindness. Then I have a numb feeling on one side of my
+face, and my right arm is less mobile.
+
+Left darling Mother in a very weak state in bed, with neuritis and a
+weak heart. She cried when I said "Goodbye," and asked me to go to
+Church as often as I could, and to read a portion of Scripture every
+day. I promised. Then she added, "For Dad's sake;" just as if I would
+not do it for her. Poor dear, she suffers a deal of pain. She does not
+know how ill I am. I have not told her.
+
+_July_ 3.
+
+Back at work. A terrible day. Thoughts of suicide--a pistol.
+
+_July_ 8.
+
+I get thro' each day with the utmost difficulty. I have to wrestle with
+every minute. Each hour is a conquest. The three quarters of an hour at
+lunch comes as a Godsend. I look forward to it all the morning, I enter
+into it with joyful relief with no thought of the dreadful moment
+impending when I must return and re-enter my room. By being wise like
+this, I manage to husband my spirits and am relatively cheerful for one
+hour in the middle of each difficult day.
+
+_July_ 9.
+
+Several times I have gone to bed and hoped I should never wake up. Life
+grows daily more impossible. To-day I put a slide underneath the
+microscope and looked at it. It was like looking at something thro' the
+wrong end of a telescope. I sat with eye glued to the ocular, so as to
+keep up a pretence of work in case some one came in. My mind was
+occupied with quite different affairs. If one is pondering on Life and
+Death, it is a terrible task to have to study Mites.
+
+_July_ 10.
+
+Am doing no work at all.... I sit motionless in my chair and beat the
+devil's tattoo with my thumbs and think, think, think in the same
+horrible circle hour after hour. I am unable to work. I haven't the
+courage to. I've lost my nerve.
+
+At five I return "home" to the Boarding-house and get more desperate.
+
+Two old maids sat down to dinner to-night, one German youth (a
+lascivious, ranting, brainless creature), a lady typist (who takes drugs
+they say), a dipsomaniac (who has monthly bouts--H---- carried him
+upstairs and put him to bed the other night), two invertebrate
+violinists who play in the Covent Garden Orchestra, a colonial lady
+engaged in a bedroom intrigue with a man who sits at my table. What are
+these people to me? I hate them all. They know it and are offended.
+
+After dinner, put on my cap and rushed out anywhere to escape. Walked to
+the end of the street, not knowing where I was going or what doing.
+Stopped and stared with fixed eyes at the traffic in Kensington Road,
+undetermined what to do with myself and unable to make up my mind
+(volitional paralysis). Turned round, walked home, and went straight to
+bed 9 p.m., anxiously looking forward to to-morrow evening when I go to
+see her again, but at the same time wondering how on earth I am to get
+through to-morrow's round before the evening comes.... This is a
+hand-to-mouth existence. My own inner life is scorching up all outside
+interests. Zoology appears as a curious thing in a Bagdad bazaar. I sit
+in my room at the B.M. and play with it; I let it trickle thro' my
+fingers and roll away like a child playing with quicksilver.
+
+_July_ 11.
+
+Over to the flat. She was looking beautiful in a black dress, with a
+white silk blouse, and a Byron collar, negligently open in front as if
+a button had come out. She said I varied: sometimes I went up in her
+estimation, sometimes down; once I went down very low. I understood her
+to say I was now UP! Alleluia!
+
+_July_ 14.
+
+... It would take too long and I am too tired to write out all the
+varying phases of this day's life--all its impressions and petty
+miseries chasing one another across my consciousness or leap-frogging
+over my chest like gleeful fiends.[1]
+
+_July_ 21.
+
+Thoroughly enjoyed the journey up to town this morning. I secretly
+gloated over the fact that the train was dashing along over the rails to
+London bearing me and all the rest of the train's company upon their
+pursuits--wealth, fame, learning. I was inebriated with the speed,
+ferocity, and dash of living.... If the train had charged into the
+buffers I should have hung my head out of the window and cheered. If a
+man had got in my way, I'd have knocked him down. The wheels of the
+carriage were singing a lusty song in which I joined.
+
+_July_ 30.
+
+... We talked of men and women, and she said she thought men were
+neither angels nor devils but just men. I said I thought women were
+either angels or devils.
+
+"I am afraid to ask you which you think me."
+
+"You needn't," I said shortly.
+
+_August_ 9.
+
+Horribly upset with news from home. Mother is really ill. The Doctor
+fears serious nerve trouble and says she will always be an invalid. This
+is awful, poor dear! It's dreadful, and yet I have a tiny wish buried at
+the bottom of my heart that she may be removed early from us rather
+than linger in pain of body and mind. Especially do I hope she may not
+live to hear any grievous news of me.... What irony that she should lose
+the use of her right arm only two years after Dad's death from
+paralysis. It is cruel for it reminds her of Dad's illness.... What,
+too, would she think if she could have heard M----'s first words to me
+yesterday on one of my periodical visits to his consulting room, "Well,
+how's the _paralysis_?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the evening went over to see her. She was wearing a black silk gown
+and looked handsome.... She is always the same sombre, fascinating,
+lissom, soft-voiced She! She herself never changes.... What am I to do?
+I cannot give her up and yet I do not altogether wish to take her to my
+heart. It distresses me to know how to proceed. I am a wily fish.
+
+_August_ 10.
+
+Sat in the gardens with her. We sat facing the sun for a while until she
+was afraid of developing freckles and turned around, deliberately
+turning her back on good King Sol.... I said it was disrespectful.
+
+"Oh! he doesn't mind," she said. "He's a dear. He kissed me and said,
+'Turn round my dear if you like.'"
+
+Isn't she tantalising?
+
+I wanted to say sarcastically, "I wonder you let him kiss you," but
+there was a danger of the remark reviving the dead.
+
+_August_ 14.
+
+I tried my best, I've sought every loophole of escape, but I am quite
+unable to avoid the melancholy fact that her thumbs are--lamentable. I
+am genuinely upset about it for I like her. No one more than I would be
+more delighted if they were otherwise.... Poor dear! how I love her!
+That's why I'm so concerned about her thumbs.
+
+_August_ 21.
+
+A wire from A---- came at 11.50 saying "Darling Mother passed peacefully
+away yesterday afternoon." ... Yesterday afternoon I was writing Zoology
+and all last night I slept soundly.... It was quite sudden. Caught the
+first train home.
+
+_August_ 23.
+
+The funeral.
+
+_August_ 31.
+
+Staying at the Hotel du Guesclin at Cancale near St. Malo with my dear
+A----.
+
+This flood of new experiences has knocked my diary habit out of gear. To
+be candid, I've forgotten all about myself. I've been too engrossed in
+living to stand the strain of setting down and in cold blood writing out
+all the things seen and heard. If I once began I should blow thro' these
+pages like a whirlwind.... But what a waste of time with M. le batelier
+waiting outside with his bisque to take us mackerel fishing!...
+
+_September_ 8.
+
+Returned to Southampton yesterday. Have spent the night at Okehampton in
+Devonshire _en route_ for T---- Rectory. This morning we hatched the
+ridiculous idea of hiring two little Dartmoor ponies and riding out from
+the town. A---- rides fairly well tho' he has not been astride a beast
+for years. As for me, I cannot ride at all! Yet I had the idea that I
+could easily manage a pretty little pony with brown eyes and a long
+tail. On going out into the Inn yard, was horrified--two horses
+saddled--one a large traction beast.... I climbed on to the smaller one,
+walked him out of the yard and down the road in good style without
+accident. Once in the country, however, my animal, the fresher of the
+two, insisted on a smart trot which shook me up a good deal so that I
+hardly kept my seat. This eventually so annoyed the animal that it
+began to fidget and zigzag across the road--no doubt preparing to break
+away at a stretch gallop when once it had rid itself of the
+incomprehensible pair of legs across its back.
+
+I got off quickly and swopped horses with A----.
+
+Walked him most of the way, while A---- cantered forward and back to
+cheer me on. Ultimately however this beast, too, got sick of walking and
+began to trot. For a time I stood this well and began to rise in my
+saddle quite nicely. After two miles, horrible soreness supervened, and
+I had to get off--very carefully, with a funny feeling in my legs--even
+looked down at them to assure myself they were not bandy! In doing so,
+the horse--this traction monster--stepped on my toe and I swore.
+
+On nearing the village, L---- arrived, riding A----'s animal and holding
+his sides for laughing at me as I crawled along holding the carthorse by
+the bridle. Got on again and rode into the Rectory grounds in fine style
+like a dashing cavalier, every one jeering at me from the lawn.
+
+_September_ 28.
+
+Having lived on this planet now for the space of 24 years, I can claim
+with some cogency that I am qualified to express some sort of opinion
+about it. I therefore hereby record that I find myself in an absorbingly
+interesting place where I live, move and have my being, dominated by one
+monstrous feature above all others--the mystery of it all! Everything is
+so astonishing, my own existence so incredible!
+
+Nothing explains itself. Every one is dumb. It is like walking about at
+a masqued Ball.... Even I myself am a mystery to me. How wonderful and
+frightening that is--to feel yourself--your innermost and most
+substantial possession to be a mystery, incomprehensible. I look at
+myself in the mirror and mock at myself. On some days I am to myself as
+strange and unfamiliar as a Pterodactyl. There is a certain grim humour
+in finding myself here possessed of a perfectly arbitrary arrangement
+of lineaments when I never asked to be here and never selected my own
+attributes. To the dignity of a human being it seems like a coarse
+practical joke.... My own freakish physique is certainly a joke.
+
+_October_ 4.
+
+_In London Again_
+
+K---- comes in from her dancing class, nods to me, hugs her sister
+around the neck and says,--
+
+"Oh! you dear thing, you've got a cold."
+
+"I shouldn't do that," I remark, green-eyed, "she's in an awful wax
+to-night."
+
+She: "Oh! I don't mind K----!"
+
+(Laughter!)
+
+_October_ 8.
+
+Heard a knock at the door last night, and, thinking it was R----, I
+unbolted it and let in a tramp who at once asked God to bless me and
+crown all my sorrow with joy. An amiable fellow to be sure--so I gave
+him some coppers and he at once repeated with wonderful fervour, "God
+bless you, sir."
+
+"I wish He would," I answered, "I have a horrible cold."
+
+"Ah, I know, I gets it myself and the hinfluenza--have you had that,
+sir?"
+
+In ten minutes I should have told him all my personal history. But he
+was thirsting for a drink and went off quickly and left me with my heart
+unburthened. London is a lonely place.
+
+To-day journeyed to ---- where I gave evidence as an _expert_ in Economic
+Entomology at the County Court in a case concerning damage to furniture
+by mites for which I am paid £8 8s. fee and expenses and travelled first
+class. What irony! (See June 30, 1911.)
+
+_October_ 11.
+
+I may be a weak, maundering, vacillating fool but I cannot help loving
+her on one day, being indifferent the next and on some occasions even
+disliking her.... To-day she was charming, with a certain warm glossy
+perfection on her face and hair.... And she loves me--I could swear it.
+"And when a woman woos ..." etc. How difficult for a vain and lonely man
+to resist her. She tells me many times in many dainty ways that she
+loves me without so much as stopping her work to talk.
+
+I wish I were permanently and irresistibly enamoured. I want a
+_bouleversement_....
+
+_October_ 13.
+
+Went to see a Harley Street oculist about the sight of one eye, which
+has caused a lot of trouble and worry of late and continuously haunted
+me with the possibility of blindness. At times, I see men as trees
+walking and print becomes hopelessly blurred.
+
+The Specialist however is reassuring. The eye is healthy --no
+neuritis--but the adjustment muscles have been thrown out of gear by the
+nervous troubles of last spring.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Was ever man more sorely tempted? Here am I lonely and uncomfortable in
+diggings with a heart like nascent oxygen.... Shall I? Yes, but.... And
+I have neither health nor wealth.
+
+_October_ 22.
+
+_The British Museum Reading Room_
+
+I saw it for the first time to-day! Gadzooks!! This is the only fit
+ejaculation to express my amazement! It's a pagan temple with the Gods
+in the middle and all around, various obscure dark figures prostrating
+themselves in worship.
+
+For any one who is not simply a Sheep or Cow or whose nervous
+organisation is a degree more sensitive than the village blacksmith's,
+it is a besetting peril to his peace of mind to be constantly moving
+about an independent being, with loves and hates, and a separate
+identity among other separate identities, who prowl and prowl around
+like the hosts of Midian--ready to snarl, fight, seize you, bore you,
+exasperate you, to arouse all your passions, call up all the worst from
+the depths where they have lain hidden.... A day spent among my fellows
+goads me to a frenzy by the evening. I am no longer fit for human
+companionship. People string me up to concert pitch. I develop
+suspicions of one that he is prying, of another that he patronises.
+Others make me horribly anxious to stand well in their eyes and horribly
+curious to know what they think of me. Others I hate and loathe--for no
+particular reason. There is a man I am acquainted with concerning whom I
+know nothing at all. He may be Jew, Gentile, Socinian, Pre-adamite,
+Anabaptist, Rosicrucian--I don't know, and I don't care, for I hate him.
+I should like to smash his face in. I don't know why.... In the whole
+course of our tenuous acquaintance we have spoken scarce a dozen words
+to each other. Yet I should like to blow up his face with dynamite. If I
+had £200 a year private income I should be in wait for him to-morrow
+round a corner and land him one--just to indicate my economic
+independence. He would call for the police and the policeman--discerning
+creature--on arrival, would surely say, "With a face like that, I'm not
+surprised."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+R---- said to me this morning, "Well, have you heard?" with an
+exuberance of curiosity that made my blood boil--he was referring to my
+Essay still at the bar of the opinion of the Editor of the _English
+Review_. "You beast," I snapped and walked off.
+
+R---- shouted with laughter for he realizes my anger with him is only
+semi-serious: it is meant and not meant: meant, for it is justified by
+the facts; not meant, for I can't be too serious over anything _au
+fond_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of all the grim and ridiculous odds and ends of chance that Fortune has
+rolled up to my feet, my friendship with a man like B---- is the
+grimmest and most ridiculous. He is a bachelor of sixty, rather
+good-looking, of powerful physique and a faultless constitution.... His
+ignorance is colossal and he once asked whether Australia, for example,
+tho' surrounded by water, is not connected up with other land underneath
+the sea. Being himself a child in intelligence (tho' commercially
+cunning), he has a great respect for my brains. Being himself a strong
+man, he views my ill-health with much contempt. His private opinion is
+that I am in consumption. When asked once by a lady if I were not going
+to be "a great man" one day, he replied, "Yes--if he lives." I ought to
+walk six miles a day, drink a bottle of stout with my dinner, and eat
+plenty of _onions_. His belief in the curative properties of onions is
+strong as death....
+
+His system of prophylaxis may be quickly summarised,--
+
+(1) Hot whisky _ad lib_. and off to bed.
+
+(2) A woman.
+
+These two sterling preventives he has often urged upon me at the same
+time tipping out a quantity of anathemas on doctors and physic....
+
+He is a cynic. He scoffs at the medical profession, the Law, the Church,
+the Press. Every man is guilty until he is proved innocent. The Premier
+is an unscrupulous character, the Bishop a salacious humbug. No doctor
+will cure, for it pays him to keep you ill. Every clergyman puts the
+Sunday-school teacher in the family way. His mouth is permanently
+distorted by cynicism.
+
+He is vain and believes all women are in love with him. When playing the
+Gallant, he turns on a special voice, wears white spats, and looks like
+a Newmarket "Crook."
+
+"I lost my 'bus," a girl says to him. "Lost your bust," he answers, in
+broad Scotch. "I can't see that you've done that." ... His sexual career
+has been a remarkable one, he claiming to have brought many women to
+bed, and actually to have lain with women of almost all European
+nationalities, for he has been a great traveller....
+
+This man is my devoted friend!... And truth to tell I get on with him
+better than I do with most people. I like his gamey flavour, his utter
+absence of self-consciousness, and his doggy loyalty to myself--his
+weaker brother. He may be depraved in his habits, coarse in his
+language, boorish in his manners, ludicrous in the wrongness of all his
+views. But I like him just because he is so hopeless. I get on with him
+because it is so impossible to reclaim him--my missionary spirit is not
+intrigued. If he only dabbled in vice (for an experiment), if he had
+pale, watery ideas about current literature--if--to use his own
+favourite epithet--he were _genteel_, I should quarrel.
+
+_October_ 30.
+
+Having developed a passion for a piece of sculpture by R. Boeltzig
+called the Reifenwerferin--the most beautiful figure of a woman. I am
+already devoted to Rodin's "Kiss" and have a photo of it framed in my
+bedroom. Have written to Bruciani's.
+
+I suspect that my growing appreciation of the plastic art is with me
+only distilled sensuality. I enjoy my morning bath for the same reason.
+My bath is a daily baptism. I revel in the pleasure of the pain of the
+cold water. I whistle gleefully because I am clean and cool and nude
+early in the morning with the sun still low, before the day has been
+stained by clothes, dirt, pain, exasperation, death.... How I love
+myself as I rub myself down!--the cool, pink skin--I could eat it! I
+want to be all day in a cold bath to enjoy the pain of mortifying the
+flesh--it is so beautiful, so soft, so inscrutable--if I cut out chunks
+of it, it would only bleed.
+
+_November_ 8.
+
+The other morning R---- said hyperbolically that he hadn't slept all
+night for fear that, before he had time to put an arresting hand on my
+shoulder and say "Don't," I might have gone and become "Entangled." ...
+
+... No, I'm as firm as a rock, my dear. But in imagination the affair
+was continued as follows,--
+
+She: "I am fond of you, you know."
+
+He: "I wish you wouldn't say these things to me--they're quite
+embarrassing."
+
+She: "Oh! my dear, I'm not serious, you know--you're such a vain young
+man."
+
+He: "Well, it's equally embarrassing any way."
+
+She: "Then I _am_ serious."
+
+Tears.
+
+I say: "I wish you would take me only for what I am--a blackguard with
+no good intentions, yet no very evil ones--but still a blackguard, whom
+you seem to find has engaging manners."
+
+I breathe freely hoping to have escaped this terrible temptation and
+turn to go. But she, looking up smiling thro' a curtain of wet
+eyelashes, asks,--
+
+"Won't the blackguard stop a little longer?" In a moment my earth works,
+redoubts, and bastions fall down, I rush forward impetuously into her
+arms shouting, "I _will_, I _will_, I will as long as for eternity."
+
+(Curtain.)
+
+I dramatised this little picture and much more last night before going
+to sleep when I was in a fever. I should succumb at once to the first
+really skilful coquette.
+
+_November_ 9.
+
+_Ludo_
+
+We played Ludo together this evening and she won 2s. 6d. Handsomely
+gowned in black and wearing black ornaments, she sat with me in the
+lamplight on the sofa in the Morris Room, with the Ludo board between us
+placed on a large green cushion. Her face was white as parchment and
+her hair seemed an ebony black. I lolled in the opposite corner, a thin,
+elongated youth, with fair hair all stivvered up, dressed in a
+light-brown lounge suit with a good trouser crease, a soft linen collar
+and--a red tie! Between us, on its green cushion the Ludo board with its
+brilliantly coloured squares:--all of it set before a background formed
+by the straight-backed, rectangular, settle-like sofa, with a charming
+covering which went with the rest of the scheme.
+
+"Rather decorative,"---- remarked in an audible voice, turning her head
+on one side and quizzing. I can well believe it was. _She_ looked wholly
+admirable.
+
+_November_ 21.
+
+_My Nightmare_
+
+Can't get rid of my cough. I have so many things to do--I am living in a
+fever of haste to get them done. Yet this cough hinders me. There is
+always something which drags me back from the achievement of my desires.
+It's like a nightmare; I see myself struggling violently to escape from
+a monster which draws continuously nearer, until his shadow falls across
+my path, when I begin to run and find my legs tied, etc. The only
+difference is that mine is a nightmare from which I never wake up. The
+haven of successful accomplishment remains as far off as ever. Oh! make
+haste.
+
+_November_ 29.
+
+The _English Review_ has returned my Essay!--This is a keen
+disappointment to me. "I wish I could use this, but I am really too
+full," the Editor writes. To be faintly encouraged and delicately
+rejected--why I prefer the printed form.
+
+_December_ 1.
+
+_More Irony_
+
+Renewed my cold--I do nothing all day but blow my nose, cough, and curse
+Austin Harrison.
+
+M---- thinks the lungs are all right. "There is nothing there, I think,"
+said he, this morning. Alleluia! I've had visions of consumption for
+weeks past and M---- himself has been expecting it. I always just escape:
+I always almost get something, do something, go somewhere, I have
+dabbled in a variety of diseases, but never got one downright[2]--but
+only enough to make me feel horribly unfit and very miserable without
+the consolation of being able to regard myself as the heroic victim of
+some incurable disorder. Instead of being Stevenson with tuberculosis,
+I've only been Jones with dyspepsia. So, too, in other directions, big
+events have always just missed me: by Herculean efforts I succeeded in
+giving up newspaper journalism and breaking thro' that steel
+environment--but only to become an Entomologist! I once achieved success
+in an Essay in the _Academy_, which attracted attention--a debut,
+however, that never developed. I had not quite arrived. It is always
+_not quite_.
+
+Yesterday, I received a state visit from the Editor of the _Furniture
+Record_ seeking advice on how to eradicate mites from upholstering! I
+received him ironically--but little did he understand.
+
+I shot up like a ball on a bagatelle board all steamy into zoology (my
+once beloved science) but at once rolled dead into the very low hole of
+Economic Entomology! Curse.... Why can't I either have a first-rate
+disease or be a first-rate zoologist?
+
+Now just think what a much better figure I should have cut, from the
+artistic view point, had I remained a newspaper reporter who had taught
+himself prodigious embryology out of F.M. Balfour's Textbook, who had
+cut sections of fowls' eggs and newt embryos with a hand microtome, who
+had passionately dissected out the hidden, internal anatomy of a great
+variety of animals, who could recite Wiedersheim's _Comparative Anatomy
+of Vertebrates_ and patter off the difference between a nephridium and a
+cœlomic duct without turning a hair--or the phylogenetic history (how
+absorbing!) of the kidney--pronephros, mesonephros and metanephros and
+all the ducts!... All this, over now and wasted. My hardly-won
+knowledge wrenched away is never brought into use--it lies piled up in
+my brain rotting. I could have become a first-rate comparative
+anatomist.
+
+_December_ 3.
+
+Cold better. So back at work--gauging ale at Dunfermline as R---- puts
+it.
+
+_December_ 9.
+
+In the evening found it quite impossible to stay in the house any
+longer: some vague fear drove me out. I was alarmed to be alone or to be
+still. It is my cough, I think.
+
+Had two glasses of port at the Kensington Hotel, conversed with the
+barmaid, and then came home.
+
+_December_ 10.
+
+"Don't be an old fossil," she said to me to-night, irrelevantly.
+
+"_A propos_ of what?" I inquired.
+
+"Mother, here's W---- proposing to E----! Do come," cried ----, with
+intent to confuse. I laughed heartlessly.
+
+Dear, dear, where will it all end? It's a sad business when you fall in
+love with a girl you don't like.
+
+_December_ 26.
+
+Spent a romping day at the Flat. Kissed her sister twice under the
+mistletoe, and in the evening went to a cinema. After supper made a mock
+heroic speech and left hilarious.
+
+
+[1] "The life of the Soul is different; there is nothing more changing,
+more varied, more restless ... to describe the incidents of one hour
+would require an eternity."--_Journal of Eugénie de Guérin_.
+
+[2] See entry for November 27, 1915.
+
+
+
+
+1914
+
+
+_February_ 4.
+
+... Finally and in conclusion I have fallen ill again, have again
+resumed my periodical visits to the Doctor, and am swallowing his
+rat-poison in a blind faith as aforetime. In fact, I am in London,
+leading the same solitary life, seeing no one, talking to no one, and
+daily struggling with this demon of ill-health. Can no one exorcise him?
+The sight of _both_ my eyes is affected now. Blindness?
+
+B---- continues whoring, drinking, sneering. R---- as usual, devoid of
+emotion, cold, passionless, Shavian, and self-absorbed, still titillates
+his mind with etching, sociology, music, etc., and I have at last ceased
+to bore him with what he probably calls the febrile utterances of an
+overwrought mind.
+
+Such is my world! Oh! I forgot--on the floor below me is a corpse--that
+of an old gentleman who passed away suddenly in the night. In the small
+hours, the landlady went for the Doctor over the way, but he refused to
+come, saying the old man was too aged. So the poor gentleman died
+alone--in this rat hole of a place.
+
+_February_ 7.
+
+Intending to buy my usual 3d. packet of Goldflakes, entered a
+tobacconist's in Piccadilly, but once inside surprised to find myself in
+a classy west-end establishment, which frightened my flabby nature into
+buying De Reszke's instead. I hadn't the courage to face the aristocrat
+behind the counter with a request for Goldflakes--probably not stocked.
+What would he think of me? Besides, I shrank from letting him see I was
+not perfectly well-to-do.
+
+_February_ 14.
+
+I wonder what this year has in store for me? The first twenty-four years
+of my life have hunted me up and down the keyboard--I have been right to
+the top and also to the bottom--very happy and very miserable. Yet I
+prefer the life that is a hunt and an adventure. I don't really mind
+being chased like this. I almost thrive on the excitement. If I knew
+always where to look with any degree of certainty for my next day's life
+I should yawn! "What if to-day be sweet," I say, and never look ahead.
+To me, next week is next century.
+
+The danger and uncertainty of my life make me cherish and hug closely to
+my heart various little projects that otherwise would seem unworthy. I
+work at them quickly, frantically, sometimes, afraid to whisper to a
+living soul what expectations I dare to harbour in my heart. What if
+_now_ the end be near? Not a word! Let me go onward.
+
+_February_ 15.
+
+To-day I have reviewed the situation carefully, exhaustively. I have
+peered into every aspect of my life and achievements and everything I
+have seen nauseates me. I can find no ray of comfort in anything I have
+done or in anything I might do. My life seems to have been a wilderness
+of futile endeavour. I started wrong from the very beginning. At the
+moment of my birth I was coming into the world in the wrong place and
+under wrong conditions. Why seek to overcome such colossal initial
+disadvantages? In this mood I found fault with my parentage, my
+inheritance, all my mental and physical disabilities....
+
+This must be a form of incipient insanity. Even as a boy, I can remember
+being preternaturally absorbed in myself and preternaturally
+discontented. I was accustomed to exhaust my mind by the most harassing
+cross-examinations--no Counsel at the Bar ever treated a witness more
+mercilessly. After a day of this sort of thing, when silently and
+morbidly in every spare moment, at meals, in school, or on a walk, I
+would incessantly ply the questions, "What is the ultimate value of your
+work, _cui bono_?" etc. I went to bed in the evening with a feeling of
+hopelessness and dissatisfaction--haggard with considerations and
+reconsiderations of my outlook, my talent, my character, my future. In
+bed, I tossed from side to side, mentally exhausted with my efforts to
+obtain some satisfying conclusion--always hopeful, determined to the
+last to be able to square up my little affairs before going to sleep.
+But out of this mazy, vertiginous mass of thinking no satisfaction ever
+came. _Now_, I thought--or the _next moment_--or as soon as I review and
+revise myself in this or in that aspect, I shall be content. And so I
+went on, tearing down and reforming, revising and reviewing, till
+finally from sheer exhaustion and very unhappy I fell asleep.
+
+Next morning I was all right.
+
+_February_ 20.
+
+Am feeling very unwell. My ill-health, my isolation, baulked ambitions,
+and daily breadwinning all conspire to bring me down. The idea of a
+pistol and the end of it grows on me day by day.
+
+_February_ 21.
+
+After four days of the most profound depression of spirits, bitterness,
+self-distrust, despair, I emerged from the cloud to-day quite suddenly
+(probably the arsenic and strychnine begins to take effect) and walked
+up Exhibition Road with the intention of visiting the Science Museum
+Library so as to refer to Schafer's _Essentials of Histology_ (I have to
+watch myself carefully so that I may act _at once_ as soon as the
+balance of mind is restored). In the lobby was a woman screaming as if
+in pain, with a passer-by at her side saying sternly, "What is the
+matter with you?" as if she were making herself ridiculous by suffering
+pain in public.
+
+I passed by quickly, pretending not to notice lest--after all--I should
+be done out of my _Essentials of Histology._ Even in the Library I very
+nearly let the opportunity slide by picking up a book on squaring the
+circle, the preface and introduction of which I was forced to read.
+
+_March_ 4.
+
+_The Entomological Society_
+
+There were a great many Scarabees present who exhibited to one another
+poor little pinned insects in collecting-boxes ... It was really a
+one-man show, Prof. Poulton, a man of very considerable scientific
+attainments, being present, and shouting with a raucous voice in a way
+that must have scared some of the timid, unassuming collectors of our
+country's butterflies and moths. Like a great powerful sheep-dog, he got
+up and barked, "Mendelian characters," or "Germ plasm," what time the
+obedient flock ran together and bleated a pitiful applause. I suppose,
+having frequently heard these and similar phrases fall from the lips of
+the great man at these reunions, they have come to regard them as
+symbols of a ritual which they think it pious to accept without any
+question. So every time the Professor says, "Allelomorph," or some such
+phrase, they cross themselves and never venture to ask him what the hell
+it is all about.
+
+_March_ 7.
+
+_A Scots Fir_
+
+Have been feeling very "down" of late, but yesterday I saw a fine Scots
+Fir by the roadside--tall, erect, as straight as a Parthenon pillar. The
+sight of it restored my courage. It had a tonic effect. Quite
+unconsciously I pulled my shoulders back and walked ahead with renewed
+vows never to flinch again. It is a noble tree. It has strength as a
+giant, and a giant's height, and yet kindly withal, the branches
+drooping down graciously towards you--like a kind giant extending its
+hands to a child.
+
+_March_ 22.
+
+_A Stagnant Day_
+
+Went to bed late last night so I slept on soundly till 9 a.m. Went down
+to the bath-room, but found the door was shut, so went back to my
+bedroom again, lay down and dosed a while, thinking of nothing in
+particular. Went down again--door still locked--swore--returned once
+more to my room and reclined on the bed, with door open, so that I could
+hear as soon as the bath-room door opened.... Rang the bell, and
+Miss ---- brought up a jug of hot water to shave with, and a tumbler of hot
+water to drink (for my dyspepsia). She, on being interrogated, said
+there was some one in the bath-room. I said I wanted a bath too, so as
+she passed on her way down she shouted, "Hurry up, Mr. Barbellion wants
+a bath as well." Her footsteps then died away as she descended lower
+into the basement, where the family lives, sleeps, and cooks our food.
+
+At length, hearing the door open, I ejaculated, "the Lord be praised,"
+rushed down, entered the bath-room and secured it from further
+intruders. I observed that Miss ---- senior had been bathing her members,
+and that the bath, tho' empty, was covered inside with patches of soap
+--unutterably black! Oh! Miss ----!
+
+Dressed leisurely and breakfasted. When the table was cleared wrote a
+portion of my essay on _Spallanzani_....
+
+Then, being giddy and tired, rang for dinner. Miss ---- laid the table.
+She looked very clean. I said, "Good-morning," and she suitably replied,
+and I went on reading, the _Winning Post_. Felt too slack to be amiable.
+Next time she came in, I said as pleasantly as I could, "Is it all
+ready?" and being informed proceeded to eat forthwith.
+
+In the afternoon, took a 'bus to Richmond. No room outside, so had to go
+inside--curse--and sit opposite a row--curse again--of fat, ugly,
+elderly women, all off to visit their married daughters, the usual
+Sunday jaunt. At Hammersmith got on the outside, and at Turnham Green
+was caught in a hail storm. Very cold all of a sudden, so got off and
+took shelter in the doorway of a shop, which was of course closed, the
+day being Sunday. Rain, wind, and hail continued for some while, as I
+gazed at the wet, almost empty street, thinking, re-thinking and
+thinking over again the same thought, viz., that the 'bus ride along
+this route was exceptionally cheap--probably because of competition with
+the trams.
+
+The next 'bus took me to Richmond. Two young girls sat in front, and
+kept looking back to know if I was "game." I looked _through_ them.
+Walked in the Park just conscious of the singing of Larks and the
+chatter of Jays, but harassed mentally by the question, "To whom shall I
+send my essay, when finished?" To shelter from the rain sat under an oak
+where four youths joined me and said, "Worse luck," and "Not half," and
+smoked cigarettes. They gossipped and giggled like girls, put their arms
+around each other's necks. At the dinner last night, they said, they had
+Duck and Tomato Soup and Beeswax ("Beesley, you know, the chap that goes
+about with Smith a lot") wore a fancy waistcoat with a dinner jacket.
+When I got up to move on, they became convulsed with laughter. I
+scowled.
+
+Had tea in the Pagoda tea-rooms, dry toast and brown bread and butter.
+Two young men opposite me were quietly playing the fool.
+
+"Hold my hand," one said audibly enough for two lovers to hear,
+comfortably settled up in a corner. Even at a side view I could see them
+kissing each other in between mouthfuls of bread and butter and jam.
+
+On rising to go, one of the two hilarious youths removed my cap and
+playfully placed it on top of the bowler which his friend was wearing.
+
+"My cap, I think," I said sharply, and the young man apologised with a
+splutter. I glared like a kill-joy of sixty.
+
+On the 'bus, coming home, thro' streets full of motor traffic and all
+available space plastered with advertisements that screamed at you, I
+espied in front three pretty girls, who gave me the "Glad Eye." One had
+a deep, musical voice, and kept on using it, one of the others a pretty
+ankle and kept on showing it.
+
+At Kew, two Italians came aboard, one of whom went out of his way to sit
+among the girls. He sat level with them, and kept turning his head
+around, giving them a sweeping glance as he did so, to shout remarks in
+Italian to his friend behind. He thought the girls were prostitutes, I
+think, and he may have been right. I was on the seat behind this man and
+for want of anything better to do, studied his face minutely. In short,
+it was fat, round, and greasy. He wore black moustachios with curly
+ends, his eyes were dark shining, bulgy, and around his neck was wrapped
+a scarf inside a dirty linen collar, as if he had a sore throat. I sat
+behind him and hated him steadily, perseveringly.
+
+At Hammersmith the three girls got off, and the bulgy-eyed Italian
+watched them go with lascivious eyes, looking over the rail and down at
+them on the pavement--still interested. I looked down too. They crossed
+the road in front of us and disappeared.
+
+Came home and here I am writing this. This is the content of to-day's
+consciousness. This is about all I have thought, said, or done, or felt.
+A stagnant day!
+
+_March_ 26.
+
+Home with a bad influenza cold. In a deplorable condition. The best I
+could do was to sit by the fire and read newspapers one by one from the
+first page to the last till the reading became mechanical. I found
+myself reading an account of the Lincoln Handicap and a column article
+on Kleptomania, while advertisements of new books were devoured with
+relish as delicacies. My mind became a morass of current Divorce Court
+News, Society Gossip--"if Sir A. goes Romeward, if Miss B. sings
+true"--and advertisements. I went on reading because I was afraid to be
+alone with myself.
+
+B---- arrived at tea and after saying he felt very "pin-eyed" swallowed
+a glass of Bols gin--the Gin of Antony Bols--and recovered sufficiently
+to inform me delightedly that he had just won £50. He told me all the
+story; meanwhile, I, tired of wiping and blowing my nose, sat in the
+dirty armchair hunched up with elbows on knees and let it drip on to the
+dirty carpet. B----, of course, noticed nothing, which was fortunate.
+
+Some kinds of damned fool would have been kindly and sympathetic. I must
+say I like old B----. I like him for his simpleness and utter absence of
+self-consciousness, which make him as charming as a child. Moreover, he
+often makes me a present of invaluable turf tips. Of course, he is a
+liar, but his lies are harmless and on his mouth like milk on an
+infant's. My own lies are much more dangerous. And when you are ill, to
+be treated as tho' you were well is good for hypochondriacs.
+
+_April_ 15.
+
+H----'s wedding. Five minutes before time, I am told I made a dramatic
+entry into the church clad in an audaciously light pair of Cashmere
+trousers, lemon-coloured gloves, with top hat and cane. The latter
+upset the respectability frightfully--it is not _comme il faut_.
+
+_April_ 16.
+
+... If I am to admit the facts they are that I eagerly anticipate love,
+look everywhere for it, long for it, am unhappy without it. She
+fascinates me--admitted. I could, if I would, surrender myself. Her
+affection makes me long to do it. I am sick of living by myself. I am
+frightened of myself. My life is miserable alone, and sometimes
+desperately miserable when I long for a little sympathy to be close at
+hand.
+
+I have often tried to persuade R---- to share a flat with me, because I
+don't really wish to marry. I struggle against the idea, I am egotist
+enough to wish to shirk the responsibilities.
+
+But then I am a ridiculously romantic creature with a wonderful ideal of
+a woman I shall never meet or if I do she won't want me--"that (wholly)
+impossible She." R---- in a flat with me would partly solve my
+difficulties. I don't love her enough for marriage. Mine must be a grand
+passion, a _bouleversement_--for I am capable of it.
+
+_April_ 17.
+
+_A Humble Confession_
+
+The Hon. ----, son and heir of Lord ----, to-day invited me to lunch
+with him in ---- Square. He's a handsome youth of twenty-five, with fair
+hair and blue eyes.... and O! such an aristocrat. Good Lord.
+
+But to continue: the receipt of so unexpected an invitation from so
+glorious a young gentleman at first gave me palpitation of the heart. I
+was so surprised that I scarcely had enough presence of mind to listen
+to the rest of his remarks and later, it was only with the greatest
+difficulty that I could recall the place where we arranged to meet. His
+remarks, too, are not easy to follow, as he talks in a stenographic,
+Alfred-Jingle-like manner, jerking out disjected members of sentences,
+and leaving you to make the best of them or else to Hell with you--by
+the Lord, I speak English, don't I? If I said, "I beg your pardon," he
+jerked again, and left me often equally unenlightened.
+
+On arriving at his home, the first thing he did was to shout down the
+stairs to the basement: "Elsie, Elsie," while I gazed with awe at a
+parcel on the hall table addressed to "Lord ----." Before lunch we sat
+in his little room and talked about ----, but I was still quite unable
+to regain my self-composure. I couldn't for the life of me forget that
+here was I lunching with Lord ----'s son, on equal terms, with mutual
+interests, that his sisters perhaps would come in directly or even the
+noble Lord himself. I felt like a scared hare. How should I address a
+peer of the realm? I kept trying to remember and every now and then for
+some unaccountable reason my mind travelled into ----shire and I saw
+Auntie C---- serving out tea and sugar over the counter of the baker's
+shop in the little village. I luxuriated in the contrast, tho' I am not
+at all inclined to be a snob.
+
+He next offered me a cigarette, which I took and lit. It was a Turkish
+cigarette with one end plugged up with cotton-wool--to absorb the
+nicotine--a, thing I've never seen before. I was so flurried at the time
+that I did not notice this and lit the wrong end. With perfect ease and
+self-possession, the Honourable One pointed out my error to me and told
+me to throw the cigarette away and have another.
+
+By this time I had completely lost my nerve. My pride, chagrin,
+excessive self-consciousness were entangling all my movements in the
+meshes of a net. Failing to tumble to the situation, I inquired, "Why
+the _wrong_ end? Is there a right and a wrong end?" Lord ----'s son and
+heir pointed out the cotton-wool end, now blackened by my match.
+
+"That didn't burn very well, did it?"
+
+I was bound to confess that it did not, and threw the smoke away under
+the impression that these wonderful cigarettes with right and wrong ends
+must be some special brand sold only to aristocrats, and at a great
+price, and possessing some secret virtue. Once again, handsome Mr. ----
+drew out his silver cigarette-case, selected a second cigarette for me,
+and held it towards me between his long delicate fingers, at the same
+time pointing out the plug at one end and making a few staccato remarks
+which I could not catch.
+
+I was still too scared to be in full possession of my faculties, and he
+apparently was too tired to be explicit to a member of the bourgeoisie,
+stumbling about his drawing-room. The cotton-wool plug only suggested to
+me some sort of a plot on the part of a dissolute scion of a noble house
+to lure me into one of his bad habits, such as smoking opium or taking
+veronal. I again prepared to light the cigarette at the wrong end.
+
+"Try the other end," repeated the young man, smiling blandly. I blushed,
+and immediately recovered my balance, and even related my knowledge of
+pipes fitted to carry similar plugs....
+
+During lunch (at which we sat alone) after sundry visits to the top of
+the stairs to shout down to the kitchen, he announced that he thought it
+wasn't last night's affair after all which was annoying the Cook (he got
+home late without a latch-key)--it was because he called her "Cook"
+instead of Mrs. Austin. He smiled serenely and decided to indulge Mrs.
+A., his indulgent attitude betraying an objectionable satisfaction with
+the security of his own unassailable social status. There was a trace of
+gratification at the little compliment secreted in the Cook's annoyance.
+She wanted Mr. Charles to call her Mrs. Austin, forsooth. Very well! and
+he smiled down on the little weakness _de haute en bas_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I enjoyed this little experience. Turning it over in my mind (as the
+housemaid says when she decides to stay on) I have come to the
+conclusion that the social parvenu is not such a vulgar fellow after
+all. He may be a bore--particularly if he sits with his finger tips
+apposed over a spherical paunch, festooned with a gold chain, and keeps
+on relating _in extenso_ how once he gummed labels on blacking bottles.
+Often enough he is a smug fellow, yet, truth to tell, we all feel a
+little interested in him. He is a traveller from an antique land, and we
+sometimes like to listen to his tales of adventure and all he has come
+through. He has traversed large territories of human experience, he has
+met strange folk and lodged in strange caravanserai. Similarly with the
+man who has come down in the world--the fool, the drunkard, the
+embezzler--he may bore us with his maudlin sympathy with himself yet his
+stories hold us. It must be a fine experience within the limits of a
+single life to traverse the whole keyboard of our social status, whether
+up or down. I should like to be a peer who grinds a barrel organ or
+(better still) a one-time organ-grinder who now lives in Park Lane. It
+must be very dull to remain stationary--once a peer always a peer.
+
+_April_ 20.
+
+Miss ---- heard me sigh to-day and asked what it might mean. "Only the
+sparks flying upward," I answered lugubriously.
+
+A blackguard is often unconscious of a good deal of his wickedness.
+Charge him with wickedness and he will deny it quite honestly--honest
+then, perhaps, for the first time in his life.
+
+An Entomologist is a large hairy man with eyebrows like antennæ.
+
+Chronic constipation has gained for me an unrivalled knowledge of all
+laxatives, aperients, purgatives and cathartic compounds. At present I
+arrange two gunpowder plots a week. It's abominable. Best literature for
+the latrine: picture puzzles.
+
+_April_ 23.
+
+_A Foolish Bird_
+
+With a menacing politeness, B---- to-day inquired of a fat curate who
+was occupying more than his fair share of a seat on top of a 'bus,--
+
+"Are you going to get up or stay where ye are, sir?"
+
+The foolish bird was sitting nearly on top of B----, mistaking a bomb
+for an egg.
+
+"I beg your pardon," replied the fat curate.
+
+B---- repeated his inquiry with more emphasis in the hideous Scotch
+brogue.
+
+"I suppose I shall stay here till I get down presently."
+
+"I don't think you will," said B----.
+
+"What do you mean?" asked the fat one in falsetto indignation.
+
+"This," B---- grunted, and shunted sideways so that the poor fellow
+almost slid on to the floor.
+
+A posse of police walking along in single file always makes me laugh. A
+single constable is a Policeman, but several in single file are
+"Coppers." I imagine every one laughs at them and I have a shrewd
+suspicion it is one of W.S. Gilbert's legacies--the _Pirates of
+Penzance_ having become part of the national Consciousness.
+
+_On Lighting Chloe's Cigarette_
+
+R---- remarked to-day that he intended writing a lyric on lighting
+Chloe's cigarette.
+
+"Ah!" I said at once appreciative, "now tell me, do you balance your
+hand--by gently (ever so gently) resting the extreme tip of your little
+finger upon her chin, and" (I was warming up) "do you hold the match
+vertically or horizontally, and do you light it in the dark or in the
+light? If you have finesse, you won't need to be told that the thing is
+to get a steady flame and the maximum of illumination upon her face to
+last over a period for as long as possible."
+
+"Chloe," replied R----, "is wearing now a charming blouse with a
+charming V-shaped opening in front. Her Aunt asked my Mother last night
+tentatively, 'How do you like Chloe's blouse? Is it too low?' My Mother
+scrutinised the dear little furry, lop-eared thing and answered
+doubtfully, 'No, Maria, I don't think so.'"
+
+"How ridiculous! Why the V is a positive signpost. My dear fellow," I
+said to R----, "I should refuse to be bluffed by those old women. Tell
+them you _know_."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Carlyle called Lamb a despicable abortion. What a crime!
+
+_May_ 2.
+
+Developed a savage fit. Up to a certain point, perhaps, but beyond that
+anxiety changes into recklessness--you simply don't care. The aperients
+are causing dyspepsia and intermittent action of the heart, which
+frightens me. After a terrifying week, during which at crises I have
+felt like dropping suddenly in the street, in the gardens, anywhere,
+from syncope, I rebelled against this humiliating fear. I pulled my
+shoulders back and walked briskly ahead along the street with a dropped
+beat every two or three steps. I laughed bitterly at it and felt it
+could stop or go on--I was at last indifferent. In a photographer's shop
+was the picture of a very beautiful woman and I stopped to look at her.
+I glowered in thro' the glass angrily and reflected how she was gazing
+out with that same expression even at the butcher's boy or the
+lamp-lighter. It embittered me to think of having to leave her to some
+other man. To me she represented all the joy of life which at any moment
+I might have had to quit for ever. Such impotence enraged me and I
+walked off up the street with a whirling heart and the thought, "I shall
+drop, I suppose, when I get up as far as that." Yet don't think I was
+alarmed. Oh! no. The iron had entered me, and I went on with cynical
+indifference waiting to be struck down.
+
+... She is a very great deal to me. Perhaps I love her very much after
+all.
+
+_May_ 3.
+
+Bad heart attack all day. Intermittency is very refined torture to one
+who wants to live very badly. Your pump goes a "dot and carry one," or
+say "misses a stitch," what time you breathe deep, begin to shake your
+friend's hand and make a farewell speech. Then it goes on again and you
+order another pint of beer.
+
+It is a fractious animal within the cage of my thorax, and I never know
+when it is going to escape and make off with my precious life between
+its teeth. I humour and coax and soothe it, but, God wot, I haven't much
+confidence in the little beast. My thorax it appears is an intolerable
+kennel.
+
+_May_ 10.
+
+In a very cheerful mood. Pleased with myself and everybody till a
+seagull soared overhead in Kensington Gardens and aroused my vast
+capacities for envy--I wish I could fly.
+
+_May_ 24.
+
+In L---- with my brother, A----. The great man is in great form and very
+happy in his love for N----. He is a most delightful creature and I love
+him more than any one else in the wide world. There is an almost
+feminine tenderness in my love.
+
+We spent a delightful day, talking and arguing and insulting one
+another.... At these seances we take delight in anaesthetising our
+hearts for the purposes of argument, and a third person would be bound
+to suppose we were in the throes of a bitter quarrel. We pile up one
+vindictive remark on another, ingeniously seeking out--and with
+malice--weak points in each other's armour, which previous exchange of
+confidences makes it easy to find. Neither of us hesitates to make use
+of such private confessions, yet our love is so strong that we can
+afford to take any liberty. There is, in fact, a fearful joy in testing
+the strength of our affection by searching for cutting rejoinders--to
+see the effect. We rig up one another's cherished ideals like Aunt
+Sallies and then knock them down, we wax sarcastic, satirical,
+contemptuous in turn, we wave our hands animatedly (hand-waving is a
+great trick with both of us), get flushed, point with our fingers, and
+thump the table to clinch some bit of repartee. Yet it's all smoke. Our
+love is unassailable--it's like the law of gravitation, you cannot
+dispute it, it underlies our existence, it is the air we breathe.
+
+N---- is charming, and thought we were quarrelling, and therefore
+intervened on his side!
+
+_May_ 31.
+
+R---- outlined an impression he had in Naples one day during a sirocco
+of the imminence of his own death. It was evidently an isolated
+experience and bored me a little as I could have said a lot myself about
+that. When he finished I drew from my pocket an envelope with my name
+and three addresses scribbled on it to help the police in case of
+syncope as I explained. I have carried this with me for several years
+and at one time a flask of brandy.
+
+_June_ 3.
+
+Went to see the Irish Players in _The Playboy_. Sitting in front of me
+was a charming little Irish girl accompanied by a male clod with
+red-rimmed eyes like a Bull-terrier's, a sandy, bristly moustache like a
+housemaid's broom, and a face like a gluteal mass, and a horrid voice
+that crepitated rather than spoke.
+
+She was dark, with shining blue eyes, and a delightful little nose of
+the utmost import to every male who should gaze upon her. Between the
+acts, the clod hearkened to her vivacious conversation--like an
+enchanted bullock. Her vivacity was such that the tip of her nose moved
+up and down for emphasis and by the end of the Third Act I was captured
+entirely. Lucky dog, that clod!
+
+After the play this little Irish maiden caught my eye and it became a
+physical impossibility for me to check a smile--and oh! Heavens!--she
+gave me a smile in return. Precisely five seconds later, she looked
+again to see if I was still smiling--I was--and we then smiled broadly
+and openly on one another--her smile being the timorous ingénue's not
+the glad eye of a _femme de joie_. Later, on the railway platform
+whither I followed her, I caught her eye again (was ever so lucky a
+fellow?), and we got into the same carriage. But so did the clod--ah!
+dear, was ever so unlucky a fellow? Forced to occupy a seat some way
+off, but she caught me trying to see her thro' a midnight forest of
+opera hats, lace ruffles, projecting ears and fat noses.
+
+Curse! Left her at High Street Station and probably will never see her
+again. This is a second great opportunity. The first was the girl on
+Lundy Island. These two women I shall always regret. There must be so
+many delightful and interesting persons in London if only I could get at
+them.
+
+_June_ 4.
+
+Rushed off to tell R---- about my little Irish girl. Her face has been
+"shadowing" me all day.
+
+_June_ 6.
+
+A violent argument with R---- _re_ marriage. He says Love means
+appropriation, and is taking the most elaborate precautions to forfend
+passion--just as if it were a militant suffragette. Every woman he meets
+he first puts into a long quarantine, lest perchance she carries the
+germ of the infectious disease. He quotes Hippolytus and talks like a
+mediæval ascetic. Himself, I imagine, he regards as a valuable but
+brittle piece of Dresden china which must be saved from rough handling
+and left unmolested to pursue its high and dusty destiny--an old crock
+as I warned him. By refusing to plunge into life he will live long and
+be a well preserved man, but scarcely a living man--a mummy rather. I
+told him so amid much laughter.
+
+"You're a reactionary," says he.
+
+"Yes, but why should a reactionary be a naughty boy?"
+
+_June_ 7.
+
+My ironical fate lured me this evening into another discussion on
+marriage in which I had to take up a position exactly opposite to the
+one I defended yesterday against R----. In fact, I actually subverted to
+my own pressing requirements some of R----'s own arguments! The
+argument, of course, was with Her.
+
+Marriage, I urged, was an economic trap for guileless young men, and for
+my part (to give myself some necessary stiffening) I did not intend to
+enter upon any such hazardous course, even if I had the chance. Miss
+---- said I was a funk--to me who the day before had been hammering
+into R---- my principle of "Plunge and damn the consequences." I was
+informed I was an old woman afraid to go out without an umbrella, an old
+tabby cat afraid to leave the kitchen fire, etc., etc.
+
+"Yes, I _am_ afraid to go out without an umbrella," I argued formally,
+"when it's raining cats and dogs. As long as I am dry, I shall keep dry.
+As soon as I find myself caught in the rain or victimised by a passion,
+I shan't be afraid of falling in love or getting wet. It would be a
+misadventure, but I am not going in search of one."
+
+All the same the discussion was very galling, for I was acting a part.
+
+... The truth is I have philandered abominably with her. I know it. And
+now I am jibbing at the idea of marriage.... I am such an egotist, I
+want, I believe, a Princess of the Blood Royal.
+
+_June_ 9.
+
+Some days ago sent a personal advertisement to the newspaper to try to
+find my little Irish girl who lives at Notting Hill Gate. To-day they
+return me the money and advert, no doubt mistaking me for a White Slave
+trafficker. And by this time, I'm thinking, my little Irish girl can go
+to blazes. Shall spend the P.O. on sweets or monkey nuts.
+
+_June_ 10
+
+_Lupus_
+
+It is raining heavily. I have just finished dinner. In the street an
+itinerant musician is singing dolefully, "O Rest in the Lord." In my
+dirty little sitting room I begin to feel very restless, so put on my
+hat and cloak and walk down towards the Station for a paper to read. It
+is all very dark and dismal, and I gaze with hungry eyes in thro' some
+of the windows disclosing happy comfortable interiors. At intervals
+thunder growls and lightning brightens up the deserted dirtiness of the
+Station Waiting Room. A few bits of desolate paper lie about on the
+floor, and up in one corner on a form a crossing-sweeper, motionless and
+abject, driven in from his pitch by the rain. His hands are deep in his
+trousers' pockets, and the poor devil lies with legs sprawling out and
+eyes closed: over the lower part of his face he wears a black mask to
+hide the ravages of lupus.... He seemed the last man on earth--after
+every one else had died of the plague. Not a soul in the station. Not a
+train. And this is June!
+
+_June_ 15.
+
+_Measuring Lice_
+
+Spent the day measuring the legs and antennæ of lice to two places of
+decimals!
+
+To the lay mind how fantastic this must seem! Indeed, I hope it is
+fantastic. I do not mind being thought odd. It seems almost fitting that
+an incurable dilettante like myself should earn his livelihood by
+measuring the legs of lice. I like to believe that such a bizarre manner
+of life suits my incurable frivolousness.
+
+I am a Magpie in a Bagdad bazaar, hopping about, useless, inquisitive,
+fascinated by a lot of astonishing things: _e.g._, a book on the
+quadrature of the circle, the _gabbertushed fustilugs_ passage in
+Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, names like Mr. Portwine or Mr.
+Hogsflesh, Tweezer's Alley or Pickle Herring Street, the excellent,
+conceitful sonnets of Henry Constable or Petticoat Lane on a Sunday
+morning.
+
+Colossal things such as Art, Science, etc., frighten me. I am afraid I
+should develop a thirst that would make me wish to drink the sea dry. My
+mind is a disordered miscellany. The world is too distracting. I cannot
+apply myself for long. London bewilders me. At times it is a
+phantasmagoria, an opium dream out of De Quincey.
+
+_June_ 17.
+
+Prof. Geo. Saintsbury's book on Elizabethan literature amuses me.
+_George_, there can be no doubt, is a very refined, cultivated fellow. I
+bet he don't eat periwinkles with a pin or bite his nails--and you
+should hear him refer to folk who can't read Homer in the original or
+who haven't been to Oxford--to Merton above all. He also says _non so
+che_ for _je ne sais quoi_.
+
+_June_ 26.
+
+... I placed the volume on the mantelpiece as if it were a bottle of
+physic straight from my Dispensary, and I began to expostulate and
+expound, as if she were a sick person and I the doctor.... She seemed a
+little nettled at my proselytising demeanour and gave herself out to be
+very preoccupied--or at any rate quite uninterested in my physic. I read
+the book last night at one sitting and was boiling over with it.
+
+"I fear I have come at an inconvenient time," I said, with a sardonic
+smile and strummed on the piano.... "I must really be off. Please read
+it (which sounded like 'three times a day after meals') and tell me how
+you like it. (Facetiously.) Of course don't give up your present manual
+for it, that would be foolish and unnecessary." ... I rambled
+on--disposed to be very playful.
+
+At last calmly and horribly, in a thoughtful voice she answered,--
+
+"I think you are very rude; you play the piano after I asked you to
+stop and walk about just as if it were your own home."
+
+I remained outwardly calm but inwardly was very surprised and full of
+tremors. I said after a pause,--
+
+"Very well, if you think so.... Good-bye."
+
+No answer; and I was too proud to apologise.
+
+"Good-bye," I repeated.
+
+She went on reading her novel in silence while I got as far as the
+door--very upset.
+
+"_Au revoir_."
+
+No answer.
+
+"Oh," said I, and went out of the room leaving my lady for good and all
+and I'm not sorry.
+
+In the passage met Miss ----. "What?" she said, "going already?"
+
+"Farewell," I said sepulchrally. "A very tragic farewell," which left
+her wondering.
+
+_June_ 29.
+
+_At the Albert Hall_
+
+Went with R---- to the Albert Hall to the _Empress of Ireland_ Memorial
+Concert with massed bands. We heard the Symphonie Pathétique, Chopin's
+Funeral March, Trauermarsch from Götterdammerung, the Ride of the
+Valkyries and a solemn melody from Bach.
+
+This afternoon I regard as a mountain peak in my existence. For two
+solid hours I sat like an Eagle on a rock gazing into infinity--a very
+fine sensation for a London Sparrow....
+
+I have an idea that if it were possible to assemble the sick and
+suffering day by day in the Albert Hall and keep the Orchestra going all
+the time, then the constant exposure of sick parts to such heavenly air
+vibrations would ultimately restore to them the lost rhythm of health.
+Surely, even a single exposure to--say Beethoven's Fifth Symphony--must
+result in some permanent reconstitution of ourselves body and soul. No
+one can be quite the same after a Beethoven Symphony has streamed thro'
+him.
+
+If one could _develop_ a human soul like a negative the effect I should
+say could be seen.... I'll tell you what I wish they'd do--seriously:
+divide up the arena into a series of cubicles where, unobserved and in
+perfect privacy, a man could execute all the various movements of his
+body and limbs which the music prompts. It would be such a delicious
+self-indulgence and it's torture to be jammed into a seat where you
+can't even tap one foot or wave an arm.
+
+The concert restored my moral health. I came away in love with people I
+was hating before and full of compassion for others I usually condemn. A
+feeling of immeasurable well being--a jolly bonhomie enveloped me like
+incandescent light. At the close when we stood up to sing the National
+Anthem we all felt a genuine spirit of camaraderie. Just as when Kings
+die, we were silent musing upon the common fate, and when the time came
+to separate we were loath to go our several ways, for we were comrades
+who together had come thro' a great experience. For my part I wanted to
+shake hands all round--happy travellers, now alas! at the journey's end
+and never perhaps to meet again--never.
+
+R---- and I walked up thro' Kensington Gardens like two young Gods!
+
+"I even like that bloody thing," I said, pointing to the Albert
+Memorial.
+
+We pointed out pretty girls to one another, watched the children play
+ring-a-ring-a-roses on the grass. We laughed exultingly at the thought
+of our dismal colleagues ... tho' I said (as before!) I loved 'em
+all--God bless 'em--even old ----. R---- said it was nothing short of
+insolence on their part to have neglected the opportunity of coming to
+the Concert.
+
+Later on, an old gaffer up from the country stopped us to ask the way to
+Rotten Row--I overwhelmed him with directions and happy descriptive
+details. I felt like walking with him and showing him what a wonderful
+place the world is.
+
+After separating from R---- very reluctantly--it was horrible to be left
+alone in such high spirits, walked up towards the Round Pond, and caught
+myself avoiding the shadows of the trees--so as to be every moment out
+in the blazing sun. I scoffed inwardly at the timorousness of pale,
+anæmic folk whom I passed hiding in the shadows of the elms.
+
+At the Round Pond, came across a Bulldog who was biting out great chunks
+of water and in luxuriant waste-fulness letting it drool out again from
+each corner of his mouth. I watched this old fellow greedily (it was
+very hot), as well pleased with him and his liquid "chops" as with
+anything I saw, unless it were a girl and a man lying full length along
+the grass and kissing beneath a sunshade. I smiled; she saw me, and
+smiled, too, in return, and then fell to kissing again.
+
+_June_ 30.
+
+_Dinosaurs_
+
+There are books which are Dinosaurs--Sir Walter Raleigh's _History of
+the World_, Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_. There are
+men who are Dinosaurs--Balzac completing his Human Comedy, Napoleon,
+Roosevelt. I like them all. I like express trains and motor lorries. I
+enjoy watching an iron girder swinging in the air or great cubes of ice
+caught up between iron pincers. I must always stop and watch these
+things. I like everything that is swift or immense: London, lightning,
+Popocatepetl. I enjoy the smell of tar, of coal, of fried fish, or a
+brass band playing a Liszt Rhapsody. And why should those foolish Mænads
+shout Women's Rights just because they burn down a church? All bonfires
+are delectable. Civilisation and top hats bore me. My own life is like a
+tame rabbit's. If only I had a long tail to lash it in feline rage! I
+would return to Nature--I could almost return to Chaos. There are times
+when I feel so dour I would wreck the universe if I could.[1]
+
+(1917: I think after three years of Armageddon I feel quite ready to go
+back to top hats and civilisation.)
+
+_July_ 8.
+
+_Sunset in Kensington Gardens_
+
+The instinct for worship occurs rhythmically--at morning and evening.
+This is natural, for twice a day at sunrise and sunset--however
+work-sodden we may be, however hypnotised by daily routine--our natural
+impulse is (provided we are awake) to look to the horizon at the sun and
+stand a moment with mute lips. During the course of the day or night, we
+are too occupied or asleep--but sunrise is the great hour of the
+departure and sunset is the arrival at the end. Everything puts on a
+mysterious appearance--to-night the tops of the elms seemed
+super-naturally high and, pushing up into the sky, had secret communion
+with the clouds; the clouds seemed waiting for a ceremony, a way had
+been prepared by the tapissier, a moment of suspense while one cloud
+stretched to another like courtiers in whispered conversation; a rumour
+of the approach; then slowly the news came thro' that the sun had
+arrived for immediate departure.
+
+_July_ 14.
+
+Have finished my essay. But am written out--obviously. To-night I
+struggled with another, and spent two hours sucking the end of my pen.
+But after painfully mountainous parturition, all I brought forth were
+the two ridiculous mice of one meretricious trope and one grammatical
+solecism. I can sometimes sit before a sheet of paper, pen in hand,
+unable to produce a word.
+
+_July_ 19.
+
+For a walk with R---- in the country, calling for tea at his Uncle's
+house at ----. Played clock golf and made the acquaintance of Miss ----,
+a tall, statuesque lady, with golden hair, as graceful as an antelope
+and very comely, her two dear little feet clad in white shoes peeping
+out (as R---- said) like two white mice one after the other as she
+moved across the lawn.
+
+Coming home I said to R---- histrionically, "Some golden-haired little
+boy will some day rest his head upon her bosom, beautiful in line and
+depth, all unconscious of his luck or of his part in a beautiful
+picture--would that I were the father to make that group a _fait
+accompli._" R----, with meticulous accuracy, always refers to her as
+"that elegant virgin."
+
+_July_ 25.
+
+While sketching under Hammersmith Bridge yesterday, R---- heard a
+whistle, and, looking up, saw a charming "young thing" leaning over the
+Bridge parapet smiling like the blessed Damozel out of Heaven.
+
+"Come down," he cried.
+
+She did, and they discussed pictures while he painted. Later he walked
+with her to the Broadway, saw her into a 'bus and said "Good-bye,"
+without so much as an exchange of names.
+
+"Even if she _were_ a whore," I said, "it's a pity your curiosity was so
+sluggish. You should have seen her home, even if you did not go home
+with her. Young man, you preferred to let go of authentic life at
+Hammersmith Broadway, so as to return at once to your precious
+water-colour painting."
+
+"Perhaps," replied he enigmatically.
+
+"Whatever you do, if ever you meet her again," I rejoined, "don't
+introduce her to that abominable ----. He is abominably handsome, and I
+hate him for it. To all his other distinctions he is welcome--parentage,
+money, success, but I can never forgive him his good looks and the
+inevitable marriage to some beautiful fair-skinned woman."
+
+R. (reflectively): "Up to now, I was inclined to think that envy as a
+_passion_ did not exist."
+
+"Have you none?"
+
+"Not much," he answered, and I believe it.
+
+"Smug wretch, then. All I can say is, I may have instincts and passions
+but I am not a pale water-colour artist.... What's the matter with you,"
+I foamed, "is that you like pictures. If I showed you a real woman, you
+would exclaim contemplatively, 'How lovely;' then putting out one hand
+to touch her, unsuspectingly, you'd scream aghast, 'Oh! it's alive, I
+hear it ticking.' 'Yes, my boy,' I answer severely with a flourish,
+'_That_ is a woman's heart.'"
+
+R---- exploded with laughter and then said, "A truce to your desire for
+more life, for actual men and women. ... I know this that last night I
+would not have exchanged the quiet armchair reading the last chapter of
+Dostoieffsky's _The Possessed_ for a Balaclava Charge."
+
+"A matter of temperament, I suppose," I reflected, in cold detachment.
+"You see, I belong to the raw meat school. _You_ prefer life cooked for
+you in a book. You prefer the confectioner's shop to cutting down the
+wheat with your own scythe."
+
+_July_ 26.
+
+The B.M. is a ghastly hole. They will give me none of the apparatus I
+require. If you ask the Trustees for a thousand pounds for the
+propagation of the Gospel in foreign parts they say, "Yes." If you ask
+for twenty pounds for a new microscope they say, "No, but we'll cut off
+your nose with a big pair of scissors."
+
+_July_ 27.
+
+To a pedantic prosy little old maid who was working in my room this
+morning, I exclaimed,--
+
+"I'd sooner make a good dissection than go to a Lord Mayor's Banquet.
+Turtle Soup ain't in it."
+
+She was uninspired, and said, "Oom," and went on pinning insects. Then
+more brightly, and with great punctilio in the pronunciation of her
+words, having cleared her throat and drawn herself up with great
+deliberation to deliver herself of a remark, she volunteered,--
+
+"I whish I had nevah taken up such a brittle grooop as the Stones
+(Stoneflies). One dare not loook at a Stone."
+
+Poor dear little old maid. This was my turn to say "Oom."
+
+"Pretty dismal work," I added ambiguously. Then with malice aforethought
+I whistled a Harry Lauder tune, asked her if she had ever heard Willie
+Solar sing, "You made me love you," and then absent-mindedly and in
+succession inquired,--
+
+"What's become of all the gold?"
+
+"What's become of Waring?"
+
+"What shall I sing when all is sung?"
+
+To which several categorical interrogations she ventured no reply, but
+presently in the usual voice,--
+
+"I have placed an Agrionine in this drawer for security and, now I want
+it, cannot find it."
+
+"Life is like that," I said. "I never can find my Agrionines!"
+
+_August_ 1.
+
+All Europe is mobilising.
+
+_August_ 2.
+
+Will England join in?
+
+_August_ 12.
+
+We all await the result of a battle between two millions of men. The
+tension makes me feel physically sick.
+
+_August_ 21--_August_ 24.
+
+In bed with a fever. I never visit the flat now, but her mother kindly
+came over to see me.
+
+_September_ 25.
+
+[Living now in rooms alone.]
+
+I have--since my return from Cornwall--placed all my journals in a
+specially made cabinet. R---- came to dinner and after a glass or so of
+Beaune and a cigarette, I open my "coffin"[2] (it is a long box with a
+brass handle at each end), and with some show of deliberation select a
+volume to read to him, drawing it from its division with lavish
+punctiliousness, and inquiring with an oily voice, "A little of 1912?"
+as if we were trying wines. R---- grins at the little farce and so
+encourages me.
+
+_September_ 26.
+
+Doctor's Consulting Rooms--my life has been spent in them! Medical
+specialists--Harley Street men--I have seen four and all to no purpose.
+M---- wrote me the other day,--
+
+"Come along and see me on Tuesday; some day I dare say we shall find
+something we can patch."
+
+He regards me with the most obvious commiseration and always when I come
+away after a visit he shakes me warmly by the hand and says, "Good-bye,
+old man, and good luck." More luck than the pharmacopœia.
+
+My life has always been a continuous struggle with ill-health and
+ambition, and I have mastered neither. I try to reassure myself that
+this accursed ill-health will not affect my career. I keep flogging my
+will in the hope of winning thro' in the end. Yet at the back of my mind
+there is the great improbability that I shall ever live long enough to
+realise myself. For a long time past my hope has simply been to last
+long enough to convince others of what I might have done--had I lived.
+That will be something. But even to do that I will not allow that I have
+overmuch time. I have never at any time lived with any sense of
+security. I have never felt permanently settled in this life--nothing
+more than a shadowy _locum tenens_, a wraith, a festoon of mist likely
+to disappear any moment.
+
+At times, when I am vividly conscious of the insecurity of my tenure
+here, my desires enter on a mad race to obtain fulfilment before it is
+too late ... and as fulfilment recedes ambition obsesses me the more. I
+am daily occupied in calculating with my ill-health: trying to
+circumvent it, to carry on in spite of all. I conquer each day. Every
+week is a victory. I am always surprised that my health or will has not
+collapsed, that, by Jove! I am still working and still living.
+
+One day it looks like appendicitis, another stoppage, another threatened
+blindness, or I develop a cough and am menaced with consumption. So I go
+on in a hurricane of bad dreams. I struggle like Laocoon with the
+serpents--the serpents of nervous depression that press around the heart
+tighter than I care to admit. I must use every kind of blandishment to
+convince myself that my life and my work are worth while. Frequently I
+must smother and kill (and it calls for prompt action) the shrill voice
+that cries from the tiniest corner of my heart, "Are you quite sure you
+are such an important fellow as you imagine?" Or I fret over the
+condition of my brain, finding that I forget what I read, I lose in
+acuteness of my perceptions. My brain is a tumefaction. But I won't give
+in. I go on trying to recollect what I have forgotten, I harry my brain
+all day to recall a word or name, I attack other folk importunately. I
+write things down so as to look them up in reference books--I am always
+looking up the things I remember I have forgotten....
+
+There is another struggle, too, that often engrosses all my energies....
+It is a horrible thing that with so large an ambition, so great a love
+of life, I should nevertheless court disaster like this. Truly Sir
+Thomas Browne you say, "Every man is his own Atropos."
+
+In short, I lead an unfathomably miserable existence in this dark, gray
+street, in these drab, dirty rooms--miserable in its emptiness of home,
+love, human society. Now that I never visit the flat, I visit about two
+houses in London--the Doctor's and R----'s Hotel. I walk along the
+streets and stare in the windows of private houses, hungry for a little
+society. It creates in me a gnawing, rancorous discontent to be seeing
+people everywhere in London--millions of them--and then to realise my
+own ridiculously circumscribed knowledge of them. I am passionately
+eager to have acquaintances, to possess at least a few friends. If I die
+to-morrow, how many persons shall I have talked to? or how many men and
+women shall I have known? A few maiden aunts and one or two old fossils.
+I am burning to meet real live men, I have masses of mental stuff I am
+anxious to unload. But I am ignorant of people as of countries and live
+in celestial isolation.
+
+This, I fear, reads like a wail of self-commiseration. But I am trying
+to give myself the pleasure of describing myself at this period
+truthfully, to make a bid at least for some posthumous sympathy.
+Therefore it shall be told that I who am capable of passionate love am
+sexually starved, and endure the pangs of a fiendish solitude in rooms,
+with an ugly landlady's face when ... I despair of ever finding a woman
+to _love_. I never meet women of my own class, and am unprepossessing in
+appearance and yet I fancy that once my reserve is melted I am not
+without attractions. "He grows on you," a girl said of me once. But I am
+hypercritical and hyperfastidious. I want too much.... I search daily in
+the streets with a starved and hungry look. What a horrible and powerful
+and hateful thing this love instinct is! I hate it, hate it, hate it. It
+will not let me rest. I wish I were a eunuch.
+
+"There's a beautiful young thing," R---- and I say to one another
+sardonically, hoping thereby to conceal the canker within.
+
+I could gnash my teeth and weep in anger--baulked, frustrated as I am at
+almost every turn of life--in my profession, in my literary efforts, and
+in my love of man and woman kind. I would utter a whole commination
+service in my present state of mind.
+
+_October_ 7.
+
+To me woman is _the_ wonderful fact of existence. If there be any next
+world and it be as I hope it is, a jolly gossiping place, with people
+standing around the mantelpiece and discussing their earthly
+experiences, I shall thump my fist on the table as my friends turn to me
+on entering and exclaim in a loud voice, "WOMAN."
+
+_October_ 11.
+
+Since I grew up I have wept three times. The first time they were tears
+of exasperation. Dad and I were sitting down side by side after a wordy
+combat in which he had remained adamant and I was forced both by
+conscience and argument to give in, to relinquish my dissections, and go
+off to some inquest on a drowning fatality. The second time was when
+Mother died, and the third was _to-day._ But I am calm now. To-day they
+were tears of remorse....
+
+On occasion bald confession in this Journal is sweet for the soul and
+strengthens it. It gives me a kind of false backbone to communicate my
+secrets: for I am determined that some day some one shall know. If God
+really intervenes in our affairs, here is an opportunity. Let Him save
+me. I challenge Him to save me from perishing in this ditch.... It is
+not often I am cornered into praying but I did this morning, for I feel
+defeated this day, and almost inarticulate in my misery.
+
+Nietzsche in a newspaper I read to-day: "For myself I have felt
+exceptionally blest having Hell's phantoms inside me to thrust at in the
+dark, internal enemies to dominate till I felt myself an ecstatic
+victor, wrenching at last good triumphant joys thro' the bars of my own
+sickness and weakness--joys with which your notions of happiness, poor
+sleek smug creatures, cannot compare! You must carry a chaos inside you
+to give birth to a dancing star."
+
+But Nietzsche is no consolation to a man who has once been weak enough
+to be brought to his knees. There I am and there I think I have prayed a
+little somehow to-day. But it's all in desperation, not in faith.
+Internal chaos I have, but no dancing star. Dancing stars are the
+consolation of genius.
+
+_October_ 12.
+
+Am better to-day. My better self is convinced that it is silly and
+small-minded to think so much about my own puny destiny--especially at
+times like these when--God love us all--there is a column of casualties
+each day. The great thing to be thankful for is that I am _alive_ and
+alive _now_, that I was alive _yesterday_, and even may be to-morrow.
+Surely that is thrilling enough. What, then, have I to complain of? I'm
+a lucky dog to be alive at all. My plight is bad, but there are others
+in a worse one. I'm going to be brave and fight on the side of
+Nietzsche. Who knows but that one day the dancing star may yet be born!
+
+_October_ 13.
+
+Spent the evening in my lodgings struggling with my will. Too flabby to
+work, disinclined to read, a dreadful vague unrest possessing me. I
+couldn't sit still in my chair, so walked around the table continuously
+like a squirrel in a cage. I wanted to be going out somewhere, talking
+to some one, to be among human beings.
+
+Many an evening during the past few months, I have got up and gone down
+the road to look across at the windows of the flat, to see if there were
+a red light behind the curtains, and, if so, wonder if she were there,
+and how she was. My pride would never allow me to visit there again on
+my own initiative. K---- has managed to bring about a rapprochement but
+I go very seldom. Pride again.
+
+I wanted to do so to-night. I thought I would just go down the road to
+look up at the windows. That seemed to be some comfort. Why do I wish to
+do this? I do not know. From a mere inspection one would say that I am
+in love. But remember I am also ill. Three times to-night I nearly put
+on my boots and went down to have a look up! What ridiculous weakness!
+Yet this room can be a frightful prison. Shall I? I cannot decide. I see
+her figure constantly before me--gentle, graceful, calm, stretching
+forth both hands and to me....
+
+Seized a pack of cards and played Patience and went on playing Patience
+because I was afraid to stop. Given a weak constitution, a great
+ambition, an amorous nature, and at the same time a very fastidious one,
+I might have known I was in for trouble.
+
+_October_ 14.
+
+_Marie Bashkirtseff_
+
+Some time ago I noticed a quotation from one, Marie Bashkirtseff in a
+book on Strindberg, and was struck with the likeness to a sentiment of
+my own. Who _are_ you? I wondered.
+
+This evening went to the Library and read about her in Mathilde Blind's
+introductory essay to her Journal. I am simply astounded. It would be
+difficult in all the world's history to discover any two persons with
+temperaments so alike. She is the "very spit of me "! I devoured
+Mathilde Blind's pages more and more astonished. We are identical! Oh,
+Marie Bashkirtseff! how we should have hated one another! She feels as I
+feel. We have the same self-absorption, the same vanity and corroding
+ambition. She is impressionable, volatile, passionate--ill! So am I. Her
+journal is my journal. All mine is stale reading now. She has written
+down all my thoughts and forestalled me! Already I have found some
+heart-rending parallels. To think I am only a replica: how humiliating
+for a human being to find himself merely a duplicate of another. Is
+there anything in the transmigration of souls? She died in 1886. I was
+born in 1889.
+
+_October_ 15.
+
+A man is always looking at himself in the mirror if for no other reason
+than to tie his tie and brush his hair. What does he think of his face?
+He must have private opinions. But it is usually considered a little out
+of taste to entertain opinions about one's personal appearance.
+
+As for myself, some mirrors do me down pretty well, others depress me!
+I am bound to confess I am biassed in favour of the friendly mirror. I
+am not handsome, but I look interesting--I hope distinguished. My eyes
+are deep-set ... but my worst moments are when the barber combs my hair
+right down over my forehead, or when I see a really handsome man in Hyde
+Park. Such occasions direct my gaze reflexly, and doubt like a thief in
+the night forces the back door!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To-day, M---- sent me dancing mad by suggesting that I copied R---- in
+my manner of speech and opinions.
+
+Now R---- has a damned pervasive way of conducting himself--for all the
+world as if he were a high official of the Foreign Office. I, on the
+contrary, am shy, self-conscious, easily overlooked, and this makes me
+writhe. As we are inseparable friends--everybody assumes that I am his
+tacky-lacky, a kind of appoggiatura to his big note. He, they suppose,
+is my guide, philosopher, and Great Maecenas--Oxford befriending the
+proletariat. The thought of it makes me sick--that any one should
+believe I imbibe his ideas, echo his conceits, and even ape his gestures
+and manner of voice.
+
+"Lost yourself?" inquired a despicable creature the other morning as I
+came out of R----'s room after finding him out. I could have shot him
+dead! ... As for ---- more than one person thinks that he alone is the
+brilliant author until at last he himself has got into the way of
+thinking it.
+
+"It makes me hate you like mad," I said to him to-day. "How can I
+confront these people with the naked truth?" R---- chuckled
+complacently.
+
+"If I deny your alleged supremacy, as I did this morning, or if
+suddenly, in a fit of spleen, I'm induced to declare that I loathe you
+(as I sometimes do)"--(more chuckles) "that your breath stinks, your
+eyes bulge, that you have swollen jugulars and a platter face: they will
+think I am either jealous or insincere.... To be your Echo tho'!--my
+God!" I spat. We then grinned at one another, and I, being bored, went
+to the lavatory and read the newspaper secure from interruption.
+
+_Resignation_
+
+In the Tube, a young widow came in and sat in front of me--pale-faced,
+grief-stricken, demure--a sort of "Thy Will be Done" look. The
+adaptability of human beings has something in it that seems horrible. It
+is dreadful to think how we have all accommodated ourselves to this War.
+Christian resignation is a feeble thing. Why won't this demure widow
+with a loud voice blaspheme against this iniquitous world that permits
+this iniquitous war?
+
+_October_ 21.
+
+I myself (licking a stamp): "The taste of gum is really very nice."
+
+R.: "I hate it."
+
+I: "My dear fellow" (surprised and entreating), "envelope gum is simply
+delicious."
+
+R.: "I never lick stamps--it's dangerous--microbes."
+
+I: "I always do: I shall buy a bookful and go away to the seaside with
+them."
+
+R.: "Yes, you'll need to."
+
+(Laughter.)
+
+Thus gaily and jauntily we went on to discuss wines, whiskies, and
+Worthington's, and I rounded it up in a typical cock-eyed manner,--
+
+"Ah! yes, it's only when the day is over that the day really
+begins--what?"
+
+_October_ 23.
+
+I expressed to R---- to-day my admiration for the exploit of the brave
+and successful Submarine Commander Max Kennedy Horton. (Name for you!)
+R---- was rather cold. "His exploits," said this bloody fool, "involve
+loss of life and scarcely make me deliriously eulogistic."
+
+I cleared my throat and began,--
+
+"Your precious sociology again--it will be the ruin of your career as an
+artist. It is so interwoven into the fibre of your brain that you never
+see anything except in relation to its State value. You are afraid to
+approve of a lying, thieving rogue, however delightful a rascal he may
+be, for fear of what Karl Marx might say.... You'll soon be drawing
+landscapes with taxpayers in the foreground, or we shall get a picture
+of Ben Nevis with Keir Hardie on the summit." And so on to our own
+infinite mutual amusement.
+
+The _English Review_ returns my Essay. I am getting simply furious with
+an ambition I am unable to satisfy, among beautiful London women I
+cannot get to know, and in ill-health that I cannot cure. Shall I ever
+find any one? Shall I ever be really well? My one solace is that I do
+not submit, it infuriates me, I resent it; I will never be resigned and
+milky. I will keep my claws sharp and fight to the end.
+
+_October_ 24.
+
+Went to Mark Lane by train, then walked over the Tower Bridge, and back
+along Lower Thames Street to London Bridge, up to Whitechapel, St.
+Paul's, Fleet Street, and Charing Cross, and so home.
+
+Near Reilly's Tavern, I saw a pavement artist who had drawn a loaf with
+the inscription in both French and English: "This is easy to draw but
+hard to earn." A baby's funeral trotted briskly over the Tower Bridge
+among Pink's jam waggons, carts carrying any goods from lead pencils and
+matches to bales of cotton and chests of tea.
+
+In the St. Catherine's Way there is one part like a deep railway
+cutting, the whole of one side for a long way, consisting of the
+brickwall of a very tall warehouse with no windows in it and beautifully
+curved and producing a wonderful effect. Walked past great blocks of
+warehouses and business establishments--a wonderful sight; and
+everywhere bacon factors, coffee roasters, merchants. On London Bridge,
+paused to feed the sea-gulls and looked down at the stevedores. Outside
+Billingsgate Market was a blackboard on an easel--for market prices--but
+instead some one had drawn an enormously enlarged chalk picture of a
+cat's rear and tail with anatomical details.
+
+In Aldgate, stopped to inspect a street stall containing popular
+literature--one brochure entitled _Suspended for Life_ to indicate the
+terrible punishment meted out to ----, a League footballer. The
+frontispiece enough to make a lump come in the juveniles' throats!
+Another stall held domestic utensils with an intimation, "Anything on
+this stall _lent_ for 1d." A newsvendor I heard exclaim to a
+fellow-tradesman in the same line of business,--
+
+"They come and look at your bloody plakaard and then passe on."
+
+Loitered at a dirty little Fleet Street bookshop where Paul de Koch's
+_The Lady with the Three Pairs of Stays_ was displayed prominently
+beside a picture of Oscar Wilde.
+
+In Fleet Street, you exchange the Whitechapel sausage restaurants for
+Taverns with "snacks at the bar," and the chestnut roasters, with their
+buckets of red-hot coals, for Grub Street camp followers, selling
+_L'Indépendance Belge_ or pamphlets entitled, _Why We Went to War_.
+
+In the Strand you may buy war maps, buttonhole flags, etc., etc. I
+bought a penny stud. One shop was turned into a shooting gallery at
+three shots a penny where the Inner Temple Barristers in between the
+case for the defence and the case for the prosecution could come and
+keep their eye in against the time the Germans come.
+
+Outside Charing Cross Station I saw a good-looking, well-dressed woman
+in mourning clothes, grinding a barrel organ....
+
+Returned to the Library and read the _Dublin Review_ (article on Samuel
+Butler), _North American Review_ (one on Henry James) and dined at seven.
+After dinner, read: _Evening Standard, Saturday Westminster_, and the
+_New Statesman_. Smoked six cigarettes and went to bed. To-morrow Fifth
+Symphony of Beethoven.
+
+_October_ 25.
+
+_Too Late_
+
+Yesterday's ramble has left me very sore in spirit. London was spread
+out before me, a vast campagne. But I felt too physically tired to
+explore. I could just amble along--a spectator merely--and automatically
+register impressions. Think of the misery of that! I want to see the
+Docks and Dockland, to enter East End public-houses and opium-dens, to
+speak to Chinamen and Lascars: I want a first-rate, first-hand knowledge
+of London, of London men, London women. I was tingling with anticipation
+yesterday and then I grew tired and fretful and morose, crawled back
+like a weevil into my nut. By 6.30 I was in a Library reading the
+_Dublin Review_!
+
+What a young fool I was to neglect those priceless opportunities of
+studying and tasting life and character in North ----, at Borough
+Council meetings, Boards of Guardians, and electioneering campaigns--not
+to mention inquests, police courts, and country fairs. Instead of
+appraising all these precious and genuine pieces of experience at their
+true value, my diary and my mind were occupied only with--Zoology, if
+you please. I ignored my exquisite chances, I ramped around, fuming and
+fretting, full of contempt for my circumscribed existence, and impatient
+as only a youth can be. What I shall never forgive myself is my present
+inability to recall that life, so that instead of being able now to push
+my chair back and entertain myself and others with descriptions of some
+of those antique and incredible happenings, my memory is rigid and
+formal: I remember only a few names and one or two isolated events. All
+that time is just as if it had never been. My recollections form only an
+indefinite smudge--odd Town Clerks, Town Criers (at least five of them
+in wonderful garb), policemen (I poached with one), ploughing match
+dinners (platters of roast beef and boiled potatoes and I, bespectacled
+student of Zoology, sitting uncomfortably among valiant trenchermen
+after their day's ploughing), election meetings in remote Exmoor
+villages (and those wonderful Inns where I had to spend the night!)--all
+are gone--too remote to bear recital--yet just sufficiently clear to
+harass the mind in my constant endeavours to raise them all again from
+the dead in my consciousness. I hate to think it is lost; that my youth
+is buried--a cemetery without even headstones. To an inquest on a
+drowned sailor--disclosing some thrilling story of the wild seas off the
+coast--with a pitiful myopia--I preferred Wiedersheim's _Comparative
+Anatomy of Vertebrates_. I used to carry Dr. Smith Woodward's
+_Paleontology_ with me to a Board of Guardians meeting, mingling
+_Pariasaurus_ and Holoptychians with tenders for repairs and reports
+from the Master. Now I take Keats or Tschekov to the Museum!
+
+London certainly lies before me. Certainly I am alive at last. Yet now
+my energy is gone. It is too late. I am ill and tired. It costs me
+infinite discomfort to write this entry, all the skin of my right hand
+is permanently "pins and needles" and in the finger tips I have lost all
+sense of touch. The sight of my right eye is also very bad and sometimes
+I can scarcely read print with it, etc., etc. But why should I go on?
+
+A trance-like condition supervenes in a semi-invalid forced to live in
+almost complete social isolation in a great whirling city like London.
+Days of routine follow each other as swiftly as the weaver's shuttle and
+numb the spirit and turn palpitating life into a silent picture show.
+Everywhere always in the street people--millions of them --whom I do not
+know, moving swiftly along. I look and look and yawn and then one day as
+to-day I wake up and race about beside myself--a swollen bag ready to
+burst with hope, love, misery, joy, desperation.
+
+_Apologia pro vita mea_
+
+How may I excuse myself for continuing to talk about my affairs and for
+continuing to write zoological memoirs during the greatest War of all
+time?
+
+Well, here are some precedents:--
+
+Goethe sat down to study the geography of China, while his fatherland
+agonised at Leipsig.
+
+Hegel wrote the last lines of the _Phenomenology of Spirit_ within sound
+of the guns of Jena.
+
+While England was being rent in twain by civil war, Sir Thomas Browne,
+ensconced in old Norwich, reflected on Cambyses and Pharaoh and on the
+song the Sirens sang.
+
+Lacépède composed his _Histoire des Poissons_ during the French
+Revolution.
+
+Then there were Diogenes and Archimedes.
+
+This defence of course implicates me in an unbounded opinion of the
+importance of my own work. "He is quite the little poet," some one said
+of Keats. "It is just as if a man remarked of Buonaparte," said Keats,
+in a pet, "that he's quite the little general."
+
+_A Woman and a Child_
+
+On the way to the Albert Hall came upon the most beautiful picture of
+young maternity that ever I saw in my life. She was a delightfully
+girlish young creature--a perfect phœnix of health and beauty. As she
+stood with her little son at the kerb waiting for a 'bus, smiling and
+chatting to him, a luminous radiance of happy, satisfied maternal love,
+maternal pride, womanliness streamed from her and enveloped me.
+
+We got on the same 'bus. The little boy, with his long hair and dressed
+in velvet like little Lord Fauntleroy, said something to her--she smiled
+delightedly, caught him up on her knees and kissed him. Two such pretty
+people never touched lips before--I'm certain of it. It was impossible
+to believe that this virginal creature was a mother--childbirth left no
+trace. She must have just budded off the baby boy like a plant. Once, in
+her glance, she took me in her purview, and I knew she knew I was
+watching her. In travelling backwards from Kensington Gardens to the boy
+again, her gaze rested on me a moment and I, of course, rendered the
+homage that was due. As a matter of fact there was no direct evidence
+that she was the mother at all.
+
+_The Albert Hall Hag_
+
+While waiting outside the Albert Hall, an extraordinarily weird contrast
+thrust itself before me--she was the most pathetic piece of human jetsam
+that ever I saw drifting about in this sea of London faces. Tall, gaunt,
+cadaverous, the skin of her face drawn tightly over her cheekbones and
+over a thin, pointed, hook-shaped nose, on her feet brown sandshoes,
+dressed in a long draggle-tailed skirt, a broken-brimmed straw hat,
+beneath which some scanty hair was scraped back and tied behind in a
+knot--this wretched soul of some thirty summers (and what summers!)
+stood in the road beside the waiting queue and weakly passed the bow
+across her violin which emitted a slight scraping sound. She could not
+play a tune and the fingers of her left hand never touched the
+strings--they merely held the handle.
+
+A policeman passed and, with an eye on the queue, muttered audibly, "Not
+'arf," but no one laughed. Then she began to rummage in her skirt,
+holding the violin by the neck in her right hand just as she must hold
+her brat by the arm when at home. Simultaneously sounds issued from her
+mouth in a high falsetto key; they were unearthly sounds, the tiny voice
+of an articulating corpse underneath the coffin lid. For a moment no one
+realised that she was reciting. For she continued to rummage in her
+skirt as she squeaked, "Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O
+sea," etc. The words were scarcely audible tho' she stood but two yards
+off. But she repeated the verse and I then made out what it was. She
+seemed ashamed of herself and of her plight, almost without the courage
+to foist this mockery of violin-playing on us--one would say she was
+frightened by her own ugliness and her own pathos.
+
+After conscientiously carrying out her programme but with the
+distracted, uncomfortable air of some one scurrying over a painful
+task--like a tired child gabbling its prayers before getting into
+bed--she at length produced from her skirt pocket a small canvas money
+bag which she started to hand around. This was the climax to this
+harrowing incident--for each time she held out the bag, she smiled,
+which stretched the skin still more tightly down over her malar
+prominence and said something--an inarticulate noise in a very high
+pitch. "A woman," I whispered to R----, "She claims to be a woman." If
+any one hesitated a moment or struggled with a purse she would wait
+patiently with bag outstretched and head turned away, the smile
+vanishing at once as if the pinched face were but too glad of the
+opportunity of a rest from smiling. She stood there, gazing
+absently--two lifeless eyes at the bottom of deep socket holes in a head
+which was almost a bare skull. She was perfunctorily carrying out an
+objectionable task because she could not kill the will to live.
+
+As she looked away and waited for you to produce the copper, she
+thought, "Why trouble? Why should I wait for this man's aid?" The clink
+of the penny recalled her to herself, and she passed on, renewing her
+terrible grimacing smile.
+
+Why didn't I do something? Why? Because I was bent on hearing
+Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, if you please.... And she may have been a
+well-to-do vagrant--well got up for the occasion--a clever
+simulator?...
+
+_October_ 28.
+
+_Rigor Bordis_
+
+Rigor bordis!--I write like this as if it were a light matter. But
+to-night I was _in extremis_.... First I read the paper; then I finished
+the book I was reading--"_Thus Spake Zarathustra_." Not knowing quite
+what next to do, I took my boots off and poured out another cup of
+coffee. But these manœuvres were only the feeble attempts of a
+cowardly wretch to evade the main issue which was:--
+
+How to occupy myself and keep myself sane during the hour and a half
+before bedtime.
+
+Before now I have tried going off to bed. But that does not work--I
+don't sleep. Moreover, I have been in the grip of a horrible mental
+unrest. To sit still in my chair, much less to lie in bed doing nothing
+seemed ghastly. I experienced all the cravings of a dissolute neurotic
+for a stimulus, but what stimulus I wanted I did not know. Had I known I
+should have gone and got it. The dipsomaniac was a man to be envied.
+
+Some mechanical means were necessary for sustaining life till bedtime. I
+sat down and played a game of Patience--no one knows how I loathe
+playing Patience and how much I despise the people who play it. Tiring
+of that, sat back in my chair, yawned, and thought of a word I wanted to
+look up in the Dictionary. This quest, forgotten until then, came like a
+beam of bright light into a dark room. So looked the word up leisurely,
+took out my watch, noted the time, and then stood up with elbows on the
+mantelpiece and stared at myself in the glass.... I was at bay at last.
+There was simply nothing I could do. I would have given worlds to have
+some one to talk to. Pride kept me from ringing for the landlady. I must
+stand motionless, back to the wall, and wait for the hour of my release.
+I had but one idea, viz., that I was surely beaten in this game of life.
+I was very miserable indeed. But being so miserable that I couldn't feel
+more so, I began to recover after a while. I began to visualise my
+lamentable situation, and rose above it as I did so. I staged it before
+my mind's eye and observed myself as hero of the plot. I saw myself
+sitting in a dirty armchair in a dirty house in a dirty London street,
+with the landlady's dirty daughter below-stairs singing, "Little Grey
+Home in the West," my head obscured in a cloud of depression, and in my
+mind the thought that if life be a test of endurance I must hang on
+grimly to the arms of the chair and sit tight till bedtime.
+
+This attitude proved a useful means of self-defence. When I had
+dramatised my misery, I enjoyed it, and acute mental pain turned into
+merely aesthetic malaise.
+
+_November_ 4.
+
+A lurid day. Suffering from the most horrible physical languor. Wrote
+the Doctor saying I was rapidly sliding down a steep place into the sea
+(like the swine I am). Could I see him?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Endured an hour's torture of indecision to-night asking myself whether I
+should go over to ask her to be my wife or should I go to the Fabian
+Society and hear Bernard Shaw. Kept putting off the decision even till
+after dinner. If I went to the flat, I must shave; to shave required hot
+water--the landlady had already cleared the table and was rapidly
+retreating. Something must be done and at once. I called the old thing
+back impulsively and ordered shaving water, consoling myself with the
+reflection that it was still unnecessary to decide; the hot water could
+be at hand in case the worst happened. If I decided on matrimony I could
+shave forthwith. Should I? (After dark I always shave in the
+sitting-room because of the better gaslight.)
+
+Drank some coffee and next found myself slowly, mournfully putting on
+hat and coat. You can't shave in hat and coat so I concluded I had
+decided on Shaw. Slowly undid the front door latch and went off.
+
+Shaw bored me. He is mid-Victorian. Sat beside a bulgy-eyed youth
+reading the _Freethinker_.
+
+_November_ 9.
+
+In the evening asked her to be my wife. She refused. Once perhaps ...
+but now....
+
+I don't think I have any moral right to propose to any woman seeing the
+state of my health and I did not actually intend or wish to.... It was
+just to get it off my mind--a plain statement.... If I don't really and
+truly love her it was a perfectly heartless comedy. But I have good
+reason to believe I do. With me, moments of headstrong passion alternate
+with moods of perfectly immobile self-introspection. It is a relief to
+have spoken.
+
+_November_ 10.
+
+Very miserable. Asked R---- three times to come and have dinner with me.
+Each time he refused. My nerves are completely jangled. _Tu l'as voulu,
+George Dandin_--that's the rub.
+
+_November_ 11.
+
+She observed me carefully--I'm looking a perfect wreck _--tu l'as voulu,
+George Dandin_--but it's mainly ill-health and not on her account.
+
+I said,--
+
+"Some things are too funny to laugh at."
+
+"Is that why you are so solemn?"
+
+"No," I answered, "I'm not solemn, I am laughing--some things are too
+solemn to be serious about."
+
+She saw me off at the door and smiled quietly--an amused faraway smile
+of feline satisfaction....
+
+_November_ 12.
+
+Horrible nervous depression. Thinking of suicide with a pistol--a
+Browning. Or of 10 days' mysterious disappearance, when I will go and
+live in a good Hotel, spend all my money, and live among human beings
+with eyes and noses and legs. This isolation. Am I going mad? If I
+disappeared, it would be interesting to see if any one missed me.
+
+_November_ 13.
+
+Still thinking of suicide. It seems the only way out. This morning my
+Essay was returned by the Editor of ----. One by one I have been
+divested of all my most cherished illusions. Once my ambitions gave me
+the fuel with which to keep myself alive. One after another they have
+been foiled, and now I've nothing to burn. I am daily facing the fact
+that my ambitions have overtaxed my abilities and health. For years, my
+whole existence has rested on a false estimate of my own value, and my
+life been revolving around a foolish self-deception. But I know myself
+as I am at last--and am not at all enamoured. The future has nothing for
+me. I am wearied of my life already. What is there for any of us to do
+but die?
+
+_November_ 14.
+
+Before going over to-night bought _London Opinion_ deliberately in order
+to find a joke or better still some cynicism about women to fire off at
+her. Rehearsed one joke, one witticism from Oscar Wilde, and one
+personal anecdote (the latter for the most part false), none of which
+came off, tho' I succeeded in carrying off a nonchalant or even jaunty
+bearing.
+
+"Don't you ever swear?" I asked. "It's a good thing you know, swearing
+is like pimples, better to come out, cleanses the moral system. The
+person who controls himself must have lots of terrible oaths circulating
+in his blood."
+
+"Swearing is not the only remedy."
+
+"I suppose you prefer the gilded pill of a curate's sermon: I prefer
+pimples to pills."
+
+Is it a wonder she does not love me?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I wonder why I paint myself in such horrid colours--why have I this
+morbid pleasure in pretending to those I love that I am a beast and a
+cynic? I suffer, I suppose, from a lacerated self-esteem, from a painful
+loneliness, from the consciousness of how ridiculous I have made myself,
+and that most people if they knew would regard me with loathing and
+disgust.
+
+I am very unhappy. I am unhappy because she does not care for me, and I
+am chiefly unhappy because I do not care for her. Instead of a passion,
+only a dragging heavy chain of attraction ... some inflexible law makes
+me gravitate to her, seizes me by the neck and suspends me over her, I
+cannot look away....
+
+In the early days when I did my best to strangle my love--as one would a
+bastard child--I took courage in the fact that for a man like me the
+murder was necessary. There were books to write and to read, and name
+and fame perhaps. To these everything must be sacrificed. ... That is
+all gone now. No man could have withstood for ever that concentrated
+essence of womanhood that flowed from her....
+
+Still the declaration has made amends. She is pleased about it--it is a
+scalp.
+
+Yet how can I forgive her for saying she supposed it was a natural
+instinct for a girl not to feel drawn to an invalid like me. That was
+cruel tho' true.
+
+_November_ 19.
+
+I might be Captain Scott writing his last words amid Antarctic cold and
+desolation. It is very cold. I am sitting hunched up by the fire in my
+lodgings after a meal of tough meat and cold apple-tart. I am full of
+self-commiseration--my only pleasure now. It is very cold and I cannot
+get warm--try as I will.
+
+My various nervous derangements take different forms. This time my
+peripheral circulation is affected, and the hand, arm, and shoulder are
+permanently cold. My right hand is blue--tho' I've shut up the window
+and piled up a roaring fire. It's Antarctic cold and desolation. London
+in November from the inside of a dingy lodging-house can be very
+terrible indeed. This celestial isolation will send me out of my mind. I
+marvel how God can stick it--lonely, damp, and cold in the clouds. That
+is how I live too--but then I am not God.
+
+I fall back on this Journal just as some other poor devil takes to
+drink. I, too, have toyed with the idea of drinking hard. I have
+frequented bars and billiards saloons and in fits of depression done my
+best to forget myself. But I am not sufficiently fond of alcohol (and it
+would take a lot to make _me_ forget myself). So I plunge into these
+literary excesses and drown my sorrows in Stephens' Blue-black Ink. It
+gives me a sulky pleasure to think that some day somebody will know....
+
+It is humiliating to feel ill as I do. If I had consumption, the disease
+would act as a stimulus--I could strike an attitude feverishly and be
+histrionic. But to be merely "below par"--to feel like a Bunny rabbit
+perennially "poorly," saps my character and mental vigour. I want to
+crawl away and die like a rat in a hole. A bronzed healthy man makes me
+wince. Healthy people regard a chronic sickly man as a leper. They
+suspect him, something fishy.
+
+_November_ 20.
+
+Still at home ill.
+
+If anything, R---- is more of a précieux than I am myself. At the
+present moment he is tickling himself with the idea that he's in love
+with a certain golden-haired damsel from the States. He reports to me
+fragments of his conversations with her, how he snatches a fearful joy
+by skirting dangerous conversational territory, or he takes a pencil and
+deftly outlines her profile or the rondeur of her bosom. Or he
+discourses at length on her nose or eye. I can well imagine him driving
+a woman crazy and then collecting her tears in a bottle as mementoes.
+Then whenever he requires a little heart stimulus he could take the
+phial from his waistcoat pocket and watch the tears condensing.
+
+"Why don't you marry her out of hand and be done with all this
+dalliance? I can tell you what's the matter with you," I growled,
+"you're a landscape artist.... You'll grow to resemble, that mean, Jewy,
+secretive, petty creature, J.W.M. Turner, and allow no human being to
+interfere with your art. A fine artist perhaps--but what a man! You'll
+finish up with a Mrs. Danby."
+
+"Yes," he answered, quoting Tennyson with great aptness, "and 'lose my
+salvation for a sketch,' like Romney deserting his wife. If I were not
+married I should have no wife to desert."
+
+It is useless to argue with him. His cosmogony is wrongly centred in Art
+not life. Life interests him--he can't altogether resign himself to the
+cowl and the tonsured head, but he will not plunge. He insists on being
+a spectator, watching the maelstrom from the bank and remarking
+exquisitely, "Ah! there is a very fine sorrow," or, "What an exquisite
+sensation." The other day after one of our furious conversational bouts
+around this subject, I drew an insect, cut it out, and pinned the slip
+in a collecting box. Then suddenly producing the box, and opening it
+with a facetious grin, I said,--
+
+"Here is a jolly little sorrow I caught this morning." The joke pleased
+him and we roared, bellowed.
+
+"That terrible forefinger of yours," he smiled.
+
+"Like Cardinal Richelieu's eyes--piercing?" I suggested with
+appreciation. (It is because I tap him on his shirt front in the space
+between waistcoat and tie aggressively for emphasis in conversation.)
+
+"You must regard my passion for painting," he began once more, "as a
+sort of dipsomania--I really can't help myself."
+
+I jumped on him vehemently,--
+
+"Exactly, my pernickety friend; it's something abnormal and unnatural.
+When, for purposes of self-culture, I see a man deliberately lop off
+great branches of himself so as to divert his strength into one limb, I
+know that if he is successful he'll be something as vulgar as a fat
+woman at a country fair; and if he is unsuccessful he'll be just a
+pathetic mutilation.... You are trying to pervert a natural instinct.
+You want to paint, I believe. Quite so. But when a boy reaches the age
+of puberty he does not grow a palette on his chin but hair.... Still,
+now you recognise it as a bad habit, why need I say more?" ("Why
+indeed?") "It's a vice, and I'm very sorry for you, old boy. I'll do all
+I can--come and have some dinner with me to-night."
+
+"Oh! thank you very much," says my gentleman, "but I'm not at all sorry
+for myself."
+
+"I thought as much. So that we are not so very much agreed after all.
+We're not shaking hands after the boxing contest, but scowling at each
+other from the ropes and shaping for another round."
+
+"Your pulpit orations, my dear Barbellion, in full canonicals," he
+reflected, "are worthy of a larger audience.... To find _you_ of all
+people preaching. I thought you were philosopher enough to see the angle
+of every one's vision and broadminded so as to see every point of view.
+Besides, you are as afraid of marriage as I am, and for the same
+reasons."
+
+"I confess, when in the philosophic citadel of my own armchair," I
+began, "I _do_ see every one's point of view. You sit on the other side
+of the rug and put out the suggestion tentatively that murder may be a
+moral act. I examine your argument and am disposed to accept it. But
+when you slit up my brother's abdomen before my eyes, I am sufficiently
+weak and human to punch you on the nose.... You are too cold and
+Olympian, up above the snowline with a box of paints."
+
+"It is very beautiful among the snows."
+
+"I suppose so."
+
+(Exit.)
+
+_November_ 23.
+
+Great physical languor, especially in the morning. It is Calvary to get
+out of bed and shoulder the day's burden.
+
+"What's been the matter?" they ask.
+
+"Oh! senile decay--general histolysis of the tissues," I say, fencing.
+
+To-night, I looked at myself accidentally in the glass and noticed at
+once the alarming extent of my dejection. Quite unconsciously I turned
+my head away and shook it, making the noise with my teeth and tongue
+which means, "Dear, dear." M---- tells me these waves of ill-health are
+quite unaccountable unless I were "leading a dissolute life, which you
+do not appear to be doing." Damn his eyes.
+
+_Reading Nietzsche_
+
+Reading Nietzsche. What splendid physic he is to Pomeranian puppies like
+myself! I am a hopeless coward. Thunderstorms always frighten me. The
+smallest cut alarms for fear of blood poisoning, and I always dab on
+antiseptics at once. But Nietzsche makes me feel a perfect mastiff.
+
+_The Test for True Love_
+
+The test for true love is whether you can endure the thought of cutting
+your sweetheart's toe-nails--the onychiotomic test. Or whether you find
+your Julia's sweat as sweet as otto of roses. I told her this to-night.
+Probably she thinks I only "saw it in a book."
+
+_Chopin_
+
+On Sunday, went to the Albert Hall, and warmed myself at the Orchestra.
+It is a wonderful sight to watch an orchestra playing from the gallery.
+It spurts and flickers like a flame. Its incessant activity arrests the
+attention and holds it just as a fire does--even a deaf man would be
+fascinated. Heard Chopin's Funeral March and other things. It would be a
+rich experience to be able to be in your coffin at rest and listen to
+Chopin's Funeral March being played above you by a string orchestra with
+Sir Henry Wood conducting.
+
+Sir Henry like a melanic Messiah was crucified as usual, the Hungarian
+Rhapsody No. 2 causing him the most awful agony....
+
+_November_ 28.
+
+_Rodin_
+
+More than once lately have been to see and admire Rodin's recent gifts
+to the nation exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The "Prodigal
+Son" is Beethoven's Fifth Symphony done in stone. It was only on my
+second visit that I noticed the small pebble in each hand--a superb
+touch!--what a frenzy of remorse!
+
+The "Fallen Angel" I loved most. The legs of the woman droop lifelessly
+backwards in an intoxicating curve. The eye caresses it--down the thighs
+and over the calves to the tips of the toes--like the hind limbs of some
+beautiful dead gazelle. He has brought off exactly the same effect in
+the woman in the group called "Eternal Spring," which I have only seen
+in a photograph.
+
+This morning at 9 a.m. lay in bed on my back, warm and comfortable, and,
+for the first time for many weeks, with no pain or discomfort of any
+kind. The mattress curved up around my body and legs and held me in a
+soft warm embrace.... I shut my eyes and whistled the saccharine melody
+for solo violin in Chopin's Funeral March. I wanted the moment prolonged
+for hours. Ill-health chases the soul out of a man. He becomes a body,
+purely physical.
+
+_November_ 29.
+
+This evening she promised to be my wife after a long silent ramble
+together thro' dark London squares and streets! I am beside myself!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_December_ 6.
+
+I know now--I love her with passion. Health and ambition and sanity are
+returning. Projects in view:--
+
+(1) To make her happy and myself worthy.
+
+(2) To get married.
+
+(3) To prepare and publish a volume of this Journal.
+
+(4) To write two essays for _Cornhill_ which shall surely induce the
+Editor to publish and not write me merely long complimentary and
+encouraging letters as heretofore.
+
+Wired to A----, "The brave little pennon has been hauled down."
+
+_December_ 7.
+
+Have so many projects in view and so little time in which to get them
+done! Moreover I am always haunted by the fear that I may never finish
+them thro' physical or temperamental disabilities--a breakdown in health
+or in purpose. I am one of those who are apt to die unexpectedly and no
+one would be surprised. An inquest would probably be unnecessary. I
+badly want to live say another twelve months. Hey! nonny-no! a man's a
+fool that wants to die.
+
+_December_ 9.
+
+... I shook her angrily by the shoulders to-night and said, "Why do I
+love you?--Tell me," but she only smiled gently and said, "I cannot
+tell...." I ought not to love her, I know--every omen is against it....
+Then I am full of self-love: an intellectual Malvolio proud of his
+brains and air of distinction....
+
+Then I am fickle, passionate, polygamous ... I am haunted by the memory
+of how I have sloughed off one enthusiasm after another. I used to
+dissect snails in a pie-dish in the kitchen while Mother baked the
+cakes--the unravelling of the internal economy of a _Helix_ caused as
+great an emotional storm as to-day the Unfinished Symphony does! I look
+for the first parasol in Kensington Gardens with the same interest as
+once I sought out the first snowdrop or listened for the first Cuckoo. I
+am as anxious to identify an instrument in Sir Henry's Orchestra as once
+to identify the song of a new bird in the woods. Nothing is further from
+my intention or desire to continue my old habit of nature study. I never
+read nature books--my old favourites--Waterton's _Wanderings_, Gilbert
+White, _The Zoologist_, etc.--have no interest for me--in fact they give
+me slight mental nausea even to glance at. Wiedersheim (good old
+Wiedersheim) is now deposed by a text book on Harmony. My main desire
+just now is to hear the best music. In the country I wore blinkers and
+saw only zoology. Now in London, I've taken the bit in my mouth--and
+it's a mouth of iron--wanting a run for all my troubles before Death
+strikes me down.
+
+All this evidence of my temperamental instability alarms and distresses
+me on reflection and makes the soul weary. I wish I loved more steadily.
+I am always sidetracking myself. The title of "husband" scares me.
+
+_December_ 12.
+
+_Sir Henry Wood conducting_
+
+Went to the Queen's Hall, sat in the Orchestra and watched Sir Henry's
+statuesque figure conducting thro' a forest of bows, "which pleased me
+mightily." He would be worth watching if you were stone deaf. If you
+could not hear a sound, the animation and excitement of an orchestra in
+full swing, with the conductor cutting and slashing at invisible foes,
+make a magnificent spectacle.
+
+The face of Sir Henry Wood strikes me as very much like the traditional
+pictures of Jesus Christ, tho' Sir Henry is dark--the melanic Messiah I
+call him (very much to my own delight). Rodin ought to do him in
+stone--Chesterfield's ideal of a man--a Corinthian edifice on Tuscan
+foundations. In Sir Henry's case there can be no disputing the Tuscan
+foundations. However swift and elegant the movements of his arms, his
+splendid lower extremities remain as firm as stone columns. While the
+music is calm and serene his right hand and baton execute in concert
+with the left, perfect geometric curves around his head. Then as it
+gathers in force and volume, when the bows begin to dart swiftly across
+the fiddles and the trumpets and trombones blaze away in a
+conflagration, we are all expectant--and even a little fearful, to
+observe his sabre-like cuts. The tension grows ... I hold my breath....
+Sir Henry snatches a second to throw back a lock of his hair that has
+fallen limply across his forehead, then goes on in unrelenting pursuit,
+cutting and slashing at hordes of invisible fiends that leap howling out
+towards him. There is a great turmoil of combat, but the Conductor
+struggles on till the great explosion happens. But in spite of that, you
+see him still standing thro' a cloud of great chords, quite undaunted.
+His sword zigzags up and down the scale--suddenly the closed fist of his
+left hand shoots up straight and points to the zenith--like the arm of a
+heathen priest appealing to Baal to bring down fire from Heaven.... But
+the appeal avails nought and it looks as tho' it were all up for poor
+Sir Henry. The music is just as infuriated--his body writhes with
+it--the melanic Messiah crucified by the inappeasable desire to express
+by visible gestures all that he feels in his heart. He surrenders --so
+you think--he opens out both arms wide and baring his breast, dares them
+all to do their worst--like the picture of Moffat the missionary among
+the savages of the Dark Continent!
+
+And yet he wins after all. At the very last moment he seems to summon
+all his remaining strength and in one final and devastating sweep mows
+down the orchestra rank by rank.... You awake from the nightmare to
+discover the victor acknowledging the applause in a series of his
+inimitable bows.
+
+One ought to pack one's ears up with cotton wool at a concert where Sir
+Henry conducts. Otherwise, the music is apt to distract one's attention.
+R.L.S. wanted to be at the head of a cavalry charge--sword over
+head--but I'd rather fight an orchestra with a baton.
+
+_Beethoven's Fifth Symphony_
+
+This symphony always works me up into an ecstasy; in ecstatic sympathy
+with its dreadfulness I could stand up in the balcony and fling myself
+down passionately into the arena below. Yet there were women sitting
+alongside me to-day--knitting! It so annoyed and irritated me that at
+the end of the first movement I got up and sat elsewhere. They would
+have sat knitting at the foot of the Cross, I suppose.
+
+At the end of the second movement, two or three other women got up and
+went home to tea! It would have surprised me no more to have seen a cork
+extract itself from its bottle and promenade.
+
+_Tschaikovsky_
+
+Just lately I've heard a lot of music including Tschaikovsky's
+Pathétique and Fifth Symphonies, some Debussy, and odd pieces by Dukas,
+Glinka, Smetana, Mozart. I am chock-full of impressions of all this
+precious stuff and scarcely know what to write. As usual, the third
+movement of the Pathétique produced a frenzy of exhilaration; I seemed
+to put on several inches around my chest and wished to shout in a voice
+of thunder. The conventions of a public concert hall are dreadfully
+oppressive at such times. I could have eaten "all the elephants of
+Hindustan and picked my teeth with the spire of Strassburg Cathedral."
+
+In the last movement of the Fifth Symphony of that splendid fellow
+Tschaikovsky, the orchestra seemed to gallop away leaving poor Landon
+Ronald to wave his whip in a ridiculously ineffective way. They went on
+crashing down chords, and just before the end I had the awful
+presentiment that the orchestra simply could not stop. I sat still
+straining every nerve in the expectancy that this chord or the next or
+the next was the end. But it went on pounding down--each one seemed the
+last but every time another followed as passionate and emphatic as the
+one before, until finally, whatever this inhuman orchestra was
+attempting to crush and destroy must have been reduced to shapeless
+pulp. I wanted to board the platform and plead with them, elderly
+gentlemen turned their heads nervously, everyone was breathless, we all
+wanted to call "For God's sake, stop"--to do anything to still this
+awful lust for annihilation.... The end came quickly in four drum beats
+in quick succession. I have never seen such hate, such passionate
+intensity of the will to destroy.... And Tschaikovsky was a Russian!
+
+Debussy was a welcome change. "L'Après-midi d'un Faun" is a musical
+setting to an oscitatory exercise. It is an orchestral yawn. Oh! so
+tired!
+
+Came away thoroughly delighted. Wanted to say to every one "Bally good,
+ain't it?" and then we would all shake hands and go home whistling.
+
+_December_ 14.
+
+My rooms are littered with old concert programmes and the Doctor's
+prescriptions (in the yellow envelopes of the dispenser) for my various
+ailments and diseases, and books, books, books.
+
+Among the latter those lying on my table at this moment are--
+
+Plays of M. Brieux.
+
+_Joseph Vance._
+
+The Sequel to _Pragmatism: The Meaning of Truth_, by Wiliam James.
+
+_Beyond Good and Evil._
+
+Dostoievsky's _The Possessed._
+
+Marie Bashkirtseff's _Journal._
+
+I have found time to read only the first chapter of this last and am
+almost afraid to go on. It would be so humiliating to find I was only
+her duplicate.
+
+On my mantelpiece stands a photograph of Huxley--the hero of my
+youth--which old B---- has always taken to be that of my grandpapa! A
+plaster-cast mask of Voltaire when first hung up made him chuckle with
+indecent laughter. "A regular all-nighter. Who is it?" he said.
+
+_December_ 15.
+
+_Petticoat Lane_
+
+This morning, being Sunday, went to Petticoat Lane and enjoyed myself.
+
+On turning the corner to go into Middlesex Street, as it it now called,
+the first thing I saw was a little girl--a Jewess--being tackled for
+selling Belgian button-hole flags by two policemen who ultimately
+marched her off to the police station.
+
+In the Lane, first of all, was a "Royal Ascot Jockey Scales" made of
+brass and upholstered in gaudy red velvet--a penny a time. A very fat
+man was being weighed and looked a little distressed on being given his
+ticket.
+
+"Another stone," he told the crowd mournfully.
+
+"You'll have to eat less pork," some one volunteered and we all laughed.
+
+Next door to the Scales was a man selling gyroscopes. "Something
+scientific, amusing as well as instructive, illustrating the principles
+of gravity and stability. What I show you is what I sell--price one
+shilling. Who?"
+
+I stopped next at a stall containing nothing but caps,--"any size, any
+colour, any pattern, a shilling apiece--now then!" This show was being
+run by two men--a Jew in a fur cap on one side of the stall and a very
+powerful-looking sort of Captain Cuttle on the other--a seafaring man,
+almost as broad as he was long, with a game leg and the voice of a
+skipper in a hurricane. Both these men were selling caps at a prodigious
+pace, and with the insouciance of tradesmen sure of their custom. The
+skipper would seize a cap, chuck it across to a timid prospective
+purchaser, and, if he dropped it, chuck him over another, crying, with a
+"yo-heave-ho" boisterousness, "Oh! what a game, what a bees' nest."
+
+Upon the small head of another customer, he would squash down his
+largest sized cap saying at once,--
+
+"There, you look the finest gentleman--oh! ah! a little too large."
+
+At which we all laughed, the customer looked silly, but took no offence.
+
+"Try this," yells the skipper above the storm, and takes off his own
+cap. "Oh! ye needn't be afraid--I washed my hair last--year."
+(Laughter.)
+
+Then to his partner, the Jew on the other side of the stall, "Oh! what a
+face you've got. Here! 6d. for any one who can tell me what it is. Why
+not take it to the trenches and get it smashed in?"
+
+The Jew wore spectacles and had a soft ingratiating voice and brown
+doe-like eyes--a Jew in every respect. "Oh!" says he, in the oleaginous
+Semitic way, and accurately taking up his cue (for all this was
+rehearsed patter), "my wife says 'my face is my fortune.'"
+
+"No wonder you're so hard up and 'ave got to take in lodgers. What's yer
+name?"
+
+"John Jones," in a demure wheedling voice.
+
+"Hoo--that's not your name in your own bloody country--I expect it's
+Hullabullinsky."
+
+"Do you know what my name really is?"
+
+"No."
+
+"It's Assenheimopoplocatdwizlinsky Kovorod." (Loud laughter.)
+
+"I shall call you 'ass' for short."
+
+I was laughing loudly at these two clowns and the skipper observing as
+much, shouted out to me,--
+
+"Parlez-vous Francois, M'sieur?"
+
+"Oui, oui," said I.
+
+"Ah! lah, you're one of us--oh! what a game! what a bees' nest," and all
+the time he went on selling caps and chucking them at the purchasers.
+
+Perhaps one of the most extraordinary things I saw was a stream of young
+men who, one after another, came up to a stall, paid a penny and
+swallowed a glass of "nerve tonic"--a green liquid syphoned out of a
+large jar--warranted a safe cure for
+
+"Inward weakness, slightest flurry or body oppressed."
+
+Another man was pulling teeth and selling tooth powder. Some of the
+little urchins' teeth, after he had cleaned them as a demonstration,
+were much whiter than their faces or his. This was "the original Chas.
+Assenheim."
+
+Mrs. Meyers, "not connected with any one else of the same name in the
+Lane" was selling eels at 2d., 3d. and 6d. and doing a brisk trade too.
+
+But I should go on for hours if I were to tell everything seen in this
+remarkable lane during an hour and a half on a Sunday morning. Each
+stall-holder sells only one kind of article--caps or clocks or songs,
+braces, shawls, indecent literature, concertinas, gramophones, coats,
+pants, reach-me-downs, epergnes. The thoroughfare was crowded with
+people (I saw two Lascars in red fez caps) inspecting the goods
+displayed and attentively observed by numerous policemen. The alarm
+clocks were all going off, each gramophone was working a record (a
+different one!) and every tradesman shouting his wares--a perfect
+pandemonium.
+
+_December_ 31.
+
+_A Conversation_
+
+"There is that easily calculable element in your nature, dear boy," I
+said, "by which you forego the dignity of a free-willed human being and
+come under an inflexible natural law. I can anticipate your movements,
+intentions, and opinions long beforehand. For example, I know quite well
+that every Saturday morning will see you with _The New Statesman_ under
+your arm; I know that the words 'Wagner' or 'Shaw' uttered slowly and
+deliberately in your ear will produce a perfectly definite reaction."
+
+"I bet you can't predict what I am going to buy now,"
+
+R---- replied gaily, advancing to the newspaper stall.
+
+He bought the _Pink 'Un_ and I laughed....
+
+"And so you read _Pragmatism_," he mused, "while the fate of the Empire
+stands in the balance."
+
+"Yes," said I, "and the Paris Academy of Sciences were discussing the
+functions of _θ_ and the Polymorphism of Antarctic diatoms last
+September when the Germans stood almost at the gates of Paris."
+
+This was a lucky stroke for me, for he knew he was rubbing me on the
+raw. We are, of course, great friends, but sometimes we get on one
+another's nerves.
+
+"I am polychromatic," I declaimed, "rhetorical, bass. You--besides being
+a bally fool--are of a pretty gray colour, a baritone and you paint in
+water-colours."
+
+"Whereas you, of course, would paint in blood?" he answered facetiously.
+
+His Oxford education has a firm hold on him. He says for example, "e
+converso" instead of "on the other hand" and "entre nous" for "between
+ourselves." He labels his paragraphs _α, β, γ_, instead of a, b, c, and
+quotes Juvenal, knows Paris and Naples, visits the Alps for the winter
+sports, all in the approved manner of dons.
+
+Not infrequently he visits the East End to Study "how the poor live," he
+lectures at Toynbee Hall, and calls the proletariat "the prolly." In
+fact, he does everything according to the regulations, being a socialist
+and an agnostic, a follower of Shaw and a devotee of Bunyan. "Erotic" he
+is careful to pronounce _eròtic_ to show he knows Greek, and the "Duma,"
+the _Dumà_, tho' he doesn't know Russian. Like any don, he is always
+ready to discuss and give an opinion on any sub- supra- or circum-lunary
+subject from bimetallism to the Symphony as an art-form.
+
+"That's a dominant fifth," I said to him the other day; no answer.
+
+"You ignorant devil," I said, "you don't know what a dominant fifth is!"
+
+We made grimaces at one another.
+
+"Who's the Master of the Mint?" I asked him. "That is an easy one."
+
+"The Chancellor of the Exchequer," was the prompt reply.
+
+"Oh! that's right," I said sarcastic and crestfallen. "Now tell me the
+shortest verse in the Bible and the date of Rameses II."
+
+We laughed. R---- is a very clever man and the most extraordinarily
+versatile man I know. He is bound to make his mark. His danger is--too
+many irons in the fire. Here are some of his occupations and
+acquirements: Art (etching, drypoint, water-colours), music (a charming
+voice), classics, French, German, Italian (both speaking and reading
+knowledge), biology, etc., etc. He is for ever titillating his mind with
+some new thing. "For God's sake, do leave it alone--you simply rag your
+mind to death. Put it out to grass--go thro' an annual season of
+complete abstinence from knowledge--an intellectual Lent."
+
+No one more than he enjoys my ragging him like this--and I do it rather
+well.
+
+
+[1] "I could eat all the elephants of Hindustan and pick my teeth with
+the Spire of Strassburg Cathedral."
+
+[2] See January 2nd, 1915.
+
+
+
+
+1915
+
+
+_January_ 1.
+
+I have grown so ridiculously hypercritical and fastidious that I will
+refuse a man's invitation to dinner because he has watery blue eyes, or
+hate him for a mannerism or an impediment or affectation in his speech.
+Some poor devil who has not heard of Turner or Debussy or Dostoieffsky I
+gird at with the arrogance of a knowledgeable youth of 17. Some oddity
+who should afford a sane mind endless amusement, I write off as a _Insus
+naturæ_ and dismiss with a flourish of contempt. My intellectual
+arrogance--excepting at such times as I become conscious of it and pull
+myself up--is incredible. It is incredible because I have no personal
+courage and all this pride boils up behind a timid exterior. I quail
+often before stupid but over-bearing persons who consequently never
+realise my contempt of them. Then afterwards, I writhe to think I never
+stood up to this fool; never uttered an appropriate word to interfere
+with another's nauseating self-love. It exasperates me to be unable to
+give a Roland for an Oliver--even servants and underlings "tick me
+off"--to fail always in sufficient presence of mind to make the
+satisfying rejoinder or riposte. I suffer from such a savage _amour
+propre_ that I fear to enter the lists with a man I dislike on account
+of the mental anguish I should suffer if he worsted me. I am therefore
+bottled up tight--both my hates and loves. For a coward is not only
+afraid to tell a man he hates him, but is nervous too of letting go of
+his feeling of affection or regard lest it be rejected or not returned.
+I shudder to think of such remarks as (referring to me), "He's one of my
+admirers, you know" (sardonically), or, "I simply can't get rid of him."
+
+If however my cork _does_ come out, there is an explosion, and placid
+people occasionally marvel to hear violent language streaming from my
+lips and nasty acid and facetious remarks.
+
+Of course, to intimate friends (only about three persons in the wide,
+wide world), I can always give free vent to my feelings, and I do so in
+privacy with that violence in which a weak character usually finds some
+compensation for his intolerable self-imposed reserve and restraint in
+public. I can never marvel enough at the ineradicable turpitude of my
+existence, at my _double-facedness_, and the remarkable contrast between
+the face I turn to the outside world and the face my friends know. It's
+like leading a double existence or artificially constructing a puppet to
+dangle before the crowd while I fulminate behind the scenes. If only I
+had the moral courage to play my part in life--to take the stage and be
+myself, to enjoy the delightful sensation of making my presence felt,
+instead of this vapourish mumming--then this Journal would be quite
+unnecessary. For to me self-expression is a necessity of life, and what
+cannot be expressed one way must be expressed in another. When colossal
+egotism is driven underground, whether by a steely surface environment
+or an unworkable temperament or as in my case by both, you get a truly
+remarkable result, and the victim a truly remarkable pain--the pain one
+might say of continuously unsuccessful attempts at parturition.
+
+It is perhaps not the whole explanation to say that my milky affability
+before, say bores or clods is sheer personal cowardice.... It is partly
+real affability. I am so glad to have opposite me some one who is making
+himself pleasant and affable and sympathetic that I forget for the
+moment that he is an unconscionable time-server, a sycophant,
+lick-spittle, toady, etc. My first impulse is always to credit folk with
+being nicer, cleverer, more honest and amiable than they are. Then, on
+reflection, I discover unpleasing characteristics, I detect their little
+motives, and hate myself for not speaking. The fellow is intolerable,
+why did I not tell him so? Bitter recriminations from my critical self
+upon my flabby amiable half.
+
+On the whole, then, I lead a pretty disgraceful inner life--excepting
+when I pull myself together and smile benignly on all things with a
+philosophical smugness, such as is by no means my mood at this present
+moment. I am so envious that a reprint of one of Romney's Ramus girls
+sends me into a dry tearless anger--for the moment till I turn over the
+next page.... Inwardly I was exacerbated this morning when R----
+recited, "Come and have a tiddle at the old Brown Bear," and explained
+how a charming "young person" sang this at breakfast the other morning.
+It was simply _too_ charming for him to hear.
+
+To-night as I brushed my hair, I decided I was quite good-looking, and
+_I believe_ I mused that E---- was really a lucky girl.... All that is
+the matter with me is a colossal conceit and a colossal discontent,
+qualities exaggerated where a man finds himself in an environment which
+....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+You observant people will notice that this explanation is something of a
+self-defence whereby the virtue goes out of my confession. I plead
+guilty, but great and unprecedented provocation as well. Intense pride
+of individuality forbids that I should ever be other than, shall I say,
+amiably disposed towards myself _au fond_, however displeased I may be
+with my environment. It is indeed impossible without sending him to a
+lunatic asylum ever to knock a man off the balance of his
+self-esteem.... A man's loyalty to himself is the most pig-headed thing
+imaginable.
+
+_January_ 2.
+
+_The Fire Bogey_
+
+"This Box contains Manuscripts. One guinea will be paid to any one who
+in case of danger from fire saves it from damage or loss."
+
+Signed: W.N.P. BARBELLION.
+
+I have had this printed in large black characters on a card, framed and
+nailed to my "coffin" of Journals. I told the printer first to say _Two
+Guineas_, but he suggested that One Guinea was quite enough. I agreed
+but wondered how the devil _he_ knew what the Journals were
+worth--nobody knows.
+
+Next month, I expect I shall have a "hand" painted on the wall and
+pointing towards the box. And the month after that I shall hire a
+fireman to be on duty night and day standing outside No. 101 in a brass
+helmet and his hatchet up at the salute.
+
+These precious Journals! Supposing I lost them! I cannot imagine the
+anguish it would cause me. It would be the death of my real self and as
+I should take no pleasure in the perpetuation of my flabby, flaccid,
+anæmic, amiable puppet-self, I should probably commit suicide.
+
+_August_ 7.
+
+Harvey who discovered the circulation of the blood also conducted a
+great many investigations into the Anatomy and development of insects.
+But all his MSS. and drawings disappeared in the fortunes of war, and
+one half of his life work thus disappeared. This makes me feverish,
+living as I do in Armageddon!
+
+Again, all Malpighi's pictures, furniture, books and MSS. were destroyed
+in a lamentable fire at his house in Bononia, occasioned it is said by
+the negligence of his old wife.
+
+About 1618, Ben Jonson suffered a similar calamity thro' a fire breaking
+out in his study. Many unpublished MSS. perished.
+
+A more modern and more tragic example I found recently in the person of
+an Australian naturalist, Dr. Walter Stimpson, who lost all his MSS.,
+drawings, and collections in the great fire of Chicago, and was so
+excoriated by this irreparable misfortune that he never recovered from
+the shock, and died the following year a broken man and unknown.
+
+Of course the housemaid who lit the fire with the _French Revolution_ is
+known to all, as well as Newton's "Fido, Fido, you little know what you
+have done."
+
+There are many dangers in preserving the labours of years in MS. form.
+Samuel Butler (of _Erewhon_) advised writing in copying ink and then
+pressing off a second copy to be kept in another and separate locality.
+My own precautions for these Journals are more elaborate. Those who know
+about it think I am mad. I wonder.... But I dare say I am a pathetic
+fool--an incredible self-deceiver!
+
+Anyhow--the "coffin" of raw material I sent down to T---- while I retain
+the two current volumes. This is to avoid Zeppelins. E---- took the
+"coffin" down for me on her way home from school, and at Taunton,
+inquisitive porters mistaking it, I suppose, for an infant's coffin
+carried it reverently outside the station and laid it down. She caught
+them looking at it just in time before her train left. Under her
+instructions they seized it by the brass handles and carried it back
+again. I sit now and with a good deal of curiosity fondle the idea of
+porters carrying about my Journals of confession. It's like being
+tickled in the palm of the hand.... Two volumes of abstracted entries I
+keep here, and, as soon as I am married, I intend to make a second copy
+of these.... Then all in God's good time I intend getting a volume ready
+for publication.
+
+_January_ 30.
+
+_Hearing Beethoven_
+
+To the Queen's Hall and heard Beethoven's Fifth and Seventh Symphonies.
+
+Before the concert began I was in a fever. I kept on saying to myself,
+"I am going to hear the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies." I regarded myself
+with the most ridiculous self-adulation--I smoothed and purred over
+myself--a great contented Tabby cat--and all because I was so splendidly
+fortunate as to be about to hear Beethoven's Fifth and Seventh
+Symphonies.
+
+It certainly upset me a little to find there were so many other people
+who were singularly fortunate as well, and it upset me still more to
+find some of them knitting and some reading newspapers as if they waited
+for sausage and mashed.
+
+How I gloried in the Seventh! I can't believe there was any one present
+who gloried in it as I did! To be processing majestically up the steps
+of a great, an unimaginable palace (in the "Staircase" introduction),
+led by Sir Henry, is to have had at least a crowded ten minutes of
+glorious life--a suspicion crossed the mind at one time "Good Heavens,
+they're going to knight me." I cannot say if that were their intentions.
+But I escaped however....
+
+I love the way in which a beautiful melody flits around the Orchestra
+and its various components like a beautiful bird.
+
+_January_ 19.
+
+_An Average Day_
+
+After a morning of very mixed emotions and more than one annoyance ...
+at last sat down to lunch and a little peace and quiet with R----. We
+began by quoting verse at one another in open competition. Of course
+neither of us listened to the other's verses. We merely enjoyed the
+pleasure of recollecting and repeating our own. I began with Tom Moore's
+"Row gently here, my Gondolier." R---- guessed the author rightly at
+once and fidgeted until he burst out with, "The Breaths of kissing night
+and day"--to me an easy one. I gave, "The Moon more indolently sleeps
+to-night" (Baudelaire), and in reply he did a great stroke by reciting
+some of the old French of Frangois Villon which entirely flummuxed me.
+
+I don't believe we really love each other, but we cling to each other
+out of ennui and discover in each other a certain cold intellectual
+sympathy.
+
+At the pay desk (Lyons' is our rendezvous) we joked with the cashier--a
+cheerful, fat little girl, who said to R---- (indicating me),--
+
+"He's a funny boy, isn't he?"
+
+"Dangerous," chirped R----, and we laughed. In the street we met an
+aged, decrepit newsvendor--very dirty and ragged--but his voice was
+unexpectedly fruity.
+
+"British Success," he called, and we stopped for the sake of the voice.
+
+"I'm not interested," I said--as an appetiser.
+
+"What! Not.... Just one sir: I haven't sold a single copy yet, and I've
+a wife and four children."
+
+"That's nothing to me--I've three wives and forty children," I remarked.
+
+"What!" in affected surprise, turning to R----, "he's Brigham Young from
+Salt Lake City. Yes I know it--I've been there myself and been dry ever
+since. Give us a drink, sir--just one."
+
+In consideration of his voice we gave him 2d. and passed on....
+
+After giving a light to a Belgian soldier whose cigarette had gone out,
+farther along we entered a queer old music shop where they sell
+flageolets, serpents, clavichords, and harps. We had previously made an
+appointment with the man to have Schubert's Unfinished Symphony played
+to us, so as to recall one or two of the melodies which we can't recall
+and it drives us crazy. "What is that one in the second movement which
+goes like this?" and R---- whistled a fragment. "I don't know," I said,
+"but let's go in here and ask." In the shop, a youth was kind enough to
+say that if we cared to call next day, Madame A----, the harp player
+would be home and would be ready to play us the symphony.
+
+So this morning, before Madame's appearance, this kind and obliging
+youth put a gramophone record of it on, to which we listened like two
+intelligent parrots with heads sideways. Presently, the fat lady harpist
+appeared and asked us just what we wanted to find out--a rather awkward
+question for us, as we did not want to "find out" anything excepting how
+the tunes went.
+
+I therefore explained that as neither of us had sisters or wives, and we
+both wanted, etc.... so would she...? In response, she smiled
+pleasantly and played us the second movement on a shop piano. Meanwhile,
+Henry the boy, hid himself behind the instruments at the rear of the
+shop and as we signed to her she would say,--
+
+"What's that, Henry?"
+
+And Henry would duly answer from his obscurity, "Wood wind," or "Solo
+oboe," or whatever it was, and the lad really spoke with authority. In
+this way, I began to find out something about the work. Before I left, I
+presented her with a copy of the score, which she did not possess and
+because she would not accept any sort of remuneration.
+
+"Won't you put your name on it?" she inquired.
+
+I pointed gaily to the words "Ecce homo," which I had scribbled across
+Schubert's name and said, "There you are." Madame smiled incredulously
+and we said, "Good-bye."
+
+It was a beautifully clement almost springlike day, and at the street
+corner, in a burst of joyousness, we each bought a bunch of violets of
+an old woman, stuck them on the ends of our walking-sticks, and marched
+off with them in triumphant protest to the B.M. Carried over our
+shoulders, our flowers amused the police and ----, who scarcely realised
+the significance of the ritual. "This is my protest," said R----,
+"against the war. It's like Oscar Wilde's Sunflower."
+
+On the way, we were both bitterly disappointed at a dramatic meeting
+between a man and woman of the artizan class which instead of beginning
+with a stormy, "Robert, where's the rent, may I ask?" fizzled out into,
+"Hullo, Charlie, why you _are_ a stranger."
+
+At tea in the A.B.C. shop, we had a violent discussion on Socialism, and
+on the station platform, going home, I said that before marriage I
+intended saving up against the possibility of divorce--a domestic
+divorce fund.
+
+"Very dreadful," said R---- with mock gravity, "to hear a recently
+affianced young man talk like that."
+
+... What should I do then? Marry? I suppose so. Shadows of the
+prison-house. At first I said I ought not to marry for two years. Then
+when I am wildly excited with her I say "next week." We could. There are
+no arrangements to be made. All her furniture--flat, etc. But I feel we
+ought to wait until the War is over.
+
+At dinner-time to-night I was feverish to do three things at once: write
+out my day's Journal, eat my food, and read the _Journal_ of Marie
+Bashkirtseff. Did all three--but unfortunately not at once, so that when
+I was occupied with one I would surreptitiously cast a glance sideways
+at the other--and repined.
+
+After dinner, paid a visit to the ---- and found Mrs. ---- playing Patience.
+I told her that 12,000 lives had been lost in the great Italian
+earthquake. Still going on dealing out the cards, she said in her gentle
+voice that that was dreadful and still absorbed in her cards inquired if
+earthquakes had aught to do with the weather.
+
+"An earthquake must be a dreadful thing," she gently piped, as she
+abstractedly dealt out the cards for a new game in a pretty
+Morris-papered room in Kensington.
+
+_January_ 20.
+
+_At a Public Dinner_
+
+... The timorous man presently took out his cigarette-case and was going
+to take out a cigarette, when he recollected that he ought first to
+offer one to the millionaire on his right. Fortunately the cigarette
+case was silver and the cigarettes appeared--from my side of the
+dinner-table--to be fat Egyptians. Yet the timorous and unassuming
+bug-hunter hesitated palpably. Ought he to offer his cigarettes? He
+thought of his own balance at the bank and then of the millionaire's and
+trembled. The case after all was only silver and the cigarettes were not
+much more than a halfpenny each. Was it not impertinent? He sat a moment
+studying the open case which he held in both hands like a hymn book,
+while the millionaire ordered not wines--but a bass! At last courage
+came, and he inoffensively pushed the cigarettes towards his friend.
+
+"No, thanks!" smiled the millionaire, "I don't smoke." And so, 'twas a
+unicorn dilemma after all.
+
+_February_ 15.
+
+Spent Xmas week at work in her studio, transcribing my Journals while
+she made drawings. All unbeknown to her I was copying out entries of
+days gone by--how scandalised she would be if...!
+
+_February_ 22.
+
+What an amazing Masque is Rotten Row on a Sunday morning! I sat on a
+seat there this morning and watched awhile.
+
+It was most exasperating to be in this kaleidoscope of human life
+without the slightest idea as to who they all were. One man in
+particular, I noticed--a first-class "swell"--whom I wanted to touch
+gently on the arm, slip a half-a-crown into his hand and whisper,
+"There, tell me all about yourself."
+
+Such "swells" there were that out in the fairway, my little cockle-shell
+boat was wellnigh swamped. To be in the wake of a really magnificent
+Duchess simply rocks a small boat in an alarming fashion. I leaned over
+my paddles and gazed up. They steamed past unheeding, but I kept my
+nerve all right and pulled in and out quizzing and observing.
+
+It is nothing less than scandalous that here I am aged 25 with no means
+of acquainting myself with contemporary men and women even of my own
+rank and station. The worst of it is, too, that I have no time to
+lose--in my state of health. This accursed ill-health cuts me off from
+everything. I make pitiful attempts to see the world around me by an
+occasional visit (wind, weather, and health permitting) to Petticoat
+Lane, the Docks, Rotten Row, Leicester Square, or the Ethical Church.
+To-morrow I purpose going to the Christian Scientists'. Meanwhile, the
+others participate in Armageddon.
+
+_February_ 23.
+
+_Looking for Lice at the Zoo_
+
+The other day went to the Zoological Gardens, and, by permission of the
+Secretary, went round with the keepers and searched the animals for
+ectoparasites.
+
+Some time this year I have to make a scientific Report to the Zoological
+Society upon all the Lice which from time to time have been collected on
+animals dying in the gardens and sent me for study and determination.
+
+We entered the cages, caught and examined several Tinamous,
+_Rhinochetus, Eurypygia_, and many more, to the tune of "The Policeman's
+Holiday" whistled by a Mynah! It was great fun.
+
+Then we went into the Ostrich House and thoroughly searched two Kiwis.
+These, being nocturnal birds, were roosting underneath a heap of straw.
+When we had finished investigating their feathers, they ran back to
+their straw at once, the keeper giving them a friendly tap on the rear
+to hurry them up a bit. They are just like little old women bundling
+along.
+
+The Penguins, of course, were the most amusing, and, after operating
+fruitlessly for some time on a troublesome Adèle, I was amused to find,
+on turning around, all the other Adèles clustered close around my feet
+in an attitude of mute supplication.
+
+The Armadillo required all the strength of two keepers to hold still
+while I went over his carcass with lens and forceps. I was also allowed
+to handle and examine the Society's two specimens of that amazing
+creature the _Echidna_.
+
+_Balœniceps rex_ like other royalty had to be approached decorously. He
+was a big, ill-tempered fellow, and quite unmanageable except by one
+keeper for whom he showed a preference. While we other conspirators hid
+ourselves outside, this man entered the house quietly and approached the
+bird with a gentle cooing sound. Then suddenly he grabbed the bill and
+held on. We entered at the same moment and secured the wings, and I
+began the search--without any luck. We must have made an amusing
+picture--three men holding on for dear life to a tall, grotesque bird
+with an imperial eye, while a fourth searched the feathers for
+parasites!
+
+_February_ 28.
+
+What a boon is Sunday! I can get out of bed just when the spirit moves
+me, dress and bath leisurely, even with punctilio. How nice to dawdle in
+the bath with a cigarette, to hear the holiday sound of Church bells!
+Then comes that supreme moment when, shaven, clean, warm and hungry for
+breakfast and coffee, I stand a moment before the looking-glass and comb
+out my towzled hair with a parting as straight as a line in Euclid. That
+gives the finishing touch of self-satisfaction, and I go down to
+breakfast ready for the day's pleasure. I hate this weekday strain of
+having to be always each day at a set time in a certain place.
+
+_March_ 3.
+
+I often sit in my room at the B.M. and look out at the traffic with a
+glassy, mesmerised face--a fainéant. How different from that extremely
+busy youth who came to London in 1912. Say--could that lad be I? How
+many hours do I waste day-dreaming. This morning I dreamed and dreamed
+and could not stop dreaming--I had not the will to shake myself down to
+my task.... My memories simply trooped the colour.
+
+It surprised me to find how many of them had gone out of my present
+consciousness and with what poignancy of feeling I recognised them
+again! How selfishly for the most part we all live in our present selves
+or in the selves that are to be.
+
+Then I raced thro' all sorts of future possibilities--oh! when and how
+is it all going to end? How do you expect me to settle down to
+scientific research with all this internal unrest! The scientific man
+above all should possess the "quiet mind in all changes of fortune"--Sir
+Henry Wotton's _How happy is he born and taught_.
+
+The truth is I am a hybrid: a mixture of two very distinct temperaments
+and they are often at war. To keep two different natures and two
+different mental habits simultaneously at work is next to impossible.
+Consequently plenty of waste and fever and--as I might have discovered
+earlier for myself--success almost out of the question. If only I were
+pure-bred science or pure-bred art!
+
+_March_ 4.
+
+Life is a dream and we are all somnambuloes. We know that for a fact at
+all times when we are most intensely alive--at crises of unprecedented
+change, in sorrow or catastrophe, or in any unusual incident brought
+swiftly to a close like a vision!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I sit here writing this--a mirage! Who am I? No one can say. What am I?
+"A soap-bubble hanging from a reed."
+
+Every man is an inexhaustible treasury of human personality. He can go
+on burrowing in it for an eternity if he have the desire--and a taste
+for introspection. I like to keep myself well within the field of the
+microscope, and, with as much detachment as I can muster, to watch
+myself live, to report my observations of what I say, feel, think. In
+default of others, I am myself my own spectator and
+self-appreciator--critical, discerning, vigilant, fond!--my own stupid
+Boswell, shrewd if silly. This spectator of mine, it seems to me, must
+be a very moral gentleman and eminently superior. His incessant
+attentions, while I go on my way misconducting myself, goad me at times
+into a surly, ill-tempered outbreak, like Dr. Johnson. I hate being
+shadowed and reported like this. Yet on the whole--like old Samuel
+again--I am rather pleased to be Boswelled. It flatters me to know that
+at least one person takes an unremitting interest in all my ways.
+
+And, mind you, there are people who have seen most things but have never
+seen themselves walking across the stage of life. If someone shows them
+glimpses of themselves they will not recognise the likeness. How do you
+walk? Do you know your own idiosyncrasies of gait, manner of speech,
+etc.?
+
+I never cease to interest myself in the Gothic architecture of my own
+fantastic soul.[1]
+
+_March_ 6.
+
+_The Punch and Judy Show_
+
+Spent a most delightful half-an-hour to-day reading an account in the
+_Encyclopædia Britannica_ (one of my favourite books--it's so "gey
+disconnekkit") the history of the Punch and Judy Show. It's a delightful
+bit of antiquarian lore and delighted me the more because it had never
+occurred to me before that it had an ancient history. I am thoroughly
+proud of this recent acquisition of knowledge and as if it were a
+valuable freehold I have been showing it off saying, "Rejoice with
+me--see what I have got here." I fired it off first in detail at ----;
+and H---- and D---- will probably be my victims to-morrow. After all, it
+is a charming little cameo of history: compact, with plenty of scope for
+conjecture, theory, research, and just that combination of all three
+which would suit my taste and capacity if I had time for a Monograph.
+
+_March_ 22
+
+I waste much time gaping and wondering. During a walk or in a book or in
+the middle of an embrace, suddenly I awake to a stark amazement at
+everything. The bare fact of existence paralyses me--holds my mind in
+mort-main. To be alive is so incredible that all I do is to lie still
+and merely breathe--like an infant on its back in a cot. It is
+impossible to be interested in anything in particular while overhead the
+sun shines or underneath my feet grows a single blade of grass. "The
+things immediate to be done," says Thoreau, "I could give them all up to
+hear this locust sing." All my energies become immobilised, even my
+self-expression frustrated. I could not exactly master and describe how
+I feel during such moments.
+
+_March_ 23.
+
+_Johnson_ v. _Yves Delage_
+
+I expect we have all of us at one time or another heard ourselves
+addressing to annoying, objectionable acquaintances some such stinging
+castigation as Hazlitt's letter to Gifford, or Burke's letter to a Noble
+Lord, or Johnson's letter to Lord Chesterfield, or Rousseau's letter to
+the Archbishop of Paris. If only I could indulge myself! At this moment
+I could glut my rancours on six different persons at least!
+
+What a raging discontent I have suffered to-day! What cynicism, what
+bitterness of spirit, what envy, hate, exasperation, childish petulance,
+what pusillanimous feelings and desires, what crude efforts to flout
+simple, ingenuous folk with my own thwarted, repressed
+self-assertiveness!
+
+A solemn fellow told me he had heard from Johnson who said he had
+already had much success from collecting in moss.[2] With an icy
+politeness I asked who Johnson was. Who the Hell is Johnson? As a _quid
+pro quo_ I began to talk of Yves Delage, which left him as much in the
+dark as he left me. Our Gods differ, we have a different hierarchy.
+
+"Well, how's your soul?" said R----, bursting in with a sardonic smile.
+
+I gave him a despairing look and said:
+
+"Oh! a pink one with blue spots," and he left me to my fate.
+
+Had tea with the ---- and was amazed to find on the music tray in the
+drawing-room of these inoffensive artists a copy of ----'s Memoir on
+_Synapta_. Within his hearing, I said, "Did you and Mrs. ---- find this
+exciting reading?" And I held it up with a sneer. I felt I had laid bare
+a nerve and forthwith proceeded to make it twinge. ----, of course, was
+glib with an explanation, yet the question remains incalculable--just
+how pleased that young man is with himself.
+
+After tea went out into the Studio and watched these two enthusiasts
+paint. I must have glowered at them. I--the energetic, ambitious,
+pushing youth--of necessity sitting down doing nought, as unconsidered
+as a child playing on the floor. I recollected my early days in my attic
+laboratory and sighed. Where is my energy now?
+
+Mrs. ---- plays Chopin divinely well. How I envied this man--to have a
+wife play you Chopin!
+
+_March_ 24.
+
+It is fortunate I am ill in one way for I need not make my mind up about
+this War. I am not interested in it--this filth and lunacy. I have not
+yet made up my mind about myself. I am so steeped in myself--in my
+moods, vapours, idiosyncrasies, so self-sodden, that I am unable to
+stand clear of the data, to marshal and classify the multitude of facts
+and thence draw the deduction what manner of man I am. I should like to
+know--if only as a matter of curiosity. So what in God's name am I? A
+fool, of course, to start with--but the rest of the diagnosis?
+
+One feature is my incredible levity about serious matters. Nothing
+matters, provided the tongue is not furred. I have coquetted with death
+for so long now, and endured such prodigious ill-health that my main
+idea when in a fair state of repair is to seize the passing moment and
+squeeze it dry. The thing that counts is to be drunken; as Baudelaire
+says, "One must be for ever drunken; that is the sole question of
+importance. If you would not feel the horrible burden of time that
+bruises your shoulders and bends you to the earth, you must be drunken
+without cease."
+
+Another feature is my insatiable curiosity. My purpose is to move about
+in this ramshackle, old curiosity shop of a world sampling existence. I
+would try everything, meddle lightly with everything. Religions and
+philosophies I devour with a relish, Pragmatism and Bishop Berkeley and
+Bergson have been my favourite bagatelles in turn. My consciousness is a
+ragbag of things: all quips, quirks, and quillets, all excellent passes
+of pate, all the "obsolete curiosities of an antiquated cabinet" take my
+eye for a moment ere I pass on. In Sir Thomas Browne's _Pseudodoxia_, I
+am interested to find "why Jews do not stink, what is the superstition
+of sneezing after saluting, wherefore negroes are black," and so forth.
+There is a poetic appropriateness that in A.D. 1915 I should be occupied
+mainly in the study of Lice. I like the insolence of it.
+
+They tell me that if the Germans won it would put back the clock of
+civilisation for a century. But what is a meagre 100 years? Consider the
+date of the first Egyptian dynasty! We are now only in A.D. 1915--surely
+we could afford to chuck away a century or two? Why not evacuate the
+whole globe and give the ball to the Boches to play with--just as an
+experiment to see what they can make of it. After all there is no
+desperate hurry. Have we a train to catch? Before I could be serious
+enough to fight, I should want God first to dictate to me his programme
+of the future of mankind.
+
+_March_ 25.
+
+Often in the middle of a quite vivid ten seconds of life, I find I have
+switched myself off from myself to make room for the person of a
+disinterested and usually vulgar spectator. Even in the thrill of a
+devotional kiss I have overheard myself saying, "Hot stuff, this witch."
+Or in a room full of agreeable and pleasant people, while I am being as
+agreeable as I know how, comes the whisper in a cynical tone, "These
+damned women." I am apparently a triple personality:
+
+(1) The respectable youth.
+
+(2) The foul-mouthed commentator and critic.
+
+(3) The real but unknown I.
+
+Curious that these three should live together amiably in the same
+tenement!
+
+_In a Crowd_
+
+A crowd makes egotists of us all. Most men find it repugnant to them to
+submerge themselves in a sea of their fellows. A silent, listening crowd
+is potentially full of commotion. Some poor devils suffocating and
+unable any longer to bear the strain will shout, "Bravo," or "Hear,
+hear," at every opportunity. At the feeblest joke we all laugh loudly,
+welcoming this means of self-survival. Hence the success of the
+Salvation Army. To be preached at and prayed for in the mass for long on
+end is what human nature can't endure in silence and a good deal of self
+can be smuggled by an experienced Salvationist into "Alleluia" or "The
+Lord be praised."
+
+_Naming Cockroaches_
+
+I had to determine the names of some exotic cockroaches to-day and
+finding it very difficult and dull raised a weak smile in two
+enthusiasts who know them as "Blattids" by rechristening them with great
+frivolity, "Fat 'eds."
+
+"These bloody insects," I said to an Australian entomologist of rare
+quality.
+
+"A good round oath," he answered quietly.
+
+"If it was a square one it wouldn't roll properly," I said. It is nice
+to find an entomologist with whom I can swear and talk bawdy.
+
+_March_ 26.
+
+_A Test of Happiness_
+
+The true test of happiness is whether you know what day of the week it
+is. A miserable man is aware of this even in his sleep. To be as
+cheerful and rosy-cheeked on Monday as on Saturday, and at breakfast as
+at dinner is to--well, make an ideal husband.
+
+... It is a strange metempsychosis, this transformation of an
+enthusiast--tense, excitable, and active, into a sceptic, nerveless,
+ironical, and idle. That's what ill-health can do for a man. To be among
+enthusiasts--zoologists, geologists, entomologists--as I frequently am,
+makes me feel a very old man, regarding them as children, and provokes
+painful retrospection and sugary sentimentality over my past flame now
+burnt out.
+
+I do wonder where I shall end up; what shall I be twenty years hence? It
+alarms me to find I am capable of such remarkable changes in character.
+I am fluid and can be poured into any mould. I have moments when I see
+in myself the most staggering possibilities. I could become a wife
+beater, and a drug-taker (especially the last). My curiosity is often
+such a ridiculous weakness that I have found myself playing Peeping Tom
+and even spying into private documents. In a railway carriage I will
+twist my neck and risk any rudeness to see the title of the book my
+neighbour is reading or how the letter she is reading begins.
+
+_April_ 10.
+
+"Why," asks Samuel Butler, "should not chicken be born and clergymen be
+laid and hatched? Or why, at any rate, should not the clergyman be born
+full grown and in Holy Orders not to say already beneficed? The present
+arrangement is not convenient ... it is not only not perfect but so much
+the reverse that we could hardly find words to express our sense of its
+awkwardness if we could look upon it with new eyes...."
+
+As soon as we are born, if we could but get up, bathe, dress, shave,
+breakfast once for all, if we could "cut" these monotonous cycles of
+routine. If once the sun rose it would stay up, or once we were alive we
+were immortal!--how much forrarder we should all get--always at the
+heart of things, working without let or hindrance in a straight line for
+the millennium! Now we waltz along instead. Even planets die off and new
+ones come in their place. How infinitely wearisome it seems. When an old
+man dies what a waste, and when a baby is born what a redundancy of
+labour in front!
+
+_Two People I hate in particular_
+
+The man walking along the pavement in front of me giving me no room to
+pass under the satisfactory impression that he is the only being on the
+pavement or in the street, city, country, world, universe: and it all
+belongs to him even the moon and sun and stars.
+
+The woman on the 'bus the other night--pouring out an interminable flow
+of poisonous chatter into the ear of her man--poor, exhausted devil who
+kept answering dreamily "Oom" and"Yes" and "Oom"--how I hated her for
+his sake!
+
+_April_ 11.
+
+_Beethoven's Fifth Symphony_
+
+If music moves me, it always generates images--a procession of
+apparently disconnected images in my mind. In the Fifth Symphony, for
+example, as soon as the first four notes are sounded and repeated, this
+magic population springs spontaneously into being. A nude,
+terror-stricken figure in headlong flight with hands pressed to the ears
+and arms bent at the elbows--a staring, bulgy-eyed mad-woman such as one
+sees in Raemakers' cartoons of the Belgian atrocities. A man in the
+first onset of mental agony on hearing sentence of death passed upon
+him. A wounded bird, fluttering and flopping in the grass. It is the
+struggle of a man with a steam-hammer--Fate. As tho' thro' the walls of
+a closed room--some mysterious room, a fearful spot--I crouch and listen
+and am conscious that inside some brutal punishment is being meted out
+--there are short intervals, then unrelenting pursuit, then hammerlike
+blows--melodramatic thuds, terrible silences (I crouch and wonder what
+has happened), and the pursuit begins again. I see clasped hands and
+appealing eyes and feel very helpless and mystified outside. An
+epileptic vision or an opium dream--_Dostoievsky_ or De Quincey set to
+music.
+
+In the Second Movement the man is broken, an unrecognisable vomit. I see
+a pale youth sitting with arms hanging limply between the knees, hands
+folded, and with sad, impenetrable eyes that have gazed on unspeakable
+horrors. I see the brave, tearful smile, the changed life after personal
+catastrophe, the Cross held before closing eyes, sudden absences of
+mind, reveries, poignant retrospects, the rustle of a dead leaf of
+thought at the bottom of the heart, the tortuous pursuit of past
+incidents down into the silence of yesterday, the droning of comfortable
+words, the painful collection of the wreckage of a life with intent to
+"carry on" for a while in duty bound, for the widow consolation in the
+child; a greyhound's cold wet nose nozzling into a listless hand, and
+outside a Thrush singing after the storm, etc., etc.
+
+In the Third Movement comes the crash by which I know something final
+and dreadful has happened. Then the resurrection with commotion in
+Heaven: tempests and human faces, scurryings to and fro, brazen
+portcullises clanging to, never to open more, the distant roll of drums
+and the sound of horses' hoofs. From behind the inmost veil of Heaven I
+faintly catch the huzzas of a great multitude. Then comes a great
+healing wind, then a few ghost-like tappings on the window pane till
+gradually the Avenue of Arches into Heaven come into view with a solemn
+cortege advancing slowly along.
+
+Above the great groundswell of woe, Hope is restored and the Unknown
+Hero enters with all pomp into his Kingdom, etc., etc.
+
+I am not surprised to learn that Beethoven was once on the verge of
+suicide.
+
+_April_ 15.
+
+There is an absurd fellow ... who insists on taking my pirouettes
+seriously. I say irresponsibly, "All men are liars," and he replies with
+jejuneness and exactitude of a pronouncing dictionary, "A liar is one
+who makes a false statement with intent to deceive." What can I do with
+him? "Did I ever meet a lady," he asked, "who wasn't afraid of mice?" "I
+don't know," I told him, "I never experiment with ladies in that way."
+
+He hates me.
+
+_May_ 11.
+
+This mysterious world makes me chilly. It is chilly to be alive among
+ghosts in a nightmare of calamity. This Titanic war reduces me to the
+size and importance of a debilitated housefly. So what is a poor egotist
+to do? To be a common soldier is to become a pawn in the game between
+ambitious dynasts and their ambitious marshals. You lose all
+individuality, you become a "bayonet" or a "machine gun," or "cannon
+fodder," or "fighting material."
+
+_May_ 22.
+
+Generosity may be only weakness, philanthropy (beautiful word),
+self-advertisement, and praise of others sheer egotism. One can almost
+hear a eulogist winding himself up to strike his eulogy that comes out
+sententious, pompous, and full of self.
+
+_May_ 23.
+
+The following is a description of Lermontov by Maurice Baring:
+
+"He had except for a few intimate friends an impossible temperament; he
+was proud, over-bearing, exasperated and exasperating, filled with a
+savage _amour-propre_ and he took a childish delight in annoying; he
+cultivated 'le plaisir aristocratique de déplaire.' ... He could not
+bear not to make himself felt and if he felt he was unsuccessful in this
+by fair means he resorted to unpleasant ones. Yet he was warm-hearted,
+thirsting for love and kindness and capable of giving himself up to love
+if he chose.... At the bottom of all this lay no doubt a deep-seated
+disgust with himself and with the world in general, and a complete
+indifference to life resulting from large aspirations which could not
+find an outlet and recoiled upon himself."
+
+This is an accurate description of Me.
+
+_May_ 26.
+
+The time will come--it's a great way off--when a joke about sex will be
+not so much objectionable as unintelligible. Thanks to Christian
+teaching, a nude body is now an obscenity, of the congress of the sexes
+it is indecent to speak and our birth is a corruption. Hence come a
+legion of evils: reticence, therefore ignorance and therefore venereal
+disease; prurience especially in adolescence, poisonous literature, and
+dirty jokes. The mind is contaminated from early youth; even the
+healthiest-minded girl will blush at the mention of _the wonder of
+creation_. Yet to the perfectly enfranchised mind it should be as
+impossible to joke about sex as about mind or digestion or physiology.
+The perfectly enfranchised poet--and Walt Whitman in "The Song of
+Myself" came near being it--should be as ready to sing of the incredible
+raptures of the sexual act between "twin souls" as of the clouds or
+sunshine. Every man or woman who has loved has a heart full of beautiful
+things to say but no man dare--for fear of the police, for fear of the
+coarse jests of others and even of a breakdown in his own
+highmindedness. I wonder just how much wonderful lyric poetry has thus
+been lost to the world!
+
+_May_ 27.
+
+_The Pool: A Retrospect_
+
+From above, the pool looked like any little innocent sheet of water. But
+down in the hollow itself it grew sinister. The villagers used to say
+and to believe that it had no bottom and certainly a very great depth
+in it could be _felt_ if not accurately gauged as one stood at the
+water's edge. A long time ago, it was a great limestone quarry, but
+to-day the large mounds of rubble on one side of it are covered with
+grass and planted with mazzard trees, grown to quite a large girth. On
+the other side one is confronted by a tall sheet of black, carboniferous
+rock, rising sheer out of the inky water--a bare sombre surface on which
+no mosses even--"tender creatures of pity," Ruskin calls them--have
+taken compassion by softening the jagged edges of the strata or nestling
+in the scars. It is an excellent example of "Contortion" as Geologists
+say, for the beds are bent into a quite regular geometrical pattern
+--syncline and anticline in waves--by deep-seated plutonic force that
+makes the mind quake in the effort to imagine it.
+
+On the top of this rock and overhanging the water--a gaunt,
+haggard-looking Fir tree impends, as it seems in a perilous balance,
+while down below, the pool, sleek and shiny, quietly waits with a
+catlike patience.
+
+In summer time, successive rows of Foxgloves one behind the other in
+barbaric splendour are ranged around the grassy rubble slopes like
+spectators in an amphitheatre awaiting the spectacle. Fire-bellied Efts
+slip here and there lazily thro' the water. Occasionally a Grass-snake
+would swim across the pool and once I caught one and on opening his
+stomach found a large fire-bellied Eft inside. The sun beats fiercely
+into this deep hollow and makes the water tepid. On the surface grows a
+glairy Alga, which was once all green but now festers in yellow patches
+and causes a horrible stench. Everything is absolutely still, air and
+water are stagnant. A large _Dytiscus_ beetle rises to the surface to
+breathe and every now and then large bubbles of marsh gas come sailing
+majestically up from the depth and explode quietly into the fetid air.
+The _horrificness_ of this place impressed me even when I was intent
+only on fishing there for bugs and efts. Now, seen in retrospect, it
+haunts me.
+
+_May_ 28.
+
+It is only by accident that certain of our bodily functions are
+distasteful. Many birds eat the faeces of their young. The vomits of
+some Owls are formed into shapely pellets, often of beautiful
+appearance, when composed of the glittering multi-coloured elytra of
+Beetles, etc. The common Eland is known to micturate on the tuft of hair
+on the crown of its head, and it does this habitually, when lying down,
+by bending its head around and down--apparently because of the aroma,
+perhaps of sexual importance during mating time, as it is a habit of the
+male alone.
+
+At lunch time, had an unpleasant intermittency period in my heart's
+action and this rather eclipsed my anxiety over a probable Zeppelin
+Raid. Went home to my rooms by 'bus, and before setting off to catch my
+train for West Wycombe to stay for the week-end at a Farm with
+E---- swallowed two teaspoonfuls of neat brandy, filled my flask, and
+took a taxi to Paddington. At 3.50 started to walk to C---- H---- Farm
+from W. Wycombe Station, where E---- has been lodging for some weeks
+taking a rest cure after a serious nervous breakdown thro' overwork. As
+soon as I stepped out of the train, I sniffed the fresh air and soon
+made off down the road, happy to have left London and the winter and the
+war far behind. The first man of whom I inquired the way happened to
+have been working at the Farm only a few weeks ago, so I relied
+implicitly on his directions, and as it was but a mile and a half
+decided that my wobbly heart could stand the strain. I set out with a
+good deal of pleasurable anticipation. I was genuinely looking forward
+to seeing E----, altho' in the past few weeks our relations had become a
+little strained, at least on my part, mainly because of her little
+scrappy notes to me scribbled in pencil, undated, and dull! Yet I could
+do with a volume of "Sonnets from the Portuguese." These letters chilled
+me. In reply, I wrote with cold steel short, lifeless formal notes, for
+I felt genuinely aggrieved that she should care so little how she wrote
+to me or how she expressed her love. I became ironical with myself over
+the prospect of marrying a girl who appeared so little to appreciate my
+education and mental habits. [What a popinjay!--1917.] My petty spirit
+grew disenchanted, out of love. I was false to her in a hundred
+inconsiderable little ways and even deliberately planned the breaking
+off of the engagement some months hence when she should be restored to
+normal health.
+
+But once in the country and, as I thought, nearing my love at every step
+and at every bend in the road, even anticipating her arms around me with
+real pleasure (for she promised to meet me half way), I on a sudden grew
+eager for her again and was assured of a happy week-end with her. Then
+the road grew puzzling and I became confused, uncertain of the way. I
+began to murmur she should have given me instructions. Every now and
+then I had to stop and rest as my heart was beating so furiously.
+Espying a farm on the left I made sure I had arrived at my destination
+and walked across a field to it and entered the yard where I heard some
+one milking a cow in a shed. I shouted over the five-barred gate into
+empty space, "Is this C---- H---- Farm?" A labourer came out of the shed
+and redirected me. It was now ten to five. I was tired and out of sorts,
+and carried a troublesome little handbag. I swore and cursed and found
+fault with E---- and the Universe.
+
+I trudged on, asking people, as I went, the way, finally emerging from
+the cover of a beautiful wood thro' a wicket gate almost at the entrance
+to the Farm I sought. At the front door we embraced affectionately and
+we entered at once, I putting a quite good face upon my afternoon's
+exertions--when I consider my unbridled fury of a short time before.
+E----, as brown as a berry, conducted me to my bedroom and I nearly
+forgot to take this obvious opportunity of kissing her again.
+
+"How are you?" I asked.
+
+"All right," she said, fencing.
+
+"But really?"
+
+"All right."
+
+(A little nettled): "My dear, that isn't going to satisfy me. You will
+have to tell me exactly how you are."
+
+After tea, I recovered myself and we went for a walk together. The
+beauty of the country warmed me up, and in the wood we kissed--I for my
+part happy and quite content with the present state of our relations,
+_i.e._, affectionate but not perfervid.
+
+_May_ 29.
+
+Got up early and walked around the Farm before breakfast. Everything
+promises to be delightful--young calves, broods of ducklings, and
+turkeys, fowls, cats and dogs. In the yard are two large Cathedral
+barns, with enormous pent roofs sloping down to within about two feet of
+the ground and entered by way of great double doors that open with the
+slowness and solemnity of a Castle's portal studded with iron knobs. It
+thrilled me to the marrow on first putting my head outside to be greeted
+with the grunt of an invisible pig that I found scraping his back on the
+other side of the garden wall.
+
+In the afternoon, E---- and I sat together in the Beech Wood: E---- on a
+deck chair and I on a rug on the ground. In spite of our beautiful
+surroundings we did not progress very well, but I attributed her slight
+aloofness to the state of her nerves. She is still far from recovered.
+These wonderful Beech Woods are quite new to me. The forest beech is a
+very different plant from the solitary tree. In the struggle to reach
+the light the Forest Beech grows lean and tall and gives an
+extraordinary suggestion of wiry powerful strength. On the margins of
+the wood, Bluebells were mobilised in serried ranks. Great Tits
+whistled--in the language of our allies--"Bijou, Bijou" and I agreed
+with every one of them.
+
+Some folk don't like to walk over Bluebells or Buttercups or other
+flowers growing on the ground. But it is foolish to try to pamper Nature
+as if she were a sickly child. She is strong and can stand it. You can
+stamp on and crush a thousand flowers--they will all come up again next
+year.
+
+By some labyrinthine way which I cannot now recall, the conversation
+worked round to a leading question by E.--if in times like these we
+ought not to cease being in love? She was quite calm and serious. I said
+"No, of course not, silly." My immediate apprehension was that she had
+perceived the coldness in my letters and I was quite satisfied that she
+was so well able to read the signs in the sky. "But you don't wish to go
+on?" she persisted. I persisted that I did, that I had no misgivings, no
+second thoughts, that I was not merely taking pity on her, etc. The wild
+temptation to seize this opportunity for a break I smothered in
+reflecting how ill she was and how necessary to wait first till she was
+well again. These thoughts passed swiftly, vaguely like wraiths thro' my
+mind: I was barely conscious of them. Then I recalled the sonnet about
+coming in the rearward of a conquered woe and mused thereon. But I took
+no action. [Fortunately--for me. 1916.]
+
+Presently with cunning I said that there was no cloud on my horizon
+whatever--only her "letters disappointed me a little--they were so
+cold," but "as soon as I saw you again, darling, those feelings
+disappeared."
+
+As soon as they were spoken I knew they were not as they might seem, the
+words of a liar and hypocrite. They _became_ true. E---- looked very
+sweet and helpless and I loved her again as much as ever.
+
+"It's funny," she said, "but I thought your letters were cold. Letters
+are so horrid."
+
+The incident shews how impossible is intellectual honesty between
+lovers. Truth is at times a hound which must to kennel.
+
+"Write as you would speak," said I. "You know I'm not one to carp about
+a spelling mistake!"
+
+The latter remark astonished me. Was it indeed I who was speaking? All
+the week I had been fuming over this. Yet I was honest: the Sun and E.'s
+presence were dispelling my ill-humours and crochets. We sealed our
+conversation with a kiss and swore never to doubt each other again. E.'s
+spell was beginning to act. It is always the same. I cannot resist the
+actual presence of this woman. Out of her sight, I can in cold blood
+plan a brutal rupture. I can pay her a visit when the first kiss is a
+duty and the embrace a formality. But after 5 minutes I am as passionate
+and devoted as before. It is always thus. After leaving her, I am angry
+to think that once more I have succumbed.
+
+In the evening we went out into a field and sat together in the grass.
+It is beautiful. We lay flat on our backs and gazed up at the sky.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+S.H. has died of enteric at Malta. In writing to Mrs. H., instead of
+dwelling on what a splendid fellow he was I belaboured the fact that I
+still remembered our boyish friendship in every detail and still kept
+his photo on my mantelpiece and altho' "in later years" I didn't suppose
+we "had a great deal in common I discovered that a friendship even
+between two small boys cannot wholly disappear into the void."
+Discussing myself when I ought to have been praising him! Ugh! She will
+think what a conceited, puff-breasted Jackanapes. These phrases have
+rankled in my mind ever since I dropped the letter into the letter-box.
+"Your Stanley, Mrs. H., was of course a very inferior sort of person and
+naturally, you could hardly expect me to remain friendly with him but
+rest assured I hadn't forgotten him," etc.
+
+_The Luxury of Lunacy_
+
+Yesterday, I read a paper at the Zoological Society about lice. There
+was a goodly baldness of sconce and some considerable length of beard
+present that listened or appeared to listen to my innocent remarks with
+great solemnity and sapience.... I badly wanted to tell them some horrid
+stories about human lice but I had not the courage. I wanted to jolt
+these middle-aged gentlemen by performing a few tricks but I am too
+timid for such adventures. But before going to sleep I imagined a
+pandemonium in which with a perfectly glacial manner I produced lice
+alive from my pockets, conjured them down from the roof in a rain, with
+the skilful sleight of hand drew them out of the chairman's beard, made
+the ladies scream as I approached, dared to say they were all lousy and
+unclean and finished up with an eloquent apostrophe after the manner of
+Thomas de Quincey (and of Sir Walter Raleigh before him) beginning:
+
+"O just, subtle and eloquent avenger, pierce the hides of these
+abominable old fogies, speckle their polished calvaria with the scarlet
+blood drops...."
+
+But I hadn't the courage. Shelley in a crowded omnibus suddenly burst
+out: "O let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of
+Kings, etc." I've always wanted to do something like that and when I
+have £5 to spare I hope to pull the communication cord of an express
+train--my hands tingle as often as I look at it. Dr. Johnson's courage
+in tapping the lamp-posts is really everyone's envy tho' we laugh at him
+for it and say, green-eyed, that he was mad. In walking along the
+pavement, I sometimes indulge myself in the unutterable, deeply rooted
+satisfaction of stepping on a separate flagstone where this is possible
+with every stride. And if this is impossible or not easy, there arises
+in me a vague mental uneasiness, some subconscious suspicion that the
+world is not properly geometrical and that the whole universe perhaps is
+working out of truth. I am also rather proud of my courageous
+self-surrender to the daemon of laughter, especially in those early days
+when H. and I used to sit opposite one another and howl like hyenas.
+After the most cacophonous cachinnations as soon as we had recovered
+ourselves he or I would regularly remark in serious and confidential
+tones, "I say--we _really_ are going mad." But what a delightful luxury
+to be thus mad amid the great, spacious, architectural solemnity with
+gargoyles and effigies of a scientific meeting! Some people never do
+more than chuckle or smile--and they are often very humorous happy
+people, ignorant nevertheless of the joy of riding themselves on the
+snaffle and losing all control.
+
+While boating on ---- last summer, we saw two persons, a man and a girl
+sitting together on the beach reading a book with heads almost touching.
+
+"I wonder what they're reading?" I said, and I was dying to know. We
+made a few facetious guesses.
+
+"Shall I ask?"
+
+"Yes, do," said Mrs. ----.
+
+The truth is we all wanted to know. We were suddenly mad with curiosity
+as we watched the happy pair turning over leaf after leaf.
+
+While R---- leaned on his oars, I stood up in the boat and threatened to
+shout out a polite enquiry--just to prove that the will is free. But
+seeing my intention the boat-load grew nervous and said seriously, "No,"
+which unnerved me at the last moment so I sat down again. Why was I so
+afraid of being thought a lunatic by two persons in the distance whom I
+had never seen and probably would never see again? Besides I _was_ a
+lunatic--we all were.
+
+In our post-prandial perambulations about S. Kensington G---- and I
+often pass the window of a photographer's shop containing always a
+profusion of bare arms, chests, necks, bosoms belonging to actresses,
+aristocrats and harlots--some very beautiful indeed. Yet on the whole
+the window annoys us, especially one picture of a young thing with an
+arum lily (ghastly plant!) laid exquisitely across her breast.
+
+"Why do we suffer this?" I asked G----, tapping the window ledge as we
+stood.
+
+"I don't know," he answered lamely--morose. (Pause while the two
+embittered young men continue to look in and the beautiful young women
+continue to look out.)
+
+Thoroughly disgruntled I said at last: "If only we had the courage of
+our innate madness, the courage of children, lunatics and men of genius,
+we should get some stamp paper, and stick a square beneath each
+photograph with our comments."
+
+Baudelaire describes how he dismissed a glass vendor because he had no
+coloured glasses--"glasses of rose and crimson, magical glasses, glasses
+of Paradise"--and, stepping out on to his balcony, threw a flowerpot
+down on the tray of glasses as soon as the man issued into the street
+below, shouting down furiously, "The Life Beautiful! The Life
+Beautiful."
+
+Bergson's theory is that laughter is a "social gesture" so that when a
+man in a top hat treads on a banana skin and slips down we laugh at him
+for his lack "of living pliableness." At this rate we ought to be
+profoundly solemn at Baudelaire's action and moreover a "social gesture"
+is more likely to be an expression of society's will to conformity in
+all its members rather than any dangerous "living pliableness." Society
+hates living pliableness and prefers drill, routine, orthodoxy,
+conformity. It hated the living pliableness of Turner, of Keats, of
+Samuel Butler and a hundred others.
+
+But to return to lunacy: the truth is we are all mad fundamentally and
+are merely schooled into sanity by education. Pascal wrote: "Men are so
+necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of
+madness." And, in fact, the man who has succeeded in extirpating this
+intoxication of life is usually said to be "temporarily insane." In
+those melancholy interludes of sanity when the mind becomes rationalised
+we all know how much we have been deceived and gulled, what an
+extraordinary spectacle humanity presents rushing on in noise and tumult
+no one knows why or whither. Look at that tailor in his shop--why does
+he do it? Some day in the future he thinks he will.... But the day
+never comes and he is nevertheless content.
+
+_May_ 30.
+
+A brilliantly sunny day. This funny old farm-house where we are staying
+quite delights me. It is pleasant, too, to dawdle over dressing, to put
+away shaving tackle for a day or so, to jump out of bed in the morning
+and thrust my head out of the window into the fresh and stock-scented
+air of the garden, listen to the bird chorus or watch a "scrap" in the
+poultry-run. Then all unashamed, I dress myself before a dear old lady
+in a flowery print gown concealing 4 thin legs and over the top of the
+mirror a piece of lace just like a bonnet, caught up in front by a
+piece of pink ribbon. On the walls Pear's Soap Annuals, on a side table
+_Swiss Family Robinson_ and _Children of the New Forest_. Then there are
+rats under the floors, two wooden staircases which wind up out of sight,
+two white dairies, iron hapses on all the doors and a privy at the top
+of the orchard. (Tell me--how do you explain the psychosis of a being
+who on a day must have seized hammer and nail and an almanac picture of
+a woman in the snow with a basket of goodies--"An Errand of
+Mercy"--carried all three to the top of the orchard and nailed the
+picture up on the dirty wall in the semi-darkness of an earth-closet?)
+
+Got up quite early before breakfast and went birds'-nesting.... It would
+take too long and be too sentimental for me to record my feelings on
+looking into the first nest I found--a Chaffinch's, the first wild
+bird's eggs I have seen for many years. As I stood with an egg between
+thumb and forefinger, my memories flocked down like white birds and
+surrounded me. I remained still, fed them with my thoughts and let them
+perch upon my person--a second St. Francis of Assisi. Then I shoo'ed
+them all away and prepared for the more palpitating enjoyment of to-day.
+
+After breakfast we sat in the Buttercup field--my love and I--and
+"plucked up kisses by the roots that grew upon our lips." The sun was
+streaming down and the field thickly peopled with Buttercups. From where
+we sat we could see the whole of the valley below and Farmer Whaley--a
+speck in the distance--working a machine in a field. We watched him
+idly. The gamekeeper's gun went off in one of the covers. It was jolly
+to put our heads together right down deep in the Buttercups and
+luxuriously follow the pelting activities of the tiny insects crawling
+here and there in the forest of grass, clambering over a broken blade
+athwart another like a wrecked tree or busily enquiring into some low
+scrub at the roots. A chicken came our way and he seemed an enormous
+bird from the grass-blade's point of view. How nice to be a chicken in
+a field of Buttercups and see them as big as Sunflowers! or to be a
+Gulliver in the Beech Woods! to be so small as to be able to climb a
+Buttercup, tumble into the corolla and be dusted yellow or to be so big
+as to be able to pull up a Beech-tree with finger and thumb! If only a
+man were a magician, could play fast and loose with rigid Nature? what a
+multitude of rich experiences he could discover for himself!
+
+I looked long and steadily this morning at the magnificent torso of a
+high forest Beech and tried to project myself into its lithe tiger-like
+form, to feel its electric sap vitalising all my frame out to the tip of
+every tingling leaf, to possess its splendid erectness in my own bones.
+I could have flung my arms around its fascinating body but the austerity
+of the great creature forbad it. Then a Hawk fired my ambition!--to be a
+Hawk, or a Falcon, to have a Falcon's soul, a Falcon's heart--that
+splendid muscle in the cage of the thorax--and the Falcon's pride and
+sagacious eye![3]
+
+When the sun grew too hot we went into the wood where waves of Bluebells
+dashed up around the foot of the Oak in front of us.... I never knew
+before, the delight of offering oneself up--an oblation of one's whole
+being; I even longed for some self-sacrifice, to have to give up
+something for her sake. It intoxicated me to think I was making another
+happy....
+
+After a lunch of scrambled eggs and rhubarb and cream went up into the
+Beech Wood again and sat on a rug at the foot of a tree. The sun
+filtered in thro' the greenery casting a "dim, religious light."
+
+"It's like a cathedral," I chattered away, "stained glass windows,
+pillars, aisles--all complete."
+
+"It would be nice to be married in a Cathedral like this," she said.
+"At C---- Hall Cathedral, by the Rev. Canon _Beech_...."
+
+"Sir Henry Wood was the organist."
+
+"Yes," she said, "and the Rev. Blackbird the precentor."
+
+We laughed over our silliness!
+
+Shrew-mice pattered over the dead leaves and one came boldly into view
+under a bramble bush--she had never seen one before. Overhead, a ribald
+fellow of a Blackbird whistled a jaunty tune. E---- laughed. "I am sure
+that Blackbird is laughing at us," she said. "It makes me feel quite
+hot."
+
+This evening we sat on the slope of a big field where by lowering our
+eyes we could see the sun setting behind the grass blades--a very pretty
+sight which I do not remember ever to have noted before. A large blue
+_Carabus_ beetle was stumbling about, Culvers cooed in the woods near
+by. It was delightful to be up 600 feet on a grassy field under the
+shadow of a large wood at sunset with my darling.
+
+_May_ 31.
+
+Sitting at tea in the farm house to-day E---- cried suddenly, pointing
+to a sandy cat in the garden:
+
+"There,--he's the father of the little kittens in the barn and I'll tell
+you how we know. P---- noticed the kittens had big feet and later on saw
+that old Tom stalking across the garden with big feet of exactly the
+same kind."
+
+"So you impute the paternity of the kittens to the gentleman under the
+laurel bushes?"
+
+I looked at the kittens to-night and found they had extra toes. "Mr.
+Sixtoes," as W---- calls him also possesses six toes, so the
+circumstantial evidence looks black against him.
+
+_June_ 1.
+
+In the Beech Wood all the morning. Heigh-ho! it's grand to lie out as
+straight as a line on your back, gaze upwards into the tree above, and
+with a caressing eye follow its branches out into their multitudinous
+ramifications forward and back--luxurious travel for the tired eye. ...
+Then I would shut my eyes and try to guess where her next kiss would
+descend. Then I opened my eyes and watched her face in the most
+extravagant detail, I counted the little filaments on her precious mole
+and saw the sun thro' the golden down of her throat....
+
+Sunlight and a fresh wind. A day of tiny cameos, little _coups
+d'Å“il_, fleeting impressions snapshotted on the mind: the glint on
+the keeper's gun as he crossed a field a mile away below us, sunlight
+all along a silken hawser which some Spider engineer had spun between
+the tops of two tall trees spanning the whole width of a bridle path,
+the constant patter of Shrew-mice over dead leaves, the pendulum of a
+Bumble-bee in a flower, and the just perceptible oscillation of the tree
+tops in the wind. While we are at meals the perfume of Lilac and Stocks
+pours in thro' the window and when we go to bed it is still pouring in
+by the open lattice.
+
+_June_ 2.
+
+Each day I drop a specially selected Buttercup in past the little
+"Peeler," at the apex of the "V" to lie among the blue ribbons of her
+camisoles--those dainty white leaves that wrap around her bosom like the
+petals around the heart of a Rose. Then at night when she undresses, it
+falls out and she preserves it.
+
+In the woods, hearing an extra loud patter on the leaves, we turned our
+heads and saw a Frog hopping our way. I caught him and gave an
+elementary lesson in Anatomy. I described to her the brain, the pineal
+organ in Anguis, Sphenodon's pineal eye, etc. Then we fell to kissing
+again.... Every now and then she raises her head and listens (like a
+Thrush on the lawn) thinking she hears someone approach. We neither of
+us speak much ... and at the end of the day, the nerve endings on my
+lips are tingling.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Farmer Whaley is a funny old man with a soft pious voice. When he feeds
+the Fowls, he sucks in a gentle, caressing noise between his lips for
+all the world as if he fed them because he loved them, and not because
+he wants to fatten them up for killing. His daughter Lucy, aged 22,
+loves all the animals of the farm and they all love her; the Cows stand
+monumentally still while she strokes them down the blaze or
+affectionately waggles their dewlaps. This morning, she walked up to a
+little Calf in the farm-yard scarce a fortnight old which started to
+"back" in a funny way, spraddling out its legs and lowering its head.
+Miss Lucy laughed merrily and cried "Ah! you funny little thing," and
+went off on her way to feed the Fowls who all raced to the gate as soon
+as they heard her footsteps. She brought in two double-yolked Ducks'
+eggs for us to see and marvel at. In the breakfast room stands a stuffed
+Collie dog in a glass case. I'd as soon embalm my grandmother and keep
+her on the sideboard.
+
+I asked young George, the farm-boy, what bird went like this: I whistled
+it. He looked abashed and said a Chaffinch. I told Miss Lucy who said
+George was a silly boy, and Miss Lucy told Farmer Whaley who said George
+ought to know better--it was a Mistle-Thrush.
+
+The letters are brought us each morning by a tramp with a game leg who
+secretes his Majesty's Mails in a shabby bowler hat, the small packages
+and parcels going to the roomy tail pocket of a dirty morning coat. A
+decayed gentleman of much interest to us.
+
+_June_ 3.
+
+We have made a little nest in the wood and I lead her into it by the
+hand over the briars and undergrowth as if conducting her to the grand
+piano on a concert platform. I kissed her....
+
+Then in a second we switch back to ordinary conversation. In an ordinary
+conversational voice I ask the trees, the birds, the sky.
+
+"What's become of all the gold?"
+
+"What's become of Waring?"
+
+"What is Love? 'Tis not hereafter."
+
+"Where are the snows of yesteryear?"
+
+"Who killed Cock Robin?"
+
+"Who's who?"
+
+And so on thro' all the great interrogatives that I could think of till
+she stopped my mouth with a kiss and we both laughed.
+
+"Miss Penderkins," I say. "Miss Penderlet, Miss Pender-au-lait, Miss
+Pender-filings."
+
+What do I mean? she cries. "What's the point of the names? Why take my
+name in vain? Why? What? How?"
+
+She does not know that clever young men sometimes trade on their
+reputation among simpler folk by pretending that meaningless remarks
+conceal some subtlety or cynicism, some little Attic snap.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have been teaching her to distinguish the songs of different birds and
+often we sit a long while in the Cathedral Wood while I say, "What's
+that?" and "What's that?" and she tells me. It is delightful to watch
+her dear serious face as she listens.... This evening I gave a _viva
+voce_ examination as per below:
+
+"What does the Yellow Hammer say?"
+
+"What colour are the Hedge Sparrow's eggs?"
+
+"Describe the Nightjar's voice."
+
+"How many eggs does it lay?"
+
+"Oh! you never told me about the Nightjar," she cried outraged.
+
+"No: it's a difficult question put in for candidates taking honours."
+
+Then we rambled on into Tomfoolery. "Describe the call-note of a motor
+omnibus." "Why does the chicken cross the road?" and "What's
+that?"--when a railway engine whistled in the distance.
+
+Measure by this our happiness!
+
+_June_ 4.
+
+At a quarter past eight, this morning, the horse and trap were awaiting
+me outside, and bidding her "Goodbye" I got in and drove off--she riding
+on the step down so far, as the gate. Then we waved till we were out of
+sight. Back in London by 10 a.m. She makes slow progress, poor dear--her
+nerves are still very much of a jangle. But I am better, my heart is
+less wobbly.
+
+_June_ 5.
+
+R---- cannot make me out. He says one day I complain bitterly at not
+receiving a Portuguese sonnet once a week, and the next all is well and
+Love reigneth. "Verily a Sphinx."
+
+_June_ 7.
+
+Spent the afternoon at the Royal Army Medical College in consultation
+with the Professor of Hygiene. Amid all the paraphernalia of research,
+even when discussing a serious problem with a serious Major, I could not
+take myself seriously. I am incurably trivial and always feel myself an
+irresponsible youth, wondering and futile, among owlish grown-ups.
+
+At 4 p.m. departed and went down on Vauxhall Bridge and watched a
+flour-barge being unloaded before returning to the Museum. I could
+readily hang on behind a cart, stare at an accident, pull a face at a
+policeman and then run away.
+
+_June_ 20.
+
+... It annoys me to find the _laissez-faire_ attitude of our relatives.
+Not one with a remonstrance for us and yet all the omens are against our
+marriage. In the state of my nervous system and in the state of hers--we
+have both had serious nervous break-downs--how impossible it seems! Yet
+they say all the old conventional things to us, about our happiness and
+so on!...
+
+... Am I a moral monster? Surely a man who can combine such calculating
+callousness with really generous impulses of the heart is--what?
+
+The truth is I think I am in love with her: but I am also mightily in
+love with myself. One or the other has to give.
+
+_June_ 25.
+
+If sometimes you saw me in my room by myself, you would say I was a
+ridiculous coxcomb. For I walk about, look out of the window then at the
+mirror--turning my head sideways perhaps so as to see it in profile. Or
+I gaze down into my eyes--my eyes always impress me--and wonder what
+effect I produce on others. This, I believe, is not so much vanity as
+curiosity. I know I am not prepossessing in appearance--my nose is
+crooked and my skin is blotched. Yet my physique--because it is
+mine--interests me. I like to see myself walking and talking. I should
+like to hold myself in my hand in front of me like a Punchinello and
+carefully examine myself at my leisure.
+
+_June_ 28.
+
+Saw my brother A---- off at Waterloo en route for Armageddon. Darling
+fellow. He shook hands with P---- and H----, and P---- wished him
+"Goodbye, and good luck." Then he held my hand a moment, said "Goodbye,
+old man," and for a second gave me a queer little nervous look. I could
+only say "Goodbye," but we understand each other perfectly.... It is
+horrible. I love him tenderly.
+
+_June_ 29.
+
+_Sleep_
+
+Sleep means unconsciousness: unconsciousness is a solemn state--you get
+it for example from a blow on the head with a mallet. It always
+weightily impresses me to see someone asleep--especially someone I love
+as to-day, stretched out as still as a log--who perhaps a few minutes
+ago was alive, even animated. And there is nothing so welcome, unless it
+be the sunrise, as the first faint gleam of recognition in the
+half-opened eye when consciousness like a mighty river begins to flow in
+and restore our love to us again.
+
+When I go to bed myself, I sometimes jealously guard my faculties from
+being filched away by sleep. I almost fear sleep: it makes me
+apprehensive--this wonderful and unknowable Thing which is going to
+happen to me for which I must lay myself out on a bed and wait, with an
+elaborate preparedness. Unlike Sir Thomas Browne, I am not always so
+content to take my leave of the sun and sleep, if need be, into the
+resurrection. And I sometimes lie awake and wonder when the mysterious
+Visitor will come to me and call me away from this thrilling world, and
+how He does it, to which end I try to remain conscious of the gradual
+process and to understand it: an impossibility of course involving a
+contradiction in terms. So I shall never know, nor will anybody else.
+
+_July_ 2.
+
+I've had such a successful evening--you've no idea! The pen simply flew
+along, automatically easy, page after page in perfect sequence. My style
+trilled and bickered and rolled and ululated in an infinite variety; you
+will find in it all the subtlest modulations, inflections and suavities.
+My afflatus came down from Heaven in a bar of light like the
+Shekinah--straight from God, very God of very God. I worked in a golden
+halo of light and electric sparks came off my pen nib as I scratched the
+paper.
+
+_July_ 3.
+
+_The Clever Young Man_
+
+Argued with R---- this morning. He is a type specimen of the clever
+young man. We both are. Our flowers of speech are often forced hot-house
+plants, paradoxes and cynicisms fly as thick as driving rain and Shaw is
+our great exemplar. I could write out an exhaustive analysis of the
+clever young man, and being one myself can speak from "inspired sources"
+as the newspapers say.
+
+A common habit is to underline and memorise short, sharp, witty remarks
+he sees in books and then on future occasions dish them up for his own
+self-glorification. If the author be famous he begins, "As ---- says,
+etc." If unknown the quotation is quietly purloined. He is always very
+self-conscious and at the same time very self-possessed and very
+conceited. You tell me with tonic candour that I am insufferably
+conceited. In return, I smile, making a sardonic avowal of my good
+opinion of myself, my theory being that as conceit is, as a rule,
+implicit and, as a rule, blushingly denied, you will mistake my impudent
+confession for bluff and conclude there is really something far more
+substantial and honest beneath my apparent conceit. If, on the other
+hand, I am conceited, why I have admitted it--I agree with you--but tho'
+there is no virtue in the confession being quite detached and
+unashamed--still you haven't caught me by the tail. It is very difficult
+to circumvent a clever young man. He is as agile as a monkey.
+
+His principal concern of course is to arouse and maintain a reputation
+for profundity and wit. This is done by the simple mechanical formula of
+antithesis: if you like winkles he proves that cockles are inveterately
+better; if you admire Ruskin he tears him to ribbons. If you want to
+learn to swim--as it is safer, he shows it is more dangerous to know how
+to swim and so on. I know his whole box of tricks. I myself am now
+playing the clever young man by writing out this analysis just as if I
+were not one myself.
+
+You doubt my cleverness? Well, some years ago in R----'s presence I
+called ----"the Rev. Fastidious Brisk,"--the nickname be it recalled
+which Henley gave to Stevenson (without the addition of "Rev."). At the
+time I had no intention of appropriating the witticism as I quite
+imagined R---- was acquainted with it. His unexpected explosion of
+mirth, however, made me uncomfortably uncertain of this, yet for the
+life of me I couldn't muster the honesty to assure him that my feather
+was a borrowed one. A few weeks later he referred to it again as
+"certainly one of my better ones"--but still I remained dumb and the
+time for explanations went for once and all. Now see what a pretty
+pickle I am in: the name "Brisk" or "F.B." is in constant use by us for
+this particular person--he goes by no other name, meanwhile I sit and
+wonder how long it will be before R---- finds me out. There are all
+sorts of ways in which he might find out: he might read about it for
+himself, someone might tell him or--worst of all--one day when we are
+dining out somewhere he will announce to the whole company my brilliant
+appellation as a little after-dinner diversion: I shall at once observe
+that the person opposite me _knows_ and is about to air his knowledge;
+then I shall look sternly at him and try to hold him: he will hesitate
+and I shall land him with a left and right: "I suppose you've read
+Henley's verses on Stevenson?" I remark easily and in a moment or so
+later the conversation has moved on.
+
+_August_ 1.
+
+Am getting married at ---- Register Office on September 15th. It is
+impossible to set down here all the labyrinthine ambages of my will and
+feelings in regard to this event. Such incredible vacillations, doubts,
+fears. I have been living at a great rate below surface recently. "If
+you enjoy only twelve months' happiness," the Doctor said to me, "it is
+worth while." But he makes a recommendation.... At his suggestion E----
+went to see him and from his own mouth learnt all the truth about the
+state of my health, to prevent possible mutual recriminations in the
+future.[4] To marry an introspective dyspeptic--what a prospect for
+her!... I exercise my microscopic analysis on her now as well as on
+myself.... This power in me is growing daily more automatic and more
+repugnant. It is a nasty morbid unhealthy growth that I want to hide if
+I cannot destroy. It amounts to being able at will to switch myself in
+and out of all my most cherished emotions; it is like the case in Sir
+Michael Foster's _Physiology_ of a man who, by pressing a tumour in his
+neck could stop or at any rate control the action of his heart.
+
+_August_ 2.
+
+House pride in newly-wed folk, for example, H. and D. to-day at Golder's
+Green or the Teignmouth folk, is very trying to the bachelor visitor.
+They will carry a chair across the room as tenderly as tho' it were a
+child and until its safe transit is assured, all conversation goes by
+the board. Or the wife suddenly makes a remark to the husband _sotto
+voce_, both thereupon start up simultaneously (leaving the fate of
+Warsaw undecided) while you, silenced by this unexpected manœuvre, wilt
+away in your chair, the pregnant phrase still-born on your lips.
+Presently they re-enter the room with the kitten that was heard in the
+scullery or with a big stick used to flourish at a little Tomtit on the
+rose tree. _She_ apologises and both settle down again, recompose their
+countenances into a listening aspect and with a devastating politeness,
+pick up the poor, little, frayed-out thread of the conversation where it
+left off with: "Europe? you were saying...." I mobilise my scattered
+units of ideas but it is all a little chilly for the lady of the house
+if she listens with her face and speaks with her lips--her heart is far
+from me: she fixes a glassy eye on the tip of my cigarette, waiting to
+see if the ash will fall on her carpet.
+
+_August_ 6.
+
+The most intimate and extensive journal can only give each day a
+relatively small sifting of the almost infinite number of things that
+flow thro' the consciousness. However vigilant and artful a diarist may
+be, plenty of things escape him and in any event re-collection is not
+re-creation....
+
+To keep a journal is to have a secret liaison of a very sentimental
+kind. A _journal intime_ is a super-confidante to whom everything is
+told and confessed. For an engaged or married man to have a secret
+super-confidante who knows things which are concealed from his lady
+seems to me to be deliberate infidelity. I am as it were engaged to two
+women and one of them is being deceived. The word "Deceit" comes up
+against me in this double life I lead, and insists I shall name a plain
+thing bluntly. There is something very like sheer moral obliquity in
+these entries behind her back.... Is this journal habit slowly
+corrupting my character? Can an engaged or married man conscientiously
+continue to write his _journal intime_?
+
+This question of giving up my faithful friend after September I must
+consider.
+
+Of course most men have something to conceal from someone. Most married
+men are furtive creatures, and married women too. But I have a Gregers
+Werle-like passion for life to be lived on a foundation of truth in
+every intercourse. I would have my wife know all about me and if I
+cannot be loved for what I surely am, I do not want to be loved for what
+I am not. If I continue to write therefore she shall read what I have
+written....
+
+My Journal keeps open house to every kind of happening in my soul.
+Provided it is a veritable autochthon--I don't care how much of a
+tatterdemalion or how ugly or repulsive--I take him in and--I fear
+sponge him down with excuses to make him more creditable in other's
+eyes. You may say why trouble whether you do or whether you don't tell
+us all the beastly little subterranean atrocities that go on in your
+mind. Any eminently "right-minded" _Times_ or _Spectator_ reader will
+ask: "Who in Faith's name is interested in your introspective
+muck-rakings--in fact, who the Devil are you?" To myself, a person of
+vast importance and vast interest, I reply,--as are other men if I could
+but understand them as well. And in the firm belief that whatever is
+inexorably true however unpleasant and discreditable (in fact true
+things can never lack a certain dignity), I would have you know Mr.
+_Times_- and Mr. _Spectator-reader_ that actual crimes have many a time
+been enacted in the secrecy of my own heart and the only difference
+between me and an habitual criminal is that the habitual criminal has
+the courage and the nerve and I have not. What, then, may these crimes
+be? Nothing much--only murders, theft, rape, etc. None of them, thank
+God; fructify in action--or at all events only the lesser ones. My
+outward and visible life if I examine it is merely a series of
+commonplace, colourless and thoroughly average events. But if I analyse
+myself, my inner life, I find I am both incredibly worse and incredibly
+better than I appear. I am Christ and the Devil at the same time--or as
+my sister once called me--a child, a wise man, and the Devil all in one.
+Just as no one knows my crimes so no one knows of my good actions. A
+generous impulse seizes me round the heart and I am suddenly moved to
+give a poor devil a £5 note. But no one knows this because by the time I
+come to the point I find myself handing him a sixpenny-bit and am quite
+powerless to intervene. Similarly my murders end merely in a little
+phlegm.
+
+_August_ 7.
+
+_Two Adventures_
+
+On a 'bus the other day a woman with a baby sat opposite, the baby
+bawled, and the woman at once began to unlace herself, exposing a large,
+red udder, which she swung into the baby's face. The infant, however,
+continued to cry and the woman said,--
+
+"Come on, there's a good boy--if you don't, I shall give it to the
+gentleman opposite."
+
+Do I look ill-nourished?
+
+"'Arma virumque cano,'" a beggar said to me this morning in the High
+Street, "or as the boy said, 'Arms and the man with a dog,' mistaking
+the verb for the noun. Oh! yes, sir, I remember my Latin. Of course, I
+feel it's rather invidious my coming to you like this, but everything is
+absolutely 'non est' with me," and so on.
+
+"My dear sir," I answered expansively, "I am as poor as you are. You at
+least have seen better days you say--but I never have."
+
+He changed in a minute his cringeing manner and rejoined:
+
+"No, I shouldn't think you had," eyeing me critically and slinking off.
+
+Am I _so_ shabby?
+
+_August_ 8.
+
+By Jove! I hope I live! ... Why does an old crock like myself go on
+living? It causes me genuine amazement. I feel almost ashamed of myself
+because I am not yet dead seeing that so many of my full-blooded
+contemporaries have perished in this War. I am so grateful for being
+allowed to live so long that nothing that happens to me except death
+could upset me much. I should be happy in a coal mine.
+
+_August_12.
+
+Suffering from indigestion. The symptoms include:
+
+Excessive pandiculation,
+
+Excessive oscitation,
+
+Excessive eructation,
+
+Dyspnœa,
+
+Sphygmic flutters,
+
+Abnormal porrigo,
+
+A desiccated epidermis.
+
+_August_ 16.
+
+_Lice or "Creeping Ferlies"_[5]
+
+I probably know more about Lice than was ever before stored together
+within the compass of a single human mind! I know the Greek for Louse,
+the Latin, the French, the German, the Italian. I can reel off all the
+best remedies for Pediculosis: I am acquainted with the measures adopted
+for dealing with the nuisance in the field by the German Imperial Board
+of Health, by the British R.A.M.C., by the armies of the Russians, the
+French, the Austrians, the Italians. I know its life history and
+structure, how many eggs it lays and how often, the anatomy of its
+brain and stomach and the physiology of all its little parts. I have
+even pursued the Louse into ancient literature and have read old medical
+treatises about it, as, for example, the _De Phthiriasi_ of Gilbert de
+Frankenau. Mucius the lawgiver died of this disease so also did the
+Dictator Scylla, Antiochus Epiphanes, the Emperor Maximilian, the
+philosopher Pherecydes, Philip II. of Spain, the fugitive Ennius,
+Callisthenes, Alcman and many other distinguished people including the
+Emperor Arnauld in 899. In 955, the Bishop of Noyon had to be sewn up in
+a leather sack before he could be buried. (See _Des Insectes reputés
+venimeux_, par M. Amoureux Fils, Doctor of Medicine in the University of
+Montpellier, Paris, 1789.) In Mexico and Peru, a poll-tax of Lice was
+exacted and bags of these treasures were found in the Palace of
+Montezuma (see Bingley, _Animal Biog_., first edition, iii.). In the
+_United Service Magazine_ for 1842 (clix., 169) is an account of the
+wreck of the _Wager_, a vessel found adrift, the crew in dire straits
+and Captain Cheap lying on the deck--"like an ant-hill."
+
+So that as an ancient writer puts it, "you must own that for the
+quelling of human pride and to pull down the high conceits of mortal
+man, this most loathesome of all maladies (Pediculosis) has been the
+inheritance of the rich, the wise, the noble and the mighty--poets,
+philosophers, prelates, princes, Kings and Emperors."
+
+In his well-known _Bridgewater Treatise_, the Rev. Dr. Kirby, the Father
+of English Entomology, asked: "Can we believe that man in his pristine
+state of glory and beauty and dignity could be the receptacle of prey so
+loathesome as these unclean and disgusting creatures?" (Vol. I., p. 13).
+He therefore dated their creation _after_ the Fall.
+
+The other day a member of the staff of the Lister Institute called to
+see me on a lousy matter, and presently drew some live Lice from his
+waistcoat pocket for me to see. They were contained in pill boxes with
+little bits of muslin stretched across the open end thro' which the
+Lice could thrust their little hypodermic needles when placed near the
+skin. He feeds them by putting these boxes into a specially constructed
+belt and at night ties the belt around his waist and all night sleeps in
+Elysium. He is not married.
+
+In this fashion, he has bred hundreds from the egg upwards and even
+hybridised the two different species!
+
+In the enfranchised mind of the scientific naturalist, the usual
+feelings of repugnance simply do not exist. Curiosity conquers
+prejudice.
+
+_August_ 27.
+
+Am spending my summer holidays in the Lakes at Coniston with G---- and
+R----.... I am simply consumed with pride at being among the mountains
+at last! It is an enormous personal success to have arrived at Coniston!
+
+_August_ 29.
+
+Climbed a windy eminence on the other side of the Lake and had a
+splendid view of Helvellyn--like a great hog's back. It is fine to walk
+over the elastic turf with the wind bellowing into each ear and swirling
+all around me in a mighty sea of air until I was as clean-blown and
+resonant as a sea-shell. I moved along as easily as a disembodied spirit
+and felt free, almost transparent. The old earth seemed to have soaked
+me up into itself, I became dissolved into it, my separate body was
+melted away from me, and Nature received me into her deepest
+communion--until, UNTIL I got on the lee side of a hedge where the calm
+brought me back my gaol of clay.
+
+_September_ 1.
+
+Fourteen days hence I shall be a married man. But I feel most dejected
+about it. When I fell down the other day, I believe I slightly concussed
+my spinal column, with the result that my 1913 trouble has returned, but
+this time on the _left_ side! paralysis and horrible vertigo and
+presentiments of sudden collapse as I walk.
+
+_September_ 2.
+
+I fear I have been overdoing it in this tempting mountain region.
+Walking too far, etc. So I am slacking. It was fortunate I did not get
+concussion of the brain--I came within an inch of it: the hair of my
+head brushed the ground.
+
+_A Buxom Rogue in Earthenware_
+
+I knocked at the door of Sunbeam Cottage the other morning to know if
+they had a boat for hire. The door was promptly opened by a plump,
+charming little wench of about 17, and I caught a glimpse of the kitchen
+with its gunrack holding two fowling pieces, a grandfather clock in one
+corner and a dresser full of blueish china.
+
+"We don't let our boat out for hire," she answered with a smile so
+honest and natural and spontaneous that I was already saying to myself I
+had never met with anything like it at all when she stretched up her
+bare, dairy-maid arm--strong, creamy and soft, just reached a big key
+strung to a wooden block and lying on the top shelf of the dresser and
+at once handed it to me with:
+
+"But you are quite welcome to use it and here is the key to the
+boathouse."
+
+I now felt certain that she was one in a million and thanked her most
+awfully. I have never met such swiftly-moving generosity.
+
+"It's very nice on the Lake just now," she said. "I like to lie in the
+boat with a book and let her drift."
+
+I asked her if she would not come too, but this tight little fairy was
+too busy in the house. She is Clara Middleton done in earthenware.
+
+Subsequently R---- and I often visited the cottage and we became great
+friends, her mother showing us some letters she received as a girl from
+John Ruskin--a great friend of hers. The gamekeeper himself said that
+for his part he could never read Ruskin's books--it was like driving a
+springless cart over a rocky road. We all laughed and I said he was
+prejudiced in view of the letters which began: "My darling," and
+finished up "Yr loving J.R."
+
+But Mrs. ---- said he had never read them, and Madge (ah! that name!)
+said her father had never shewn the least interest in them at which we
+laughed again, and the gamekeeper laughed too. He is such a jolly
+man--they all are delightfully simple, charming folk and we talked of
+Beasts and Birds that live on the mountains.
+
+_September_ 4.
+
+Bathed in the Lake from the boat. It was brilliantly fine. R---- dipped
+her paddles in occasionally just to keep the boat from grounding. Then I
+clambered over the bows and stood up to dry myself in the sun like one
+of Mr. Tuke's young men.
+
+_September_ 7.
+
+My 26th birthday. In London again. Went straight to the Doctor and
+reported myself. I quite expected him to forbid the marriage as I could
+scarcely hobble to his house. To my amazement, he apparently made light
+of my paralysis, said it was a common accident to bruise the _os
+coccyx_, etc.
+
+_September_ 8.
+
+Am staying at ---- for a few days to rest and try to be better by that
+fateful 11th, when I am married.
+
+_Later_: My first experience of a Zeppelin raid. Bombs dropped only a
+quarter of a mile away and shrapnel from the guns fell on our roof. We
+got very pannicky and went into a neighbour's house, where we cowered
+down in our dressing-gowns in absolute darkness while bombs exploded and
+the dogs barked.
+
+I was scared out of my life and had a fit of uncontrollable trembling.
+Later we rang up ---- and ----, and thank Heavens both are safe. A great
+fire is burning in London, judging by the red glare. At midnight sat and
+drank sherry and smoked a cigar with Mr. ----, my braces depending from
+my trousers like a tail and shewing in spite of dressing-gown. Then went
+home and had some neat brandy to steady my heart. H---- arrived soon
+after midnight. A motor-omnibus in Whitechapel was blown to bits. Great
+scenes in the city.
+
+_September_ 9.
+
+Very nervy to-day. Hobbled down the road to see the damage done by the
+bombs.
+
+_September_ 10.
+
+A swingeing cold in the head thro' running about on the night of the
+raid. Too feeble to walk far, so Mrs. ---- went into the town for me and
+purchased my wedding-ring, which cost £2 5s. 0d.
+
+
+
+[1] 1917. I am now editing my own Journal--bowdlerising my own book!
+
+[2] A method of collecting insects in winter by shaking moss over white
+paper.
+
+[3] 1917. Cf. Sainte-Beuve's Essay on Maurice de Guérin: "Il aimait à se
+répandre et presque à se ramifier dans la Nature. Il a exprimé en mainte
+occasion cette sensation diffuse, errante; il y avait des jours ou, dans
+son amour ou calme, il enviait la vie forte et muette qui règne sons
+l'écorce des chênes; il rêvait à je ne sais quelle métamorphose en
+arbre...."
+
+[4] Cf. 1916, November 6.
+
+[5] Cf. Burns's poem "On a Louse."
+
+
+
+
+PART III--MARRIAGE
+
+
+_September_ 12.
+
+This evening we walked thro' the Churchyard reading tombstone
+inscriptions. What a lot of men have had wives!
+
+I can't make out what has come over folk recently: the wit, wisdom and
+irony on the old tombstones have given place to maudlin sentiment and
+pious Bible references. Then on the anniversary of the death the custom
+among poorer classes is to publish such pathetic doggerel as the
+following--cuttings I have taken from time to time from the local
+newspaper in ----:
+
+     "Her wish:
+
+     "'Farewell dear brother, Mother, sisters,
+     My life was passed in love for thee.
+     Mourn not for me nor sorrow take
+     But love my husband for my sake
+     Until the call comes home to thee,
+     Live thou in peace and harmony.'"
+
+Again:
+
+     "A day of remembrance sad to recall
+     But still in my heart he is loved best of all
+     No matter how I think of him--his name I oft recall;
+     There is nothing left to answer me but his photo on the wall."
+
+Or:
+
+     "One year has passed since that sad day,
+     When one we loved was called away.
+     God took her home; it was His will,
+     Forget her?--No, we never will."
+
+These piteous screeds fill me with loving-kindness and with contempt
+alternately in a pendulum-like rhythm. What is the truth about them? Is
+the grief of these people as mean and ridiculous as their rhymes? Or is
+it a pitiful inarticulateness? Or is it merely vulgar advertisement of
+their sorrow? Or does it signify a passionate intention never to
+forget?--or a fear of forgetting, the rhymes being used as a fillip to
+the memory? Or--most miserable of all--is it just a custom, and one
+followed in order to appear respectable in others' eyes? Are they poor
+souls? or contemptible fools?
+
+_September_ 14.
+
+There is a ridiculous Cocker spaniel at the house where we are staying.
+He must have had a love affair and been jilted, or else he's a sort of
+village idiot. The landlady says he's not so silly as he looks--but he
+looks very silly: he languishes sentimentally, and when we laugh at him
+he looks "hurt." To-day we took him up on the Down and it seemed to
+brighten him up. Really, he is sane enough, with plenty of commonsense
+and good manners. But he is kept at home in the garden so much, lolling
+about all day, that as E---- said, having nothing to do, he falls in love.
+
+The _Saturday Review_ writes: The effect of the "Brides and the Bath"
+Case on people with any trace of _nice feeling_ is perhaps not
+particularly mischievous, tho' the thing is repulsive and hateful to
+them.... To gloat over the details of repulsive horrors, simply _from
+motives of curiosity_--this is bad and degrading.
+
+What a lot of repulsive things the nice refined people who read the
+_Saturday Review_ must find in the world just now. For example the War.
+"Simply from motives of curiosity." Why certainly, no other than these,
+concerning one of the most remarkable murders in the annals of crime.
+And murders anyhow are damned interesting--which the _Saturday Review_
+isn't.
+
+_Chipples_
+
+I was surprised to discover the other day that when I talked of Chipples
+no one understood what I meant! It proves to be a dialect word familiar
+to all residents in Devonshire and designating spring onions. Anyway
+you won't find it in Murray's Dictionary; yet etymologically it is an
+extremely interesting word and a thoroughly good word with a splendid
+pedigree. To wit:
+
+Italian: Cipollo.
+
+Spanish: Cebolla.
+
+French: Ciboule.
+
+Latin: Cæpulla, dim. of cæpa (_cf_. cive, civot).
+
+Now how did this pretty little alien manage to settle down among simple
+Devon folk? What has been the relation between Italy and--say Appledore,
+or Plymouth?[1]
+
+_October_ 6.
+
+In London once more, living at her flat and using her furniture.
+
+_The Chalcidoidea_
+
+The Chalcidoidea are minute winged insects that parasitise other
+insects, and in the _Memoirs of the Queensland Museum_ (Vol. I., 1912)
+you shall find an enormous catalogue of them by a person named Girault
+who writes the following dedication:
+
+"I respectfully dedicate this little portion of work to science, common
+sense or true knowledge. I am convinced that human welfare is so
+dependent upon science that civilisation would not endure without it,
+and that what is meant by progress would be impossible. Also I am
+convinced that the great majority of mankind are too ignorant, that
+education is too archaic and impractical as looked at from the
+standpoint of intrinsic knowledge. There is too little known of the
+essential unity of the Universe and of things included, for instance,
+man himself. Opinions and prejudices rule in the place of what is
+true...."
+
+Part II. is dedicated to:
+
+"The genius of mankind, especially to that form of it expressed in
+monistic philosophy, whose conceived perception is the highest
+attainment reached by man."
+
+I can only echo Whistler's remark one day as he stood before an
+execrably bad drawing "God bless my soul"--uttered slowly and
+thoughtfully and then repeated.
+
+The beauty of it is that the Editor adds a serious footnote,
+dissociating himself, and a Scarabee to whom I shewed the Work, read it
+with a clouded brow and then said: "I think it rather out of place in a
+paper of this sort." (Tableau.)
+
+_October_ 12.
+
+Down with influenza.
+
+_October_ 13.
+
+A Zeppelin raid last night. I am down with a temperature, but our little
+household remained quite calm, thank God. We heard guns going off, and I
+had a fit of trembling as I lay in bed. Many dead of heart failure owing
+to the excitement.
+
+_October_ 14.
+
+Still in bed. No raid last night. There were two raids on Wednesday, one
+at 9.30, and another at midnight. The first time the caretaker of the
+flats came up very alarmed to say "Zeppelins about," so we put out the
+lights. Then at midnight when everyone else was asleep I heard a big
+voice shout up from the street: "Lights out there. They're about again."
+Lay still in bed and waited. Distant gunfire.
+
+_October_ 17.
+
+Bad heart attack.
+
+_October_ 18.
+
+Heart intermits. Every three or four minutes. M---- said that I ought to
+be getting used to it by now! Phew!! Very nervy and pusillanimous.
+Taking strychnine in strong doses. I hope dear E---- does not catch the
+'flu. She swallows quinine with large hopes.
+
+_October_ 19.
+
+Staying at R----. Had a ghastly journey down, changing trains twice at
+Clapham Junction and at Croydon, heart intermitting all the time in
+every position. Poor E---- with me. To-day surprised to find myself still
+alive.
+
+_October_ 20.
+
+Better to-day. After much persuasion, I have got E---- to let the flat so
+that we can get away into the country outside the Zeppelin zone.
+
+_October_ 24.
+
+Back in London again. Am better, bolstered up with arsenic and
+strychnine. Too nervously excited to do any work.
+
+_October_ 25.
+
+The letting of our flat is now in the hands of an agent, and E----, poor
+dear, is quite resigned to abandoning all her precious wallpapers, etc.
+
+_November_ 7.
+
+The flat is let and we are now living in rooms at ----, 20 miles out of
+London, to the Westward.
+
+_November_ 8.
+
+It is a great relief to be down in the country. Zeppelins terrify me.
+Have just had a delightful experience in reading Conrad's new book,
+_Victory_--a welcome relief from all the tension of the past two months.
+To outward view, I have been merely a youth getting married, catching
+the 'flu and giving up a London flat.
+
+Inwardly, I have been whizzing around like a Catherine Wheel. Consider
+the items:
+
+Concussion of the spine.
+
+Resulting paralysis of left leg ten days before marriage.
+
+Zeppelin raid (heard a cannon go off for the first time).
+
+Severe cold in the head day before marriage (and therefore wild
+anxiety).
+
+Successful marriage with abatement of cold.
+
+Return to our home.
+
+Ten days later, down with influenza.
+
+A second Zeppelin raid.
+
+Bad heart attack.
+
+Then flat sub-let and London evacuated.
+
+The record nauseates me. I am nauseated with myself and my
+self-centredness.... Suppose I have been "whizzing" as I call it--what
+then? They are but subjective trifles--meanwhile other men are seeing
+great adventures in Gallipoli and elsewhere. "The _Triumph_ is gone,"
+exclaimed the Admiral who in a little group of naval officers on board
+the flagship had been watching H.M.S. _Triumph_ sink in the Ægean. He
+shuts his telescope with a click and returns in great dudgeon to his own
+quarters. How I envy all these men who are participating in this
+War--soldiers, sailors, war correspondents--all who live and throb and
+are not afraid. I am a timid youth, anæmic, wear spectacles, and am
+frightened by a Zep raid! How humiliating. I hate myself for a
+white-livered craven: I am suffocated for want of more life and courage.
+My damnable body is slowly killing off all my spirit and buoyancy. Even
+my mind is becoming blurred. My memory is like an old man's exactly.
+(Ask ----.)
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Yet thro' all my nausea, here I remain happy to discuss myself and my
+little mishaps. I'm damned sick of myself and all my neurotic
+whimperings, and so I hereby and now intend to lead a new life and throw
+this Journal to the Devil. I want to mangle it, tear it to shreds. You
+smug, hypocritical readers! you'll get no more of me. All you say I know
+is true before you say it and I know _now_ all the criticism you are
+going to launch. So please spare yourself the trouble. You cannot
+enlighten me upon myself. I _know_. I disgust myself--and you, and as
+for you, you can go to the Devil with this Journal.
+
+_Finis_
+
+_November_ 27.
+
+To-day, armed with a certificate from my Doctor in a sealed envelope and
+addressed "to the Medical Officer examining Mr. W.N.P. Barbellion," I
+got leave to attend the recruiting office and offer my services to my
+King and Country. At the time, the fact that the envelope was sealed
+caused no suspicion and I had been comfortably carrying the document
+about in my pocket for days past.
+
+Of course I attended merely as a matter of form under pressure of the
+authorities, as I knew I was totally unfit--but not quite _how_ unfit.
+After receiving this precious certificate, I learnt that K---- was
+recruiting Doctor at W----, and he offered to "put me thro' in five
+minutes," as he knows the state of my health. So at a time agreed upon,
+I went to-day and was immediately rejected as soon as he had
+stethoscoped my heart. The certificate therefore was not needed, and
+coming home in the train I opened it out of curiosity....
+
+I was quite casual and thought it would be merely interesting to see
+what M---- said.
+
+It was.
+
+"Some 18 months ago," it ran, "Mr. Barbellion shewed the just visible
+symptoms of ---- ----" and altho' this fact was at once communicated to
+my relatives it was withheld from me and M---- therefore asked the M.O.
+to respect this confidence and to reject me without stating on what
+grounds. He went on to refer to my patellar and plantar reflexes, by
+which time I had had enough, tore the paper up and flung it out of the
+railway carriage window.
+
+I then returned to the Museum intending to find out what ---- ---- was
+in Clifford Allbutt's System of Medicine. I wondered whether it was
+brain or heart; and the very thought gave me palpitation. I hope it is
+heart--something short and sharp rather than lingering. But I believe it
+must be ---- of the brain, the opposite process of softening occurring in
+old age. I recall M----'s words to me before geting married: that I had
+this "nerve weakness," but I was more likely to succumb to pneumonia
+than to any nervous trouble, and that only 12 months' happiness would be
+worth while.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the whole I am amazed at the calm way in which I take this news. I
+was a fool never to have suspected serious nerve trouble before. Does
+dear E---- know? What did M---- tell her when he saw her before our
+marriage?
+
+_November_ 28.
+
+As soon as I woke up in this clear, country air this morning, I thought:
+---- ----. I have decided never to find out what it is. I shall find out
+in good time by the course of events.
+
+A few years ago, the news would have scared me. But not so now. It only
+interests me. I have been happy, merry, and quite high-spirited to-day.
+
+_December_ 5.
+
+I believe it's creeping paralysis. My left leg goes lame after a short
+walk. Fortunately E---- does not take alarm.
+
+_December_ 17.
+
+Spent the last two days, both of us, in a state of unrelieved gloom. The
+clouds never lifted for a moment--it's awful. I scarcely have spoken a
+word.... And eugenically, what kind of an infant would even a Mark
+Tapley expect of a father with a medical history like mine, and a mother
+with a nervous system like hers?... Could anything be more unfortunate?
+And the War? What may not have happened by this time next year? My
+health is grotesque.
+
+_December_ 20.
+
+I wonder if she knows. I believe she does but I am afraid to broach the
+matter in case she doesn't. I think she must know something otherwise
+she would show more alarm over my leg, and when I went to the Recruiting
+Office she seemed to show no fear whatever lest they took me. Several
+times a day in the middle of a talk, or a meal, or a kiss, this problem
+flashes thro' my mind. I look at her but find no solution. However--for
+the present--the matter is not urgent.
+
+
+[1] The English Dialect Dictionary derives the word from Old French
+_chiboule_, and gives a reference to Piers Plowman. Why hasn't such an
+old and useful word become a part of the English language like others
+also brought over at the time of the Norman Conquest?
+
+
+
+
+1916
+
+
+_February_ 1.
+
+Since I last wrote--a month ago--I have recovered my buoyancy after a
+blow which kept me under water so long I thought I should never come up
+and be happy again.... I was reciting my woes to R----, and gaining
+much relief thereby, when we espied another crony on the other side of
+the street, crossed over at once, bandied words with him and then walked
+on, picking up the thread of my lugubrious story just where I had left
+off--secretly staggered at my emotional agility. I've got to this
+now,--I simply don't care.
+
+_February_ 2.
+
+"And she draiglet all her petticoatie, Coming thro' the rye." These
+words have a ridiculous fascination for me; I cannot resist their
+saccharine, affectionate, nay amorous jingle and keep repeating them
+aloud all over the house--as Lamb once kept reciting "Rose Aylmer."
+
+_February_ 16.
+
+We took possession of our country cottage to-day: very charming and
+overlooking a beautiful Park.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Have just discovered the Journal of the De Goncourts and been reading it
+greedily. Life has really been a commodity. I am boiling over with
+vitality, chattering amiably to everyone about nothing--argumentative,
+sanguine, serious, ridiculous. I called old R---- a Rapscallion, a
+Curmudgeon, and a Scaramouche, and E---- a trull, a drab, a trollop, a
+callet. "You certainly are a unique husband," said that sweet little
+lady, and I....
+
+With me, one of the symptoms of delirium is always a melodramatic
+truculence! I shake my fist in R----'s face and make him explode with
+laughing.... The sun to-day, and the great, whopping white clouds all
+bellied out, made me feel inside quite a bright young dog wriggling its
+body in ecstatic delight let loose upon the green sward.
+
+"You must come down for a week end," I said to R---- at lunch. "Come down
+as soon as you can. You will find every comfort. It is an enormous
+house--I have not succeeded in finding my way about it and--it's
+dangerous to lose yourself--makes you late for dinner. When you arrive
+our gilded janitor will say: 'I believe Mr. Barbellion is in the
+library.'"
+
+"Black eunuchs wait on you at dinner, I suppose," R---- rejoined.
+
+"Oh! yes and golden chandeliers and a marble stair-case--all in barbaric
+splendour."
+
+"Yes, I shall certainly be glad to come down," said R----,
+phlegmatically.
+
+And so on and so on. Words, idle words all day in a continuous rush. And
+I am sure that the match which fired the gun-powder was the discovery of
+the De Goncourts' Journal! It's extraordinary how I have been going on
+from week to week quite calmly for all the world as if I had read all
+the books and seen all the places and done everything according to the
+heart's desire. This book has really jolted me out of my complacency: to
+think that all this time, I have been dead to so much! Why I might have
+died unconscious that the De Goncourts had ever lived and written their
+colossal book and now I am aware of it, I am all in a fever to read it
+and take it up into my brain: I might die now before I have finished
+it--a thought that makes me wild with desire just as I once endured most
+awful pangs when I felt my health going, and believed that I might die
+before having ever been in love--to die and never to have been in love!
+--for an instant at a time this possibility used to make me writhe.
+
+_March_ 22.
+
+R---- has an unpleasant habit of making some scarifying announcement
+drawing forth an explosive query from me and then lapsing at once into
+an eleusinian silence: he appears to take a sensuous pleasure in the
+pause that keeps you expectant. I could forgive a man who keeps you on
+tenterhooks for two puffs in order to keep his pipe alight, but
+R---- shuts up out of sheer self-indulgence and goes on gazing at the
+horizon with the eyes of a seer (he thinks) trying to cod me he sees a
+portent there only revealed to God's elect.
+
+I told him this in the middle of one of his luxurious silences. "I will
+tell you," he said deliberately, "when we reach the Oratory." (We were
+in Brompton Road.)
+
+"Which side of it?" I enquired anxiously. "This or that?"
+
+"That," said he, "will depend on how you behave in the meantime."
+
+_April_ 3.
+
+We met a remarkable Bulldog to-day in the street, humbly following
+behind a tiny boy to whom it was attached by a piece of string. At the
+time we were following in the wake of three magnificent Serbian
+Officers, and I was particularly interesting myself in the curious cut
+of their top boots. But the Bulldog was the Red Herring in our path.
+
+"Is that a Dog?" I asked the little boy.
+
+He assured me that it was, and so it turned out to be, tho' Bull-frog
+would have been a better name for it, the forelegs being more bandied,
+the back broader and the mouth wider than in any Bulldog I have ever
+seen. It was a super-Bulldog.
+
+We turned and walked on. "There," said R----, "now we have lost our
+Serbian Officers."
+
+_April_ 4.
+
+"May I use your microscope?" he asked.
+
+"By all means," I said with a gesture of elaborate politeness.
+
+He sat down at my table, in my chair, and used my instrument--becoming
+at once absorbed and oblivious to my banter as per below:
+
+"As Scotchmen," I said, "are monuments rather than men, this latest raid
+on Edinboro's worthy inhabitants must be called vandalism rather than
+murder."
+
+No answer. I continued to stand by my chair.
+
+"How pleased Swift, Johnson, Lamb, and other anti-Caledonians would
+be...."
+
+"Hope you don't mind my occupying your chair a little longer," the
+Scotchman said, "but this is a larva, has curious maxillæ...." and his
+voice faded away in abstraction.
+
+"Oh! no--go on," I said, "I fear it is a grievous absence of hospitality
+on my part in not providing you with a glass of whiskey. Can I offer you
+water, Sir?"
+
+No answer.
+
+Another enthusiast ushered himself in, was greeted with delight by the
+first and invited to sit down. I pulled out a chair for him and said:
+
+"Shave, sir, or hair cut?"
+
+"If you follow along to the top of the galea," No. I droned on
+imperturbably, "you will...." etc.
+
+I got tired of standing and talking to an empty house but at last they
+got up, apologising and making for the door.
+
+I entreated them not to mention the matter--my fee should be nominal--I
+did it out of sheer love, etc.
+
+They thanked me again and would have said more but I added blandly:
+
+"You know your way out?" They assured me they did (having worked in the
+place for 30 years and more)--I thanked God--and sat down to my table
+once more.
+
+(These reports of conversations are rather fatuous: yet they give an
+idea of the sort of person I have to deal with, and also the sort of
+person I am among this sort of person.)
+
+_April_ 6.
+
+_The Housefly Problem_--1916
+
+For weeks past we have all been in a terrible flutter scarcely
+paralleled by the outbreak of Armageddon in August, 1914. The spark
+which fired almost the whole building was a letter to the _Times_
+written by Dr. ----, making public an ignominious confession of
+ignorance on the part of Entomologists as to how the Housefly passed the
+winter. In reply, many correspondents wrote to say they hibernated, and
+one man was even so temerarious as to quote to us Entomologists the
+exact Latin name of the Housefly: viz., _Musca domestica_. We asked for
+specimens and enormous numbers of flies at once began to arrive at the
+Museum, alive and dead--and not a Housefly among them! So there was a
+terrible howdedo.
+
+One of the correspondents was named "Masefield." "Not Masefield the
+poet?" an excited dipterist asked. I reassured him.
+
+"I've a good mind," said Dr. ----, "to reply to this chap who's so
+emphatic and give him a whigging--only he's climbing down a bit in this
+second letter in to-day's issue." I strongly advocated clemency.
+
+But still the affair goes on. Every morning sees more letters and more
+flies sent by all sorts of persons--we seem to have set the whole world
+searching for Houseflies--Duchesses, signalmen, farmers, footmen. Every
+morning each fresh batch of flies is mounted on pins by experts in the
+Setting Room, and an Assistant's whole time is devoted to identifying,
+arranging, listing and reporting upon the new arrivals. At the last
+meeting of the Trustees a sample collection was displayed to show
+indubitably that the insects which hibernate in houses are not _Musca
+domestica_ but _Pollenia rudis_. I understand the Trustees were
+appreciative.
+
+An observant eye can now discover state visits to our dipterists from
+interested persons carrying their flies with them, animated discussions
+in the corridor, knots of excited enthusiasts in the Lavatory, in the
+Library, everywhere--and everywhere the subject discussed is the same:
+How does the Housefly pass the winter? As one passes one catches: "In
+Bakehouses certainly they are to be found but...." or a wistful voice,
+"I wish I had caught that one in my bathroom three winters ago--I am
+certain it was a Housefly." The Doctor himself--a gallant
+Captain--wanders from room to room stimulating his lieutenants to make
+suggestions, and examining every answer to the great interrogative on
+its merits, no matter how humble or insignificant the person who makes
+it. Then of an afternoon he will entirely disappear, and word goes round
+that he has set forth to examine a rubbish heap in Soho or Pimlico. As
+the afternoon draws to its close someone enquires if he has come back
+yet; next morning a second asks if I had seen him, then a third
+announces mournfully that he has just been holding conversation with
+him, but that nothing at all was found in the rubbish heap.
+
+The great sensation of all occurred last week when somebody ran along
+the corridor crying that Mr. ---- had just found a Housefly in his room.
+We were all soon agog with the news, and the excited Captain was
+presently espied setting out for the scene of operations with a killing
+bottle and net. The insect was promptly impounded and identified as a
+veritable _Musca domestica_. A consultation being held to sit on the
+body, a lady finally laid information that two "forced Houseflies"
+hatched the day before had escaped from her possession. She suggested
+Mr. ----'s specimen was one of them.
+
+"How would it get from your room to Mr. ----'s?" she
+
+was immediately asked. And breathless, we all heard her answer
+deliberately and quite audibly that the fugitive may have gone out of
+her window, up the garden and in by Mr. ----'s window, _or_ it may have
+gone out of her door, up the corridor and in by his door. I wanted to
+know why it should have entered Mr. ----'s room as he is not a dipterist
+but a microlepidopterist. They looked at me sternly and we slowly
+dispersed.
+
+This morning, the Dr. came to me with a newspaper cutting in his hand,
+saying, "_The Times_ is behindhand." He handed me the slip. It was a
+clipping from to-day's _Times_ about a sackful of flies which had been
+taken from Wandsworth Clock Tower in a state of hibernation.
+
+"Behindhand?" I asked timidly, for I felt that all the story was not in
+front of me.
+
+"Why, yes. Don't you know?"
+
+I knew nothing, but was prepared for anything.
+
+"_The Star_, two days ago," he informed me, "had a paragraph about
+this--headed 'Tempus fugit' "--this last in a resentful tone as tho' the
+frivolous reporter were attempting to discredit our mystery.
+
+There was a long pause. Neither of us spoke. Then he slowly said:
+
+"I wonder why _The Times_ is so behindhand. This is two days late."
+
+_May_ 5.
+
+Hulloa, old friend: how are you? I mean my Diary. I haven't written to
+you for ever so long, and my silence as usual indicates happiness. I
+have been passing thro' an unbroken succession of calm happy days,
+walking in the woods with my darling, or doing a little gentle gardening
+on coming home in the evening--and the War has been centuries away.
+Later on towards bedtime, E---- reads Richard Jefferies, I play Patience
+and Mrs. ---- makes garments for Priscilla.
+
+The only troubles have been a chimney which smokes and a neighbour's dog
+which barks at night. So to be sure, I have made port after storm at
+last--and none too soon. To-day my cheerfulness has been rising in a
+crescendo till to-night it broke in such a handsome crest of pure
+delight that I cannot think of going to bed without recording it.
+
+_Pachmann_
+
+After sitting on the wall around the fountain in the middle of Trafalgar
+Square, eating my sandwiches and feeding the Pigeons with the crumbs, I
+listened for a moment to the roar of the traffic around three sides of
+the Square as I stood in the centre quite alone, what time one fat old
+pigeon, all unconcerned, was treading another. It was an extraordinary
+experience: motor horns tooted incessantly and it seemed purposelessly,
+so that one had the fancy that all London was out for a joy-ride--it was
+a great British Victory perhaps, or Peace Day.
+
+Then walked down Whitehall to Westminster Bridge in time to see the 2
+o'clock boat start upstream for Kew. I loitered by the old fellow with
+the telescope who keeps his pitch by Boadicea: I saw a piper of the
+Scots Guards standing near gazing across the river but at nothing in
+particular--just idling as I was. I saw another man sitting on the stone
+steps and reading a dirty fragment of newspaper. I saw the genial,
+red-faced sea-faring man in charge of the landing stage strolling up and
+down his small domain,--chatting, jesting, spitting, and making fast a
+rope or so. Everything was _alive_ to the finger tips, vividly shining,
+pulsating.
+
+Arrived at Queen's Hall in time for Pachmann's Recital at 3.15.... As
+usual he kept us waiting for 10 minutes. Then a short, fat, middle-aged
+man strolled casually on to the platform and everyone clapped
+violently--so it was Pachmann: a dirty greasy looking fellow with long
+hair of dirty grey colour, reaching down to his shoulders and an ugly
+face. He beamed on us and then shrugged his shoulders and went on
+shrugging them until his eye caught the music stool, which seemed to
+fill him with amazement. He stalked it carefully, held out one hand to
+it caressingly, and finding all was well, went two steps backwards,
+clasping his hands before him and always gazing at the little stool in
+mute admiration, his eyes sparkling with pleasure, like Mr. Pickwick's
+on the discovery of the archeological treasure. He approached once more,
+bent down and ever so gently moved it about 7/8ths of an inch nearer
+the piano. He then gave it a final pat with his right hand and sat down.
+
+He played Nocturne No. 2, Prelude No. 20, a Mazurka and two Etudes of
+Chopin and Schubert's Impromptu No. 4.
+
+At the close we all crowded around the platform and gave the queer,
+old-world gentleman an ovation, one man thrusting up his hand which
+Pachmann generously shook as desired.
+
+As an encore he gave us a Valse--"Valse, Valse," he exclaimed
+ecstatically, jumping up and down in his seat in time to the music. It
+was a truly remarkable sight: on his right the clamorous crowd around
+the platform; on his left the seat holders of the Orchestra Stalls,
+while at the piano bobbed this grubby little fat man playing divine
+Chopin divinely well, at the same time rising and falling in his seat,
+turning a beaming countenance first to the right and then to the left,
+crying, "Valse, Valse." He is as entertaining as a tumbler at a variety
+hall.
+
+As soon as he had finished, we clapped and rattled for more, Pachmann
+meanwhile standing surrounded by his idolaters in affected despair at
+ever being able to satisfy us. Presently he walked off and a scuffle was
+half visible behind the scenes between him and his agent who sent him in
+once more.
+
+The applause was wonderful. As soon as he began again it ceased on the
+instant, and as soon as he left off it started again
+immediately--nothing boisterous or rapturous but a steady, determined
+thunder of applause that came regularly and evenly like the roar from
+some machine.
+
+_May_ 20.
+
+Spent a quiet day. Sat at my escritoire in the Studio this morning
+writing an Essay, with a large 4-fold window on my left, looking on to
+woods and fields, with Linnets, Greenfinches, Cuckoos calling. This
+afternoon while E---- rested awhile I sat on the veranda in the sun and
+read _Antony and Cleopatra_.... Yes, I'm in harbour at last. I'd be the
+last to deny it but I cannot believe it will last. It's too good to
+last and it's all too good to be even true. E---- is too good to be
+true, the home is too good to be true, and this quiet restful existence
+is too wonderful to last in the middle of a great war. It's just a
+little deceitful April sunshine, that's all....[1]
+
+Had tea at the ----. A brilliant summer's evening. Afterwards, we
+wandered into the garden and shrubbery and sat about on the turf of the
+lawn, chatting and smoking. Mr. ---- played with a rogue of a white
+Tomcat called Chatham, and E---- talked about our neighbour, "Shamble
+legs," about garden topics, etc. Then I strolled into the drawing-room
+where Cynthia was playing Chopin on a grand piano. Is it not all
+perfectly lovely?
+
+How delicious to be silent, lolling on the Chesterfield, gazing
+abstractedly thro' the lattice window and listening to the lulling
+charities of Nocturne No. 2, Op. 37! The melody in the latter part of
+this nocturne took me back at once to a cloudless day in an open boat in
+the Bay of Combemartin, with oars up and the water quietly and regularly
+lapping the gunwales as we rose and fell. A state of the most profound
+calm and happiness took possession of me.
+
+_June_ 2.
+
+From the local paper:
+
+"A comrade in the Gloucesters writing to a friend at ---- mentions that
+Pte. J---- has been fatally shot in action. J---- was well known here
+for years as an especially smart young newsvendor."
+
+_June_ 3.
+
+What a bitter disappointment it is to realise that people the most
+intimately in love with one another are really separated by such a
+distance. A woman is calmly knitting socks or playing Patience while her
+husband or sweetheart lies dead in Flanders. However strong the tie that
+binds them together yet they are insufficiently _en rapport_ for her to
+sense even a catastrophe--and she must wait till the War Office forsooth
+sends her word. How humiliating that the War Office must do what Love
+cannot. Human love seems then such a superficial thing. Every person is
+a distinct egocentric being. Each for himself and the Devil take the
+hindmost. "Ah! but she didn't know." "Yes, but she _ought_ to have
+known." Mental telepathy and clairvoyance should be common at least to
+all lovers.
+
+This morning in bed I heard a man with a milkcart say in the road to a
+villager at about 6.30 a.m., "... battle ... and we lost six cruisers."
+This was the first I knew of the Battle of Jutland. At 8 a.m. I read in
+the _Daily News_ that the British Navy had been defeated, and thought it
+was the end of all things. The news took away our appetites. At the
+railway station, the _Morning Post_ was more cheerful, even reassuring,
+and now at 6.30 p.m. the Battle has turned into a merely regrettable
+indecisive action. We breathe once more.
+
+_June_ 4.
+
+It has now become a victory.
+
+_June_ 11.
+
+Old systems of Classification: Rafinesc's Theory of Fives, Swainson's
+Theory of Sevens, Edward Newman's book called _Sphinx Vespiformis_
+tracing fives throughout the animal world, Sir Thomas Browne's Quincunx,
+chasing fives throughout the whole of nature--in the words of Coleridge,
+"quincunxes in Heaven above, quincunxes in the Earth below, quincunxes
+in the mind of man, in optic nerves, in roots of trees, in leaves, in
+everything!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Old false trails:
+
+The Philosopher's Stone (Balthazar Clæs).[2]
+
+A universal catholicon (Bishop Berkeley's tar-water). Mystical numbers
+(as per above).
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My father was Sir Thomas Browne and my mother Marie Bashkirtseff. See
+what a curious hybrid I am!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I toss these pages in the faces of timid, furtive, respectable people
+and say: "There! that's me! You may like it or lump it, but it's true.
+And I challenge you to follow suit, to flash the searchlight of your
+self-consciousness into every remotest corner of your life and invite
+everybody's inspection. Be candid, be honest, break down the partitions
+of your cubicle, come out of your burrow, little worm." As we are all
+such worms we should at least be honest worms.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My gratitude to E---- for plucking me out of the hideous miseries of my
+life in London is greater than I can express. If I were the cheap hero
+of a ladies' novel I should immolate my journals as a token, and you
+would have a pretty picture of a pale young man watching his days go up
+in smoke by the drawing-room fire. But I have more confidence in her
+sterling good sense, and if I cannot be loved for what I am, I do not
+wish to be loved for what I am not.
+
+Since the fateful Nov. 27th, my life has become entirely posthumous. I
+live now in the grave and am busy furnishing it with posthumous joys. I
+accept my fate with great content, my one-time restless ambition lies
+asleep now, my one-time, furious self-assertiveness is anæsthetised by
+this great War; the War and the discovery about my health together have
+plucked out of me that canker of self-obsession. I sit at home here in
+this country cottage in perfect isolation--flattened out by a steam
+hammer (tho' it took Armageddon to do it!), yet as cheerful and busy as
+a Dormouse laying up store for the winter. For I am almost resigned to
+the issue in the knowledge that some day, someone will know, perhaps
+somebody will understand and--immortal powers!--even sympathise, "the
+quick heart quickening from the heart that's still."
+
+_July_ 19.
+
+_Omniscience_
+
+An omniscient Caledonian asked me to-day:
+
+"Where are the Celebes? Are they E. or N.E. of the Sandwich Group?"
+
+I marked him down at once as my legitimate prey. Sitting back in my
+chair, I replied slowly in my most offensive manner:
+
+"The Island of Celebes is of enormous size and curious shape situated in
+the Malay Archipelago."
+
+The Caledonian made no sign. Instead of grinning at his error and
+confessing to a "floater," he endeavoured to carry on by remarking,
+"That of course would be N. of Papua," just for all the world as if his
+error was a minor one of latitude and longitude.
+
+Ignoring his comment, I continued:
+
+"From the Zoogeographical point of view, Celebes is unequalled in
+importance, having the strangest fauna almost of any island on the face
+of the globe. Then there's 'Wallace's Line,'" I said, being purposely
+obscure.
+
+The Caledonian said nought but "looked hurt." It was so obvious that he
+didn't know, and it was so obvious that I knew that he didn't know, that
+after my farcical truculence I expected the tension to dissolve in
+laughter. Yet it is hard for a Caledonian to say "God be merciful to me,
+ignorant devil that I am." So I pursued him with more information about
+"Wallace's Line," with an insouciant air, as much as to say, "Wallace's
+Line of course you heard discussed before you were breached."
+
+"Some do say, you know, that the Line is 'all my eye and Betty Martin,'
+_e.g._, R----."
+
+This gave him his first opportunity of finding his feet in this
+perilously deep water. So he said promptly, eager to seem knowledgeable
+with an intelligent rejoinder:
+
+"As! yes, R---- is an authority on Fishes."
+
+I assented. "At the last meeting of the British Ass. he tore the idea to
+shreds."
+
+The drowning Caledonian seized at any straw:
+
+"Fishes, however, are not of paramount importance in cases of
+geographical distribution, are they?"
+
+I knew he was thinking of _marine_ fishes, but I did not illumine him,
+and merely said:
+
+"Oh! yes, of very great importance," at which he looked still more
+"hurt," decamped in silence and left me conqueror of the field but
+without the spoils of victory: it was impossible to bring him to say "I
+do not know"--four mono-syllables was all I wanted from the man who for
+months past has been lecturing me on all things from Music and the Drama
+to Philosophy, Painting and--Insects.
+
+_July_ 20.
+
+The cradle came a few days ago but I had not seen it until this morning
+when I unlocked the cupboard door, looked in and shuddered.
+
+"That's the skeleton in our cupboard," I said on coming down to
+breakfast. She laughed, but I really meant it.
+
+E---- keeps a blue bowl replenished with flaming Poppies in our room.
+The cottage is plagued with Ear-wigs which fly in at night and get among
+the clothes and bedlinen. This morning, dressing, she held up her
+chemise to the light saying: "I always do this--you can see their little
+heathen bodies then against the light...." Isn't she charming?
+
+_July_ 30.
+
+The other day R---- and I were sitting on a stile on the uplands in
+perfect summer weather and talking of happy days before the War--he was
+in khaki and I was resting my "gammy" leg.... As we talked, we let our
+eyes roam, resting luxuriously wherever we pleased and occasionally
+interrupting the conversation with "Look at that cow scratching herself
+against the Oak," or "Do you see the oats waving?" In the distance we
+saw a man and a boy walking up towards us along the path thro' the corn,
+but the eye having momentarily scrutinised them wandered away and the
+conversation never paused. When next I looked, they were much
+nearer--crossing the furrows in the potato field in fact, and we both
+stopped talking to watch--idly. The boy seemed to be about 10 years old,
+and it amused us to see his great difficulty in stepping across the
+furrows.
+
+"Poor little chap," R---- said, and we laughed.
+
+Then the boy stumbled badly and all at once the man lifted his
+walking-stick and beat him, saying ill-naturedly, "Step between the
+furrows," and again, "Step between the furrows." Our enchanting little
+picture was transfigured in an instant. The "charming little boy" was a
+natural idiot--a gross, hefty creature perhaps 30 years of age, very
+short and very thick, dressed in a little sailor suit. I said,
+"Heavens," and R---- looked positively scared. We stood aside for them
+to get over the stile, the "boy" still suffering from his over exertion,
+breathing stertorously like a horse pulling uphill and still evidently
+fearful of the big stick behind. He scrambled over the stile as best he
+could, rolling a wild eye at us as he did so--a large, bulgy eye with
+the lower lid swollen and sore, like the eye of a terrified ox on the
+way to the slaughter house. So much then for our little picture of
+charming childhood! The man followed close at his heels and looked at me
+with stern defiant eyes. "Yes, that is my son," his eyes declaimed, "and
+I'll thank you to avert your gaze or by the Lord I'll beat you too."
+
+_A Yellow Cat_
+
+Last week, I saw a yellow cat perched up quite high on a window ledge at
+the S---- Underground Station in celestial detachment from the crowd of
+serious, black-coated gentlemen hustling along to and from the trains.
+He had his back turned to us, but as I swept past in the stream, I was
+forced to look back a moment, and caught the outline of his whiskers--it
+made me smile intensely to myself and secretly I gave the palm to the
+cat for wisdom.
+
+_July_ 31.
+
+This War is so great and terrible that hyperbole is impossible. And yet
+my gorge rises at those fatuous journalists continually prating about
+this "Greatest War of all time," this "Great Drama," this "world
+catastrophe unparalleled in human history," because it is easy to see
+that they are really more thrilled than shocked by the immensity of the
+War. They indulge in a vulgar Yankee admiration for the Big Thing. Why
+call this shameful Filth by high sounding phrases--as if it were a
+tragedy from Euripides? We ought to hush it up, not brag about it, to
+mention it with a blush instead of spurting it out brazen-faced.
+
+Mr. Garvin, for example, positively gloats over the War each week in the
+_Observer_: "Last week was one of those pivotal occasions on which
+destiny seems to swing"--and so on every week, you can hear him,
+historical glutton smacking his lips with an offensive relish.
+
+For my part, I never seem to be in the same mind about the War twice
+following. Sometimes I am wonderstruck and make out a list of all the
+amazing events I have lived to see since August, 1914, and sometimes and
+more often I am swollen with contempt for its colossal imbecility. And
+sometimes I am swept away with admiration for all the heroism of the
+War, or by some particularly noble self-sacrifice, and think it is
+really all worth while. Then--and more frequently--I remember that this
+War has let loose on the world not only barbarities, butcheries and
+crimes, but lies, lies, lies--hypocrisies, deceits, ignoble desires for
+self-aggrandizement, self-preservation such as no one before ever
+dreamed existed in embryo in the heart of human beings.
+
+The War rings the changes on all the emotions. It twangs all my strings
+in turn and occasionally all at once, so that I scarcely know how to
+react or what to think. You see, here am I, a compulsory spectator, and
+all I can do is to reflect. A Zeppelin brought down in flames that lit
+up all London--now that makes me want to write like Mr. Garvin. But a
+Foreign Correspondent's eager discussion of "Italy's aspirations in the
+Trentino," how Russia insists on a large slice of Turkey, and so forth,
+makes me splutter. How insufferably childish to be slicing up the
+earth's surface! How immeasureably "above the battle" I am at times.
+What a prig you will say I am when I sneer at such contemptible little
+devilries as the Bodies' trick of sending over a little note, "Warsaw is
+fallen," into our trenches, or as ours in reply: "Gorizia!"
+
+"There is no difference in principle between the case of a man who loses
+a limb in the service of his country and that of the man who loses his
+reason, both have an obvious claim to the grateful recognition of the
+State."--A morning paper.
+
+A jejune comment like this makes me grin like a gargoyle! Hark to the
+fellow--this leader-writer over his cup of tea. But it is a lesson to
+show how easily and quickly we have all adapted ourselves to the War.
+The War is everything; it is noble, filthy, great, petty, degrading,
+inspiring, ridiculous, glorious, mad, bad, hopeless yet full of hope. I
+don't know what to think about it.
+
+_August_ 13.
+
+I hate elderly women who mention their legs. It makes me shudder.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had two amusing conversations this morning, one with a jealous old man
+of 70 summers who, in spite of his age, is jealous--I can find no other
+term--of me in spite of mine, and the other with a social climber. I
+always tell the first of any of my little successes and regularly hand
+him all my memoirs as they appear, to which he as regularly protests
+that he reads very little now.
+
+"Oh! never mind," I always answer gaily, "you take it and read it going
+down in the train--it will amuse you." He submits but is always silent
+next time I see him--a little, admonitory silence. Or, I mention I am
+giving an address at ----, and he says "Oom," and at once begins his
+reminiscences, which I have heard many times before, and am sometimes
+tempted to correct him when, his memory failing, he leaves out an
+essential portion of his story. Thus do crabbed age and boastful youth
+tantalise one another.
+
+To the social climber I said slyly:
+
+"You seem to move in a very distinguished entourage during your week
+ends."
+
+He smiled a little self-consciously, hesitated a moment and then said:
+
+"Oh! I have a few nice friends, you know."
+
+Now I am sorry, but though I scrutinised this lick-spittle and arch
+belly-truck rider very closely, I am quite unable to say whether that
+smile and unwonted diffidence meant simple pleasure at the now certain
+knowledge that I was duly impressed, or whether it was genuine confusion
+at the thought that he had perhaps been overdoing it.
+
+Curiously enough, all bores of whatever kind make a dead set at me. I am
+always a ready listener and my thrusts are always gentle. Hence the
+pyramids! I constantly act as phlebotomist to the vanity of the young
+and to the anecdotage of the senile and senescent.
+
+_August_ 13.
+
+... I stood by his chair and looked down at him, and surveyed carefully
+the top of his head, neck, and collar, and with admirable restraint and
+calm, considered my most reasonable contempt of him. In perfect silence,
+we remained thus, while I looked down at a sore spot in the centre of
+his calvarium which he scratches occasionally, and toyed with the fine
+flower of my scorn.... But it is a dangerous license to take. One never
+knows....
+
+_Equilibrium Restored_
+
+To clear away the cobwebs and to purge my soul of evil thoughts and
+bitter feelings, went for a walk this evening over the uplands. Among
+the stubble, I sat down for a while with my back against the corn pook
+and listened to the Partridges calling. Then wandered around the edge of
+this upland field with the wind in my face and a shower of delicious,
+fresh rain pattering down on the leaves and dry earth. Then into a wood
+among tall forest Beeches and a few giant Larches where I rested again
+and heard a Woodpecker tapping out its message aloft.
+
+This ramble in beautiful B----shire country restored my mental and
+spiritual poise. I came home serene and perfectly balanced--my
+equilibrium was something like the just perceptible oscillation of tall
+Larch-tree tops on the heights of a cliff and the sea below with a just
+perceptible swell on a calm and perfect June day. I felt exquisite
+--superb. I could have walked all the way home on a tight rope.
+
+_September_ 2.
+
+Just recently, I have been going fairly strong. I get frequent colds and
+sometimes show unpleasant nerve symptoms, but I take a course of arsenic
+and strychnine every month or so in tabloid form, and this helps me over
+bad patches.
+
+Under the beatific influence of more comfortable health, the rare flower
+of my ambition has raised its head once more: my brain has bubbled with
+projects. To wit:
+
+(1) An investigation of the Balancers in Larval Urodeles.
+
+(2) The Present Parlous State of Systematic Zoology (for "Science
+Progress").
+
+(3) The Anatomy of the Psocidæ.
+
+Etc.
+
+The strength of my ambition at any given moment is the measure of my
+state of health. It must really be an extraordinarily tenacious thing to
+have hung on thro' all my recent experiences. Considerately enough this
+great Crab lets go of my big toe when I am sunk low in health, yet
+pinches devilishly hard as now when I am well.[3]
+
+_A Bad Listener_
+
+When I begin to speak, T---- will sometimes interrupt with his loud,
+rasping voice. I usually submit to this from sheer lack of lung power or
+I may have a sore throat. But occasionally after the fifth or sixth
+interruption I lose my equanimity and refuse to give him ground. I keep
+straight on with what I intended to say, only in a louder voice; he
+assumes a voice louder still, but not to be denied, I pile Pelion on
+Ossa and finally overwhelm him in a thunder of sound. For example:
+
+"The other day"--I begin quietly collecting my thoughts to tell the
+story in detail, "I went to the----"
+
+"Ah! you must come and see my pictures----" he breaks in; but I go on
+and he goes on and as I talk, I catch phrases: "St. Peters" or"Michael
+Angelo" or "Botticelli" in wondrous antiphon with my own "British
+Museum" and "I saw there," "two Syracusan," "tetradrachms," until very
+likely I reach the end of my sentence before he does his, or perhaps his
+rasp drives my remarks out of my head. But that makes no difference, for
+rather than give in I go on improvising in a louder and louder voice
+when suddenly, at length made aware of the fact that I am talking too,
+he stops! leaving me bellowing nonsense at the top of my voice, thus:
+"and I much admired these Syracusan tetradrachms, very charming indeed,
+I like them, the Syracusan tetradrachms I mean you know, and it will be
+good to go again and see them (louder) if possible and the weather keeps
+dry (louder) and the moon and the stars keep in their courses, if the
+slugs on the thorn (loudest)----" he stops, hears the last few words of
+my remarks, pretends to be appreciative but wonders what in Heaven's
+name I can have been talking about.
+
+_September_ 3.
+
+This is the sort of remark I like to make: Someone says to me: "You
+_are_ a pessimist."
+
+"Ah! well," I say, looking infernally deep, "pessimism is a good policy;
+it's like having your cake and eating it at the same time."
+
+Chorus: "Why?"
+
+"Because if the future turns out badly you can say, 'I told you so,' to
+your own satisfaction, and if all is well, why you share everyone else's
+satisfaction."
+
+Or I say: "No, I can't swim; and I don't want to!"
+
+Chorus: "Why?"
+
+"Because it is so dangerous."
+
+Chorus: "Why?"
+
+The Infernally Wise Youth: "For several reasons. If you are a swimmer
+you are likely to be oftener near water and oftener in danger than a
+non-swimmer. Further, as soon as you can swim even only a little, then
+as an honourable man, it behoves you to plunge in at once to save a
+drowning person, whereas, if you couldn't swim it would be merely
+tempting Providence."
+
+Isn't it sickening?
+
+_A Jolt_
+
+Yesterday the wind was taken out of my sails. Racing along with
+spinnaker and jib, feeling pretty fit and quite excited over some
+interesting ectoparasites just collected on some Tinamous, I suddenly
+shot into a menacing dead calm: that stiflingly still atmosphere which
+precedes a Typhoon. That is to say, my eye caught the title of an
+enormous quarto memoir in the _Trans. Roy. Soc._, Edinburgh: The
+Histology of ---- ----.
+
+I was browsing in the library at the time when this hit me like a
+carelessly handled gaff straight in the face. I almost ran away to my
+room.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My Pink Form just received amazes me! To be a soldier? C'est incroyable,
+ma foi! The possibility even is distracting! To send me a notice
+requesting me to prepare myself for killing men! Why I should feel no
+more astonished to receive a War Office injunction under dire penalties
+to perform miracles, to move mountains, to raise from the dead: My reply
+would be: "I cannot." I should sit still and watch the whole universe
+pass to its destruction rather than raise a hand to knife a fellow. This
+may be poor, anæmic; but there it is, a positive fact.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There are moments when I have awful misgivings: Is this blessed Journal
+worth while? I really don't know, and that's the harassing fact of the
+matter. If only I were sure of myself, if only I were capable of an
+impartial view! But I am too fond of myself to be able to see myself
+objectively. I wish I knew for certain what I am and how much I am
+worth. There are such possibilities about the situation; it may turn out
+tremendously, or else explode in a soap bubble. It is the torture of
+Tantalus to be so uncertain. I should be relieved to know even the
+worst. I would almost gladly burn my MSS. in the pleasure of having my
+curiosity satisfied. I go from the nadir of disappointment to the zenith
+of hope and back several times a week, and all the time I am
+additionally harassed by the perfect consciousness that it is all petty
+and pusillanimous to desire to be known and appreciated, that my
+ambition is a morbid diathesis of the mind. I am not such a fool either
+as not to see that there is but little satisfaction in posthumous fame,
+and I am not such a fool as not to realise that all fame is fleeting,
+and that the whole world itself is passing away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I smile with sardonic amusement when I reflect how the War has changed
+my status. Before the War I was an interesting invalid. Now I am a lucky
+dog. Then, I was a star turn in tragedy; now I am drowned and ignored in
+an overcrowded chorus. No valetudinarian was ever more unpleasantly
+jostled out of his self-compassion. It is difficult to accustom myself
+to the new role all at once: I had begun to lose the faculty for
+sympathising in others' griefs. It is hard to have to realise that in
+all this slaughter, my own superfluous life has become negligible and
+scarcely anyone's concern but my own. In this colossal _sauve-qui-peut_
+which is developing, who can stay to consider a useless mouth? Am I not
+a comfortable parasite? And, God forgive me, an Egotist to boot?
+
+The War is searching out everyone, concentrating a beam of inquisitive
+light upon everyone's mind and character and publishing it for all the
+world to see. And the consequence to many honest folk has been a keen
+personal disappointment. We ignoble persons had thought we were better
+than we really are. We scarcely anticipated that the War was going to
+discover for us our emotions so despicably small by comparison, or our
+hearts so riddled with selfish motives. In the wild race for security
+during these dangerous times, men and women have all been sailing so
+closehauled to the wind that their eyes have been glued to their own
+forepeaks with never a thought for others: fathers have vied with one
+another in procuring safe jobs for their sons, wives have been bitter
+and recriminating at the security of other wives' husbands. The men
+themselves plot constantly for staff appointments, and everyone is
+pulling strings who can. Bereavement has brought bitterness and immunity
+indifference.
+
+And how pathetically some of us cling still to fragments of the old
+regime that has already passed--like ship-wrecked mariners to floating
+wreckage, to the manner of the conservatoire amid the thunder of all
+Europe being broken up; to our newspaper gossip and parish teas, to our
+cherished aims--wealth, fame, success--in spite of all, _ruat coelum!_
+Mr. A.C. Benson and his trickling, comfortable Essays, Mr. Shaw and his
+Scintillations--they are all there as before, revolving like haggard
+windmills in a devastated landscape! A little while ago, I read in the
+local newspaper which I get up from the country two columns concerning
+the accidental death of an old woman, while two lines were used to
+record the death of a townsman at the front from an aerial dart. Behold
+this poor rag! staggering along under the burden of the War in a
+passionate endeavour to preserve the old-time interest in an old woman's
+decease. Yet more or less we are all in the same case: I still write my
+Journal and play Patience of an evening, and an old lady I know still
+reads as before the short items of gossip in the papers, neglecting
+articles and leaders.... We are like a nest of frightened ants when
+someone lifts the stone. That is the world just now.
+
+_September_ 5.
+
+... I was so ashamed of having to fall back upon such ignominious
+publications for my literary efforts that on presenting him with two
+copies, I told the following lie to save my face:
+
+"They were two essays of mine left over at the beginning of the War, you
+know. My usual channel became blocked so I had to have recourse to
+these."
+
+"Where do you publish as a rule?" he innocently asked.
+
+"Oh! several in the _Manchester Guardian_," I told him out of vanity.
+"But of course every respectable journal now has closed down to
+extra-war topics."
+
+I lie out of vanity. And then I confess to lying--out of vanity too. So
+that one way or another I am determined to make kudos out of myself.
+Even this last reflection is written down with an excessive appreciation
+of its wit and the intention that it shall raise a smile.
+
+_September_ 9.
+
+Still nothing to report. The anxiety is telling on us all. The nurse has
+another case on the 22nd.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I looked at myself in the mirror this morning--nude, a most revolting
+picture. An emaciated human being is the most unlovely thing in
+creation. Some time ago a smart errand boy called out "Bovril" after me
+in the street.
+
+On my way to the Station met two robust, brawny curates on the way to
+the daily weekday service--which is attended only by two decrepit old
+women in black, each with her prayer-book caught up to her breast as if
+she were afraid it might gallop off. That means a parson apiece--and in
+war time too.
+
+_September_ 10.
+
+My sympathy with myself is so unfailing that I don't deserve anybody
+else's. In many respects, however, this Journal I believe gives the
+impression that I behave myself in the public gaze much worse than I
+actually do. You must remember that herein I let myself go at a stretch
+gallop: in life I rein in, I am almost another person. Would you believe
+it, E---- says I am full of quick sympathy with others and
+extraordinarily cheerful, nay gay. Verily I lead a curious double
+existence: among most people, I pass for a complaisant, amiable,
+mealy-mouthed, furry if conceited creature. Here I stand revealed as a
+contemptuous, arrogant malcontent. My life has embittered me _an fond_,
+I have the crabbed temper of the disappointed man insufficiently
+developed yet to be very plainly visible beneath my innate affable,
+unassuming, humble, diffident, cheerful characteristics. With fools on
+every hand I am becoming insolent, aggressive, self-declamatory. Last
+evening came home and got down Robert Buchanan's sonnet, "When He
+returns and finds the world so drear," and felt constrained to read it
+out to E----. I poured out its acid sentiment with the base revenge of a
+vitriol thrower, and then became quiescent.
+
+It is a helpless feeling, sitting still and watching circumstances
+pounding away at my malleable character and moulding it wrongly.
+
+_September_ 14.
+
+_An American Neighbour_
+
+We have a delightful American neighbour here whose life revolves like
+the fly-wheel of an engine. Even when not in eruption his volcanic
+energy is always rumbling and can be heard. Seeing he is a globe
+trotter, I was surprised to observe his most elaborate precautions for
+catching the train and getting a seat when he takes his wife and family
+to town. He first of all plants himself and all his property down at a
+certain carefully selected point along the platform as if he were in the
+wild west lying in wait for a Buffalo. Then as the train comes in, his
+eye fixes on an empty compartment as it passes and he dashes off after
+it in furious pursuit up the platform, shouting to his family to follow
+him. Having lassooed the compartment, squaw and piccaninnies are hustled
+in as if there was not a moment to lose, what time the black-coated,
+suburban Englishmen look on in pain and silence, and then slowly with
+offensive deliberation enter their respective carriages.
+
+_The Stockbroker_
+
+Another neighbour who interests me is mainly notable for his
+extraordinary gait. He is a man with a large, round head, a large round,
+dissolute looking face and fairly broad shoulders, below which
+everything tapers away to a pair of tiny feet neatly booted. These two
+little feet are excessively sensitive to road surface--one would say he
+had special sense organs on his toes, to judge by the manner in which he
+picks out his path along the country road in short, quick, fussy steps:
+his feet seem to dissect out the road as if boning a herring. A big
+bunion is as good as a sense organ, but his feet are too small and
+elegant.
+
+_September_ 24.
+
+The second nurse arrived to-day. Great air raid last night of which we
+heard nothing, thank God!
+
+My nerves are giving way under the strain.... One leg (the left) drags
+abominably.... We shall want a bath-chair as well as a perambulator.
+
+Crawled up thro' the path-fields to the uplands and sat in a field in
+the sun with my back against a haystack. I was so immobile in my
+dejection that Flies and Grass-hoppers came and perched about me. This
+made me furious. "I am not dead yet," I said, "get away," and I would
+suddenly drive them off.... In horrible dejection....
+
+Even my mental powers are disintegrating--that's the rub. Some quite
+recent incidents I cannot remember even when reminded of them: they seem
+to have passed clean out of my mind--a remarkable sensation this.
+
+My sensibility is dulled too. It chagrins me to find that my present
+plight by no means overwhelms me with anguish as it would have done
+once. It only worries me. I am just a worried ox.
+
+_September_ 26.
+
+The numbness in my right hand is getting very trying. ... The Baby puts
+the lid on it all. Can't you see the sordid picture? I can, and it
+haunts me. To be paralysed with a wife and child and no money--ugh!
+
+Retribution proceeds with an almost mathematical accuracy of measure. It
+would necessitate a vernier rather than a chain. There is no mercy in
+Cause and Effect. It is inhuman clockwork. Every single act expended
+brings one its precise equivalent in return....
+
+_September_ 28.
+
+Still nothing to report.
+
+I am astonished at the false impression these entries give of myself.
+The picture is incomplete anyhow. It represents the cloud of forebodings
+over my inner self but does not show the outward front I present to
+others. This is one of almost constant gaiety--unforced and quite
+natural. Ask E----, who said yesterday I was like a schoolboy.
+
+     "Camerade, I give you my hand!
+     I give you my love more precious than money,
+     I give you myself before preaching or law;
+     Will you give me yourself? Will you come, travel with me?
+     Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?"
+
+She cut this out of her copy of Walt Whitman and gave it me soon after
+our engagement. It is very precious to me.
+
+(On Sept. 29th, on the Doctor's advice I went away by the sea alone, my
+nerves being all unstrung. For an account of the miseries of this
+journey, see Dec. 12th _infra_).
+
+_October_ 3.
+
+A wire to say Susan arrived 2.15 p.m. All well.
+
+_October_ 5.
+
+Home again with my darling. She is the most wonderful darling woman. Our
+love is for always. The Baby is a monster.
+
+_October_ 23.
+
+The fact that I can't write, finally bottles me up.[4] Damn! Damn! Damn!
+If only I can get my Essay on Journal Writers done. E---- goes on well.
+I have a thousand things to say.
+
+_October_ 27.
+
+Still awaiting a reprieve. I hate alarming the Doctor--he's such a
+cheerful man so I conceal my symptoms, quite a collection by now.
+
+The prospect of breaking the news to her makes me miserable. I hide away
+as much as possible lest she should see. I _must_ speak when she is well
+again.
+
+_October_ 28.
+
+Life has been very treacherous to me--this, the greatest treachery of
+all. But I don't care. I exult over it. Last night I lay awake and
+listened to the wind in the trees and was full of exultation.
+
+Now I can only talk, but nobody to talk to. Shall hire a row of
+broomsticks. More and more, the War appears to me a tragic hoax.
+
+_November_ 1.
+
+E---- has had a set-back and is in bed again. However sclerotic my nerve
+tissue, I feel as flaccid as a jelly.
+
+My God! how I loathe the prospect of death.
+
+_November_ 3.
+
+I must have some music or I shall hear the paralysis creeping. That is
+why I lie in bed and whistle.
+
+"My dear Brown, what am I to do?"[5] (I like to dramatise myself like
+that--it is an anodyne).
+
+I feel as if I were living alone on Ascension Island with the tide
+coming up continuously, up and up and up.
+
+_November_ 6.
+
+She has known _all_ from the beginning! M---- warned her _not_ to marry
+me. How brave and loyal of her! What an ass I have been. I am
+overwhelmed with feelings of shame and self-contempt and sorrow for her.
+She is quite cheerful and an enormous help.
+
+_November_ 12.
+
+What a wreck my existence has become and--dragging down others with me.
+
+If only I could rest assured that after I am dead these Journals will be
+tenderly cared for--as tenderly as this blessed infant! It would be
+cruel if even after I have paid the last penalty, my efforts and
+sufferings should continue to remain unknown or disregarded. What I
+would give to know the effect I shall produce when published! I am
+tortured by two doubts--whether these MSS. (the labour and hope of many
+years) will survive accidental loss and whether they really are of any
+value. I have no faith in either.
+
+_November_ 14.
+
+In fits of panic, I keep saying to myself: "My dear Brown, what am I to
+do?" But where is Brown? Brown, you devil! where are you?
+
+... To think how I have acted the Prince to her when really I am only a
+beggar!
+
+_November_ 16.
+
+A little better and more cheerful: altho' my impregnable colon still
+holds out.
+
+It would be nice if a physician from London one of these days were to
+gallop up hotspur, tether his horse to the gate post and dash in waving
+a reprieve--the discovery of a cure!
+
+... I was in an impish mood and said: "Oh! dear, I'm full of misery."
+
+"Don't be silly," she said, "so am I."
+
+_November_ 17.
+
+E---- has been telling me some of her emotions during and after her
+fateful visit to my Doctor just before our marriage. He did not spare
+her and even estimated the length of my life after I had once taken to
+my bed--about 12 months. I remember his consulting room so well--all its
+furniture and the photograph of Madam Blavatsky over the door, and I
+picture her to myself sitting opposite to him in a sullen silence
+listening to the whole lugubrious story. Then she said at last: "All
+this won't make any difference to me." She went home to her mother in a
+dream, along the streets I have followed so often. I can follow all her
+footsteps in imagination and keep on retracing them. It hurts, but I do
+so because it seems to make her some amends for my being childishly
+unconscious at the time. Poor darling woman--if only I had known! My
+instinct was right--I felt in my bones it was wrong to marry, yet here
+was M---- urging me on. "You marry," her mother said to her, "I'll stand
+by you," which was right royal of her. There followed some trying months
+of married life with this white hot secret in her bosom as a barricade
+to perfect intimacy; me she saw always under this cloud of crude
+disgusting pathos making her say a hundred times to herself: "He doesn't
+know;" then Zeppelin raids and a few symptoms began to grow obvious,
+until what before she had to take on trust from the Doctor came
+diabolically true before her eyes. Thank God that's all over at last. I
+know her now for all she is worth--her loyalty and devotion, her courage
+and strength. If only I had something to give her in return! something
+more than the dregs of a life and a constitutional pessimism. I greatly
+desire to make some sacrifice, but I am so poor these days, so very much
+a pauper on her charity, there is no sacrifice I can make. Even my life
+would scarcely be a sacrifice in the circumstances--it is hard not to be
+able to give when one _wants_ to give.
+
+_November_ 20.
+
+In the doldrums. Tired of this damnable _far niente_,--I am being gently
+smothered under a mountain of feathers. I should like to engage upon
+some cold, hard, glittering intellectualism.
+
+"I want to read Kant," I said. The Baby slept, E---- was sewing and
+N---- writing letters. I leaned back in my armchair beside the bookshelf
+and began to read out the titles of my books in a loud voice.
+
+"My dear!" E---- said.
+
+"I am caressing my past," I answered. "Wiedersheim's _Comparative
+Anatomy of Vertebrates_, Smith Woodward's _Vertebrate Palæontology_--why
+it's like visiting old prospects and seeing how the moss has grown over
+the stones."
+
+I hummed a comic song and then said: "As I can't burn the house down, I
+shall go to bed."
+
+N----: "You can talk if you like, it won't interfere."
+
+E----: "He's talking to his besoms."
+
+"Certainly," I said to N----, absent-mindedly.
+
+E----: "You ought to have said 'Thank you.'"
+
+I blew out my cheeks and E---- laughed.
+
+N----: "How do you spell 'regimental'?"
+
+I told her--wrongly, and E---- said I was in a devilish mood.
+
+"If we say that we have no sin" I chanted in reply, "we deceive
+ourselves and the truth is not in us." I next gave a bit out of a
+speech by Disraeli with exaggerated rhetorical gestures.
+
+E---- (with pity): "Poor young man."
+
+Presently she came over and in a tired way put her arms around my neck
+so I immediately began to sing "Rock of Ages, cleft for me," in the
+bass, which immediately reminded me of dear old Dad, whose favourite
+hymn it was.... Then I imitated the Baby. And then to bed fretful and
+very bitter.
+
+_November_ 27.
+
+... I wish I could die of heart failure--and at once! What a luxury that
+would be as compared with my present prospect!
+
+A Tomtit on the fence this morning made me dissolve in tears:--self-pity
+I believe. I remember Tomtits in ----shire. Put on a gramophone record
+and--ugh! but I'm too sick to write.
+
+_November_ 28.
+
+The shock I gave my spinal column in 1915 up in the Lakes undoubtedly
+re-awakened activity among the bacteria. Luck for you! I, of all persons
+to concuss my spine!!
+
+... I listen to the kettle singing, I look at the pictures in the fire,
+read a bit, ask what time it is, see the Baby "topped and tailed," yawn,
+blow my nose, put on a gramophone record--I have the idea of passing on
+the midnight with no pain to the tune of some healing ragtime.
+
+_November_ 29.
+
+The anniversary of our engagement day two years ago. How mad the idea of
+marriage seemed to me--and my instinct was right: if only I had known!
+Yet she says she does not regret anything.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This morning I turned to read with avidity accounts of the last hours of
+Keats, Gibbon, Oscar Wilde and Baudelaire. I gained astonishing comfort
+out of this, especially in the last ... who died of G.P.I. in a Brussels
+Hospital.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+E---- is awfully courageous and,--as usual ready to do everything in her
+power. How can I ever express sufficient gratitude to these two dear
+women (and my wife, above all) for casting in their lot knowingly with
+mine?
+
+_December_ 1.
+
+I believe I am good for another 12 months without abnormal worries. Just
+now, of course, the Slug ain't exactly on the thorn--on the cabbage in
+fact as E---- suggested. The Grasshopper is much of a burden and the
+voice of the Turtle has gone from my land (where did all these Bible
+phrases come from?). The first bark of the Wolf (God save us, 'tis all
+the Animal Kingdom sliding down my penholder) was heard with the
+reduction in her work to-day, and I suspect there's worse to come with a
+sovereign already only worth 12s. 6d.
+
+_December_ 4.
+
+The Baby touch is the most harrowing of all. If we were childless we
+should be merely unfortunate, but an infant....
+
+_December_ 11.
+
+Am receiving ionisation treatment from an electrical therapeutist--a
+quack! He is a sort of electrician--still, if he mends my bells I'll
+kiss his boots. As for ----, he is no better than a byreman, and I call
+him Hodge. This is not the first time I have felt driven to act behind
+the back of the Profession. In 1912, being desperate, and M---- worse
+than a headache, I greedily and credulously sucked in the advice of my
+boarding-house proprietor and went to see a homœopathist in Finsbury
+Circus. He proved to be a charlatan at 10s. 6d. a time, and tho' I
+realised it at once, I religiously travelled about for a month or more
+with tinctures and drop-bottle. I could write a book on the Doctors I
+have known and the blunders they have made about me.... The therapeutist
+took me for 33. I feel 63. I am 27. What a wreck I am, and....
+
+_December_ 12.
+
+It is so agreeable to be able to write again that I write now for the
+sheer physical pleasure of being able to use a pen and form letters.
+
+_An Adventure in Search of Health_
+
+About the end of September, I began to feel so ill that Nurse went for
+the Doctor who assured me that E---- was all right--I need not
+worry--"You go away at once and get some fresh air," and so forth. "I
+feel quite ill," I said, struggling to break the news.
+
+"Sort of nervous?" he enquired good-naturedly, "run down? I should get
+right away at once."
+
+I began tentatively. "Well, I have a rather long medical history and
+perhaps ... you ... might care to read the certificate of my London
+Doctor?"
+
+I went to my escritoire and returned with M----'s letter addressed to
+"The M.O. examining Mr. B."
+
+Hodge pulled out the missive, studied the brief note carefully and long,
+at the same time drawing in his breath--deeply, and gnawing the back of
+his hand.
+
+"I know all about it," I said to relieve him.
+
+"Is it quite certain? about this disease?" he said presently. "You are
+very young for it."
+
+"I think there is no doubt," and he began to put me thro' the usual
+tricks.
+
+"I should go right away at once," he said, "and go on with your arsenic.
+And whatever you do--don't worry--your wife is all right."
+
+After beseeching him to keep silence about it as I thought she did not
+know, I shewed him out and locked up the certificate again.
+
+Next morning I felt thoroughly cornered: I was not really fit enough to
+travel; my hand and leg were daily growing more and more paralysed and
+J---- wired to say she could not put me up as they were going away for
+the week end. So I wired back engaging rooms, as with the nurse in the
+house and E---- as she was, I simply could not stay at home....
+
+On the way to the Station I was still in two minds whether or not to
+pull the taxi up at the Nursing Home and go inside, but harassing debate
+as it was, our rapidly diminishing bank balance finally drove me on.
+
+---- came up to London with me and sought out a comfortable corner seat,
+but by the time the train left, a mother and a crying child had got in
+and everywhere else was full. A girl opposite who saw ---- hand me a
+brandy flask and knew I was ill, looked at me compassionately.
+
+At Reading, another woman with a baby got in and both babies cried in
+chorus, jangling my nerves to bits!--until I got out into the corridor,
+by a miracle not falling down, with one leg very feeble and treacherous.
+All seats were taken, excepting a first-class compartment where I looked
+in enviously at a lucky youth stretched out asleep full length along the
+empty seat.
+
+All the people and the noise of the train began to make me fret, so I
+sought out the repose of a lavatory where I remained eating sandwiches
+and an apple for the best part of an hour. It was good to be alone.
+
+Later on, I discovered an empty seat in a compartment occupied by
+persons whose questionable appearance my short sight entirely failed to
+make me aware of until I got inside with them. They were a family of
+Sheenies, father, mother and three children, whose joint emanations in a
+closed-up railway carriage made an effluvium like to kill a regiment of
+guards. They were E. end pawnbrokers or dealers in second-hand clothes.
+
+I was too nervous to appear rude by immediately with-drawing, so I said
+politely to the man clad in second-hand furs: "Is that seat taken?"
+
+He affected to be almost asleep. So I repeated. He stared at me and then
+said:
+
+"Oh! yes ... but you can have it for a bit if you like."
+
+I sat down timorously on the extreme edge of the seat and stared at, but
+could not read, my newspaper out of sheer nervous apprehension. My sole
+idea was to get out as soon as I decorously could. Out of the corner of
+my eye, I observed the three children--two girls and a boy--all garbed
+in black clothes and wearing large clumsy boots with nails and scutes on
+the soles. The girls had large inflorescences of bushy hair which they
+swung about as they turned their heads and made me shudder. The mother's
+face was like a brown, shrivelled apple, topped with a black bonnet and
+festooned on each side with ringlets of curly dark hair. Around her neck
+a fur tippet: as I live--second-hand clothes dealers from Whitechapel.
+
+The man I dare not look at: I sat beside him and merely imagined.
+
+At ----, I got a decent seat and arrived at T---- jaded, but still
+alive, with no one to meet me. Decent rooms on the sea-front.
+
+Next morning J---- went away for the week end and I could not possibly
+explain how ill I was: she might have stayed at home.
+
+To preserve my sanity, Saturday afternoon, took a desperate remedy by
+hiring a motor-car and travelling to Torquay and back _via_
+Babbacombe....
+
+On the Sunday, feeling suddenly ill, I sent for the local medico whom I
+received in the drab little room by lamplight after dinner. "I've a
+tingling in my right hand," I said, "that drives me nearly silly."
+
+"And on the soles of your feet?" he asked at once.
+
+I assented, and he ran thro' at once all the symptoms in series.
+
+"I see you know what my trouble is," I said shyly. And we chatted a
+little about the War, about disease, and I told him of the recent memoir
+on the histology of the disease ---- in the _Trans. Roy. Soc_, Edin.
+which interested him. Then he went away again--very amiable, very polite
+--an obvious _non possumus_....
+
+On Monday at 4 went up to ---- to tea as previously arranged, but found
+the house shut up so returned to my rooms in a rage.
+
+After tea, having read the newspapers inside out, sat by the open window
+looking out on to the Marine Parade. It was dusk, a fine rain was
+falling, and the parade and sea-front were deserted save for an
+occasional figure hurrying past with mackintosh and umbrella. Suddenly
+as I sat looking out on this doleful scene, a dirge from nowhere in
+particular sounded on my ears which I soon recognised as "Robin Adair,"
+sung very _lento_ and very _maestoso_ by a woman, with a flute obligato
+played by some second person. The tide was right up, and the little
+waves murmured listlessly at long intervals: never before I think have I
+been plunged into such an abyss of acute misery.
+
+Next day the wire came. But it was too late. The day after that, I was
+worse, a single ray of sunshine being the rediscovery of the
+second-hand-clothes family from Whitechapel taking the air together on
+the front. This dreary party was traipsing along, the parents in their
+furs giving an occasional glance at the sea uncomfortably, as if they
+only noticed it was wet, and the children still in black and still
+wearing their scuted boots, obviously a little uncomfortable in a place
+so clean and windswept. I think they all came to the seaside out of
+decorum and for the satisfaction of feeling that they could afford it
+like other folk, and that old-clothes was as profitable a business as
+another.
+
+On Thursday, returned home as I was afraid of being taken ill and having
+to go into the public hospital. Arrived home and went to bed and here we
+are till Jan. 1st on 3 months' sick leave. However, the swingeing
+urtication in my hands and feet has now almost entirely abated and
+to-day I went out with E---- and the perambulator, _which I pushed_.
+
+_December_ 13.
+
+_A Baby-Girl_
+
+Walked down the bottom of the road and hung over some wooden railings. A
+little village baby-girl aged not more than 3 was hovering about near
+me while I gazed abstractedly across the Park at the trees. Presently,
+she crawled through the railings into the field and picked up a few dead
+leaves--a baby picking up dead leaves! Then she threw them down, and
+kicked them. Then moved on again--rustling about intermittently like a
+winter Thrush in the shrubbery. At last, she had stumbled around to
+where I was leaning over the railings. She stood immediately in front of
+me and silently looked up with a steady reproachful gaze: "Ain't you
+'shamed, you lazy-bones?" till I could bear her inquisitorial gaze no
+longer, and so went and hung over some more railings further on.
+
+_Service_
+
+He asked for a Tennyson. She immediately went upstairs in the dark, lit
+a match and got it for him.
+
+He asked for a Shakespeare. And without a moment's hesitation, she went
+upstairs again, lit another match and got that for him.
+
+And I believe if he had said "Rats," she would have shot out silently
+into the dark and tried to catch one for him. Only a woman is capable of
+such service.
+
+_Hardy's Poetry_
+
+
+                                "You did not come,
+     And marching time drew on and wore me numb--
+     Yet less for loss of your dear presence there
+     Than that I thus found lacking in your make
+     That high compassion which can overbear
+     Reluctance for pure loving-kindness' sake
+     Grieved I, _when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum_,
+                                     You did not come."
+
+I thoroughly enjoy Hardy's poetry for its masterfulness, for his sheer
+muscular compulsion over the words and sentences. In his rough-hewn
+lines he yokes the recalcitrant words together and drives them along
+mercilessly with something that looks like simple brute strength.
+Witness the triumphant last line in the above where the words are
+absolute bondslaves to his exact meaning, his indomitable will. All
+this pleases me the more for I know to my cost what stubborn, sullen,
+hephæstian beasts words and clauses can sometimes be. It is nice to see
+them punished. Hardy's poetry is Michael Angelo rather than Greek,
+Browning not Tennyson.
+
+_December_ 14.
+
+What a day! After a night of fog signals, I awoke this morning to find
+it still foggy and the ground covered with a grey rime. All day the fog
+has remained: I look out now thro' the yellowish atmosphere across a
+field which is frosted over, the grass and brambles stiff and glassy. My
+back is aching and the cold is so intense that unless I crouch over the
+fire hands and feet become immediately stone-cold. All day I have
+crouched over the fire, reading newspapers, listening to fog signals and
+the screaming of the baby.... I have been in a torpor, like a Bat in a
+cavern--really dead yet automatically hanging on to life by my hind
+legs.
+
+_December_ 15.
+
+"To stand upon one's guard against Death exasperates her malice and
+protracts our sufferings." W.S. Landor.
+
+_December_ 19.
+
+The Parson called, over the christening of the baby. I told him I was an
+agnostic. "There are several interesting lines of thought down here," he
+said wearily, passing his hand over his eyes. I know several men more
+enthusiastic over Fleas and Worms than this phlegmatic priest, over
+Jesus Christ.
+
+_December_ 20.
+
+The reason why I do not spend my days in despair and my nights in
+hopeless weeping simply is that I am in love with my own ruin. I
+therefore deserve no sympathy, and probably shan't get it: my own
+profound self-compassion is enough. I am so abominably self-conscious
+that no smallest detail in this tragedy eludes me. Day after day I sit
+in the theatre of my own life and watch the drama of my own history
+proceeding to its close. Pray God the curtain falls at the right moment
+lest the play drag on into some long and tedious anticlimax.
+
+We all like to dramatise ourselves. Byron was dramatising himself when,
+in a fit of rhetorical self-compassion, he wrote:
+
+"Oh! could I feel as I have felt or be what I have been, Or weep as I
+could once have wept o'er many a vanished scene."
+
+Shelley, too, being an artist could not stand insensible to his own
+tragedy and Francis Thompson suggests that he even anticipated his own
+end from a passage in _Julian and Maddalo_, "... if you can't swim,
+Beware of Providence." "Did no earthly _dixisti_," Thompson asks, "sound
+in his ears as he wrote it?"
+
+In any event, it was an admirable ending from the dramatic point of
+view; Destiny is often a superb dramatist. What more perfect than the
+death of Rupert Brooke at Scyros in the Ægean?[6] The lives of some men
+are works of art, perfect in form, in development and in climax. Yet how
+frequently a life eminently successful or even eminently ruinous is also
+an unlovely, sordid, ridiculous or vulgar affair! Every one will concede
+that it must be a hard thing to be commonplace and vulgar even in
+misfortune, to discover that the tragedy of your own precious life has
+been dramatically bad, that your life even in its ruins is but a poor
+thing, and your own miseries pathetic from their very insignificance;
+that you are only Jones with chronic indigestion rather than Guy de
+Maupassant mad, or Coleridge with a great intellect being slowly
+dismantled by opium.
+
+If only I could order my life by line and level, if I could control or
+create my own destiny and mould it into some marble perfection! In
+short, if life were an art and not a lottery! In the lives of all of us,
+how many wasted efforts, how many wasted opportunities, false starts,
+blind--how many lost days--and man's life is but a paltry three score
+years and ten: pitiful short commons indeed.
+
+Sometimes, as I lean over a five-barred gate or gaze stupidly into the
+fire, I garner a bitter-sweet contentment in making ideal
+reconstructions of my life, selecting my parents, the date and place of
+my birth, my gifts, my education, my mentors and what portions out of
+the infinity of knowledge shall gain a place within my mind--that sacred
+glebe-land to be zealously preserved and enthusiastically cultivated.
+Whereas, my mind is now a wilderness in which all kinds of useless
+growths have found an ineradicable foothold. I am exasperated to find I
+have by heart the long addresses of a lot of dismal business
+correspondents and yet can't remember the last chapters of Ecclesiastes:
+what a waste of mind-stuff there! It irks me to be acquainted even to
+nausea with the spot in which I live, I whose feet have never traversed
+even so much as this little island much less carried me in triumph to
+Timbuctoo, Honolulu, Rio, Rome.
+
+_December_ 21.
+
+This continuous preoccupation with self sickens me--as I look back over
+these entries. It is inconceivable that I should be here steadily
+writing up my ego day by day in the middle of this disastrous war....
+Yesterday I had a move on. To-day life wearies me. I am sick of myself
+and life. This beastly world with its beastly war and hate makes me
+restless, dissatisfied, and full of a longing to be quit of it. I am as
+full of unrest as an autumn Swallow. "My soul," I said to them at
+breakfast with a sardonic grin, "is like a greyhound in the slips. I
+shall have to wear heavy boots to prevent myself from soaring. I have
+such an uplift on me that I could carry a horse, a dog, a cat, if you
+tied them on to my homing spirit and so transformed my Ascension into an
+adventure out of Baron Munchausen." With a gasconnade of contempt, I
+should like to turn on my heel and march straight out of this wretched
+world at once.
+
+_December_ 22.
+
+_Gibbon's Autobiography_
+
+This book makes me of all people (and especially just now) groan
+inwardly. "I am at a loss," he says, referring to the _Decline and
+Fall_, "how to describe the success of the work without betraying the
+vanity of the writer.... My book was on every table and almost on every
+toilette." It makes me bite my lips. Rousseau and his criticism of "I
+sighed as a lover; I obeyed as a son," and Gibbon on his dignity in
+reply make one of the most ludicrous incidents in literary history. "...
+that extraordinary man whom I admire and pity, should have been less
+precipitate in condemning the moral character and conduct of a
+stranger!" Oh my giddy Aunt! Isn't this _rich_? Still, I am glad you did
+not marry her: we could ill spare Madam de Staël, Madam Necker's
+daughter, that wonderful, vivacious and warmhearted woman.
+
+"After the morning has been occupied with the labours of the library, I
+wish to unbend rather than exercise my mind; and in the interval between
+tea and supper, I am far from disdaining the innocent amusement of a
+game of cards." How Jane Austen would have laughed at him! The passage
+reminds me of the Rev. Mr. Collins saying:
+
+"Had I been able I should have been only too pleased to give you a song,
+for I regard music as a harmless diversion and perfectly compatible with
+the profession of a clergyman."
+
+"When I contemplate the common lot of mortality," Gibbon writes, "I must
+acknowledge I have drawn a high prize in the lottery of life," and he
+goes on to count up all his blessings with the most offensive
+delight--his wealth, the good fortune of his birth, his ripe years, a
+cheerful temper, a moderate sensibility, health, sound and peaceful
+slumbers from infancy, his valuable friendship with Lord Sheffield, his
+rank, fame, etc., etc., _ad nauseam_. He rakes over his whole life for
+things to be grateful for. He intones his happiness in a long recitative
+of thanksgiving that his lot was not that of a savage, of a slave, or a
+peasant; he washes his hands with imaginary soap on reflecting on the
+bounty of Nature which cast his birth in a free and civilised country,
+in an age of science and philosophy, in a family of honourable rank and
+decently endowed with the gifts of fortune--sleek, complacent,
+oleaginous and salacious old gentleman, how I would love to have bombed
+you out of your self-satisfaction!
+
+_Masefield's "Gallipoli"_
+
+It amused me to discover the evident relish with which the author of _In
+the Daffodil Fields_ emphasises the blood and the flowers in the attack
+on Achi Baba. It's all blood and beautiful flowers mixed up together to
+Masefield's great excitement.
+
+     "A swear word in a city slum
+      A simple swear word is to some--
+      To Masefield something more."
+
+                              MAX BEERBOHM.
+
+Still, to call Gallipoli "bloody Hell" is, after all, only a
+pedantically exact description. You understand, tho', a very remarkable
+book--a work of genius.
+
+_December_ 23.
+
+To be cheerful this Xmas would require a _coup de théâtre_--some sort of
+psychological sleight of hand.
+
+I get downstairs at 10 and spend the day reading and writing, without a
+soul to converse with. Everything comes to me second-hand--thro' the
+newspapers, the world of life thro' the halfpenny _Daily News_, and the
+world of books thro' the _Times Literary Supplement_. For the rest I
+listen to the kettle singing and make symphonies out of it, or I look
+into the fire to see the pictures there....
+
+_December_ 24.
+
+Everyone I suppose engaged in this irony of Xmas. What a solemn lunatic
+the world is.
+
+Walked awhile in a beautiful lane close by, washed hard and clean and
+deeply channelled by the recent rain. On the hill-top, I could look
+right across the valley to the uplands, where on the sky line a few Firs
+stood in stately sequestration from common English Oaks, like a group of
+ambassadors in full dress. In the distance a hen clucked, I saw a few
+Peewits wheeling and watched the smoke rising from our cottage
+perpendicularly into the motionless air. There was a clement quiet and a
+clement warmth, and in my heart a burst of real happiness that made me
+rich even beside less unfortunate beings and beyond what I had ever
+expected to be again.
+
+_December_ 26.
+
+"In thus describing and illustrating my intellectual torpor, I use terms
+that apply more or less to every part of the years during which I was
+under the Circean spells of opium. But for misery--"
+
+(Why do I waste my energy with this damned Journal? I stop. I hate it. I
+am going out for a walk in the fog.)
+
+_December_ 31.
+
+_Reminiscences_
+
+For the past few days I have been living in a quiet hermitage of
+retrospect. My memories have gone back to the times--remote,
+inaccessible, prehistoric--before ever this Journal was begun, when I
+myself was but a jelly without form and void--that is, before I had
+developed any characteristic qualities and above all the dominant one, a
+passion for Natural History.
+
+One day a school friend, being covetous of certain stamps in my
+collection, induced me to "swop" them for his collection of birds' eggs
+which he showed me nestling in the bran at the bottom of a box. He was a
+cunning boy and thought he had the better of the bargain. He little
+realised--nor did I--the priceless gift he bestowed when his little fat
+dirty hands decorated, I remember, with innumerable warts, picked out
+the eggs and gave them to me. In fact, a smile momentarily crossed his
+face, he turned his head aside, he spat in happy contemplation of the
+deal.
+
+I continued eagerly to add to the little collection of Birds' eggs, but
+for a long time it never occurred to me to go out into the country
+myself and collect them,--I just _swopped,_ until one day our errand
+boy, who stuttered, had bandy legs, and walked on the outside of his
+feet with the gait of an Anthropoid, said to me, "I will sh-how you how
+to find Birds' n-nests if you like to come out to the w-woods." So one
+Saturday, when the backyard was cleaned down and the coal boxes filled,
+he and I started off together to a wood some way down the river bank,
+where he--my good and beneficent angel--presently showed me a Thrush's
+nest in the fork of a young Oak tree. Never-to-be-forgotten moment! The
+sight of those blue speckled eggs lying so unexpectedly, as I climbed up
+the tree, on the other side of an untidy tangle of dried moss and grass,
+in a neat little earthenware cup, caused probably the first tremor of
+real emotion at a beautiful object. The emotion did not last long! In a
+moment I had stolen the eggs and soon after smashed them--in trying to
+blow them, schoolboy fashion.
+
+Then, I rapidly became an ardent field naturalist. My delight in Birds
+and Birds' eggs spread in a benignant infection to every branch of
+Natural History. I collected Beetles, Butterflies, plants, Birds' wings,
+Birds' claws, etc. Dr. Gordon Staples in the _Boy's Own Paper_, taught
+me how to make a skin, and I got hold of a Mole and then a Squirrel (the
+latter falling to my prowess with a catapult), stuffed them and set them
+up in cases which I glazed myself. I even painted in suitable
+backgrounds, in the one case a mole-hill, looking, I fear, more like a
+mountain, and in the other, a Fir tree standing at an impossible angle
+of 45°. Then I read a book on trapping, and tried to catch Hares. Then I
+read Sir John Lubbock's _Ants, Bees and Wasps_, and constructed an
+observation Ants' nest (though the Ants escaped).
+
+In looking back to these days, I am chiefly struck by my extraordinary
+ignorance of the common objects of the countryside, for although we
+lived in the far west country, the house, without a garden, was in the
+middle of the town, and all my seniors were as ignorant as I. Nature
+Study in the schools did not then exist, I had no benevolent
+paterfamilias to take me by the hand and point out the common British
+Birds; for my father's only interest was in politics. I can remember
+coming home once all agog with a wonderful Bird I had seen--like a tiny
+Magpie, I said. No one could tell me that it was, of course, only a
+little Pied Wagtail.
+
+The absence of sympathy or of congenial companionship, however, had
+absolutely no effect in damping my ardour. As I grew older my
+egg-collecting companions fell away, some took up the law, or tailoring,
+or clerking, some entered the Church, while I became yearly more
+engrossed. In my childhood my enthusiasm lay like a watch-spring, coiled
+up and hidden inside me, until that Thrush's nest and eggs seized hold
+of it by the end and pulled it out by degrees in a long silver ribbon. I
+kept live Bats in our upstairs little-used drawing-room, and Newts and
+Frogs in pans in the backyard. My mother tolerated these things because
+I had sufficiently impressed her with the importance to science of the
+observations which I was making and about to publish. Those on Bats
+indeed were thought fit to be included in a standard work
+--Barrett-Hamilton's _Mammals of Great Britain and Ireland_. The
+published articles served to bring me into correspondence with other
+naturalists, and I shall never forget my excitement on receiving for the
+first time a letter of appreciation. It was from the author of several
+natural history books, to
+
+               "W.N.P. BARBELLION, ESQ.,
+                  Naturalist,
+                           Downstable,"
+
+and illustrated with a delightful sketch of Ring Plovers feeding on the
+saltings. This letter was carefully pasted into my diary, where it still
+remains.
+
+After all, it is perhaps unfair to say that I had no kindred spirit with
+me in my investigations. Martha, the servant girl who had been with us
+for 30 years, loved animals of all sorts and--what was strange in a
+country girl--she had no fear of handling even such things as Newts and
+Frogs. My Batrachia often used to escape from their pans in the yard
+into Martha's kitchen, and, not a bit scandalised, she would sometimes
+catch one marching across the rug or squeezing underneath a cupboard.
+"Lor'!" would be her comment as she picked the vagrant up and took it
+back to its aquarium, "can't 'em travel?" Martha had an eye for
+character in animals. In the long dynasty of cats we possessed one at
+length who by association of opposite ideas we called Marmaduke because
+he ought to have been called Jan Stewer. "A chuff old feller, 'idden
+'ee?" Martha used to ask me with pride and love in her eyes. "He purrs
+in broad Devon," I used to answer. Marmaduke need only wave the tip of
+his tail to indicate to her his imperative desire to promenade. Martha
+knew if no one else did that every spring "Pore 'Duke," underneath his
+fur, used to come out in spots. "'Tiz jus' like a cheel 'e gets a bit
+spotty as the warm weather cums along." Starlings on the washhouse roof,
+regularly fed with scraps, were ever her wonder and delight. "Don' 'em
+let it down, I zay?" In later years, when I was occupied in the top
+attic, making dissections of various animals that I collected, she would
+sometimes leave her scrubbing and cleaning in the room below to thrust
+her head up the attic stairs and enquire, "'Ow be 'ee gettin' on then?"
+Her unfeigned interest in my anatomical researches gave me real
+pleasure, and I took delight in arousing her wonder by pointing out and
+explaining the brain of a Pigeon or the nervous system of a Dog-fish, or
+a Frog's heart taken out and still beating in the dissecting dish. She,
+in reply, would add reflections upon her own experiences in preparing
+meat for dinner--anecdotes about the "maw" of an old Fowl, or the great
+"pipe" of a Goose. Then, suddenly scurrying downstairs, she would say,
+"I must be off or I shall be all be'ind like the cow's tail." Now the
+dignified interest of the average educated man would have chilled me.
+
+By the way, years later, when he was a miner in S. Wales, that historic
+errand-boy displayed his consciousness of the important role he once
+played by sending me on a postcard congratulations on my success in the
+B.M. appointment. It touched me to think he had not forgotten after
+years of separation.
+
+
+[1] So it proved. See September 26 _et seq._
+
+[2] In "La Recherche de l'Absolu" (Balzac).
+
+[3] See September 3 (next entry), "_A Jolt_," and September 24
+(_infra_).
+
+[4] The handwriting is painfully laboured, very large across a page and
+so crooked as to be almost undecipherable in places.
+
+[5] This is from a letter written by the dying Keats in Naples to his
+friend Brown.
+
+[6] Contrast with it Wordsworth rotting at Rydal Mount or Swinburne at
+Putney.
+
+
+
+
+1917
+
+
+_January_ 1.
+
+The New Year came in like a thief in the night--noiselessly; no bells,
+no syrens, no songs by order of the Government. Nothing could have been
+more appropriate than a burglarious entry like this--seeing what the
+year has come to filch from us all in the next 12 months.
+
+_January_ 20.
+
+I am over 6 feet high and as thin as a skeleton; every bone in my body,
+even the neck vertebrae, creak at odd intervals when I move. So that I
+am not only a skeleton but a badly articulated one to boot. If to this
+is coupled the fact of the creeping paralysis, you have the complete
+horror. Even as I sit and write, millions of bacteria are gnawing away
+my precious spinal cord, and if you put your ear to my back the sound of
+the gnawing I dare say could be heard. The other day a man came and set
+up a post in the garden for the clothes' line. As soon as I saw the post
+I said "gibbet"--it looks exactly like one, and I, for sure, must be the
+malefactor. Last night while E---- was nursing the baby I most
+delightfully remarked: "What a little parasite--why you are Cleopatra
+affixing the aspic--'Tarry, good lady, the bright day is done, and we
+are for the dark.'"
+
+The fact that such images arise spontaneously in my mind, show how
+rotten to the core I am.
+
+... The advent of the Baby was my _coup de grâce._ The little creature
+seems to focus under one head all my personal disasters and more than
+once a senseless rage has clutched me at the thought of a baby in
+exchange for my ambition, a nursery for the study. Yet, on the whole, I
+find it a good and satisfying thing to see her, healthy, new, intact on
+the threshold: I grow tired of my own dismal life just as one does of a
+suit of dirty clothes. My life and person are patched and greasy; hers
+is new and without a single blemish or misfortune.... Moreover, she
+makes her mother happy and consoles her grandmother too.
+
+_January_ 21.
+
+_Death_
+
+What a delightful thing the state of Death would be if the dead passed
+their time haunting the places they loved in life and living over again
+the dear delightful past--if death were one long indulgence in the
+pleasures of memory! if the disembodied spirit forgot all the pains of
+its previous existence and remembered only the happiness! Think of me
+flitting about the orchards and farm-yards in ---- birdsnesting, walking
+along the coast among the seabirds, climbing Exmoor, bathing in streams
+and in the sea, haunting all my old loves and passions, cutting open
+with devouring curiosity Rabbits, Pigeons, Frogs, Dogfish, Amphioxus;
+think of me, too, at length unwillingly deflected from these cherished
+pursuits in the raptures of first love, cutting her initials on trees
+and fences instead of watching birds, day-dreaming over _Parker and
+Haswell_ and then bitterly reproaching myself later for much loss of
+precious time. How happy I shall be if Death is like this: to be living
+over again and again all my ecstasies, over first times--the first time
+I found a Bottle Tit's nest, the first time I succeeded in penetrating
+into the fastnesses of my El Dorado--Exmoor, the first time I gazed upon
+the internal anatomy of a Snail, the first time I read Berkeley's
+_Principles of Human Understanding_ (what a soul-shaking epoch that
+was!), and the first time I kissed her! My hope is that I may haunt
+these times again, that I may haunt the places, the books, the bathes,
+the walks, the desires, the hopes, the first (and last) loves of my life
+all transfigured and beatified by sovereign Memory.
+
+_January_ 26.
+
+Out of doors to-day it's like the roaring forties! Every tree I passed
+in the lane was a great wind instrument, bellowing out a passionate
+song, and the sky was torn to ribbons. It is cold enough to freeze the
+nose off a brass Monkey, but very exhilarating. I stood on the hill and
+squared my fists to the wind and bade everything come on. I sit writing
+this by the fire and am thoroughly scourged and purified by this great
+castigating wind.... I think I will stick it out--I will sit quite still
+in my chair and defy this sculking footpad--let the paralysis creep into
+every bone, I will hang on to the last and watch it skulking with my
+most hideous grimace.
+
+_January_ 27.
+
+Still freezing and blowing. Coming back from the village, tho' I was
+tired and hobbling badly, decided to walk up the lane even if it meant
+crawling home on hands and knees.
+
+The sky was a quick-change artist to-day. Every time you looked you saw
+a different picture. From the bottom of the hill I looked up and saw
+above me--it seemed at an immense and windy height--a piece of blue,
+framed in an irregular edge of white woolly cloud seen thro' the crooked
+branches of an Oak. It was a narrow crooked lane, sunk deep in the soil
+with large smooth surfaces of stone like skulls bulging up in places
+where the rain had washed away the soil.
+
+Further on, the sun was lying low almost in the centre of a
+semi-circular bend in the near horizon. It frosted the wool of a few
+sheep seen in silhouette, and then slowly disappeared in mist. On the
+right-hand side was a cottage with the smoke being wrenched away from
+the chimney top, and on the left a group of stately Firs, chanting a
+requiem like a cathedral choir.
+
+_January_ 28.
+
+Still blowing and bitterly cold. Along the path fields in the Park I
+stopped to look at a thick clump of Firs standing aloof on some high
+ground and guarded by an outside ring of honest English Oaks, Ashes and
+Elms. They were a sombre mysterious little crowd intent, I fancied, on
+some secret ritual of the trees. The high ground on which they stood
+looked higher and more inaccessible than it really was, the clump was
+dark green, almost black, and in between their trunks where all was
+obscurity, some hardy adventurer might well have discovered a Grand Lama
+sitting within his Penetralia. But I had no taste for any such
+profanity, and even as I looked the sun came out from behind a cloud
+very slowly, bringing the picture into clearer focus, chasing away
+shadows and bringing out all the colours. The landscape resumed its
+homely aspect: an English park with Firs in it.
+
+_January_ 29.
+
+Last night, I pulled aside the window curtain of our front door and
+peeped out. Just below the densely black projecting gable of the house I
+saw the crescent moon lying on her back in a bed of purple sky, and I
+saw our little white frosted garden path curving up towards the garden
+gate. It was a delicious _coup d'Å“il_, and I shewed it to E----.
+
+_January_ 31.
+
+Showers of snow at intervals, the little flakes rocking about lazily or
+spiralling down, while the few that eventually reached the ground would
+in a moment or so be caught up in a sudden furious puff of wind, and
+sent driving along the road with the dust.
+
+My usual little jaunt up the lane past the mossy farm-house. Home to
+toasted tea-cakes and a pinewood fire, with my wife chattering prettily
+to the baby. After tea, enchanted by the reading of a new book--_Le
+Journal de Maurice de Guérin_--or rather the introduction to it by
+Sainte-Beuve. I devoured it! I have spent a devouring day; under a calm
+exterior I have burnt up the hours; all of me has been athrob; every
+little cell in my brain has danced to its own little tune. For to-day,
+Death has been an impossibility. I have felt that anyhow to-day I could
+not die--I have laughed at the mere thought of it. If only this mood
+would last! If I could feel thus always, then I could fend off Death for
+an immortality of life.
+
+But suddenly, as now, the real horror of my life and future comes on me
+in a flash. For a second I am terrified by the menace of the future, but
+fortunately only for a second. For I've learnt a trick which I fear to
+reveal; it is so valuable and necessary to me that if I talked of it or
+vulgarised it my secret might be stolen away. Not a word then!
+
+_Later_. I have just heard on the gramophone, some Grieg, and it has
+charged my happiness with disrupting voltage of desire. Oh! if only I
+had health, I could make the welkin ring! I shall leave so little behind
+me, such a few paltry pages beside what I have it in me to do. It
+shatters me.
+
+_February_ 1.
+
+Looking back, I must say I like the splendid gusto with which I lived
+thro' yesterday: that mettlesome fashion in which I took the lane, and
+at the top, how I swung around to sweep my gaze across to the uplands
+opposite with snow falling all the time. Then in the evening, the almost
+complete absorption in the new book when I forgot everything _pro tem_.
+It was quite like the old days.
+
+_February_ 2.
+
+_Crowd Fever_
+
+After four months' sick leave, returned to work and London.
+
+An illness like mine rejuvenates one--for the time being! A pony and
+jingle from the old "Fox and Hounds Inn" took me to the Station, and I
+enjoyed the feel of the wheels rolling beneath me over the hard road. In
+the train, I looked out of the window as interested as any schoolboy. On
+the Underground I was delighted with the smooth, quiet way with which
+the "Metro" trains glide into the Station. I had quite forgotten this.
+Then, when my hand began to get better, I rediscovered the pleasures of
+penmanship and kept on writing, with my tongue out. And I re-enjoyed the
+child's satisfaction in coaxing a button to slip into its hole: all
+grown-up people have forgotten how difficult and complex such operations
+are.
+
+This morning how desirable everything seemed to me! The world
+intoxicated me. Moving again among so many human beings gave me the
+crowd-fever, and started again all the pangs of the old familiar hunger
+for a fuller life, that centrifugal elan in which I feared for the
+disruption and scattering of my parts in all directions. Temporarily I
+lost the hegemony of my own soul. Every man and woman I met was my
+enemy, threatening me with the secession of some inward part. I was
+alarmed to discover how many women I could passionately love and with
+how many men I could form a lasting friendship. Within, all was anarchy
+and commotion, a cold fright seized me lest some extraordinary event was
+about to happen: some general histolysis of my body, some sudden
+disintegration of my personality, some madness, some strange death....
+I wanted to crush out the life of all these men and women in a great
+Bear's hug, my God! this sea of human faces whom I can never recognise,
+all of us alive together beneath this yellow catafalque of fog on the
+morning of the announcement of world famine and world war!...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To-night, I have lost this paroxysm. For I am home again by the
+fireside. All the multitude have disappeared from my view. I have lost
+them, every one. I have lost another day of my life and so have they,
+and we have lost each other. Meanwhile the great world spins on
+unrelentingly, frittering away lightly my precious hours (surely a small
+stock now?) while I sit discomfited by the evening fire and nurse my
+scraped hands that tingle because the spinning world has wrenched itself
+out of my feeble grasp.
+
+_February_ 3.
+
+This morning on arriving at S. Kensington, went straight to a Chemist's
+shop, but finding someone inside, I drew back, and went on to another.
+
+"Have you any morphia tabloids?" I asked a curly-haired, nice-looking,
+smiling youth, who leaned with both hands on the counter and looked at
+me knowingly, as if he had had unlimited experience of would-be morphi
+nomaniacs.
+
+"Yes, plenty of them," he said, fencing. And then waited.
+
+"Can you supply me?" I asked, feeling very conscious of myself.
+
+He smiled once more, shook his head and said it was contrary to the
+Defence of the Realm Act.
+
+I made a sorry effort to appear ingenuous, and he said:
+
+"Of course, it is only a palliative."
+
+With a solemn countenance intended to indicate pain I answered:
+
+"Yes, but palliatives are very necessary sometimes," and I walked out of
+the hateful shop discomfited.
+
+_February_ 6.
+
+Am busy re-writing,[1] editing and bowdlerising my journals for
+publication against the time when I shall have gone the way of all
+flesh. No one else would prepare it for publication if I don't. Reading
+it through again, I see what a remarkable book I have written. If only
+they will publish it!
+
+_February_ 7.
+
+_Chinese Lanterns_
+
+The other morning as I dressed, I could see the sun like a large yellow
+moon rising on a world, stiff, stark, its contours merely indicated
+beneath a winding-sheet of snow. Further around the horizon was another
+moon--the full moon itself--yellow likewise, but setting. It was the
+strangest picture I ever saw. I might well have been upon another
+planet; I could not have been more surprised even at a whole ring of
+yellow satellites arranged at regular intervals all around the horizon.
+
+In the evening of the same day, I drove home from the Station in a
+little governess-cart, over a snow-clogged road. The cautious little
+pony picked out her way so carefully in little
+strides--pat-pat-pat--wherever it was slippery, and the Landlord of the
+Inn sat opposite me extolling all the clever little creature's merits.
+It was dusk, and for some reason of the atmosphere the scraps of cloud
+appeared as blue sky and the blue sky as cloud, beneath which the full
+moon like a great Chinese lantern hung suspended so low down it seemed
+to touch the trees and hills. How have folk been able to "carry on" in a
+world so utterly strange as this one during the past few days! I marvel
+that beneath such moons and suns, the peoples of the world have not
+ceased for a while from the petty business of war during at least a few
+of our dancing revolutions around this furnace of a star. One of these
+days I should not be surprised if this fascinated earth did not fall
+into it like a moth into a candle. And where would our Great War be
+then?
+
+_February_ 28.
+
+_The Strangeness of my Life_
+
+Consider the War: and the current adventures of millions of men on land,
+sea and air; and the incessant labours of millions of men in factory and
+workshop and in the field; think of the hospitals and all they hold, of
+everyone hoping, fearing, suffering, waiting--of the concentration of
+all humanity on the one subject--the War. And then think of me, poor
+little me, deserted and forgotten, a tiny fragment sunk so deep and
+helplessly between the sheer granite walls of my environment that scarce
+an echo reaches me of the thunder among the mountains above. I read
+about the War in a ha'penny paper, and see it in the pictures of the
+_Daily Mirror_. For the rest, I live by counting the joints on insects'
+legs and even that much effort is almost beyond my strength.
+
+That is strange enough. But my life is stranger still by comparison. And
+this is the marvel: that every day I spend by the waters of Babylon,
+weeping and neglected among enthusiasts, enthusiastically counting
+joints, while every evening I return to Zion to my books, to Hardy's
+poems, to Maurice de Guérin's Journals, to my own memoirs. Mine is a
+life of consummate isolation, and I frequently marvel at it.
+
+The men I meet accept me as an entomologist and _ipso facto_, an
+enthusiast in the science. That is all they know of me, and all they
+want to know of me, or of any man. Surely no man's existence was ever
+quite such a duplicity as mine. I smile bitterly to myself ten times a
+day, as I engage in all the dreary technical jargon of professional talk
+with them. How they would gossip over the facts of my life if they knew!
+How scandalised they would be over my inner life's activities, how
+resentful of enthusiasm other than entomological!
+
+I find it very irksome to keep up this farce of concealment. I would
+love to declare myself. I loathe, hate and detest the secrecy of my real
+self: the continuous restraint enforced on me ulcerates my heart and
+makes harmonious social existence impossible with those who do not know
+me thoroughly. "On dit qu'au jugement dernier le secret des consciences
+sera révélé à tout l'univers; je voudrais qu'il en fut ainsi de moi dès
+aujourd'hui et que la vue de mon âme fut ouvert à tous venants." Maurice
+de Guérin.
+
+_March_ 1.
+
+It is curious for me to look at my tubes and microscope and realise that
+I shall never require them again for serious use. Life is a dreadful
+burden to me at the Museum. I am too ill for any scientific work so I
+write labels and put things away. I am simply marking time on the edge
+of a precipice awaiting the order, "Forward."
+
+It is excoriating to be thus wasting the last few precious days of my
+life in such mummery merely to get bread to eat. They might at least let
+me die in peace, and with fitting decorum. It is so ignoble to be
+tinkering about in a Museum among Scarabees and insects when I ought to
+be reflecting on life and death.
+
+I ask myself what ought to be my most appropriate reaction in such
+circumstances as the present? Why, of course, to carry on as if all were
+normal, and the future unknown: why, so I do, to outward view, for the
+sake of the others. Yet that is no reason why in my own inward parts I
+should not at times indulge in a little relaxation. It is a relief to
+put off the mailed coat, to sit awhile by the green-room fire and have
+life as it really is, all to myself. But the necessity of living will
+not let me alone. I must be always mumming.
+
+My life has been all isolation and restriction. And it now appears even
+my death is to be hedged around with prohibitions. Drugs for
+example--how beneficent a little laudanum at times in a case like mine!
+and how happy I could be if I knew that in my waistcoat pocket I carried
+a kindly, easy means of shuffling off this coil when the time comes as
+come it must. It horrifies me to consider how I might break the life of
+E---- clean in two, and sap her courage by a lingering, dawdling dying.
+But there is the Defence of the Realm Act. It is a case of a Scorpion in
+a ring of fire but without any sting in its tail.
+
+_March_ 2.
+
+I ask myself: what are my views on death, the next world, God? I look
+into my mind and discover I am too much of a mannikin to have any. As
+for death, I am a little bit of trembling jelly of anticipation. I am
+prepared for anything, but I am the complete agnostic; I simply don't
+know. To have views, faith, beliefs, one needs a backbone. This great
+bully of a universe overwhelms me. The stars make me cower. I am
+intimidated by the immensity surrounding my own littleness. It is futile
+and presumptuous for me to opine anything about the next world. But I
+_hope_ for something much freer and more satisfying after death, for
+emancipation of the spirit and above all for the obliteration of this
+puny self, this little, skulking, sharp-witted ferret.
+
+_A Potted Novel_
+
+(1)
+
+He was an imaginative youth, and she a tragedy queen. So he fell in love
+with her because she was melancholy and her past tragic. "She is
+_capable_ of tragedy, too," he said, which was a high encomium.
+
+But he was also an ambitious youth and all for dalliance in love.
+"Marriage," said he sententiously, "is an economic trap." And then, a
+little wistfully: "If she were a bit more melancholy and a bit more
+beautiful she would be quite irresistible."
+
+(2)
+
+But he was a miserable youth, too, and in the anguish of loneliness and
+lovelessness a home tempted him sorely. Still, he dallied. _She_ waited.
+Ill-health after all made marriage impossible.
+
+(3)
+
+Yet love and misery drove him towards it. So one day he closed his eyes
+and offered himself up with sacrificial hands.... "Too late," she said.
+"Once perhaps ... but now...." His eyes opened again, and in a second
+Love entered his Temple once more and finally ejected the money
+changers.
+
+(4)
+
+So they married after all, and he was under the impression she had made
+a good match. He had ill-health perhaps, yet who could doubt his
+ultimate fame?
+
+Then the War came, and he had the hardihood to open a sealed letter from
+his Doctor to the M.O. examining recruits.... Stars and staggers!! So
+it was she who was the victim in marriage! That harassing question: Did
+she know? What an ass he had been all through, what superlative egoism
+and superlative conceit!
+
+(5)
+
+Then a baby came. He broke under the strain and daily the symptoms grew
+more obvious. Did she know?... The question dazed him.
+
+Well, she _did_ know, and had married him for love, nevertheless,
+against every friendly counsel, the Doctor's included.
+
+(6)
+
+And now the invalid's gratitude is almost cringeing, his admiration
+boundless and his love for always. It is the perfect _rapprochement_
+between two souls, one that was honeycombed with self-love and lost in
+the labyrinthine ways of his own motives and the other straight, direct,
+almost imperious in love and altogether adorable.
+
+_Finis_
+
+_March_ 5.
+
+At home ill again. Yesterday was a day of utter dreariness. All my
+nerves were frozen, my heart congealed. I had no love for anyone ... no
+emotion of any sort. It was a catalepsy of the spirit harder to bear
+than fever or pain.... To-day, life is once more stirring in me, I am
+slowly awaking to the consciousness of acute but almost welcome misery.
+
+_March_ 6.
+
+An affectionate letter from H---- that warmed the cockles of my
+heart--poor frozen molluscs. A---- has written only once since August.
+
+_March_ 7.
+
+I am, I suppose, a whey-faced, lily-livered creature ... yet even an
+infantry subaltern has a chance....
+
+My dear friend ---- has died and a _Memorial_ Exhibition of his pictures
+is being held at the Goupil Gallery. The most fascinating man I ever
+met. I was attracted by him almost as one is attracted by a charming
+woman: by little ways, by laughing eyes, by the manner of speech. And
+now he is dead, of a lingering and painful disease.
+
+_March_ 8.
+
+_Death_
+
+Have been reading Sir Oliver Lodge's _Raymond_. I do not deny that I am
+curious about the next world, or about the condition of death. I am and
+always have been. In my early youth, I reflected continually on death
+and hated it bitterly. But now that my end is near and certain, I
+consider it less and am content to wait and see. As, for all practical
+purposes, I have done with life, and my own existence is often a burden
+to me and is like to become a burden also to others, I wish I possessed
+the wherewithal to end it at my will. With two or three tabloids in my
+waistcoat pocket, and my secret locked in my heart, how serenely I would
+move about among my friends and fellows, conscious that at some
+specially selected moment--at midnight or high noon--just when the
+spirit moved me, I could quietly slip out to sea on this Great
+Adventure. It would be well to be able to control this: the time, the
+place, and the manner of one's exit. For what disturbs me in particular
+is how I shall conduct myself; I am afraid lest I become afraid, it is a
+fear of fear. By means of my tabloids, I could arrange my death in an
+artistic setting, say underneath a big tree on a summer's day, with an
+open Homer in my hand, or more appropriately, a magnifying glass and
+Miall and Denny's _Cockroach._ It would be stage-managing my own demise
+and surely the last thing in self-conscious elegance!
+
+I think it was De Quincey who said Death to him seemed most awful in the
+summer. On the contrary the earth is warm then, and would welcome my old
+bones. It is on a cold night by the winter fire that the churchyard
+seems to me the least inviting: especially horrible it is the first
+evening after the funeral.
+
+_March_ 10.
+
+Have had a relapse. My hand I fear is going. Food prices are leaping up.
+Woe to the unfit and the old and the poor in these coming days! We shall
+soon have nothing left in our pantries, and a piece of Wrigley's chewing
+gum will be our only comfort.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I come to quit this world I scarcely know which will be the greater
+regret: the people I have never met, or the places I have never seen. In
+the world of books, I rest fairly content: I have read my fair share.
+
+To-day I read down the column of to-morrow's preachers with the most
+ludicrous avidity, ticking off the Churches I have visited: St. Paul's
+and the Abbey, the Ethical Church in Bayswater and Westminster
+Cathedral. But the Unitarians, the Christadelphians, the Theosophists,
+the Church of Christ Scientist, the Buddhist Society, the Brompton
+Oratory, the Church of Humanity, the New Life Centre; all these
+adventures I intended one day to make.... It is not much fun ticking off
+things you have done from a list if you have done very little. I get
+more satisfaction out of a list of books. But Iona and the Hebrides,
+Edinburgh, Brussels, Buenos Ayres, Spitzbergen (when the flowers are
+out), the Niagara Falls (by moonlight), the Grindelwald, Cairo--these
+names make me growl and occasionally yelp like a hurt puppy, although to
+outward view I am sitting in an armchair blowing smoke-rings.
+
+_March_ 11.
+
+_The Graph of Temperament_
+
+In this Journal, my pen is a delicate needle point, tracing out a graph
+of temperament so as to show its daily fluctuations: grave and gay, up
+and down, lamentation and revelry, self-love and self-disgust. You get
+here all my thoughts and opinions, always irresponsible and often
+contradictory or mutually exclusive, all my moods and vapours, all the
+varying reactions to environment of this jelly which is I. I snap at
+any idea that comes floating down, particularly if it is gaudy or
+quixotic, no matter if it is wholly incompatible with what I said the
+day before. People unpleasantly refer me back, and to escape I have to
+invent some sophistry. I unconsciously imitate the mannerisms of folk I
+am particularly taken with. Other people never fail to tell me of my
+simulations. If I read a book and like it very much, by a process of
+peaceful penetration, the author takes possession of my whole
+personality just as if I were a medium giving a sitting, and for some
+time subsequently his ideas come spurting up like a fountain making a
+pretty display which I take to be my own. Other people say of me, "Oh! I
+expect he read it in a book."
+
+I am something between a Monkey, a Chameleon, and a Jellyfish. To any
+bully with an intellect like a blunderbuss, I have always timidly held
+up my hands and afterwards gnashed my teeth for my cowardice. In
+conversation with men of alien sentiment I am self-effacing to my
+intense chagrin, often from mere shyness. I say, "Yes ... yes ... yes,"
+to nausea, when it ought to be "No ... no ... no." I become my own
+renegade, an amiable dissembler, an ass in short. It is a torture to
+have a sprightly mind blanketed by personal timidity and a feeble
+presence. The humiliating thing is that almost any strong character
+hynotises me into complacency, especially if he is a stranger; I find
+myself for the time being in really sincere agreement with him, and only
+later, discover to myself his abominable doctrines. Then I lie in bed
+and have imaginary conversations in which I get my own back.
+
+But, by Jove, I wreak vengeance on my familiars, and on those brethren
+even weaker than myself. They get my concentrated gall, my sulphurous
+fulminations, and would wonder to read this confession.
+
+_Cynicism_
+
+For an unusually long time after I grew up, I maintained a beautiful
+confidence in the goodness of mankind. Rumours did reach me, but I
+brushed them aside as slanders. I was an ingénu, unsuspecting,
+credulous. I thoroughly believed that men and women and I were much
+better than we actually are. I have not come to the end of my
+disillusions even now. I still rub my eyes on occasion. I simply can't
+believe that we are such humbugs, hypocrites, self-deceivers. And
+strange to say it is the "good" people above all who most bitterly
+disappoint me. Give me a healthy liar, or a thief, or a vagabond, and he
+arouses no expectations, and so I get no heart-burning. It is the good,
+the honest, the true, who cheat me of my boyhood's beliefs.... I am a
+cynic then, but not a reckless cynic--a careworn unhappy cynic without
+the cynic's pride. "It is easy to be cynical," someone admonished me.
+"Unfortunately it is," I said.
+
+We are so cold, so aloof, so self-centred even the warmest friends. Men
+of piety love God, but their love for each other is so commonly but a
+poor thing. My own affections are always frosted over with the
+Englishman's reserve. I hesitate as if I were not sure of them. I am
+afraid of self-deception, I hate to find out either myself or others.
+And yet I am always doing so. Mine is a restlessly analytical brain. I
+dissect everyone, even those I love, and my discoveries frequently sting
+me to the quick. "To the pure all things are pure," whence I should
+conclude I suppose that it is the beam in my own eye. But I would not
+tolerate being deceived concerning either my own beam or other people's
+motes.
+
+_March_ 12.
+
+_Archæopteryx and Mudflats_
+
+Yesterday I collected two distinct and several twinges and hereby save
+them up. They were more than that--they were pangs, and pangs that
+twanged.
+
+(Why do I make fun of my suffering?)
+
+One was when I saw the well-known figure of the _Archæopteryx_ remains
+in the slab of Lithographic sandstone of Bavaria: a reproduction in an
+illustrated encyclopædia. The other was when someone mentioned mud, and
+I thought of the wide estuary of the T----, its stretches of mudflats
+and its wild-fowl. We were turning over some pages and she said:
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"_Archæopteryx_," said I.
+
+"Whatever is _Archæopteryx_?"
+
+"An extinct bird," I answered mournfully.
+
+Like an old amour, my love of palæontology and anatomy, and all the high
+hopes I entertained of them, came smarting to life again, so I turned
+over the page quickly.
+
+But why need I explain to you, O my Journal? To others, I could not
+explain. I was tongue-tied.
+
+"I used to get very muddy," I remarked lamentably, "in the old days when
+stalking birds on the mudflats."
+
+And they rather jeered at such an occupation in such a place, just as
+those beautiful sights and sounds of zostera-covered mud-banks,
+twinkling runnels, swiftly running thin-legged waders, their whistles
+and cries began to steal over my memory like a delicate pain.
+
+To my infinite regret, I have no description, no photograph or sketch,
+no token of any sort to remember them by. And their doom is certain.
+Heavens! how I wasted my impressions and experiences then! Swinburne has
+some lines about saltings which console me a little, but I know of no
+other descriptions by either pen or brush.
+
+_March_ 15.
+
+How revolting it is to see some barren old woman love-sick over a baby,
+bestowing voluptuous kisses on its nose, eyes, hands, feet, utterly
+intoxicated and chattering incessantly in the "little language," and
+hopping about like an infatuated cock grouse.
+
+_May_ 5.
+
+The nurse has been here now for over five weeks. One day has been pretty
+much the same as another. I get out of bed usually about tea-time and
+sit by the window and churn over past, present, and future. However, the
+Swallows have arrived at last, though they were very late, and there
+are also Cuckoos, Green Wood-peckers, Moorhens, calling from across the
+park. At night, when the moon is up, I get a great deal of fun out of an
+extremely self-inflated Brown Owl, who hoots up through the breadth and
+length of the valley, and then I am sure, listens with satisfaction to
+his echo. Still, I have much sympathy with that Brown Owl and his
+hooting.
+
+What I do (goodness knows what E---- does), is to drug my mind with
+print. I am just a rag-bag of Smollett, H.G. Wells, Samuel Butler, the
+_Daily News_, the Bible, the _Labour Leader, Joseph Vance_, etc., etc.
+Except for an occasional geyser of malediction when some particularly
+acrid memory comes uppermost in my mind, I find myself submitting with a
+surprising calm and even cheerfulness. That agony of frustration which
+gnawed my vitals so much in 1913 has disappeared, and I, who expected to
+go down in the smoke and sulphur of my own fulminations, am quite as
+likely to fold my hands across my chest with a truly Christian
+resignation. Joubert said, "Patience and misfortune, courage and death,
+resignation and the inevitable, generally come together. Indifference to
+life generally arises with the impossibility of preserving it"--how
+cynical that sounds.
+
+_May_ 8.
+
+This and another volume of my Journal are temporarily lodged in a drawer
+in my bedroom. It appears to me that as I become more static and
+moribund, they become more active and aggressive. All day they make a
+perfect uproar in their solitary confinement--although no one hears it.
+And at night they become phosphorescent, though nobody sees it. One of
+these days, with continued neglect they will blow up from spontaneous
+combustion like diseased gunpowder, the dismembered diarist being thus
+hoist upon his own petard.
+
+_June_ 1.
+
+We discuss post mortem affairs quite genially and without restraint. It
+is the contempt bred of familiarity I suppose. E---- says widows' weeds
+have been so vulgarised by the war widows that she won't go into deep
+mourning. "But you'll wear just one weed or two for me?" I plead, and
+then we laugh. She has promised me that should a suitable chance arise,
+she will marry again. Personally, I wish I could place my hand on the
+young fellow at once, so as to put him thro' his paces--shew him where
+the water main runs and where the gas meter is, and so on.
+
+You will observe what a relish I have for my own _macabre_, and how
+keenly I appreciate the present situation. Nobody can say I am not
+making the best of it. One might call it pulling the hangman's beard.
+Yet I ought, I fancy, to be bewailing my poor wife and fatherless child.
+
+_June_ 15.
+
+I sit all day in my chair, moving 8 feet to my bed at night, and 8 feet
+from it to my chair in the morning--and wait. The assignation is
+certain. "Life is a coquetry with Death that wearies me, Too sure of the
+amour."
+
+_July_ 5.
+
+It is odd that at this time of the breaking of nations, Destiny, with
+her hands so full, should spare the time to pursue a non-combatant atom
+like me down such a labyrinthine side-track. It is odd to find her
+determined to destroy me with such tremendous thoroughness--one would
+have thought it sufficient merely to brush the dust off my wings. Why
+this deliberate, slow-moving malignity? Perhaps it is a punishment for
+the impudence of my desires. I wanted everything so I get nothing. I
+gave nothing so I receive nothing. I am not offering up my life
+willingly--it is being taken from me piece by piece, while I watch the
+pilfering with lamentable eyes.
+
+I have tendered my resignation and retire on a small gratuity.
+
+_July_ 7.
+
+My hand gets a little better. But it's a cat and mouse game, and so
+humiliating to be the mouse.
+
+... Parental affection comes to me only in spasms, and if they hurt,
+they do not last long. Curiously enough, as in the case of very old
+people, my consciousness reverts more easily to conditions long past. I
+seem unable to apprehend all the significance of having a nine-months
+old daughter, but some Bullfinches or Swallows seen thro' the window
+rouse me more. No one can deny I have loved Birds to intoxication. In my
+youth, birds' eggs, and little nestlings and chickens sent me into such
+raptures I could never tell it to you adequately.... I am too tired to
+write more.
+
+_July_ 23.
+
+Reading Pascal again. If Shelley was "gold dusty from tumbling among the
+stars," Pascal was bruised and shaken. The one was delighted, and the
+other frightened. I like Pascal's prostration before the infinities of
+Time, Space and the Unknown. Somehow, he conveys this more vividly than
+the uplift afforded him by religion.
+
+_July_ 25.
+
+I don't believe in the twin-soul theory of marriage. There are plenty of
+men any one of whom she might have married and lived with happily, and
+simpler men than I am. Methinks there are large tracts could be sliced
+off my character and she would scarcely feel the want of them. To think
+that she of all women, with a past such as hers, should be swept into my
+vicious orbit! Yet she seems to bear Destiny no resentment, so I bear it
+for her and enough for two. At our engagement I gave her my own ring to
+wear as a pledge--we thought it nicer than buying a new one. It was a
+signet ring with a dark smooth stone. Strange to say it never once
+occurred to me till now that it was a mourning ring in memory of a
+great-uncle of mine, actually with an inscription on the inside.
+
+_July_ 26.
+
+As long as I can hold a pen, I shall, I suppose, go on trickling ink
+into this diary!
+
+I am amusing myself by reading the _Harmsworth Encyclopædia_ in 15
+volumes, _i.e._, I turn over the pages and read everything of interest
+that catches my eye.
+
+I get out of bed about ten, wash and sit by the window in my blue
+striped pyjama suit. It is so hot I need no additional clothing.
+E---- comes in, brushes my hair, sprinkles me with lavender water, lights
+my cigarette, and gives me my book-rest and books. She forgets nothing.
+
+From my window I look out on a field with Beech hedge down one side and
+beyond, tall trees--one showing in outline exactly like the profile of a
+Beefeater's head, more especially at sunset each evening when the tree
+next behind is in shadow. The field is full of blue Scabious plants,
+Wild Parsley and tall grass--getting brown now in the sun. Great numbers
+of White Butterflies are continually rocking themselves across--they go
+over in coveys of four or five at a time--I counted 50 in five minutes,
+which bodes ill for the cabbages. Not even the heaviest thunder showers
+seem to debilitate their kinetic ardour. They rock on like white
+aeroplanes in a hail of machine-gun bullets.
+
+Then there are the Swallows and Martins cutting such beautiful figures
+thro' the air that one wishes they carried a pencil in their bills as
+they fly and traced the lines of flight on a Bristol board. How I hanker
+after the Swallows! so free and gay and vigorous. This autumn, as they
+prepare to start, I shall hang on every twitter they make, and on every
+wing-beat; and when they have gone, begin sadly to set my house in
+order, as when some much loved visitors have taken their departure. I am
+appreciating things a little more the last few days.
+
+_August_ 1.
+
+_A Jeremiad_
+
+When I resigned my appointment last month, no one knows what I had to
+give up. But I know. Tho' if I say what I know no one is compelled to
+believe me excepting out of charity. It will never be discovered whether
+what I am going to state is not simply despairing bombast. My few
+intimate friends and relatives are entirely innocent of science, not to
+say zoology, and all they realise is the significant fact that I am
+prone to go extravagant lengths in conversation. But you may take it or
+leave it: I was the ablest junior on the staff and one of the ablest
+zoologists in the place--but my ability was always muffled by the
+inferior work they gave me to do. My last memoir published last December
+was the best of its kind in treatment, method and technique that ever
+issued from the institution--I do not say the most important. It was
+trivial--my work always was trivial because they put me in a mouldy
+department where all the work was trivial and the methods used as
+primitive, slipshod and easy as those of Fabricius, the idea being that
+as I had enjoyed no academic career I was unsuited to fill other posts
+then vacant--one, work on the CÅ“lenterates and another on _Vermes_,
+both rarely favoured by amateurs and requiring laboratory training.
+Later, I had the mortification of seeing these posts filled by men whose
+powers I by no means felt inclined to estimate as greater than my own.
+Meanwhile, I who had been dissecting for dear life up and down the whole
+Animal Kingdom in a poorly equipped attic laboratory at home, with no
+adequate instruments, was bitterly disappointed to find still less
+provision made even in a so-called Scientific Institution so grandly
+styled the British Museum (N.H.). On my first arrival I was presented
+with a pen, ink, paper, ruler, and an enormous instrument of steel which
+on enquiry I found to be a paper cutter. I asked for my microscope and
+microtome. I ought to have asked what Form I was in.
+
+So I had to continue my struggle against odds, and only within the last
+year or so began to squeeze the authorities with any success. In time I
+should have revolutionised the study of Systematic Zoology, and the
+anonymous paper I wrote in conjunction with R---- in the _American
+Naturalist_ was a rare _jeu d'esprit_, and my most important scientific
+work.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the literary world I have fared no better. My first published article
+appeared at the age of 15 over my father's name, my motive being not so
+much modesty as cunning--if the literary world (!) ragged it
+unmercifully, there was still a chance left for me to make good.
+
+My next achievement of any magnitude was the unexpected printing of a
+story in the _Academy_ after I had unsuccessfully badgered almost every
+other newspaper. This was when I was 19. No proof had been sent me and
+no intimation of its acceptance. Moreover, there were two ugly printer's
+errors. I at once wrote off to correct them in the next issue. My letter
+was neither published nor acknowledged. I submitted, but presently wrote
+again, politely hinting that my cheque was overdue. But--screams of
+silence, and I thought it wise not to complain in view of future
+printing favours. I soon discovered that the journal had changed hands
+and was probably on its last legs at the time of my success. As soon as
+it grew financially sound again no more of my stories were accepted.
+
+A more recent affair I had with the American _Forum,_ which delighted me
+by publishing my article, but did not pay--tho' the Editor went out of
+his way to write that "payment was on publication." I did not venture to
+remonstrate as I had another article on the stocks which they also
+printed without paying me. In spite of uniform failure, my literary
+ambition has never flagged.[2] I have for years past received my
+rejected MSS. back from every conceivable kind of periodical, from
+_Punch_ to the _Hibbert Journal_. At one time I used to file their
+rejection forms and meditated writing a facetious essay on them. But I
+decided they were too monotonously similar. My custom was when the
+ordinary avenues to literary fame had failed me--the half-crown Reviews
+and the sixpenny Weeklies--to seek out at a library some obscure
+publication--a Parish Magazine or the local paper--anything was grabbed
+as a last chance. On one of these occasions I discovered the
+_Westminster Review_ and immediately plied them with a manuscript and
+the usual polite note. After six weeks, having no reply, I wrote again
+and waited for another six weeks. My second remonstrance met with a
+similar fate, so I went into the city to interview the publishers, and
+to demand my manuscript back. The manager was out, and I was asked to
+call again. After waiting about for some time, I left my card, took my
+departure and decided I would write. The same evening I told the
+publishers that the anonymous editor would neither print my article nor
+return it. Would they kindly give me his name and address so that I
+could write personally. After some delay they replied that although it
+was not the custom to disclose the editor's name, the following address
+would find her. She was a lady living in Richmond Row, Shepherd's Bush.
+I wrote to her at once and received no answer. Meanwhile, I had observed
+that no further issues of the review had appeared on the bookstalls, and
+the book-sellers were unable to give me any information. I wrote again
+to the address--this time a playful and facetious letter in which I said
+I did not propose to take the matter into court, but if it would save
+her any trouble I would call for the MS. as I lived only a few minutes'
+walk distant. I received no answer. I was busy at the time and kept
+putting off executing my firm purpose of visiting the good lady until
+one evening as I was casually reading the _Star_ coming home in the
+'bus, I read an account of how some charitably disposed woman had
+recently visited the Hammersmith Workhouse and removed to her own home a
+poor soul who was once the friend of George Eliot, George Henry Lewes,
+and other well-known literary persons of the sixties and had, until it
+ceased publication a few months before, edited the once notable
+_Westminster Review_.
+
+Recently, however, there has been evidence of a more benevolent attitude
+towards me on the part of London editors. A certain magnificent
+quarterly has published one or two of my essays, and one of these called
+forth two pages of quotation and flattering comment in _Public Opinion_,
+which thrill me to the marrow. I fear, however, the flood-tide has come
+too late.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If this achievement impressed me it did not seem to impress anyone else.
+A---- regarded it as a joke and laughed incredulously when someone told
+him of "P.O.'s" eulogy. You see I am still his foolish little brother. I
+am secretly very nettled too because E---- treated the whole matter very
+indifferently. She did not even take the trouble to read the paper's
+critique, and tho' she volunteered to buy several copies to send to
+friends, she never remembered to do so, and the whole affair has passed
+out of her mind.
+
+Now a pleasant paragraph that appeared in the press noticing some
+drawings of a friend of her friend, she read twice and marched off to
+Francesca with it in great glee. Another successful young person got his
+photo into the picture papers--a man we know only by hearsay, and yet it
+impressed her until I recalled, what strange to say she had quite
+forgotten, how the photographers wished to publish her own photograph in
+the picture papers at the time of our marriage. But she scornfully
+refused. (And so did I.)
+
+But what a queer woman!... [And I, too, a queer man, drunken with
+wormwood and gall.]
+
+_August_ 6.
+
+E---- and I were very modern in our courtship. Our candour was mutual
+and complete--parents and relatives would be shocked and staggered if
+they knew.... You see I am a biologist and we are both freethinkers.
+_Voilà_!... I hate all reticence and concealment.... There is a good
+deal of that ass, Gregers Werle, in my nature.
+
+_August_ 7.
+
+_My Gastrocnemius_
+
+I become dreadfully emaciated. This morning, before getting off the bed
+I lifted my leg and gazed wistfully along all its length. My flabby
+_gastrocnemius_ swung suspended from the _tibia_ like a gondola from a
+Zeppelin. I touched it gently with the tip of my index finger and it
+oscillated.
+
+_August_ 17.
+
+My beloved wife comes home this evening after a short, much needed
+holiday.
+
+_August_ 27.
+
+My gratuity has turned out to be unexpectedly small. I hoped at least
+for one year's salary. And the horrible thing is I might live for
+several years longer! No one was ever more enthusiastic for death than I
+am at this moment. I hate this world with its war, and I bitterly regret
+I never managed to buy laudanum in time. There are only E---- and dear
+R---- and one or two others--the rest of the people I know I hate _en
+bloc_. If only I could get at them. I hate to have to leave them to
+themselves without getting my own back.
+
+_August_ 31.
+
+My darling sweetheart, you ask me why I love you. I do not know. All I
+know is that I _do_ love you, and beyond measure. Why do _you_ love
+me--surely a more inscrutable problem. You do not know. No one ever
+knows. "The heart has its reasons which the reason knows not of." We
+love in obedience to a powerful gravitation of our beings, and then try
+to explain it by recapitulating one another's characters just as a man
+forms his opinions first and then thinks out reasons in support.
+
+What delights me is to recall that our love has _evolved._ It did not
+suddenly spring into existence like some beautiful sprite. It developed
+slowly to perfection--it was forged in the white heat of our
+experiences. That is why it will always remain.
+
+_September_ 1.
+
+Your love, darling, impregnates my heart, touches it into calm, strongly
+beating life so that when I am with you, I forget I am a dying man. It
+is too difficult to believe that when we die true love like ours
+disappears with our bodies. My own experience makes me feel that human
+love is the earnest after death of a great reunion of souls in God who
+is love. When as a boy I was bending the knee to Haeckel, the saying,
+"God is Love," scarcely interested me. I am wiser now. You must not
+think I am still anything but an infidel (as the churchmen say),--I
+should hate not to be taken for an infidel--and you must not be
+surprised that an embittered, angry, hateful person like myself should
+believe in a Gospel of Love. I am embittered because an intense desire
+to love has in many instances[3] been baulked by my own idealising yet
+also analytical mind. I have wanted to love men blindly, yet I am always
+finding them out, and the disappointment chills the heart. Hence my
+malice and venom: which, dear, do not misconstrue. I am as greedy as an
+Octopus, ready out of love to take the whole world into my inside--that
+seat of the affections!--but I am also as sensitive as an Octopus, and
+quickly retract my arms into the rocky, impregnable recess where I live.
+
+_September_ 2.
+
+But am I dying? I have no presentiments--no conviction--like the people
+you read of in books. Am I, after all, in love? "I dote yet doubt;
+suspect yet strongly love." It is all a matter of degree. Beside Abélard
+and Héloïse, our love may be just glassy affection. It is a great and
+difficult question to decide. I love no one else but E----, that, at
+least, is a certainty, and I have never loved anyone more.
+
+_September_ 3.
+
+My bedroom is on the ground floor as I cannot mount the stairs. But the
+other day when they were all out, I determined to clamber upstairs if
+possible, and search in the bedrooms for a half bottle of laudanum,
+which Mrs. ---- told me she found the other day in a box--a relic of the
+time when ---- had to take it to relieve pain.
+
+I got off the bed on to the floor and crawled around on hands and knees
+to the door, where I knelt up straight, reached the handle and turned
+it. Then I crawled across the hall to the foot of the stairs, where I
+sat down on the bottom step and rested. It is a short flight of only 12
+steps and I soon reached the top by sitting down on each and raising
+myself up to the next one with my hands.
+
+Arrived at the top, I quickly decided on the most likely room to search
+first, and painfully crawled along the passage and thro' the bathroom by
+the easiest route to the small door--there are two. The handles of all
+the doors in the house are fixed some way up above the middle, so that
+only by kneeling with a straight back could I reach them from the floor.
+This door in addition was at the top of a high but narrow step, and I
+had to climb on to this, balance myself carefully, and then carefully
+pull myself up towards the handle by means of a towel hung on the
+handle. After three attempts I reached the handle and found the door
+locked on the inside.
+
+I collapsed on the floor and could have cried. I lay on the floor of the
+bathroom resting with head on my arm, then set my teeth and crawled
+around the passage along two sides of a square, up three more steps to
+the other door which I opened and then entered. I had only examined two
+drawers containing only clothes, when a key turned in the front door
+lock and E---- entered with ---- and gave her usual whistle.
+
+I closed the drawers and crawled out of the room in time to hear
+E---- say in a startled voice to her mother: "Who's that upstairs?" I
+whistled, and said that being bored I had come up to see the cot: which
+passed at that time all right.
+
+Next morning my darling asked me why I went upstairs. I did not answer,
+and I think she knows.
+
+_September_ 4.
+
+I am getting ill again, and can scarcely hold the pen. So good-bye
+Journal--only for a time perhaps.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Have read this blessed old Journal out to E----. It required some
+courage, and I boggled at one or two bits and left them out.
+
+_September_ 5.
+
+_Leap-frog_
+
+Some girls up the road spent a very wet Sunday morning playing leap-frog
+in their pyjamas around the tennis lawn. It makes me envious. To think I
+never thought of doing that! and now it is too late. They wore purple
+pyjamas too. I once hugged myself with pride for undressing in a cave by
+the sea and bathing in the pouring rain, but that seems tame in
+comparison.
+
+_Liebestod_
+
+A perfect autumn morning--cool, fine and still. What sweet music a horse
+and cart make trundling slowly along a country road on a quiet morning!
+I listened to it in a happy mood of abstraction as it rolled on further
+and further away. I put my head out of the window so as to hear it up to
+the very last, until a Robin's notes relieved the nervous tension and
+helped me to resign myself to my loss. The incident reminded me of the
+Liebestod in "Tristan," with the Robin taking the part of the harp.
+
+For days past my emotions have been undergoing kaleidoscopic changes,
+not only from day to day but from hour to hour. For ten minutes at a
+time I am happy or miserable, or revengeful, venomous, loving, generous,
+noble, angry, or murderous--you could measure them with a stop-watch.
+Hell's phantoms course across my chest. If I could lie on this bed as
+quiet and stony as an effigy on a tomb! But a moment ago I had a sharp
+spasm at the sudden thought that never, never, never again should I walk
+thro' the path-fields to the uplands.
+
+_September_ 7.
+
+My 28th birthday.
+
+Dear old R---- (the man I love above all others) has been in a military
+hospital for months. It is a great hardship to have our intercourse
+almost completely cut off.
+
+Dear old Journal, I love you! Good-bye.
+
+_September_ 29.
+
+I could never have believed so great misery compatible with sanity. Yet
+I am quite sane. How long I or any man can remain sane in this condition
+God knows.... It is a consummate vengeance this inability to write.[4] I
+cannot help but smile grimly at the astuteness of the thrust. To be
+sure, how cunning to deprive me of my one secret consolation! How
+amusing that in this agony of isolation such an aggressive egotist as I
+should have his last means of self-expression cut off. I am being slowly
+stifled.
+
+_Later. (In E.'s handwriting.)_
+
+Yesterday we shifted into a tiny cottage at half the rental of the other
+one, and situated about two miles further out from the village.... A
+wholly ideal and beautiful little cottage you may say. But a
+"camouflaged" cottage. For in spite of the happiness of its exterior it
+contains just now two of the most dejected mortals even in this present
+sorrow-laden world.
+
+_September_ 30.
+
+Last night, E---- sitting on the bed by me, burst into tears. It was my
+fault. "I can stand a good deal but there must come a breaking point."
+Poor, poor girl, my heart aches for you.
+
+I wept too, and it relieved us to cry. We blew our noses. "People who
+cry in novels," E---- observed with detachment, "never blow their noses.
+They just weep." ... But the thunder clouds soon come up again.
+
+_October_ 1.
+
+The immediate future horrifies me.
+
+_October_ 2.
+
+Poushkin (as we have named the cat) is coiled up on my bed, purring and
+quite happy. It does me good to see him.
+
+But consider: A paralytic, a screaming infant, two women, a cat and a
+canary, shut up in a tiny cottage with no money, the war still on, and
+food always scarcer day by day. "Give us this day, our daily bread."
+
+I want to be loved--above all, I want to love. My great danger is lest I
+grow maudlin and say petulantly, "Nobody loves me, nobody cares." I must
+have more courage and more confidence in other people's good-nature.
+Then I can love more freely.
+
+_October_ 3.
+
+I am grateful to-day for some happy hours plucked triumphantly from
+under the very nose of Fate, and spent in the warm sun in the garden.
+They carried me out at 12, and I stayed till after tea-time. A Lark
+sang, but the Swallows--dear things--have gone. E---- picked two
+Primroses. I sat by some Michaelmas Daisies and watched the Bees, Flies,
+and Butterflies.
+
+_October_ 6.
+
+In fits of maudlin self-compassion I try to visualise Belgium, Armenia,
+Serbia, etc., and usually cure myself thereby.
+
+_October_ 12.
+
+It is winter--no autumn this year. Of an evening we sit by the fire and
+enjoy the beautiful sweet-smelling wood-smoke, and the open hearth with
+its big iron bar carrying pot-hook and hanger. E---- knits warm garments
+for the Baby, and I play Chopin, César-Franck hymns, Three Blind Mice
+(with variations) on a mouth-organ, called "The Angels' Choir," and made
+in Germany.... You would pity me would you? I am lonely, penniless,
+paralysed, and just turned twenty-eight. But I snap my fingers in your
+face and with equal arrogance I pity you. I pity you your smooth-running
+good luck and the stagnant serenity of your mind. I prefer my own
+torment. I am dying, but you are already a corpse. You have never really
+lived. Your body has never been flayed into tingling life by hopeless
+desire to love, to know, to act, to achieve. I do not envy you your
+absorption in the petty cares of a commonplace existence.
+
+Do you think I would exchange the communion with my own heart for the
+toy balloons of your silly conversation? Or my curiosity for your
+flickering interests? Or my despair for your comfortable Hope? Or my
+present tawdry life for yours as polished and neat as a new three-penny
+bit? I would not. I gather my mantle around me and I solemnly thank God
+that I am not as some other men are.
+
+I am only twenty-eight, but I have telescoped into those few years a
+tolerably long life: I have loved and married, and have a family; I have
+wept and enjoyed; struggled and overcome, and when the hour comes I
+shall be content to die.
+
+_ October_ 14 _to_ 20.
+
+Miserable.
+
+_October_ 21.
+
+Self-disgust.
+
+FINIS.
+
+[Barbellion died on December 31.]
+
+
+[1] John Wesley _rewrote_ his journals from entries in rough draft.
+
+[2] I once received from an editor a very encouraging letter which gave
+me a great deal of pleasure and made me hope he was going to open the
+pages of his magazine to me. But three weeks after he committed suicide
+by jumping out of his bedroom window.
+
+[3] The Egoist explains himself again.
+
+[4] Writing difficult to decipher.
+
+
+
+
+SYNOPSIS
+
+PART I: AT HOME
+
+   Rambles and bathes, 2, 3, 4, 9, 11, 20, 37, 45, 46, 48, 49
+   Natural History and Zoology, 9, 12, 13, 20, 29
+   Leaves school, 10
+   Newspaper reporting, 17, 19
+   Ambition, 8, 10, 13, 26, 29
+   Calf-love, 8, 12, 23, 28
+   The Wesleyan Minister Microscopist, 18
+   Conversation with Prof. Herdman, 46
+   Ill-health, 10, 24, 25, 35, 42, 48 (Jul. 31)
+   Heart attacks, 33, 36
+   On Death, 33, 38, 43, 44
+   Sits for British Museum exam., 29
+   Failure, 30, 31, 32
+   Appointment to Laboratory at Plymouth, 32
+   Everything "ghostly, unreal, enigmatic," 29, 33
+   Self-consciousness, 27, 40
+   The Poppy, 43
+   Appointment resigned and his father's illness, 34
+   His father's death, 50, 51
+   Success and appointment to B.M., 55
+   A youthful Passion, 56, 57
+
+PART II: IN LONDON
+
+   Disillusionment, 59, 61, 93, 94, 132, 178, 185
+   Life in a boarding-house, 63, 78, 79, 94, 99, 107
+   Ambition, 71, 73, 109
+   An affair in a taxicab, 75
+   Self-disgust, 77
+   In love, 78, 96, 107
+   Conversations: (a) with E., 65, 69, 70, 75, 76, 79, 95, 96, 99,
+                      104, 151, 152
+                  (b) with H., 82, 83
+                  (c) with R., 131, 140, 141, 142, 154, 155, 165,
+   Ill-health, 59, 62, 69, 72, 74, 100, 107, 110, 114, 134-5, 153, 156
+   On Death, 62, 63, 84, 88
+   Heart attacks, 71, 72, 120, 122
+   Nervous breakdown, 80, 81, 82
+   Meets an old love, 86, 87
+   Holidays: (_a_) at C----, by the sea in North ----, 65, 66, 67
+             (_b_) at home, 82
+             (_c_) in Brittany and on Dartmoor (_riding a pony_), 97
+   Life in rooms, 102, 107, 108, 114, 138, 148, 149, 153
+   His brother, 121, 206
+   Discussions on marriage, 123, 124
+   In his sitting-room, 162
+   The fascination of London, 74, 142-145
+       (_a_) Petticoat Lane, 163
+       (_b_) Rotten Row, 176
+   Goes to concerts, 127, 161, 172
+   A lovers' quarrel, 126
+   He struggles with himself, 135, 137, 138
+   Engaged, 150, 158
+   Fears his inconstancy, 159, 185
+   Self-analysis, 167 _et seq_., 182, 183
+   Day-dreams: Life a dream, 178, 179, 188
+   The War, 182
+   Holidays: (_a_) on a Buckinghamshire farm, 191-205
+             (_b_) at the Lakes, 215-217
+   Should a husband keep a private journal? 210
+   Marriage, 205, 209, 215
+
+PART III: MARRIAGE
+
+   Zeppelin raid and influenza, 222
+   Living in the country, 223, 227, 228
+   Reads his doctor's certificate after visit to recruiting-office, 225, 238
+   Self-disgust, 223, 224, 225, 247, 250 (_nude_), 267
+   Mental agony, 226, 227
+   Conversations: with R., 229
+                  with Scarabees, 230, 239, 243
+   Halcyon days, 233, 235, 238
+   A natural idiot climbs a stile on uplands, 240
+   Tension, 250, 252
+   The War, 237 (_Jutland_), 242, 247, 248, 249
+   Another nervous breakdown, 253
+   How E. knew all the time, 255, 256
+   Self-compassion, 251, 304
+   Home ill, 257 ("_in the doldrums_"), 259, 265
+   Returns to work, 278
+   Ill again, 285
+   From an invalid's view-point, 292, 293 (_by his bedroom window_)
+   Post-mortem affairs, 291
+   Resigns appointment, 294, 299
+   Self-consciousness and self-dramatization, 255, 265, 267
+   A badly articulated skeleton, 274
+   Cold weather in January, 276, 277, 278
+   On Death, 275, 283, 286, 291
+   His phosphorescent Journals, 291
+   Morphia and laudanum, 280, 300
+   Great misery, 303, 305
+
+
+
+
+INDEX OF NAMES
+
+   A----, 21, 51, 82, 97, 98, 121, 158, 206, 285, 298
+   _"Academy," The_, 23, 24, 106, 296
+   _Adventure in Search of Health, An_, 260
+   A Kempis, Thomas, 28
+   _Albert Hall, Hag, The_, 147
+   _Ambition_, 29
+   "_American Naturalist_," 295
+   _American Neighbour, An_, 251
+   _Apologia pro mea vita_, 145
+   _Archæopteryx and Mudflats_, 289
+   _Aristotle's Lantern_, 19
+   _At a Public Dinner_, 175
+   _At C----, a tiny little village by the Sea in N_----, 65
+   _At Home_, 82
+   _At the Albert Hall_, 127
+   Austen, Jane, 268
+   _Average Day, An_, 172
+
+   B----, 102, 107, 114, 118, 119
+   _Baby-Girl, A_, 263
+   _Bad Listener, A_, 246
+   Baring, Maurice, 188
+   _Bathing_, 60
+   Baudelaire, 60, 62, 173, 183, 197, 198, 258
+   Beerbohm, Max, 269
+   _Beethoven's Fifth Symphony_, 161, 186
+   Benson, A.C., 249
+   Bergson, 47, 55, 78, 183, 198
+   Berkeley, 275
+   Blind Mathilde, 139
+   Boeltzig, R., 103
+   Bradford, Sir John Rose, 54
+   Brieux, 162
+   _"Brilliant Career," A_, 62
+   British Museum, 26, 29, 49, 57, 59, 61, 79, 94, 132, 174, 178,
+    225, 274, 282, 283, 295
+   _British Museum Reading Room, The_, 100
+   Brooke, Rupert, 266
+   Browne, Sir Thomas, 146, 183, 238
+   Buchanan, Robert, 251
+   Bunyan, 166
+   Burke, 2
+   Burlington House, 29
+   Burton, 125
+   Butler, Samuel, 143, 171, 185, 291
+   _Buxom Rogue in Earthenware, A_, 216
+   _By the Sea_, 61
+   Byron, 266
+
+   _Camping out at S---- Sands_, 91
+   Carlyle, 120, 171
+   Cassell's _Natural History_, 13
+   _Chalcidoidea, The_, 221
+   _Character, A_, 39
+   _Chinese Lanterns_, 280
+   _Chipples_, 220
+   _Chopin_, 157
+   _Clever Young Man, The_, 207
+   Coleridge, 266
+   _Confession, A_, 74
+   Conrad, 50, 223
+   _Crowd Fever_, 278
+   _Cynicism_, 288
+
+   D----, 69, 180
+   Darwin, 6, 55
+   _Day in Autumn, A_, 51
+   _Death_, 33, 84, 275, 286
+   Debussy, 161, 162, 167
+   De Goncourt, 227, 228
+   De Guérin, 200, 277, 282
+   De Maupassant, Guy, 63, 266
+   _Depression_, 89
+   De Quincey, 10, 42, 126, 187, 196, 286
+   Devonshire Club, 32
+   _Dinosaurs_, 129
+   Disraeli, 258
+   _Dr. Spurgeon_, 90
+   Dostoieffsky, 132, 163, 167, 187
+   Duke, Mr., K.C., 17
+
+   E----, 68, 78, 79, 107, 171, 191, 192, 193, 194, 201, 209, 220, 223, 226,
+    228, 233, 235, 236, 238, 240, 251, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 259, 260,
+    261, 263, 274, 277, 283, 291, 292, 294, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303,
+    304
+   _Early Boughies_, 66
+   _Empress of Ireland_, 127
+   _English Review_, 101, 105, 142
+   _Equilibrium Restored_, 245
+   _Entomological Society, The_, 110
+
+   Father, 34, 50, 51, 137
+   _Finis_, 225, 285
+   _Fire Bogey, The_, 170
+   _Foolish Bird, A_, 118
+   "_Fortnightly_," 61
+   "_Forum_," 296
+   Foster, Sir Michael, 209
+   _From one Maiden Lady to another (authentic)_, 37
+
+   G----, 78, 197, 215
+   _Gardening_,83
+   Gaskel, 23, 55
+   Gibbon, 129, 258
+   _Gibbon's Autobiography_, 268
+   Gissing, George, 32
+   Goethe, 146
+   _Graph of Temperament, The,_ 287
+
+   H----, 7, 8, 13, 38, 51, 60, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 89, 92,
+    94, 114, 180, 196, 206, 218, 285
+   Haeckel, 23, 300
+   _Harmsworth Encyclopædia_, 294
+   Harmsworth _Self-Educator_, 10
+   Hardy, 24, 282
+   _Hardy's Poetry_, 264
+   _Hearing Beethoven_, 172
+   Hegel, 146
+   Henley, 208, 209
+   Herdman, Prof., 46
+   Hervey, 170
+   Horton, Max Kennedy, 141
+   _Housefly Problem, The_--1916, 231
+   _Humble Confession, A_, 115
+   Huxley, 37, 163
+
+   "_Illustrated London News_," 53
+   _In a Crowd_, 184
+   _In London_, 59
+   _In London again_, 93, 99
+
+   J----, 78, 263
+   James, 163, 166
+   Jefferies, Richard, 44, 233
+   _Jeremiad, A_, 294
+   Johnson, 2, 10, 180, 181, 196, 230
+   _Johnson_ v. _Yves Delage_, 181
+   _Jolt, A_, 247
+   Jonson, Ben, 171
+   Joubert, 291
+   _Justifiable Mendacity_, 52
+
+   K----, 80, 99, 138, 225
+   Kant, 257
+   Keats, 10, 145, 146, 258
+
+   L----, 1, 3, 4, 43, 98
+   Lacépède, 146
+   Lamb, Charles, 13, 120, 227, 230
+   Landor, W.S., 265
+   La Rochefoucauld, 31
+   _Leap-frog_, 302
+   Lodge, Sir Oliver, 286
+   _Liebestod_, 302
+   _Lice or "Creeping Ferlies_," 213
+   _Looking for Lice at the Zoo_, 177
+   Lubbock, 7
+   _Ludo_, 104
+   _Lupus_, 125
+   _Luxury of Lunacy, The_, 195
+
+   M----, 12, 20, 62, 69, 70, 80, 81, 96, 105, 106, 134, 140, 156,
+    222, 225, 226, 255, 250, 259, 260
+   Macaulay, 30
+   Maeterlinck, 42
+   Malpighi, 171
+   _Marie Bashkirtseff_, 139, 163, 175, 238
+   Mary, 8, 23, 28
+   _Masefield's "Gallipoli,"_ 269
+   _Measuring Lice_, 125
+   Moffat, 161
+   Moore, Tom, 173
+   _More Irony_, 105
+   Mosenthal, 13
+   Mother, 34, 50, 51, 59, 93, 95, 97, 137
+   Mozart, 161
+   _My Gastrocnemius_, 208
+   _My Nightmare_, 105
+   _My Sense of Touch_, 91
+
+   N----, 29, 78, 121, 122, 257, 261
+   _Naming Cockroaches_, 184
+   Natural History Museum, 6, 54
+   _New Pile in the Pier, A_, 88
+   Newton, 171
+   Nietzsche, 137, 156
+
+   _Old Diaries_, 44
+   _Omniscience_, 239
+   _On Lighting Chloe's Cigarette,_ 119
+   _On Lundy Island_, 21
+   _On the N. Downs_, 68
+   _Our Simian Ancestry_, 27
+
+   P----, 76, 78, 79, 80
+   _Pachmann_, 234
+   Pascal, 293
+   _Petticoat Lane_, 163
+   Piers Plowman, 221
+   Plymouth Marine Laboratory, 29, 32,47, 79
+   _Pool: a Retrospect, The_, 189
+   _Potted Novel, A_, 284
+   _Prawning_, 17
+   _Preparing a Snake's Skull_, 50
+   "_Punch_," 296
+   _Punch and Judy Show, The,_ 180
+
+   R----, 81, 99, 101, 104, 107, 115, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124,
+    127, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 140, 141, 148,
+    151, 154, 166, 167, 169, 172, 173, 174, 175, 182, 197, 205,
+    207, 208, 209, 215, 2l6, 217, 227, 228, 229, 230, 239, 240,
+    241, 295, 299, 303
+   _Raemakers_, 186
+   _Railway Travel_, 41
+   _Raleigh, Sir Walter_, 129, 196
+   _Reading Nietzsche_, 156
+   _Reminiscences_, 270
+   _Renunciation_, 85
+   _Resignation_, 141
+   _Restlessness of the Sea, The,_ 90
+   Richepin, 57
+   Richelieu, Cardinal, 155
+   _Rigor Bordis_, 148
+   _Rodin_, 103, 157, 160
+   Romney, 169
+   Rousseau, 63, 181, 268
+   Ruskin, 30, 190, 208, 216
+
+   S----, 1, 3
+   Saintsbury, Prof. Geo., 126
+   Sainte-Beuve, 200, 277
+   Schäfer, 110
+   Schopenhauer, 34
+   Schubert, 173, 174
+   _Scots Fir, A_, 111
+   Scott, 75, 153
+   _Service_, 264
+   Shakespeare, 264
+   Shaw, Bernard, 59, 150, 166, 249
+   Shelley, 196, 266, 293
+   _Sir Henry Wood conducting_, 159
+   _Sleep_, 206
+   _Small Red Viper, A_, 16
+   Smiles, Samuel, 14
+   Smollett, 291
+   _Sollas's "Ancient Hunters,"_ 72
+   Southey, 16
+   Spallanzani, 47, 71, 112
+   Spinoza, 16
+   _Spring in the Woods_, 15
+   _Staying by the Sea_, 43
+   _Stagnancy_, 84
+   _Stagnant Day, A_, 111
+   Stevenson, 63, 106, 161, 208, 209
+   _Stockbroker, The_, 252
+   _Strangeness of my Life, The,_ 281
+   Strindberg, 139
+   Susan, 254
+   _Sunset in Kensington Gardens_, 130
+   Swift, 230
+   Swinburne, 61, 290
+
+   T----, 14, 171, 246
+
+   "_T.P.'s Weekly_," 41
+   Tennyson, 154, 264
+   _Test for True Love, The_, 157
+   _Test of Happiness, A_, 185
+   Thompson, Francis, 266
+   Thoreau, 181
+   _Too Late_, 144
+   _Tschaikovsky_, 161, 162
+   Turner, J.M.W., 154, 167
+   _Two Adventures_, 212
+   _Two Months' Sick Leave_, 80
+   _Two People I hate in particular,_ 186
+   _Two Young Men Talking_, 60
+
+   _Une Caractère_, 53
+
+   Verlaine, 60
+   Villon, Francois, 173
+   Voltaire, 63, 163
+
+   Wagner, 166
+   Wallace, 23, 37
+   Walton, Isaac, 8
+   Wasmann, Father, 47
+   Waterton, 159
+   Wells, H.G., 291
+   Whistler, 222
+   White, Gilbert, 159
+   Whitman, Walt, 189, 253
+   Wilde, Oscar, 76, 143, 152, 175, 258
+   _Windy Ash_,35
+   _Wiedersheim_, 106, 145, 159, 257
+   _Woman and a Child, A_, 146
+   Wood, Sir Henry, 157, 159, 172, 201
+   Woodward, Dr. Smith, 145
+
+   _Yellow Cat, A_, 241
+
+   Zola, 17
+
+
+
+
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+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Journal of a Disappointed Man, by Wilhelm Nero Pilate Barbellion</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
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+country where you are located before using this eBook.
+</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: The Journal of a Disappointed Man</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Wilhelm Nero Pilate Barbellion</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: April 30, 2012 [eBook #39585]<br />
+[Most recently updated: April 28, 2022]</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: Marc D’Hooghe</div>
+<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE JOURNAL OF A DISAPPOINTED MAN ***</div>
+
+<h1>THE JOURNAL OF A DISAPPOINTED MAN</h1>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>W.N.P. BARBELLION</h2>
+
+
+
+<h4>WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY H.G. WELLS</h4>
+
+
+
+<h5>NEW YORK</h5>
+
+<h5>GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY</h5>
+
+<h5>1919</h5>
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+<blockquote><p>"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift,
+nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet
+riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time
+and chance happeneth to them all.</p></blockquote>
+
+<blockquote><p>"For man also knoweth not his time; as the fishes that are taken in an
+evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons
+of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span></p></blockquote>
+
+<p><a href="#Contents">Contents</a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="INTRODUCTION" id="INTRODUCTION"></a>INTRODUCTION</h3>
+
+<h4>By H.G. WELLS</h4>
+
+<p>Your egoist, like the solitary beasts, lives only for himself; your
+altruist declares that he lives only for others; for either there may be
+success or failure but for neither can there be tragedy. For even if the
+altruist meets nothing but ingratitude, what has he to complain of? His
+premises abolish his grounds of complaint. But both egoist and altruist
+are philosophical abstractions. The human being by nature and necessity
+is neither egoist nor altruist; he trims a difficult course between the
+two; for the most part we are, within the limits of our powers of
+expression, <i>egotists</i>, and our desire is to think and if possible talk
+and write about this marvellous experiment of ourselves, with all the
+world&mdash;or as much as we can conveniently assemble&mdash;for audience. There
+is variety in our styles. Some drape the central figure; some let it
+rather appear than call attention to it; some affect a needless
+frankness: "<i>I</i> am an egotist, mind you, and I pretend nothing else";
+some by adopting a pose with accessories do at least develop so great
+and passionate an interest in the accessories as to generalise and
+escape more or less completely from self. An egotism like an eggshell is
+a thing from which to escape; the art of life is that escape. The
+fundamental art of life is to recover the sense of that great
+self-forgetful continuous life from which we have individually budded
+off. Many people have done this through religion, which begins with a
+tremendous clamour to some saviour god or other to recognise us and ends
+in our<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[Pg vi]</a></span> recognition of him; or through science, when your egotist begins
+with: "Behold me! I, I your humble servant, am a scientific man, devoted
+to the clear statement of truth," and ends with so passionate a
+statement of truth that self is forgotten altogether.</p>
+
+<p>In this diary of an intensely egotistical young naturalist, tragically
+caught by the creeping approach of death, we have one of the most moving
+records of the youthful aspects of our universal struggle. We begin with
+one of those bright schoolboys that most of us like to fancy we once
+were, that many of us have come to love as sons or nephews or younger
+brothers, and this youngster is attracted by natural science, by the
+employments of the naturalist and by the thought of being himself some
+day a naturalist. From the very beginning we find in this diary the
+three qualities, from the narrowest to broadest. "Observe me," he says
+to himself, "I am observing nature." There is the self-conscious,
+self-centred boy. But he also says "I am observing nature!" And at
+moments comes the clear light. He forgets himself in the twilight cave
+with the bats or watching the starlings in the evening sky, he becomes
+just you and I and the mind of mankind gathering knowledge. And the
+diary, as the keen edge of untimely fate cuts down into the sensitive
+tissue, shows us presently, after outcries and sorrow and darkness of
+spirit, the habits of the observer rising to the occasion. Not for him,
+he realises, are the long life, the honours of science, the Croonian
+lecture, the listening Royal Society, one's memory embalmed in specific
+or generic names, the sure place in the temple of fame, that once filled
+his boyish dreams. But here is something close at hand to go on
+observing manfully to the end, in which self may be forgotten, and that
+is his own tormented self, with desire still great and power and hope
+receding. "I will go on with this diary," I read between the lines. "You
+shall have at least one specimen, carefully displayed and labelled. Here
+is a recorded unhappiness. When you talk about life and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span> the rewards of
+life and the justice of life and its penalties, what you say must square
+with this."</p>
+
+<p>Such is what we have here. It will be going beyond the necessities of
+this preface to expatiate upon a certain thread of unpremeditated and
+exquisite beauty that runs through the story this diary tells. To all
+sensitive readers it will be plain enough, and those who cannot see it
+plain do not deserve to have it underlined for them, that, still
+unseeing, they may pretend to see. Nor need we dilate upon the
+development of the quality of this diary from the rather fussy egotism
+of the earlier half. But it may be well to add a few explanatory facts
+that the opening chapters rather take for granted. Barbellion began life
+at a material as well as a physical disadvantage; neither of his parents
+were sturdy people, his mother died at last of constitutional heart
+weakness, and his father belonged to that most unfortunate class, the
+poor educated, who live lives of worry in straitened circumstances.
+Barbellion's father was a newspaper reporter in a west country town, his
+income rarely exceeded a couple of hundred pounds a year; the
+educational facilities of the place were poor, and young Barbellion had
+to get such learning as he could as a day boy at a small private school,
+his father supplementing this meagre training and presently taking him
+on as an apprentice reporter. How the passion for natural science arose
+does not appear in this diary; we already find the naturalist formed in
+the first schoolboy entries. An uncle, a chemist, seems to have
+encouraged the tendency, and to have given him textbooks and other help.
+Somehow at any rate he acquired a considerable amount of knowledge; by
+the time he was eighteen he was already publishing quite excellent
+observations of his own in such periodicals as the <i>Zoologist</i>, and by
+the time he was twenty he could secure an appointment as assistant
+naturalist to the director of a well-known marine biological station. It
+was a success, as the reader will learn, gained only to be renounced.
+His father was ill and he had to stand by his family; our<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span> economical
+country cannot afford to make biologists out of men who can earn a
+living as hack reporters. Poverty and science are sisters wherever the
+flag of Britain waves; for how could the rich live if we wasted money on
+that sort of thing? But the dream was not altogether abandoned, and in
+1911 Barbellion got a post, one of the dozen or so of rare and coveted
+opportunities to toil in a scientific atmosphere that our Empire
+affords; he secured an assistantship at the Natural History Museum,
+South Kensington, to which a living wage was attached, a fair equivalent
+to a reporter's earnings. The rest of the story needs no helping out.
+Let me only add that since 1911 Barbellion, in spite of his steadily
+diminishing strength, has published articles in both British and
+American periodicals, that entirely justify the statement that in him
+biological science loses one of the most promising of its recent
+recruits. His scientific work is not only full and exact but it has
+those literary qualities, the grace, the power of handling, the breadth
+of reference, which have always distinguished the best English
+biological work, and which mark off at once the true scientific man from
+the mere collector and recorder of items. With this much introduction
+Barbellion may be left to tell the tragedy of his hopes and of the dark,
+unforeseen, unforeseeable, and inexplicable fate that has overtaken
+him.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="PART_I_THE_JOURNAL_BEGINS_WHEN_ITS_AUTHOR_IS_A_LITTLE_OVER_13_YEARS" id="PART_I_THE_JOURNAL_BEGINS_WHEN_ITS_AUTHOR_IS_A_LITTLE_OVER_13_YEARS"></a>PART I&mdash;THE JOURNAL BEGINS WHEN ITS AUTHOR IS A LITTLE OVER 13 YEARS
+OLD.</h3>
+
+<p class="center"><i>[The Following are Selected Entries.]</i></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="a1903" id="a1903"></a>1903</h3>
+
+
+<p><i>January</i> 3.</p>
+
+<p>Am writing an essay on the life-history of insects and have abandoned
+the idea of writing on "How Cats Spend their Time."</p>
+
+<p><i>January</i> 17.</p>
+
+<p>Went with L&mdash;&mdash; out catapult shooting. While walking down the main road
+saw a Goldfinch, but very indistinctly&mdash;it might not have been one. Had
+some wonderful shots at a tree creeper in the hedge about a foot away
+from me. While near a stream, L&mdash;&mdash; spotted what he thought to be some
+Wild Duck and brought one down, hitting it right in the head. He is a
+splendid shot. We discovered on examining it that it was <i>not</i> Wild Duck
+at all but an ordinary tame Wild Duck&mdash;a hen. We ran away, and to-night
+L&mdash;&mdash; tells me he saw the Farmer enter the poulterer's shop with the
+bird in his hand.</p>
+
+<p><i>January</i> 19.</p>
+
+<p>Went to A&mdash;&mdash; Wood with S&mdash;&mdash; and L&mdash;&mdash;. Saw a Barn Owl (<i>Strix
+flammea</i>) flying in broad daylight. At A&mdash;&mdash; Woods, be it known, there
+is a steep cliff where we were all out climbing to inspect and find all
+the likely places for birds to build in, next spring. S&mdash;&mdash; and I got along
+all right, but L&mdash;&mdash;, being a bit too careless, let go his hold on a
+tree and fell headlong down. He turned over and over and seemed to us to
+pitch on the back of his neck. However, he got up as cheerfully as ever,
+saying, "I don't like that&mdash;a bit of a nasty knock."</p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 8.</p>
+
+<p>Joe became the mother of one kitten to-day. It was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span> born at 1.20. It is
+a tiny little thing. One would almost call it deformed. It is gray.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 18.</p>
+
+<p>Our Goldfinch roosts at 5.30. Joe's kitten is a very small one. "Magpie"
+is its name.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 28.</p>
+
+<p>Went our usual ramble. But we were unfortunate from the very beginning.
+First, when we reached the "Nightjar Field," we found there were two men
+at the bottom of it cutting the hedge, so we decided not to venture on,
+as Gimbo and Bounce were with us, and it would look like poaching. Later
+on, we came to a splendid wood, but had to withdraw hastily from it, an
+old farmer giving us a severe chase. There were innumerable rabbits in
+the wood, so, of course, the dogs barked hard. I gave them a sound
+beating when we got back out of danger, The old farmer is known as "Bale
+the Bell-hanger."</p>
+
+<p><i>April</i> 2.</p>
+
+<p>I was glad yesterday to see the egg season so well in. I shall have to
+get blow-pipes and egg drills. Spring has really arrived and even the
+grasshoppers are beginning to stridulate, yet Burke describes these
+little creatures as being "loud and troublesome" and the chirp
+unpleasant. Like Samuel Johnson, he must have preferred brick walls to
+green hedges. Many people go for a walk and yet are unable to admire
+Nature simply because their power of observation is untrained. Of course
+some are not suited to the study at all and do not trouble themselves
+about it. In that case they should not talk of what they do not
+understand.... I might have noticed that I have used the term "Study of
+Nature." But it cannot be called a <i>study</i>. It <i>is</i> a pastime of sheer
+delight, with naught but beautiful dreams and lovely thoughts, where we
+are urged forward by the fact that we are in God's world which He made
+for us to be our comfort in time of trouble.... Language cannot express
+the joy and happy forgetfulness<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span> during a ramble in the country. I do
+not mean that all the ins and outs and exact knowledge of a naturalist
+are necessary to produce such delight, but merely the common
+objects&mdash;Sun, Thrush, Grasshopper, Primrose, and Dew.</p>
+
+<p><i>April</i> 21.</p>
+
+<p>S&mdash;&mdash; and I have made a little hut in the woods out of a large natural
+hole in the ground by a big tree. We have pulled down branches all
+around it and stuck in upright sticks as a paling. We are training ivy
+to grow over the sticks. We smoke "Pioneer" cigarettes here and hide the
+packets in a hole under the roots of the tree. It's like a sort of
+cupboard.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 6.</p>
+
+<p>In the evening, S&mdash;&mdash; and I cycled to S&mdash;&mdash;, and when it was dark we
+went down on the rocks and lit a fire which crackled and burnt in the
+dusk of the evening.... Intend to do a bit to Beetles these hols. Rev.
+J. Wood in the <i>B.O.P</i>. has incited me to take them up, and it is really
+time, for at present I am as ignorant as I can hang together of the
+Coleoptera.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 24.</p>
+
+<p>Went out with L&mdash;&mdash; to try to see the squirrels again. We could not find
+one and were just wondering if we should draw blank when L&mdash;&mdash; noticed
+one clinging to the bark of a tree with a nut in its mouth. We gave it a
+good chase, but it escaped into the thickest part of the fir tree, still
+carrying the nut, and we gave up firing at it. Later on, L&mdash;&mdash; got
+foolishly mischievous&mdash;owing, I suppose, to our lack of sport&mdash;and
+unhinged a gate which he carried two yards into a copse, and threw it on
+the ground. Just then, he saw the Squirrel again and jumped over the
+hedge into the copse, chasing it from tree to tree with his catty.
+Having lost it, he climbed a fir tree into a Squirrel's drey at the top
+and sat there on the tree top, and I, below, was just going to lift the
+gate back when I looked up<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> and saw a farmer watching me, menacing and
+silent. I promptly dropped the gate and fled. L&mdash;&mdash; from his Squirrel's
+drey, not knowing what had happened, called out to me about the
+nest&mdash;that there was nothing in it. The man looked up and asked him who
+he was and who I was. L&mdash;&mdash; would not say and would not come down. The
+farmer said he would come up. L&mdash;&mdash; answered that if he did he would
+"gob" [<i>i.e</i>. spit] on him. Eventually L&mdash;&mdash; climbed down and asked the
+farmer for a glass of cider. The latter gave him his boot and L&mdash;&mdash; ran
+away.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="a1904" id="a1904"></a>1904</h3>
+
+
+<p><i>January</i> 23.</p>
+
+<p>Went to the meet of the Stag hounds. Saw a hind in the stream at
+L&mdash;&mdash;with not a horse, hound, or man in sight. It looked quite
+unconcerned and did not seem to have been hunted. I tried to head it,
+but a confounded sheep-dog got there before me and drove it off in the
+wrong direction. I <i>was</i> mad, because if I had succeeded in heading it
+and had there been a kill, I should have got a slot. Got home at 6.30,
+after running and walking fifteen miles&mdash;tired out.</p>
+
+<p><i>April</i> 5.</p>
+
+<p>Just read <i>Stalky &amp; Co</i>. Of Stalky, Beetle, and McTurk, I like Beetle
+best.</p>
+
+<p><i>April</i> 14.</p>
+
+<p>Won the School Gymnasium championship (under fifteen).</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 25.</p>
+
+<p>Had quite an adventure to-day. D&mdash;&mdash; and I cycled to the Lighthouse at
+----. On the way, in crossing the sands near the Hospital Ship we espied
+a lame Curlew which could hardly fly. I gave chase, but it managed to
+scramble over a gut full of water about two yards wide. D&mdash;&mdash; took off
+his boots and stockings and carried me over<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> on his back, and we both
+raced across the sands to where the Curlew lay in an exhausted state. I
+picked him up and carried him off under my arm, like the boy with the
+Goose that laid the golden eggs. All the time, the bird screamed loudly,
+opening its enormously long bill and struggling to escape. Arrived at
+the gut again, we found that the incoming tide had made the gut wider
+and deeper so that we were cut off from the mainland, and found it
+necessary to wade across at once before it got deeper. As I had to carry
+a pair of field-glasses as well as my boots and stockings, I handed over
+the struggling bird to D&mdash;&mdash;. While wading across, I suddenly sank to my
+waist in a sandpit. This frightened me, and I was glad to reach the
+other side in safety. But on arrival I found D&mdash;&mdash;, but no Curlew. In
+wading across the current, he grew flurried and let it go. The tide
+swept it upstream, and the poor bird, I fear, perished by drowning....
+Knocked up my friend P&mdash;&mdash;, who is skipper of the ship <i>N</i>&mdash;&mdash; and asked
+him if he had a fire so that I could dry myself. He replied that they
+had no fire but that his "missus" would look out a pair of pants for me.
+Before falling in with this plan unconditionally, I thought it best to
+inspect the garment. However, it was quite clean&mdash;a pair of blue serge
+seaman's trousers, very baggy in the seat and far too long. But I turned
+up the bottoms and hid the baggy part underneath my overcoat. So, I got
+back home!</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 8.</p>
+
+<p>Wet all day. Toothache.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 9.</p>
+
+<p>Toothache.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 10.</p>
+
+<p>Toothache.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 11.</p>
+
+<p>Toothache.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>Xmas Day.</i></p>
+
+<p>Mother and Dad wanted to give me one of G.A. Henty's, but, fearing lest
+I did not want it, they did not put my name in it, so that if I wished I
+could change it. Intend doing this. Am reading the <i>Origin of Species</i>.
+It requires careful study, but I understand it so far and shall go on.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 26.</p>
+
+<p>I have caught nothing in my traps yet. A little while ago I set a
+springe and two horse-hair nooses in the reed bed for water rails. I
+have bought a book on practical trapping.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="a1905" id="a1905"></a>1905</h3>
+
+
+<p><i>January</i> 15.</p>
+
+<p>I am thinking that on the whole I am a most discontented mortal. I get
+fits of what I call "What's the good of anything" mania. I keep asking
+myself incessantly till the question wears me out: "What's the good of
+going into the country <i>naturalising</i>? what's the good of studying so
+hard? where is it going to end? will it lead anywhere?"</p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 17.</p>
+
+<p>When I can get hold of any one interested in Natural History I talk away
+in the most garrulous manner and afterwards feel ashamed of myself for
+doing it.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 15.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Captain</i>, in answer to my letter, advises me to join one of the
+ordinary professions and then follow up Nat. History as a recreation, or
+else join Science Classes at S. Kensington, or else by influence get a
+post in the Natural History Museum. But I shall see.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 9.</p>
+
+<p>During dinner hour, between morning and afternoon school, went out on
+the S&mdash;&mdash; B&mdash;&mdash; River Bank, and found another Sedge Warbler's nest. This
+is the fifth I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> have found this year. People who live opposite on the
+T&mdash;&mdash; V&mdash;&mdash; hear them sing at night and think they are Nightingales!</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 27.</p>
+
+<p>On reviewing the past egg-season, I find in all I have discovered 232
+nests belonging to forty-four species. I only hope I shall be as
+successful with the beetle-season.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 15.</p>
+
+<p>A hot, sultry afternoon, during most of which I was stretched out on the
+grass beside an upturned stone where a battle royal was fought between
+Yellow and Black Ants. The victory went to the hardy little Yellows....
+By the way, I held a Newt by the tail to-day and it emitted a squeak! So
+that the Newt has a voice after all.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 26.</p>
+
+<p>In bed with a feverish cold. I am afraid I have very few Nat. His.
+observations to make. It is hard to observe anything at all when lying
+in bed in a dull bedroom with one small window. Gulls and Starlings
+pass, steam engines whistle, horses' feet clatter down the street, and
+sometimes the voice of a passer-by reaches me, and often the loud laugh
+that speaks the vacant mind. I can also hear my own cough echoing
+through my head, and, by the evening, the few pages of Lubbock's <i>Ants,
+Bees, and Wasps</i> which I struggled to get through during the day rattle
+through my brain till I am disgusted to find I have them by heart. The
+clock strikes midnight and I wait for the morning. Oh! what a weary
+world.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 13.</p>
+
+<p>Down with another cold. Feeling pretty useless. It's a wonder I don't
+develop melancholia.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 6.</p>
+
+<p>By 7 a.m. H&mdash;&mdash; and I were down on the mudflats of the River with
+field-glasses, watching Waders. Ringed Plover in great numbers.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="a1906" id="a1906"></a>1906</h3>
+
+<p><i>January</i> 13.</p>
+
+<p>I have always had one ambition to be a great naturalist. That is, I
+suppose, a child's fancy, and I can see my folly in hoping for such
+great things. Still, there is no reason why I should not become a
+<i>learned</i> naturalist if I study hard. I hope that whatever I do I shall
+do in the hope of increasing knowledge of truth and not for my own fame.
+This entry may suggest that I am horribly conceited. But really I am as
+humble as possible. I know I have advanced beyond many others, and I
+know I shall advance further, but why be conceited?... What a short life
+we have, and what heaps of glorious work to be done! Supper bell&mdash;so I
+am off.... This reads like Isaac Walton's funny mixtures of the sublime
+with the ridiculous. He discusses abstract happiness and the best salmon
+sauce all in one breath.</p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 26.</p>
+
+<p>Although it is a grand achievement to have added but one jot or tittle
+to the sum of human knowledge it is grander still to have added a
+thought. It is best for a man to try to be both poet and naturalist&mdash;not
+to be too much of a naturalist and so overlook the beauty of things, or
+too much of a poet and so fail to understand them or even perceive those
+hidden beauties only revealed by close observation.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 17.</p>
+
+<p>Woke up this morning covered with spots, chest inflamed, and bad cough.
+H&mdash;&mdash; carted me down from the Attic to the Lower Bedroom, and when the
+Dr. came he confirmed the general opinion that I had measles. It is
+simply disgusting, I have somewhere near 10,000 spots on me.</p>
+
+<p><i>April</i> 27.</p>
+
+<p>Went to A&mdash;&mdash; Woods, where, strange to say, I again saw Mary. But she
+had a tribe of friends with her, so<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> did not speak, but watched her from
+a distance through my field-glasses.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 8.</p>
+
+<p>On interviewing my old friend Dr. H&mdash;&mdash;, found I had chickenpox. This
+instead of being a Diary of a Naturalist's observations<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> will be one
+of infectious diseases.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 28.</p>
+
+<p>[Letter from Editor of <i>Countryside</i> to my brother saying that if the
+<i>Countryside</i> grew he might be able to offer me a billet. "Meanwhile he
+will be able to get along with his pen ... he will soon make a living
+and in time too a name."] This is a bit of all right. I shall always be
+on the look-out for a job on a N.H. Journal.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 7.</p>
+
+<p>Went to F&mdash;&mdash; Duckponds. Flocks of Wigeon and Teal on the water. Taking
+advantage of a dip in the land managed to stalk them splendidly, and for
+quite a long time I lay among the long grass watching them through my
+field-glasses. But during the day Wild Duck are not particularly lively
+or interesting birds. They just rest serenely on the water like floating
+corks on a sheet of glass. Occasionally one will paddle around lazily.
+But for the most part they show a great ennui and seem so sleepy and
+tired that one would almost think to be able to approach and feed them
+out of the hand. But I moved one hand carelessly and the whole flock was
+up in a minute and whizzing across the river. Afterwards, at dusk, on
+returning to the ponds, they had come back; but now that the sun was
+down, those dozy, flapdoodle creatures of the afternoon were transformed
+into quacking, quarrelsome, blustering birds that squabbled and chivvied
+each other, every moment seizing the chance of a luxurious dip, flinging
+the ice-cold water off their backs with a shake of the tail that seemed
+to indicate the keenest-edged delight.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was now quite dark. A Snipe rose at my feet and disappeared into the
+darkness. Coots and Moorhens clekked, and a Little Grebe grew bold and
+began to dive and fish quite close to me, methodically working its way
+upstream and so quartering out its feeding area.</p>
+
+<p>A happy half-hour! Alas! I enjoy these moments the more as they recede.
+Not often do I realise the living present. That is always difficult. It
+is the mere shades&mdash;the ghosts of the dead days&mdash;that are dearest to me.</p>
+
+<p>Spent my last day at school. De Quincey says (or was it Johnson?) that
+whenever we do anything for the last time, provided we have done it
+regularly for years before, we are a little melancholy, even though it
+has been distasteful to us.... True.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 14.</p>
+
+<p>Signed my Death Warrant, <i>i.e.</i>, my articles apprenticing me to
+journalism for five years. By Jove! I shall work frantically during the
+next five years so as to be ready at the end of them to take up a
+Natural History appointment.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Up to 1911, the Journal is mainly devoted to records of
+observations in general Natural History and latterly in Zoology alone.</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="a1907" id="a1907"></a>1907</h3>
+
+
+<p><i>March</i> 1.</p>
+
+<p>As long as he has good health, a man need never despair. Without good
+health, I <i>might</i> keep a long while in the race, yet as the goal of my
+ambition grew more and more unattainable I should surely remember the
+words of Keats and give up: "There is no fiercer Hell than the failure
+of a great ambition."</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 14.</p>
+
+<p>Have been reading through the Chemistry Course in the Harmsworth
+<i>Self-Educator</i> and learning all the latest facts and ideas about
+radium. I would rather have a clear comprehension of the atom as a solar
+system than a private income of £100 a year. If only I had eyes to go on
+reading without a stop!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 1.</p>
+
+<p>Met an old gentleman in E&mdash;&mdash;, a naturalist with a great contempt for
+the Book of Genesis. He wanted to know how the Kangaroo leapt from
+Australia to Palestine and how Noah fed the animals in the Ark. He
+rejects the Old T. theogony and advised me to read "Darwin and J.G.
+Wood!" Silly old man!</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 22.</p>
+
+<p>To Challacombe and then walked across Exmoor. This is the first time I
+have been on Exmoor. My first experience of the Moors came bursting in
+on me with a flood of ideas, impressions, and delights. I cannot write
+out the history of to-day. It would take too long and my mind is a
+palpitating tangle. I have so many things to record that I cannot record
+one of them. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to draw up an
+inventory of things seen and heard and trust to my memory to fill in the
+details when in the future I revert to this date. Too much joy, like too
+much pain, simply makes me prostrate. It wounds the organism. It is too
+much. I shall try to forget it all as quickly as possible so as to be
+able to return to egg-collecting and bird-watching the sooner as a calm
+and dispassionate observer. Yet these dear old hills. How I love them. I
+cannot leave them without one friendly word. I wish I were a shepherd!</p>
+
+<p>At the "Ring of Bells" had a long yarn with the landlord, who, as he
+told us the story of his life, was constantly interrupted but never
+disconcerted by the exuberant loyalty and devotion of his wife&mdash;a stout,
+florid, creamy woman, who capped every story with: "Ees quite honest,
+sir; no 'arm at all in old Joshua."</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 5.</p>
+
+<p>A half-an-hour of to-day I spent in a punt under a copper beech out of
+the pouring rain listening to Lady &mdash;&mdash;'s gamekeeper at A&mdash;&mdash; talk about
+beasts and local politics&mdash;just after a visit of inspection to the
+Heronry in the firs on the island in the middle of the Lake. It<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> was
+delightful to hear him describing a Heron killing an Eel with "a dap on
+the niddick," helping out the figure with a pat on the nape of his thick
+bull neck.</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 22.</p>
+
+<p>Am reading Huxley's <i>Crayfish</i>. H&mdash;&mdash; brought me in that magnificent
+aculeate <i>Chrysis ignita</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 15.</p>
+
+<p>Met <i>her</i> in the market with M&mdash;&mdash;. I just lifted my hat and passed on.
+She has the most marvellous brown eyes I have ever seen. She is
+perfectly self-possessed. A bad sign this.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 18.</p>
+
+<p>When I feel ill, cinema pictures of the circumstances of my death flit
+across my mind's eye. I cannot prevent them. I consider the nature of
+the disease and all I said before I died&mdash;something heroic, of course!</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 31.</p>
+
+<p>She is a ripping girl. Her eyes are magnificent. I have never seen any
+one better looking.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 1.</p>
+
+<p>In the afternoon dissected a Frog, following Milnes Marshall's Book. Am
+studying Chemistry and attending classes at the Evening School and
+reading Physiology (Foster's). Am also teaching myself German. I wish I
+had a microscope.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 3.</p>
+
+<p>What heaps of things to be done! How short the time to do them in! An
+appetite for knowledge is apt to rush one off one's feet, like any other
+appetite if not curbed. I often stand in the centre of the Library here
+and think despairingly how impossible it is ever to become possessed of
+all the wealth of facts and ideas contained in the books surrounding me
+on every hand. I pull out<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> one volume from its place and feel as if I
+were no more than giving one dig with a pick in an enormous quarry. The
+Porter spends his days in the Library keeping strict vigil over this
+catacomb of books, passing along between the shelves and yet never
+paying heed to the almost audible susurrus of desire&mdash;the desire every
+book has to be taken down and read, to live, to come into being in
+somebody's mind. He even hands the volumes over the counter, seeks them
+out in their proper places or returns them there without once realising
+that a Book is a Person and not a Thing. It makes me shudder to think of
+Lamb's <i>Essays</i> being carted about as if they were fardels.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 16.</p>
+
+<p>Dissected an Eel. Cassell's <i>Natural History</i> says the Air-bladder is
+divided. This is not so in the one I opened. Found what I believe to be
+the lymphatic heart in the tail beneath the vent.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="a1908" id="a1908"></a>1908</h3>
+
+
+<p><i>March</i> 10.</p>
+
+<p>Am working frantically so as to keep up my own work with the daily
+business of reporting. Shorthand, type-writing, German, Chemistry
+classes, Electricity lectures, Zoology (including dissections) and field
+work. Am reading Mosenthal's <i>Muscle and Nerve</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>April</i> 7.</p>
+
+<p>Sectioned a leech. H&mdash;&mdash; has lent me a hand microtome and I have
+borrowed an old razor. My table in the Attic is now fitted up quite like
+a Laboratory. I get up every morning at 6 a.m. to dissect. Have worked
+at the Anatomy of <i>Dytiscus, Lumbricus</i>, another Leech, and <i>Petromyzon
+fluviatilis</i> all collected by myself. The "branchial basket" of
+<i>Petromyzon</i> interested me vastly. But it's a brute to dissect.<a name="FNanchor_1_2" id="FNanchor_1_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_2" class="fnanchor">[1]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 1.</p>
+
+<p>Cycled to the Lighthouse at the mouth of the Estuary. Underneath some
+telegraph wires, picked up a Landrail in excellent condition. The colour
+of the wings is a beautiful warm chestnut. While sweeping the sandhills
+with my field-glasses in search of Ring Plover, which nest there in the
+shingle beaches, I espied a Shelduck (<i>Tadorna</i>) squatting on a piece of
+level ground. On walking up cautiously, found it was dead&mdash;a Drake in
+splendid plumage and quite fresh and uninjured. Put him in my poacher's
+pocket, alongside of the Landrail. My coat looked rather bulgy, for a
+Shelduck is nearly as big as a Goose. Heard a Grasshopper Warbler&mdash;a
+rare bird in North &mdash;&mdash;. Later, after much patient watching, saw the
+bird in a bramble bush, creeping about like a mouse.</p>
+
+<p>On the sea-shore picked up a number of Sea Mice (<i>Aphrodite</i>) and
+bottled them in my jar of 70 per cent., as they will come in useful for
+dissection. Also found the cranium of a <i>Scyllium</i>, which I will
+describe later on.</p>
+
+<p>Near the Lighthouse watched some fishermen bring in a large Salmon in a
+seine net worked from the shore. It was most exciting. Cycled down three
+miles of hard sand with the wind behind me to the village where I had
+tea and&mdash;as if nothing could stay to-day's good luck&mdash;met Margaret &mdash;&mdash;.
+I showed her one by one all my treasures&mdash;Rail, Duck, Skull, Sea Mice,
+etc., and felt like Thomas Edward, beloved of Samuel Smiles. To her I
+must have appeared a very ridiculous person.</p>
+
+<p>"How do you know it's the skull of a dog-fish?" she asked, incredulous.</p>
+
+<p>"How do I know anything?" I said, a little piqued.</p>
+
+<p>On arriving home found T&mdash;&mdash; awaiting me with the news that he had
+discovered a Woodpecker's nest. When will the luck cease? I have never
+had such a flawless ten hours in <i>le grand air</i>. These summer days eat
+into my being. The sea has been roaring into my ears and the sun blazing
+down so that even the backs of my hands are sunburnt. And then: those
+coal-black eyes. Ah! me, she <i>is</i> pretty.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 2.</p>
+
+<p>Dissected the Sheldrake. Very entertained to discover the extraordinary
+asymmetry of the syrinx....</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 3.</p>
+
+<p>Dissected Corncrake, examining carefully the pessulus, bronchidesmus
+(incomplete), <i>tympani-form and semi-lunar</i> membranes of a very
+interesting syrinx....</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 6.</p>
+
+<p>Dissected one of the Sea Mice. It has a remarkable series of hepatic
+ducts running into the alimentary canal as in Nudibranchs....</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 9.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Spring in the Woods</i></p>
+
+<p>Among the Oak Saplings we seemed enveloped in a cloud of green. The tall
+green grasses threw up a green light against the young green of the
+Oaks, and the sun managed to trickle through only here and there. Bevies
+of swinging bluebells grew in patches among the grass. Overhead in the
+oaks I heard secret leaf whispers&mdash;those little noiseless noises. Birds
+and trees and flowers were secretive and mysterious like expectant
+motherhood. All the live things plotted together, having the same big
+business in hand. Out in the sunlit meadows, there was a different
+influence abroad. Here everything was gay, lively, irresponsible. The
+brook prattled like an inconsequential schoolgirl. The Marsh Marigolds
+in flamboyant yellow sunbonnets played ring-a-ring-a-roses.</p>
+
+<p>An Oak Sapling should make an elderly man avuncular. There are so many
+tremendous possibilities about a well-behaved young oak that it is
+tempting to put a hand upon its shoulder and give some seasoned,
+timberly advice.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 1.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>A Small Red Viper</i></p>
+
+<p>Went to L&mdash;&mdash; Sessions. After the Court rose, I transcribed my notes
+quickly and walked out to the famous Valley of Rocks which Southey
+described as the ribs of the old Earth poking through. At the bottom of
+one of the hills saw a snake, a Red Viper. Put my boot on him quickly so
+that he couldn't get away and then recognised him as a specimen of what
+I consider to be the fourth species of British Serpent&mdash;<i>Vipera rubra</i>.
+The difficulty was to know how to secure him. This species is more
+ferocious than the ordinary <i>V. bera</i>, and I did not like the idea of
+putting my hand down to seize him by the neck. I stood for some time
+with my foot so firmly pressed down on its back that my leg ached and I
+began to wonder if I had been bitten. I held on and presently hailed a
+baker's cart coming along the road. The man got out and ran across the
+grass to where I stood. I showed him what I had beneath my boot and he
+produced a piece of string which I fastened around the snake's tail and
+so gently hauled the little brute up. It already appeared moribund, but
+I squashed its head on the grass with my heel to make certain. After
+parting with the baker, to whom all thanks be given, I remember that
+Adders are tenacious of life and so I continue to carry him at string's
+length and occasionally wallop him against a stone. As he was lifeless I
+wrapped him in paper and put him in my pocket&mdash;though to make assurance
+doubly sure I left the string on and let its end hang out over my
+pocket. So home by a two hours' railway journey with the adder in the
+pocket of my overcoat and the overcoat on the rack over my head. Settled
+down to the reading of a book on Spinoza's <i>Ethics</i>. At home it proved
+to be quite alive, and, on being pulled out by the string, coiled up on
+the drawing-room floor and hissed in a fury, to my infinite surprise.
+Finished him off with the poker and so spoilt the skin.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 18.</p>
+
+<p>Have had toothache for a week. Too much of a coward to have it out.
+Started for P&mdash;&mdash; early in the morning to report Mr. Duke, K.C. After a
+week's pain, felt a little dicky. All the way in the train kept
+hardening myself to the task in front of me by recollecting the example
+of Zola, who killed pain with work. So all day to-day I have endeavoured
+to act as if I had no pain&mdash;the worst of all pains&mdash;toothache. By the
+time I got home I was rather done up, but the pain was actually less.
+This gave me a furious joy, and, after days of morose silence, to-night
+at supper I made them all laugh by bursting out violently with, "I don't
+know whether you know it but I've had a horrible day to-day." I
+explained at length and received the healing ointment of much sympathy.
+Went to bed happy with tooth still aching. I fear it was scarcely
+playing the strict Zolaesque game to divulge the story of my
+sufferings.... No, I am not a martyr or a saint. Just an ordinary devil
+who's having a rough time.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 17.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Prawning</i></p>
+
+<p>Had a glorious time on the rocks at low tide prawning. Caught some
+Five-Bearded Rocklings and a large <i>Cottus bubalis</i>. The sun did not
+simply shine to-day&mdash;it came rushing down from the sky in a cataract and
+flooded the sands with light. Sitting on a rock, with prawning net over
+my knees I looked along three miles of flat hard and yellow sands. The
+sun poured down on them so heavily that it seemed to raise a luminous
+golden yellow dust for about three feet high.</p>
+
+<p>On the rocks was a pretty flapper in a pink sunbonnet&mdash;also prawning in
+company of S&mdash;&mdash;, the artist, who has sent her picture to the Royal
+Academy. They saw I was a naturalist, so my services were secured to
+pronounce my judgment on a "fish" she had caught. It was a Squid, "an
+odd little beast," in truth, as she said.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> "The same class of animal," I
+volunteered, "as the Cuttlefish and Octopus."</p>
+
+<p>"Does it sting?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it ought to with a face like that." She laughed merrily, and the
+bearded but youthful artist laughed too.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know anything about these things," he said hopelessly.</p>
+
+<p>"Nor I," said the naturalist modestly. "I study fish."</p>
+
+<p>This was puzzling. "Fish?" What was a Squid then?</p>
+
+<p>... The artist would stop now and then and raise his glasses at a
+passing ship, and Maud's face occasionally disappeared in the pink
+sunbonnet as she stooped over a pool to examine a seaweed or crab.</p>
+
+<p>She's a dear&mdash;and she gave me the Squid. What a merry little cuss!</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 1.</p>
+
+<p>Went with Uncle to see a Wesleyan minister whose fame as a microscopist,
+according to Uncle, made it worth my while to visit him. As I expected,
+he was just a silly old man, a diatomaniac fond of pretty-pretty slides
+and not a scientific man at all. He lectures Bands of Hope on the
+Butterfly's Life History and hates his next-door neighbour, who is also
+a microscopist and incidentally a scientific man, because he interests
+himself in "parasites and those beastly things."</p>
+
+<p>I remarked that his friend next door had shown me an Amphioxus.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! I expect that's some beastly bacteria thing," he said petulantly.
+"I can't understand Wilkinson. He's a pervert."</p>
+
+<p>I told him what <i>Amphioxus</i> was and laughed up my sleeve. He likes to
+think of Zoology as a series of pretty pictures illustrating beautiful
+moral truths. The old fellow's saving grace was enthusiasm.... Having
+focused an object for us, he would stand by, breathless, while we
+squinted down his gas-tube, and gave vent to tremendous expletives of
+surprise such as "Heavens," or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> "Jupiter." His eyes would twinkle with
+delight and straightway another miracle is selected for us to view.
+"They are all miracles," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Those are the valves"&mdash;washing his hands with invisible soap&mdash;"no one
+has yet been able to solve the problem of the Diatom's valves. No one
+knows what they are&mdash;no, nor ever will know&mdash;why?&mdash;why can't we see
+behind the valves?&mdash;because God is behind the valves&mdash;that is why!"
+Amen.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 1.</p>
+
+<p>Telegraphed 1,000 words of Lord &mdash;&mdash;'s speech at T&mdash;&mdash;.</p>
+
+<p>Spent the night at a comfortable country inn and read Moore's lyrics.
+"Row gently here, my Gondolier," ran through my head continuously. The
+Inn is an old one with a long narrow passage that leads straight from
+front door to back with wainscoted smoke room and parlours on each side.
+China dogs, bran on the floor, and the picture of Derby Day with horses
+galloping incredibly, the drone of an old crony in the bar, and a
+pleasant barmy smell. Slept in a remarkable bedroom full of massive
+furniture, draped with cloth and covered with trinkets. The bed had a
+tremendous hood over it like a catafalque, and lying in it made me think
+I was an effigy. Read Moore till the small hours and then found I had
+left my handbag downstairs. Lit a candle and went on a voyage of
+discovery. Made a considerable noise, but roused no one. Entered
+drawing-room, kitchen, pantries, parlour, bar&mdash;everywhere looking for my
+bag and dropping candle grease everywhere! Slept in my day shirt. Tired
+out and slept like a top.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 3.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Aristotle's Lantern</i></p>
+
+<p>Dissected the Sea Urchin (<i>Echinus esculentus</i>). Very excited over my
+first view of Aristotle's Lantern. These complicated pieces of animal
+mechanism never smell of musty age&mdash;after æons of evolution. When I open
+a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> Sea Urchin and see the Lantern, or dissect a Lamprey and cast eyes on
+the branchial basket, such structures strike me as being as finished and
+exquisite as if they had just a moment before been tossed me fresh from
+the hands of the Creator. They are fresh, young, they smell <i>new</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 3.</p>
+
+<p>Hard at work dissecting a Dogfish. Ruridecanal Conference in the
+afternoon. I enjoy this double life I lead. It amazes me to be laying
+bare the brain of a dogfish in the morning and in the afternoon to be
+taking down in shorthand what the Bishop says on Mission Work.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 4.</p>
+
+<p>Went to the Veterinary Surgeon and begged of him the skull of a horse.
+Carried the trophy home under my arm&mdash;bare to the public view. "Why,
+Lor', 'tis an ole 'orse's jib," M&mdash;&mdash; said when I got back.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_2" id="Footnote_1_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_2"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> There are numerous drawings of dissections scattered
+through the Journal about this period.</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="a1909" id="a1909"></a>1909</h3>
+
+
+<p><i>March</i> 7.</p>
+
+<p>My programme of work is: (1) Continue German. (2) Sectioning embryo of
+(<i>a</i>) Fowl, (<i>b</i>) Newt. (3) Paper on Arterial System of Newts. (4)
+Psychology of Newts. (5) General Zoological Reading.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 2.</p>
+
+<p>To C&mdash;&mdash; Hill. Too much taken with the beauty of the Woods to be able to
+do any nesting. Here are some of the things I saw: the bark on several
+of the trees in the mazzard orchards rubbed into a beautifully smooth,
+polished surface by the Red Devon Cows when scratching where it itched;
+I put my hand on the smooth almost cherry-red patch of bark and felt
+delighted and grateful that cows had fleas: the young shoots of the
+whortle-berry plants on the hill were red tipped with the gold of an
+almost horizontal sun. I caught a little lizard which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> slipped across my
+path.... Afar off down in the valley I had come through, in a convenient
+break in a holly bush, I could just see a Cow sitting on her matronly
+haunches in a field. She flicked her ears and two starlings settled on
+her back. A Rabbit swept out of a sweet-brier bush, and a Magpie flew
+out of the hedge on my right.</p>
+
+<p>In another direction I could see a field full of luscious, tall, green
+grass. Every stalk was so full of sap that had I cut one I am sure it
+would have bled great green drops. In the field some lambs were
+sleeping; one woke up and looked at me with the back of its head to the
+low sun, which shone through its two small ears and gave them a
+transparent pink appearance.</p>
+
+<p>No sooner am I rebaptized in the sun than I have to be turning home
+again. No sooner do "the sudden lilies push between the loosening fibres
+of the heart" than I am whisked back into the old groove&mdash;the daily
+round. If only I had more time!&mdash;more time in which to think, to love,
+to observe, to frame my disposition, to direct as far as in me lies the
+development and unfolding of my character, if only I could direct all my
+energies to the great and difficult profession of life, of being man
+instead of trifling with one profession that bores me and dabbling in
+another.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 5.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>On Lundy Island</i></p>
+
+<p>Frankie is blowing Seagulls' eggs in the scullery. His father, after a
+day's work at the farm, is at his supper very hungry, yet immensely
+interested, and calls out occasionally,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Ow you're getting on, Foreman?"</p>
+
+<p>"All right, Capt.," says Frankie affectionately, and the unpleasant
+asthmatic, wheezy noise of the egg-blowing goes on.... There are three
+dogs asleep under the kitchen table; all three belong to different
+owners and neither one to A&mdash;&mdash;.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 6.</p>
+
+<p>Our egg-collecting with the Lighthouse Keepers. They walk about the
+cliffs as surefooted as cats, and feed their dogs on birds' eggs
+collected in a little bag at the end of a long pole. One dog ate three
+right off in as many minutes, putting his teeth through and cracking the
+shell, then lapping up the contents. Crab for tea.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 7.</p>
+
+<p>After a glorious day at the N. end of the Island with the Puffins, was
+forced to-night to take another walk, as the smell of Albert's tobacco,
+together with that of his stockinged feet and his boots removed, was
+asphyxiating.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 9.</p>
+
+<p>The governess is an awfully pretty girl. We have been talking together
+to-day and she asked me if I were a naturalist. I said "Yes." She said,
+"Well, I found a funny little beetle yesterday and Mr. S&mdash;&mdash; said I
+ought to have given it to you." Later, I felt she was looking at me, so
+I looked at her, across the beach. Yes! it was true. When our eyes met
+she gave me one of the most provokingly pretty smiles, then turned and
+went up the cliff path and so out of my life&mdash;to my everlasting regret.</p>
+
+<p>Return to-night in a cattle steamer.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 18.</p>
+
+<p>Dr.&mdash;&mdash;, M.A., F.R.S., D.C.L., LL.D., called in the office to-day, and
+seeing Dad typing, said, "Are you Mr. Barbellion?" Dad replied in the
+affirmative, whereupon the Doctor handed him his card, and Dad said he
+thought it was his son he wanted to see. He is an old gentleman aged
+eighty or thereabouts, with elastic-sided boots, an umbrella, and a
+guardian nephew&mdash;a youngster of about sixty. But I paid him due
+reverence as a celebrated zoologist and at his invitation [and to my
+infinite pride] accompanied him on an excursion to the coast, where he
+wanted to see <i>Philoscia Couchii</i>, which I readily turned up for him.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I chanced to remark that I thought torsion in gastropods one of the most
+fascinating and difficult problems in Zoology. Why should a snail be
+twisted round?</p>
+
+<p>"Humph," said he, "why do we stand upright?" I was not such a fool as to
+argue with him, so pretended his reply was a knock-out. But it enabled
+me to size him up intellectually.</p>
+
+<p>In the evening dined with him at his hotel.... He knows Wallace and
+Haeckel personally, and I sat at his feet with my tongue out listening
+to personal reminiscences of these great men. However, he seemed never
+to have heard of Gaskell's Theory on the Origin of Vertebrates.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 27.</p>
+
+<p>Walked to V&mdash;&mdash;. As usual, Nature with clockwork regularity had all her
+taps turned on&mdash;larks singing, cherries ripening, and bees humming. It
+all bored me a little. Why doesn't she vary it a little?</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 8.</p>
+
+<p>A cold note from Dr. &mdash;&mdash; saying that he cannot undertake the
+responsibility of advising me to give up journalism for zoology.</p>
+
+<p>A hellish cold in the head. Also a swingeing inflammation of the eyes.
+Just heard them singing in the Chapel over the way: "God shall wipe away
+all tears from their eyes." Hope so, I'm sure.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 9.</p>
+
+<p>A transformation. After a long series of drab experiences in Sheffield,
+etc., the last being the climax of yesterday, an anti-cyclone arrived
+this morning and I sailed like an Eagle into cloudless, windless
+weather! <i>The Academy</i> has published my article, my cold is suddenly
+better, and going down by the sea this afternoon met Mary &mdash;&mdash;!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 20.</p>
+
+<p>Had an amusing letter from my maiden-aunt F&mdash;&mdash;, who does not like "the
+agnostic atmosphere" in my <i>Academy</i> article. Poor dear! She is sorry if
+I really feel like that, and, if I do, what a pity to put it into print.
+Then a Bible reference to the Epistle to the Romans.</p>
+
+<p><i>Xmas Day</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Feeling ill&mdash;like a sloppy Tadpole. My will is paralysed. I visit the
+Doctor regularly to be stethoscoped, ramble about the streets, idly scan
+magazines in the Library and occasionally rink&mdash;with palpitation of the
+heart as a consequence. In view of the shortness, bitterness, and
+uncertainty of life, all scientific labour for me seems futile.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="a1910" id="a1910"></a>1910</h3>
+
+
+<p><i>January</i> 10.</p>
+
+<p>Better, but still very dicky: a pallid animal: a weevil in a nut. I have
+a weak heart, an enervated nervous system; I suffer from lack of funds
+with which to carry on my studies; I hate
+newspaper-reporting&mdash;particularly some skinny-witted speaker like &mdash;&mdash;;
+and last, but not least, there are women; all these worries fight over
+my body like jackals over carrion. Yet Zoology is all I want. Why won't
+Life leave me alone?</p>
+
+<p><i>January</i> 15.</p>
+
+<p>Reading Hardy's novels. He is altogether delightful in the subtlety with
+which he lets you perceive the first tiny love presentiments between his
+heroes and heroines&mdash;the casual touch of the hands, the peep of a foot
+or ankle underneath the skirt&mdash;all these in Hardy signify the cloud no
+bigger than a man's hand. They are the susurrus of the breeze before the
+storm, and you await what is to follow with palpitating heart.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 3.</p>
+
+<p>For days past have been living in a state of mental ebullition. All
+kinds of pictures of Love, Life, and Death have been passing through my
+mind. Now I am too indolent and nerveless to set them down. Physically I
+am such a wreck that to carry out the least intention, such as putting
+on my boots, I have to flog my will like an Arab with a slave "in a sand
+of Ayaman." Three months ago when I got up before breakfast to dissect
+rabbits, dogfish, frogs, newts, etc., this would have seemed impossible.</p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 6.</p>
+
+<p>Still visit Dr. &mdash;&mdash;'s surgery each week. I have two dull spots at the
+bottom of each lung. What a fine expressive word is <i>gloom</i>. Let me
+write it: GLOOM....</p>
+
+<p>One evening coming home in the train from L&mdash;&mdash; County Sessions I
+noticed a horrible, wheezy sound whenever I breathed deep. I was scared
+out of my life, and at once thought of consumption. Went to the Doctor's
+next day, and he sounded me and reassured me. I was afraid to tell him
+of the little wheezy sound at the apex of each lung, and I believed he
+overlooked it. So next day, very harassed, I went back to him again and
+told him. He <i>hadn't</i> noticed it and looked glum. Have to keep out of
+doors as much as possible.</p>
+
+<p>The intense internal life I lead, worrying about my health, reading
+(eternally reading), reflecting, observing, feeling, loving and
+hating&mdash;with no outlet for superfluous steam, cramped and confined on
+every side, without any friends or influence of any sort, without even
+any acquaintances excepting my colleagues in journalism (whom I
+contemn)&mdash;all this will turn me into the most self-conscious, conceited,
+mawkish, gauche creature in existence.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 6.</p>
+
+<p>The facts are undeniable: Life is pain. No sophistry can win me over to
+any other view. And yet years ago<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> I set out so hopefully and
+healthfully&mdash;what are birds' eggs to me <i>now</i>? My ambition is enormous
+but vague. I am too distributed in my abilities ever to achieve
+distinction.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 22.</p>
+
+<p>Had a letter from the Keeper of Zoology at the British Museum, advising
+me of three vacancies in his Dept., and asking me if I would like to
+try, etc.... So that Dr. &mdash;&mdash;'s visit to me bore some fruit.<a name="FNanchor_1_3" id="FNanchor_1_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_3" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> Spent
+the morning day-dreaming.... Perhaps this is the flood tide at last! I
+shall work like a drayhorse to pull through if I am nominated.... I
+await developments in a frightfully turbulent state of mind. I have a
+frantic desire to control the factors which are going to affect my
+future so permanently. And this ferocious desire, of course, collides
+with a crash all day long with the fact that however much I desire there
+will still remain the unalterable logic of events.</p>
+
+<p><i>April</i> 7.</p>
+
+<p>... How delicious all this seemed! To be alive&mdash;thinking, seeing,
+enjoying, walking, eating&mdash;all quite apart from the amount of money in
+your purse or the prospects of a career. I revelled in the sensuous
+enjoyment of my animal existence.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 2.</p>
+
+<p>Up to now my life has been one of great internal strife and
+struggle&mdash;the struggle with a great ambition and a weak will&mdash;unequal to
+the task of coping with it. I have planned on too big a scale, perhaps.
+I have put too great a strain on my talents, I have whipped a flagging
+will, I have been for ever cogitating, worrying, devising means of
+escape. Meanwhile, the moments have gone by unheeded and unenjoyed.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 10.</p>
+
+<p>Legginess is bad enough in a woman, but bandy legginess is impossible.</p>
+
+<p>Solitude is good for the soul. After an hour of it, I feel as lofty and
+imperial as Marcus Aurelius.</p>
+
+<p>The best girl in the best dress immediately looks disreputable if her
+stockings be downgyved.</p>
+
+<p>Some old people on reaching a certain age go on living out of habit&mdash;a
+bad habit too.</p>
+
+<p>How much I can learn of a stranger by his laugh.</p>
+
+<p>Bees, Poppies, and Swallows!&mdash;and all they mean to him who really knows
+them! Or a White Gull on a piece of floating timber, or a troop of shiny
+Rooks close on the heels of a ploughman on a sunny autumn day.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 30.</p>
+
+<p>My egoism appals me. Likewise the extreme intensification of the
+consciousness of myself. Whenever I walk down the High Street on a
+market day, my self-consciousness magnifies my proportions to the size
+of a Gulliver&mdash;so that it is grievous to reflect that in spite of that
+the townsfolk see me only as an insignificant bourgeois youth who
+reports meetings in shorthand.</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 17.</p>
+
+<p>We sang to-night in Church, "But when I know Thee as Thou art, I'll
+praise Thee as I ought." Exactly! Till then, farewell. We are a great
+little people, we humans. If there be no next world, still the Spirit of
+Man will have lived and uttered its protest.</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 22.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Our Simian Ancestry</i></p>
+
+<p>How I hate the man who talks about the "brute creation," with an ugly
+emphasis on <i>brute</i>. Only Christians are capable of it. As for me, I am
+proud of my close kinship with other animals. I take a jealous pride in
+my Simian ancestry. I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy
+fellow living in the trees and that my frame<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> has come down through
+geological time <i>via</i> sea jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish,
+Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in
+the Garden of Eden?</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 9.</p>
+
+<p>I do not ever like going to bed. For me each day ends in a little
+sorrow. I hate the time when it comes to put my books away, to knock out
+my pipe and say "Good-night," exchanging the vivid pleasures of the day
+for the darkness of sleep and oblivion.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 23.</p>
+
+<p>Spent the afternoon and evening till ten in the woods with Mary &mdash;&mdash;.
+Had tea in the Haunted House, and after sat in the Green Arbor until
+dark, when I kissed her. "Achilles was not the worse warrior for his
+probation in petticoats."</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 1.</p>
+
+<p>I hope to goodness she doesn't think I want to marry her. In the Park in
+the dark, kissing her. I was testing and experimenting with a new
+experience.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 4.</p>
+
+<p>Last evening, after much mellifluous cajolery, induced her to <i>kiss me</i>.
+My private opinion about this whole affair is that all the time I have
+been at least twenty degrees below real love heat. In any case I am
+constitutionally and emotionally unfaithful. I said things which I did
+not believe just because it was dark and she was charming.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 5.</p>
+
+<p>Read Thomas à Kempis in the train. It made me so angry I nearly flung it
+out of the window. "Meddle not with things that be too deep for thee,"
+he says, "but read such things as yield compunction to the heart rather
+than elevation to the head." Forsooth! Can't you see me?<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 15.</p>
+
+<p>A puzzling afternoon: weather perfect, the earth green and humming like
+a top, yet a web of dream overlaid the great hill, and at certain
+moments, which recurred in a kind of pulsation, accompanied by
+subjective feelings of vague strife and effort, I easily succeeded in
+letting all I saw&mdash;the field and the blackberry bush, the whole valley
+and the apple orchards&mdash;change into something unreal, flimsy, gauzelike,
+immaterial, and totally unexperienced. Suddenly when the impression was
+most vivid, the whole of this mysterious tapestry would vanish away and
+I was back where 2 and 2 make 4. Oh! Earth! how jealously you guard your
+secrets!</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 4.</p>
+
+<p>Sat at the Civil Service Commission in Burlington House for the exam,
+for the vacancy in the B.M. No luck at all with the papers. The whole of
+my nine months' assiduous preparation helped me in only two questions.
+In fine, I have not succeeded, I shall not obtain the appointment, and
+in a few weeks I shall be back in the wilds of</p>
+
+<p>N&mdash;&mdash; again under the old regime, reporting platitudes from greasy
+guardians of the poor, and receiving condolences from people not
+altogether displeased at some one else's misfortune.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 14.</p>
+
+<p>Returned home from London. Felt horribly defeated in crossing the
+threshold. It was so obviously <i>returning</i> after an unsuccessful flight.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 22.</p>
+
+<p>Dissected a <i>Squilla</i> for which I paid 2s. 6d. to the Plymouth Marine
+Laboratory.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 23.</p>
+
+<p><i>Ambition</i></p>
+
+<p>Am attempting to feel after some practical philosophy of
+living&mdash;something that will enable me to accept dis<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>appointment with
+equanimity and Town Council meetings with a broad and tolerant smile. At
+present, ambition consumes me. I was ambitious before I was breeched. I
+can remember wondering as a child if I were a young Macaulay or Ruskin
+and secretly deciding that I was. My infant mind even was bitter with
+those who insisted on regarding me as a normal child and not as a
+prodigy. Since then I have struggled with this canker for many a day,
+and as success fails to arrive it becomes more gnawing.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 24.</p>
+
+<p>In the morning a Town Council and in the afternoon a Rural Council. With
+this abominable trash in my notebook waiting to be written up and turned
+into "copy," and with the dream pictures of a quiet studious life in
+Cromwell Road not yet faded from my mind, where can I turn for
+consolation? That I have done my best? That's only a mother's saying to
+her child.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps after all it is a narrow life&mdash;this diving and delving among
+charming little secrets, plying diligently scalpel and microscope and
+then weaving the facts obtained into theoretic finespun. It is all
+vastly entertaining to the naturalist but it leaves the world unmoved. I
+sometimes envy the zealot with a definite mission in life. Life without
+one seems void. The monotonous pursuit of our daily vocations&mdash;the
+soldier, sailor, candlestick-maker&mdash;so they go on, never living but only
+working, never thinking but only hypnotising themselves by the routine
+and punctuality of their lives into just so many mechanical toys
+warranted to go for so long and then stop when Death takes them.... It
+amazes me that men must spend their precious days of existence for the
+most part in slaving for food and clothing and the bare necessaries of
+existence.</p>
+
+<p>To sum up my despondency, what's the good of such a life? Where does it
+lead? Where am I going? Why should I work? What means this procession of
+nights and days wherein we are all seen moving along intent and stern as
+if we had some purpose or a goal?... Of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> course to the man who believes
+in the next world and a personal God, it is quite another matter. The
+Christian is the Egoist <i>par excellence</i>. He does not mind annihilation
+by arduous labour in this world if in the next he shall have won eternal
+life.... He is reckless of to-day, extravagant in the expenditure of his
+life. This intolerable fellow will be cheerful in a dungeon. For he
+flatters himself that God Almighty up in Heaven is all the time watching
+through the keyhole and marking him down for eternal life.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 26.</p>
+
+<p>The nose-snuffling, cynical man who studies La Rochefoucauld, and prides
+himself on a knowledge of human motives, is pleased to point out that
+every action and every motive is selfish, from the philanthropist who
+advertises himself by his charities to the fanatic who lays down his
+life for a cause. Even secret charities, for they give pleasure to the
+doer. So your cynic thinks he has thus, with one stroke of his
+psychological scalpel, laid human nature bare in all its depravities.
+All he has done really is to reclassify motives&mdash;instead of grouping
+them as selfish and unselfish (which is more convenient) he lumps them
+together as selfish, a method by which even he is forced to recognise
+different grades of selfishness. For example, the selfishness of a
+wife-beater is lower than the selfishness of a man who gives up his life
+for another.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 28.</p>
+
+<p>The result arrived. As I thought, I have failed, being fourth with only
+three vacancies.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 7.</p>
+
+<p>It is useless to bewail the course of fortune. It cannot be much credit
+to possess&mdash;though we may covet&mdash;those precious things, to possess which
+depends on circumstances outside our control.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 9.</p>
+
+<p>Dined at the Devonshire Club in St. James's Street, W., with Dr.
+H&mdash;&mdash;and Mr. &mdash;&mdash;, the latter showing the grave symptomatic phenomena of
+a monocle and spats. A dinner of eight courses. Only made one mistake
+&mdash;put my salad on my dish instead of on the side dish. Horribly nervous
+and reticent. I was apparently expected to give an account of myself and
+my abilities&mdash;and with that end in view, they gave me a few pokes in my
+cranial ribs. But I am a peculiar animal, and, before unbosoming myself,
+I would require a happier <i>mise-en-scène</i> than a West End Club, and a
+more tactful method of approach than ogling by two professors, who
+seemed to think I was a simple penny-in-the-slot machine. I froze from
+sheer nervousness and nothing resulted.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 11.</p>
+
+<p>Returned home and found a letter awaiting me from Dr. A&mdash;&mdash; offering me
+£60 a year for a temporary job as assistant at the Plymouth Marine
+Laboratory.</p>
+
+<p>Left London horribly depressed. They evidently intend to shuffle me off.</p>
+
+<p>Read Geo. Gissing's novel, <i>Born in Exile</i>. Godwin Peak, with his
+intense pride of individuality, self-torturing capacities, and
+sentimental languishment, reminds me of myself.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 20.</p>
+
+<p>A purulent cold in the nose. My heart is weak. Palpitation after the
+least exertion. But I shall soon be swinging my cudgels in the battle of
+life, so it won't do to be hypochondriacal.... Let all the powers of the
+world and the Devil attack me, yet I will win in the end&mdash;though the
+conquest may very well be one which no one but myself will view.</p>
+
+<p>Have accepted the Plymouth appointment.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 30.</p>
+
+<p>Struggling in the depths again within the past few days with heart
+attacks. Am slowly getting better of them and trying to forget as soon
+as may be visions of sudden death, coffins, and obituary notices.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 2.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Death</i></p>
+
+<p>At first, when we are very young, Death arouses our curiosity, as it did
+Cain in the beginning.<a name="FNanchor_2_4" id="FNanchor_2_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_4" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> It is a strange and very rare phenomenon which
+we cannot comprehend, and every time we hear of some one's death, we try
+to recall that person's appearance in life and are disappointed if we
+can't. The endeavour is to discover what it is, this Death, to compare
+two things, the idea of the person alive and the idea of him dead. At
+last some one we know well dies&mdash;and that is the first shock.... I shall
+never forget when our Matron died at the D&mdash;&mdash; School.... As the years
+roll on, we get used to the man with the scythe and an acquaintance's
+death is only a bit of gossip.</p>
+
+<p>Suppose the Hellfire of the orthodox really existed! We have no
+assurance that it does not! It seems incredible, but many incredible
+things are true. We do not <i>know</i> that God is not as cruel as a Spanish
+inquisitor. Suppose, then, He is! If, after Death, we wicked ones were
+shovelled into a furnace of fire&mdash;we should have to burn. There would be
+no redress. It would simply be the Divine Order of things. It is
+outrageous that we should be so helpless and so dependent on any
+one&mdash;even God.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 9.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes I think I am going mad. I live for days in the mystery and
+tears of things so that the commonest object, the most familiar
+face&mdash;even my own&mdash;become ghostly, unreal, enigmatic. I get into an
+attitude of almost total scepticism, nescience, solipsism even, in a
+world of dumb, sphinx-like things that cannot explain<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> themselves. The
+discovery of how I am situated&mdash;a sentient being on a globe in space
+overshadows me. I wish I were just nothing.</p>
+
+<p><i>Later</i>: While at a public meeting, the office-boy approached me and
+immediately whispered without hesitation,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Just had a telephone message to say that your father is at the
+T&mdash;&mdash;Railway Station, lying senseless. He has evidently had an
+apoplectic fit."</p>
+
+<p>(How those brutal words, "lying senseless," banged and bullied and
+knocked me down. Mother was waiting for me at the door in a dreadful
+state and expecting the worst.)</p>
+
+<p>Met the train with the Doctor, and took him home in the cab&mdash;still
+alive, thank God, but helpless. He was brave enough to smile and shake
+me by the hand&mdash;with his left, though he was speechless and the right
+side of his body helpless. A porter discovered him at the railway
+terminus lying on the floor of a second-class carriage.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 10.</p>
+
+<p>He is a trifle better. It is fifteen years since he had the first
+paralytic stroke.</p>
+
+<p>Am taking over all his work and have written at once resigning the
+Plymouth appointment.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 23.</p>
+
+<p>It really did require an effort to go upstairs to-day to his bedroom and
+say cheerfully I was not going to P. after all, and that the matter was
+of no consequence to me. I laughed gaily and Dad was relieved. A
+thundering good joke. What annoys me is that other folk&mdash;the brainless,
+heartless mob, as Schopenhauer remarks, still continue to regard me as
+one of themselves.... I had nearly escaped into a seaside laboratory,
+and now suddenly to be flung back into the dirt and sweat of the
+newspaper world seems very hard, and it <i>is</i> very hard.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 26.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Windy Ash</i></p>
+
+<p>With the dog for a walk around Windy Ash. It was a beautiful winter's
+morning&mdash;a low sun giving out a pale light but no warmth&mdash;a luminant,
+not a fire&mdash;the hedgerows bare and well trimmed, an Elm lopped close
+showing white stumps which glistened liquidly in the sun, a Curlew
+whistling overhead, a deeply cut lane washed hard and clean by the
+winter rains, a gunshot from a distant cover, a creeping Wren, silent
+and tame, in a bramble bush, and over the five-barred gate the granite
+roller with vacant shafts. I leaned on the gate and saw the great whisps
+of cloud in the sky like comets' tails. Everything cold, crystalline.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_3" id="Footnote_1_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_3"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> He had spoken about me to the Museum authorities, and it
+was his influence which got me the nomination to sit for the
+examination.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_4" id="Footnote_2_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_4"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> In Byron's poem.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h3><a name="a1911" id="a1911"></a>1911</h3>
+
+
+<p><i>January</i> 2.</p>
+
+<p>As a young man&mdash;a <i>very</i> young man&mdash;my purpose was to plough up all
+obstacles, brook no delays, and without let or hindrance win through to
+an almost immediate success! But witness 1910! "My career" so far has
+been like the White Knight's, who fell off behind when the horse
+started, in front when it stopped, and sideways occasionally to vary the
+monotony.</p>
+
+<p><i>January</i> 30.</p>
+
+<p>Feeling ill and suffering from attacks of faintness. My ill health has
+produced a change in my attitude towards work. As soon as I begin to
+feel the least bit down, I am bound to stop at once as the idea of
+bending over a desk or a dissecting dish, of reading or studying,
+nauseates me when I think that perhaps to-morrow or next day or next
+week, next month, next year I may be dead. What a waste of life it seems
+to work! Zoology is repugnant and philosophy superfluous beside the
+bliss of sheer living&mdash;out in the cold polar air or indoors in a chair
+before a roaring fire with hands clasped, watching the bustling,
+soothing activity of the flames.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Then, as soon as I am well again, I forget all this, grow discontented
+with doing nothing and work like a Tiger.</p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 11.</p>
+
+<p>Walked in the country. Coming home, terrified by a really violent attack
+of palpitation. Almost every one I met I thought would be the
+unfortunate person who would have to pick me up. As each one in the
+street approached me, I weighed him in the balance and considered if he
+had presence of mind and how he would render first aid. After my friend,
+P.C. &mdash;&mdash;, had passed, I felt sorry that the tragedy had not already
+happened, for he knows me and where I live. At length, after sundry
+leanings over the river wall, arrived at the Library, which I entered,
+and sat down, when the full force of the palpitation was immediately
+felt. My face burned with the hot blood, my hand holding the paper shook
+with the angry pulse, and my heart went bang! bang! bang! and I could
+feel its beat in the carotids of the neck and up along the Torcular
+herophili and big vessels in the occipital region of the head. Drew in
+each breath very gently for fear of aggravating the fiend. Got home
+(don't know how) and had some sal volatile. Am better now but very
+demoralised.</p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 13.</p>
+
+<p>Feel like a piece of drawn threadwork, or an undeveloped negative, or a
+jelly fish on stilts, or a sloppy tadpole, or a weevil in a nut, or a
+spitchcocked eel. In other words and in short&mdash;ill.</p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 16.</p>
+
+<p>After some days with the vision of sudden death constantly before me,
+have come to the conclusion that it's a long way to go to die. Am coming
+back anyhow. Yet these are a few terrible pages in my history.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 4.</p>
+
+<p>... The Doctor's orders "Cease Work" have brought on in an aggravated
+form my infatuation for zoological research. I lie in bed and
+manufacture rolling periods in praise of it, I get dithyrambic over the
+zoologists themselves&mdash;Huxley, Wallace, Brooks, Lankester. I chortle to
+reflect that in zoology there are no stock exchange ambitions, there is
+no mention of slum life, Tariff Reform is not included. In the repose of
+the spacious laboratory by the seaside or in the halls of some great
+Museum, life with its vulgar struggles, its hustle and obscenity,
+scarcely penetrates. Behind those doors, life flows slowly, deeply. I am
+ascetic and long for the monastic seclusion of a student's life.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 5.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>From One Maiden Lady to Another</i>. (<i>Authentic</i>)</p>
+
+<p>"My dear Sister,&mdash;You have been expecting to hear from me I know, I have
+had inflammation to my eyes twice in 3 weeks so I thought I had better
+let the Doctor see and he says it is catarrh of the eyes and windpipe. I
+am inhaling and taking lozenges and medicine. You will be sorry to learn
+Leonora Mims has been taken to a Sanatorium with Diptheria, we heard
+yesterday, she is better, poor Mrs. Mims herself quite an invalid, she
+has to walk with a stick, I believe you know she has had to have her
+breast cut off, they keep a servant as she can't do anything, old Mrs.
+Point is 87 I think it is so they too have a lot of trouble, Fred Mims
+has just got married....</p>
+
+<p>"Poor old Mrs. Seemsoe is just the same, she doesn't know anybody but
+she talks, the nurse put a grape in her mouth but she didn't know what
+to do with it, I think it is very sad. She was taken about a fortnight
+before Easter. Will you tell me dear if this is right receipt for
+clothes 1/2 oz. carbolic in 1/2 pint of rose water. Harry Gammon's 2
+little children have measles, poor Maisie has gone with her Aunt Susan,
+poor old Joe Gammon they say had very little to leave, we don't know
+where<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> Robert gets his money from. I dare say you saw that Tom Sagg has
+married another of Ned Smith's daughters and we hear these Smith girls
+are rare housekeepers and this girl that has married Tom Sagg has made
+all her own linen. Mrs. Wilkins, the butcher's wife is going to have a
+little one after 15 years, our Vicar has been laid up with an abscess,
+he told us about his brother the other day, he says as brothers they
+love each other very much. We have 3 very sad cases of men ill in the
+village. We had 4 but one man died of cancer.</p>
+
+<p>"Yr loving Sister Amy."</p>
+
+<p>Voilà!</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 7.</p>
+
+<p>If I die I should like to be buried in the cherry orchards at V&mdash;&mdash;.</p>
+
+<p>How the beastly mob loves a tragedy! The sudden death of the Bank
+Manager is simply thrilling the town, and the newspapers sell like hot
+cakes. Scarcely before the body is cold the coincidence of his death on
+the anniversary of his birth is discussed in every household; every one
+tells everybody else where they saw him last "he looked all right then."
+The policeman and the housemaid, the Mayor and the Town Clerk, the
+cabman and the billposter, stand and discuss the deceased gentleman's
+last words or what the widow's left with. "Ah! well, it is very sad,"
+they remark to one another with no emotion and continue on their way.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 10.</p>
+
+<p>On coming downstairs in the evening played Ludo with H&mdash;&mdash;. At one stage
+I laughed so much in conjunction with that harlequin H&mdash;&mdash; that I got
+cramp in the abdominal muscles and the tears trickled down my face.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 13.</p>
+
+<p>H&mdash;&mdash; and I play Ludo incessantly. We've developed the gambling fever,
+and our pent-up excitement every<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> now and then explodes in fiendish
+cackles, and Mother looks up over her spectacles and says, "William,
+William, they'll hear in the street presently."</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>A Character</i></p>
+
+<p>For this world's unfortunates, his is the ripe sympathy of a
+well-developed nature, standing in strong contrast with the rest of his
+personality, which is wholly self-centred, a little ungenerous, and what
+strong men of impeccable character call "weak." If you are ill he is
+delightful, if you are robust or successful he can be very
+objectionable. To an influenza victim he goes out of his way to carry a
+book, but if you tell him with gusto you have passed your exam, he says,
+"Oh, but there's not much behind it, is there?" "Oh! no," I answer,
+comforting him, "it is really a misfortune to be a success." And so only
+the bankrupts, dipsos (as he calls them), ne'er-do-weels, and sudden
+deaths ever touch his heart or tap his sympathy. He is a short, queery,
+dressy little fellow, always spruce and clean. His joy consists in a
+glass of beer, a full stomach, a good cigar, or a pretty girl to flirt
+with. He frequents drinking saloons and billiard rooms, goes to dances
+and likes to be thought a lady's man. "Urn," he will say, with the air
+of a connoisseur, "a little too broad in the beam," as some attractive
+damsel walks down the street. Any day about twelve you can see both of
+us, "the long and the short of it" (he is only half my height and I call
+him .5), walking together in the Park, and engaged in the most heated
+discussion over some entirely trivial matter, such as whether he would
+marry a woman with sore eyes, etc., etc. More than once we have caught
+cabmen idle on the cab-rank or policemen on point duty jerking their
+thumbs backward at us and expressing some facetious remarks which we
+longed to overhear. I usually walk in the gutter to bring my height down
+a bit.</p>
+
+<p>A good raconteur himself, he does not willingly suffer a story from
+another. The varmint on occasion finishes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> your joke off for you, which
+is his delicate way of intimating that he has heard it before. He is a
+first-class mimic, and sends every one into a thousand fits while he
+gives you in succession the Mayor and all the Corporation. He also
+delights me at times by mimicking me. His mind is receptive rather than
+creative: it picks up all sorts of gaudy ideas by the wayside like a
+magpie, and I sometimes enjoy the exquisite sensation of hearing some of
+these petty pilferings (which he has filched from me) laid at my feet as
+if they were his own. The ideas which are his own are always
+unmistakable.</p>
+
+<p>His favourite poems are Omar and the Ballad of Reading Jail, his
+favourite drinks Medoc or a Cherry Mixture. Me he describes as
+<i>serpentilous</i> with <i>Gibbon-like arms,</i> pinheaded, and so on. He amuses
+me. In fact I love him.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 16.</p>
+
+<p>No one will ever understand without personal experience that an
+exceedingly self-conscious creature like myself driven in on himself to
+consume himself is the unhappiest of men. I have come to loathe myself:
+my finicking, hypersensitive, morbid nature, always thinking, talking,
+writing about myself for all the world as if the world beyond did not
+exist! I am rings within rings, circles concentric and intersecting, a
+maze, a tangle: watching myself behave or misbehave, always reflecting
+on what impression I am making on others or what they think of me.
+Introduce me to a stranger and I swell out as big as Alice.
+Self-consciousness makes me pneumatic, and consequently so awkward and
+clumsy and swollen that I don't know how to converse&mdash;and God help the
+other fellow.</p>
+
+<p><i>Later</i>: Youth is an intoxication without wine, some one says. Life is
+an intoxication. The only sober man is the melancholiac, who,
+disenchanted, looks at life, sees it as it really is, and cuts his
+throat. If this be so, I want to be very drunk. The great thing is to
+live, to clutch at our existence and race away with it in some great
+and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> enthralling pursuit. Above all, I must beware of all ultimate
+questions&mdash;they are too maddeningly unanswerable&mdash;let me eschew
+philosophy and burn Omar.</p>
+
+<p>In this week's <i>T.P.'s Weekly</i> a youth advertises:&mdash;"Young thinkers
+interested in philosophy, religion, social reform, the future of
+humanity, and all freethought, please communicate with 'Evolution,' aged
+21!" All right for 21.</p>
+
+<p><i>Later</i>: I have in mind some work on the vascular system of larval
+newts. In the autumn I see a large piece of work to be done in animal
+psychology&mdash;namely, frequency of stimulus and its relation to habit
+formation. Yet the doctor advises long rest and the office work remains
+to be done. I must hack my way through somehow. I sit trying to
+disentangle these knots; then some one plays a dreamy waltz and all my
+fine edifices of the will vanish in mist. Is it worth while? Why not
+float with the tide? But I soon throw off these temptations. If I live,
+I shall play a fine game! I am determined. A lame-dog life is of no use.</p>
+
+<p><i>April</i> 17.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Railway Travel</i></p>
+
+<p>A journey in a railway train makes me sentimental. If I enter the
+compartment a robust-minded, cheerful youth, fresh and whistling from a
+walk by the sea, yet, as soon as I am settled down in one corner and the
+train is rattling along past fields, woods, towns, and painted stations,
+I find myself indulging in a saccharine sadness&mdash;very toothsome and
+jolly. I pull a long face and gaze out of the window wistfully and look
+sad. But I am really happy&mdash;and incredibly sentimental.</p>
+
+<p>The effect is produced, I suppose, by the quickly changing panoramic
+view of the country, and as I see everything sliding swiftly by, and
+feel myself being hurtled forward willy-nilly, I am sub-conscious of the
+flight of Time, of the eternal flux, of the trajectory of my own
+life.... Timid folk, of course, want some Rock of Ages, something<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>
+static. They want life a mill pond rather than the torrent which it is,
+a homely affair of teacups and tabby cats rather than a dangerous
+expedition.</p>
+
+<p><i>April</i> 22.</p>
+
+<p>Who will rid me of the body of this death? My body is chained to me&mdash;a
+dead weight. It is my warder. I can do nothing without first consulting
+it and seeking its permission. I jeer at its grotesqueness. I chafe at
+the thongs it binds on me. On this bully I am dependent for everything
+the world can give me. How can I preserve my <i>amour propre</i> when I must
+needs be for ever wheedling and cajoling a despot with delicate meats
+and soft couches?&mdash;I who am proud, ambitious, and full of energy! In the
+end, too, I know it intends to carry me off.... I should like though to
+have the last kick and, copying De Quincey, arrange to hand it over for
+dissection to the medical men&mdash;out of revenge.</p>
+
+<p>"Hope thou not much; fear thou not at all"&mdash;my motto of late.</p>
+
+<p><i>April</i> 30.</p>
+
+<p>I can well imagine looking back on these entries later on and blushing
+at the pettiness of my soul herein revealed.... Only be charitable, kind
+reader. There are three Johns, and I am much mistaken if in these pages
+there will not be found something of the John known to himself, and an
+inkling, perhaps, of the man as he is known to his Creator. As a timid
+showman afraid that unless he emphasises the feature of his exhibit,
+they will be overlooked, let me, hat in hand, point out that I know I am
+an ass, that I am still hoping (in spite of ill health) that I am an
+enthusiast.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 2.</p>
+
+<p>Maeterlinck's <i>Wisdom and Destiny</i> is distilled Marcus Aurelius. I am
+rather tired of these comfortable philosophers. If a man be harassed by
+Fate with a red rag and a picador let him turn and rend him&mdash;or try to,
+anyway.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 8.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Staying by the Sea</i></p>
+
+<p>I have been living out of doors a lot lately and am getting sunburnt. It
+gives me infinite pleasure to be sunburnt&mdash;to appear the man of the open
+air, the open road, and the wild life. The sun intoxicates me to-day.
+The sea is not big enough to hold me nor the sky for me to breathe in. I
+feel I should like to be swaying with all the passions, throbbing with
+life and a vast activity of heart and sinew&mdash;to live magnificently&mdash;with
+an unquenchable thirst to drink to the lees, to plumb the depth of every
+joy and every sorrow, to see my life flash in the heat. Ah! Youth!
+Youth! Youth!!! In these moments of ecstasy my happiness is torrential.
+I have the soul of the poppy flaming in me then. I am rather like the
+poppy in many ways.... It is peculiarly appropriate. It must be my
+flower! I am the poppy!!</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 9.</p>
+
+<p>L&mdash;&mdash; was digging up the ground in his garden to-day and one shovelful
+came up thick and shapely. He laid the sod on its back gently without
+breaking it and said simply, "Doesn't it come up nice?" His face was
+radiant!&mdash;Real happiness lies in the little things, in a bit of garden
+work, in the rattle of the teacups in the next room, in the last chapter
+of a book.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 14.</p>
+
+<p>Returned home. I hate living in this little town. If some one dies, he
+is sure to be some one you had a joke with the night before. A
+suicide&mdash;ten to one&mdash;implicates your bosom friend, or else the little
+man at the bookshop cut him down. There have been three deaths since I
+came home&mdash;I knew them all. It depresses me. The town seems a mortuary
+with all these dead bodies lying in it. Lucky for you, if you're a fat,
+rubicund, unimaginative physician.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 16.</p>
+
+<p>Two more people dead&mdash;one a school friend. Sat on a seat on the river
+bank and read the <i>Journal of Animal Behaviour</i>. It made me long to be
+at work. I foamed at the mouth to be sitting there perforce in an
+overcoat on a seat doing nothing like a pet dove. A weak heart makes
+crossing a road an adventure and turns each day into a dangerous
+expedition.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 18.</p>
+
+<p>A dirty ragamuffin on the river's bank held up a tin can to me with the
+softly persuasive words,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Ere, Mister, BAIT."</p>
+
+<p>"What are you going to do with it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Fish."</p>
+
+<p>"What for?"</p>
+
+<p>"Salmon."</p>
+
+<p>We have all tried to catch salmon with a bent pin. No matter though if
+no salmon be caught. Richard Jefferies said, "If there be no immortality
+still we shall have had the glory of that thought."</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 19.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Old Diaries</i></p>
+
+<p>Spent some happy time reading over old diaries. I was grieved and
+surprised to find how much I had forgotten. To forget the past so easily
+seems scarcely loyal to oneself. I am so selfishly absorbed in my
+present self that I have grown not to care a damn about that ever
+increasing collection of past selves&mdash;those dear, dead gentlemen who one
+after the other have tenanted the temple of this flesh and handed on the
+torch of my life and personal identity before creeping away silently and
+modestly to rest.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 6.</p>
+
+<p>Brilliantly fine and warm. Unable to resist the sun, so I caught the ten
+train to S&mdash;&mdash; and walked across<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> the meadow (buttercups,
+forget-me-nots, ragged robins) to the Dipper stream and the ivy bridge.
+Read ardently in Geology till twelve. Then took off my boots and socks,
+and waded underneath the right arch of the bridge in deep water, and
+eventually sat on a dry stone at the top of the masonry just where the
+water drops into the green salmon pool in a solid bar. Next I waded
+upstream to a big slab of rock tilted at a comfortable angle. I lay flat
+on this with my nether extremities in water up to my knees. The sun
+bathed my face and dragon flies chased up and down intent on murder. But
+I cared not a tinker's Demetrius about Nature red in tooth and claw. I
+was quite satisfied with Nature under a June sun in the cool atmosphere
+of a Dipper stream. I lay on the slab completely relaxed, and the cool
+water ran strongly between my toes. Surely I was never again going to be
+miserable. The voices of children playing in the wood made me extra
+happy. As a rule I loathe children. I am too much of a youth still. But
+not this morning. For these were fairy voices ringing through enchanted
+woods.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 8.</p>
+
+<p>Brilliantly fine and warm. Went by train to C&mdash;&mdash; Woods. Took
+first-class return on account of the heat. Crossed the meadow and up the
+hill to the mill leat, where we bathed our feet and read. Ate a powerful
+lunch and made several unsuccessful grabs at Caddie flies. I want one to
+examine the mouth parts. After lunch we sat on the foot-bridge over the
+stream, and I rested on it flat in the face of the sun. The sun seemed
+to burn into my very bones, purging away everything that may be dark or
+threatening there. The physical sensation of the blood flow beneath the
+skin was good to feel, and the heat made every tissue glow with a
+radiant well-being. When I got up and opened my eyes all the colours of
+the landscape vanished under the silvery whiteness of the intense
+sunlight.</p>
+
+<p>We put on our boots and socks (our feet seemed to have swollen to a very
+large size) and wandered downstream<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> to a little white house, a
+gamekeeper's cottage, where the old woman gave us cream and milk and
+home-made bread in her beautiful old kitchen with open hearth. China
+dogs, of course, and on the wall an old painting representing the person
+of a page boy (so she said) who was once employed up at the squire's. An
+unwholesome atmosphere of pigs pervaded the garden, but as this is not
+pretty I ought to leave it out....</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 14.</p>
+
+<p>Brilliantly fine. Went by the early train to S&mdash;&mdash;. Walked to the ivy
+bridge and then waded upstream to the great slab of rock where I spread
+myself in the sun as before. The experiment was so delightful it is
+worth repeating a hundred times. In this position I read of the decline
+and fall of Trilobites, of the Stratigraphy of the Lias and so on.
+Geology is a very crushing science, yet I enjoyed my existence this
+morning with the other flies about that stream.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 20.</p>
+
+<p>Sat at Liverpool University for the practical exam. Zoology, Board of
+Education.</p>
+
+<p>At the close the other students left but I went on working. Prof.
+Herdman asked me if I had finished. I said "No," so he gave me a little
+more time. Later he came up again, and again I said "No," but he replied
+that he was afraid I must stop. "What could you do further?" he asked,
+picking up a dish of plankton. I pointed out a <i>Sagitta</i>, an
+<i>Oikopleura</i>, and a <i>Noctiluca</i>, and he replied, "Of course I put in
+more than you were expected to identify in the time, so as to make a
+choice possible." Then he complimented me on my written papers which
+were sent in some weeks ago, and looking at my practical work he added,
+"And this, too, seems to be quite excellent."</p>
+
+<p>I thanked him from the bottom of a greedy and grateful heart, and he
+went on, "I see you describe yourself in your papers as a journalist,
+but can you tell me exactly what has been your career in Zoology?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> I
+answered of course rather proudly that I had had <i>no</i> career in Zoology.</p>
+
+<p>"But what school or college have you worked at?" he persisted.</p>
+
+<p>"None," I said a little doggedly. "What I know I have taught myself."</p>
+
+<p>"So you've had no training in Zoology at all?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if you've taught yourself all you know, you've done remarkably
+well."</p>
+
+<p>He still seemed a little incredulous, and when I explained how I got a
+great many of my marine animals for dissection and study at the Plymouth
+Marine Laboratory, he immediately asked me suspiciously if I had ever
+worked there. We shook hands, and he wished me all success in the
+future, to which I to myself devoutly said Amen.</p>
+
+<p>Came home very elated at having impressed some one at last.</p>
+
+<p>Now for Dublin.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 30.</p>
+
+<p>Oeconomic biology may be very useful but I am not interested in it. Give
+me the pure science. I don't want to be worrying my head over remedies
+for potato disease nor cures for fleas in fowls. Heaven preserve me from
+ever becoming a County Council lecturer or a Government
+Entomologist!<a name="FNanchor_1_5" id="FNanchor_1_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_5" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>... Give me the recluse life of a scholar or
+investigator, full of leisure, culture, and delicate skill. I would
+rather know Bergson than be able to stay at the Ritz Hotel. I would
+rather be able to dissect a star-fish's water-vascular system than know
+the price of Consols. I should make a most industrious country gentleman
+with £5,000 a year and a deer park.... My idea is to withdraw from the
+<i>mobile vulgus</i> and spend laborious days in the library or laboratory.
+The world is too much with us. I long for the monotony of monastic life!
+Father Wasmann and the Abbé Spallanzani are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> the type. Let me set my
+face towards them. Such lives afford poor material for novelists or
+dramatists, but so much the better. Hamlet makes fine reading, but I
+don't want to be Hamlet myself.</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 6.</p>
+
+<p>In the afternoon went out dredging in fifteen fathoms off the pier at
+I&mdash;&mdash;, but without much success.... Got a large number of interesting
+things, however, in the tow net, including some advanced eggs of
+<i>Loligo</i> and a <i>Tomopteris</i>....</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 7.</p>
+
+<p>Went to the trout stream again. After stretching a muslin net crosswise
+on the water for insects floating down, sat on the footbridge and read
+Geology for the Dublin Examination. Later, waded downstream to a hazel
+bush on the right bank beneath a shady oak. Squatted right down on the
+bush, which supported me like an arm-chair&mdash;and, with legs dangling in
+the cool water, opened a Meredith and enjoyed myself.</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 28.</p>
+
+<p>Had to write backing out of the Dublin Examination for which I am
+nominated to sit. I am simply not fit for the racket of such a journey
+in my present state of health. My chances of success, too, are not such
+as to warrant my drawing on Dad for the money. He is still ill, and
+secretly agitated, I fear, because I am so bent on giving up his work.
+It looks, however, as if newspaper journalism is to be my fate. It was
+the refinement of torture having to write.</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 31.</p>
+
+<p>Had a letter from Dr. S&mdash;&mdash; enough to wring tears from a monument.</p>
+
+<p>Sat like a valetudinarian in the Park all day getting fresh air&mdash;among
+the imbeciles, invalids, and children. Who cares? "But, gentlemen, you
+<i>shall</i> hear."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 4.</p>
+
+<p>Still another chance&mdash;quite unexpectedly received a second nomination
+this morning to sit for another exam, for two vacancies in the British
+Museum. Good luck this.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 11.</p>
+
+<p>Very hot, so went to S&mdash;&mdash;, and bathed in the salmon pool. Stretched
+myself out in the water, delighted to find that I had at last got to the
+very heart of the countryside. I was not just watching from the
+outside&mdash;on the bank. I was in it, and plunging in it, too, up to my
+armpits. What did I care about the British Museum or Zoology then? All
+but the last enemy and object of conquest I had overcome&mdash;for the moment
+perhaps even Death himself was under heel&mdash;I was immortal&mdash;in that
+minute I was always prostrate in the stream&mdash;sunk deep in the bosom of
+old Mother Earth who cannot die!</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 14.</p>
+
+<p>At 4 p.m. to the Salmon Pool for a bathe. 87.3 in the shade. The meadow
+was delicious in the sunshine. It made me want to hop, flirt my tail,
+sing. I felt ever such a bright-eyed wily bird!</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 17.</p>
+
+<p>Caught the afternoon train to C&mdash;&mdash;, but unfortunately forgot to take
+with me either watch or tubes (for insects). So I applied to the
+station-master, a youth of about eighteen, who is also signalman,
+porter, ticket-collector, and indeed very factotal&mdash;even to the extent
+of providing me with empty match boxes. I agreed with him to be called
+by three halloos from the viaduct just before the evening train came in.
+Then I went up to the leat, set up my muslin net in it for insects
+floating down, and then went across to the stream and bathed.
+Afterwards, went back and boxed the insects caught, and returned to the
+little station, with its creepers on the walls and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> over the roof, all
+as delightfully quiet as ever, and the station youth as delightfully
+silly. Then the little train came around the bend of the line&mdash;green
+puffing engine and red coaches, like a crawling caterpillar of gay
+colour.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 20.</p>
+
+<p>A trapper killed a specimen of <i>Tropidonotus natrix</i> and brought it to
+me. I gave him sixpence for it and am just going to dissect it.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 21.</p>
+
+<p>There are folk who notice nothing. (Witness Capt. McWhirr in Conrad's
+<i>Typhoon</i>.) They live side by side with genius or tragedy as innocent as
+babies; there are heaps of people who live on a mountain, a volcano,
+even, without knowing it. If the stars of Heaven fell and the Moon were
+turned into blood some one would have to direct their attention to
+it.... Perhaps after all, the most obvious things are the most difficult
+to see. We all recognise Keats now, but suppose he was only "the boy
+next door"&mdash;why should I read his verses?</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 27.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Preparing a Snake's Skull</i></p>
+
+<p>Prepared the skull of grass snake. I fancy I scooped out the eyes with
+patent delight&mdash;I suppose symbolically, as though, on behalf of the rest
+of suffering humanity, I were wiping off the old score against the beast
+for its behaviour in the Garden of Eden.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 5.</p>
+
+<p>At 2.30 Dad had three separate "strokes" of paralysis in as many
+minutes, the third leaving him helpless. They sent for me in the
+Library, where I was reading, and I hurried home. Just as I entered the
+bedroom where he and Mother were another attack came on, and it was with
+the utmost difficulty that with her help I managed to get him from the
+chair to the bed. He struggled with his left arm and leg and made
+inarticulate noises which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> sounded as if they might be groans. I don't
+know if he was in pain. Dear Mother.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 14.</p>
+
+<p>Dad cannot live long. Mother bears up wonderfully well. Tried to do some
+examination work but failed utterly. A&mdash;&mdash; is watching in the sick-room
+with Mother who will not leave.</p>
+
+<p>8.30. The nurse says he will not live through the night.</p>
+
+<p>8.45. Telegraphed for A&mdash;&mdash; to come.</p>
+
+<p>11.00. A&mdash;&mdash; came downstairs and had a little supper.</p>
+
+<p>12.00. Went to bed. H&mdash;&mdash; and the others lit a fire and we have all sat
+around it silent, listening to its murmur. Every one felt cold. Dad has
+been unconscious for over an hour.</p>
+
+<p>1.45 a.m. Heard a noise, then heard Mother coming downstairs past my
+bedroom door with some one&mdash;sobbing. I knew it must be all over.
+H&mdash;&mdash;was helping her down. Waited in my bedroom in the dark for three
+parts of an hour, when H&mdash;&mdash; came up, opened the door slowly and said,
+"He's gone, old man." It was a tremendous relief to know that since he
+had to die his sufferings and cruel plight were over. Fell asleep from
+sheer exhaustion and slept soundly.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 18.</p>
+
+<p>The funeral. <i>It is not death but the dreadful possibilities of life
+which are so depressing</i>.<a name="FNanchor_2_6" id="FNanchor_2_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_6" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 21.</p>
+
+<p><i>A Day in Autumn</i></p>
+
+<p>A cool, breezy autumn day. The beach was covered with patches of soapy
+foam that shook tremulously in the wind&mdash;all the rocks and everything
+were drenched with water, and the spray came off the breaking waves like
+steam. A red sun went lower and lower and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> shadows cast by the rocks
+grew very long and grotesque. Underneath the breaking waves, the hollows
+were green and dark like sea caverns. Herring gulls played about in the
+air balancing themselves as they faced the breeze, then sweeping
+suddenly around and downwards with the wind behind them. We all sat down
+on the rocks and were very quiet, almost monosyllabic. We pointed out a
+passing vessel to one another or chucked a bit of shingle into the sea.
+You would have said we were bored. Yet deep down in ourselves we were
+astir and all around us we could hear the rumours of divine passage,
+soft and mysterious as the flight of birds migrating in the dark.</p>
+
+<p>The wind rose and tapped the line against the flag-staff at the
+Coastguard Station. It roared through my hair and past my ears for an
+hour on end till I felt quite windswept and bleak. On the way home we
+saw the wind darting hither and thither over the long grass like a
+lunatic snake. The wind! Oh! the wind&mdash;I have an enormous faith in the
+curative properties of the wind. I feel better already.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 17.</p>
+
+<p>Staying in Surrey. Exam. over and I feel fairly confident&mdash;after an
+agony for a few days before on account of the development of a cold
+which threatened to snatch the last chance out of my hands.</p>
+
+<p><i>Justifiable Mendacity</i></p>
+
+<p>Sitting on a gate on the N. Downs I saw a long way below me in the
+valley a man standing in a chalk pit and wielding a stick vigorously.
+For some reason or another the idea came to me that it would be
+interesting if he were in the act of killing a Snake&mdash;he so far away
+below and I above and unnoticed quietly watching him. At dinner
+to-night, this revised version of the story came out quite pat and
+natural and obviously interested the assembly. I added graphically that
+the man was too far away from me to be able to say what <i>species</i> of
+Snake it was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> he was killing. I possess the qualifications of an
+artistic liar. Yet I can't regard such a story as a lie&mdash;it was rather a
+justifiable emendation of an otherwise uninteresting incident.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 24.</p>
+
+<p><i>Une Caractère</i></p>
+
+<p>... She is a tiny little old lady, very frail and very delicate, with a
+tiny voice like the noise of a fretsaw. She talks incessantly about
+things which do not interest you, until your face gets stiff with
+forcing a polite smile, and your voice cracked and your throat dry with
+saying, "Yes," and "Really."</p>
+
+<p>To-night I attend the Zoological Society to read my first paper, so I am
+really in a fluster and want to be quiet. Therefore to prevent her from
+talking I write two letters which I represent as urgent. At 6.15
+desperate, so went out for a walk in the dark London streets. Returned
+to supper and to Her. After the wife, the husband is intellectual
+pyrotechnics. Referring to the Museum,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Would you have there, I suppose, any insects, in a case like, what you
+might say to study to yourself when no one is by?" he inquired.</p>
+
+<p>6.40. It is now one hour before I need leave for the meeting, and
+whether I sigh, cough, smoke, or read the paper, she goes on. She even
+refuses to allow me to scan the lines below photos in the <i>Illustrated
+London News.</i> I write this as the last sole resource to escape her
+devastating prattle and the ceaseless hum of her tiny gnat-like mind.
+She thinks (because I told her so) that I am preparing notes for the
+evening meeting.</p>
+
+<p><i>Later</i>: Spent an absolutely damnable day. Am sick, tired, bored,
+frantic with her voice which I have been able to share with no one
+except the intellectual giant, her husband, at tea time. In order to
+break the flow of chatter, I would rudely interrupt and go on talking,
+by this means keeping my end up for as long as I could, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> enjoying a
+short respite from the fret-sawing voice. But I tired of this and it was
+of no permanent value. When I broke in, she still went on for a few
+sentences unable to stop, and lo! here was the spectacle of two persons
+alone together in a room both talking at the same time and neither
+listening. I persisted though&mdash;and she had to stop. Once started, I was
+afraid to stop&mdash;scared at the certain fact of the voice beginning to saw
+again. After a while the fountain of my artificial garrulity dried up,
+and the Voice at once leaped into the breach, resuming&mdash;amazing and
+incredible as it seems&mdash;at the precise point where it had left off. At 7
+I am quite exhausted and sit on the opposite side of the hearth, staring
+with glassy eyes, arms drooping at my sides and mouth druling. At 7.05
+her cough increases, and she has to stop to attend to it. With a
+fiendish smile I push back my chair, and quietly watch her cough.... She
+coughs continuously now and can talk no longer. Thank God! 8 p.m., left
+for the meeting, where I read my paper in a state of awful
+nervousness.... I read out all I had to say and kept them amused for
+about ten minutes. I was very excited when Dr. &mdash;&mdash; got up and praised
+the paper,<a name="FNanchor_3_7" id="FNanchor_3_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_7" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> saying it was interesting, and hoping I should continue
+the experiments. The chairman, Sir John Rose Bradford, asked a question,
+I answered it and then sat down. After the meeting we went upstairs to
+the library, had tea and chatted with some of the big people.... Zoology
+is certainly delightful, yet it seems to me the Zoologists are much as
+other people. I like Zoology. I wish I could do without Zoologists....</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 30.</p>
+
+<p>Home once more. The Natural History Museum impressed me enormously. It
+is a magnificent building&mdash;too magnificent to work there&mdash;to follow
+one's profession in a building like that seems an altogether too
+grandiose<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> manner of life. A pious zoologist might go up to pray in
+it&mdash;but not to earn his daily bread there.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 31.</p>
+
+<p>I'm in, in, in!!!!!!!!! being first with 141 marks to spare. Old
+M&mdash;&mdash;[the servant] rushes up to my sister's bedroom with the news just
+after 7 a.m., and she says, "Fine, fine," and comes down in her
+nightgown to my bedroom, where we drink our morning cup of tea
+together&mdash;and talk! I'm delighted. What a magnificent obstacle race it
+has been! Still one ditch&mdash;the medical exam! Wired to friends.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 1.</p>
+
+<p>This is the sort of letter which is balm to me:&mdash;"My darling W&mdash;&mdash;,&mdash;I
+need hardly tell you how absolutely delighted we were at the grand news
+of this morning. You must be feeling a huge glow of satisfaction with
+the knowledge of your object attained through untold difficulties. I
+don't wish to butter you up, or to gush, but I must honestly say that I
+feel tip-top proud of my old Beano. I admire your brains more than ever,
+and also your indomitable pluck and grit, and your quiet bravery in
+disappointment and difficulty...."</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 14.</p>
+
+<p>The three most fascinating books in Science that I have so far read are
+(easily):&mdash;1. Darwin's <i>Expression of the Emotions</i>. 2. Gaskell's
+<i>Origin of Vertebrates</i>. 3. Bergson's <i>Le Rire</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Went to the dentist in the afternoon. Evening chiefly occupied in
+reading <i>Le Rire</i>. By my halidom, it is an extraordinarily interesting
+book!</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 29.</p>
+
+<p>... I am always looking out for new friends&mdash;assaying for friendship....
+There is no more delightful adventure than an expedition into a rich,
+many-sided personality. Gradually over a long probation&mdash;for deep minds
+are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> naturally reticent&mdash;piece after piece is added to the geography of
+your friend's mind, and each piece pleases or entertains, while in
+return you let him steal away piece after piece of your own territory,
+perhaps saving a bit up here and there&mdash;such as an enthusiasm for
+Francis Thompson's poetry&mdash;and then letting it go unexpectedly. It's a
+delightful reciprocity.</p>
+
+<p>I dream of "the honeyed ease of the Civil Servant's working day"
+(Peacock). Yet the French say <i>Songes sont mensonges</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 13.</p>
+
+<p>In the Park it was very dark and she said,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"If I lose you I shan't be able to find my way home."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! I'll look after you," I said.</p>
+
+<p>Both being of the same mind at the same time we sat down on a seat
+together when a fortunate thing happened. It began to rain. So I offered
+her part of my overcoat. She nestled in under my arm and I kissed her
+out of hand. <i>Voilà</i>! A very pretty little girl, 'pon my word.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 20.</p>
+
+<p>The thing is obsessing me. After an early supper called and found my
+lady ready to receive me. No one else at home. So walked into the
+oak-panelled room with the red-curtained windows, took off my coat and
+scarf. She followed and switched off the light. There was a roaring fire
+in the grate. She is very amorous and I am not Hippolytus, so we were
+soon closely engaged in the large chair before the fire. As we sailed
+thus, close hauled to the wind, with double entendres and she trembled
+in the storm (and I was at the helm) the garden gate slammed and both of
+us got up quickly. I next heard a key turn in the lock and a foot in the
+passage: "Mr. &mdash;&mdash;" she said....</p>
+
+<p>She switched on the light, went out swiftly into the passage, and
+meeting him conducted him to her office, while I as swiftly put on
+overcoat and scarf, and slipped out through the open door, stumbling
+over his bicycle,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> but of course not stopping to pick it up. Later she
+telephoned to say it was all right. Very relieved!... She recalls
+Richepin's <i>La Glu</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 21.</p>
+
+<p>She is a fine sedative. Her movements are a pleasant adagio, her voice
+piano to pianissimo, her conversation breaks off in thrilling
+aposiopoeses.</p>
+
+<p>An awful comedy this morning&mdash;for as soon as I was securely "gagged" the
+dentist went out of the room. She approached, leered at me helpless, and
+said provokingly, "Oh! you do look funny." Minx. On returning he said to
+her, "Would you like to hold his hand?"</p>
+
+<p>She: "Oh! not just now."</p>
+
+<p>And they grinned at one another and at me waiting to be tortured.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 23.</p>
+
+<p>... On the Station waited for an hour for the train. Gave her a box of
+sweets and the <i>Bystander</i>. We walked up the platform to extreme end in
+the dark and kissed! But it was very windy and cold. (I noticed that!)
+So we entered an empty luggage guard's van on rail beside platform left
+there by shunters. Here we were out of the wind and far better off. But
+a shunter came along and turned us out. She gave me a silver match-box.
+But I believe for various reasons that it is one of her own and not a
+new one. Said "Good-bye."</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 28.</p>
+
+<p>At R&mdash;&mdash;. Played the negligent <i>flaneur</i>, reclining on the Chesterfield,
+leaning against the grand piano, or measuring my length on the mat
+before the fire.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 31.</p>
+
+<p>To-morrow I begin duties at the British Museum of Natural History. I
+cannot quite imagine myself a Museum assistant. Before I get there I
+know I shall be the strangest<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> assistant on the staff. It will be
+singing my song in a Strange land and weeping&mdash;I hope not too
+bitterly&mdash;down by the waters of a very queer Babylon.</p>
+
+<p>Still, I have burnt my bridges like Cæsar&mdash;or burnt my ships like
+Cortez. So forward!</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_5" id="Footnote_1_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_5"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> See entry for October 8, 1913.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_6" id="Footnote_2_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_6"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Italics added 1917.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_7" id="Footnote_3_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_7"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> The paper was "Distant Orientation in Batrachia"&mdash;detailing
+experiments on the homing faculty in newts.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span></p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="PART_II_IN_LONDON" id="PART_II_IN_LONDON"></a>PART II&mdash;IN LONDON</h3>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="a1912" id="a1912"></a>1912</h3>
+
+
+<p><i>January</i> 21.</p>
+
+<p>Am at last beginning to get more content with the work at the Museum, so
+that I muse on Bernard Shaw's saying, "Get what you like or you'll grow
+to like what you get." I have a terrible suspicion that the security of
+tenure here is like the lion's den in the fable&mdash;<i>Nulla vestiga
+retrorsum</i>. Of course I am wonderfully proud of being at the Museum,
+although I am disappointed and write as if I were quite blasé.</p>
+
+<p><i>January</i> 25.</p>
+
+<p>I should be disappointed if at the end of my career (if I live to see it
+through) I do not win the F.R.S. I should very much like it.... My
+nature is very mixed&mdash;ambitious above all things and yet soon giddy with
+the audacity of my aspirations. The B.M. and my colleagues make me feel
+most inferior in fact, but in theory&mdash;in the secrecy of my own
+bedchamber&mdash;I feel that there are few men there my equal.</p>
+
+<p><i>April</i> 26.</p>
+
+<p>Down with influenza. A boarding-house with the 'flue!</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 8.</p>
+
+<p>Went home to recuperate, a beef jelly in one pocket and sal volatile in
+the other. On arrival, my blanched appearance frightened Mother and the
+others, so went to bed at once. "Fate's a fiddler, life's a dance."</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 12.</p>
+
+<p>Weak enough to sit down before dressing-table while I shave and brush my
+hair. Dyspepsia appalling. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> Doctor in Kensington seemed to think me
+an awful wreck and asked if I were concealing&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Reading Baudelaire and Verlaine.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 24.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Bathing</i></p>
+
+<p>Sat on a seat overlooking the sand-hills with stick between my legs like
+an old man, and watched a buxom wench aet. 25 run down the path pursued
+by "Rough" and two little girls in blue. Later they emerged from a
+striped bathing tent in the glory of blue bathing dresses. It made me
+feel quite an old man to see the girl galloping out over the hard level
+sands to the breakers, a child clinging to each hand. Legs and arms
+twinkled in the sun which shone with brilliance. If life were as level
+as those sands and as beautiful as that trio of girls!</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 26.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Two Young Men Talking</i></p>
+
+<p>With H&mdash;&mdash; in his garden. He is a great enthusiast.</p>
+
+<p>"I disapprove entirely of your taste in gardening," I said. "You object
+to the 'ragged wilderness' style, I like it. You like lawns laid out for
+croquet and your privet hedges pruned into 'God Save the King' or 'Dieu
+et mon droit.' My dear boy, if you saw Mr. &mdash;&mdash;'s wilderness at
+----you'd be so shocked you'd cut and run, and I imagine there'd be an
+affecting reunion between you and your beloved geraniums. For my part, I
+don't like geraniums: they're suburban, and all of a piece with
+antimacassars and stuffed birds under glass bells. The colour of your
+specimens, moreover," I rapped out, "is vulgar&mdash;like the muddied
+petticoats of old market women."</p>
+
+<p>H&mdash;&mdash;, quite unmoved, replied slowly, "Well, here are some like the
+beautiful white cambric of a lady of fashion. You've got no taste in
+flowers&mdash;you're just six feet of grief and patience." We roared with
+laughing.</p>
+
+<p>"Do stop watering those damned plants," I exclaimed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> at last. But he
+went on. I exclaimed again and out of sheer ridiculousness, in reply he
+proceeded to water the cabbages, the gravel path, the oak tree&mdash;and me!
+While I writhed with laughing.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 27.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>By the Sea</i></p>
+
+<p>Sat upon a comfortable jetty of rock and watched the waves without a
+glimmer of an idea in my mind about anything&mdash;though to outward view I
+might have been a philosopher in cerebral parturition with thoughts as
+big as babies. Instead, little rustling dead leaves of thoughts stirred
+and fluttered in the brain&mdash;the pimple <i>e.g.</i> I recollected on my Aunt's
+nose, or the boyishness of Dr. &mdash;&mdash;'s handwriting, or Swinburne's lines:
+"If the golden-crested wren Were a nightingale&mdash;why, then Something seen
+and heard of men Might be half as sweet as when Laughs a child of
+seven."</p>
+
+<p>I continued in this pleasurable coma all the afternoon and went home
+refreshed.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 29.</p>
+
+<p>Have returned to London and the B.M. My first day at the M. Sat at my
+table in a state of awful apathy.</p>
+
+<p>At least temporarily, I am quite disenchanted of Zoology. I work&mdash;God
+save the mark&mdash;in the Insect Room!</p>
+
+<p>On the way home, purchased:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Peroxide of hydrogen (pyorrhœa threatened). One bottle of physic (for
+my appalling dyspepsia).</p>
+
+<p>One flask of brandy for emergencies (as my heart is intermittent again).</p>
+
+<p>Prussic acid next.</p>
+
+<p>Must have been near pneumonia at R&mdash;&mdash;. Auntie was nervous, and came in
+during the night to see how I was.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 20.</p>
+
+<p>It caused me anguish to see my article returned from the <i>Fortnightly</i>
+and lying in a big envelope on the table<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> when I returned home this
+evening. I can't do any work because of it, and in desperation rushed
+off to the stately pleasure domes of the White City, and systematically
+went through all the thrills&mdash;from the Mountain Railway to the Wiggle
+Woggle and the 'Witching Waves.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 21.</p>
+
+<p>To-day I am easier. The cut worm forgives the plough. But how restless
+this disappointment has made me.... I have no plans for recuperation and
+cannot settle down to work.</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 6.</p>
+
+<p>On my doctor's advice, went to see Dr. P&mdash;&mdash;, a lung specialist.
+M&mdash;&mdash;found a dull spot on one of my lungs, and, not feeling very sure,
+and without telling me the nature of his suspicion, he arranged for Dr.
+P&mdash;&mdash; to see me, allowing me to suppose he was a stomach authority as my
+dyspepsia is bad.</p>
+
+<p>Well: it is <i>not</i> consumption, but my lungs and physique are such that
+consumption might easily supervene. As soon as Dr. P&mdash;&mdash; had gone,
+M&mdash;&mdash;appended the following lugubrious yarn:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Whenever I catch cold, I must go and be treated at once, all my leisure
+must be spent out of doors, I must take cream and milk in prodigious
+quantities and get fat at all costs. There is even a question of my
+giving up work.</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 10.</p>
+
+<p>A young but fat woman sitting in the sun and oozing moisture is as nasty
+as anything in Baudelaire.</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 14.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>A "Brilliant Career"</i></p>
+
+<p>My old head master once prophesied for me "a brilliant career." That was
+when I was in the Third Form. Now I have more than a suspicion that I am
+one of those who, as he once pointed out, grow sometimes out of a
+brilliant<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> boyhood into very commonplace men. This continuous ill health
+is having a very obvious effect on my work and activities. With what
+courage I possess I have to face the fact that to-day I am unable to
+think or express myself as well as when I was a boy in my teens&mdash;witness
+this Journal!</p>
+
+<p>I intend to go on however. I have decided that my death shall be
+disputed all the way.</p>
+
+<p>Oh! it is so humiliating to die! I writhe to think of being overcome by
+so unfair an enemy before I have demonstrated myself to maiden aunts who
+mistrust me, to colleagues who scorn me, and even to brothers and
+sisters who believe in me.</p>
+
+<p>As an Egotist I hate death because I should cease to be I.</p>
+
+<p>Most folk, when sick unto death, gain a little consolation over the
+notoriety gained by the fact of their decease. Criminals enjoy the pomp
+and circumstance of their execution. Voltaire said of Rousseau that he
+wouldn't mind being hanged if they'd stick his name on the gibbet. But
+my own death would be so mean and insignificant. Guy de Maupassant died
+in a grand manner&mdash;a man of intellect and splendid physique who became
+insane. Tusitala's death in the South Seas reads like a romance. Heine,
+after a life of sorrow, died with a sparkling witticism on his lips;
+Vespasian with a jest.</p>
+
+<p>But I cannot for the life of me rake up any excitement over my own
+immediate decease&mdash;an unobtrusive passing away of a rancorous,
+disappointed, morbid, and self-assertive entomologist in a West
+Kensington Boarding House&mdash;what a mean little tragedy! It is hard not to
+be somebody even in death.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>A sing-song to-night in the drawing-room; all the boarding-house present
+in full muster. There was a German, Schulz, who sat and leered at his
+inamorata&mdash;a sensual-looking, pasty-faced girl&mdash;while she gave us
+daggers-and-moonlight recitations with the most<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> unwarranted
+self-assurance (she boasts of a walking-on part at one of the theatres);
+there was Miss M&mdash;&mdash; listening to her fiancé, Capt. O&mdash;&mdash; (home from
+India), singing Indian Love Songs at her; there was Miss T&mdash;&mdash;, a sour
+old maid, who knitted and snorted, not fully conscious of this young
+blood coursing around her; Mrs. Barclay Woods pursued her usual
+avocation of imposing on us all the great weight of her immense social
+superiority, clucking, in between, to her one chick&mdash;a fluffy girl of 18
+or 19, who was sitting now in the draught, now too close to a "common"
+musician of the Covent Garden Opera; finally our hostess, a divorcee,
+who hated all males, even Tom-cats. We were a pathetic little
+company&mdash;so motley, ill-assorted&mdash;who had come together not from love or
+regard but because man is a gregarious animal. In fact, we sat secretly
+criticising and contemning one another ... yet outside there were so
+many millions of people unknown, and overhead the multitude of the stars
+was equally comfortless.</p>
+
+<p><i>Later</i>: ... Zoology on occasion still fires my ambition! Surely I
+cannot be dying yet.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever misfortune befalls me I do hope I shall be able to meet it
+unflinchingly. I do not fear ill-health in itself, but I do fear its
+possible effect on my mind and character.... Already I am slowly
+altering, as the Lord liveth. Already for example my sympathy with
+myself is maudlin.</p>
+
+<p>Whenever the blow shall fall, some sort of a reaction <i>must</i> be given.
+Heine flamed into song. Beethoven wrote the 5th Symphony. So what shall
+I do when my time comes? I don't think I have any lyrics or symphonies
+to write, so I shall just have to grin and bear it&mdash;like a dumb
+animal.... As long as I have spirit and buoyancy I don't care what
+happens&mdash;for I know that or so long I cannot be accounted a failure. The
+only <i>real</i> failure is one in which the victim is left spiritless,
+dazed, dejected with blackness all around, and within, a knife slowly
+and unrelentingly cutting the strings of his heart.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>My head whirls with conflicting emotions, struggling, desperate ideas,
+and a flood of impressions of all sorts of things that are never
+sufficiently sifted and arranged to be caught down on paper. I am
+brought into this world, hustled along it and then hustled out of it,
+with no time for anything. I want to be on a great hill and square up
+affairs.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 28.</p>
+
+<p>... After tea, we all three walked in Kensington Gardens and sat on a
+seat by the Round Pond. My umbrella fell to the ground, and I left it
+there with its nose poking up in a cynical manner, as She remarked.</p>
+
+<p>"It's not cynical," I said, "only a little knowing. Won't you let yours
+fall down to keep it company? Yours is a lady umbrella and a
+good-looking one&mdash;they might flirt together."</p>
+
+<p>"Mine doesn't want to flirt," she answered stiffly.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 13.</p>
+
+<p><i>At C&mdash;&mdash;, a tiny little village by the sea in N&mdash;&mdash;.</i></p>
+
+<p>Looking up from a rockpool, where I had been watching Gobies, I saw
+three children racing across the sands to bathe, I saw a man dive from a
+boat, and I saw a horse-man gallop his mare down to the beach and plunge
+about in the line of breakers. The waters thundered, the mare whinnied,
+the children shouted to one another, and I turned my head down again to
+the rockpool with a great thumping heart of happiness: it was so lovely
+to be conscious of the fact that out there this beautiful picture was
+awaiting me whenever and as often as I chose to lift my head. I
+purposely kept my head down, for the picture was so beautiful I did not
+want to hurt it by breathing on it, and I kept my head down out of a
+playful self-cheating delight; I decided not to indulge myself.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 16.</p>
+
+<p>Out in the Bay dredging for Echinoderms with "Carrots." Brilliantly
+fine. The haul was a failure, but, being out in a boat on a waveless sea
+under a cloudless sky, I was scarcely depressed at this! We cruised
+along from one little bay to another, past smugglers' caves and white
+pebble beaches, the dredge all the while growling along the sea bottom,
+and "Carrots" and I lying listless in the bows. I was <i>immensely happy</i>.
+My mercury was positively ringing the bell.</p>
+
+<p>Who, then, is "Carrots"? He is a fine brawny boat-man who jumps over the
+rocks like a Chamois, swims like a Fish, pulls like an Ox, snorts like a
+Grampus&mdash;a sort of compound zoological perfection, built eclectically.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 18.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Early Boughies</i></p>
+
+<p>Up the village, Mrs. Beavan keeps a tiny little shop and runs a very
+large garden. She showed us all about the garden, and introduced us to
+her husband, whom we discovered in an apple tree&mdash;an old man, aged 76,
+very hard of hearing, and with an impediment in his speech. He at once
+began to move his mouth, and I caught odd jingles of sound that sounded
+like nothing at all&mdash;at first, but which gradually resolved themselves
+on close attention to such familiar landmarks as "Early Boughies,"
+"Stubbits," "Ribstone Pippins" into a discourse on Apples.</p>
+
+<p>The following curious conversation took place between me and the deaf
+gaffer, aged 76, standing in the apple tree,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"These be all appulls from Kent&mdash;I got 'em all from Kent."</p>
+
+<p>"How long have you lived in C&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"Bunyard &amp; Son&mdash;that's the firm&mdash;they live just outside the town of
+Maidstone."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you keep Bees here?"</p>
+
+<p>"One of these yer appulls is called Bunyard after the firm&mdash;a fine fruit
+too."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Your good wife must be of great assistance to you in your work."</p>
+
+<p>"Little stalks maybe, but a large juishy appull for all that."</p>
+
+<p>Just then I heard Mrs. B&mdash;&mdash; saying to E&mdash;&mdash;,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Aw yes, he's very active for 76. A little deaf, but he manages the
+garden all 'eesulf, I bolsters 'un up wi' meat and drink&mdash;little and
+often as they zay for children.... Now there's a bootifull tree, me
+dear, that 'as almost beared itself to death, as you may say."</p>
+
+<p>She picked an apple off it shouting to poor Tom still aloft,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Tom what's the name of this one?"</p>
+
+<p>"You should come a bit earlier, zir," replied T. "'Tis late a bit now
+doan't 'ee zee?"</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;what's its name I want," shouted his spouse.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes, give the lady one to take home&mdash;there's plenty for all," he
+said.</p>
+
+<p>"What is the NAME? THE NAME OF THIS YER APPULL," screamed Mrs. B., and
+old Tom moving his bones slowly down from the tree answered quite
+unmoved,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Aw the name? Why, 'tis a common kind of appull&mdash;there's a nice tree of
+'em up there."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! never mind, 'tis a Gladstone," said Mrs. B., turning to us.</p>
+
+<p>"A very fine Appull," droned the old boy.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 28.</p>
+
+<p>Back in town again. Wandered about in a somnambulistic way all the
+afternoon till I found myself taking tea in Kew Gardens. I enjoyed the
+wind in my face and hair. Otherwise there is nothing to be said&mdash;a
+colourless day.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 10.</p>
+
+<p>Came across the following arresting sentence: "Pale, anæmic, cadaverous,
+bad teeth and disordered digestion and a morbid egotism." Yes, but my
+teeth are <i>not</i> bad.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 20.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>On the N. Downs</i></p>
+
+<p>Under the oak where I sat the ground was covered with dead leaves. I
+kicked them, and I beat them with my stick, because I was angry that
+they were dead. In the coppice, leaves were quietly and majestically
+floating earthwards in the pomp of death. It was very thrilling to
+observe them.</p>
+
+<p>It was a curious sensation to realise that since the last time I sat
+under the old oak I had been right up to the N. of England, then right
+down to the S.W., and back once more to London town. I bragged about my
+kinetic activity to the stationary oak and I scoffed at the old hill for
+having to remain always in the same place.</p>
+
+<p>It gave me a pleasing sense of infinite superiority to <i>come back</i> and
+see everything the same as before, to sit on the same old seat under the
+same old oak. Even that same old hurdle was lying in the same position
+among the bracken. How sorry I was for it! Poor wretch&mdash;unable to
+move&mdash;to go to Whitby, to go to C&mdash;&mdash;, to be totally ignorant of the
+great country of London....</p>
+
+<p>Day dreamed. My own life as it unrolls day by day is a source of
+constant amazement, delight, and pain. I can think of no more
+interesting volume than a detailed, intimate, psychological history of
+my own life. I want a perfect comprehension at least of myself....</p>
+
+<p>We are all such egotists that a sorrow or hardship&mdash;provided it is great
+enough&mdash;flatters our self-importance. We feel that a calamity by
+overtaking us has distinguished us above our fellows. A man likes not to
+be ignored even by a railway accident. A man with a grievance is always
+happy.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 23.</p>
+
+<p>Over to see E&mdash;&mdash;. Came away disillusioned.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 25.</p>
+
+<p>Met her in Smith's book shop looking quite bewitching. Hang it all, I
+thought I had finished. Went home with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> her, watched her make a pudding
+in the kitchen, then we sat by the firelight in the drawing-room and had
+supper. Scrumptious (not the supper).</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 27.</p>
+
+<p>Quarrelled with D&mdash;&mdash;! The atmosphere is changed at the flat&mdash;my
+character is ruined. D&mdash;&mdash; has told them I'm a loose fellow. I've always
+contrived to give him that impression&mdash;I liked to be cutting my
+throat&mdash;and now it's cut!</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 1.</p>
+
+<p>D&mdash;&mdash; came and carried me off to the flat, where they asked why I hadn't
+been over&mdash;which, of course, pleased me immensely.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 6.</p>
+
+<p>Doctor M&mdash;&mdash; is very gloomy about my health and talks of S. Africa,
+Labrador, and so on. I'm not responding to his treatment as I should.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 11.</p>
+
+<p>Met her this evening in Kensington Road. "I timed this well," said she,
+"I thought I should meet you." Good Heavens, I am getting embroiled.
+Returned to the flat with her and after supper called her "The Lady of
+Shalott."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think you know what you're talking about"&mdash;this stiffly.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps not," I answered. "I leave it to you."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! but it rests with you," she said.</p>
+
+<p>Am I in love? God knows&mdash;but I don't suppose God cares.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 15.</p>
+
+<p>On M&mdash;&mdash;'s advice went to see a stomach specialist&mdash;Dr. Hawkins. As I
+got there a little too early walked up the street&mdash;Portland Place&mdash;on
+the opposite side (from shyness) past an interminable and nauseating
+series of night bells and brass plates, then down again on the right<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>
+side till I got to No. 66 which made me flutter&mdash;for ten doors ahead I
+mused is the house I must call at. It made me shiver a little.</p>
+
+<p>The specialist took copious notes of my evidence and after examining me
+retired to consult with M&mdash;&mdash;. What a parade of ceremony! On coming
+back, the jury returned a verdict of "Not proven." I was told I ought to
+go out and live on the prairies&mdash;and in two years I should be a <i>giant</i>!
+But where are the prairies? What 'bus? If I get worse, I must take
+several months' leave. I think it will come to this.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 16.</p>
+
+<p>Arthur came down for the week end. He likes the Lady of Shalott. She is
+"not handsome, but arresting, striking" and "capable of tragedy." That I
+believe she has achieved already.... If she were a bit more gloomy and a
+bit more beautiful, she'd be irresistible.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 22.</p>
+
+<p>He: "Have a cigarette? I enjoy lighting your cigarettes."</p>
+
+<p>She: "I don't know how to smoke properly."</p>
+
+<p>He: "You smoke only as <i>you</i> could."</p>
+
+<p>She: "How's that?"</p>
+
+<p>H.: "Gracefully, of course."</p>
+
+<p>S.: "Do you think I like pretty things being said to me?"</p>
+
+<p>H.: "Why not, if they are true. Flattery is when you tell an ugly woman
+she is beautiful. Have you so poor an opinion of yourself to think all I
+say of you is flattery?"</p>
+
+<p>S.: "Yes. I am only four bare walls,&mdash;with nothing inside."</p>
+
+<p>H.: "What a deliciously empty feeling that must be. ... But I don't
+think you're so simple as all that. You bewilder me sometimes."</p>
+
+<p>S.: "Why?"</p>
+
+<p>H.: "I feel like Sindbad the Sailor."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>S.: "Why?"</p>
+
+<p>H.: "Because I'm not George Meredith." The title of "husband" frightens
+me.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 9.</p>
+
+<p>It's a fearful strain to go on endeavouring to live up to time with a
+carefully laid-out time-table of future achievements. I am hurrying on
+with my study of Italian in order to read the Life of Spallanzani in
+order to include him in my book&mdash;to be finished by the end of next year;
+I am also subsidising Jenkinson's embryological lectures at University
+College with the more detailed account of practical and experimental
+work in his text-book; I have also started a lengthy research upon the
+Trichoptera&mdash;all with a horrible sense of time fleeing swiftly and
+opportunities for work too few ever to be squandered, and, in the
+background, behind all this feverish activity, the black shadow that I
+might die suddenly with nothing done&mdash;next year, next month, next week,
+to-morrow, now!</p>
+
+<p>Then sometimes, as to-night, I have misgivings. Shall I do these things
+so well now as I might once have done them? Has not my ill-health
+seriously affected my mental powers? Surely the boy of 1908-10 was
+almost a genius or&mdash;seen at this distance&mdash;a very remarkable youth in
+the fanatical zeal with which he sought to pursue, and succeeded in
+gaining, his own end of a zoological education for himself.</p>
+
+<p>It is a terrible suspicion to cross the mind of an ambitious youth that
+perhaps, after all, he is a very commonplace mortal&mdash;that his life,
+whether comedy or tragedy, or both, or neither, is any way
+insignificant, of no account.</p>
+
+<p>It is still more devastating for him to have to consider whether the
+laurel wreath was not once within his grasp, and whether he must not
+ascribe his own incalculable loss to his stomach simply.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 15.</p>
+
+<p>A very bad heart attack. As I write it intermits every three or four
+beats. Who knows if I shall live thro' to-night?<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 16.</p>
+
+<p>Here I am once more. A passable night. After breakfast the intermittency
+recommenced&mdash;it is better now, with a dropped beat only about once per
+half-hour, so that I am almost happy after yesterday, which was Hell.
+The world is too good to give up without remonstrance at the beck of a
+weak heart.</p>
+
+<p>Before I went to sleep last night, my watch stopped&mdash;I at once observed
+the cessation of its tick and wondered if it were an omen. I was
+genuinely surprised to find myself still ticking when I awoke this
+morning. A moment ago a hearse passed down the street.... Yes, but I'm
+damned if I haven't a right to be morbid after yesterday. To be ill like
+this in a boarding-house! I'd marry to-morrow if I had the chance.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 22.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Sollas's "Ancient Hunters"</i></p>
+
+<p>Read Sollas's book <i>Ancient Hunters</i>&mdash;very thrilling&mdash;mind full of the
+Aurignacians, Mousterians, Magdalenians! I have been peering down such
+tremendous vistas of time and change that my own troubles have been
+eclipsed into ridiculous insignificance. It has been really a Pillar of
+Strength to me&mdash;a splendid tonic. Palæontology has its comfortable words
+too. I have revelled in my littleness and irresponsibility. It has
+relieved me of the harassing desire to live, I feel content to live
+dangerously, indifferent to my fate; I have discovered I am a fly, that
+we are all flies, that nothing matters. It's a great load off my life,
+for I don't mind being such a micro-organism&mdash;to me the honour is
+sufficient of belonging to the universe&mdash;such a great universe, so grand
+a scheme of things. Not even Death can rob me of that honour. For
+nothing can alter the fact that I <i>have</i> lived; <i>I have been I</i>, if for
+ever so short a time. And when I am dead, the matter which composes my
+body is indestructible&mdash;and eternal, so that come what may to my "Soul,"
+my dust will always be going on, each separate atom of me playing its
+separate part&mdash;I shall<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> still have some sort of a finger in the Pie.
+When I am dead, you can boil me, burn me, drown me, scatter me&mdash;but you
+cannot destroy me: my little atoms would merely deride such heavy
+vengeance. Death can do no more than kill you.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 27.</p>
+
+<p>"It is a pleasure to note the success attending the career of Mr. W.N.P.
+Barbellion now engaged in scientific work on the staff of the Natural
+History Museum ..." etc., etc.</p>
+
+<p>This is a cutting from the local paper&mdash;one of many that from time to
+time I once delightedly pasted in the pages of the Journal. Not so now.</p>
+
+<p>... At 23, I am a different being. Surrounded by all the stimulating
+environment of scientific research, I am cold and disdainful. I keep up
+the old appearances but underneath it is quite different. I am a
+<i>hypocrite</i>. I have to wear the mask and cothornoi, finding the part
+daily more difficult to bear. I am living on my immense initial
+momentum&mdash;while the machinery gradually slows up. My career! Gadzooks.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="a1913" id="a1913"></a>1913</h3>
+
+
+<p><i>January</i> 3.</p>
+
+<p>From the drawing-room window I see pass almost daily an old gentleman
+with white hair, a firm step, broad shoulders, healthy pink skin, a
+sunny smile&mdash;always singing to himself as he goes&mdash;a happy, rosy-cheeked
+old fellow, with a rosy-cheeked mind.... I should like to throw mud at
+him. By Jove, how I hate him. He makes me wince with my own pain. It is
+heartless, indecently so, for an <i>old</i> man to be so blithe. Life has, I
+suppose, never lain in wait for him. The Great Anarchist has spared him
+a bomb.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>January</i> 19.</p>
+
+<p>My Aunt, aged 75, who has apparently concluded from my constant absences
+from Church that my spiritual life is in a parlous way, to-day read me
+her portion from a large book with a broad purple-tasseled bookmark. I
+looked up from "<i>I Promessi Sposi</i>" and said "Very nice." It was about
+someone whose soul was not saved and who would not answer the door when
+it was knocked. It is jolly to be regarded as a wicked, libidinous youth
+by an aged maiden Aunt.</p>
+
+<p><i>January</i> 22.</p>
+
+<p>This Diary reads for all the world as if I were not living in mighty
+London. The truth is I live in a bigger, dirtier city&mdash;ill-health.
+Ill-health, when chronic, is like a permanent ligature around one's
+life. What a fine fellow I'd be if I were perfectly well. My energy for
+one thing would lift the roof off....</p>
+
+<p>We conversed around the text: "To travel hopefully is better than to
+arrive and true success is to labour." She is&mdash;well, so graceful. My
+God! I love her, I love her, I love her!!!</p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 3.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>A Confession</i></p>
+
+<p>H&mdash;&mdash; B&mdash;&mdash; invited me to tea to meet his fiancée.</p>
+
+<p>Rather pleased with the invitation&mdash;I don't know why, for my idea of
+myself is greater than my idea of him and probably greater than his idea
+of himself.</p>
+
+<p>Yet I went and got shaved, and even thought of buying a new pair of
+gloves, but poverty proved greater than vanity, so I went with naked
+hands. On arriving at Turnham Green, I removed my spectacles (well
+knowing how much they damage my personal appearance). However, the
+beauty of the thing was that, tho' I waited as agreed, he never turned
+up, and so I returned home again, crestfallen&mdash;and, with my spectacles
+on again.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 9.</p>
+
+<p>... "Now, W&mdash;&mdash;, talk to me prettily," she said as soon as the door was
+closed on them.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! make him read a book," whined her sister, but we talked of marriage
+instead&mdash;in all its aspects. Bless their hearts, I found these two dear
+young things simply sodden with the idea of it.</p>
+
+<p>In the middle I did a knee-jerk which made them scream with
+laughing&mdash;the patellar reflex was new to them, so I seized a brush from
+the grate, crossed to Her and gently tapped: out shot her foot, and
+----cried: "Oh, do do it to me as well." It was rare fun.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"Oh! pretty knee, what do I see?</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">And he stooped and he tied up my garter for me."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 10.</p>
+
+<p>News of Scott's great adventure! Scott dead a year ago!! The news, when
+I saw it to-night in the <i>Pall Mall Gazette</i> gave me cold thrills. I
+could have wept.... What splendid people we humans are! If there be no
+loving God to watch us, it's a pity for His sake as much as for our own.</p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 15.</p>
+
+<p>Tried to kiss her in a taxi-cab on the way home from the Savoy&mdash;the
+taxi-cab danger is very present with us&mdash;but she rejected me quietly,
+sombrely. I apologised on the steps of the Flats and said I feared I had
+greatly annoyed her. "I'm not annoyed," she said, "only surprised"&mdash;in
+a thoughtful, chilly voice.</p>
+
+<p>We had had supper in Soho, and I took some wine, and she looked so
+bewitching it sent me in a fever, thrumming my fingers on the seat of
+the cab while she sat beside me impassive. Her shoulders are exquisitely
+modelled and a beautiful head is carried poised on a tiny neck.</p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 16.</p>
+
+<p>Walking up the steps to her flat to-night made me pose to H&mdash;&mdash; (who was
+with me) as Sydney Carton in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> picture in <i>A Tale of Two Cities</i> on
+the steps of the scaffold. He laughed boisterously, as he is delighted
+to know of my last evening's misadventure.</p>
+
+<p>At supper, a story was told of a man who knocked at the door of his
+lady's heart four times and at last was admitted. I remarked that the
+last part of the romance was weak. She disagreed. H&mdash;&mdash; exclaimed, "Oh!
+but this man has no sentiment at all!"</p>
+
+<p>"So much the worse for him," chimed in the others.</p>
+
+<p>"He was 66 years of age," added Mrs.&mdash;&mdash;.</p>
+
+<p>"Too old," said P. "What do you think the best age for a man to marry?"</p>
+
+<p>H.: "Thirty for a man, twenty-five for a woman."</p>
+
+<p>She: "That's right: it still gives me a little time."</p>
+
+<p>P.: "What do <i>you</i> think?" (to me).</p>
+
+<p>I replied sardonically,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"A young man may not yet and an old man not at all."</p>
+
+<p>"That's right, old wet blanket," chirruped P&mdash;&mdash;.</p>
+
+<p>"You know," I continued, delighted to seize the opportunity to assume
+the role of youthful cynic, "Cupid and Death once met at an Inn and
+exchanged arrows, since when young men have died and old men have
+doted."</p>
+
+<p>H&mdash;&mdash; was charming enough to opine that it was impossible to fix a time
+for love. Love simply came.</p>
+
+<p>We warned him to be careful on the boat going out.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I know," said H&mdash;&mdash; (who is in love with P&mdash;&mdash;).</p>
+
+<p>"My brother had a dose of moonlight on board a boat when he sailed and
+he's been happy ever since."</p>
+
+<p>P.: "How romantic!"</p>
+
+<p>H.: "A great passion!"</p>
+
+<p>"The only difference," I interjected in a sombre monotone, "between a
+passion and a caprice is that the caprice lasts a little longer."</p>
+
+<p>"Sounds like a book," She said in contempt.</p>
+
+<p>It was&mdash;Oscar Wilde!</p>
+
+<p>P&mdash;&mdash; insisted on my taking a biscuit. "Don't mind me," she said. "Just
+think I'm a waitress and take no notice at all."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>H.: "Humph! I never see him taking no notice of a waitress."</p>
+
+<p class="center">(Sneers and Curtain.)</p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 24.</p>
+
+<p>H&mdash;&mdash; came home last night and told me that she said as he came away,
+"Tell W&mdash;&mdash; I hate him." So it's all right. I shall go over to-morrow
+again&mdash;Hurrah! My absence has been felt then.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 7.</p>
+
+<p>Came home, lay on my bed, still dressed, and ruminated....</p>
+
+<p>First a suspicion then a conviction came to me that I was a cad&mdash;a
+callous, selfish, sensation-hunting cad.... For the time being the
+bottom was knocked out of my smug self-satisfaction. For several long
+half-hours I found myself drifting without compass or stars. I was quite
+disorientated, temporarily thrown off the balance of my <i>amour propre</i>.
+Then I got up, lit the gas and looking at myself in the mirror, found it
+was really true,&mdash;I was a mean creature, wholly absorbed in self.</p>
+
+<p>As an act of contrition, I ought to have gone out into the garden and
+eaten worms. But the mirror brought back my self-consciousness and I
+began to crawl back into my recently discarded skin&mdash;I began to be less
+loathesome to myself. For as soon as I felt interested or amused or
+curious over the fact that I had been really loathesome to myself I
+began to regain my equilibrium. <i>Now</i>, I and myself are on comparatively
+easy terms with one another. I am settled on the old swivel.... I take a
+lot of knocking off it and if shot off soon return.</p>
+
+<p>To-day, she was silent and melancholy but wonderfully fascinating. One
+day I am desperate and the next cold and apathetic. Am I in love? God
+knows! She came to the door to say "Good night," and I deliberately
+strangled my desire to say something.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 9.</p>
+
+<p>In bed till 12.30 reading Bergson and the O.T.</p>
+
+<p>Over to the flat to supper. E&mdash;&mdash; was cold and silent. She spurned me.
+No wonder. I talked volubly and quite brilliantly with the definite
+purpose of showing up J&mdash;&mdash;'s somnolence. I also pulled his leg. He
+hates me. No wonder. After supper, he went in to her studio and remained
+there alone with her while she worked. At 11 p.m. he was still there
+when I came away in a whirlwind of jealousy, regrets, and rage. G&mdash;&mdash;
+said he was going to stay on until he saw "the blighter off the
+premises." Neither of us would go in to turn him out.</p>
+
+<p>I love her deeply and once my heart jumped when I thought I heard her
+coming into the room. But it was only P&mdash;&mdash;. Did not see her again&mdash;even
+to say "Good-night."</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 10.</p>
+
+<p>Work in the evening in our bedroom&mdash;two poor miserable bachelors&mdash;H&mdash;&mdash;
+reading Equity Law, a rug around his legs before an empty grate, while I
+am sitting at the table in top-coat, with collar up, and writing my
+<i>magnum opus,</i> which is to bring me fame, fortune and&mdash;E&mdash;&mdash;!</p>
+
+<p>H&mdash;&mdash; says that this morning I was putting on my shoes when he pointed
+out a large hole in the heel of my sock.</p>
+
+<p>"Damn! I shall have to wear boots," I said&mdash;at least he says I said it,
+and I am quite ready to believe him. Such unconsciousness of self is
+rare with me.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 15.</p>
+
+<p>[At a public dinner at the Holborn Restaurant] J&mdash;&mdash;replied to the toast
+of the Ladies. Feeble! H&mdash;&mdash; and I stood and had a silent toast to E&mdash;&mdash;
+and N&mdash;&mdash; by just winking one eye at each other. He sat opposite me.</p>
+
+<p>If I had been asked to reply to this toast I should have said with the
+greatest gusto, something as follows,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>[Here follows the imaginary speech in full, composed the same night
+before going to sleep.]<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Yet I am taken for a soft fool! My manner is soft, self-conscious, shy.
+What a lot of self-glorification I lose thereby! What a lot of
+self-torture I gain in its stead!</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 17.</p>
+
+<p>To-day went to the B.M. but did very little work. Thought over the
+matter carefully and decided to ask E&mdash;&mdash; to marry me. Relief to be able
+to decide. I was happy too.</p>
+
+<p>Yesterday P&mdash;&mdash; came in to us from E&mdash;&mdash;'s studio and said,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"E&mdash;&mdash; sends her love."</p>
+
+<p>"To whom?" H&mdash;&mdash; inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," P&mdash;&mdash; replied, smiling at me.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 18.</p>
+
+<p>Had a long conversation with H&mdash;&mdash; last night. He says all E&mdash;&mdash;
+intended to convey was that the quarrel was over.... I felt relieved,
+because I have no money, but&mdash;a large ambition. Then I am selfish, and
+have not forgotten that I want to spend my holidays in the Jura, and
+next year three weeks at the Plymouth Laboratory.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 19.</p>
+
+<p>Went over to see E&mdash;&mdash;. We had an awkward half-an-hour alone together.
+She was looking bewitching! I am plunging more and more into love. Had
+it on the tip of my tongue once. I am dreadfully fond of her.</p>
+
+<p>"I have a most profound gloom over me," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"Why don't you try and get rid of it?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't until Zeus has pity and rolls away the clouds."</p>
+
+<p><i>April</i> 21.</p>
+
+<p>We are sitting up in our beds which are side by side in a room on the
+top story of a boarding house in &mdash;&mdash; Road.</p>
+
+<p>It is 11.30 p.m. and I am leaning over one one side lighting the oil
+lamp so as to boil the kettle to make Ovaltine before going to sleep.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Whom have I seduced?" I screamed. "You rotter, don't you know that a
+dead passion full of regrets is as terrible as a dead body full of
+worms? There, I talk literature, my boy, if you were only Boswell
+enough to take it down.... As for K&mdash;&mdash;, I shall never invite him to
+dinner again. He comes to me and whines that nobody loves him, and so I
+say, 'Oh! poor lad, never mind, if you're bored, why, come to my rooms
+of an evening and hear me talk&mdash;you'll have the time of your life.' And
+now he's cheeky."</p>
+
+<p>H. (sipping his drink and very much preoccupied with it) replied
+abstractedly, "When you die you'll go to Hell." (I liked his Homeric
+simplicity.) "You ought to be buried in a fireproof safe."</p>
+
+<p>Silence.</p>
+
+<p>H. (returning to the attack), "I hope she turns you down."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"As for P&mdash;&mdash;," he resumed, "she's double-Dutch to me."</p>
+
+<p>"Go to the Berlitz School," I suggested, "and learn the language."</p>
+
+<p>"You bally fool.... All you do is to sit there and smile like a
+sanguinary cat. Nothing I say ever rouses you. I believe if I came to
+you and said, 'Here, Professor, is a Beetle with 99 legs that has lived
+on granite in the middle of the Sahara for 40 days and 40 nights,' you'd
+simply answer, 'Yes, and that reminds me I've forgotten to blow my
+nose.'"</p>
+
+<p>The two pyjamaed figures shake with laughing, the light goes out and the
+sanguinary conversation continues on similar lines until we fall asleep.</p>
+
+<p><i>April</i> 26.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Two Months' Sick Leave</i></p>
+
+<p>In a horrible panic&mdash;the last few days&mdash;I believe I am developing
+locomotor ataxy. One leg, one arm, and my speech are affected, <i>i.e.</i>
+the right side and my speech centre. M&mdash;&mdash; is serious.... I hope the
+disease, whatever it is,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> will be sufficiently lingering to enable me to
+complete my book.</p>
+
+<p>R&mdash;&mdash; is a dear man. I shall not easily forget his kindness during this
+terrible week.... Can the Fates have the audacity?... Who can say?</p>
+
+<p><i>April</i> 27.</p>
+
+<p>I believe there can be no doubt that I have had a slight partial
+paralysis of my right side (like Dad). I stutter a little in my speech
+when excited, I cannot write properly (look at this handwriting), and my
+right leg is rocky at the knee. My head swims.</p>
+
+<p>It is too inconceivably horrible to be buried in the Earth in such
+splendid spring weather. Who can tell me what is in store for me?...
+Life opens to me, I catch a glimpse of a vision, and the doors clang to
+again noiselessly. It is dark. That will be my history. Am developing a
+passionate belief in my book and a fever of haste to complete it before
+the <i>congé définitif</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>April</i> 29.</p>
+
+<p>Saw M&mdash;&mdash; again, who said my symptoms were alarming certainly, but he
+was sure no definite diagnosis could be made.</p>
+
+<p><i>April</i> 30.</p>
+
+<p>Went with M&mdash;&mdash; to see a well-known nerve specialist&mdash;Dr. H&mdash;&mdash;. He
+could find no symptoms of a definite disease, tho' he asked me
+suspiciously if I had ever been with women.</p>
+
+<p>Ordered two months' complete rest in the country. H&mdash;&mdash; chased me round
+his consulting room with a drum-stick, tapping my nerves and cunningly
+working my reflexes. Then he tickled the soles of my feet and pricked me
+with a pin&mdash;all of which I stood like a man. He wears a soft black hat,
+looks like a Quaker, and reads the <i>Verhandlungen d. Gesellschaft d.
+Nervenarzten</i>.</p>
+
+<p>M&mdash;&mdash; is religious and after I had disclosed my physique to him
+yesterday (for the 99th time) he remained on his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> knees by the couch in
+his consulting room (after working my reflexes) for a moment or two in
+the attitude of prayer. When the Doctor prays for you&mdash;better call in
+the undertaker. My epitaph "He played Ludo well." The game anyhow
+requires moral stamina&mdash;ask H&mdash;&mdash;.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 5.</p>
+
+<p>At R&mdash;&mdash;. Mugged about all day. Put on a gramophone record&mdash;then crawled
+up into a corner of the large, empty drawing room and ate my heart out.
+Heart has a bitter taste&mdash;if it's your own.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 6.</p>
+
+<p>Sat in the "morning room" feeling ill. In the chair opposite sat Aunt
+Fanny, aged 86, knitting. I listened to the click of her needles, while
+out in the garden a thrush sang, and there was a red sunset.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 8.</p>
+
+<p>Before I left R&mdash;&mdash;, A&mdash;&mdash; [My brother] had written to Uncle enclosing
+my doctor's letter. I don't know the details except that Dr. M&mdash;&mdash;
+emphasised the seriousness and yet held out hope that two months' rest
+would allay the symptoms.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 11.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>At Home</i></p>
+
+<p>I made some offensive remark to H&mdash;&mdash; whom I met in the street. This set
+him off.</p>
+
+<p>"You blighter, I hope you marry a loose woman. May your children be all
+bandy-legged and squint-eyed, may your teeth drop out, and your toes
+have bunions," and so on in his usual lengthy commination.</p>
+
+<p>I turned to the third man.</p>
+
+<p>"Bob&mdash;this!&mdash;after all I've done for that young man! I have even gone
+out of my Way to cultivate in him a taste for poetry&mdash;until he is now,
+in fact, quite wrapped up in it&mdash;indeed, so much so, that for a time he
+was nothing but a brown paper parcel labelled Poetry."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>H. (doggedly): "When are you going to die?"</p>
+
+<p>"That Master H&mdash;&mdash;," I answered menacingly, "is on the knees of the
+Gods."</p>
+
+<p>H.: "I shan't believe you're dead till I see your tombstone. I shall
+then say to the Sexton, 'Is he really dead, then?' and the Sexton will
+say, 'Well, 'ee's buried onny way.'"</p>
+
+<p>Bob was not quite in sympathy with our boisterous spirits.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 15.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Gardening</i></p>
+
+<p>Sought out H&mdash;&mdash; as he was watering his petunias in the garden. He
+informed me he was going to London on Monday.</p>
+
+<p>H.: "Mother is coming too."</p>
+
+<p>B.: "Why?"</p>
+
+<p>H.: "Oh! I'm buying my kit&mdash;shirts and things. I sail at the beginning
+of July."</p>
+
+<p>B.: "I suppose shirts are difficult to buy. You wouldn't know what to do
+with one if you had one. Your mother will lead you by the hand into a
+shop and say, 'H&mdash;&mdash;, dear, this is a shirt,' and you'll reply with
+pathos, 'Mother what are the wild shirts saying?'"</p>
+
+<p>H.: "You're a B.F." (goes on watering).</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder what you'd do if you were let loose in a big garden," I began.</p>
+
+<p>H.: "I should be as happy as a bird. I should hop about, chirrup and lay
+eggs. You should have seen my tomato plants last year&mdash;one was as tall
+as father."</p>
+
+<p>B.: "Now tell me of the Gooseberry as big as Mother."</p>
+
+<p>Mutual execrations. Then we grinned and cackled at each other, emitting
+weird and ferocious cachinnations. Several times a day in confidential,
+serious tones&mdash;after one of these explosions&mdash;we say, "I really believe
+we're mad." You never heard such extraordinary caterwaulings. Our snappy
+conversations are interrupted with them every minute or so!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Stagnancy</i></p>
+
+<p>A stagnant day. Lay still in the Park all day with just sufficient
+energy to observe. The Park was almost empty. Every one but me at work.
+Nothing is more dreary than a pleasure ground on workdays. There was one
+man a little way off throwing a ball to a clever dog. Behind me on the
+path, some one came along wheeling a pram. I listened in a kind of coma
+to the scrunching of the gravel in the distance a long time after the
+pram was out of sight. Far away&mdash;the tinkle of Church bells in a village
+across the river, and, in front, the man still throwing the ball to his
+clever dog.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 25.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Death</i></p>
+
+<p>... I suppose the truth is I am at last broken to the idea of Death. Once
+it terrified me and once I hated it. But now it only annoys me. Having
+lived with the Bogey for so long, and broken bread with him so often, I
+am used to his ugliness, tho' his persistent attentions bore me. Why
+doesn't he do it and have done with me? Why this deference, why does he
+pass me everything but the poison? Why am I such an unconscionably long
+time dying?</p>
+
+<p>What embitters me is the humiliation of having to die, to have to be
+pouring out the precious juices of my life into the dull Earth, to be no
+longer conscious of what goes on, no longer moving abroad upon the Earth
+creating attraction and repulsions, pouring out one's ego in a stream.
+To think that the women I have loved will be marrying and forget, and
+that the men I have hated will continue on their way and forget I ever
+hated them&mdash;the ignominy of being dead! What voluble talker likes his
+mouth to be stopped with earth, who relishes the idea of the carrion
+worm mining in the seat of the intellect?<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 29.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Renunciation</i></p>
+
+<p>Staying at the King's Hotel, &mdash;&mdash;. Giddiness very bad. Death seems
+unavoidable. A tumour on the brain?</p>
+
+<p>Coming down here in the train, sat in corner of the compartment, twined
+one leg around the other, rested my elbow on the window ledge, and gazed
+out helplessly at the exuberant green fields, green woods, and green
+hedgerows. The weather was perfect, the sun blazed down.</p>
+
+<p>Certainly, I was rather sorry for myself at the thought of leaving it
+all. But I girded up my loins and wrapped around me for a while the
+mantle of a nobler sentiment; <i>i.e.</i> I felt sorry for the others as
+well&mdash;for the two brown carters in the road ambling along with a timber
+waggon, for the two old maids in the same compartment with me knitting
+bedsocks, for the beautiful Swallows darting over the stream, for the
+rabbit that lopped into the fern just as we passed&mdash;they too were all
+leaving it.</p>
+
+<p>The extent of my benign compassion startled me&mdash;it was so unexpected.
+Perhaps for the first time in my life I forgot all about my own
+miserable ambitions&mdash;I forgave the successful, the time-servers, the
+self-satisfied, the overweening, the gracious and condescending&mdash;all, in
+fact, who hitherto have been thorns in my flesh and innocently enough
+have goaded me to still fiercer efforts to win thro'. "Poor people," I
+said. "Leave them alone. Let them be happy if they can." With a
+submissive heart, I was ready to sit down in the rows of this world's
+failures and never have thought one bitter word about success. To all
+those persons who in one way or another had foiled my purposes I
+extended a pardon with Olympian gravity, and, strangest of all, I could
+have melted such frosty moral rectitudes with a genuine interest in the
+careers of my struggling contemporaries. With perfect self-abnegation, I
+held out my hand to them and wished them all "God Speed."</p>
+
+<p>It was a strange metempsychosis. Yet of a truth it is no use being
+niggardly over our lives. We are all of us<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> "shelling out." And we can
+afford to be generous, for we shall all&mdash;some early, some late&mdash;be
+bankrupt in the end. For my part, I've had a short and boisterous voyage
+and shan't be sorry to get into port. I give up all my plans, all my
+hopes, all my loves and enthusiasms without remonstrance. I renounce
+all&mdash;I myself am already really dead.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 30.</p>
+
+<p>Last night the sea was as flat as a pavement, a pretty barque with all
+her sails out to catch the smallest puff of wind&mdash;the tiniest
+inspiration&mdash;was nevertheless without motion&mdash;a painted ship on a
+tapestry of violet. H&mdash;&mdash; Hill was an immense angular mass of indigo
+blue. Even rowing boats made little progress and the water came off the
+languid paddles in syrupy clots. Everything was utterly still, the air
+thick&mdash;like cottonwool to the touch and very stifling; vitality in
+living things leaked away under a sensuous lotus influence.
+Intermittently after the darkness had come, Bullpoint Lighthouse shone
+like the wink of a lascivious eye.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Pottering about all day on the Pier and Front, listening to other
+people's talk, catching snippets of conversation&mdash;not edifying. If there
+were seven wise men in the town, I would not save it. Damn the place!</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 31.</p>
+
+<p>... I espied her first in the distance and turned my head away quickly
+and looked out to sea. A moment after, I began to turn my head round
+again slowly with the cautiousness and air of suspicion of a Tortoise
+poking its head out from underneath his shell. I was terrified to
+discover that in the meantime she had come and sat down on the seat
+immediately behind me with her back to mine. We sat like this back to
+back for some time and I enjoyed the novel experience and the tension. A
+few years ago, the bare sight of her gave me palpitation of the heart,
+and, on the first occasion that I had the courage to stop to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> speak, I
+felt livid and the skin on my face twitched uncontrollably.</p>
+
+<p>Presently I got up and walked past&mdash;in the knowledge that she must now
+be conscious of my presence after a disappearance of three years. Later
+we met face to face and I broke the ice. She's a pretty girl.... So too
+is her sister.</p>
+
+<p>Few people, except my barber, know how amorous I am. He has to shave my
+sinuous lips.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 3.</p>
+
+<p>Spent many dreadful hours cogitating whether to accept their invitation
+to dinner.... I wanted to go for several reasons. I wanted to see her in
+a home-setting for the first time, and I wanted to spend the evening
+with three pretty girls. I also had the idea of displaying myself to the
+scrutinising gaze of the family as the hero of the old romance: and of
+showing Her how much I had progressed since last we met and what a
+treasure she had lost.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, I was afraid that the invitation was only a casual
+one, I feared a snuffy reception, a frosty smile and a rigid hand. Could
+I go up and partake of meat at their board, among brothers and sisters
+taking me for an ogre of a jilt, and she herself perhaps opposite me
+making me blush perpetually to recall our one-time passionate kisses,
+our love letters and our execrable verses to each other! There seemed
+dreadful possibilities in such an adventure. Yet I badly wanted to
+experience the piquant situation.</p>
+
+<p>At 7 p.m., half an hour before I was due, decided on strong measures. I
+entered a pub and took a stiff whisky and soda, and then set off with a
+stout heart to take the icy family by storm&mdash;and if need be live down my
+evil reputation by my amiability and urbanity!</p>
+
+<p>I went&mdash;and of course everything passed off in the most normal manner.
+She is a very pretty girl&mdash;like velvet. Before dinner, we walked in the
+garden&mdash;and talked only of flowers.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 4.</p>
+
+<p>On the Hill, this morning, felt the thrill of the news of my own Death:
+I mean I imagined I heard the words,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"You've heard the news about B&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>Second Voice: "No, what?"</p>
+
+<p>"He's dead."</p>
+
+<p>Silence.</p>
+
+<p>Won't all this seem piffle if I don't die after all! As an artist in
+life I <i>ought</i> to die; it is the only artistic ending &mdash;and I ought to
+die now or the Third Act will fizzle out in a long doctor's bill.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 5.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>A New Pile in the Pier</i></p>
+
+<p>Watched some men put a new pile in the pier. There was all the usual
+paraphernalia of chains, pulleys, cranes, and ropes, with a massive
+wooden pile swinging over the water at the end of a long wire hawser.
+Everything was in the massive style&mdash;even the men&mdash;very powerful men,
+slow, ruminative, silent men.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing very relevant could be gathered from casual remarks. The
+conversation was without exception monosyllabic: "Let go," or "Stand
+fast." But by close attention to certain obscure movements of the man on
+the ladder near the water's edge, it gradually came thro' to my
+consciousness that all these powerful, silent men were up against some
+bitter difficulty. I cannot say what it was. The burly monsters were
+silent about the matter.... In fact they appeared almost
+indifferent&mdash;and tired, oh! so very tired of the whole business. The
+attitude of the man nearest me was that for all he cared the pile could
+go on swinging in mid-air to the crack of Doom.</p>
+
+<p>They continued slow, laborious efforts to overcome the secret
+difficulty. But these gradually slackened and finally ceased. One
+massive man after another abandoned his post in order to lean over the
+rails and gaze like a mystic into the depths of the sea. No one spoke.
+No one saw anything not even in the depths of the sea. One spat, and
+with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> round, sad eyes contemplated the trajectory of his brown bolus (he
+had been chewing) in its descent into the water.</p>
+
+<p>The foreman, an original thinker, lit a cigarette, which relieved the
+tension. Then, slowly and with majesty, he turned on his heel, and
+walked away. With the sudden eclipse of the foreman's interest, the
+incident closed. I should have been scarcely surprised to find him
+behind the Harbour-master's Office playing "Shove-ha'penny" or skittles
+with the pile still swinging in mid-air.... After all it was only a
+bloody pile.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 11.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Depression</i></p>
+
+<p>Suffering from depression.... The melancholy fit fell very suddenly. All
+the colour went out of my life, the world was dirty gray. On the way
+back to my hotel caught sight of H&mdash;&mdash;, jumping into a cab, after a
+visit to S&mdash;&mdash; Sands. But the sight of him aroused no desire in me to
+shout or wave. I merely wondered how on earth he could have spent a
+happy day at such a Sandy place.</p>
+
+<p>On arriving at &mdash;&mdash;, sank deeper into my morass. It suffocated me to
+find the old familiar landmarks coming into view ... the holiday-makers
+along the streets how I hated them&mdash;the Peg Top Hill how desolate&mdash;all
+as before&mdash;how dull. The very fact that they were all there as before in
+the morning nauseated me. The sea-coast here is magnificent, the town is
+pretty&mdash;I know that, of course. But all looked dreary and
+cheerless&mdash;just the sort of feeling one gets on entering an empty house
+with no fire on a winter's day and nowhere to sit down.... I felt as
+lonely and desolate as a man suddenly fallen from the clouds into an
+unknown town on the Antarctic Continent built of ice and inhabited by
+Penguins. Who are these people? I asked myself irritably. There perhaps
+on the other side of the street was my own brother. But I was not even
+faintly interested and told the cabman to drive on. The spray from the
+sea fogged my spectacles and made me weary.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 14.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>The Restlessness of the Sea</i></p>
+
+<p>The restlessness of the sea acts as a soporific on jangled nerves. You
+gaze at its incessant activities, unwillingly at first because they
+distract your attention from your own cherished worries and griefs,&mdash;but
+later you watch with complete self-abandon&mdash;it wrenches you out of
+yourself&mdash;and eventually with a kind of stupid hypnotic stare.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Dr. Spurgeon</i></p>
+
+<p>The day has been overcast, but to-night a soft breeze sprang up and
+swept the sky clear as softly as a mop. The sun coming out shone upon a
+white sail far out in the channel, scarcely another vessel hove in
+sight. The white sail glittered like a piece of silver paper whenever
+the mainsail swung round as the vessel tacked. Its solitariness and
+whiteness in a desert of marine blue attracted the attention and held it
+till at last I could look at nothing else. The sight of it&mdash;so clean and
+white and fair&mdash;set me yearning for all the rarest and most exquisite
+things my imagination could conjure up&mdash;a beautiful girl, with fair and
+sunburnt skin, brown eyes, dark eyebrows, and small pretty feet; a
+dewdrop in a violet's face; an orange-tip butterfly swinging on an umbel
+of a flower.</p>
+
+<p>The sail went on twinkling and began to exert an almost moral influence
+over me. It drew out all the good in me. I longed to follow it on white
+wings&mdash;an angel I suppose&mdash;to quit this husk of a body "as raiment put
+away," and pursue Truth and Beauty across the sea to the horizon, and
+beyond the horizon up the sky itself to its last tenuous confines, no
+doubt with a still small voice summoning me and the rest of the elect to
+an Agapemone, with Dr. Spurgeon at the door distributing tracts.</p>
+
+<p>I can scoff like this now. But at the time my exaltation was very real.
+My soul strained in the leash. I was full of a desire for unattainable
+spiritual beauty. I wanted something. But I don't know what I want.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 16.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>My Sense of Touch</i></p>
+
+<p>My sense of touch has always been morbidly acute. I like to feel a
+cigarette locked in the extreme corner of my mouth. When I remove it
+from my mouth then I hold it probably up in the fork between two
+fingers. If I am waiting for a meal I finger the cool knives and forks.
+If I am in the country I plunge my hands with outspread fingers into a
+mass of large-topped grasses, then close my fingers, crush and
+decapitate the lot.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 27.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Camping Out at S&mdash;&mdash; Sands</i></p>
+
+<p>A brilliant summer day. Up early, breakfasted, and, clad in sweater and
+trousers, walked up the sands to the boathouse with bare feet.</p>
+
+<p>Everything was wonderful! I strode along over the level sands infatuated
+with the sheer ability to put one leg in front of the other and walk. I
+loved to feel the muscles of my thighs working, and to swing my arms in
+rhythm with the stride. The stiff breeze had blown the sky clear, and
+was rushing through my long hair, and bellowing into each ear. I strode
+as Alexander must have done!</p>
+
+<p>Then I stretched my whole length out along a flat plank on the sands,
+which was as dry as a bone and warm. There was not a soul on the sands.
+Everything was bare, clean, windswept. My plank had been washed clean
+and white. The sands&mdash;3 miles of it&mdash;were hard and purified, level. My
+eye raced along in every direction&mdash;there was nothing&mdash;not a bird or a
+man&mdash;to stop it. In that immense windswept space nothing was present
+save me and the wind and the sea&mdash;a flattering moment for the egotist.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>At the foot of the cliffs on the return journey met an old man gathering
+sticks. As he ambled along dropping sticks into a long sack he called
+out casually, "Do you<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> believe in Jesus Christ?" in the tone of voice in
+which one would say, "I think we shall have some rain before night."
+"Aye, aye," came the answer without hesitation from a boy lying on his
+back in the sands a few yards distant, "and that He died to save me."</p>
+
+<p>Life is full of surprises like this. The only other sounds I have heard
+to-day were the Herring Gull's cackle. Your own gardener will one day
+look over his rake and give you the correct chemical formula for
+carbonic acid gas. I met a postman once reading Shelley as he walked his
+rounds.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 28.</p>
+
+<p>I am writing this by the lamp in the cabin among the sandhills waiting
+for H&mdash;&mdash; to arrive from town with provisions. I wear a pair of bags, a
+dirty sweater, and go without hat or shoes and stockings. There is a
+"Deadwood Dick" atmosphere here. I'm a sort of bronco-breaker or rancher
+off duty writing home. In a minute I haven't the slightest doubt, H&mdash;&mdash;
+will gallop into the compound, tether his colt and come in "raising
+Cain" for a belly-full of red meat.... If I am going to live after all
+(touch wood) I shall go abroad and be in the open.</p>
+
+<p>I eat greedily, am getting very sunburnt, am growing hairy (that means
+strength!), and utter portentous oaths. If I stayed here much longer I
+should grow a tail and climb trees.</p>
+
+<p>After a supper of fried eggs and fried bread done to a nicety, turned in
+at ten, and both of us lay warm and comfortable in bed, smoking
+cigarettes and listening to Hoffmann's Barcarolle on the gramophone. We
+put the lamp out, and it pleased us to watch the glow of each other's
+cigarettes in the dark.... Neither of us spoke.... Went to sleep at
+midnight. Awoke at sunrise to hear an Owl still hooting, a Lark singing,
+and several Jackdaws clattering on our tin roof with their claws as they
+walked.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 1.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>In London Again</i></p>
+
+<p>Returned to London very depressed. Am not so well as I was three weeks
+ago. The sight of one eye is affected, and I am haunted by the
+possibility of blindness. Then I have a numb feeling on one side of my
+face, and my right arm is less mobile.</p>
+
+<p>Left darling Mother in a very weak state in bed, with neuritis and a
+weak heart. She cried when I said "Goodbye," and asked me to go to
+Church as often as I could, and to read a portion of Scripture every
+day. I promised. Then she added, "For Dad's sake;" just as if I would
+not do it for her. Poor dear, she suffers a deal of pain. She does not
+know how ill I am. I have not told her.</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 3.</p>
+
+<p>Back at work. A terrible day. Thoughts of suicide&mdash;a pistol.</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 8.</p>
+
+<p>I get thro' each day with the utmost difficulty. I have to wrestle with
+every minute. Each hour is a conquest. The three quarters of an hour at
+lunch comes as a Godsend. I look forward to it all the morning, I enter
+into it with joyful relief with no thought of the dreadful moment
+impending when I must return and re-enter my room. By being wise like
+this, I manage to husband my spirits and am relatively cheerful for one
+hour in the middle of each difficult day.</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 9.</p>
+
+<p>Several times I have gone to bed and hoped I should never wake up. Life
+grows daily more impossible. To-day I put a slide underneath the
+microscope and looked at it. It was like looking at something thro' the
+wrong end of a telescope. I sat with eye glued to the ocular, so as to
+keep up a pretence of work in case some one came in. My mind was
+occupied with quite different affairs. If<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> one is pondering on Life and
+Death, it is a terrible task to have to study Mites.</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 10.</p>
+
+<p>Am doing no work at all.... I sit motionless in my chair and beat the
+devil's tattoo with my thumbs and think, think, think in the same
+horrible circle hour after hour. I am unable to work. I haven't the
+courage to. I've lost my nerve.</p>
+
+<p>At five I return "home" to the Boarding-house and get more desperate.</p>
+
+<p>Two old maids sat down to dinner to-night, one German youth (a
+lascivious, ranting, brainless creature), a lady typist (who takes drugs
+they say), a dipsomaniac (who has monthly bouts&mdash;H&mdash;&mdash; carried him
+upstairs and put him to bed the other night), two invertebrate
+violinists who play in the Covent Garden Orchestra, a colonial lady
+engaged in a bedroom intrigue with a man who sits at my table. What are
+these people to me? I hate them all. They know it and are offended.</p>
+
+<p>After dinner, put on my cap and rushed out anywhere to escape. Walked to
+the end of the street, not knowing where I was going or what doing.
+Stopped and stared with fixed eyes at the traffic in Kensington Road,
+undetermined what to do with myself and unable to make up my mind
+(volitional paralysis). Turned round, walked home, and went straight to
+bed 9 p.m., anxiously looking forward to to-morrow evening when I go to
+see her again, but at the same time wondering how on earth I am to get
+through to-morrow's round before the evening comes.... This is a
+hand-to-mouth existence. My own inner life is scorching up all outside
+interests. Zoology appears as a curious thing in a Bagdad bazaar. I sit
+in my room at the B.M. and play with it; I let it trickle thro' my
+fingers and roll away like a child playing with quicksilver.</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 11.</p>
+
+<p>Over to the flat. She was looking beautiful in a black dress, with a
+white silk blouse, and a Byron collar, negligently<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> open in front as if
+a button had come out. She said I varied: sometimes I went up in her
+estimation, sometimes down; once I went down very low. I understood her
+to say I was now UP! Alleluia!</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 14.</p>
+
+<p>... It would take too long and I am too tired to write out all the
+varying phases of this day's life&mdash;all its impressions and petty
+miseries chasing one another across my consciousness or leap-frogging
+over my chest like gleeful fiends.<a name="FNanchor_1_8" id="FNanchor_1_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_8" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 21.</p>
+
+<p>Thoroughly enjoyed the journey up to town this morning. I secretly
+gloated over the fact that the train was dashing along over the rails to
+London bearing me and all the rest of the train's company upon their
+pursuits&mdash;wealth, fame, learning. I was inebriated with the speed,
+ferocity, and dash of living.... If the train had charged into the
+buffers I should have hung my head out of the window and cheered. If a
+man had got in my way, I'd have knocked him down. The wheels of the
+carriage were singing a lusty song in which I joined.</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 30.</p>
+
+<p>... We talked of men and women, and she said she thought men were
+neither angels nor devils but just men. I said I thought women were
+either angels or devils.</p>
+
+<p>"I am afraid to ask you which you think me."</p>
+
+<p>"You needn't," I said shortly.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 9.</p>
+
+<p>Horribly upset with news from home. Mother is really ill. The Doctor
+fears serious nerve trouble and says she will always be an invalid. This
+is awful, poor dear! It's dreadful, and yet I have a tiny wish buried at
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> bottom of my heart that she may be removed early from us rather
+than linger in pain of body and mind. Especially do I hope she may not
+live to hear any grievous news of me.... What irony that she should lose
+the use of her right arm only two years after Dad's death from
+paralysis. It is cruel for it reminds her of Dad's illness.... What,
+too, would she think if she could have heard M&mdash;&mdash;'s first words to me
+yesterday on one of my periodical visits to his consulting room, "Well,
+how's the <i>paralysis</i>?"</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>In the evening went over to see her. She was wearing a black silk gown
+and looked handsome.... She is always the same sombre, fascinating,
+lissom, soft-voiced She! She herself never changes.... What am I to do?
+I cannot give her up and yet I do not altogether wish to take her to my
+heart. It distresses me to know how to proceed. I am a wily fish.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 10.</p>
+
+<p>Sat in the gardens with her. We sat facing the sun for a while until she
+was afraid of developing freckles and turned around, deliberately
+turning her back on good King Sol.... I said it was disrespectful.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! he doesn't mind," she said. "He's a dear. He kissed me and said,
+'Turn round my dear if you like.'"</p>
+
+<p>Isn't she tantalising?</p>
+
+<p>I wanted to say sarcastically, "I wonder you let him kiss you," but
+there was a danger of the remark reviving the dead.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 14.</p>
+
+<p>I tried my best, I've sought every loophole of escape, but I am quite
+unable to avoid the melancholy fact that her thumbs are&mdash;lamentable. I
+am genuinely upset about it for I like her. No one more than I would be
+more delighted if they were otherwise.... Poor dear! how I love her!
+That's why I'm so concerned about her thumbs.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 21.</p>
+
+<p>A wire from A&mdash;&mdash; came at 11.50 saying "Darling Mother passed peacefully
+away yesterday afternoon." ... Yesterday afternoon I was writing Zoology
+and all last night I slept soundly.... It was quite sudden. Caught the
+first train home.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 23.</p>
+
+<p class="center">The funeral.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 31.</p>
+
+<p>Staying at the Hotel du Guesclin at Cancale near St. Malo with my dear
+A&mdash;&mdash;.</p>
+
+<p>This flood of new experiences has knocked my diary habit out of gear. To
+be candid, I've forgotten all about myself. I've been too engrossed in
+living to stand the strain of setting down and in cold blood writing out
+all the things seen and heard. If I once began I should blow thro' these
+pages like a whirlwind.... But what a waste of time with M. le batelier
+waiting outside with his bisque to take us mackerel fishing!...</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 8.</p>
+
+<p>Returned to Southampton yesterday. Have spent the night at Okehampton in
+Devonshire <i>en route</i> for T&mdash;&mdash; Rectory. This morning we hatched the
+ridiculous idea of hiring two little Dartmoor ponies and riding out from
+the town. A&mdash;&mdash; rides fairly well tho' he has not been astride a beast
+for years. As for me, I cannot ride at all! Yet I had the idea that I
+could easily manage a pretty little pony with brown eyes and a long
+tail. On going out into the Inn yard, was horrified&mdash;two horses
+saddled&mdash;one a large traction beast.... I climbed on to the smaller one,
+walked him out of the yard and down the road in good style without
+accident. Once in the country, however, my animal, the fresher of the
+two, insisted on a smart trot which shook me up a good deal so that I
+hardly kept my seat. This eventually so annoyed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> the animal that it
+began to fidget and zigzag across the road&mdash;no doubt preparing to break
+away at a stretch gallop when once it had rid itself of the
+incomprehensible pair of legs across its back.</p>
+
+<p>I got off quickly and swopped horses with A&mdash;&mdash;.</p>
+
+<p>Walked him most of the way, while A&mdash;&mdash; cantered forward and back to
+cheer me on. Ultimately however this beast, too, got sick of walking and
+began to trot. For a time I stood this well and began to rise in my
+saddle quite nicely. After two miles, horrible soreness supervened, and
+I had to get off&mdash;very carefully, with a funny feeling in my legs&mdash;even
+looked down at them to assure myself they were not bandy! In doing so,
+the horse&mdash;this traction monster&mdash;stepped on my toe and I swore.</p>
+
+<p>On nearing the village, L&mdash;&mdash; arrived, riding A&mdash;&mdash;'s animal and holding
+his sides for laughing at me as I crawled along holding the carthorse by
+the bridle. Got on again and rode into the Rectory grounds in fine style
+like a dashing cavalier, every one jeering at me from the lawn.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 28.</p>
+
+<p>Having lived on this planet now for the space of 24 years, I can claim
+with some cogency that I am qualified to express some sort of opinion
+about it. I therefore hereby record that I find myself in an absorbingly
+interesting place where I live, move and have my being, dominated by one
+monstrous feature above all others&mdash;the mystery of it all! Everything is
+so astonishing, my own existence so incredible!</p>
+
+<p>Nothing explains itself. Every one is dumb. It is like walking about at
+a masqued Ball.... Even I myself am a mystery to me. How wonderful and
+frightening that is&mdash;to feel yourself&mdash;your innermost and most
+substantial possession to be a mystery, incomprehensible. I look at
+myself in the mirror and mock at myself. On some days I am to myself as
+strange and unfamiliar as a Pterodactyl. There is a certain grim humour
+in finding myself here<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> possessed of a perfectly arbitrary arrangement
+of lineaments when I never asked to be here and never selected my own
+attributes. To the dignity of a human being it seems like a coarse
+practical joke.... My own freakish physique is certainly a joke.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 4.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>In London Again</i></p>
+
+<p>K&mdash;&mdash; comes in from her dancing class, nods to me, hugs her sister
+around the neck and says,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! you dear thing, you've got a cold."</p>
+
+<p>"I shouldn't do that," I remark, green-eyed, "she's in an awful wax
+to-night."</p>
+
+<p>She: "Oh! I don't mind K&mdash;&mdash;!"</p>
+
+<p>(Laughter!)</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 8.</p>
+
+<p>Heard a knock at the door last night, and, thinking it was R&mdash;&mdash;, I
+unbolted it and let in a tramp who at once asked God to bless me and
+crown all my sorrow with joy. An amiable fellow to be sure&mdash;so I gave
+him some coppers and he at once repeated with wonderful fervour, "God
+bless you, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"I wish He would," I answered, "I have a horrible cold."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, I know, I gets it myself and the hinfluenza&mdash;have you had that,
+sir?"</p>
+
+<p>In ten minutes I should have told him all my personal history. But he
+was thirsting for a drink and went off quickly and left me with my heart
+unburthened. London is a lonely place.</p>
+
+<p>To-day journeyed to &mdash;&mdash; where I gave evidence as an <i>expert</i> in Economic
+Entomology at the County Court in a case concerning damage to furniture
+by mites for which I am paid £8 8s. fee and expenses and travelled first
+class. What irony! (See June 30, 1911.)<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 11.</p>
+
+<p>I may be a weak, maundering, vacillating fool but I cannot help loving
+her on one day, being indifferent the next and on some occasions even
+disliking her.... To-day she was charming, with a certain warm glossy
+perfection on her face and hair.... And she loves me&mdash;I could swear it.
+"And when a woman woos ..." etc. How difficult for a vain and lonely man
+to resist her. She tells me many times in many dainty ways that she
+loves me without so much as stopping her work to talk.</p>
+
+<p>I wish I were permanently and irresistibly enamoured. I want a
+<i>bouleversement</i>....</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 13.</p>
+
+<p>Went to see a Harley Street oculist about the sight of one eye, which
+has caused a lot of trouble and worry of late and continuously haunted
+me with the possibility of blindness. At times, I see men as trees
+walking and print becomes hopelessly blurred.</p>
+
+<p>The Specialist however is reassuring. The eye is healthy &mdash;no
+neuritis&mdash;but the adjustment muscles have been thrown out of gear by the
+nervous troubles of last spring.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Was ever man more sorely tempted? Here am I lonely and uncomfortable in
+diggings with a heart like nascent oxygen.... Shall I? Yes, but.... And
+I have neither health nor wealth.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 22.</p>
+
+<p><i>The British Museum Reading Room</i></p>
+
+<p>I saw it for the first time to-day! Gadzooks!! This is the only fit
+ejaculation to express my amazement! It's a pagan temple with the Gods
+in the middle and all around, various obscure dark figures prostrating
+themselves in worship.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>For any one who is not simply a Sheep or Cow or whose nervous
+organisation is a degree more sensitive than the village blacksmith's,
+it is a besetting peril to his peace of mind to be constantly moving
+about an independent being, with loves and hates, and a separate
+identity among other separate identities, who prowl and prowl around
+like the hosts of Midian&mdash;ready to snarl, fight, seize you, bore you,
+exasperate you, to arouse all your passions, call up all the worst from
+the depths where they have lain hidden.... A day spent among my fellows
+goads me to a frenzy by the evening. I am no longer fit for human
+companionship. People string me up to concert pitch. I develop
+suspicions of one that he is prying, of another that he patronises.
+Others make me horribly anxious to stand well in their eyes and horribly
+curious to know what they think of me. Others I hate and loathe&mdash;for no
+particular reason. There is a man I am acquainted with concerning whom I
+know nothing at all. He may be Jew, Gentile, Socinian, Pre-adamite,
+Anabaptist, Rosicrucian&mdash;I don't know, and I don't care, for I hate him.
+I should like to smash his face in. I don't know why.... In the whole
+course of our tenuous acquaintance we have spoken scarce a dozen words
+to each other. Yet I should like to blow up his face with dynamite. If I
+had £200 a year private income I should be in wait for him to-morrow
+round a corner and land him one&mdash;just to indicate my economic
+independence. He would call for the police and the policeman&mdash;discerning
+creature&mdash;on arrival, would surely say, "With a face like that, I'm not
+surprised."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>R&mdash;&mdash; said to me this morning, "Well, have you heard?" with an
+exuberance of curiosity that made my blood boil&mdash;he was referring to my
+Essay still at the bar of the opinion of the Editor of the <i>English
+Review</i>. "You beast," I snapped and walked off.</p>
+
+<p>R&mdash;&mdash; shouted with laughter for he realizes my anger with him is only
+semi-serious: it is meant and not meant:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> meant, for it is justified by
+the facts; not meant, for I can't be too serious over anything <i>au
+fond</i>.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Of all the grim and ridiculous odds and ends of chance that Fortune has
+rolled up to my feet, my friendship with a man like B&mdash;&mdash; is the
+grimmest and most ridiculous. He is a bachelor of sixty, rather
+good-looking, of powerful physique and a faultless constitution.... His
+ignorance is colossal and he once asked whether Australia, for example,
+tho' surrounded by water, is not connected up with other land underneath
+the sea. Being himself a child in intelligence (tho' commercially
+cunning), he has a great respect for my brains. Being himself a strong
+man, he views my ill-health with much contempt. His private opinion is
+that I am in consumption. When asked once by a lady if I were not going
+to be "a great man" one day, he replied, "Yes&mdash;if he lives." I ought to
+walk six miles a day, drink a bottle of stout with my dinner, and eat
+plenty of <i>onions</i>. His belief in the curative properties of onions is
+strong as death....</p>
+
+<p>His system of prophylaxis may be quickly summarised,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>(1) Hot whisky <i>ad lib</i>. and off to bed.</p>
+
+<p>(2) A woman.</p>
+
+<p>These two sterling preventives he has often urged upon me at the same
+time tipping out a quantity of anathemas on doctors and physic....</p>
+
+<p>He is a cynic. He scoffs at the medical profession, the Law, the Church,
+the Press. Every man is guilty until he is proved innocent. The Premier
+is an unscrupulous character, the Bishop a salacious humbug. No doctor
+will cure, for it pays him to keep you ill. Every clergyman puts the
+Sunday-school teacher in the family way. His mouth is permanently
+distorted by cynicism.</p>
+
+<p>He is vain and believes all women are in love with him. When playing the
+Gallant, he turns on a special voice, wears white spats, and looks like
+a Newmarket "Crook."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I lost my 'bus," a girl says to him. "Lost your bust," he answers, in
+broad Scotch. "I can't see that you've done that." ... His sexual career
+has been a remarkable one, he claiming to have brought many women to
+bed, and actually to have lain with women of almost all European
+nationalities, for he has been a great traveller....</p>
+
+<p>This man is my devoted friend!... And truth to tell I get on with him
+better than I do with most people. I like his gamey flavour, his utter
+absence of self-consciousness, and his doggy loyalty to myself&mdash;his
+weaker brother. He may be depraved in his habits, coarse in his
+language, boorish in his manners, ludicrous in the wrongness of all his
+views. But I like him just because he is so hopeless. I get on with him
+because it is so impossible to reclaim him&mdash;my missionary spirit is not
+intrigued. If he only dabbled in vice (for an experiment), if he had
+pale, watery ideas about current literature&mdash;if&mdash;to use his own
+favourite epithet&mdash;he were <i>genteel</i>, I should quarrel.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 30.</p>
+
+<p>Having developed a passion for a piece of sculpture by R. Boeltzig
+called the Reifenwerferin&mdash;the most beautiful figure of a woman. I am
+already devoted to Rodin's "Kiss" and have a photo of it framed in my
+bedroom. Have written to Bruciani's.</p>
+
+<p>I suspect that my growing appreciation of the plastic art is with me
+only distilled sensuality. I enjoy my morning bath for the same reason.
+My bath is a daily baptism. I revel in the pleasure of the pain of the
+cold water. I whistle gleefully because I am clean and cool and nude
+early in the morning with the sun still low, before the day has been
+stained by clothes, dirt, pain, exasperation, death.... How I love
+myself as I rub myself down!&mdash;the cool, pink skin&mdash;I could eat it! I
+want to be all day in a cold bath to enjoy the pain of mortifying the
+flesh&mdash;it is so beautiful, so soft, so inscrutable&mdash;if I cut out chunks
+of it, it would only bleed.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 8.</p>
+
+<p>The other morning R&mdash;&mdash; said hyperbolically that he hadn't slept all
+night for fear that, before he had time to put an arresting hand on my
+shoulder and say "Don't," I might have gone and become "Entangled." ...</p>
+
+<p>... No, I'm as firm as a rock, my dear. But in imagination the affair
+was continued as follows,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>She: "I am fond of you, you know."</p>
+
+<p>He: "I wish you wouldn't say these things to me&mdash;they're quite
+embarrassing."</p>
+
+<p>She: "Oh! my dear, I'm not serious, you know&mdash;you're such a vain young
+man."</p>
+
+<p>He: "Well, it's equally embarrassing any way."</p>
+
+<p>She: "Then I <i>am</i> serious."</p>
+
+<p>Tears.</p>
+
+<p>I say: "I wish you would take me only for what I am&mdash;a blackguard with
+no good intentions, yet no very evil ones&mdash;but still a blackguard, whom
+you seem to find has engaging manners."</p>
+
+<p>I breathe freely hoping to have escaped this terrible temptation and
+turn to go. But she, looking up smiling thro' a curtain of wet
+eyelashes, asks,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Won't the blackguard stop a little longer?" In a moment my earth works,
+redoubts, and bastions fall down, I rush forward impetuously into her
+arms shouting, "I <i>will</i>, I <i>will</i>, I will as long as for eternity."</p>
+
+<p>(Curtain.)</p>
+
+<p>I dramatised this little picture and much more last night before going
+to sleep when I was in a fever. I should succumb at once to the first
+really skilful coquette.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 9.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Ludo</i></p>
+
+<p>We played Ludo together this evening and she won 2s. 6d. Handsomely
+gowned in black and wearing black ornaments, she sat with me in the
+lamplight on the sofa in the Morris Room, with the Ludo board between us
+placed on a large green cushion. Her face was white as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> parchment and
+her hair seemed an ebony black. I lolled in the opposite corner, a thin,
+elongated youth, with fair hair all stivvered up, dressed in a
+light-brown lounge suit with a good trouser crease, a soft linen collar
+and&mdash;a red tie! Between us, on its green cushion the Ludo board with its
+brilliantly coloured squares:&mdash;all of it set before a background formed
+by the straight-backed, rectangular, settle-like sofa, with a charming
+covering which went with the rest of the scheme.</p>
+
+<p>"Rather decorative,"&mdash;&mdash; remarked in an audible voice, turning her head
+on one side and quizzing. I can well believe it was. <i>She</i> looked wholly
+admirable.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 21.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>My Nightmare</i></p>
+
+<p>Can't get rid of my cough. I have so many things to do&mdash;I am living in a
+fever of haste to get them done. Yet this cough hinders me. There is
+always something which drags me back from the achievement of my desires.
+It's like a nightmare; I see myself struggling violently to escape from
+a monster which draws continuously nearer, until his shadow falls across
+my path, when I begin to run and find my legs tied, etc. The only
+difference is that mine is a nightmare from which I never wake up. The
+haven of successful accomplishment remains as far off as ever. Oh! make
+haste.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 29.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>English Review</i> has returned my Essay!&mdash;This is a keen
+disappointment to me. "I wish I could use this, but I am really too
+full," the Editor writes. To be faintly encouraged and delicately
+rejected&mdash;why I prefer the printed form.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 1.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>More Irony</i></p>
+
+<p>Renewed my cold&mdash;I do nothing all day but blow my nose, cough, and curse
+Austin Harrison.</p>
+
+<p>M&mdash;&mdash; thinks the lungs are all right. "There is nothing there, I think,"
+said he, this morning. Alleluia! I've<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> had visions of consumption for
+weeks past and M&mdash;&mdash; himself has been expecting it. I always just escape:
+I always almost get something, do something, go somewhere, I have
+dabbled in a variety of diseases, but never got one downright<a name="FNanchor_2_9" id="FNanchor_2_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_9" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>&mdash;but
+only enough to make me feel horribly unfit and very miserable without
+the consolation of being able to regard myself as the heroic victim of
+some incurable disorder. Instead of being Stevenson with tuberculosis,
+I've only been Jones with dyspepsia. So, too, in other directions, big
+events have always just missed me: by Herculean efforts I succeeded in
+giving up newspaper journalism and breaking thro' that steel
+environment&mdash;but only to become an Entomologist! I once achieved success
+in an Essay in the <i>Academy</i>, which attracted attention&mdash;a debut,
+however, that never developed. I had not quite arrived. It is always
+<i>not quite</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Yesterday, I received a state visit from the Editor of the <i>Furniture
+Record</i> seeking advice on how to eradicate mites from upholstering! I
+received him ironically&mdash;but little did he understand.</p>
+
+<p>I shot up like a ball on a bagatelle board all steamy into zoology (my
+once beloved science) but at once rolled dead into the very low hole of
+Economic Entomology! Curse.... Why can't I either have a first-rate
+disease or be a first-rate zoologist?</p>
+
+<p>Now just think what a much better figure I should have cut, from the
+artistic view point, had I remained a newspaper reporter who had taught
+himself prodigious embryology out of F.M. Balfour's Textbook, who had
+cut sections of fowls' eggs and newt embryos with a hand microtome, who
+had passionately dissected out the hidden, internal anatomy of a great
+variety of animals, who could recite Wiedersheim's <i>Comparative Anatomy
+of Vertebrates</i> and patter off the difference between a nephridium and a
+cœlomic duct without turning a hair&mdash;or the phylogenetic history (how
+absorbing!) of the kidney&mdash;pronephros, mesonephros and metanephros and
+all the ducts!... All this, over now and wasted. My hardly-won
+knowledge<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> wrenched away is never brought into use&mdash;it lies piled up in
+my brain rotting. I could have become a first-rate comparative
+anatomist.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 3.</p>
+
+<p>Cold better. So back at work&mdash;gauging ale at Dunfermline as R&mdash;&mdash; puts
+it.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 9.</p>
+
+<p>In the evening found it quite impossible to stay in the house any
+longer: some vague fear drove me out. I was alarmed to be alone or to be
+still. It is my cough, I think.</p>
+
+<p>Had two glasses of port at the Kensington Hotel, conversed with the
+barmaid, and then came home.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 10.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't be an old fossil," she said to me to-night, irrelevantly.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>A propos</i> of what?" I inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"Mother, here's W&mdash;&mdash; proposing to E&mdash;&mdash;! Do come," cried &mdash;&mdash;, with
+intent to confuse. I laughed heartlessly.</p>
+
+<p>Dear, dear, where will it all end? It's a sad business when you fall in
+love with a girl you don't like.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 26.</p>
+
+<p>Spent a romping day at the Flat. Kissed her sister twice under the
+mistletoe, and in the evening went to a cinema. After supper made a mock
+heroic speech and left hilarious.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_8" id="Footnote_1_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_8"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> "The life of the Soul is different; there is nothing more
+changing, more varied, more restless ... to describe the incidents of
+one hour would require an eternity."&mdash;<i>Journal of Eugénie de Guérin</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_9" id="Footnote_2_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_9"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> See entry for November 27, 1915.</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="a1914" id="a1914"></a>1914</h3>
+
+
+<p><i>February</i> 4.</p>
+
+<p>... Finally and in conclusion I have fallen ill again, have again
+resumed my periodical visits to the Doctor, and am swallowing his
+rat-poison in a blind faith as aforetime. In fact, I am in London,
+leading the same solitary life, seeing no one, talking to no one, and
+daily struggling with this demon of ill-health. Can no one exorcise him?
+The sight of <i>both</i> my eyes is affected now. Blindness?</p>
+
+<p>B&mdash;&mdash; continues whoring, drinking, sneering. R&mdash;&mdash; as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> usual, devoid of
+emotion, cold, passionless, Shavian, and self-absorbed, still titillates
+his mind with etching, sociology, music, etc., and I have at last ceased
+to bore him with what he probably calls the febrile utterances of an
+overwrought mind.</p>
+
+<p>Such is my world! Oh! I forgot&mdash;on the floor below me is a corpse&mdash;that
+of an old gentleman who passed away suddenly in the night. In the small
+hours, the landlady went for the Doctor over the way, but he refused to
+come, saying the old man was too aged. So the poor gentleman died
+alone&mdash;in this rat hole of a place.</p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 7.</p>
+
+<p>Intending to buy my usual 3d. packet of Goldflakes, entered a
+tobacconist's in Piccadilly, but once inside surprised to find myself in
+a classy west-end establishment, which frightened my flabby nature into
+buying De Reszke's instead. I hadn't the courage to face the aristocrat
+behind the counter with a request for Goldflakes&mdash;probably not stocked.
+What would he think of me? Besides, I shrank from letting him see I was
+not perfectly well-to-do.</p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 14.</p>
+
+<p>I wonder what this year has in store for me? The first twenty-four years
+of my life have hunted me up and down the keyboard&mdash;I have been right to
+the top and also to the bottom&mdash;very happy and very miserable. Yet I
+prefer the life that is a hunt and an adventure. I don't really mind
+being chased like this. I almost thrive on the excitement. If I knew
+always where to look with any degree of certainty for my next day's life
+I should yawn! "What if to-day be sweet," I say, and never look ahead.
+To me, next week is next century.</p>
+
+<p>The danger and uncertainty of my life make me cherish and hug closely to
+my heart various little projects that otherwise would seem unworthy. I
+work at them quickly, frantically, sometimes, afraid to whisper to a
+living soul what expectations I dare to harbour in my heart. What if
+<i>now</i> the end be near? Not a word! Let me go onward.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 15.</p>
+
+<p>To-day I have reviewed the situation carefully, exhaustively. I have
+peered into every aspect of my life and achievements and everything I
+have seen nauseates me. I can find no ray of comfort in anything I have
+done or in anything I might do. My life seems to have been a wilderness
+of futile endeavour. I started wrong from the very beginning. At the
+moment of my birth I was coming into the world in the wrong place and
+under wrong conditions. Why seek to overcome such colossal initial
+disadvantages? In this mood I found fault with my parentage, my
+inheritance, all my mental and physical disabilities....</p>
+
+<p>This must be a form of incipient insanity. Even as a boy, I can remember
+being preternaturally absorbed in myself and preternaturally
+discontented. I was accustomed to exhaust my mind by the most harassing
+cross-examinations&mdash;no Counsel at the Bar ever treated a witness more
+mercilessly. After a day of this sort of thing, when silently and
+morbidly in every spare moment, at meals, in school, or on a walk, I
+would incessantly ply the questions, "What is the ultimate value of your
+work, <i>cui bono</i>?" etc. I went to bed in the evening with a feeling of
+hopelessness and dissatisfaction&mdash;haggard with considerations and
+reconsiderations of my outlook, my talent, my character, my future. In
+bed, I tossed from side to side, mentally exhausted with my efforts to
+obtain some satisfying conclusion&mdash;always hopeful, determined to the
+last to be able to square up my little affairs before going to sleep.
+But out of this mazy, vertiginous mass of thinking no satisfaction ever
+came. <i>Now</i>, I thought&mdash;or the <i>next moment</i>&mdash;or as soon as I review and
+revise myself in this or in that aspect, I shall be content. And so I
+went on, tearing down and reforming, revising and reviewing, till
+finally from sheer exhaustion and very unhappy I fell asleep.</p>
+
+<p>Next morning I was all right.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 20.</p>
+
+<p>Am feeling very unwell. My ill-health, my isolation, baulked ambitions,
+and daily breadwinning all conspire to bring me down. The idea of a
+pistol and the end of it grows on me day by day.</p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 21.</p>
+
+<p>After four days of the most profound depression of spirits, bitterness,
+self-distrust, despair, I emerged from the cloud to-day quite suddenly
+(probably the arsenic and strychnine begins to take effect) and walked
+up Exhibition Road with the intention of visiting the Science Museum
+Library so as to refer to Schafer's <i>Essentials of Histology</i> (I have to
+watch myself carefully so that I may act <i>at once</i> as soon as the
+balance of mind is restored). In the lobby was a woman screaming as if
+in pain, with a passer-by at her side saying sternly, "What is the
+matter with you?" as if she were making herself ridiculous by suffering
+pain in public.</p>
+
+<p>I passed by quickly, pretending not to notice lest&mdash;after all&mdash;I should
+be done out of my <i>Essentials of Histology.</i> Even in the Library I very
+nearly let the opportunity slide by picking up a book on squaring the
+circle, the preface and introduction of which I was forced to read.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 4.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>The Entomological Society</i></p>
+
+<p>There were a great many Scarabees present who exhibited to one another
+poor little pinned insects in collecting-boxes ... It was really a
+one-man show, Prof. Poulton, a man of very considerable scientific
+attainments, being present, and shouting with a raucous voice in a way
+that must have scared some of the timid, unassuming collectors of our
+country's butterflies and moths. Like a great powerful sheep-dog, he got
+up and barked, "Mendelian characters," or "Germ plasm," what time the
+obedient flock ran together and bleated a pitiful applause. I suppose,
+having frequently heard these and similar phrases<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> fall from the lips of
+the great man at these reunions, they have come to regard them as
+symbols of a ritual which they think it pious to accept without any
+question. So every time the Professor says, "Allelomorph," or some such
+phrase, they cross themselves and never venture to ask him what the hell
+it is all about.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 7.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>A Scots Fir</i></p>
+
+<p>Have been feeling very "down" of late, but yesterday I saw a fine Scots
+Fir by the roadside&mdash;tall, erect, as straight as a Parthenon pillar. The
+sight of it restored my courage. It had a tonic effect. Quite
+unconsciously I pulled my shoulders back and walked ahead with renewed
+vows never to flinch again. It is a noble tree. It has strength as a
+giant, and a giant's height, and yet kindly withal, the branches
+drooping down graciously towards you&mdash;like a kind giant extending its
+hands to a child.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 22.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>A Stagnant Day</i></p>
+
+<p>Went to bed late last night so I slept on soundly till 9 a.m. Went down
+to the bath-room, but found the door was shut, so went back to my
+bedroom again, lay down and dosed a while, thinking of nothing in
+particular. Went down again&mdash;door still locked&mdash;swore&mdash;returned once
+more to my room and reclined on the bed, with door open, so that I could
+hear as soon as the bath-room door opened.... Rang the bell, and
+Miss &mdash;&mdash; brought up a jug of hot water to shave with, and a tumbler of hot
+water to drink (for my dyspepsia). She, on being interrogated, said
+there was some one in the bath-room. I said I wanted a bath too, so as
+she passed on her way down she shouted, "Hurry up, Mr. Barbellion wants
+a bath as well." Her footsteps then died away as she descended lower
+into the basement, where the family lives, sleeps, and cooks our food.</p>
+
+<p>At length, hearing the door open, I ejaculated, "the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> Lord be praised,"
+rushed down, entered the bath-room and secured it from further
+intruders. I observed that Miss &mdash;&mdash; senior had been bathing her members,
+and that the bath, tho' empty, was covered inside with patches of soap
+&mdash;unutterably black! Oh! Miss &mdash;&mdash;!</p>
+
+<p>Dressed leisurely and breakfasted. When the table was cleared wrote a
+portion of my essay on <i>Spallanzani</i>....</p>
+
+<p>Then, being giddy and tired, rang for dinner. Miss &mdash;&mdash; laid the table.
+She looked very clean. I said, "Good-morning," and she suitably replied,
+and I went on reading, the <i>Winning Post</i>. Felt too slack to be amiable.
+Next time she came in, I said as pleasantly as I could, "Is it all
+ready?" and being informed proceeded to eat forthwith.</p>
+
+<p>In the afternoon, took a 'bus to Richmond. No room outside, so had to go
+inside&mdash;curse&mdash;and sit opposite a row&mdash;curse again&mdash;of fat, ugly,
+elderly women, all off to visit their married daughters, the usual
+Sunday jaunt. At Hammersmith got on the outside, and at Turnham Green
+was caught in a hail storm. Very cold all of a sudden, so got off and
+took shelter in the doorway of a shop, which was of course closed, the
+day being Sunday. Rain, wind, and hail continued for some while, as I
+gazed at the wet, almost empty street, thinking, re-thinking and
+thinking over again the same thought, viz., that the 'bus ride along
+this route was exceptionally cheap&mdash;probably because of competition with
+the trams.</p>
+
+<p>The next 'bus took me to Richmond. Two young girls sat in front, and
+kept looking back to know if I was "game." I looked <i>through</i> them.
+Walked in the Park just conscious of the singing of Larks and the
+chatter of Jays, but harassed mentally by the question, "To whom shall I
+send my essay, when finished?" To shelter from the rain sat under an oak
+where four youths joined me and said, "Worse luck," and "Not half," and
+smoked cigarettes. They gossipped and giggled like girls, put their arms
+around each other's necks. At the dinner last night, they said, they had
+Duck and Tomato Soup and Beeswax ("Beesley, you know, the chap that goes
+about with Smith a lot") wore a fancy waistcoat with a dinner<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> jacket.
+When I got up to move on, they became convulsed with laughter. I
+scowled.</p>
+
+<p>Had tea in the Pagoda tea-rooms, dry toast and brown bread and butter.
+Two young men opposite me were quietly playing the fool.</p>
+
+<p>"Hold my hand," one said audibly enough for two lovers to hear,
+comfortably settled up in a corner. Even at a side view I could see them
+kissing each other in between mouthfuls of bread and butter and jam.</p>
+
+<p>On rising to go, one of the two hilarious youths removed my cap and
+playfully placed it on top of the bowler which his friend was wearing.</p>
+
+<p>"My cap, I think," I said sharply, and the young man apologised with a
+splutter. I glared like a kill-joy of sixty.</p>
+
+<p>On the 'bus, coming home, thro' streets full of motor traffic and all
+available space plastered with advertisements that screamed at you, I
+espied in front three pretty girls, who gave me the "Glad Eye." One had
+a deep, musical voice, and kept on using it, one of the others a pretty
+ankle and kept on showing it.</p>
+
+<p>At Kew, two Italians came aboard, one of whom went out of his way to sit
+among the girls. He sat level with them, and kept turning his head
+around, giving them a sweeping glance as he did so, to shout remarks in
+Italian to his friend behind. He thought the girls were prostitutes, I
+think, and he may have been right. I was on the seat behind this man and
+for want of anything better to do, studied his face minutely. In short,
+it was fat, round, and greasy. He wore black moustachios with curly
+ends, his eyes were dark shining, bulgy, and around his neck was wrapped
+a scarf inside a dirty linen collar, as if he had a sore throat. I sat
+behind him and hated him steadily, perseveringly.</p>
+
+<p>At Hammersmith the three girls got off, and the bulgy-eyed Italian
+watched them go with lascivious eyes, looking over the rail and down at
+them on the pavement&mdash;still interested. I looked down too. They crossed
+the road in front of us and disappeared.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Came home and here I am writing this. This is the content of to-day's
+consciousness. This is about all I have thought, said, or done, or felt.
+A stagnant day!</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 26.</p>
+
+<p>Home with a bad influenza cold. In a deplorable condition. The best I
+could do was to sit by the fire and read newspapers one by one from the
+first page to the last till the reading became mechanical. I found
+myself reading an account of the Lincoln Handicap and a column article
+on Kleptomania, while advertisements of new books were devoured with
+relish as delicacies. My mind became a morass of current Divorce Court
+News, Society Gossip&mdash;"if Sir A. goes Romeward, if Miss B. sings
+true"&mdash;and advertisements. I went on reading because I was afraid to be
+alone with myself.</p>
+
+<p>B&mdash;&mdash; arrived at tea and after saying he felt very "pin-eyed" swallowed
+a glass of Bols gin&mdash;the Gin of Antony Bols&mdash;and recovered sufficiently
+to inform me delightedly that he had just won £50. He told me all the
+story; meanwhile, I, tired of wiping and blowing my nose, sat in the
+dirty armchair hunched up with elbows on knees and let it drip on to the
+dirty carpet. B&mdash;&mdash;, of course, noticed nothing, which was fortunate.</p>
+
+<p>Some kinds of damned fool would have been kindly and sympathetic. I must
+say I like old B&mdash;&mdash;. I like him for his simpleness and utter absence of
+self-consciousness, which make him as charming as a child. Moreover, he
+often makes me a present of invaluable turf tips. Of course, he is a
+liar, but his lies are harmless and on his mouth like milk on an
+infant's. My own lies are much more dangerous. And when you are ill, to
+be treated as tho' you were well is good for hypochondriacs.</p>
+
+<p><i>April</i> 15.</p>
+
+<p>H&mdash;&mdash;'s wedding. Five minutes before time, I am told I made a dramatic
+entry into the church clad in an audaciously light pair of Cashmere
+trousers, lemon-coloured<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> gloves, with top hat and cane. The latter
+upset the respectability frightfully&mdash;it is not <i>comme il faut</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>April</i> 16.</p>
+
+<p>... If I am to admit the facts they are that I eagerly anticipate love,
+look everywhere for it, long for it, am unhappy without it. She
+fascinates me&mdash;admitted. I could, if I would, surrender myself. Her
+affection makes me long to do it. I am sick of living by myself. I am
+frightened of myself. My life is miserable alone, and sometimes
+desperately miserable when I long for a little sympathy to be close at
+hand.</p>
+
+<p>I have often tried to persuade R&mdash;&mdash; to share a flat with me, because I
+don't really wish to marry. I struggle against the idea, I am egotist
+enough to wish to shirk the responsibilities.</p>
+
+<p>But then I am a ridiculously romantic creature with a wonderful ideal of
+a woman I shall never meet or if I do she won't want me&mdash;"that (wholly)
+impossible She." R&mdash;&mdash; in a flat with me would partly solve my
+difficulties. I don't love her enough for marriage. Mine must be a grand
+passion, a <i>bouleversement</i>&mdash;for I am capable of it.</p>
+
+<p><i>April</i> 17.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>A Humble Confession</i></p>
+
+<p>The Hon. &mdash;&mdash;, son and heir of Lord &mdash;&mdash;, to-day invited me to lunch
+with him in &mdash;&mdash; Square. He's a handsome youth of twenty-five, with fair
+hair and blue eyes.... and O! such an aristocrat. Good Lord.</p>
+
+<p>But to continue: the receipt of so unexpected an invitation from so
+glorious a young gentleman at first gave me palpitation of the heart. I
+was so surprised that I scarcely had enough presence of mind to listen
+to the rest of his remarks and later, it was only with the greatest
+difficulty that I could recall the place where we arranged to meet. His
+remarks, too, are not easy to follow, as he talks in a stenographic,
+Alfred-Jingle-like manner, jerking out disjected members of sentences,
+and leaving you to make<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> the best of them or else to Hell with you&mdash;by
+the Lord, I speak English, don't I? If I said, "I beg your pardon," he
+jerked again, and left me often equally unenlightened.</p>
+
+<p>On arriving at his home, the first thing he did was to shout down the
+stairs to the basement: "Elsie, Elsie," while I gazed with awe at a
+parcel on the hall table addressed to "Lord &mdash;&mdash;." Before lunch we sat
+in his little room and talked about &mdash;&mdash;, but I was still quite unable
+to regain my self-composure. I couldn't for the life of me forget that
+here was I lunching with Lord &mdash;&mdash;'s son, on equal terms, with mutual
+interests, that his sisters perhaps would come in directly or even the
+noble Lord himself. I felt like a scared hare. How should I address a
+peer of the realm? I kept trying to remember and every now and then for
+some unaccountable reason my mind travelled into &mdash;&mdash;shire and I saw
+Auntie C&mdash;&mdash; serving out tea and sugar over the counter of the baker's
+shop in the little village. I luxuriated in the contrast, tho' I am not
+at all inclined to be a snob.</p>
+
+<p>He next offered me a cigarette, which I took and lit. It was a Turkish
+cigarette with one end plugged up with cotton-wool&mdash;to absorb the
+nicotine&mdash;a, thing I've never seen before. I was so flurried at the time
+that I did not notice this and lit the wrong end. With perfect ease and
+self-possession, the Honourable One pointed out my error to me and told
+me to throw the cigarette away and have another.</p>
+
+<p>By this time I had completely lost my nerve. My pride, chagrin,
+excessive self-consciousness were entangling all my movements in the
+meshes of a net. Failing to tumble to the situation, I inquired, "Why
+the <i>wrong</i> end? Is there a right and a wrong end?" Lord &mdash;&mdash;'s son and
+heir pointed out the cotton-wool end, now blackened by my match.</p>
+
+<p>"That didn't burn very well, did it?"</p>
+
+<p>I was bound to confess that it did not, and threw the smoke away under
+the impression that these wonderful cigarettes with right and wrong ends
+must be some special brand sold only to aristocrats, and at a great
+price, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> possessing some secret virtue. Once again, handsome Mr. &mdash;&mdash;
+drew out his silver cigarette-case, selected a second cigarette for me,
+and held it towards me between his long delicate fingers, at the same
+time pointing out the plug at one end and making a few staccato remarks
+which I could not catch.</p>
+
+<p>I was still too scared to be in full possession of my faculties, and he
+apparently was too tired to be explicit to a member of the bourgeoisie,
+stumbling about his drawing-room. The cotton-wool plug only suggested to
+me some sort of a plot on the part of a dissolute scion of a noble house
+to lure me into one of his bad habits, such as smoking opium or taking
+veronal. I again prepared to light the cigarette at the wrong end.</p>
+
+<p>"Try the other end," repeated the young man, smiling blandly. I blushed,
+and immediately recovered my balance, and even related my knowledge of
+pipes fitted to carry similar plugs....</p>
+
+<p>During lunch (at which we sat alone) after sundry visits to the top of
+the stairs to shout down to the kitchen, he announced that he thought it
+wasn't last night's affair after all which was annoying the Cook (he got
+home late without a latch-key)&mdash;it was because he called her "Cook"
+instead of Mrs. Austin. He smiled serenely and decided to indulge Mrs.
+A., his indulgent attitude betraying an objectionable satisfaction with
+the security of his own unassailable social status. There was a trace of
+gratification at the little compliment secreted in the Cook's annoyance.
+She wanted Mr. Charles to call her Mrs. Austin, forsooth. Very well! and
+he smiled down on the little weakness <i>de haute en bas</i>.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I enjoyed this little experience. Turning it over in my mind (as the
+housemaid says when she decides to stay on) I have come to the
+conclusion that the social parvenu is not such a vulgar fellow after
+all. He may be a bore&mdash;particularly if he sits with his finger tips
+apposed over a spherical paunch, festooned with a gold chain, and keeps<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>
+on relating <i>in extenso</i> how once he gummed labels on blacking bottles.
+Often enough he is a smug fellow, yet, truth to tell, we all feel a
+little interested in him. He is a traveller from an antique land, and we
+sometimes like to listen to his tales of adventure and all he has come
+through. He has traversed large territories of human experience, he has
+met strange folk and lodged in strange caravanserai. Similarly with the
+man who has come down in the world&mdash;the fool, the drunkard, the
+embezzler&mdash;he may bore us with his maudlin sympathy with himself yet his
+stories hold us. It must be a fine experience within the limits of a
+single life to traverse the whole keyboard of our social status, whether
+up or down. I should like to be a peer who grinds a barrel organ or
+(better still) a one-time organ-grinder who now lives in Park Lane. It
+must be very dull to remain stationary&mdash;once a peer always a peer.</p>
+
+<p><i>April</i> 20.</p>
+
+<p>Miss &mdash;&mdash; heard me sigh to-day and asked what it might mean. "Only the
+sparks flying upward," I answered lugubriously.</p>
+
+<p>A blackguard is often unconscious of a good deal of his wickedness.
+Charge him with wickedness and he will deny it quite honestly&mdash;honest
+then, perhaps, for the first time in his life.</p>
+
+<p>An Entomologist is a large hairy man with eyebrows like antennæ.</p>
+
+<p>Chronic constipation has gained for me an unrivalled knowledge of all
+laxatives, aperients, purgatives and cathartic compounds. At present I
+arrange two gunpowder plots a week. It's abominable. Best literature for
+the latrine: picture puzzles.</p>
+
+<p><i>April</i> 23.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>A Foolish Bird</i></p>
+
+<p>With a menacing politeness, B&mdash;&mdash; to-day inquired of a fat curate who
+was occupying more than his fair share of a seat on top of a 'bus,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Are you going to get up or stay where ye are, sir?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The foolish bird was sitting nearly on top of B&mdash;&mdash;, mistaking a bomb
+for an egg.</p>
+
+<p>"I beg your pardon," replied the fat curate.</p>
+
+<p>B&mdash;&mdash; repeated his inquiry with more emphasis in the hideous Scotch
+brogue.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose I shall stay here till I get down presently."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think you will," said B&mdash;&mdash;.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean?" asked the fat one in falsetto indignation.</p>
+
+<p>"This," B&mdash;&mdash; grunted, and shunted sideways so that the poor fellow
+almost slid on to the floor.</p>
+
+<p>A posse of police walking along in single file always makes me laugh. A
+single constable is a Policeman, but several in single file are
+"Coppers." I imagine every one laughs at them and I have a shrewd
+suspicion it is one of W.S. Gilbert's legacies&mdash;the <i>Pirates of
+Penzance</i> having become part of the national Consciousness.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>On Lighting Chloe's Cigarette</i></p>
+
+<p>R&mdash;&mdash; remarked to-day that he intended writing a lyric on lighting
+Chloe's cigarette.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!" I said at once appreciative, "now tell me, do you balance your
+hand&mdash;by gently (ever so gently) resting the extreme tip of your little
+finger upon her chin, and" (I was warming up) "do you hold the match
+vertically or horizontally, and do you light it in the dark or in the
+light? If you have finesse, you won't need to be told that the thing is
+to get a steady flame and the maximum of illumination upon her face to
+last over a period for as long as possible."</p>
+
+<p>"Chloe," replied R&mdash;&mdash;, "is wearing now a charming blouse with a
+charming V-shaped opening in front. Her Aunt asked my Mother last night
+tentatively, 'How do you like Chloe's blouse? Is it too low?' My Mother
+scrutinised the dear little furry, lop-eared thing and answered
+doubtfully, 'No, Maria, I don't think so.'"</p>
+
+<p>"How ridiculous! Why the V is a positive signpost<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>. My dear fellow," I
+said to R&mdash;&mdash;, "I should refuse to be bluffed by those old women. Tell
+them you <i>know</i>."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Carlyle called Lamb a despicable abortion. What a crime!</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 2.</p>
+
+<p>Developed a savage fit. Up to a certain point, perhaps, but beyond that
+anxiety changes into recklessness&mdash;you simply don't care. The aperients
+are causing dyspepsia and intermittent action of the heart, which
+frightens me. After a terrifying week, during which at crises I have
+felt like dropping suddenly in the street, in the gardens, anywhere,
+from syncope, I rebelled against this humiliating fear. I pulled my
+shoulders back and walked briskly ahead along the street with a dropped
+beat every two or three steps. I laughed bitterly at it and felt it
+could stop or go on&mdash;I was at last indifferent. In a photographer's shop
+was the picture of a very beautiful woman and I stopped to look at her.
+I glowered in thro' the glass angrily and reflected how she was gazing
+out with that same expression even at the butcher's boy or the
+lamp-lighter. It embittered me to think of having to leave her to some
+other man. To me she represented all the joy of life which at any moment
+I might have had to quit for ever. Such impotence enraged me and I
+walked off up the street with a whirling heart and the thought, "I shall
+drop, I suppose, when I get up as far as that." Yet don't think I was
+alarmed. Oh! no. The iron had entered me, and I went on with cynical
+indifference waiting to be struck down.</p>
+
+<p>... She is a very great deal to me. Perhaps I love her very much after
+all.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 3.</p>
+
+<p>Bad heart attack all day. Intermittency is very refined torture to one
+who wants to live very badly. Your pump goes a "dot and carry one," or
+say "misses a stitch,"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> what time you breathe deep, begin to shake your
+friend's hand and make a farewell speech. Then it goes on again and you
+order another pint of beer.</p>
+
+<p>It is a fractious animal within the cage of my thorax, and I never know
+when it is going to escape and make off with my precious life between
+its teeth. I humour and coax and soothe it, but, God wot, I haven't much
+confidence in the little beast. My thorax it appears is an intolerable
+kennel.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 10.</p>
+
+<p>In a very cheerful mood. Pleased with myself and everybody till a
+seagull soared overhead in Kensington Gardens and aroused my vast
+capacities for envy&mdash;I wish I could fly.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 24.</p>
+
+<p>In L&mdash;&mdash; with my brother, A&mdash;&mdash;. The great man is in great form and very
+happy in his love for N&mdash;&mdash;. He is a most delightful creature and I love
+him more than any one else in the wide world. There is an almost
+feminine tenderness in my love.</p>
+
+<p>We spent a delightful day, talking and arguing and insulting one
+another.... At these seances we take delight in anaesthetising our
+hearts for the purposes of argument, and a third person would be bound
+to suppose we were in the throes of a bitter quarrel. We pile up one
+vindictive remark on another, ingeniously seeking out&mdash;and with
+malice&mdash;weak points in each other's armour, which previous exchange of
+confidences makes it easy to find. Neither of us hesitates to make use
+of such private confessions, yet our love is so strong that we can
+afford to take any liberty. There is, in fact, a fearful joy in testing
+the strength of our affection by searching for cutting rejoinders&mdash;to
+see the effect. We rig up one another's cherished ideals like Aunt
+Sallies and then knock them down, we wax sarcastic, satirical,
+contemptuous in turn, we wave our hands animatedly (hand-waving<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> is a
+great trick with both of us), get flushed, point with our fingers, and
+thump the table to clinch some bit of repartee. Yet it's all smoke. Our
+love is unassailable&mdash;it's like the law of gravitation, you cannot
+dispute it, it underlies our existence, it is the air we breathe.</p>
+
+<p>N&mdash;&mdash; is charming, and thought we were quarrelling, and therefore
+intervened on his side!</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 31.</p>
+
+<p>R&mdash;&mdash; outlined an impression he had in Naples one day during a sirocco
+of the imminence of his own death. It was evidently an isolated
+experience and bored me a little as I could have said a lot myself about
+that. When he finished I drew from my pocket an envelope with my name
+and three addresses scribbled on it to help the police in case of
+syncope as I explained. I have carried this with me for several years
+and at one time a flask of brandy.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 3.</p>
+
+<p>Went to see the Irish Players in <i>The Playboy</i>. Sitting in front of me
+was a charming little Irish girl accompanied by a male clod with
+red-rimmed eyes like a Bull-terrier's, a sandy, bristly moustache like a
+housemaid's broom, and a face like a gluteal mass, and a horrid voice
+that crepitated rather than spoke.</p>
+
+<p>She was dark, with shining blue eyes, and a delightful little nose of
+the utmost import to every male who should gaze upon her. Between the
+acts, the clod hearkened to her vivacious conversation&mdash;like an
+enchanted bullock. Her vivacity was such that the tip of her nose moved
+up and down for emphasis and by the end of the Third Act I was captured
+entirely. Lucky dog, that clod!</p>
+
+<p>After the play this little Irish maiden caught my eye and it became a
+physical impossibility for me to check a smile&mdash;and oh! Heavens!&mdash;she
+gave me a smile in return. Precisely five seconds later, she looked
+again to see if I was still smiling&mdash;I was&mdash;and we then smiled broadly
+and openly on one another&mdash;her smile being the timorous<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> ingénue's not
+the glad eye of a <i>femme de joie</i>. Later, on the railway platform
+whither I followed her, I caught her eye again (was ever so lucky a
+fellow?), and we got into the same carriage. But so did the clod&mdash;ah!
+dear, was ever so unlucky a fellow? Forced to occupy a seat some way
+off, but she caught me trying to see her thro' a midnight forest of
+opera hats, lace ruffles, projecting ears and fat noses.</p>
+
+<p>Curse! Left her at High Street Station and probably will never see her
+again. This is a second great opportunity. The first was the girl on
+Lundy Island. These two women I shall always regret. There must be so
+many delightful and interesting persons in London if only I could get at
+them.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 4.</p>
+
+<p>Rushed off to tell R&mdash;&mdash; about my little Irish girl. Her face has been
+"shadowing" me all day.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 6.</p>
+
+<p>A violent argument with R&mdash;&mdash; <i>re</i> marriage. He says Love means
+appropriation, and is taking the most elaborate precautions to forfend
+passion&mdash;just as if it were a militant suffragette. Every woman he meets
+he first puts into a long quarantine, lest perchance she carries the
+germ of the infectious disease. He quotes Hippolytus and talks like a
+mediæval ascetic. Himself, I imagine, he regards as a valuable but
+brittle piece of Dresden china which must be saved from rough handling
+and left unmolested to pursue its high and dusty destiny&mdash;an old crock
+as I warned him. By refusing to plunge into life he will live long and
+be a well preserved man, but scarcely a living man&mdash;a mummy rather. I
+told him so amid much laughter.</p>
+
+<p>"You're a reactionary," says he.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but why should a reactionary be a naughty boy?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 7.</p>
+
+<p>My ironical fate lured me this evening into another discussion on
+marriage in which I had to take up a position exactly opposite to the
+one I defended yesterday against R&mdash;&mdash;. In fact, I actually subverted to
+my own pressing requirements some of R&mdash;&mdash;'s own arguments! The
+argument, of course, was with Her.</p>
+
+<p>Marriage, I urged, was an economic trap for guileless young men, and for
+my part (to give myself some necessary stiffening) I did not intend to
+enter upon any such hazardous course, even if I had the chance. Miss
+&mdash;&mdash; said I was a funk&mdash;to me who the day before had been hammering
+into R&mdash;&mdash; my principle of "Plunge and damn the consequences." I was
+informed I was an old woman afraid to go out without an umbrella, an old
+tabby cat afraid to leave the kitchen fire, etc., etc.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I <i>am</i> afraid to go out without an umbrella," I argued formally,
+"when it's raining cats and dogs. As long as I am dry, I shall keep dry.
+As soon as I find myself caught in the rain or victimised by a passion,
+I shan't be afraid of falling in love or getting wet. It would be a
+misadventure, but I am not going in search of one."</p>
+
+<p>All the same the discussion was very galling, for I was acting a part.</p>
+
+<p>... The truth is I have philandered abominably with her. I know it. And
+now I am jibbing at the idea of marriage.... I am such an egotist, I
+want, I believe, a Princess of the Blood Royal.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 9.</p>
+
+<p>Some days ago sent a personal advertisement to the newspaper to try to
+find my little Irish girl who lives at Notting Hill Gate. To-day they
+return me the money and advert, no doubt mistaking me for a White Slave
+trafficker. And by this time, I'm thinking, my little Irish girl can go
+to blazes. Shall spend the P.O. on sweets or monkey nuts.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 10</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Lupus</i></p>
+
+<p>It is raining heavily. I have just finished dinner. In the street an
+itinerant musician is singing dolefully, "O Rest in the Lord." In my
+dirty little sitting room I begin to feel very restless, so put on my
+hat and cloak and walk down towards the Station for a paper to read. It
+is all very dark and dismal, and I gaze with hungry eyes in thro' some
+of the windows disclosing happy comfortable interiors. At intervals
+thunder growls and lightning brightens up the deserted dirtiness of the
+Station Waiting Room. A few bits of desolate paper lie about on the
+floor, and up in one corner on a form a crossing-sweeper, motionless and
+abject, driven in from his pitch by the rain. His hands are deep in his
+trousers' pockets, and the poor devil lies with legs sprawling out and
+eyes closed: over the lower part of his face he wears a black mask to
+hide the ravages of lupus.... He seemed the last man on earth&mdash;after
+every one else had died of the plague. Not a soul in the station. Not a
+train. And this is June!</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 15.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Measuring Lice</i></p>
+
+<p>Spent the day measuring the legs and antennæ of lice to two places of
+decimals!</p>
+
+<p>To the lay mind how fantastic this must seem! Indeed, I hope it is
+fantastic. I do not mind being thought odd. It seems almost fitting that
+an incurable dilettante like myself should earn his livelihood by
+measuring the legs of lice. I like to believe that such a bizarre manner
+of life suits my incurable frivolousness.</p>
+
+<p>I am a Magpie in a Bagdad bazaar, hopping about, useless, inquisitive,
+fascinated by a lot of astonishing things: <i>e.g.</i>, a book on the
+quadrature of the circle, the <i>gabbertushed fustilugs</i> passage in
+Burton's <i>Anatomy of Melancholy</i>, names like Mr. Portwine or Mr.
+Hogsflesh, Tweezer's Alley or Pickle Herring Street, the excellent,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span>
+conceitful sonnets of Henry Constable or Petticoat Lane on a Sunday
+morning.</p>
+
+<p>Colossal things such as Art, Science, etc., frighten me. I am afraid I
+should develop a thirst that would make me wish to drink the sea dry. My
+mind is a disordered miscellany. The world is too distracting. I cannot
+apply myself for long. London bewilders me. At times it is a
+phantasmagoria, an opium dream out of De Quincey.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 17.</p>
+
+<p>Prof. Geo. Saintsbury's book on Elizabethan literature amuses me.
+<i>George</i>, there can be no doubt, is a very refined, cultivated fellow. I
+bet he don't eat periwinkles with a pin or bite his nails&mdash;and you
+should hear him refer to folk who can't read Homer in the original or
+who haven't been to Oxford&mdash;to Merton above all. He also says <i>non so
+che</i> for <i>je ne sais quoi</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 26.</p>
+
+<p>... I placed the volume on the mantelpiece as if it were a bottle of
+physic straight from my Dispensary, and I began to expostulate and
+expound, as if she were a sick person and I the doctor.... She seemed a
+little nettled at my proselytising demeanour and gave herself out to be
+very preoccupied&mdash;or at any rate quite uninterested in my physic. I read
+the book last night at one sitting and was boiling over with it.</p>
+
+<p>"I fear I have come at an inconvenient time," I said, with a sardonic
+smile and strummed on the piano.... "I must really be off. Please read
+it (which sounded like 'three times a day after meals') and tell me how
+you like it. (Facetiously.) Of course don't give up your present manual
+for it, that would be foolish and unnecessary." ... I rambled
+on&mdash;disposed to be very playful.</p>
+
+<p>At last calmly and horribly, in a thoughtful voice she answered,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I think you are very rude; you play the piano after I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> asked you to
+stop and walk about just as if it were your own home."</p>
+
+<p>I remained outwardly calm but inwardly was very surprised and full of
+tremors. I said after a pause,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Very well, if you think so.... Good-bye."</p>
+
+<p>No answer; and I was too proud to apologise.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-bye," I repeated.</p>
+
+<p>She went on reading her novel in silence while I got as far as the
+door&mdash;very upset.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Au revoir</i>."</p>
+
+<p>No answer.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said I, and went out of the room leaving my lady for good and all
+and I'm not sorry.</p>
+
+<p>In the passage met Miss &mdash;&mdash;. "What?" she said, "going already?"</p>
+
+<p>"Farewell," I said sepulchrally. "A very tragic farewell," which left
+her wondering.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 29.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>At the Albert Hall</i></p>
+
+<p>Went with R&mdash;&mdash; to the Albert Hall to the <i>Empress of Ireland</i> Memorial
+Concert with massed bands. We heard the Symphonie Pathétique, Chopin's
+Funeral March, Trauermarsch from Götterdammerung, the Ride of the
+Valkyries and a solemn melody from Bach.</p>
+
+<p>This afternoon I regard as a mountain peak in my existence. For two
+solid hours I sat like an Eagle on a rock gazing into infinity&mdash;a very
+fine sensation for a London Sparrow....</p>
+
+<p>I have an idea that if it were possible to assemble the sick and
+suffering day by day in the Albert Hall and keep the Orchestra going all
+the time, then the constant exposure of sick parts to such heavenly air
+vibrations would ultimately restore to them the lost rhythm of health.
+Surely, even a single exposure to&mdash;say Beethoven's Fifth Symphony&mdash;must
+result in some permanent reconstitution of ourselves body and soul. No
+one can be quite the same after a Beethoven Symphony has streamed thro'
+him.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>If one could <i>develop</i> a human soul like a negative the effect I should
+say could be seen.... I'll tell you what I wish they'd do&mdash;seriously:
+divide up the arena into a series of cubicles where, unobserved and in
+perfect privacy, a man could execute all the various movements of his
+body and limbs which the music prompts. It would be such a delicious
+self-indulgence and it's torture to be jammed into a seat where you
+can't even tap one foot or wave an arm.</p>
+
+<p>The concert restored my moral health. I came away in love with people I
+was hating before and full of compassion for others I usually condemn. A
+feeling of immeasurable well being&mdash;a jolly bonhomie enveloped me like
+incandescent light. At the close when we stood up to sing the National
+Anthem we all felt a genuine spirit of camaraderie. Just as when Kings
+die, we were silent musing upon the common fate, and when the time came
+to separate we were loath to go our several ways, for we were comrades
+who together had come thro' a great experience. For my part I wanted to
+shake hands all round&mdash;happy travellers, now alas! at the journey's end
+and never perhaps to meet again&mdash;never.</p>
+
+<p>R&mdash;&mdash; and I walked up thro' Kensington Gardens like two young Gods!</p>
+
+<p>"I even like that bloody thing," I said, pointing to the Albert
+Memorial.</p>
+
+<p>We pointed out pretty girls to one another, watched the children play
+ring-a-ring-a-roses on the grass. We laughed exultingly at the thought
+of our dismal colleagues ... tho' I said (as before!) I loved 'em
+all&mdash;God bless 'em&mdash;even old &mdash;&mdash;. R&mdash;&mdash; said it was nothing short of
+insolence on their part to have neglected the opportunity of coming to
+the Concert.</p>
+
+<p>Later on, an old gaffer up from the country stopped us to ask the way to
+Rotten Row&mdash;I overwhelmed him with directions and happy descriptive
+details. I felt like walking with him and showing him what a wonderful
+place the world is.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>After separating from R&mdash;&mdash; very reluctantly&mdash;it was horrible to be left
+alone in such high spirits, walked up towards the Round Pond, and caught
+myself avoiding the shadows of the trees&mdash;so as to be every moment out
+in the blazing sun. I scoffed inwardly at the timorousness of pale,
+anæmic folk whom I passed hiding in the shadows of the elms.</p>
+
+<p>At the Round Pond, came across a Bulldog who was biting out great chunks
+of water and in luxuriant waste-fulness letting it drool out again from
+each corner of his mouth. I watched this old fellow greedily (it was
+very hot), as well pleased with him and his liquid "chops" as with
+anything I saw, unless it were a girl and a man lying full length along
+the grass and kissing beneath a sunshade. I smiled; she saw me, and
+smiled, too, in return, and then fell to kissing again.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 30.</p>
+
+<p><i>Dinosaurs</i></p>
+
+<p>There are books which are Dinosaurs&mdash;Sir Walter Raleigh's <i>History of
+the World</i>, Gibbon's <i>Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire</i>. There are
+men who are Dinosaurs&mdash;Balzac completing his Human Comedy, Napoleon,
+Roosevelt. I like them all. I like express trains and motor lorries. I
+enjoy watching an iron girder swinging in the air or great cubes of ice
+caught up between iron pincers. I must always stop and watch these
+things. I like everything that is swift or immense: London, lightning,
+Popocatepetl. I enjoy the smell of tar, of coal, of fried fish, or a
+brass band playing a Liszt Rhapsody. And why should those foolish Mænads
+shout Women's Rights just because they burn down a church? All bonfires
+are delectable. Civilisation and top hats bore me. My own life is like a
+tame rabbit's. If only I had a long tail to lash it in feline rage! I
+would return to Nature&mdash;I could almost return to Chaos. There are times
+when I feel so dour I would wreck the universe if I could.<a name="FNanchor_1_10" id="FNanchor_1_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_10" class="fnanchor">[1]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>(1917: I think after three years of Armageddon I feel quite ready to go
+back to top hats and civilisation.)</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 8.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Sunset in Kensington Gardens</i></p>
+
+<p>The instinct for worship occurs rhythmically&mdash;at morning and evening.
+This is natural, for twice a day at sunrise and sunset&mdash;however
+work-sodden we may be, however hypnotised by daily routine&mdash;our natural
+impulse is (provided we are awake) to look to the horizon at the sun and
+stand a moment with mute lips. During the course of the day or night, we
+are too occupied or asleep&mdash;but sunrise is the great hour of the
+departure and sunset is the arrival at the end. Everything puts on a
+mysterious appearance&mdash;to-night the tops of the elms seemed
+super-naturally high and, pushing up into the sky, had secret communion
+with the clouds; the clouds seemed waiting for a ceremony, a way had
+been prepared by the tapissier, a moment of suspense while one cloud
+stretched to another like courtiers in whispered conversation; a rumour
+of the approach; then slowly the news came thro' that the sun had
+arrived for immediate departure.</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 14.</p>
+
+<p>Have finished my essay. But am written out&mdash;obviously. To-night I
+struggled with another, and spent two hours sucking the end of my pen.
+But after painfully mountainous parturition, all I brought forth were
+the two ridiculous mice of one meretricious trope and one grammatical
+solecism. I can sometimes sit before a sheet of paper, pen in hand,
+unable to produce a word.</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 19.</p>
+
+<p>For a walk with R&mdash;&mdash; in the country, calling for tea at his Uncle's
+house at &mdash;&mdash;. Played clock golf and made the acquaintance of Miss &mdash;&mdash;,
+a tall, statuesque lady, with golden hair, as graceful as an antelope
+and very comely, her two dear little feet clad in white shoes peeping
+out<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> (as R&mdash;&mdash; said) like two white mice one after the other as she
+moved across the lawn.</p>
+
+<p>Coming home I said to R&mdash;&mdash; histrionically, "Some golden-haired little
+boy will some day rest his head upon her bosom, beautiful in line and
+depth, all unconscious of his luck or of his part in a beautiful
+picture&mdash;would that I were the father to make that group a <i>fait
+accompli.</i>" R&mdash;&mdash;, with meticulous accuracy, always refers to her as
+"that elegant virgin."</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 25.</p>
+
+<p>While sketching under Hammersmith Bridge yesterday, R&mdash;&mdash; heard a
+whistle, and, looking up, saw a charming "young thing" leaning over the
+Bridge parapet smiling like the blessed Damozel out of Heaven.</p>
+
+<p>"Come down," he cried.</p>
+
+<p>She did, and they discussed pictures while he painted. Later he walked
+with her to the Broadway, saw her into a 'bus and said "Good-bye,"
+without so much as an exchange of names.</p>
+
+<p>"Even if she <i>were</i> a whore," I said, "it's a pity your curiosity was so
+sluggish. You should have seen her home, even if you did not go home
+with her. Young man, you preferred to let go of authentic life at
+Hammersmith Broadway, so as to return at once to your precious
+water-colour painting."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps," replied he enigmatically.</p>
+
+<p>"Whatever you do, if ever you meet her again," I rejoined, "don't
+introduce her to that abominable &mdash;&mdash;. He is abominably handsome, and I
+hate him for it. To all his other distinctions he is welcome&mdash;parentage,
+money, success, but I can never forgive him his good looks and the
+inevitable marriage to some beautiful fair-skinned woman."</p>
+
+<p>R. (reflectively): "Up to now, I was inclined to think that envy as a
+<i>passion</i> did not exist."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you none?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not much," he answered, and I believe it.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Smug wretch, then. All I can say is, I may have instincts and passions
+but I am not a pale water-colour artist.... What's the matter with you,"
+I foamed, "is that you like pictures. If I showed you a real woman, you
+would exclaim contemplatively, 'How lovely;' then putting out one hand
+to touch her, unsuspectingly, you'd scream aghast, 'Oh! it's alive, I
+hear it ticking.' 'Yes, my boy,' I answer severely with a flourish,
+'<i>That</i> is a woman's heart.'"</p>
+
+<p>R&mdash;&mdash; exploded with laughter and then said, "A truce to your desire for
+more life, for actual men and women. ... I know this that last night I
+would not have exchanged the quiet armchair reading the last chapter of
+Dostoieffsky's <i>The Possessed</i> for a Balaclava Charge."</p>
+
+<p>"A matter of temperament, I suppose," I reflected, in cold detachment.
+"You see, I belong to the raw meat school. <i>You</i> prefer life cooked for
+you in a book. You prefer the confectioner's shop to cutting down the
+wheat with your own scythe."</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 26.</p>
+
+<p>The B.M. is a ghastly hole. They will give me none of the apparatus I
+require. If you ask the Trustees for a thousand pounds for the
+propagation of the Gospel in foreign parts they say, "Yes." If you ask
+for twenty pounds for a new microscope they say, "No, but we'll cut off
+your nose with a big pair of scissors."</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 27.</p>
+
+<p>To a pedantic prosy little old maid who was working in my room this
+morning, I exclaimed,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I'd sooner make a good dissection than go to a Lord Mayor's Banquet.
+Turtle Soup ain't in it."</p>
+
+<p>She was uninspired, and said, "Oom," and went on pinning insects. Then
+more brightly, and with great punctilio in the pronunciation of her
+words, having cleared her throat and drawn herself up with great
+deliberation to deliver herself of a remark, she volunteered,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I whish I had nevah taken up such a brittle grooop as the Stones
+(Stoneflies). One dare not loook at a Stone."</p>
+
+<p>Poor dear little old maid. This was my turn to say "Oom."</p>
+
+<p>"Pretty dismal work," I added ambiguously. Then with malice aforethought
+I whistled a Harry Lauder tune, asked her if she had ever heard Willie
+Solar sing, "You made me love you," and then absent-mindedly and in
+succession inquired,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"What's become of all the gold?"</p>
+
+<p>"What's become of Waring?"</p>
+
+<p>"What shall I sing when all is sung?"</p>
+
+<p>To which several categorical interrogations she ventured no reply, but
+presently in the usual voice,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I have placed an Agrionine in this drawer for security and, now I want
+it, cannot find it."</p>
+
+<p>"Life is like that," I said. "I never can find my Agrionines!"</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 1.</p>
+
+<p>All Europe is mobilising.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 2.</p>
+
+<p>Will England join in?</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 12.</p>
+
+<p>We all await the result of a battle between two millions of men. The
+tension makes me feel physically sick.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 21&mdash;<i>August</i> 24.</p>
+
+<p>In bed with a fever. I never visit the flat now, but her mother kindly
+came over to see me.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 25.</p>
+
+<p>[Living now in rooms alone.]</p>
+
+<p>I have&mdash;since my return from Cornwall&mdash;placed all my journals in a
+specially made cabinet. R&mdash;&mdash; came to dinner and after a glass or so of
+Beaune and a cigarette,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> I open my "coffin"<a name="FNanchor_2_11" id="FNanchor_2_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_11" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> (it is a long box with a
+brass handle at each end), and with some show of deliberation select a
+volume to read to him, drawing it from its division with lavish
+punctiliousness, and inquiring with an oily voice, "A little of 1912?"
+as if we were trying wines. R&mdash;&mdash; grins at the little farce and so
+encourages me.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 26.</p>
+
+<p>Doctor's Consulting Rooms&mdash;my life has been spent in them! Medical
+specialists&mdash;Harley Street men&mdash;I have seen four and all to no purpose.
+M&mdash;&mdash; wrote me the other day,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Come along and see me on Tuesday; some day I dare say we shall find
+something we can patch."</p>
+
+<p>He regards me with the most obvious commiseration and always when I come
+away after a visit he shakes me warmly by the hand and says, "Good-bye,
+old man, and good luck." More luck than the pharmacopœia.</p>
+
+<p>My life has always been a continuous struggle with ill-health and
+ambition, and I have mastered neither. I try to reassure myself that
+this accursed ill-health will not affect my career. I keep flogging my
+will in the hope of winning thro' in the end. Yet at the back of my mind
+there is the great improbability that I shall ever live long enough to
+realise myself. For a long time past my hope has simply been to last
+long enough to convince others of what I might have done&mdash;had I lived.
+That will be something. But even to do that I will not allow that I have
+overmuch time. I have never at any time lived with any sense of
+security. I have never felt permanently settled in this life&mdash;nothing
+more than a shadowy <i>locum tenens</i>, a wraith, a festoon of mist likely
+to disappear any moment.</p>
+
+<p>At times, when I am vividly conscious of the insecurity of my tenure
+here, my desires enter on a mad race to obtain fulfilment before it is
+too late ... and as fulfilment recedes ambition obsesses me the more. I
+am<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> daily occupied in calculating with my ill-health: trying to
+circumvent it, to carry on in spite of all. I conquer each day. Every
+week is a victory. I am always surprised that my health or will has not
+collapsed, that, by Jove! I am still working and still living.</p>
+
+<p>One day it looks like appendicitis, another stoppage, another threatened
+blindness, or I develop a cough and am menaced with consumption. So I go
+on in a hurricane of bad dreams. I struggle like Laocoon with the
+serpents&mdash;the serpents of nervous depression that press around the heart
+tighter than I care to admit. I must use every kind of blandishment to
+convince myself that my life and my work are worth while. Frequently I
+must smother and kill (and it calls for prompt action) the shrill voice
+that cries from the tiniest corner of my heart, "Are you quite sure you
+are such an important fellow as you imagine?" Or I fret over the
+condition of my brain, finding that I forget what I read, I lose in
+acuteness of my perceptions. My brain is a tumefaction. But I won't give
+in. I go on trying to recollect what I have forgotten, I harry my brain
+all day to recall a word or name, I attack other folk importunately. I
+write things down so as to look them up in reference books&mdash;I am always
+looking up the things I remember I have forgotten....</p>
+
+<p>There is another struggle, too, that often engrosses all my energies....
+It is a horrible thing that with so large an ambition, so great a love
+of life, I should nevertheless court disaster like this. Truly Sir
+Thomas Browne you say, "Every man is his own Atropos."</p>
+
+<p>In short, I lead an unfathomably miserable existence in this dark, gray
+street, in these drab, dirty rooms&mdash;miserable in its emptiness of home,
+love, human society. Now that I never visit the flat, I visit about two
+houses in London&mdash;the Doctor's and R&mdash;&mdash;'s Hotel. I walk along the
+streets and stare in the windows of private houses, hungry for a little
+society. It creates in me a gnawing, rancorous discontent to be seeing
+people everywhere in London&mdash;millions of them&mdash;and then to realise my
+own ridiculously circumscribed knowledge of them. I am passionately<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>
+eager to have acquaintances, to possess at least a few friends. If I die
+to-morrow, how many persons shall I have talked to? or how many men and
+women shall I have known? A few maiden aunts and one or two old fossils.
+I am burning to meet real live men, I have masses of mental stuff I am
+anxious to unload. But I am ignorant of people as of countries and live
+in celestial isolation.</p>
+
+<p>This, I fear, reads like a wail of self-commiseration. But I am trying
+to give myself the pleasure of describing myself at this period
+truthfully, to make a bid at least for some posthumous sympathy.
+Therefore it shall be told that I who am capable of passionate love am
+sexually starved, and endure the pangs of a fiendish solitude in rooms,
+with an ugly landlady's face when ... I despair of ever finding a woman
+to <i>love</i>. I never meet women of my own class, and am unprepossessing in
+appearance and yet I fancy that once my reserve is melted I am not
+without attractions. "He grows on you," a girl said of me once. But I am
+hypercritical and hyperfastidious. I want too much.... I search daily in
+the streets with a starved and hungry look. What a horrible and powerful
+and hateful thing this love instinct is! I hate it, hate it, hate it. It
+will not let me rest. I wish I were a eunuch.</p>
+
+<p>"There's a beautiful young thing," R&mdash;&mdash; and I say to one another
+sardonically, hoping thereby to conceal the canker within.</p>
+
+<p>I could gnash my teeth and weep in anger&mdash;baulked, frustrated as I am at
+almost every turn of life&mdash;in my profession, in my literary efforts, and
+in my love of man and woman kind. I would utter a whole commination
+service in my present state of mind.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 7.</p>
+
+<p>To me woman is <i>the</i> wonderful fact of existence. If there be any next
+world and it be as I hope it is, a jolly gossiping place, with people
+standing around the mantelpiece<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> and discussing their earthly
+experiences, I shall thump my fist on the table as my friends turn to me
+on entering and exclaim in a loud voice, "WOMAN."</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 11.</p>
+
+<p>Since I grew up I have wept three times. The first time they were tears
+of exasperation. Dad and I were sitting down side by side after a wordy
+combat in which he had remained adamant and I was forced both by
+conscience and argument to give in, to relinquish my dissections, and go
+off to some inquest on a drowning fatality. The second time was when
+Mother died, and the third was <i>to-day.</i> But I am calm now. To-day they
+were tears of remorse....</p>
+
+<p>On occasion bald confession in this Journal is sweet for the soul and
+strengthens it. It gives me a kind of false backbone to communicate my
+secrets: for I am determined that some day some one shall know. If God
+really intervenes in our affairs, here is an opportunity. Let Him save
+me. I challenge Him to save me from perishing in this ditch.... It is
+not often I am cornered into praying but I did this morning, for I feel
+defeated this day, and almost inarticulate in my misery.</p>
+
+<p>Nietzsche in a newspaper I read to-day: "For myself I have felt
+exceptionally blest having Hell's phantoms inside me to thrust at in the
+dark, internal enemies to dominate till I felt myself an ecstatic
+victor, wrenching at last good triumphant joys thro' the bars of my own
+sickness and weakness&mdash;joys with which your notions of happiness, poor
+sleek smug creatures, cannot compare! You must carry a chaos inside you
+to give birth to a dancing star."</p>
+
+<p>But Nietzsche is no consolation to a man who has once been weak enough
+to be brought to his knees. There I am and there I think I have prayed a
+little somehow to-day. But it's all in desperation, not in faith.
+Internal chaos I have, but no dancing star. Dancing stars are the
+consolation of genius.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 12.</p>
+
+<p>Am better to-day. My better self is convinced that it is silly and
+small-minded to think so much about my own puny destiny&mdash;especially at
+times like these when&mdash;God love us all&mdash;there is a column of casualties
+each day. The great thing to be thankful for is that I am <i>alive</i> and
+alive <i>now</i>, that I was alive <i>yesterday</i>, and even may be to-morrow.
+Surely that is thrilling enough. What, then, have I to complain of? I'm
+a lucky dog to be alive at all. My plight is bad, but there are others
+in a worse one. I'm going to be brave and fight on the side of
+Nietzsche. Who knows but that one day the dancing star may yet be born!</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 13.</p>
+
+<p>Spent the evening in my lodgings struggling with my will. Too flabby to
+work, disinclined to read, a dreadful vague unrest possessing me. I
+couldn't sit still in my chair, so walked around the table continuously
+like a squirrel in a cage. I wanted to be going out somewhere, talking
+to some one, to be among human beings.</p>
+
+<p>Many an evening during the past few months, I have got up and gone down
+the road to look across at the windows of the flat, to see if there were
+a red light behind the curtains, and, if so, wonder if she were there,
+and how she was. My pride would never allow me to visit there again on
+my own initiative. K&mdash;&mdash; has managed to bring about a rapprochement but
+I go very seldom. Pride again.</p>
+
+<p>I wanted to do so to-night. I thought I would just go down the road to
+look up at the windows. That seemed to be some comfort. Why do I wish to
+do this? I do not know. From a mere inspection one would say that I am
+in love. But remember I am also ill. Three times to-night I nearly put
+on my boots and went down to have a look up! What ridiculous weakness!
+Yet this room can be a frightful prison. Shall I? I cannot decide. I see
+her figure constantly before me&mdash;gentle, graceful, calm, stretching
+forth both hands and to me....<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Seized a pack of cards and played Patience and went on playing Patience
+because I was afraid to stop. Given a weak constitution, a great
+ambition, an amorous nature, and at the same time a very fastidious one,
+I might have known I was in for trouble.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 14.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Marie Bashkirtseff</i></p>
+
+<p>Some time ago I noticed a quotation from one, Marie Bashkirtseff in a
+book on Strindberg, and was struck with the likeness to a sentiment of
+my own. Who <i>are</i> you? I wondered.</p>
+
+<p>This evening went to the Library and read about her in Mathilde Blind's
+introductory essay to her Journal. I am simply astounded. It would be
+difficult in all the world's history to discover any two persons with
+temperaments so alike. She is the "very spit of me "! I devoured
+Mathilde Blind's pages more and more astonished. We are identical! Oh,
+Marie Bashkirtseff! how we should have hated one another! She feels as I
+feel. We have the same self-absorption, the same vanity and corroding
+ambition. She is impressionable, volatile, passionate&mdash;ill! So am I. Her
+journal is my journal. All mine is stale reading now. She has written
+down all my thoughts and forestalled me! Already I have found some
+heart-rending parallels. To think I am only a replica: how humiliating
+for a human being to find himself merely a duplicate of another. Is
+there anything in the transmigration of souls? She died in 1886. I was
+born in 1889.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 15.</p>
+
+<p>A man is always looking at himself in the mirror if for no other reason
+than to tie his tie and brush his hair. What does he think of his face?
+He must have private opinions. But it is usually considered a little out
+of taste to entertain opinions about one's personal appearance.</p>
+
+<p>As for myself, some mirrors do me down pretty well,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> others depress me!
+I am bound to confess I am biassed in favour of the friendly mirror. I
+am not handsome, but I look interesting&mdash;I hope distinguished. My eyes
+are deep-set ... but my worst moments are when the barber combs my hair
+right down over my forehead, or when I see a really handsome man in Hyde
+Park. Such occasions direct my gaze reflexly, and doubt like a thief in
+the night forces the back door!</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>To-day, M&mdash;&mdash; sent me dancing mad by suggesting that I copied R&mdash;&mdash; in
+my manner of speech and opinions.</p>
+
+<p>Now R&mdash;&mdash; has a damned pervasive way of conducting himself&mdash;for all the
+world as if he were a high official of the Foreign Office. I, on the
+contrary, am shy, self-conscious, easily overlooked, and this makes me
+writhe. As we are inseparable friends&mdash;everybody assumes that I am his
+tacky-lacky, a kind of appoggiatura to his big note. He, they suppose,
+is my guide, philosopher, and Great Maecenas&mdash;Oxford befriending the
+proletariat. The thought of it makes me sick&mdash;that any one should
+believe I imbibe his ideas, echo his conceits, and even ape his gestures
+and manner of voice.</p>
+
+<p>"Lost yourself?" inquired a despicable creature the other morning as I
+came out of R&mdash;&mdash;'s room after finding him out. I could have shot him
+dead! ... As for &mdash;&mdash; more than one person thinks that he alone is the
+brilliant author until at last he himself has got into the way of
+thinking it.</p>
+
+<p>"It makes me hate you like mad," I said to him to-day. "How can I
+confront these people with the naked truth?" R&mdash;&mdash; chuckled
+complacently.</p>
+
+<p>"If I deny your alleged supremacy, as I did this morning, or if
+suddenly, in a fit of spleen, I'm induced to declare that I loathe you
+(as I sometimes do)"&mdash;(more chuckles) "that your breath stinks, your
+eyes bulge, that you have swollen jugulars and a platter face: they will
+think I am either jealous or insincere.... To be your Echo tho'!&mdash;my
+God!" I spat. We then grinned at one<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> another, and I, being bored, went
+to the lavatory and read the newspaper secure from interruption.</p>
+
+<p><i>Resignation</i></p>
+
+<p>In the Tube, a young widow came in and sat in front of me&mdash;pale-faced,
+grief-stricken, demure&mdash;a sort of "Thy Will be Done" look. The
+adaptability of human beings has something in it that seems horrible. It
+is dreadful to think how we have all accommodated ourselves to this War.
+Christian resignation is a feeble thing. Why won't this demure widow
+with a loud voice blaspheme against this iniquitous world that permits
+this iniquitous war?</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 21.</p>
+
+<p>I myself (licking a stamp): "The taste of gum is really very nice."</p>
+
+<p>R.: "I hate it."</p>
+
+<p>I: "My dear fellow" (surprised and entreating), "envelope gum is simply
+delicious."</p>
+
+<p>R.: "I never lick stamps&mdash;it's dangerous&mdash;microbes."</p>
+
+<p>I: "I always do: I shall buy a bookful and go away to the seaside with
+them."</p>
+
+<p>R.: "Yes, you'll need to."</p>
+
+<p>(Laughter.)</p>
+
+<p>Thus gaily and jauntily we went on to discuss wines, whiskies, and
+Worthington's, and I rounded it up in a typical cock-eyed manner,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! yes, it's only when the day is over that the day really
+begins&mdash;what?"</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 23.</p>
+
+<p>I expressed to R&mdash;&mdash; to-day my admiration for the exploit of the brave
+and successful Submarine Commander Max Kennedy Horton. (Name for you!)
+R&mdash;&mdash; was rather cold. "His exploits," said this bloody fool, "involve
+loss of life and scarcely make me deliriously eulogistic."</p>
+
+<p>I cleared my throat and began,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Your precious sociology again&mdash;it will be the ruin of your career as an
+artist. It is so interwoven into the fibre of your brain that you never
+see anything except in relation to its State value. You are afraid to
+approve of a lying, thieving rogue, however delightful a rascal he may
+be, for fear of what Karl Marx might say.... You'll soon be drawing
+landscapes with taxpayers in the foreground, or we shall get a picture
+of Ben Nevis with Keir Hardie on the summit." And so on to our own
+infinite mutual amusement.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>English Review</i> returns my Essay. I am getting simply furious with
+an ambition I am unable to satisfy, among beautiful London women I
+cannot get to know, and in ill-health that I cannot cure. Shall I ever
+find any one? Shall I ever be really well? My one solace is that I do
+not submit, it infuriates me, I resent it; I will never be resigned and
+milky. I will keep my claws sharp and fight to the end.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 24.</p>
+
+<p>Went to Mark Lane by train, then walked over the Tower Bridge, and back
+along Lower Thames Street to London Bridge, up to Whitechapel, St.
+Paul's, Fleet Street, and Charing Cross, and so home.</p>
+
+<p>Near Reilly's Tavern, I saw a pavement artist who had drawn a loaf with
+the inscription in both French and English: "This is easy to draw but
+hard to earn." A baby's funeral trotted briskly over the Tower Bridge
+among Pink's jam waggons, carts carrying any goods from lead pencils and
+matches to bales of cotton and chests of tea.</p>
+
+<p>In the St. Catherine's Way there is one part like a deep railway
+cutting, the whole of one side for a long way, consisting of the
+brickwall of a very tall warehouse with no windows in it and beautifully
+curved and producing a wonderful effect. Walked past great blocks of
+warehouses and business establishments&mdash;a wonderful sight;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> and
+everywhere bacon factors, coffee roasters, merchants. On London Bridge,
+paused to feed the sea-gulls and looked down at the stevedores. Outside
+Billingsgate Market was a blackboard on an easel&mdash;for market prices&mdash;but
+instead some one had drawn an enormously enlarged chalk picture of a
+cat's rear and tail with anatomical details.</p>
+
+<p>In Aldgate, stopped to inspect a street stall containing popular
+literature&mdash;one brochure entitled <i>Suspended for Life</i> to indicate the
+terrible punishment meted out to &mdash;&mdash;, a League footballer. The
+frontispiece enough to make a lump come in the juveniles' throats!
+Another stall held domestic utensils with an intimation, "Anything on
+this stall <i>lent</i> for 1d." A newsvendor I heard exclaim to a
+fellow-tradesman in the same line of business,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"They come and look at your bloody plakaard and then passe on."</p>
+
+<p>Loitered at a dirty little Fleet Street bookshop where Paul de Koch's
+<i>The Lady with the Three Pairs of Stays</i> was displayed prominently
+beside a picture of Oscar Wilde.</p>
+
+<p>In Fleet Street, you exchange the Whitechapel sausage restaurants for
+Taverns with "snacks at the bar," and the chestnut roasters, with their
+buckets of red-hot coals, for Grub Street camp followers, selling
+<i>L'Indépendance Belge</i> or pamphlets entitled, <i>Why We Went to War</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In the Strand you may buy war maps, buttonhole flags, etc., etc. I
+bought a penny stud. One shop was turned into a shooting gallery at
+three shots a penny where the Inner Temple Barristers in between the
+case for the defence and the case for the prosecution could come and
+keep their eye in against the time the Germans come.</p>
+
+<p>Outside Charing Cross Station I saw a good-looking, well-dressed woman
+in mourning clothes, grinding a barrel organ....</p>
+
+<p>Returned to the Library and read the <i>Dublin Review</i> (article on Samuel
+Butler), <i>North American Review</i> (one on Henry James) and dined at seven.
+After dinner, read: <i>Evening Standard, Saturday Westminster</i>, and the
+<i>New Statesman</i>. Smoked six cigarettes and went to bed. To-morrow Fifth
+Symphony of Beethoven.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 25.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Too Late</i></p>
+
+<p>Yesterday's ramble has left me very sore in spirit. London was spread
+out before me, a vast campagne. But I felt too physically tired to
+explore. I could just amble along&mdash;a spectator merely&mdash;and automatically
+register impressions. Think of the misery of that! I want to see the
+Docks and Dockland, to enter East End public-houses and opium-dens, to
+speak to Chinamen and Lascars: I want a first-rate, first-hand knowledge
+of London, of London men, London women. I was tingling with anticipation
+yesterday and then I grew tired and fretful and morose, crawled back
+like a weevil into my nut. By 6.30 I was in a Library reading the
+<i>Dublin Review</i>!</p>
+
+<p>What a young fool I was to neglect those priceless opportunities of
+studying and tasting life and character in North &mdash;&mdash;, at Borough
+Council meetings, Boards of Guardians, and electioneering campaigns&mdash;not
+to mention inquests, police courts, and country fairs. Instead of
+appraising all these precious and genuine pieces of experience at their
+true value, my diary and my mind were occupied only with&mdash;Zoology, if
+you please. I ignored my exquisite chances, I ramped around, fuming and
+fretting, full of contempt for my circumscribed existence, and impatient
+as only a youth can be. What I shall never forgive myself is my present
+inability to recall that life, so that instead of being able now to push
+my chair back and entertain myself and others with descriptions of some
+of those antique and incredible happenings, my memory is rigid and
+formal: I remember only a few names and one or two isolated events. All
+that time is just as if it had never been. My recollections form only an
+indefinite smudge&mdash;odd Town Clerks, Town Criers (at least five of them
+in wonderful garb), policemen (I poached with one), ploughing match
+dinners (platters of roast beef and boiled potatoes and I, bespectacled
+student of Zoology, sitting uncomfortably among valiant trenchermen
+after their day's ploughing), election meetings in remote Exmoor<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>
+villages (and those wonderful Inns where I had to spend the night!)&mdash;all
+are gone&mdash;too remote to bear recital&mdash;yet just sufficiently clear to
+harass the mind in my constant endeavours to raise them all again from
+the dead in my consciousness. I hate to think it is lost; that my youth
+is buried&mdash;a cemetery without even headstones. To an inquest on a
+drowned sailor&mdash;disclosing some thrilling story of the wild seas off the
+coast&mdash;with a pitiful myopia&mdash;I preferred Wiedersheim's <i>Comparative
+Anatomy of Vertebrates</i>. I used to carry Dr. Smith Woodward's
+<i>Paleontology</i> with me to a Board of Guardians meeting, mingling
+<i>Pariasaurus</i> and Holoptychians with tenders for repairs and reports
+from the Master. Now I take Keats or Tschekov to the Museum!</p>
+
+<p>London certainly lies before me. Certainly I am alive at last. Yet now
+my energy is gone. It is too late. I am ill and tired. It costs me
+infinite discomfort to write this entry, all the skin of my right hand
+is permanently "pins and needles" and in the finger tips I have lost all
+sense of touch. The sight of my right eye is also very bad and sometimes
+I can scarcely read print with it, etc., etc. But why should I go on?</p>
+
+<p>A trance-like condition supervenes in a semi-invalid forced to live in
+almost complete social isolation in a great whirling city like London.
+Days of routine follow each other as swiftly as the weaver's shuttle and
+numb the spirit and turn palpitating life into a silent picture show.
+Everywhere always in the street people&mdash;millions of them &mdash;whom I do not
+know, moving swiftly along. I look and look and yawn and then one day as
+to-day I wake up and race about beside myself&mdash;a swollen bag ready to
+burst with hope, love, misery, joy, desperation.</p>
+
+<p><i>Apologia pro vita mea</i></p>
+
+<p>How may I excuse myself for continuing to talk about my affairs and for
+continuing to write zoological memoirs during the greatest War of all
+time?</p>
+
+<p>Well, here are some precedents:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Goethe sat down to study the geography of China, while his fatherland
+agonised at Leipsig.</p>
+
+<p>Hegel wrote the last lines of the <i>Phenomenology of Spirit</i> within sound
+of the guns of Jena.</p>
+
+<p>While England was being rent in twain by civil war, Sir Thomas Browne,
+ensconced in old Norwich, reflected on Cambyses and Pharaoh and on the
+song the Sirens sang.</p>
+
+<p>Lacépède composed his <i>Histoire des Poissons</i> during the French
+Revolution.</p>
+
+<p>Then there were Diogenes and Archimedes.</p>
+
+<p>This defence of course implicates me in an unbounded opinion of the
+importance of my own work. "He is quite the little poet," some one said
+of Keats. "It is just as if a man remarked of Buonaparte," said Keats,
+in a pet, "that he's quite the little general."</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>A Woman and a Child</i></p>
+
+<p>On the way to the Albert Hall came upon the most beautiful picture of
+young maternity that ever I saw in my life. She was a delightfully
+girlish young creature&mdash;a perfect phœnix of health and beauty. As she
+stood with her little son at the kerb waiting for a 'bus, smiling and
+chatting to him, a luminous radiance of happy, satisfied maternal love,
+maternal pride, womanliness streamed from her and enveloped me.</p>
+
+<p>We got on the same 'bus. The little boy, with his long hair and dressed
+in velvet like little Lord Fauntleroy, said something to her&mdash;she smiled
+delightedly, caught him up on her knees and kissed him. Two such pretty
+people never touched lips before&mdash;I'm certain of it. It was impossible
+to believe that this virginal creature was a mother&mdash;childbirth left no
+trace. She must have just budded off the baby boy like a plant. Once, in
+her glance, she took me in her purview, and I knew she knew I was
+watching her. In travelling backwards from Kensington Gardens to the boy
+again, her gaze rested on me a moment and I, of course, rendered the
+homage that was due. As<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> a matter of fact there was no direct evidence
+that she was the mother at all.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>The Albert Hall Hag</i></p>
+
+<p>While waiting outside the Albert Hall, an extraordinarily weird contrast
+thrust itself before me&mdash;she was the most pathetic piece of human jetsam
+that ever I saw drifting about in this sea of London faces. Tall, gaunt,
+cadaverous, the skin of her face drawn tightly over her cheekbones and
+over a thin, pointed, hook-shaped nose, on her feet brown sandshoes,
+dressed in a long draggle-tailed skirt, a broken-brimmed straw hat,
+beneath which some scanty hair was scraped back and tied behind in a
+knot&mdash;this wretched soul of some thirty summers (and what summers!)
+stood in the road beside the waiting queue and weakly passed the bow
+across her violin which emitted a slight scraping sound. She could not
+play a tune and the fingers of her left hand never touched the
+strings&mdash;they merely held the handle.</p>
+
+<p>A policeman passed and, with an eye on the queue, muttered audibly, "Not
+'arf," but no one laughed. Then she began to rummage in her skirt,
+holding the violin by the neck in her right hand just as she must hold
+her brat by the arm when at home. Simultaneously sounds issued from her
+mouth in a high falsetto key; they were unearthly sounds, the tiny voice
+of an articulating corpse underneath the coffin lid. For a moment no one
+realised that she was reciting. For she continued to rummage in her
+skirt as she squeaked, "Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O
+sea," etc. The words were scarcely audible tho' she stood but two yards
+off. But she repeated the verse and I then made out what it was. She
+seemed ashamed of herself and of her plight, almost without the courage
+to foist this mockery of violin-playing on us&mdash;one would say she was
+frightened by her own ugliness and her own pathos.</p>
+
+<p>After conscientiously carrying out her programme but with the
+distracted, uncomfortable air of some one scurrying over a painful
+task&mdash;like a tired child gabbling its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> prayers before getting into
+bed&mdash;she at length produced from her skirt pocket a small canvas money
+bag which she started to hand around. This was the climax to this
+harrowing incident&mdash;for each time she held out the bag, she smiled,
+which stretched the skin still more tightly down over her malar
+prominence and said something&mdash;an inarticulate noise in a very high
+pitch. "A woman," I whispered to R&mdash;&mdash;, "She claims to be a woman." If
+any one hesitated a moment or struggled with a purse she would wait
+patiently with bag outstretched and head turned away, the smile
+vanishing at once as if the pinched face were but too glad of the
+opportunity of a rest from smiling. She stood there, gazing
+absently&mdash;two lifeless eyes at the bottom of deep socket holes in a head
+which was almost a bare skull. She was perfunctorily carrying out an
+objectionable task because she could not kill the will to live.</p>
+
+<p>As she looked away and waited for you to produce the copper, she
+thought, "Why trouble? Why should I wait for this man's aid?" The clink
+of the penny recalled her to herself, and she passed on, renewing her
+terrible grimacing smile.</p>
+
+<p>Why didn't I do something? Why? Because I was bent on hearing
+Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, if you please.... And she may have been a
+well-to-do vagrant&mdash;well got up for the occasion&mdash;a clever
+simulator?...</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 28.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Rigor Bordis</i></p>
+
+<p>Rigor bordis!&mdash;I write like this as if it were a light matter. But
+to-night I was <i>in extremis</i>.... First I read the paper; then I finished
+the book I was reading&mdash;"<i>Thus Spake Zarathustra</i>." Not knowing quite
+what next to do, I took my boots off and poured out another cup of
+coffee. But these manœuvres were only the feeble attempts of a
+cowardly wretch to evade the main issue which was:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>How to occupy myself and keep myself sane during the hour and a half
+before bedtime.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Before now I have tried going off to bed. But that does not work&mdash;I
+don't sleep. Moreover, I have been in the grip of a horrible mental
+unrest. To sit still in my chair, much less to lie in bed doing nothing
+seemed ghastly. I experienced all the cravings of a dissolute neurotic
+for a stimulus, but what stimulus I wanted I did not know. Had I known I
+should have gone and got it. The dipsomaniac was a man to be envied.</p>
+
+<p>Some mechanical means were necessary for sustaining life till bedtime. I
+sat down and played a game of Patience&mdash;no one knows how I loathe
+playing Patience and how much I despise the people who play it. Tiring
+of that, sat back in my chair, yawned, and thought of a word I wanted to
+look up in the Dictionary. This quest, forgotten until then, came like a
+beam of bright light into a dark room. So looked the word up leisurely,
+took out my watch, noted the time, and then stood up with elbows on the
+mantelpiece and stared at myself in the glass.... I was at bay at last.
+There was simply nothing I could do. I would have given worlds to have
+some one to talk to. Pride kept me from ringing for the landlady. I must
+stand motionless, back to the wall, and wait for the hour of my release.
+I had but one idea, viz., that I was surely beaten in this game of life.
+I was very miserable indeed. But being so miserable that I couldn't feel
+more so, I began to recover after a while. I began to visualise my
+lamentable situation, and rose above it as I did so. I staged it before
+my mind's eye and observed myself as hero of the plot. I saw myself
+sitting in a dirty armchair in a dirty house in a dirty London street,
+with the landlady's dirty daughter below-stairs singing, "Little Grey
+Home in the West," my head obscured in a cloud of depression, and in my
+mind the thought that if life be a test of endurance I must hang on
+grimly to the arms of the chair and sit tight till bedtime.</p>
+
+<p>This attitude proved a useful means of self-defence. When I had
+dramatised my misery, I enjoyed it, and acute mental pain turned into
+merely aesthetic malaise.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 4.</p>
+
+<p>A lurid day. Suffering from the most horrible physical languor. Wrote
+the Doctor saying I was rapidly sliding down a steep place into the sea
+(like the swine I am). Could I see him?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Endured an hour's torture of indecision to-night asking myself whether I
+should go over to ask her to be my wife or should I go to the Fabian
+Society and hear Bernard Shaw. Kept putting off the decision even till
+after dinner. If I went to the flat, I must shave; to shave required hot
+water&mdash;the landlady had already cleared the table and was rapidly
+retreating. Something must be done and at once. I called the old thing
+back impulsively and ordered shaving water, consoling myself with the
+reflection that it was still unnecessary to decide; the hot water could
+be at hand in case the worst happened. If I decided on matrimony I could
+shave forthwith. Should I? (After dark I always shave in the
+sitting-room because of the better gaslight.)</p>
+
+<p>Drank some coffee and next found myself slowly, mournfully putting on
+hat and coat. You can't shave in hat and coat so I concluded I had
+decided on Shaw. Slowly undid the front door latch and went off.</p>
+
+<p>Shaw bored me. He is mid-Victorian. Sat beside a bulgy-eyed youth
+reading the <i>Freethinker</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 9.</p>
+
+<p>In the evening asked her to be my wife. She refused. Once perhaps ...
+but now....</p>
+
+<p>I don't think I have any moral right to propose to any woman seeing the
+state of my health and I did not actually intend or wish to.... It was
+just to get it off my mind&mdash;a plain statement.... If I don't really and
+truly love her it was a perfectly heartless comedy. But I have good
+reason to believe I do. With me, moments of headstrong passion alternate
+with moods of perfectly immobile self-introspection. It is a relief to
+have spoken.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 10.</p>
+
+<p>Very miserable. Asked R&mdash;&mdash; three times to come and have dinner with me.
+Each time he refused. My nerves are completely jangled. <i>Tu l'as voulu,
+George Dandin</i>&mdash;that's the rub.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 11.</p>
+
+<p>She observed me carefully&mdash;I'm looking a perfect wreck <i>&mdash;tu l'as voulu,
+George Dandin</i>&mdash;but it's mainly ill-health and not on her account.</p>
+
+<p>I said,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Some things are too funny to laugh at."</p>
+
+<p>"Is that why you are so solemn?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," I answered, "I'm not solemn, I am laughing&mdash;some things are too
+solemn to be serious about."</p>
+
+<p>She saw me off at the door and smiled quietly&mdash;an amused faraway smile
+of feline satisfaction....</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 12.</p>
+
+<p>Horrible nervous depression. Thinking of suicide with a pistol&mdash;a
+Browning. Or of 10 days' mysterious disappearance, when I will go and
+live in a good Hotel, spend all my money, and live among human beings
+with eyes and noses and legs. This isolation. Am I going mad? If I
+disappeared, it would be interesting to see if any one missed me.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 13.</p>
+
+<p>Still thinking of suicide. It seems the only way out. This morning my
+Essay was returned by the Editor of &mdash;&mdash;. One by one I have been
+divested of all my most cherished illusions. Once my ambitions gave me
+the fuel with which to keep myself alive. One after another they have
+been foiled, and now I've nothing to burn. I am daily facing the fact
+that my ambitions have overtaxed my abilities and health. For years, my
+whole existence has rested on a false estimate of my own value, and my
+life been revolving around a foolish self-deception. But I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> know myself
+as I am at last&mdash;and am not at all enamoured. The future has nothing for
+me. I am wearied of my life already. What is there for any of us to do
+but die?</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 14.</p>
+
+<p>Before going over to-night bought <i>London Opinion</i> deliberately in order
+to find a joke or better still some cynicism about women to fire off at
+her. Rehearsed one joke, one witticism from Oscar Wilde, and one
+personal anecdote (the latter for the most part false), none of which
+came off, tho' I succeeded in carrying off a nonchalant or even jaunty
+bearing.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you ever swear?" I asked. "It's a good thing you know, swearing
+is like pimples, better to come out, cleanses the moral system. The
+person who controls himself must have lots of terrible oaths circulating
+in his blood."</p>
+
+<p>"Swearing is not the only remedy."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you prefer the gilded pill of a curate's sermon: I prefer
+pimples to pills."</p>
+
+<p>Is it a wonder she does not love me?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I wonder why I paint myself in such horrid colours&mdash;why have I this
+morbid pleasure in pretending to those I love that I am a beast and a
+cynic? I suffer, I suppose, from a lacerated self-esteem, from a painful
+loneliness, from the consciousness of how ridiculous I have made myself,
+and that most people if they knew would regard me with loathing and
+disgust.</p>
+
+<p>I am very unhappy. I am unhappy because she does not care for me, and I
+am chiefly unhappy because I do not care for her. Instead of a passion,
+only a dragging heavy chain of attraction ... some inflexible law makes
+me gravitate to her, seizes me by the neck and suspends me over her, I
+cannot look away....</p>
+
+<p>In the early days when I did my best to strangle my love&mdash;as one would a
+bastard child&mdash;I took courage in the fact that for a man like me the
+murder was necessary.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> There were books to write and to read, and name
+and fame perhaps. To these everything must be sacrificed. ... That is
+all gone now. No man could have withstood for ever that concentrated
+essence of womanhood that flowed from her....</p>
+
+<p>Still the declaration has made amends. She is pleased about it&mdash;it is a
+scalp.</p>
+
+<p>Yet how can I forgive her for saying she supposed it was a natural
+instinct for a girl not to feel drawn to an invalid like me. That was
+cruel tho' true.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 19.</p>
+
+<p>I might be Captain Scott writing his last words amid Antarctic cold and
+desolation. It is very cold. I am sitting hunched up by the fire in my
+lodgings after a meal of tough meat and cold apple-tart. I am full of
+self-commiseration&mdash;my only pleasure now. It is very cold and I cannot
+get warm&mdash;try as I will.</p>
+
+<p>My various nervous derangements take different forms. This time my
+peripheral circulation is affected, and the hand, arm, and shoulder are
+permanently cold. My right hand is blue&mdash;tho' I've shut up the window
+and piled up a roaring fire. It's Antarctic cold and desolation. London
+in November from the inside of a dingy lodging-house can be very
+terrible indeed. This celestial isolation will send me out of my mind. I
+marvel how God can stick it&mdash;lonely, damp, and cold in the clouds. That
+is how I live too&mdash;but then I am not God.</p>
+
+<p>I fall back on this Journal just as some other poor devil takes to
+drink. I, too, have toyed with the idea of drinking hard. I have
+frequented bars and billiards saloons and in fits of depression done my
+best to forget myself. But I am not sufficiently fond of alcohol (and it
+would take a lot to make <i>me</i> forget myself). So I plunge into these
+literary excesses and drown my sorrows in Stephens' Blue-black Ink. It
+gives me a sulky pleasure to think that some day somebody will know....</p>
+
+<p>It is humiliating to feel ill as I do. If I had consumption, the disease
+would act as a stimulus&mdash;I could strike<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> an attitude feverishly and be
+histrionic. But to be merely "below par"&mdash;to feel like a Bunny rabbit
+perennially "poorly," saps my character and mental vigour. I want to
+crawl away and die like a rat in a hole. A bronzed healthy man makes me
+wince. Healthy people regard a chronic sickly man as a leper. They
+suspect him, something fishy.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 20.</p>
+
+<p class="center">Still at home ill.</p>
+
+<p>If anything, R&mdash;&mdash; is more of a précieux than I am myself. At the
+present moment he is tickling himself with the idea that he's in love
+with a certain golden-haired damsel from the States. He reports to me
+fragments of his conversations with her, how he snatches a fearful joy
+by skirting dangerous conversational territory, or he takes a pencil and
+deftly outlines her profile or the rondeur of her bosom. Or he
+discourses at length on her nose or eye. I can well imagine him driving
+a woman crazy and then collecting her tears in a bottle as mementoes.
+Then whenever he requires a little heart stimulus he could take the
+phial from his waistcoat pocket and watch the tears condensing.</p>
+
+<p>"Why don't you marry her out of hand and be done with all this
+dalliance? I can tell you what's the matter with you," I growled,
+"you're a landscape artist.... You'll grow to resemble, that mean, Jewy,
+secretive, petty creature, J.W.M. Turner, and allow no human being to
+interfere with your art. A fine artist perhaps&mdash;but what a man! You'll
+finish up with a Mrs. Danby."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he answered, quoting Tennyson with great aptness, "and 'lose my
+salvation for a sketch,' like Romney deserting his wife. If I were not
+married I should have no wife to desert."</p>
+
+<p>It is useless to argue with him. His cosmogony is wrongly centred in Art
+not life. Life interests him&mdash;he can't altogether resign himself to the
+cowl and the tonsured head, but he will not plunge. He insists on being
+a spectator, watching the maelstrom from the bank and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> remarking
+exquisitely, "Ah! there is a very fine sorrow," or, "What an exquisite
+sensation." The other day after one of our furious conversational bouts
+around this subject, I drew an insect, cut it out, and pinned the slip
+in a collecting box. Then suddenly producing the box, and opening it
+with a facetious grin, I said,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Here is a jolly little sorrow I caught this morning." The joke pleased
+him and we roared, bellowed.</p>
+
+<p>"That terrible forefinger of yours," he smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"Like Cardinal Richelieu's eyes&mdash;piercing?" I suggested with
+appreciation. (It is because I tap him on his shirt front in the space
+between waistcoat and tie aggressively for emphasis in conversation.)</p>
+
+<p>"You must regard my passion for painting," he began once more, "as a
+sort of dipsomania&mdash;I really can't help myself."</p>
+
+<p>I jumped on him vehemently,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly, my pernickety friend; it's something abnormal and unnatural.
+When, for purposes of self-culture, I see a man deliberately lop off
+great branches of himself so as to divert his strength into one limb, I
+know that if he is successful he'll be something as vulgar as a fat
+woman at a country fair; and if he is unsuccessful he'll be just a
+pathetic mutilation.... You are trying to pervert a natural instinct.
+You want to paint, I believe. Quite so. But when a boy reaches the age
+of puberty he does not grow a palette on his chin but hair.... Still,
+now you recognise it as a bad habit, why need I say more?" ("Why
+indeed?") "It's a vice, and I'm very sorry for you, old boy. I'll do all
+I can&mdash;come and have some dinner with me to-night."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! thank you very much," says my gentleman, "but I'm not at all sorry
+for myself."</p>
+
+<p>"I thought as much. So that we are not so very much agreed after all.
+We're not shaking hands after the boxing contest, but scowling at each
+other from the ropes and shaping for another round."</p>
+
+<p>"Your pulpit orations, my dear Barbellion, in full canonicals," he
+reflected, "are worthy of a larger audience....<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> To find <i>you</i> of all
+people preaching. I thought you were philosopher enough to see the angle
+of every one's vision and broadminded so as to see every point of view.
+Besides, you are as afraid of marriage as I am, and for the same
+reasons."</p>
+
+<p>"I confess, when in the philosophic citadel of my own armchair," I
+began, "I <i>do</i> see every one's point of view. You sit on the other side
+of the rug and put out the suggestion tentatively that murder may be a
+moral act. I examine your argument and am disposed to accept it. But
+when you slit up my brother's abdomen before my eyes, I am sufficiently
+weak and human to punch you on the nose.... You are too cold and
+Olympian, up above the snowline with a box of paints."</p>
+
+<p>"It is very beautiful among the snows."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose so."</p>
+
+<p>(Exit.)</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 23.</p>
+
+<p>Great physical languor, especially in the morning. It is Calvary to get
+out of bed and shoulder the day's burden.</p>
+
+<p>"What's been the matter?" they ask.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! senile decay&mdash;general histolysis of the tissues," I say, fencing.</p>
+
+<p>To-night, I looked at myself accidentally in the glass and noticed at
+once the alarming extent of my dejection. Quite unconsciously I turned
+my head away and shook it, making the noise with my teeth and tongue
+which means, "Dear, dear." M&mdash;&mdash; tells me these waves of ill-health are
+quite unaccountable unless I were "leading a dissolute life, which you
+do not appear to be doing." Damn his eyes.</p>
+
+<p><i>Reading Nietzsche</i></p>
+
+<p>Reading Nietzsche. What splendid physic he is to Pomeranian puppies like
+myself! I am a hopeless coward. Thunderstorms always frighten me. The
+smallest cut alarms for fear of blood poisoning, and I always dab on
+antiseptics at once. But Nietzsche makes me feel a perfect mastiff.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>The Test for True Love</i></p>
+
+<p>The test for true love is whether you can endure the thought of cutting
+your sweetheart's toe-nails&mdash;the onychiotomic test. Or whether you find
+your Julia's sweat as sweet as otto of roses. I told her this to-night.
+Probably she thinks I only "saw it in a book."</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Chopin</i></p>
+
+<p>On Sunday, went to the Albert Hall, and warmed myself at the Orchestra.
+It is a wonderful sight to watch an orchestra playing from the gallery.
+It spurts and flickers like a flame. Its incessant activity arrests the
+attention and holds it just as a fire does&mdash;even a deaf man would be
+fascinated. Heard Chopin's Funeral March and other things. It would be a
+rich experience to be able to be in your coffin at rest and listen to
+Chopin's Funeral March being played above you by a string orchestra with
+Sir Henry Wood conducting.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Henry like a melanic Messiah was crucified as usual, the Hungarian
+Rhapsody No. 2 causing him the most awful agony....</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 28.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Rodin</i></p>
+
+<p>More than once lately have been to see and admire Rodin's recent gifts
+to the nation exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The "Prodigal
+Son" is Beethoven's Fifth Symphony done in stone. It was only on my
+second visit that I noticed the small pebble in each hand&mdash;a superb
+touch!&mdash;what a frenzy of remorse!</p>
+
+<p>The "Fallen Angel" I loved most. The legs of the woman droop lifelessly
+backwards in an intoxicating curve. The eye caresses it&mdash;down the thighs
+and over the calves to the tips of the toes&mdash;like the hind limbs of some
+beautiful dead gazelle. He has brought off exactly the same effect in
+the woman in the group called "Eternal Spring," which I have only seen
+in a photograph.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This morning at 9 a.m. lay in bed on my back, warm and comfortable, and,
+for the first time for many weeks, with no pain or discomfort of any
+kind. The mattress curved up around my body and legs and held me in a
+soft warm embrace.... I shut my eyes and whistled the saccharine melody
+for solo violin in Chopin's Funeral March. I wanted the moment prolonged
+for hours. Ill-health chases the soul out of a man. He becomes a body,
+purely physical.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 29.</p>
+
+<p>This evening she promised to be my wife after a long silent ramble
+together thro' dark London squares and streets! I am beside myself!</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><i>December</i> 6.</p>
+
+<p>I know now&mdash;I love her with passion. Health and ambition and sanity are
+returning. Projects in view:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>(1) To make her happy and myself worthy.</p>
+
+<p>(2) To get married.</p>
+
+<p>(3) To prepare and publish a volume of this Journal.</p>
+
+<p>(4) To write two essays for <i>Cornhill</i> which shall surely induce the
+Editor to publish and not write me merely long complimentary and
+encouraging letters as heretofore.</p>
+
+<p>Wired to A&mdash;&mdash;, "The brave little pennon has been hauled down."</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 7.</p>
+
+<p>Have so many projects in view and so little time in which to get them
+done! Moreover I am always haunted by the fear that I may never finish
+them thro' physical or temperamental disabilities&mdash;a breakdown in health
+or in purpose. I am one of those who are apt to die unexpectedly and no
+one would be surprised. An inquest would probably be unnecessary. I
+badly want to live say another twelve months. Hey! nonny-no! a man's a
+fool that wants to die.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 9.</p>
+
+<p>... I shook her angrily by the shoulders to-night and said, "Why do I
+love you?&mdash;Tell me," but she only smiled gently and said, "I cannot
+tell...." I ought not to love her, I know&mdash;every omen is against it....
+Then I am full of self-love: an intellectual Malvolio proud of his
+brains and air of distinction....</p>
+
+<p>Then I am fickle, passionate, polygamous ... I am haunted by the memory
+of how I have sloughed off one enthusiasm after another. I used to
+dissect snails in a pie-dish in the kitchen while Mother baked the
+cakes&mdash;the unravelling of the internal economy of a <i>Helix</i> caused as
+great an emotional storm as to-day the Unfinished Symphony does! I look
+for the first parasol in Kensington Gardens with the same interest as
+once I sought out the first snowdrop or listened for the first Cuckoo. I
+am as anxious to identify an instrument in Sir Henry's Orchestra as once
+to identify the song of a new bird in the woods. Nothing is further from
+my intention or desire to continue my old habit of nature study. I never
+read nature books&mdash;my old favourites&mdash;Waterton's <i>Wanderings</i>, Gilbert
+White, <i>The Zoologist</i>, etc.&mdash;have no interest for me&mdash;in fact they give
+me slight mental nausea even to glance at. Wiedersheim (good old
+Wiedersheim) is now deposed by a text book on Harmony. My main desire
+just now is to hear the best music. In the country I wore blinkers and
+saw only zoology. Now in London, I've taken the bit in my mouth&mdash;and
+it's a mouth of iron&mdash;wanting a run for all my troubles before Death
+strikes me down.</p>
+
+<p>All this evidence of my temperamental instability alarms and distresses
+me on reflection and makes the soul weary. I wish I loved more steadily.
+I am always sidetracking myself. The title of "husband" scares me.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 12.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Sir Henry Wood conducting</i></p>
+
+<p>Went to the Queen's Hall, sat in the Orchestra and watched Sir Henry's
+statuesque figure conducting thro' a forest of bows, "which pleased me
+mightily." He would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> be worth watching if you were stone deaf. If you
+could not hear a sound, the animation and excitement of an orchestra in
+full swing, with the conductor cutting and slashing at invisible foes,
+make a magnificent spectacle.</p>
+
+<p>The face of Sir Henry Wood strikes me as very much like the traditional
+pictures of Jesus Christ, tho' Sir Henry is dark&mdash;the melanic Messiah I
+call him (very much to my own delight). Rodin ought to do him in
+stone&mdash;Chesterfield's ideal of a man&mdash;a Corinthian edifice on Tuscan
+foundations. In Sir Henry's case there can be no disputing the Tuscan
+foundations. However swift and elegant the movements of his arms, his
+splendid lower extremities remain as firm as stone columns. While the
+music is calm and serene his right hand and baton execute in concert
+with the left, perfect geometric curves around his head. Then as it
+gathers in force and volume, when the bows begin to dart swiftly across
+the fiddles and the trumpets and trombones blaze away in a
+conflagration, we are all expectant&mdash;and even a little fearful, to
+observe his sabre-like cuts. The tension grows ... I hold my breath....
+Sir Henry snatches a second to throw back a lock of his hair that has
+fallen limply across his forehead, then goes on in unrelenting pursuit,
+cutting and slashing at hordes of invisible fiends that leap howling out
+towards him. There is a great turmoil of combat, but the Conductor
+struggles on till the great explosion happens. But in spite of that, you
+see him still standing thro' a cloud of great chords, quite undaunted.
+His sword zigzags up and down the scale&mdash;suddenly the closed fist of his
+left hand shoots up straight and points to the zenith&mdash;like the arm of a
+heathen priest appealing to Baal to bring down fire from Heaven.... But
+the appeal avails nought and it looks as tho' it were all up for poor
+Sir Henry. The music is just as infuriated&mdash;his body writhes with
+it&mdash;the melanic Messiah crucified by the inappeasable desire to express
+by visible gestures all that he feels in his heart. He surrenders &mdash;so
+you think&mdash;he opens out both arms wide and baring his breast, dares them
+all to do their worst&mdash;like the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> picture of Moffat the missionary among
+the savages of the Dark Continent!</p>
+
+<p>And yet he wins after all. At the very last moment he seems to summon
+all his remaining strength and in one final and devastating sweep mows
+down the orchestra rank by rank.... You awake from the nightmare to
+discover the victor acknowledging the applause in a series of his
+inimitable bows.</p>
+
+<p>One ought to pack one's ears up with cotton wool at a concert where Sir
+Henry conducts. Otherwise, the music is apt to distract one's attention.
+R.L.S. wanted to be at the head of a cavalry charge&mdash;sword over
+head&mdash;but I'd rather fight an orchestra with a baton.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Beethoven's Fifth Symphony</i></p>
+
+<p>This symphony always works me up into an ecstasy; in ecstatic sympathy
+with its dreadfulness I could stand up in the balcony and fling myself
+down passionately into the arena below. Yet there were women sitting
+alongside me to-day&mdash;knitting! It so annoyed and irritated me that at
+the end of the first movement I got up and sat elsewhere. They would
+have sat knitting at the foot of the Cross, I suppose.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of the second movement, two or three other women got up and
+went home to tea! It would have surprised me no more to have seen a cork
+extract itself from its bottle and promenade.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Tschaikovsky</i></p>
+
+<p>Just lately I've heard a lot of music including Tschaikovsky's
+Pathétique and Fifth Symphonies, some Debussy, and odd pieces by Dukas,
+Glinka, Smetana, Mozart. I am chock-full of impressions of all this
+precious stuff and scarcely know what to write. As usual, the third
+movement of the Pathétique produced a frenzy of exhilaration; I seemed
+to put on several inches around my chest and wished to shout in a voice
+of thunder. The conventions<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> of a public concert hall are dreadfully
+oppressive at such times. I could have eaten "all the elephants of
+Hindustan and picked my teeth with the spire of Strassburg Cathedral."</p>
+
+<p>In the last movement of the Fifth Symphony of that splendid fellow
+Tschaikovsky, the orchestra seemed to gallop away leaving poor Landon
+Ronald to wave his whip in a ridiculously ineffective way. They went on
+crashing down chords, and just before the end I had the awful
+presentiment that the orchestra simply could not stop. I sat still
+straining every nerve in the expectancy that this chord or the next or
+the next was the end. But it went on pounding down&mdash;each one seemed the
+last but every time another followed as passionate and emphatic as the
+one before, until finally, whatever this inhuman orchestra was
+attempting to crush and destroy must have been reduced to shapeless
+pulp. I wanted to board the platform and plead with them, elderly
+gentlemen turned their heads nervously, everyone was breathless, we all
+wanted to call "For God's sake, stop"&mdash;to do anything to still this
+awful lust for annihilation.... The end came quickly in four drum beats
+in quick succession. I have never seen such hate, such passionate
+intensity of the will to destroy.... And Tschaikovsky was a Russian!</p>
+
+<p>Debussy was a welcome change. "L'Après-midi d'un Faun" is a musical
+setting to an oscitatory exercise. It is an orchestral yawn. Oh! so
+tired!</p>
+
+<p>Came away thoroughly delighted. Wanted to say to every one "Bally good,
+ain't it?" and then we would all shake hands and go home whistling.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 14.</p>
+
+<p>My rooms are littered with old concert programmes and the Doctor's
+prescriptions (in the yellow envelopes of the dispenser) for my various
+ailments and diseases, and books, books, books.</p>
+
+<p>Among the latter those lying on my table at this moment are&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Plays of M. Brieux.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>Joseph Vance.</i></p>
+
+<p>The Sequel to <i>Pragmatism: The Meaning of Truth</i>, by Wiliam James.</p>
+
+<p><i>Beyond Good and Evil.</i></p>
+
+<p>Dostoievsky's <i>The Possessed.</i></p>
+
+<p>Marie Bashkirtseff's <i>Journal.</i></p>
+
+<p>I have found time to read only the first chapter of this last and am
+almost afraid to go on. It would be so humiliating to find I was only
+her duplicate.</p>
+
+<p>On my mantelpiece stands a photograph of Huxley&mdash;the hero of my
+youth&mdash;which old B&mdash;&mdash; has always taken to be that of my grandpapa! A
+plaster-cast mask of Voltaire when first hung up made him chuckle with
+indecent laughter. "A regular all-nighter. Who is it?" he said.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 15.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Petticoat Lane</i></p>
+
+<p>This morning, being Sunday, went to Petticoat Lane and enjoyed myself.</p>
+
+<p>On turning the corner to go into Middlesex Street, as it it now called,
+the first thing I saw was a little girl&mdash;a Jewess&mdash;being tackled for
+selling Belgian button-hole flags by two policemen who ultimately
+marched her off to the police station.</p>
+
+<p>In the Lane, first of all, was a "Royal Ascot Jockey Scales" made of
+brass and upholstered in gaudy red velvet&mdash;a penny a time. A very fat
+man was being weighed and looked a little distressed on being given his
+ticket.</p>
+
+<p>"Another stone," he told the crowd mournfully.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll have to eat less pork," some one volunteered and we all laughed.</p>
+
+<p>Next door to the Scales was a man selling gyroscopes. "Something
+scientific, amusing as well as instructive, illustrating the principles
+of gravity and stability. What I show you is what I sell&mdash;price one
+shilling. Who?"</p>
+
+<p>I stopped next at a stall containing nothing but caps<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>,&mdash;"any size, any
+colour, any pattern, a shilling apiece&mdash;now then!" This show was being
+run by two men&mdash;a Jew in a fur cap on one side of the stall and a very
+powerful-looking sort of Captain Cuttle on the other&mdash;a seafaring man,
+almost as broad as he was long, with a game leg and the voice of a
+skipper in a hurricane. Both these men were selling caps at a prodigious
+pace, and with the insouciance of tradesmen sure of their custom. The
+skipper would seize a cap, chuck it across to a timid prospective
+purchaser, and, if he dropped it, chuck him over another, crying, with a
+"yo-heave-ho" boisterousness, "Oh! what a game, what a bees' nest."</p>
+
+<p>Upon the small head of another customer, he would squash down his
+largest sized cap saying at once,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"There, you look the finest gentleman&mdash;oh! ah! a little too large."</p>
+
+<p>At which we all laughed, the customer looked silly, but took no offence.</p>
+
+<p>"Try this," yells the skipper above the storm, and takes off his own
+cap. "Oh! ye needn't be afraid&mdash;I washed my hair last&mdash;year."
+(Laughter.)</p>
+
+<p>Then to his partner, the Jew on the other side of the stall, "Oh! what a
+face you've got. Here! 6d. for any one who can tell me what it is. Why
+not take it to the trenches and get it smashed in?"</p>
+
+<p>The Jew wore spectacles and had a soft ingratiating voice and brown
+doe-like eyes&mdash;a Jew in every respect. "Oh!" says he, in the oleaginous
+Semitic way, and accurately taking up his cue (for all this was
+rehearsed patter), "my wife says 'my face is my fortune.'"</p>
+
+<p>"No wonder you're so hard up and 'ave got to take in lodgers. What's yer
+name?"</p>
+
+<p>"John Jones," in a demure wheedling voice.</p>
+
+<p>"Hoo&mdash;that's not your name in your own bloody country&mdash;I expect it's
+Hullabullinsky."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know what my name really is?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"It's Assenheimopoplocatdwizlinsky Kovorod." (Loud laughter.)<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I shall call you 'ass' for short."</p>
+
+<p>I was laughing loudly at these two clowns and the skipper observing as
+much, shouted out to me,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Parlez-vous Francois, M'sieur?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oui, oui," said I.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! lah, you're one of us&mdash;oh! what a game! what a bees' nest," and all
+the time he went on selling caps and chucking them at the purchasers.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps one of the most extraordinary things I saw was a stream of young
+men who, one after another, came up to a stall, paid a penny and
+swallowed a glass of "nerve tonic"&mdash;a green liquid syphoned out of a
+large jar&mdash;warranted a safe cure for</p>
+
+<p>"Inward weakness, slightest flurry or body oppressed."</p>
+
+<p>Another man was pulling teeth and selling tooth powder. Some of the
+little urchins' teeth, after he had cleaned them as a demonstration,
+were much whiter than their faces or his. This was "the original Chas.
+Assenheim."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Meyers, "not connected with any one else of the same name in the
+Lane" was selling eels at 2d., 3d. and 6d. and doing a brisk trade too.</p>
+
+<p>But I should go on for hours if I were to tell everything seen in this
+remarkable lane during an hour and a half on a Sunday morning. Each
+stall-holder sells only one kind of article&mdash;caps or clocks or songs,
+braces, shawls, indecent literature, concertinas, gramophones, coats,
+pants, reach-me-downs, epergnes. The thoroughfare was crowded with
+people (I saw two Lascars in red fez caps) inspecting the goods
+displayed and attentively observed by numerous policemen. The alarm
+clocks were all going off, each gramophone was working a record (a
+different one!) and every tradesman shouting his wares&mdash;a perfect
+pandemonium.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 31.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>A Conversation</i></p>
+
+<p>"There is that easily calculable element in your nature, dear boy," I
+said, "by which you forego the dignity of a free-willed human being and
+come under an inflexible<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> natural law. I can anticipate your movements,
+intentions, and opinions long beforehand. For example, I know quite well
+that every Saturday morning will see you with <i>The New Statesman</i> under
+your arm; I know that the words 'Wagner' or 'Shaw' uttered slowly and
+deliberately in your ear will produce a perfectly definite reaction."</p>
+
+<p>"I bet you can't predict what I am going to buy now,"</p>
+
+<p>R&mdash;&mdash; replied gaily, advancing to the newspaper stall.</p>
+
+<p>He bought the <i>Pink 'Un</i> and I laughed....</p>
+
+<p>"And so you read <i>Pragmatism</i>," he mused, "while the fate of the Empire
+stands in the balance."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said I, "and the Paris Academy of Sciences were discussing the
+functions of <i>θ</i> [Greek: Thèta] and the Polymorphism of Antarctic
+diatoms last September when the Germans stood almost at the gates of
+Paris."</p>
+
+<p>This was a lucky stroke for me, for he knew he was rubbing me on the
+raw. We are, of course, great friends, but sometimes we get on one
+another's nerves.</p>
+
+<p>"I am polychromatic," I declaimed, "rhetorical, bass. You&mdash;besides being
+a bally fool&mdash;are of a pretty gray colour, a baritone and you paint in
+water-colours."</p>
+
+<p>"Whereas you, of course, would paint in blood?" he answered facetiously.</p>
+
+<p>His Oxford education has a firm hold on him. He says for example, "e
+converso" instead of "on the other hand" and "entre nous" for "between
+ourselves." He labels his paragraphs <i>α, β, γ</i>, instead of a, b, c, and
+quotes Juvenal, knows Paris and Naples, visits the Alps for the winter
+sports, all in the approved manner of dons.</p>
+
+<p>Not infrequently he visits the East End to Study "how the poor live," he
+lectures at Toynbee Hall, and calls the proletariat "the prolly." In
+fact, he does everything according to the regulations, being a socialist
+and an agnostic, a follower of Shaw and a devotee of Bunyan. "Erotic" he
+is careful to pronounce <i>eròtic</i> to show he knows Greek, and the "Duma,"
+the <i>Dumà</i>, tho' he doesn't know Russian. Like any don, he is always
+ready to discuss and give an opinion on any sub- supra- or circum-lunary
+subject from bimetallism to the Symphony as an art-form.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"That's a dominant fifth," I said to him the other day; no answer.</p>
+
+<p>"You ignorant devil," I said, "you don't know what a dominant fifth is!"</p>
+
+<p>We made grimaces at one another.</p>
+
+<p>"Who's the Master of the Mint?" I asked him. "That is an easy one."</p>
+
+<p>"The Chancellor of the Exchequer," was the prompt reply.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! that's right," I said sarcastic and crestfallen. "Now tell me the
+shortest verse in the Bible and the date of Rameses II."</p>
+
+<p>We laughed. R&mdash;&mdash; is a very clever man and the most extraordinarily
+versatile man I know. He is bound to make his mark. His danger is&mdash;too
+many irons in the fire. Here are some of his occupations and
+acquirements: Art (etching, drypoint, water-colours), music (a charming
+voice), classics, French, German, Italian (both speaking and reading
+knowledge), biology, etc., etc. He is for ever titillating his mind with
+some new thing. "For God's sake, do leave it alone&mdash;you simply rag your
+mind to death. Put it out to grass&mdash;go thro' an annual season of
+complete abstinence from knowledge&mdash;an intellectual Lent."</p>
+
+<p>No one more than he enjoys my ragging him like this&mdash;and I do it rather
+well.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_10" id="Footnote_1_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_10"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> "I could eat all the elephants of Hindustan and pick my
+teeth with the Spire of Strassburg Cathedral."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_11" id="Footnote_2_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_11"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> See January 2nd, 1915.</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="a1915" id="a1915"></a>1915</h3>
+
+
+<p><i>January</i> 1.</p>
+
+<p>I have grown so ridiculously hypercritical and fastidious that I will
+refuse a man's invitation to dinner because he has watery blue eyes, or
+hate him for a mannerism or an impediment or affectation in his speech.
+Some poor devil who has not heard of Turner or Debussy or Dostoieffsky I
+gird at with the arrogance of a knowledgeable youth of 17. Some oddity
+who should afford a sane mind endless amusement, I write off as a <i>Insus
+naturæ</i> and dismiss with a flourish of contempt. My intellectual
+arrogance&mdash;excepting at such times as I become conscious of it and pull<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>
+myself up&mdash;is incredible. It is incredible because I have no personal
+courage and all this pride boils up behind a timid exterior. I quail
+often before stupid but over-bearing persons who consequently never
+realise my contempt of them. Then afterwards, I writhe to think I never
+stood up to this fool; never uttered an appropriate word to interfere
+with another's nauseating self-love. It exasperates me to be unable to
+give a Roland for an Oliver&mdash;even servants and underlings "tick me
+off"&mdash;to fail always in sufficient presence of mind to make the
+satisfying rejoinder or riposte. I suffer from such a savage <i>amour
+propre</i> that I fear to enter the lists with a man I dislike on account
+of the mental anguish I should suffer if he worsted me. I am therefore
+bottled up tight&mdash;both my hates and loves. For a coward is not only
+afraid to tell a man he hates him, but is nervous too of letting go of
+his feeling of affection or regard lest it be rejected or not returned.
+I shudder to think of such remarks as (referring to me), "He's one of my
+admirers, you know" (sardonically), or, "I simply can't get rid of him."</p>
+
+<p>If however my cork <i>does</i> come out, there is an explosion, and placid
+people occasionally marvel to hear violent language streaming from my
+lips and nasty acid and facetious remarks.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, to intimate friends (only about three persons in the wide,
+wide world), I can always give free vent to my feelings, and I do so in
+privacy with that violence in which a weak character usually finds some
+compensation for his intolerable self-imposed reserve and restraint in
+public. I can never marvel enough at the ineradicable turpitude of my
+existence, at my <i>double-facedness</i>, and the remarkable contrast between
+the face I turn to the outside world and the face my friends know. It's
+like leading a double existence or artificially constructing a puppet to
+dangle before the crowd while I fulminate behind the scenes. If only I
+had the moral courage to play my part in life&mdash;to take the stage and be
+myself, to enjoy the delightful sensation of making my presence felt,
+instead of this vapourish mumming&mdash;then this Journal would be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> quite
+unnecessary. For to me self-expression is a necessity of life, and what
+cannot be expressed one way must be expressed in another. When colossal
+egotism is driven underground, whether by a steely surface environment
+or an unworkable temperament or as in my case by both, you get a truly
+remarkable result, and the victim a truly remarkable pain&mdash;the pain one
+might say of continuously unsuccessful attempts at parturition.</p>
+
+<p>It is perhaps not the whole explanation to say that my milky affability
+before, say bores or clods is sheer personal cowardice.... It is partly
+real affability. I am so glad to have opposite me some one who is making
+himself pleasant and affable and sympathetic that I forget for the
+moment that he is an unconscionable time-server, a sycophant,
+lick-spittle, toady, etc. My first impulse is always to credit folk with
+being nicer, cleverer, more honest and amiable than they are. Then, on
+reflection, I discover unpleasing characteristics, I detect their little
+motives, and hate myself for not speaking. The fellow is intolerable,
+why did I not tell him so? Bitter recriminations from my critical self
+upon my flabby amiable half.</p>
+
+<p>On the whole, then, I lead a pretty disgraceful inner life&mdash;excepting
+when I pull myself together and smile benignly on all things with a
+philosophical smugness, such as is by no means my mood at this present
+moment. I am so envious that a reprint of one of Romney's Ramus girls
+sends me into a dry tearless anger&mdash;for the moment till I turn over the
+next page.... Inwardly I was exacerbated this morning when R&mdash;&mdash;
+recited, "Come and have a tiddle at the old Brown Bear," and explained
+how a charming "young person" sang this at breakfast the other morning.
+It was simply <i>too</i> charming for him to hear.</p>
+
+<p>To-night as I brushed my hair, I decided I was quite good-looking, and
+<i>I believe</i> I mused that E&mdash;&mdash; was really a lucky girl.... All that is
+the matter with me is a colossal conceit and a colossal discontent,
+qualities exaggerated where a man finds himself in an environment which
+....</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span></p><hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>You observant people will notice that this explanation is something of a
+self-defence whereby the virtue goes out of my confession. I plead
+guilty, but great and unprecedented provocation as well. Intense pride
+of individuality forbids that I should ever be other than, shall I say,
+amiably disposed towards myself <i>au fond</i>, however displeased I may be
+with my environment. It is indeed impossible without sending him to a
+lunatic asylum ever to knock a man off the balance of his
+self-esteem.... A man's loyalty to himself is the most pig-headed thing
+imaginable.</p>
+
+<p><i>January</i> 2.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>The Fire Bogey</i></p>
+
+<p>"This Box contains Manuscripts. One guinea will be paid to any one who
+in case of danger from fire saves it from damage or loss."</p>
+
+<p>Signed: W.N.P. BARBELLION.</p>
+
+<p>I have had this printed in large black characters on a card, framed and
+nailed to my "coffin" of Journals. I told the printer first to say <i>Two
+Guineas</i>, but he suggested that One Guinea was quite enough. I agreed
+but wondered how the devil <i>he</i> knew what the Journals were
+worth&mdash;nobody knows.</p>
+
+<p>Next month, I expect I shall have a "hand" painted on the wall and
+pointing towards the box. And the month after that I shall hire a
+fireman to be on duty night and day standing outside No. 101 in a brass
+helmet and his hatchet up at the salute.</p>
+
+<p>These precious Journals! Supposing I lost them! I cannot imagine the
+anguish it would cause me. It would be the death of my real self and as
+I should take no pleasure in the perpetuation of my flabby, flaccid,
+anæmic, amiable puppet-self, I should probably commit suicide.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 7.</p>
+
+<p>Harvey who discovered the circulation of the blood also conducted a
+great many investigations into the Anatomy and development of insects.
+But all his MSS. and drawings<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> disappeared in the fortunes of war, and
+one half of his life work thus disappeared. This makes me feverish,
+living as I do in Armageddon!</p>
+
+<p>Again, all Malpighi's pictures, furniture, books and MSS. were destroyed
+in a lamentable fire at his house in Bononia, occasioned it is said by
+the negligence of his old wife.</p>
+
+<p>About 1618, Ben Jonson suffered a similar calamity thro' a fire breaking
+out in his study. Many unpublished MSS. perished.</p>
+
+<p>A more modern and more tragic example I found recently in the person of
+an Australian naturalist, Dr. Walter Stimpson, who lost all his MSS.,
+drawings, and collections in the great fire of Chicago, and was so
+excoriated by this irreparable misfortune that he never recovered from
+the shock, and died the following year a broken man and unknown.</p>
+
+<p>Of course the housemaid who lit the fire with the <i>French Revolution</i> is
+known to all, as well as Newton's "Fido, Fido, you little know what you
+have done."</p>
+
+<p>There are many dangers in preserving the labours of years in MS. form.
+Samuel Butler (of <i>Erewhon</i>) advised writing in copying ink and then
+pressing off a second copy to be kept in another and separate locality.
+My own precautions for these Journals are more elaborate. Those who know
+about it think I am mad. I wonder.... But I dare say I am a pathetic
+fool&mdash;an incredible self-deceiver!</p>
+
+<p>Anyhow&mdash;the "coffin" of raw material I sent down to T&mdash;&mdash; while I retain
+the two current volumes. This is to avoid Zeppelins. E&mdash;&mdash; took the
+"coffin" down for me on her way home from school, and at Taunton,
+inquisitive porters mistaking it, I suppose, for an infant's coffin
+carried it reverently outside the station and laid it down. She caught
+them looking at it just in time before her train left. Under her
+instructions they seized it by the brass handles and carried it back
+again. I sit now and with a good deal of curiosity fondle the idea of
+porters carrying about my Journals of confession. It's like being
+tickled<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> in the palm of the hand.... Two volumes of abstracted entries I
+keep here, and, as soon as I am married, I intend to make a second copy
+of these.... Then all in God's good time I intend getting a volume ready
+for publication.</p>
+
+<p><i>January</i> 30.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Hearing Beethoven</i></p>
+
+<p>To the Queen's Hall and heard Beethoven's Fifth and Seventh Symphonies.</p>
+
+<p>Before the concert began I was in a fever. I kept on saying to myself,
+"I am going to hear the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies." I regarded myself
+with the most ridiculous self-adulation&mdash;I smoothed and purred over
+myself&mdash;a great contented Tabby cat&mdash;and all because I was so splendidly
+fortunate as to be about to hear Beethoven's Fifth and Seventh
+Symphonies.</p>
+
+<p>It certainly upset me a little to find there were so many other people
+who were singularly fortunate as well, and it upset me still more to
+find some of them knitting and some reading newspapers as if they waited
+for sausage and mashed.</p>
+
+<p>How I gloried in the Seventh! I can't believe there was any one present
+who gloried in it as I did! To be processing majestically up the steps
+of a great, an unimaginable palace (in the "Staircase" introduction),
+led by Sir Henry, is to have had at least a crowded ten minutes of
+glorious life&mdash;a suspicion crossed the mind at one time "Good Heavens,
+they're going to knight me." I cannot say if that were their intentions.
+But I escaped however....</p>
+
+<p>I love the way in which a beautiful melody flits around the Orchestra
+and its various components like a beautiful bird.</p>
+
+<p><i>January</i> 19.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>An Average Day</i></p>
+
+<p>After a morning of very mixed emotions and more than one annoyance ...
+at last sat down to lunch and a little peace and quiet with R&mdash;&mdash;. We
+began by quoting<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> verse at one another in open competition. Of course
+neither of us listened to the other's verses. We merely enjoyed the
+pleasure of recollecting and repeating our own. I began with Tom Moore's
+"Row gently here, my Gondolier." R&mdash;&mdash; guessed the author rightly at
+once and fidgeted until he burst out with, "The Breaths of kissing night
+and day"&mdash;to me an easy one. I gave, "The Moon more indolently sleeps
+to-night" (Baudelaire), and in reply he did a great stroke by reciting
+some of the old French of Frangois Villon which entirely flummuxed me.</p>
+
+<p>I don't believe we really love each other, but we cling to each other
+out of ennui and discover in each other a certain cold intellectual
+sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>At the pay desk (Lyons' is our rendezvous) we joked with the cashier&mdash;a
+cheerful, fat little girl, who said to R&mdash;&mdash; (indicating me),&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"He's a funny boy, isn't he?"</p>
+
+<p>"Dangerous," chirped R&mdash;&mdash;, and we laughed. In the street we met an
+aged, decrepit newsvendor&mdash;very dirty and ragged&mdash;but his voice was
+unexpectedly fruity.</p>
+
+<p>"British Success," he called, and we stopped for the sake of the voice.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not interested," I said&mdash;as an appetiser.</p>
+
+<p>"What! Not.... Just one sir: I haven't sold a single copy yet, and I've
+a wife and four children."</p>
+
+<p>"That's nothing to me&mdash;I've three wives and forty children," I remarked.</p>
+
+<p>"What!" in affected surprise, turning to R&mdash;&mdash;, "he's Brigham Young from
+Salt Lake City. Yes I know it&mdash;I've been there myself and been dry ever
+since. Give us a drink, sir&mdash;just one."</p>
+
+<p>In consideration of his voice we gave him 2d. and passed on....</p>
+
+<p>After giving a light to a Belgian soldier whose cigarette had gone out,
+farther along we entered a queer old music shop where they sell
+flageolets, serpents, clavichords, and harps. We had previously made an
+appointment with the man to have Schubert's Unfinished Symphony played
+to us, so as to recall one or two of the melodies which we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> can't recall
+and it drives us crazy. "What is that one in the second movement which
+goes like this?" and R&mdash;&mdash; whistled a fragment. "I don't know," I said,
+"but let's go in here and ask." In the shop, a youth was kind enough to
+say that if we cared to call next day, Madame A&mdash;&mdash;, the harp player
+would be home and would be ready to play us the symphony.</p>
+
+<p>So this morning, before Madame's appearance, this kind and obliging
+youth put a gramophone record of it on, to which we listened like two
+intelligent parrots with heads sideways. Presently, the fat lady harpist
+appeared and asked us just what we wanted to find out&mdash;a rather awkward
+question for us, as we did not want to "find out" anything excepting how
+the tunes went.</p>
+
+<p>I therefore explained that as neither of us had sisters or wives, and we
+both wanted, etc.... so would she...? In response, she smiled
+pleasantly and played us the second movement on a shop piano. Meanwhile,
+Henry the boy, hid himself behind the instruments at the rear of the
+shop and as we signed to her she would say,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"What's that, Henry?"</p>
+
+<p>And Henry would duly answer from his obscurity, "Wood wind," or "Solo
+oboe," or whatever it was, and the lad really spoke with authority. In
+this way, I began to find out something about the work. Before I left, I
+presented her with a copy of the score, which she did not possess and
+because she would not accept any sort of remuneration.</p>
+
+<p>"Won't you put your name on it?" she inquired.</p>
+
+<p>I pointed gaily to the words "Ecce homo," which I had scribbled across
+Schubert's name and said, "There you are." Madame smiled incredulously
+and we said, "Good-bye."</p>
+
+<p>It was a beautifully clement almost springlike day, and at the street
+corner, in a burst of joyousness, we each bought a bunch of violets of
+an old woman, stuck them on the ends of our walking-sticks, and marched
+off with them in triumphant protest to the B.M. Carried over our
+shoulders, our flowers amused the police and &mdash;&mdash;, who scarcely realised
+the significance of the ritual. "This is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> my protest," said R&mdash;&mdash;,
+"against the war. It's like Oscar Wilde's Sunflower."</p>
+
+<p>On the way, we were both bitterly disappointed at a dramatic meeting
+between a man and woman of the artizan class which instead of beginning
+with a stormy, "Robert, where's the rent, may I ask?" fizzled out into,
+"Hullo, Charlie, why you <i>are</i> a stranger."</p>
+
+<p>At tea in the A.B.C. shop, we had a violent discussion on Socialism, and
+on the station platform, going home, I said that before marriage I
+intended saving up against the possibility of divorce&mdash;a domestic
+divorce fund.</p>
+
+<p>"Very dreadful," said R&mdash;&mdash; with mock gravity, "to hear a recently
+affianced young man talk like that."</p>
+
+<p>... What should I do then? Marry? I suppose so. Shadows of the
+prison-house. At first I said I ought not to marry for two years. Then
+when I am wildly excited with her I say "next week." We could. There are
+no arrangements to be made. All her furniture&mdash;flat, etc. But I feel we
+ought to wait until the War is over.</p>
+
+<p>At dinner-time to-night I was feverish to do three things at once: write
+out my day's Journal, eat my food, and read the <i>Journal</i> of Marie
+Bashkirtseff. Did all three&mdash;but unfortunately not at once, so that when
+I was occupied with one I would surreptitiously cast a glance sideways
+at the other&mdash;and repined.</p>
+
+<p>After dinner, paid a visit to the &mdash;&mdash; and found Mrs. &mdash;&mdash; playing Patience.
+I told her that 12,000 lives had been lost in the great Italian
+earthquake. Still going on dealing out the cards, she said in her gentle
+voice that that was dreadful and still absorbed in her cards inquired if
+earthquakes had aught to do with the weather.</p>
+
+<p>"An earthquake must be a dreadful thing," she gently piped, as she
+abstractedly dealt out the cards for a new game in a pretty
+Morris-papered room in Kensington.</p>
+
+<p><i>January</i> 20.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>At a Public Dinner</i></p>
+
+<p>... The timorous man presently took out his cigarette-case and was going
+to take out a cigarette, when he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> recollected that he ought first to
+offer one to the millionaire on his right. Fortunately the cigarette
+case was silver and the cigarettes appeared&mdash;from my side of the
+dinner-table&mdash;to be fat Egyptians. Yet the timorous and unassuming
+bug-hunter hesitated palpably. Ought he to offer his cigarettes? He
+thought of his own balance at the bank and then of the millionaire's and
+trembled. The case after all was only silver and the cigarettes were not
+much more than a halfpenny each. Was it not impertinent? He sat a moment
+studying the open case which he held in both hands like a hymn book,
+while the millionaire ordered not wines&mdash;but a bass! At last courage
+came, and he inoffensively pushed the cigarettes towards his friend.</p>
+
+<p>"No, thanks!" smiled the millionaire, "I don't smoke." And so, 'twas a
+unicorn dilemma after all.</p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 15.</p>
+
+<p>Spent Xmas week at work in her studio, transcribing my Journals while
+she made drawings. All unbeknown to her I was copying out entries of
+days gone by&mdash;how scandalised she would be if...!</p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 22.</p>
+
+<p>What an amazing Masque is Rotten Row on a Sunday morning! I sat on a
+seat there this morning and watched awhile.</p>
+
+<p>It was most exasperating to be in this kaleidoscope of human life
+without the slightest idea as to who they all were. One man in
+particular, I noticed&mdash;a first-class "swell"&mdash;whom I wanted to touch
+gently on the arm, slip a half-a-crown into his hand and whisper,
+"There, tell me all about yourself."</p>
+
+<p>Such "swells" there were that out in the fairway, my little cockle-shell
+boat was wellnigh swamped. To be in the wake of a really magnificent
+Duchess simply rocks a small boat in an alarming fashion. I leaned over
+my paddles and gazed up. They steamed past unheeding,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> but I kept my
+nerve all right and pulled in and out quizzing and observing.</p>
+
+<p>It is nothing less than scandalous that here I am aged 25 with no means
+of acquainting myself with contemporary men and women even of my own
+rank and station. The worst of it is, too, that I have no time to
+lose&mdash;in my state of health. This accursed ill-health cuts me off from
+everything. I make pitiful attempts to see the world around me by an
+occasional visit (wind, weather, and health permitting) to Petticoat
+Lane, the Docks, Rotten Row, Leicester Square, or the Ethical Church.
+To-morrow I purpose going to the Christian Scientists'. Meanwhile, the
+others participate in Armageddon.</p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 23.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Looking for Lice at the Zoo</i></p>
+
+<p>The other day went to the Zoological Gardens, and, by permission of the
+Secretary, went round with the keepers and searched the animals for
+ectoparasites.</p>
+
+<p>Some time this year I have to make a scientific Report to the Zoological
+Society upon all the Lice which from time to time have been collected on
+animals dying in the gardens and sent me for study and determination.</p>
+
+<p>We entered the cages, caught and examined several Tinamous,
+<i>Rhinochetus, Eurypygia</i>, and many more, to the tune of "The Policeman's
+Holiday" whistled by a Mynah! It was great fun.</p>
+
+<p>Then we went into the Ostrich House and thoroughly searched two Kiwis.
+These, being nocturnal birds, were roosting underneath a heap of straw.
+When we had finished investigating their feathers, they ran back to
+their straw at once, the keeper giving them a friendly tap on the rear
+to hurry them up a bit. They are just like little old women bundling
+along.</p>
+
+<p>The Penguins, of course, were the most amusing, and, after operating
+fruitlessly for some time on a troublesome Adèle, I was amused to find,
+on turning around, all the other Adèles clustered close around my feet
+in an attitude of mute supplication.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Armadillo required all the strength of two keepers to hold still
+while I went over his carcass with lens and forceps. I was also allowed
+to handle and examine the Society's two specimens of that amazing
+creature the <i>Echidna</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>Balœniceps rex</i> like other royalty had to be approached decorously. He
+was a big, ill-tempered fellow, and quite unmanageable except by one
+keeper for whom he showed a preference. While we other conspirators hid
+ourselves outside, this man entered the house quietly and approached the
+bird with a gentle cooing sound. Then suddenly he grabbed the bill and
+held on. We entered at the same moment and secured the wings, and I
+began the search&mdash;without any luck. We must have made an amusing
+picture&mdash;three men holding on for dear life to a tall, grotesque bird
+with an imperial eye, while a fourth searched the feathers for
+parasites!</p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 28.</p>
+
+<p>What a boon is Sunday! I can get out of bed just when the spirit moves
+me, dress and bath leisurely, even with punctilio. How nice to dawdle in
+the bath with a cigarette, to hear the holiday sound of Church bells!
+Then comes that supreme moment when, shaven, clean, warm and hungry for
+breakfast and coffee, I stand a moment before the looking-glass and comb
+out my towzled hair with a parting as straight as a line in Euclid. That
+gives the finishing touch of self-satisfaction, and I go down to
+breakfast ready for the day's pleasure. I hate this weekday strain of
+having to be always each day at a set time in a certain place.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 3.</p>
+
+<p>I often sit in my room at the B.M. and look out at the traffic with a
+glassy, mesmerised face&mdash;a fainéant. How different from that extremely
+busy youth who came to London in 1912. Say&mdash;could that lad be I? How
+many hours do I waste day-dreaming. This morning I dreamed and dreamed
+and could not stop dreaming&mdash;I had not the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> will to shake myself down to
+my task.... My memories simply trooped the colour.</p>
+
+<p>It surprised me to find how many of them had gone out of my present
+consciousness and with what poignancy of feeling I recognised them
+again! How selfishly for the most part we all live in our present selves
+or in the selves that are to be.</p>
+
+<p>Then I raced thro' all sorts of future possibilities&mdash;oh! when and how
+is it all going to end? How do you expect me to settle down to
+scientific research with all this internal unrest! The scientific man
+above all should possess the "quiet mind in all changes of fortune"&mdash;Sir
+Henry Wotton's <i>How happy is he born and taught</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The truth is I am a hybrid: a mixture of two very distinct temperaments
+and they are often at war. To keep two different natures and two
+different mental habits simultaneously at work is next to impossible.
+Consequently plenty of waste and fever and&mdash;as I might have discovered
+earlier for myself&mdash;success almost out of the question. If only I were
+pure-bred science or pure-bred art!</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 4.</p>
+
+<p>Life is a dream and we are all somnambuloes. We know that for a fact at
+all times when we are most intensely alive&mdash;at crises of unprecedented
+change, in sorrow or catastrophe, or in any unusual incident brought
+swiftly to a close like a vision!</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I sit here writing this&mdash;a mirage! Who am I? No one can say. What am I?
+"A soap-bubble hanging from a reed."</p>
+
+<p>Every man is an inexhaustible treasury of human personality. He can go
+on burrowing in it for an eternity if he have the desire&mdash;and a taste
+for introspection. I like to keep myself well within the field of the
+microscope, and, with as much detachment as I can muster, to watch
+myself live, to report my observations of what I say, feel, think.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> In
+default of others, I am myself my own spectator and
+self-appreciator&mdash;critical, discerning, vigilant, fond!&mdash;my own stupid
+Boswell, shrewd if silly. This spectator of mine, it seems to me, must
+be a very moral gentleman and eminently superior. His incessant
+attentions, while I go on my way misconducting myself, goad me at times
+into a surly, ill-tempered outbreak, like Dr. Johnson. I hate being
+shadowed and reported like this. Yet on the whole&mdash;like old Samuel
+again&mdash;I am rather pleased to be Boswelled. It flatters me to know that
+at least one person takes an unremitting interest in all my ways.</p>
+
+<p>And, mind you, there are people who have seen most things but have never
+seen themselves walking across the stage of life. If someone shows them
+glimpses of themselves they will not recognise the likeness. How do you
+walk? Do you know your own idiosyncrasies of gait, manner of speech,
+etc.?</p>
+
+<p>I never cease to interest myself in the Gothic architecture of my own
+fantastic soul.<a name="FNanchor_1_12" id="FNanchor_1_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_12" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 6.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>The Punch and Judy Show</i></p>
+
+<p>Spent a most delightful half-an-hour to-day reading an account in the
+<i>Encyclopædia Britannica</i> (one of my favourite books&mdash;it's so "gey
+disconnekkit") the history of the Punch and Judy Show. It's a delightful
+bit of antiquarian lore and delighted me the more because it had never
+occurred to me before that it had an ancient history. I am thoroughly
+proud of this recent acquisition of knowledge and as if it were a
+valuable freehold I have been showing it off saying, "Rejoice with
+me&mdash;see what I have got here." I fired it off first in detail at &mdash;&mdash;;
+and H&mdash;&mdash; and D&mdash;&mdash; will probably be my victims to-morrow. After all, it
+is a charming little cameo of history: compact, with plenty of scope for
+conjecture, theory, research, and just that combination of all three
+which would suit my taste and capacity if I had time for a Monograph.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 22</p>
+
+<p>I waste much time gaping and wondering. During a walk or in a book or in
+the middle of an embrace, suddenly I awake to a stark amazement at
+everything. The bare fact of existence paralyses me&mdash;holds my mind in
+mort-main. To be alive is so incredible that all I do is to lie still
+and merely breathe&mdash;like an infant on its back in a cot. It is
+impossible to be interested in anything in particular while overhead the
+sun shines or underneath my feet grows a single blade of grass. "The
+things immediate to be done," says Thoreau, "I could give them all up to
+hear this locust sing." All my energies become immobilised, even my
+self-expression frustrated. I could not exactly master and describe how
+I feel during such moments.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 23.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Johnson</i> v. <i>Yves Delage</i></p>
+
+<p>I expect we have all of us at one time or another heard ourselves
+addressing to annoying, objectionable acquaintances some such stinging
+castigation as Hazlitt's letter to Gifford, or Burke's letter to a Noble
+Lord, or Johnson's letter to Lord Chesterfield, or Rousseau's letter to
+the Archbishop of Paris. If only I could indulge myself! At this moment
+I could glut my rancours on six different persons at least!</p>
+
+<p>What a raging discontent I have suffered to-day! What cynicism, what
+bitterness of spirit, what envy, hate, exasperation, childish petulance,
+what pusillanimous feelings and desires, what crude efforts to flout
+simple, ingenuous folk with my own thwarted, repressed
+self-assertiveness!</p>
+
+<p>A solemn fellow told me he had heard from Johnson who said he had
+already had much success from collecting in moss.<a name="FNanchor_2_13" id="FNanchor_2_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_13" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> With an icy
+politeness I asked who Johnson was. Who the Hell is Johnson? As a <i>quid
+pro quo</i> I began to talk of Yves Delage, which left him as much in the
+dark as he left me. Our Gods differ, we have a different hierarchy.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Well, how's your soul?" said R&mdash;&mdash;, bursting in with a sardonic smile.</p>
+
+<p>I gave him a despairing look and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! a pink one with blue spots," and he left me to my fate.</p>
+
+<p>Had tea with the &mdash;&mdash; and was amazed to find on the music tray in the
+drawing-room of these inoffensive artists a copy of &mdash;&mdash;'s Memoir on
+<i>Synapta</i>. Within his hearing, I said, "Did you and Mrs. &mdash;&mdash; find this
+exciting reading?" And I held it up with a sneer. I felt I had laid bare
+a nerve and forthwith proceeded to make it twinge. &mdash;&mdash;, of course, was
+glib with an explanation, yet the question remains incalculable&mdash;just
+how pleased that young man is with himself.</p>
+
+<p>After tea went out into the Studio and watched these two enthusiasts
+paint. I must have glowered at them. I&mdash;the energetic, ambitious,
+pushing youth&mdash;of necessity sitting down doing nought, as unconsidered
+as a child playing on the floor. I recollected my early days in my attic
+laboratory and sighed. Where is my energy now?</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. &mdash;&mdash; plays Chopin divinely well. How I envied this man&mdash;to have a
+wife play you Chopin!</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 24.</p>
+
+<p>It is fortunate I am ill in one way for I need not make my mind up about
+this War. I am not interested in it&mdash;this filth and lunacy. I have not
+yet made up my mind about myself. I am so steeped in myself&mdash;in my
+moods, vapours, idiosyncrasies, so self-sodden, that I am unable to
+stand clear of the data, to marshal and classify the multitude of facts
+and thence draw the deduction what manner of man I am. I should like to
+know&mdash;if only as a matter of curiosity. So what in God's name am I? A
+fool, of course, to start with&mdash;but the rest of the diagnosis?</p>
+
+<p>One feature is my incredible levity about serious matters. Nothing
+matters, provided the tongue is not furred. I have coquetted with death
+for so long now, and endured such prodigious ill-health that my main
+idea when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> in a fair state of repair is to seize the passing moment and
+squeeze it dry. The thing that counts is to be drunken; as Baudelaire
+says, "One must be for ever drunken; that is the sole question of
+importance. If you would not feel the horrible burden of time that
+bruises your shoulders and bends you to the earth, you must be drunken
+without cease."</p>
+
+<p>Another feature is my insatiable curiosity. My purpose is to move about
+in this ramshackle, old curiosity shop of a world sampling existence. I
+would try everything, meddle lightly with everything. Religions and
+philosophies I devour with a relish, Pragmatism and Bishop Berkeley and
+Bergson have been my favourite bagatelles in turn. My consciousness is a
+ragbag of things: all quips, quirks, and quillets, all excellent passes
+of pate, all the "obsolete curiosities of an antiquated cabinet" take my
+eye for a moment ere I pass on. In Sir Thomas Browne's <i>Pseudodoxia</i>, I
+am interested to find "why Jews do not stink, what is the superstition
+of sneezing after saluting, wherefore negroes are black," and so forth.
+There is a poetic appropriateness that in A.D. 1915 I should be occupied
+mainly in the study of Lice. I like the insolence of it.</p>
+
+<p>They tell me that if the Germans won it would put back the clock of
+civilisation for a century. But what is a meagre 100 years? Consider the
+date of the first Egyptian dynasty! We are now only in A.D. 1915&mdash;surely
+we could afford to chuck away a century or two? Why not evacuate the
+whole globe and give the ball to the Boches to play with&mdash;just as an
+experiment to see what they can make of it. After all there is no
+desperate hurry. Have we a train to catch? Before I could be serious
+enough to fight, I should want God first to dictate to me his programme
+of the future of mankind.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 25.</p>
+
+<p>Often in the middle of a quite vivid ten seconds of life, I find I have
+switched myself off from myself to make room for the person of a
+disinterested and usually<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> vulgar spectator. Even in the thrill of a
+devotional kiss I have overheard myself saying, "Hot stuff, this witch."
+Or in a room full of agreeable and pleasant people, while I am being as
+agreeable as I know how, comes the whisper in a cynical tone, "These
+damned women." I am apparently a triple personality:</p>
+
+<p>(1) The respectable youth.</p>
+
+<p>(2) The foul-mouthed commentator and critic.</p>
+
+<p>(3) The real but unknown I.</p>
+
+<p>Curious that these three should live together amiably in the same
+tenement!</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>In a Crowd</i></p>
+
+<p>A crowd makes egotists of us all. Most men find it repugnant to them to
+submerge themselves in a sea of their fellows. A silent, listening crowd
+is potentially full of commotion. Some poor devils suffocating and
+unable any longer to bear the strain will shout, "Bravo," or "Hear,
+hear," at every opportunity. At the feeblest joke we all laugh loudly,
+welcoming this means of self-survival. Hence the success of the
+Salvation Army. To be preached at and prayed for in the mass for long on
+end is what human nature can't endure in silence and a good deal of self
+can be smuggled by an experienced Salvationist into "Alleluia" or "The
+Lord be praised."</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Naming Cockroaches</i></p>
+
+<p>I had to determine the names of some exotic cockroaches to-day and
+finding it very difficult and dull raised a weak smile in two
+enthusiasts who know them as "Blattids" by rechristening them with great
+frivolity, "Fat 'eds."</p>
+
+<p>"These bloody insects," I said to an Australian entomologist of rare
+quality.</p>
+
+<p>"A good round oath," he answered quietly.</p>
+
+<p>"If it was a square one it wouldn't roll properly," I said. It is nice
+to find an entomologist with whom I can swear and talk bawdy.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 26.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>A Test of Happiness</i></p>
+
+<p>The true test of happiness is whether you know what day of the week it
+is. A miserable man is aware of this even in his sleep. To be as
+cheerful and rosy-cheeked on Monday as on Saturday, and at breakfast as
+at dinner is to&mdash;well, make an ideal husband.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>... It is a strange metempsychosis, this transformation of an
+enthusiast&mdash;tense, excitable, and active, into a sceptic, nerveless,
+ironical, and idle. That's what ill-health can do for a man. To be among
+enthusiasts&mdash;zoologists, geologists, entomologists&mdash;as I frequently am,
+makes me feel a very old man, regarding them as children, and provokes
+painful retrospection and sugary sentimentality over my past flame now
+burnt out.</p>
+
+<p>I do wonder where I shall end up; what shall I be twenty years hence? It
+alarms me to find I am capable of such remarkable changes in character.
+I am fluid and can be poured into any mould. I have moments when I see
+in myself the most staggering possibilities. I could become a wife
+beater, and a drug-taker (especially the last). My curiosity is often
+such a ridiculous weakness that I have found myself playing Peeping Tom
+and even spying into private documents. In a railway carriage I will
+twist my neck and risk any rudeness to see the title of the book my
+neighbour is reading or how the letter she is reading begins.</p>
+
+<p><i>April</i> 10.</p>
+
+<p>"Why," asks Samuel Butler, "should not chicken be born and clergymen be
+laid and hatched? Or why, at any rate, should not the clergyman be born
+full grown and in Holy Orders not to say already beneficed? The present
+arrangement is not convenient ... it is not only not perfect but so much
+the reverse that we could hardly find words to express our sense of its
+awkwardness if we could look upon it with new eyes...."</p>
+
+<p>As soon as we are born, if we could but get up, bathe,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> dress, shave,
+breakfast once for all, if we could "cut" these monotonous cycles of
+routine. If once the sun rose it would stay up, or once we were alive we
+were immortal!&mdash;how much forrarder we should all get&mdash;always at the
+heart of things, working without let or hindrance in a straight line for
+the millennium! Now we waltz along instead. Even planets die off and new
+ones come in their place. How infinitely wearisome it seems. When an old
+man dies what a waste, and when a baby is born what a redundancy of
+labour in front!</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Two People I hate in particular</i></p>
+
+<p>The man walking along the pavement in front of me giving me no room to
+pass under the satisfactory impression that he is the only being on the
+pavement or in the street, city, country, world, universe: and it all
+belongs to him even the moon and sun and stars.</p>
+
+<p>The woman on the 'bus the other night&mdash;pouring out an interminable flow
+of poisonous chatter into the ear of her man&mdash;poor, exhausted devil who
+kept answering dreamily "Oom" and"Yes" and "Oom"&mdash;how I hated her for
+his sake!</p>
+
+<p><i>April</i> 11.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Beethoven's Fifth Symphony</i></p>
+
+<p>If music moves me, it always generates images&mdash;a procession of
+apparently disconnected images in my mind. In the Fifth Symphony, for
+example, as soon as the first four notes are sounded and repeated, this
+magic population springs spontaneously into being. A nude,
+terror-stricken figure in headlong flight with hands pressed to the ears
+and arms bent at the elbows&mdash;a staring, bulgy-eyed mad-woman such as one
+sees in Raemakers' cartoons of the Belgian atrocities. A man in the
+first onset of mental agony on hearing sentence of death passed upon
+him. A wounded bird, fluttering and flopping in the grass. It is the
+struggle of a man with a steam-hammer&mdash;Fate. As tho' thro' the walls of
+a closed room&mdash;some mysterious room, a fearful spot&mdash;I crouch and listen
+and am conscious<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> that inside some brutal punishment is being meted out
+&mdash;there are short intervals, then unrelenting pursuit, then hammerlike
+blows&mdash;melodramatic thuds, terrible silences (I crouch and wonder what
+has happened), and the pursuit begins again. I see clasped hands and
+appealing eyes and feel very helpless and mystified outside. An
+epileptic vision or an opium dream&mdash;<i>Dostoievsky</i> or De Quincey set to
+music.</p>
+
+<p>In the Second Movement the man is broken, an unrecognisable vomit. I see
+a pale youth sitting with arms hanging limply between the knees, hands
+folded, and with sad, impenetrable eyes that have gazed on unspeakable
+horrors. I see the brave, tearful smile, the changed life after personal
+catastrophe, the Cross held before closing eyes, sudden absences of
+mind, reveries, poignant retrospects, the rustle of a dead leaf of
+thought at the bottom of the heart, the tortuous pursuit of past
+incidents down into the silence of yesterday, the droning of comfortable
+words, the painful collection of the wreckage of a life with intent to
+"carry on" for a while in duty bound, for the widow consolation in the
+child; a greyhound's cold wet nose nozzling into a listless hand, and
+outside a Thrush singing after the storm, etc., etc.</p>
+
+<p>In the Third Movement comes the crash by which I know something final
+and dreadful has happened. Then the resurrection with commotion in
+Heaven: tempests and human faces, scurryings to and fro, brazen
+portcullises clanging to, never to open more, the distant roll of drums
+and the sound of horses' hoofs. From behind the inmost veil of Heaven I
+faintly catch the huzzas of a great multitude. Then comes a great
+healing wind, then a few ghost-like tappings on the window pane till
+gradually the Avenue of Arches into Heaven come into view with a solemn
+cortege advancing slowly along.</p>
+
+<p>Above the great groundswell of woe, Hope is restored and the Unknown
+Hero enters with all pomp into his Kingdom, etc., etc.</p>
+
+<p>I am not surprised to learn that Beethoven was once on the verge of
+suicide.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>April</i> 15.</p>
+
+<p>There is an absurd fellow ... who insists on taking my pirouettes
+seriously. I say irresponsibly, "All men are liars," and he replies with
+jejuneness and exactitude of a pronouncing dictionary, "A liar is one
+who makes a false statement with intent to deceive." What can I do with
+him? "Did I ever meet a lady," he asked, "who wasn't afraid of mice?" "I
+don't know," I told him, "I never experiment with ladies in that way."</p>
+
+<p>He hates me.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 11.</p>
+
+<p>This mysterious world makes me chilly. It is chilly to be alive among
+ghosts in a nightmare of calamity. This Titanic war reduces me to the
+size and importance of a debilitated housefly. So what is a poor egotist
+to do? To be a common soldier is to become a pawn in the game between
+ambitious dynasts and their ambitious marshals. You lose all
+individuality, you become a "bayonet" or a "machine gun," or "cannon
+fodder," or "fighting material."</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 22.</p>
+
+<p>Generosity may be only weakness, philanthropy (beautiful word),
+self-advertisement, and praise of others sheer egotism. One can almost
+hear a eulogist winding himself up to strike his eulogy that comes out
+sententious, pompous, and full of self.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 23.</p>
+
+<p>The following is a description of Lermontov by Maurice Baring:</p>
+
+<p>"He had except for a few intimate friends an impossible temperament; he
+was proud, over-bearing, exasperated and exasperating, filled with a
+savage <i>amour-propre</i> and he took a childish delight in annoying; he
+cultivated 'le plaisir aristocratique de déplaire.' ... He could not
+bear not to make himself felt and if he felt he was unsuccessful in this
+by fair means he resorted to unpleasant ones.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> Yet he was warm-hearted,
+thirsting for love and kindness and capable of giving himself up to love
+if he chose.... At the bottom of all this lay no doubt a deep-seated
+disgust with himself and with the world in general, and a complete
+indifference to life resulting from large aspirations which could not
+find an outlet and recoiled upon himself."</p>
+
+<p>This is an accurate description of Me.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 26.</p>
+
+<p>The time will come&mdash;it's a great way off&mdash;when a joke about sex will be
+not so much objectionable as unintelligible. Thanks to Christian
+teaching, a nude body is now an obscenity, of the congress of the sexes
+it is indecent to speak and our birth is a corruption. Hence come a
+legion of evils: reticence, therefore ignorance and therefore venereal
+disease; prurience especially in adolescence, poisonous literature, and
+dirty jokes. The mind is contaminated from early youth; even the
+healthiest-minded girl will blush at the mention of <i>the wonder of
+creation</i>. Yet to the perfectly enfranchised mind it should be as
+impossible to joke about sex as about mind or digestion or physiology.
+The perfectly enfranchised poet&mdash;and Walt Whitman in "The Song of
+Myself" came near being it&mdash;should be as ready to sing of the incredible
+raptures of the sexual act between "twin souls" as of the clouds or
+sunshine. Every man or woman who has loved has a heart full of beautiful
+things to say but no man dare&mdash;for fear of the police, for fear of the
+coarse jests of others and even of a breakdown in his own
+highmindedness. I wonder just how much wonderful lyric poetry has thus
+been lost to the world!</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 27.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>The Pool: A Retrospect</i></p>
+
+<p>From above, the pool looked like any little innocent sheet of water. But
+down in the hollow itself it grew sinister. The villagers used to say
+and to believe that it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> had no bottom and certainly a very great depth
+in it could be <i>felt</i> if not accurately gauged as one stood at the
+water's edge. A long time ago, it was a great limestone quarry, but
+to-day the large mounds of rubble on one side of it are covered with
+grass and planted with mazzard trees, grown to quite a large girth. On
+the other side one is confronted by a tall sheet of black, carboniferous
+rock, rising sheer out of the inky water&mdash;a bare sombre surface on which
+no mosses even&mdash;"tender creatures of pity," Ruskin calls them&mdash;have
+taken compassion by softening the jagged edges of the strata or nestling
+in the scars. It is an excellent example of "Contortion" as Geologists
+say, for the beds are bent into a quite regular geometrical pattern
+&mdash;syncline and anticline in waves&mdash;by deep-seated plutonic force that
+makes the mind quake in the effort to imagine it.</p>
+
+<p>On the top of this rock and overhanging the water&mdash;a gaunt,
+haggard-looking Fir tree impends, as it seems in a perilous balance,
+while down below, the pool, sleek and shiny, quietly waits with a
+catlike patience.</p>
+
+<p>In summer time, successive rows of Foxgloves one behind the other in
+barbaric splendour are ranged around the grassy rubble slopes like
+spectators in an amphitheatre awaiting the spectacle. Fire-bellied Efts
+slip here and there lazily thro' the water. Occasionally a Grass-snake
+would swim across the pool and once I caught one and on opening his
+stomach found a large fire-bellied Eft inside. The sun beats fiercely
+into this deep hollow and makes the water tepid. On the surface grows a
+glairy Alga, which was once all green but now festers in yellow patches
+and causes a horrible stench. Everything is absolutely still, air and
+water are stagnant. A large <i>Dytiscus</i> beetle rises to the surface to
+breathe and every now and then large bubbles of marsh gas come sailing
+majestically up from the depth and explode quietly into the fetid air.
+The <i>horrificness</i> of this place impressed me even when I was intent
+only on fishing there for bugs and efts. Now, seen in retrospect, it
+haunts me.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 28.</p>
+
+<p>It is only by accident that certain of our bodily functions are
+distasteful. Many birds eat the faeces of their young. The vomits of
+some Owls are formed into shapely pellets, often of beautiful
+appearance, when composed of the glittering multi-coloured elytra of
+Beetles, etc. The common Eland is known to micturate on the tuft of hair
+on the crown of its head, and it does this habitually, when lying down,
+by bending its head around and down&mdash;apparently because of the aroma,
+perhaps of sexual importance during mating time, as it is a habit of the
+male alone.</p>
+
+<p>At lunch time, had an unpleasant intermittency period in my heart's
+action and this rather eclipsed my anxiety over a probable Zeppelin
+Raid. Went home to my rooms by 'bus, and before setting off to catch my
+train for West Wycombe to stay for the week-end at a Farm with
+E&mdash;&mdash; swallowed two teaspoonfuls of neat brandy, filled my flask, and
+took a taxi to Paddington. At 3.50 started to walk to C&mdash;&mdash; H&mdash;&mdash; Farm
+from W. Wycombe Station, where E&mdash;&mdash; has been lodging for some weeks
+taking a rest cure after a serious nervous breakdown thro' overwork. As
+soon as I stepped out of the train, I sniffed the fresh air and soon
+made off down the road, happy to have left London and the winter and the
+war far behind. The first man of whom I inquired the way happened to
+have been working at the Farm only a few weeks ago, so I relied
+implicitly on his directions, and as it was but a mile and a half
+decided that my wobbly heart could stand the strain. I set out with a
+good deal of pleasurable anticipation. I was genuinely looking forward
+to seeing E&mdash;&mdash;, altho' in the past few weeks our relations had become a
+little strained, at least on my part, mainly because of her little
+scrappy notes to me scribbled in pencil, undated, and dull! Yet I could
+do with a volume of "Sonnets from the Portuguese." These letters chilled
+me. In reply, I wrote with cold steel short, lifeless formal notes, for
+I felt genuinely aggrieved that she should care so little how she wrote
+to me or how she expressed her love. I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> became ironical with myself over
+the prospect of marrying a girl who appeared so little to appreciate my
+education and mental habits. [What a popinjay!&mdash;1917.] My petty spirit
+grew disenchanted, out of love. I was false to her in a hundred
+inconsiderable little ways and even deliberately planned the breaking
+off of the engagement some months hence when she should be restored to
+normal health.</p>
+
+<p>But once in the country and, as I thought, nearing my love at every step
+and at every bend in the road, even anticipating her arms around me with
+real pleasure (for she promised to meet me half way), I on a sudden grew
+eager for her again and was assured of a happy week-end with her. Then
+the road grew puzzling and I became confused, uncertain of the way. I
+began to murmur she should have given me instructions. Every now and
+then I had to stop and rest as my heart was beating so furiously.
+Espying a farm on the left I made sure I had arrived at my destination
+and walked across a field to it and entered the yard where I heard some
+one milking a cow in a shed. I shouted over the five-barred gate into
+empty space, "Is this C&mdash;&mdash; H&mdash;&mdash; Farm?" A labourer came out of the shed
+and redirected me. It was now ten to five. I was tired and out of sorts,
+and carried a troublesome little handbag. I swore and cursed and found
+fault with E&mdash;&mdash; and the Universe.</p>
+
+<p>I trudged on, asking people, as I went, the way, finally emerging from
+the cover of a beautiful wood thro' a wicket gate almost at the entrance
+to the Farm I sought. At the front door we embraced affectionately and
+we entered at once, I putting a quite good face upon my afternoon's
+exertions&mdash;when I consider my unbridled fury of a short time before.
+E&mdash;&mdash;, as brown as a berry, conducted me to my bedroom and I nearly
+forgot to take this obvious opportunity of kissing her again.</p>
+
+<p>"How are you?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"All right," she said, fencing.</p>
+
+<p>"But really?"</p>
+
+<p>"All right."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>(A little nettled): "My dear, that isn't going to satisfy me. You will
+have to tell me exactly how you are."</p>
+
+<p>After tea, I recovered myself and we went for a walk together. The
+beauty of the country warmed me up, and in the wood we kissed&mdash;I for my
+part happy and quite content with the present state of our relations,
+<i>i.e.</i>, affectionate but not perfervid.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 29.</p>
+
+<p>Got up early and walked around the Farm before breakfast. Everything
+promises to be delightful&mdash;young calves, broods of ducklings, and
+turkeys, fowls, cats and dogs. In the yard are two large Cathedral
+barns, with enormous pent roofs sloping down to within about two feet of
+the ground and entered by way of great double doors that open with the
+slowness and solemnity of a Castle's portal studded with iron knobs. It
+thrilled me to the marrow on first putting my head outside to be greeted
+with the grunt of an invisible pig that I found scraping his back on the
+other side of the garden wall.</p>
+
+<p>In the afternoon, E&mdash;&mdash; and I sat together in the Beech Wood: E&mdash;&mdash; on a
+deck chair and I on a rug on the ground. In spite of our beautiful
+surroundings we did not progress very well, but I attributed her slight
+aloofness to the state of her nerves. She is still far from recovered.
+These wonderful Beech Woods are quite new to me. The forest beech is a
+very different plant from the solitary tree. In the struggle to reach
+the light the Forest Beech grows lean and tall and gives an
+extraordinary suggestion of wiry powerful strength. On the margins of
+the wood, Bluebells were mobilised in serried ranks. Great Tits
+whistled&mdash;in the language of our allies&mdash;"Bijou, Bijou" and I agreed
+with every one of them.</p>
+
+<p>Some folk don't like to walk over Bluebells or Buttercups or other
+flowers growing on the ground. But it is foolish to try to pamper Nature
+as if she were a sickly child. She is strong and can stand it. You can
+stamp on and crush a thousand flowers&mdash;they will all come up again next
+year.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>By some labyrinthine way which I cannot now recall, the conversation
+worked round to a leading question by E.&mdash;if in times like these we
+ought not to cease being in love? She was quite calm and serious. I said
+"No, of course not, silly." My immediate apprehension was that she had
+perceived the coldness in my letters and I was quite satisfied that she
+was so well able to read the signs in the sky. "But you don't wish to go
+on?" she persisted. I persisted that I did, that I had no misgivings, no
+second thoughts, that I was not merely taking pity on her, etc. The wild
+temptation to seize this opportunity for a break I smothered in
+reflecting how ill she was and how necessary to wait first till she was
+well again. These thoughts passed swiftly, vaguely like wraiths thro' my
+mind: I was barely conscious of them. Then I recalled the sonnet about
+coming in the rearward of a conquered woe and mused thereon. But I took
+no action. [Fortunately&mdash;for me. 1916.]</p>
+
+<p>Presently with cunning I said that there was no cloud on my horizon
+whatever&mdash;only her "letters disappointed me a little&mdash;they were so
+cold," but "as soon as I saw you again, darling, those feelings
+disappeared."</p>
+
+<p>As soon as they were spoken I knew they were not as they might seem, the
+words of a liar and hypocrite. They <i>became</i> true. E&mdash;&mdash; looked very
+sweet and helpless and I loved her again as much as ever.</p>
+
+<p>"It's funny," she said, "but I thought your letters were cold. Letters
+are so horrid."</p>
+
+<p>The incident shews how impossible is intellectual honesty between
+lovers. Truth is at times a hound which must to kennel.</p>
+
+<p>"Write as you would speak," said I. "You know I'm not one to carp about
+a spelling mistake!"</p>
+
+<p>The latter remark astonished me. Was it indeed I who was speaking? All
+the week I had been fuming over this. Yet I was honest: the Sun and E.'s
+presence were dispelling my ill-humours and crochets. We sealed our
+conversation with a kiss and swore never to doubt each other again. E.'s
+spell was beginning to act. It is always the same. I cannot<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> resist the
+actual presence of this woman. Out of her sight, I can in cold blood
+plan a brutal rupture. I can pay her a visit when the first kiss is a
+duty and the embrace a formality. But after 5 minutes I am as passionate
+and devoted as before. It is always thus. After leaving her, I am angry
+to think that once more I have succumbed.</p>
+
+<p>In the evening we went out into a field and sat together in the grass.
+It is beautiful. We lay flat on our backs and gazed up at the sky.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>S.H. has died of enteric at Malta. In writing to Mrs. H., instead of
+dwelling on what a splendid fellow he was I belaboured the fact that I
+still remembered our boyish friendship in every detail and still kept
+his photo on my mantelpiece and altho' "in later years" I didn't suppose
+we "had a great deal in common I discovered that a friendship even
+between two small boys cannot wholly disappear into the void."
+Discussing myself when I ought to have been praising him! Ugh! She will
+think what a conceited, puff-breasted Jackanapes. These phrases have
+rankled in my mind ever since I dropped the letter into the letter-box.
+"Your Stanley, Mrs. H., was of course a very inferior sort of person and
+naturally, you could hardly expect me to remain friendly with him but
+rest assured I hadn't forgotten him," etc.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>The Luxury of Lunacy</i></p>
+
+<p>Yesterday, I read a paper at the Zoological Society about lice. There
+was a goodly baldness of sconce and some considerable length of beard
+present that listened or appeared to listen to my innocent remarks with
+great solemnity and sapience.... I badly wanted to tell them some horrid
+stories about human lice but I had not the courage. I wanted to jolt
+these middle-aged gentlemen by performing a few tricks but I am too
+timid for such adventures. But before going to sleep I imagined a
+pandemonium in which with a perfectly glacial manner I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> produced lice
+alive from my pockets, conjured them down from the roof in a rain, with
+the skilful sleight of hand drew them out of the chairman's beard, made
+the ladies scream as I approached, dared to say they were all lousy and
+unclean and finished up with an eloquent apostrophe after the manner of
+Thomas de Quincey (and of Sir Walter Raleigh before him) beginning:</p>
+
+<p>"O just, subtle and eloquent avenger, pierce the hides of these
+abominable old fogies, speckle their polished calvaria with the scarlet
+blood drops...."</p>
+
+<p>But I hadn't the courage. Shelley in a crowded omnibus suddenly burst
+out: "O let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of
+Kings, etc." I've always wanted to do something like that and when I
+have £5 to spare I hope to pull the communication cord of an express
+train&mdash;my hands tingle as often as I look at it. Dr. Johnson's courage
+in tapping the lamp-posts is really everyone's envy tho' we laugh at him
+for it and say, green-eyed, that he was mad. In walking along the
+pavement, I sometimes indulge myself in the unutterable, deeply rooted
+satisfaction of stepping on a separate flagstone where this is possible
+with every stride. And if this is impossible or not easy, there arises
+in me a vague mental uneasiness, some subconscious suspicion that the
+world is not properly geometrical and that the whole universe perhaps is
+working out of truth. I am also rather proud of my courageous
+self-surrender to the daemon of laughter, especially in those early days
+when H. and I used to sit opposite one another and howl like hyenas.
+After the most cacophonous cachinnations as soon as we had recovered
+ourselves he or I would regularly remark in serious and confidential
+tones, "I say&mdash;we <i>really</i> are going mad." But what a delightful luxury
+to be thus mad amid the great, spacious, architectural solemnity with
+gargoyles and effigies of a scientific meeting! Some people never do
+more than chuckle or smile&mdash;and they are often very humorous happy
+people, ignorant nevertheless of the joy of riding themselves on the
+snaffle and losing all control.</p>
+
+<p>While boating on &mdash;&mdash; last summer, we saw two persons,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> a man and a girl
+sitting together on the beach reading a book with heads almost touching.</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder what they're reading?" I said, and I was dying to know. We
+made a few facetious guesses.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall I ask?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, do," said Mrs. &mdash;&mdash;.</p>
+
+<p>The truth is we all wanted to know. We were suddenly mad with curiosity
+as we watched the happy pair turning over leaf after leaf.</p>
+
+<p>While R&mdash;&mdash; leaned on his oars, I stood up in the boat and threatened to
+shout out a polite enquiry&mdash;just to prove that the will is free. But
+seeing my intention the boat-load grew nervous and said seriously, "No,"
+which unnerved me at the last moment so I sat down again. Why was I so
+afraid of being thought a lunatic by two persons in the distance whom I
+had never seen and probably would never see again? Besides I <i>was</i> a
+lunatic&mdash;we all were.</p>
+
+<p>In our post-prandial perambulations about S. Kensington G&mdash;&mdash; and I
+often pass the window of a photographer's shop containing always a
+profusion of bare arms, chests, necks, bosoms belonging to actresses,
+aristocrats and harlots&mdash;some very beautiful indeed. Yet on the whole
+the window annoys us, especially one picture of a young thing with an
+arum lily (ghastly plant!) laid exquisitely across her breast.</p>
+
+<p>"Why do we suffer this?" I asked G&mdash;&mdash;, tapping the window ledge as we
+stood.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," he answered lamely&mdash;morose. (Pause while the two
+embittered young men continue to look in and the beautiful young women
+continue to look out.)</p>
+
+<p>Thoroughly disgruntled I said at last: "If only we had the courage of
+our innate madness, the courage of children, lunatics and men of genius,
+we should get some stamp paper, and stick a square beneath each
+photograph with our comments."</p>
+
+<p>Baudelaire describes how he dismissed a glass vendor because he had no
+coloured glasses&mdash;"glasses of rose and crimson, magical glasses, glasses
+of Paradise"&mdash;and, stepping out on to his balcony, threw a flowerpot
+down on the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> tray of glasses as soon as the man issued into the street
+below, shouting down furiously, "The Life Beautiful! The Life
+Beautiful."</p>
+
+<p>Bergson's theory is that laughter is a "social gesture" so that when a
+man in a top hat treads on a banana skin and slips down we laugh at him
+for his lack "of living pliableness." At this rate we ought to be
+profoundly solemn at Baudelaire's action and moreover a "social gesture"
+is more likely to be an expression of society's will to conformity in
+all its members rather than any dangerous "living pliableness." Society
+hates living pliableness and prefers drill, routine, orthodoxy,
+conformity. It hated the living pliableness of Turner, of Keats, of
+Samuel Butler and a hundred others.</p>
+
+<p>But to return to lunacy: the truth is we are all mad fundamentally and
+are merely schooled into sanity by education. Pascal wrote: "Men are so
+necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of
+madness." And, in fact, the man who has succeeded in extirpating this
+intoxication of life is usually said to be "temporarily insane." In
+those melancholy interludes of sanity when the mind becomes rationalised
+we all know how much we have been deceived and gulled, what an
+extraordinary spectacle humanity presents rushing on in noise and tumult
+no one knows why or whither. Look at that tailor in his shop&mdash;why does
+he do it? Some day in the future he thinks he will.... But the day
+never comes and he is nevertheless content.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 30.</p>
+
+<p>A brilliantly sunny day. This funny old farm-house where we are staying
+quite delights me. It is pleasant, too, to dawdle over dressing, to put
+away shaving tackle for a day or so, to jump out of bed in the morning
+and thrust my head out of the window into the fresh and stock-scented
+air of the garden, listen to the bird chorus or watch a "scrap" in the
+poultry-run. Then all unashamed, I dress myself before a dear old lady
+in a flowery print gown concealing 4 thin legs and over the top of the
+mirror a piece<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> of lace just like a bonnet, caught up in front by a
+piece of pink ribbon. On the walls Pear's Soap Annuals, on a side table
+<i>Swiss Family Robinson</i> and <i>Children of the New Forest</i>. Then there are
+rats under the floors, two wooden staircases which wind up out of sight,
+two white dairies, iron hapses on all the doors and a privy at the top
+of the orchard. (Tell me&mdash;how do you explain the psychosis of a being
+who on a day must have seized hammer and nail and an almanac picture of
+a woman in the snow with a basket of goodies&mdash;"An Errand of
+Mercy"&mdash;carried all three to the top of the orchard and nailed the
+picture up on the dirty wall in the semi-darkness of an earth-closet?)</p>
+
+<p>Got up quite early before breakfast and went birds'-nesting.... It would
+take too long and be too sentimental for me to record my feelings on
+looking into the first nest I found&mdash;a Chaffinch's, the first wild
+bird's eggs I have seen for many years. As I stood with an egg between
+thumb and forefinger, my memories flocked down like white birds and
+surrounded me. I remained still, fed them with my thoughts and let them
+perch upon my person&mdash;a second St. Francis of Assisi. Then I shoo'ed
+them all away and prepared for the more palpitating enjoyment of to-day.</p>
+
+<p>After breakfast we sat in the Buttercup field&mdash;my love and I&mdash;and
+"plucked up kisses by the roots that grew upon our lips." The sun was
+streaming down and the field thickly peopled with Buttercups. From where
+we sat we could see the whole of the valley below and Farmer Whaley&mdash;a
+speck in the distance&mdash;working a machine in a field. We watched him
+idly. The gamekeeper's gun went off in one of the covers. It was jolly
+to put our heads together right down deep in the Buttercups and
+luxuriously follow the pelting activities of the tiny insects crawling
+here and there in the forest of grass, clambering over a broken blade
+athwart another like a wrecked tree or busily enquiring into some low
+scrub at the roots. A chicken came our way and he seemed an enormous
+bird from the grass-blade's point of view. How nice to be a chicken in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>
+a field of Buttercups and see them as big as Sunflowers! or to be a
+Gulliver in the Beech Woods! to be so small as to be able to climb a
+Buttercup, tumble into the corolla and be dusted yellow or to be so big
+as to be able to pull up a Beech-tree with finger and thumb! If only a
+man were a magician, could play fast and loose with rigid Nature? what a
+multitude of rich experiences he could discover for himself!</p>
+
+<p>I looked long and steadily this morning at the magnificent torso of a
+high forest Beech and tried to project myself into its lithe tiger-like
+form, to feel its electric sap vitalising all my frame out to the tip of
+every tingling leaf, to possess its splendid erectness in my own bones.
+I could have flung my arms around its fascinating body but the austerity
+of the great creature forbad it. Then a Hawk fired my ambition!&mdash;to be a
+Hawk, or a Falcon, to have a Falcon's soul, a Falcon's heart&mdash;that
+splendid muscle in the cage of the thorax&mdash;and the Falcon's pride and
+sagacious eye!<a name="FNanchor_3_14" id="FNanchor_3_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_14" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<p>When the sun grew too hot we went into the wood where waves of Bluebells
+dashed up around the foot of the Oak in front of us.... I never knew
+before, the delight of offering oneself up&mdash;an oblation of one's whole
+being; I even longed for some self-sacrifice, to have to give up
+something for her sake. It intoxicated me to think I was making another
+happy....</p>
+
+<p>After a lunch of scrambled eggs and rhubarb and cream went up into the
+Beech Wood again and sat on a rug at the foot of a tree. The sun
+filtered in thro' the greenery casting a "dim, religious light."</p>
+
+<p>"It's like a cathedral," I chattered away, "stained glass windows,
+pillars, aisles&mdash;all complete."</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span></p><p>"It would be nice to be married in a Cathedral like this," she said.
+"At C&mdash;&mdash; Hall Cathedral, by the Rev. Canon <i>Beech</i>...."</p>
+
+<p>"Sir Henry Wood was the organist."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said, "and the Rev. Blackbird the precentor."</p>
+
+<p>We laughed over our silliness!</p>
+
+<p>Shrew-mice pattered over the dead leaves and one came boldly into view
+under a bramble bush&mdash;she had never seen one before. Overhead, a ribald
+fellow of a Blackbird whistled a jaunty tune. E&mdash;&mdash; laughed. "I am sure
+that Blackbird is laughing at us," she said. "It makes me feel quite
+hot."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<p>This evening we sat on the slope of a big field where by lowering our
+eyes we could see the sun setting behind the grass blades&mdash;a very pretty
+sight which I do not remember ever to have noted before. A large blue
+<i>Carabus</i> beetle was stumbling about, Culvers cooed in the woods near
+by. It was delightful to be up 600 feet on a grassy field under the
+shadow of a large wood at sunset with my darling.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 31.</p>
+
+<p>Sitting at tea in the farm house to-day E&mdash;&mdash; cried suddenly, pointing
+to a sandy cat in the garden:</p>
+
+<p>"There,&mdash;he's the father of the little kittens in the barn and I'll tell
+you how we know. P&mdash;&mdash; noticed the kittens had big feet and later on saw
+that old Tom stalking across the garden with big feet of exactly the
+same kind."</p>
+
+<p>"So you impute the paternity of the kittens to the gentleman under the
+laurel bushes?"</p>
+
+<p>I looked at the kittens to-night and found they had extra toes. "Mr.
+Sixtoes," as W&mdash;&mdash; calls him also possesses six toes, so the
+circumstantial evidence looks black against him.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 1.</p>
+
+<p>In the Beech Wood all the morning. Heigh-ho! it's grand to lie out as
+straight as a line on your back, gaze upwards into the tree above, and
+with a caressing eye follow<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> its branches out into their multitudinous
+ramifications forward and back&mdash;luxurious travel for the tired eye. ...
+Then I would shut my eyes and try to guess where her next kiss would
+descend. Then I opened my eyes and watched her face in the most
+extravagant detail, I counted the little filaments on her precious mole
+and saw the sun thro' the golden down of her throat....</p>
+
+<p>Sunlight and a fresh wind. A day of tiny cameos, little <i>coups
+d'Å“il</i>, fleeting impressions snapshotted on the mind: the glint on
+the keeper's gun as he crossed a field a mile away below us, sunlight
+all along a silken hawser which some Spider engineer had spun between
+the tops of two tall trees spanning the whole width of a bridle path,
+the constant patter of Shrew-mice over dead leaves, the pendulum of a
+Bumble-bee in a flower, and the just perceptible oscillation of the tree
+tops in the wind. While we are at meals the perfume of Lilac and Stocks
+pours in thro' the window and when we go to bed it is still pouring in
+by the open lattice.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 2.</p>
+
+<p>Each day I drop a specially selected Buttercup in past the little
+"Peeler," at the apex of the "V" to lie among the blue ribbons of her
+camisoles&mdash;those dainty white leaves that wrap around her bosom like the
+petals around the heart of a Rose. Then at night when she undresses, it
+falls out and she preserves it.</p>
+
+<p>In the woods, hearing an extra loud patter on the leaves, we turned our
+heads and saw a Frog hopping our way. I caught him and gave an
+elementary lesson in Anatomy. I described to her the brain, the pineal
+organ in Anguis, Sphenodon's pineal eye, etc. Then we fell to kissing
+again.... Every now and then she raises her head and listens (like a
+Thrush on the lawn) thinking she hears someone approach. We neither of
+us speak much ... and at the end of the day, the nerve endings on my
+lips are tingling.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Farmer Whaley is a funny old man with a soft pious voice. When he feeds
+the Fowls, he sucks in a gentle, caressing noise between his lips for
+all the world as if he fed them because he loved them, and not because
+he wants to fatten them up for killing. His daughter Lucy, aged 22,
+loves all the animals of the farm and they all love her; the Cows stand
+monumentally still while she strokes them down the blaze or
+affectionately waggles their dewlaps. This morning, she walked up to a
+little Calf in the farm-yard scarce a fortnight old which started to
+"back" in a funny way, spraddling out its legs and lowering its head.
+Miss Lucy laughed merrily and cried "Ah! you funny little thing," and
+went off on her way to feed the Fowls who all raced to the gate as soon
+as they heard her footsteps. She brought in two double-yolked Ducks'
+eggs for us to see and marvel at. In the breakfast room stands a stuffed
+Collie dog in a glass case. I'd as soon embalm my grandmother and keep
+her on the sideboard.</p>
+
+<p>I asked young George, the farm-boy, what bird went like this: I whistled
+it. He looked abashed and said a Chaffinch. I told Miss Lucy who said
+George was a silly boy, and Miss Lucy told Farmer Whaley who said George
+ought to know better&mdash;it was a Mistle-Thrush.</p>
+
+<p>The letters are brought us each morning by a tramp with a game leg who
+secretes his Majesty's Mails in a shabby bowler hat, the small packages
+and parcels going to the roomy tail pocket of a dirty morning coat. A
+decayed gentleman of much interest to us.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 3.</p>
+
+<p>We have made a little nest in the wood and I lead her into it by the
+hand over the briars and undergrowth as if conducting her to the grand
+piano on a concert platform. I kissed her....</p>
+
+<p>Then in a second we switch back to ordinary conversation. In an ordinary
+conversational voice I ask the trees, the birds, the sky.</p>
+
+<p>"What's become of all the gold?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"What's become of Waring?"</p>
+
+<p>"What is Love? 'Tis not hereafter."</p>
+
+<p>"Where are the snows of yesteryear?"</p>
+
+<p>"Who killed Cock Robin?"</p>
+
+<p>"Who's who?"</p>
+
+<p>And so on thro' all the great interrogatives that I could think of till
+she stopped my mouth with a kiss and we both laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Penderkins," I say. "Miss Penderlet, Miss Pender-au-lait, Miss
+Pender-filings."</p>
+
+<p>What do I mean? she cries. "What's the point of the names? Why take my
+name in vain? Why? What? How?"</p>
+
+<p>She does not know that clever young men sometimes trade on their
+reputation among simpler folk by pretending that meaningless remarks
+conceal some subtlety or cynicism, some little Attic snap.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I have been teaching her to distinguish the songs of different birds and
+often we sit a long while in the Cathedral Wood while I say, "What's
+that?" and "What's that?" and she tells me. It is delightful to watch
+her dear serious face as she listens.... This evening I gave a <i>viva
+voce</i> examination as per below:</p>
+
+<p>"What does the Yellow Hammer say?"</p>
+
+<p>"What colour are the Hedge Sparrow's eggs?"</p>
+
+<p>"Describe the Nightjar's voice."</p>
+
+<p>"How many eggs does it lay?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! you never told me about the Nightjar," she cried outraged.</p>
+
+<p>"No: it's a difficult question put in for candidates taking honours."</p>
+
+<p>Then we rambled on into Tomfoolery. "Describe the call-note of a motor
+omnibus." "Why does the chicken cross the road?" and "What's
+that?"&mdash;when a railway engine whistled in the distance.</p>
+
+<p>Measure by this our happiness!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 4.</p>
+
+<p>At a quarter past eight, this morning, the horse and trap were awaiting
+me outside, and bidding her "Goodbye" I got in and drove off&mdash;she riding
+on the step down so far, as the gate. Then we waved till we were out of
+sight. Back in London by 10 a.m. She makes slow progress, poor dear&mdash;her
+nerves are still very much of a jangle. But I am better, my heart is
+less wobbly.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 5.</p>
+
+<p>R&mdash;&mdash; cannot make me out. He says one day I complain bitterly at not
+receiving a Portuguese sonnet once a week, and the next all is well and
+Love reigneth. "Verily a Sphinx."</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 7.</p>
+
+<p>Spent the afternoon at the Royal Army Medical College in consultation
+with the Professor of Hygiene. Amid all the paraphernalia of research,
+even when discussing a serious problem with a serious Major, I could not
+take myself seriously. I am incurably trivial and always feel myself an
+irresponsible youth, wondering and futile, among owlish grown-ups.</p>
+
+<p>At 4 p.m. departed and went down on Vauxhall Bridge and watched a
+flour-barge being unloaded before returning to the Museum. I could
+readily hang on behind a cart, stare at an accident, pull a face at a
+policeman and then run away.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 20.</p>
+
+<p>... It annoys me to find the <i>laissez-faire</i> attitude of our relatives.
+Not one with a remonstrance for us and yet all the omens are against our
+marriage. In the state of my nervous system and in the state of hers&mdash;we
+have both had serious nervous break-downs&mdash;how impossible it seems! Yet
+they say all the old conventional things to us, about our happiness and
+so on!...</p>
+
+<p>... Am I a moral monster? Surely a man who can<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> combine such calculating
+callousness with really generous impulses of the heart is&mdash;what?</p>
+
+<p>The truth is I think I am in love with her: but I am also mightily in
+love with myself. One or the other has to give.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 25.</p>
+
+<p>If sometimes you saw me in my room by myself, you would say I was a
+ridiculous coxcomb. For I walk about, look out of the window then at the
+mirror&mdash;turning my head sideways perhaps so as to see it in profile. Or
+I gaze down into my eyes&mdash;my eyes always impress me&mdash;and wonder what
+effect I produce on others. This, I believe, is not so much vanity as
+curiosity. I know I am not prepossessing in appearance&mdash;my nose is
+crooked and my skin is blotched. Yet my physique&mdash;because it is
+mine&mdash;interests me. I like to see myself walking and talking. I should
+like to hold myself in my hand in front of me like a Punchinello and
+carefully examine myself at my leisure.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 28.</p>
+
+<p>Saw my brother A&mdash;&mdash; off at Waterloo en route for Armageddon. Darling
+fellow. He shook hands with P&mdash;&mdash; and H&mdash;&mdash;, and P&mdash;&mdash; wished him
+"Goodbye, and good luck." Then he held my hand a moment, said "Goodbye,
+old man," and for a second gave me a queer little nervous look. I could
+only say "Goodbye," but we understand each other perfectly.... It is
+horrible. I love him tenderly.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 29.</p>
+
+<p><i>Sleep</i></p>
+
+<p>Sleep means unconsciousness: unconsciousness is a solemn state&mdash;you get
+it for example from a blow on the head with a mallet. It always
+weightily impresses me to see someone asleep&mdash;especially someone I love
+as to-day, stretched out as still as a log&mdash;who perhaps a few minutes
+ago was alive, even animated. And there is nothing so welcome, unless it
+be the sunrise, as the first faint gleam of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> recognition in the
+half-opened eye when consciousness like a mighty river begins to flow in
+and restore our love to us again.</p>
+
+<p>When I go to bed myself, I sometimes jealously guard my faculties from
+being filched away by sleep. I almost fear sleep: it makes me
+apprehensive&mdash;this wonderful and unknowable Thing which is going to
+happen to me for which I must lay myself out on a bed and wait, with an
+elaborate preparedness. Unlike Sir Thomas Browne, I am not always so
+content to take my leave of the sun and sleep, if need be, into the
+resurrection. And I sometimes lie awake and wonder when the mysterious
+Visitor will come to me and call me away from this thrilling world, and
+how He does it, to which end I try to remain conscious of the gradual
+process and to understand it: an impossibility of course involving a
+contradiction in terms. So I shall never know, nor will anybody else.</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 2.</p>
+
+<p>I've had such a successful evening&mdash;you've no idea! The pen simply flew
+along, automatically easy, page after page in perfect sequence. My style
+trilled and bickered and rolled and ululated in an infinite variety; you
+will find in it all the subtlest modulations, inflections and suavities.
+My afflatus came down from Heaven in a bar of light like the
+Shekinah&mdash;straight from God, very God of very God. I worked in a golden
+halo of light and electric sparks came off my pen nib as I scratched the
+paper.</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 3.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>The Clever Young Man</i></p>
+
+<p>Argued with R&mdash;&mdash; this morning. He is a type specimen of the clever
+young man. We both are. Our flowers of speech are often forced hot-house
+plants, paradoxes and cynicisms fly as thick as driving rain and Shaw is
+our great exemplar. I could write out an exhaustive analysis of the
+clever young man, and being one myself can speak from "inspired sources"
+as the newspapers say.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A common habit is to underline and memorise short, sharp, witty remarks
+he sees in books and then on future occasions dish them up for his own
+self-glorification. If the author be famous he begins, "As &mdash;&mdash; says,
+etc." If unknown the quotation is quietly purloined. He is always very
+self-conscious and at the same time very self-possessed and very
+conceited. You tell me with tonic candour that I am insufferably
+conceited. In return, I smile, making a sardonic avowal of my good
+opinion of myself, my theory being that as conceit is, as a rule,
+implicit and, as a rule, blushingly denied, you will mistake my impudent
+confession for bluff and conclude there is really something far more
+substantial and honest beneath my apparent conceit. If, on the other
+hand, I am conceited, why I have admitted it&mdash;I agree with you&mdash;but tho'
+there is no virtue in the confession being quite detached and
+unashamed&mdash;still you haven't caught me by the tail. It is very difficult
+to circumvent a clever young man. He is as agile as a monkey.</p>
+
+<p>His principal concern of course is to arouse and maintain a reputation
+for profundity and wit. This is done by the simple mechanical formula of
+antithesis: if you like winkles he proves that cockles are inveterately
+better; if you admire Ruskin he tears him to ribbons. If you want to
+learn to swim&mdash;as it is safer, he shows it is more dangerous to know how
+to swim and so on. I know his whole box of tricks. I myself am now
+playing the clever young man by writing out this analysis just as if I
+were not one myself.</p>
+
+<p>You doubt my cleverness? Well, some years ago in R&mdash;&mdash;'s presence I
+called &mdash;&mdash;"the Rev. Fastidious Brisk,"&mdash;the nickname be it recalled
+which Henley gave to Stevenson (without the addition of "Rev."). At the
+time I had no intention of appropriating the witticism as I quite
+imagined R&mdash;&mdash; was acquainted with it. His unexpected explosion of
+mirth, however, made me uncomfortably uncertain of this, yet for the
+life of me I couldn't muster the honesty to assure him that my feather
+was a borrowed one. A few weeks later he referred to it again<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> as
+"certainly one of my better ones"&mdash;but still I remained dumb and the
+time for explanations went for once and all. Now see what a pretty
+pickle I am in: the name "Brisk" or "F.B." is in constant use by us for
+this particular person&mdash;he goes by no other name, meanwhile I sit and
+wonder how long it will be before R&mdash;&mdash; finds me out. There are all
+sorts of ways in which he might find out: he might read about it for
+himself, someone might tell him or&mdash;worst of all&mdash;one day when we are
+dining out somewhere he will announce to the whole company my brilliant
+appellation as a little after-dinner diversion: I shall at once observe
+that the person opposite me <i>knows</i> and is about to air his knowledge;
+then I shall look sternly at him and try to hold him: he will hesitate
+and I shall land him with a left and right: "I suppose you've read
+Henley's verses on Stevenson?" I remark easily and in a moment or so
+later the conversation has moved on.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 1.</p>
+
+<p>Am getting married at &mdash;&mdash; Register Office on September 15th. It is
+impossible to set down here all the labyrinthine ambages of my will and
+feelings in regard to this event. Such incredible vacillations, doubts,
+fears. I have been living at a great rate below surface recently. "If
+you enjoy only twelve months' happiness," the Doctor said to me, "it is
+worth while." But he makes a recommendation.... At his suggestion E&mdash;&mdash;
+went to see him and from his own mouth learnt all the truth about the
+state of my health, to prevent possible mutual recriminations in the
+future.<a name="FNanchor_4_15" id="FNanchor_4_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_15" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> To marry an introspective dyspeptic&mdash;what a prospect for
+her!... I exercise my microscopic analysis on her now as well as on
+myself.... This power in me is growing daily more automatic and more
+repugnant. It is a nasty morbid unhealthy growth that I want to hide if
+I cannot destroy. It amounts to being able at will to switch myself in
+and out of all my most cherished emotions; it is like the case in Sir
+Michael Foster's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> <i>Physiology</i> of a man who, by pressing a tumour in his
+neck could stop or at any rate control the action of his heart.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 2.</p>
+
+<p>House pride in newly-wed folk, for example, H. and D. to-day at Golder's
+Green or the Teignmouth folk, is very trying to the bachelor visitor.
+They will carry a chair across the room as tenderly as tho' it were a
+child and until its safe transit is assured, all conversation goes by
+the board. Or the wife suddenly makes a remark to the husband <i>sotto
+voce</i>, both thereupon start up simultaneously (leaving the fate of
+Warsaw undecided) while you, silenced by this unexpected manœuvre, wilt
+away in your chair, the pregnant phrase still-born on your lips.
+Presently they re-enter the room with the kitten that was heard in the
+scullery or with a big stick used to flourish at a little Tomtit on the
+rose tree. <i>She</i> apologises and both settle down again, recompose their
+countenances into a listening aspect and with a devastating politeness,
+pick up the poor, little, frayed-out thread of the conversation where it
+left off with: "Europe? you were saying...." I mobilise my scattered
+units of ideas but it is all a little chilly for the lady of the house
+if she listens with her face and speaks with her lips&mdash;her heart is far
+from me: she fixes a glassy eye on the tip of my cigarette, waiting to
+see if the ash will fall on her carpet.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 6.</p>
+
+<p>The most intimate and extensive journal can only give each day a
+relatively small sifting of the almost infinite number of things that
+flow thro' the consciousness. However vigilant and artful a diarist may
+be, plenty of things escape him and in any event re-collection is not
+re-creation....</p>
+
+<p>To keep a journal is to have a secret liaison of a very sentimental
+kind. A <i>journal intime</i> is a super-confidante to whom everything is
+told and confessed. For an engaged or married man to have a secret
+super-confidante who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> knows things which are concealed from his lady
+seems to me to be deliberate infidelity. I am as it were engaged to two
+women and one of them is being deceived. The word "Deceit" comes up
+against me in this double life I lead, and insists I shall name a plain
+thing bluntly. There is something very like sheer moral obliquity in
+these entries behind her back.... Is this journal habit slowly
+corrupting my character? Can an engaged or married man conscientiously
+continue to write his <i>journal intime</i>?</p>
+
+<p>This question of giving up my faithful friend after September I must
+consider.</p>
+
+<p>Of course most men have something to conceal from someone. Most married
+men are furtive creatures, and married women too. But I have a Gregers
+Werle-like passion for life to be lived on a foundation of truth in
+every intercourse. I would have my wife know all about me and if I
+cannot be loved for what I surely am, I do not want to be loved for what
+I am not. If I continue to write therefore she shall read what I have
+written....</p>
+
+<p>My Journal keeps open house to every kind of happening in my soul.
+Provided it is a veritable autochthon&mdash;I don't care how much of a
+tatterdemalion or how ugly or repulsive&mdash;I take him in and&mdash;I fear
+sponge him down with excuses to make him more creditable in other's
+eyes. You may say why trouble whether you do or whether you don't tell
+us all the beastly little subterranean atrocities that go on in your
+mind. Any eminently "right-minded" <i>Times</i> or <i>Spectator</i> reader will
+ask: "Who in Faith's name is interested in your introspective
+muck-rakings&mdash;in fact, who the Devil are you?" To myself, a person of
+vast importance and vast interest, I reply,&mdash;as are other men if I could
+but understand them as well. And in the firm belief that whatever is
+inexorably true however unpleasant and discreditable (in fact true
+things can never lack a certain dignity), I would have you know Mr.
+<i>Times</i>- and Mr. <i>Spectator-reader</i> that actual crimes have many a time
+been enacted in the secrecy of my own heart and the only difference
+between me and an habitual criminal is that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> the habitual criminal has
+the courage and the nerve and I have not. What, then, may these crimes
+be? Nothing much&mdash;only murders, theft, rape, etc. None of them, thank
+God; fructify in action&mdash;or at all events only the lesser ones. My
+outward and visible life if I examine it is merely a series of
+commonplace, colourless and thoroughly average events. But if I analyse
+myself, my inner life, I find I am both incredibly worse and incredibly
+better than I appear. I am Christ and the Devil at the same time&mdash;or as
+my sister once called me&mdash;a child, a wise man, and the Devil all in one.
+Just as no one knows my crimes so no one knows of my good actions. A
+generous impulse seizes me round the heart and I am suddenly moved to
+give a poor devil a £5 note. But no one knows this because by the time I
+come to the point I find myself handing him a sixpenny-bit and am quite
+powerless to intervene. Similarly my murders end merely in a little
+phlegm.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 7.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Two Adventures</i></p>
+
+<p>On a 'bus the other day a woman with a baby sat opposite, the baby
+bawled, and the woman at once began to unlace herself, exposing a large,
+red udder, which she swung into the baby's face. The infant, however,
+continued to cry and the woman said,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Come on, there's a good boy&mdash;if you don't, I shall give it to the
+gentleman opposite."</p>
+
+<p>Do I look ill-nourished?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<p>"'Arma virumque cano,'" a beggar said to me this morning in the High
+Street, "or as the boy said, 'Arms and the man with a dog,' mistaking
+the verb for the noun. Oh! yes, sir, I remember my Latin. Of course, I
+feel it's rather invidious my coming to you like this, but everything is
+absolutely 'non est' with me," and so on.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear sir," I answered expansively, "I am as poor as you are. You at
+least have seen better days you say&mdash;but I never have."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He changed in a minute his cringeing manner and rejoined:</p>
+
+<p>"No, I shouldn't think you had," eyeing me critically and slinking off.</p>
+
+<p>Am I <i>so</i> shabby?</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 8.</p>
+
+<p>By Jove! I hope I live! ... Why does an old crock like myself go on
+living? It causes me genuine amazement. I feel almost ashamed of myself
+because I am not yet dead seeing that so many of my full-blooded
+contemporaries have perished in this War. I am so grateful for being
+allowed to live so long that nothing that happens to me except death
+could upset me much. I should be happy in a coal mine.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i>12.</p>
+
+<p>Suffering from indigestion. The symptoms include:</p>
+
+<p>Excessive pandiculation,</p>
+
+<p>Excessive oscitation,</p>
+
+<p>Excessive eructation,</p>
+
+<p>Dyspnœa,</p>
+
+<p>Sphygmic flutters,</p>
+
+<p>Abnormal porrigo,</p>
+
+<p>A desiccated epidermis.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 16.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Lice or "Creeping Ferlies"</i><a name="FNanchor_5_16" id="FNanchor_5_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_16" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></p>
+
+<p>I probably know more about Lice than was ever before stored together
+within the compass of a single human mind! I know the Greek for Louse,
+the Latin, the French, the German, the Italian. I can reel off all the
+best remedies for Pediculosis: I am acquainted with the measures adopted
+for dealing with the nuisance in the field by the German Imperial Board
+of Health, by the British R.A.M.C., by the armies of the Russians, the
+French, the Austrians, the Italians. I know its life history and
+structure, how<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> many eggs it lays and how often, the anatomy of its
+brain and stomach and the physiology of all its little parts. I have
+even pursued the Louse into ancient literature and have read old medical
+treatises about it, as, for example, the <i>De Phthiriasi</i> of Gilbert de
+Frankenau. Mucius the lawgiver died of this disease so also did the
+Dictator Scylla, Antiochus Epiphanes, the Emperor Maximilian, the
+philosopher Pherecydes, Philip II. of Spain, the fugitive Ennius,
+Callisthenes, Alcman and many other distinguished people including the
+Emperor Arnauld in 899. In 955, the Bishop of Noyon had to be sewn up in
+a leather sack before he could be buried. (See <i>Des Insectes reputés
+venimeux</i>, par M. Amoureux Fils, Doctor of Medicine in the University of
+Montpellier, Paris, 1789.) In Mexico and Peru, a poll-tax of Lice was
+exacted and bags of these treasures were found in the Palace of
+Montezuma (see Bingley, <i>Animal Biog</i>., first edition, iii.). In the
+<i>United Service Magazine</i> for 1842 (clix., 169) is an account of the
+wreck of the <i>Wager</i>, a vessel found adrift, the crew in dire straits
+and Captain Cheap lying on the deck&mdash;"like an ant-hill."</p>
+
+<p>So that as an ancient writer puts it, "you must own that for the
+quelling of human pride and to pull down the high conceits of mortal
+man, this most loathesome of all maladies (Pediculosis) has been the
+inheritance of the rich, the wise, the noble and the mighty&mdash;poets,
+philosophers, prelates, princes, Kings and Emperors."</p>
+
+<p>In his well-known <i>Bridgewater Treatise</i>, the Rev. Dr. Kirby, the Father
+of English Entomology, asked: "Can we believe that man in his pristine
+state of glory and beauty and dignity could be the receptacle of prey so
+loathesome as these unclean and disgusting creatures?" (Vol. I., p. 13).
+He therefore dated their creation <i>after</i> the Fall.</p>
+
+<p>The other day a member of the staff of the Lister Institute called to
+see me on a lousy matter, and presently drew some live Lice from his
+waistcoat pocket for me to see. They were contained in pill boxes with
+little bits of muslin stretched across the open end thro' which the
+Lice<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> could thrust their little hypodermic needles when placed near the
+skin. He feeds them by putting these boxes into a specially constructed
+belt and at night ties the belt around his waist and all night sleeps in
+Elysium. He is not married.</p>
+
+<p>In this fashion, he has bred hundreds from the egg upwards and even
+hybridised the two different species!</p>
+
+<p>In the enfranchised mind of the scientific naturalist, the usual
+feelings of repugnance simply do not exist. Curiosity conquers
+prejudice.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 27.</p>
+
+<p>Am spending my summer holidays in the Lakes at Coniston with G&mdash;&mdash; and
+R&mdash;&mdash;.... I am simply consumed with pride at being among the mountains
+at last! It is an enormous personal success to have arrived at Coniston!</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 29.</p>
+
+<p>Climbed a windy eminence on the other side of the Lake and had a
+splendid view of Helvellyn&mdash;like a great hog's back. It is fine to walk
+over the elastic turf with the wind bellowing into each ear and swirling
+all around me in a mighty sea of air until I was as clean-blown and
+resonant as a sea-shell. I moved along as easily as a disembodied spirit
+and felt free, almost transparent. The old earth seemed to have soaked
+me up into itself, I became dissolved into it, my separate body was
+melted away from me, and Nature received me into her deepest
+communion&mdash;until, UNTIL I got on the lee side of a hedge where the calm
+brought me back my gaol of clay.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 1.</p>
+
+<p>Fourteen days hence I shall be a married man. But I feel most dejected
+about it. When I fell down the other day, I believe I slightly concussed
+my spinal column, with the result that my 1913 trouble has returned, but
+this time on the <i>left</i> side! paralysis and horrible vertigo and
+presentiments of sudden collapse as I walk.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 2.</p>
+
+<p>I fear I have been overdoing it in this tempting mountain region.
+Walking too far, etc. So I am slacking. It was fortunate I did not get
+concussion of the brain&mdash;I came within an inch of it: the hair of my
+head brushed the ground.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>A Buxom Rogue in Earthenware</i></p>
+
+<p>I knocked at the door of Sunbeam Cottage the other morning to know if
+they had a boat for hire. The door was promptly opened by a plump,
+charming little wench of about 17, and I caught a glimpse of the kitchen
+with its gunrack holding two fowling pieces, a grandfather clock in one
+corner and a dresser full of blueish china.</p>
+
+<p>"We don't let our boat out for hire," she answered with a smile so
+honest and natural and spontaneous that I was already saying to myself I
+had never met with anything like it at all when she stretched up her
+bare, dairy-maid arm&mdash;strong, creamy and soft, just reached a big key
+strung to a wooden block and lying on the top shelf of the dresser and
+at once handed it to me with:</p>
+
+<p>"But you are quite welcome to use it and here is the key to the
+boathouse."</p>
+
+<p>I now felt certain that she was one in a million and thanked her most
+awfully. I have never met such swiftly-moving generosity.</p>
+
+<p>"It's very nice on the Lake just now," she said. "I like to lie in the
+boat with a book and let her drift."</p>
+
+<p>I asked her if she would not come too, but this tight little fairy was
+too busy in the house. She is Clara Middleton done in earthenware.</p>
+
+<p>Subsequently R&mdash;&mdash; and I often visited the cottage and we became great
+friends, her mother showing us some letters she received as a girl from
+John Ruskin&mdash;a great friend of hers. The gamekeeper himself said that
+for his part he could never read Ruskin's books&mdash;it was like driving a
+springless cart over a rocky road. We all laughed and I said he was
+prejudiced in view of the letters which began: "My darling," and
+finished up "Yr loving J.R."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But Mrs. &mdash;&mdash; said he had never read them, and Madge (ah! that name!)
+said her father had never shewn the least interest in them at which we
+laughed again, and the gamekeeper laughed too. He is such a jolly
+man&mdash;they all are delightfully simple, charming folk and we talked of
+Beasts and Birds that live on the mountains.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 4.</p>
+
+<p>Bathed in the Lake from the boat. It was brilliantly fine. R&mdash;&mdash; dipped
+her paddles in occasionally just to keep the boat from grounding. Then I
+clambered over the bows and stood up to dry myself in the sun like one
+of Mr. Tuke's young men.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 7.</p>
+
+<p>My 26th birthday. In London again. Went straight to the Doctor and
+reported myself. I quite expected him to forbid the marriage as I could
+scarcely hobble to his house. To my amazement, he apparently made light
+of my paralysis, said it was a common accident to bruise the <i>os
+coccyx</i>, etc.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 8.</p>
+
+<p>Am staying at &mdash;&mdash; for a few days to rest and try to be better by that
+fateful 11th, when I am married.</p>
+
+<p><i>Later</i>: My first experience of a Zeppelin raid. Bombs dropped only a
+quarter of a mile away and shrapnel from the guns fell on our roof. We
+got very pannicky and went into a neighbour's house, where we cowered
+down in our dressing-gowns in absolute darkness while bombs exploded and
+the dogs barked.</p>
+
+<p>I was scared out of my life and had a fit of uncontrollable trembling.
+Later we rang up &mdash;&mdash; and &mdash;&mdash;, and thank Heavens both are safe. A great
+fire is burning in London, judging by the red glare. At midnight sat and
+drank sherry and smoked a cigar with Mr. &mdash;&mdash;, my braces depending from
+my trousers like a tail and shewing in spite of dressing-gown. Then went
+home and had some neat<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> brandy to steady my heart. H&mdash;&mdash; arrived soon
+after midnight. A motor-omnibus in Whitechapel was blown to bits. Great
+scenes in the city.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 9.</p>
+
+<p>Very nervy to-day. Hobbled down the road to see the damage done by the
+bombs.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 10.</p>
+
+<p>A swingeing cold in the head thro' running about on the night of the
+raid. Too feeble to walk far, so Mrs. &mdash;&mdash; went into the town for me and
+purchased my wedding-ring, which cost £2 5s. 0d.</p>
+
+
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_12" id="Footnote_1_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_12"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 1917. I am now editing my own Journal&mdash;bowdlerising my own
+book!</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_13" id="Footnote_2_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_13"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> A method of collecting insects in winter by shaking moss
+over white paper.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_14" id="Footnote_3_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_14"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> 1917. Cf. Sainte-Beuve's Essay on Maurice de Guérin: "Il
+aimait à se répandre et presque à se ramifier dans la Nature. Il a
+exprimé en mainte occasion cette sensation diffuse, errante; il y avait
+des jours ou, dans son amour ou calme, il enviait la vie forte et muette
+qui règne sons l'écorce des chênes; il rêvait à je ne sais quelle
+métamorphose en arbre...."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_15" id="Footnote_4_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_15"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Cf. 1916, November 6.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_16" id="Footnote_5_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_16"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> Cf. Burns's poem "On a Louse."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span></p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="PART_III_MARRIAGE" id="PART_III_MARRIAGE"></a>PART III&mdash;MARRIAGE</h3>
+
+
+<p><i>September</i> 12.</p>
+
+<p>This evening we walked thro' the Churchyard reading tombstone
+inscriptions. What a lot of men have had wives!</p>
+
+<p>I can't make out what has come over folk recently: the wit, wisdom and
+irony on the old tombstones have given place to maudlin sentiment and
+pious Bible references. Then on the anniversary of the death the custom
+among poorer classes is to publish such pathetic doggerel as the
+following&mdash;cuttings I have taken from time to time from the local
+newspaper in &mdash;&mdash;:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"Her wish:</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"'Farewell dear brother, Mother, sisters,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">My life was passed in love for thee.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Mourn not for me nor sorrow take</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">But love my husband for my sake</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Until the call comes home to thee,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Live thou in peace and harmony.'"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Again:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"A day of remembrance sad to recall</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">But still in my heart he is loved best of all</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">No matter how I think of him&mdash;his name I oft recall;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">There is nothing left to answer me but his photo on the wall."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Or:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"One year has passed since that sad day,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">When one we loved was called away.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">God took her home; it was His will,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Forget her?&mdash;No, we never will."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>These piteous screeds fill me with loving-kindness and with contempt
+alternately in a pendulum-like rhythm. What is the truth about them? Is
+the grief of these people as mean and ridiculous as their rhymes? Or is
+it a pitiful inarticulateness? Or is it merely vulgar advertisement of
+their sorrow? Or does it signify a passionate intention<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> never to
+forget?&mdash;or a fear of forgetting, the rhymes being used as a fillip to
+the memory? Or&mdash;most miserable of all&mdash;is it just a custom, and one
+followed in order to appear respectable in others' eyes? Are they poor
+souls? or contemptible fools?</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 14.</p>
+
+<p>There is a ridiculous Cocker spaniel at the house where we are staying.
+He must have had a love affair and been jilted, or else he's a sort of
+village idiot. The landlady says he's not so silly as he looks&mdash;but he
+looks very silly: he languishes sentimentally, and when we laugh at him
+he looks "hurt." To-day we took him up on the Down and it seemed to
+brighten him up. Really, he is sane enough, with plenty of commonsense
+and good manners. But he is kept at home in the garden so much, lolling
+about all day, that as E&mdash;&mdash; said, having nothing to do, he falls in love.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Saturday Review</i> writes: The effect of the "Brides and the Bath"
+Case on people with any trace of <i>nice feeling</i> is perhaps not
+particularly mischievous, tho' the thing is repulsive and hateful to
+them.... To gloat over the details of repulsive horrors, simply <i>from
+motives of curiosity</i>&mdash;this is bad and degrading.</p>
+
+<p>What a lot of repulsive things the nice refined people who read the
+<i>Saturday Review</i> must find in the world just now. For example the War.
+"Simply from motives of curiosity." Why certainly, no other than these,
+concerning one of the most remarkable murders in the annals of crime.
+And murders anyhow are damned interesting&mdash;which the <i>Saturday Review</i>
+isn't.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Chipples</i></p>
+
+<p>I was surprised to discover the other day that when I talked of Chipples
+no one understood what I meant! It proves to be a dialect word familiar
+to all residents in Devonshire and designating spring onions. Anyway
+you<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> won't find it in Murray's Dictionary; yet etymologically it is an
+extremely interesting word and a thoroughly good word with a splendid
+pedigree. To wit:</p>
+
+<p>Italian: Cipollo.</p>
+
+<p>Spanish: Cebolla.</p>
+
+<p>French: Ciboule.</p>
+
+<p>Latin: Cæpulla, dim. of cæpa (<i>cf</i>. cive, civot).</p>
+
+<p>Now how did this pretty little alien manage to settle down among simple
+Devon folk? What has been the relation between Italy and&mdash;say Appledore,
+or Plymouth?<a name="FNanchor_1_17" id="FNanchor_1_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_17" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 6.</p>
+
+<p>In London once more, living at her flat and using her furniture.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>The Chalcidoidea</i></p>
+
+<p>The Chalcidoidea are minute winged insects that parasitise other
+insects, and in the <i>Memoirs of the Queensland Museum</i> (Vol. I., 1912)
+you shall find an enormous catalogue of them by a person named Girault
+who writes the following dedication:</p>
+
+<p>"I respectfully dedicate this little portion of work to science, common
+sense or true knowledge. I am convinced that human welfare is so
+dependent upon science that civilisation would not endure without it,
+and that what is meant by progress would be impossible. Also I am
+convinced that the great majority of mankind are too ignorant, that
+education is too archaic and impractical as looked at from the
+standpoint of intrinsic knowledge. There is too little known of the
+essential unity of the Universe and of things included, for instance,
+man himself. Opinions and prejudices rule in the place of what is
+true...."</p>
+
+<p>Part II. is dedicated to:</p>
+
+<p>"The genius of mankind, especially to that form of it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> expressed in
+monistic philosophy, whose conceived perception is the highest
+attainment reached by man."</p>
+
+<p>I can only echo Whistler's remark one day as he stood before an
+execrably bad drawing "God bless my soul"&mdash;uttered slowly and
+thoughtfully and then repeated.</p>
+
+<p>The beauty of it is that the Editor adds a serious footnote,
+dissociating himself, and a Scarabee to whom I shewed the Work, read it
+with a clouded brow and then said: "I think it rather out of place in a
+paper of this sort." (Tableau.)</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 12.</p>
+
+<p>Down with influenza.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 13.</p>
+
+<p>A Zeppelin raid last night. I am down with a temperature, but our little
+household remained quite calm, thank God. We heard guns going off, and I
+had a fit of trembling as I lay in bed. Many dead of heart failure owing
+to the excitement.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 14.</p>
+
+<p>Still in bed. No raid last night. There were two raids on Wednesday, one
+at 9.30, and another at midnight. The first time the caretaker of the
+flats came up very alarmed to say "Zeppelins about," so we put out the
+lights. Then at midnight when everyone else was asleep I heard a big
+voice shout up from the street: "Lights out there. They're about again."
+Lay still in bed and waited. Distant gunfire.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 17.</p>
+
+<p>Bad heart attack.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 18.</p>
+
+<p>Heart intermits. Every three or four minutes. M&mdash;&mdash; said that I ought to
+be getting used to it by now! Phew!! Very nervy and pusillanimous.
+Taking strychnine in strong<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> doses. I hope dear E&mdash;&mdash; does not catch the
+'flu. She swallows quinine with large hopes.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 19.</p>
+
+<p>Staying at R&mdash;&mdash;. Had a ghastly journey down, changing trains twice at
+Clapham Junction and at Croydon, heart intermitting all the time in
+every position. Poor E&mdash;&mdash; with me. To-day surprised to find myself still
+alive.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 20.</p>
+
+<p>Better to-day. After much persuasion, I have got E&mdash;&mdash; to let the flat so
+that we can get away into the country outside the Zeppelin zone.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 24.</p>
+
+<p>Back in London again. Am better, bolstered up with arsenic and
+strychnine. Too nervously excited to do any work.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 25.</p>
+
+<p>The letting of our flat is now in the hands of an agent, and E&mdash;&mdash;, poor
+dear, is quite resigned to abandoning all her precious wallpapers, etc.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 7.</p>
+
+<p>The flat is let and we are now living in rooms at &mdash;&mdash;, 20 miles out of
+London, to the Westward.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 8.</p>
+
+<p>It is a great relief to be down in the country. Zeppelins terrify me.
+Have just had a delightful experience in reading Conrad's new book,
+<i>Victory</i>&mdash;a welcome relief from all the tension of the past two months.
+To outward view, I have been merely a youth getting married, catching
+the 'flu and giving up a London flat.</p>
+
+<p>Inwardly, I have been whizzing around like a Catherine Wheel. Consider
+the items:</p>
+
+<p>Concussion of the spine.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Resulting paralysis of left leg ten days before marriage.</p>
+
+<p>Zeppelin raid (heard a cannon go off for the first time).</p>
+
+<p>Severe cold in the head day before marriage (and therefore wild
+anxiety).</p>
+
+<p>Successful marriage with abatement of cold.</p>
+
+<p>Return to our home.</p>
+
+<p>Ten days later, down with influenza.</p>
+
+<p>A second Zeppelin raid.</p>
+
+<p>Bad heart attack.</p>
+
+<p>Then flat sub-let and London evacuated.</p>
+
+<p>The record nauseates me. I am nauseated with myself and my
+self-centredness.... Suppose I have been "whizzing" as I call it&mdash;what
+then? They are but subjective trifles&mdash;meanwhile other men are seeing
+great adventures in Gallipoli and elsewhere. "The <i>Triumph</i> is gone,"
+exclaimed the Admiral who in a little group of naval officers on board
+the flagship had been watching H.M.S. <i>Triumph</i> sink in the Ægean. He
+shuts his telescope with a click and returns in great dudgeon to his own
+quarters. How I envy all these men who are participating in this
+War&mdash;soldiers, sailors, war correspondents&mdash;all who live and throb and
+are not afraid. I am a timid youth, anæmic, wear spectacles, and am
+frightened by a Zep raid! How humiliating. I hate myself for a
+white-livered craven: I am suffocated for want of more life and courage.
+My damnable body is slowly killing off all my spirit and buoyancy. Even
+my mind is becoming blurred. My memory is like an old man's exactly.
+(Ask &mdash;&mdash;.)</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Yet thro' all my nausea, here I remain happy to discuss myself and my
+little mishaps. I'm damned sick of myself and all my neurotic
+whimperings, and so I hereby and now intend to lead a new life and throw
+this Journal to the Devil. I want to mangle it, tear it to shreds. You
+smug, hypocritical readers! you'll get no more of me. All you say I know
+is true before you say it and I know <i>now</i> all the criticism you are
+going to launch. So please spare<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> yourself the trouble. You cannot
+enlighten me upon myself. I <i>know</i>. I disgust myself&mdash;and you, and as
+for you, you can go to the Devil with this Journal.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Finis</i></p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 27.</p>
+
+<p>To-day, armed with a certificate from my Doctor in a sealed envelope and
+addressed "to the Medical Officer examining Mr. W.N.P. Barbellion," I
+got leave to attend the recruiting office and offer my services to my
+King and Country. At the time, the fact that the envelope was sealed
+caused no suspicion and I had been comfortably carrying the document
+about in my pocket for days past.</p>
+
+<p>Of course I attended merely as a matter of form under pressure of the
+authorities, as I knew I was totally unfit&mdash;but not quite <i>how</i> unfit.
+After receiving this precious certificate, I learnt that K&mdash;&mdash; was
+recruiting Doctor at W&mdash;&mdash;, and he offered to "put me thro' in five
+minutes," as he knows the state of my health. So at a time agreed upon,
+I went to-day and was immediately rejected as soon as he had
+stethoscoped my heart. The certificate therefore was not needed, and
+coming home in the train I opened it out of curiosity....</p>
+
+<p>I was quite casual and thought it would be merely interesting to see
+what M&mdash;&mdash; said.</p>
+
+<p>It was.</p>
+
+<p>"Some 18 months ago," it ran, "Mr. Barbellion shewed the just visible
+symptoms of &mdash;&mdash; &mdash;&mdash;" and altho' this fact was at once communicated to
+my relatives it was withheld from me and M&mdash;&mdash; therefore asked the M.O.
+to respect this confidence and to reject me without stating on what
+grounds. He went on to refer to my patellar and plantar reflexes, by
+which time I had had enough, tore the paper up and flung it out of the
+railway carriage window.</p>
+
+<p>
+I then returned to the Museum intending to find out what &mdash;&mdash;
+&mdash;&mdash; was in Clifford Allbutt's System of Medicine. I wondered whether
+it was brain or heart; and the very thought gave me palpitation. I hope it is
+heart<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span>&mdash;something
+short and sharp rather than lingering. But I believe it must be &mdash;&mdash;
+of the brain, the opposite process of softening occurring in old age. I recall
+M&mdash;&mdash;'s words to me before geting married: that I had this "nerve
+weakness," but I was more likely to succumb to pneumonia than to any nervous
+trouble, and that only 12 months' happiness would be worth while.
+</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>On the whole I am amazed at the calm way in which I take this news. I
+was a fool never to have suspected serious nerve trouble before. Does
+dear E&mdash;&mdash; know? What did M&mdash;&mdash; tell her when he saw her before our
+marriage?</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 28.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as I woke up in this clear, country air this morning, I thought:
+&mdash;&mdash; &mdash;&mdash;. I have decided never to find out what it is. I shall find out
+in good time by the course of events.</p>
+
+<p>A few years ago, the news would have scared me. But not so now. It only
+interests me. I have been happy, merry, and quite high-spirited to-day.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 5.</p>
+
+<p>I believe it's creeping paralysis. My left leg goes lame after a short
+walk. Fortunately E&mdash;&mdash; does not take alarm.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 17.</p>
+
+<p>Spent the last two days, both of us, in a state of unrelieved gloom. The
+clouds never lifted for a moment&mdash;it's awful. I scarcely have spoken a
+word.... And eugenically, what kind of an infant would even a Mark
+Tapley expect of a father with a medical history like mine, and a mother
+with a nervous system like hers?... Could anything be more unfortunate?
+And the War? What may not have happened by this time next year? My
+health is grotesque.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 20.</p>
+
+<p>I wonder if she knows. I believe she does but I am afraid to broach the
+matter in case she doesn't. I think she must know something otherwise
+she would show more alarm over my leg, and when I went to the Recruiting
+Office she seemed to show no fear whatever lest they took me. Several
+times a day in the middle of a talk, or a meal, or a kiss, this problem
+flashes thro' my mind. I look at her but find no solution. However&mdash;for
+the present&mdash;the matter is not urgent.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_17" id="Footnote_1_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_17"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> The English Dialect Dictionary derives the word from Old
+French <i>chiboule</i>, and gives a reference to Piers Plowman. Why hasn't
+such an old and useful word become a part of the English language like
+others also brought over at the time of the Norman Conquest?</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="a1916" id="a1916"></a>1916</h3>
+
+
+<p><i>February</i> 1.</p>
+
+<p>Since I last wrote&mdash;a month ago&mdash;I have recovered my buoyancy after a
+blow which kept me under water so long I thought I should never come up
+and be happy again.... I was reciting my woes to R&mdash;&mdash;, and gaining
+much relief thereby, when we espied another crony on the other side of
+the street, crossed over at once, bandied words with him and then walked
+on, picking up the thread of my lugubrious story just where I had left
+off&mdash;secretly staggered at my emotional agility. I've got to this
+now,&mdash;I simply don't care.</p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 2.</p>
+
+<p>"And she draiglet all her petticoatie, Coming thro' the rye." These
+words have a ridiculous fascination for me; I cannot resist their
+saccharine, affectionate, nay amorous jingle and keep repeating them
+aloud all over the house&mdash;as Lamb once kept reciting "Rose Aylmer."</p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 16.</p>
+
+<p>We took possession of our country cottage to-day: very charming and
+overlooking a beautiful Park.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Have just discovered the Journal of the De Goncourts and been reading it
+greedily. Life has really been a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> commodity. I am boiling over with
+vitality, chattering amiably to everyone about nothing&mdash;argumentative,
+sanguine, serious, ridiculous. I called old R&mdash;&mdash; a Rapscallion, a
+Curmudgeon, and a Scaramouche, and E&mdash;&mdash; a trull, a drab, a trollop, a
+callet. "You certainly are a unique husband," said that sweet little
+lady, and I....</p>
+
+<p>With me, one of the symptoms of delirium is always a melodramatic
+truculence! I shake my fist in R&mdash;&mdash;'s face and make him explode with
+laughing.... The sun to-day, and the great, whopping white clouds all
+bellied out, made me feel inside quite a bright young dog wriggling its
+body in ecstatic delight let loose upon the green sward.</p>
+
+<p>"You must come down for a week end," I said to R&mdash;&mdash; at lunch. "Come down
+as soon as you can. You will find every comfort. It is an enormous
+house&mdash;I have not succeeded in finding my way about it and&mdash;it's
+dangerous to lose yourself&mdash;makes you late for dinner. When you arrive
+our gilded janitor will say: 'I believe Mr. Barbellion is in the
+library.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Black eunuchs wait on you at dinner, I suppose," R&mdash;&mdash; rejoined.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! yes and golden chandeliers and a marble stair-case&mdash;all in barbaric
+splendour."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I shall certainly be glad to come down," said R&mdash;&mdash;,
+phlegmatically.</p>
+
+<p>And so on and so on. Words, idle words all day in a continuous rush. And
+I am sure that the match which fired the gun-powder was the discovery of
+the De Goncourts' Journal! It's extraordinary how I have been going on
+from week to week quite calmly for all the world as if I had read all
+the books and seen all the places and done everything according to the
+heart's desire. This book has really jolted me out of my complacency: to
+think that all this time, I have been dead to so much! Why I might have
+died unconscious that the De Goncourts had ever lived and written their
+colossal book and now I am aware of it, I am all in a fever to read it
+and take it up into my brain: I might die now before I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> have finished
+it&mdash;a thought that makes me wild with desire just as I once endured most
+awful pangs when I felt my health going, and believed that I might die
+before having ever been in love&mdash;to die and never to have been in love!
+&mdash;for an instant at a time this possibility used to make me writhe.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 22.</p>
+
+<p>R&mdash;&mdash; has an unpleasant habit of making some scarifying announcement
+drawing forth an explosive query from me and then lapsing at once into
+an eleusinian silence: he appears to take a sensuous pleasure in the
+pause that keeps you expectant. I could forgive a man who keeps you on
+tenterhooks for two puffs in order to keep his pipe alight, but
+R&mdash;&mdash; shuts up out of sheer self-indulgence and goes on gazing at the
+horizon with the eyes of a seer (he thinks) trying to cod me he sees a
+portent there only revealed to God's elect.</p>
+
+<p>I told him this in the middle of one of his luxurious silences. "I will
+tell you," he said deliberately, "when we reach the Oratory." (We were
+in Brompton Road.)</p>
+
+<p>"Which side of it?" I enquired anxiously. "This or that?"</p>
+
+<p>"That," said he, "will depend on how you behave in the meantime."</p>
+
+<p><i>April</i> 3.</p>
+
+<p>We met a remarkable Bulldog to-day in the street, humbly following
+behind a tiny boy to whom it was attached by a piece of string. At the
+time we were following in the wake of three magnificent Serbian
+Officers, and I was particularly interesting myself in the curious cut
+of their top boots. But the Bulldog was the Red Herring in our path.</p>
+
+<p>"Is that a Dog?" I asked the little boy.</p>
+
+<p>He assured me that it was, and so it turned out to be, tho' Bull-frog
+would have been a better name for it, the forelegs being more bandied,
+the back broader and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> mouth wider than in any Bulldog I have ever
+seen. It was a super-Bulldog.</p>
+
+<p>We turned and walked on. "There," said R&mdash;&mdash;, "now we have lost our
+Serbian Officers."</p>
+
+<p><i>April</i> 4.</p>
+
+<p>"May I use your microscope?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"By all means," I said with a gesture of elaborate politeness.</p>
+
+<p>He sat down at my table, in my chair, and used my instrument&mdash;becoming
+at once absorbed and oblivious to my banter as per below:</p>
+
+<p>"As Scotchmen," I said, "are monuments rather than men, this latest raid
+on Edinboro's worthy inhabitants must be called vandalism rather than
+murder."</p>
+
+<p>No answer. I continued to stand by my chair.</p>
+
+<p>"How pleased Swift, Johnson, Lamb, and other anti-Caledonians would
+be...."</p>
+
+<p>"Hope you don't mind my occupying your chair a little longer," the
+Scotchman said, "but this is a larva, has curious maxillæ...." and his
+voice faded away in abstraction.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! no&mdash;go on," I said, "I fear it is a grievous absence of hospitality
+on my part in not providing you with a glass of whiskey. Can I offer you
+water, Sir?"</p>
+
+<p>No answer.</p>
+
+<p>Another enthusiast ushered himself in, was greeted with delight by the
+first and invited to sit down. I pulled out a chair for him and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Shave, sir, or hair cut?"</p>
+
+<p>"If you follow along to the top of the galea," No. I droned on
+imperturbably, "you will...." etc.</p>
+
+<p>I got tired of standing and talking to an empty house but at last they
+got up, apologising and making for the door.</p>
+
+<p>I entreated them not to mention the matter&mdash;my fee should be nominal&mdash;I
+did it out of sheer love, etc.</p>
+
+<p>They thanked me again and would have said more but I added blandly:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You know your way out?" They assured me they did (having worked in the
+place for 30 years and more)&mdash;I thanked God&mdash;and sat down to my table
+once more.</p>
+
+<p>(These reports of conversations are rather fatuous: yet they give an
+idea of the sort of person I have to deal with, and also the sort of
+person I am among this sort of person.)</p>
+
+<p><i>April</i> 6.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>The Housefly Problem</i>&mdash;1916</p>
+
+<p>For weeks past we have all been in a terrible flutter scarcely
+paralleled by the outbreak of Armageddon in August, 1914. The spark
+which fired almost the whole building was a letter to the <i>Times</i>
+written by Dr. &mdash;&mdash;, making public an ignominious confession of
+ignorance on the part of Entomologists as to how the Housefly passed the
+winter. In reply, many correspondents wrote to say they hibernated, and
+one man was even so temerarious as to quote to us Entomologists the
+exact Latin name of the Housefly: viz., <i>Musca domestica</i>. We asked for
+specimens and enormous numbers of flies at once began to arrive at the
+Museum, alive and dead&mdash;and not a Housefly among them! So there was a
+terrible howdedo.</p>
+
+<p>One of the correspondents was named "Masefield." "Not Masefield the
+poet?" an excited dipterist asked. I reassured him.</p>
+
+<p>"I've a good mind," said Dr. &mdash;&mdash;, "to reply to this chap who's so
+emphatic and give him a whigging&mdash;only he's climbing down a bit in this
+second letter in to-day's issue." I strongly advocated clemency.</p>
+
+<p>But still the affair goes on. Every morning sees more letters and more
+flies sent by all sorts of persons&mdash;we seem to have set the whole world
+searching for Houseflies&mdash;Duchesses, signalmen, farmers, footmen. Every
+morning each fresh batch of flies is mounted on pins by experts in the
+Setting Room, and an Assistant's whole time is devoted to identifying,
+arranging, listing and reporting upon the new arrivals. At the last
+meeting of the Trustees a sample collection was displayed to show
+indubitably that the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> insects which hibernate in houses are not <i>Musca
+domestica</i> but <i>Pollenia rudis</i>. I understand the Trustees were
+appreciative.</p>
+
+<p>An observant eye can now discover state visits to our dipterists from
+interested persons carrying their flies with them, animated discussions
+in the corridor, knots of excited enthusiasts in the Lavatory, in the
+Library, everywhere&mdash;and everywhere the subject discussed is the same:
+How does the Housefly pass the winter? As one passes one catches: "In
+Bakehouses certainly they are to be found but...." or a wistful voice,
+"I wish I had caught that one in my bathroom three winters ago&mdash;I am
+certain it was a Housefly." The Doctor himself&mdash;a gallant
+Captain&mdash;wanders from room to room stimulating his lieutenants to make
+suggestions, and examining every answer to the great interrogative on
+its merits, no matter how humble or insignificant the person who makes
+it. Then of an afternoon he will entirely disappear, and word goes round
+that he has set forth to examine a rubbish heap in Soho or Pimlico. As
+the afternoon draws to its close someone enquires if he has come back
+yet; next morning a second asks if I had seen him, then a third
+announces mournfully that he has just been holding conversation with
+him, but that nothing at all was found in the rubbish heap.</p>
+
+<p>The great sensation of all occurred last week when somebody ran along
+the corridor crying that Mr. &mdash;&mdash; had just found a Housefly in his room.
+We were all soon agog with the news, and the excited Captain was
+presently espied setting out for the scene of operations with a killing
+bottle and net. The insect was promptly impounded and identified as a
+veritable <i>Musca domestica</i>. A consultation being held to sit on the
+body, a lady finally laid information that two "forced Houseflies"
+hatched the day before had escaped from her possession. She suggested
+Mr. &mdash;&mdash;'s specimen was one of them.</p>
+
+<p>"How would it get from your room to Mr. &mdash;&mdash;'s?" she</p>
+
+<p>was immediately asked. And breathless, we all heard her answer
+deliberately and quite audibly that the fugitive may have gone out of
+her window, up the garden and in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> by Mr. &mdash;&mdash;'s window, <i>or</i> it may have
+gone out of her door, up the corridor and in by his door. I wanted to
+know why it should have entered Mr. &mdash;&mdash;'s room as he is not a dipterist
+but a microlepidopterist. They looked at me sternly and we slowly
+dispersed.</p>
+
+<p>This morning, the Dr. came to me with a newspaper cutting in his hand,
+saying, "<i>The Times</i> is behindhand." He handed me the slip. It was a
+clipping from to-day's <i>Times</i> about a sackful of flies which had been
+taken from Wandsworth Clock Tower in a state of hibernation.</p>
+
+<p>"Behindhand?" I asked timidly, for I felt that all the story was not in
+front of me.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, yes. Don't you know?"</p>
+
+<p>I knew nothing, but was prepared for anything.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>The Star</i>, two days ago," he informed me, "had a paragraph about
+this&mdash;headed 'Tempus fugit' "&mdash;this last in a resentful tone as tho' the
+frivolous reporter were attempting to discredit our mystery.</p>
+
+<p>There was a long pause. Neither of us spoke. Then he slowly said:</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder why <i>The Times</i> is so behindhand. This is two days late."</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 5.</p>
+
+<p>Hulloa, old friend: how are you? I mean my Diary. I haven't written to
+you for ever so long, and my silence as usual indicates happiness. I
+have been passing thro' an unbroken succession of calm happy days,
+walking in the woods with my darling, or doing a little gentle gardening
+on coming home in the evening&mdash;and the War has been centuries away.
+Later on towards bedtime, E&mdash;&mdash; reads Richard Jefferies, I play Patience
+and Mrs. &mdash;&mdash; makes garments for Priscilla.</p>
+
+<p>The only troubles have been a chimney which smokes and a neighbour's dog
+which barks at night. So to be sure, I have made port after storm at
+last&mdash;and none too soon. To-day my cheerfulness has been rising in a
+crescendo till to-night it broke in such a handsome crest of pure
+delight that I cannot think of going to bed without recording it.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Pachmann</i></p>
+
+<p>After sitting on the wall around the fountain in the middle of Trafalgar
+Square, eating my sandwiches and feeding the Pigeons with the crumbs, I
+listened for a moment to the roar of the traffic around three sides of
+the Square as I stood in the centre quite alone, what time one fat old
+pigeon, all unconcerned, was treading another. It was an extraordinary
+experience: motor horns tooted incessantly and it seemed purposelessly,
+so that one had the fancy that all London was out for a joy-ride&mdash;it was
+a great British Victory perhaps, or Peace Day.</p>
+
+<p>Then walked down Whitehall to Westminster Bridge in time to see the 2
+o'clock boat start upstream for Kew. I loitered by the old fellow with
+the telescope who keeps his pitch by Boadicea: I saw a piper of the
+Scots Guards standing near gazing across the river but at nothing in
+particular&mdash;just idling as I was. I saw another man sitting on the stone
+steps and reading a dirty fragment of newspaper. I saw the genial,
+red-faced sea-faring man in charge of the landing stage strolling up and
+down his small domain,&mdash;chatting, jesting, spitting, and making fast a
+rope or so. Everything was <i>alive</i> to the finger tips, vividly shining,
+pulsating.</p>
+
+<p>Arrived at Queen's Hall in time for Pachmann's Recital at 3.15.... As
+usual he kept us waiting for 10 minutes. Then a short, fat, middle-aged
+man strolled casually on to the platform and everyone clapped
+violently&mdash;so it was Pachmann: a dirty greasy looking fellow with long
+hair of dirty grey colour, reaching down to his shoulders and an ugly
+face. He beamed on us and then shrugged his shoulders and went on
+shrugging them until his eye caught the music stool, which seemed to
+fill him with amazement. He stalked it carefully, held out one hand to
+it caressingly, and finding all was well, went two steps backwards,
+clasping his hands before him and always gazing at the little stool in
+mute admiration, his eyes sparkling with pleasure, like Mr. Pickwick's
+on the discovery of the archeological treasure. He approached once more,
+bent down and ever so<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> gently moved it about 7/8ths of an inch nearer
+the piano. He then gave it a final pat with his right hand and sat down.</p>
+
+<p>He played Nocturne No. 2, Prelude No. 20, a Mazurka and two Etudes of
+Chopin and Schubert's Impromptu No. 4.</p>
+
+<p>At the close we all crowded around the platform and gave the queer,
+old-world gentleman an ovation, one man thrusting up his hand which
+Pachmann generously shook as desired.</p>
+
+<p>As an encore he gave us a Valse&mdash;"Valse, Valse," he exclaimed
+ecstatically, jumping up and down in his seat in time to the music. It
+was a truly remarkable sight: on his right the clamorous crowd around
+the platform; on his left the seat holders of the Orchestra Stalls,
+while at the piano bobbed this grubby little fat man playing divine
+Chopin divinely well, at the same time rising and falling in his seat,
+turning a beaming countenance first to the right and then to the left,
+crying, "Valse, Valse." He is as entertaining as a tumbler at a variety
+hall.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as he had finished, we clapped and rattled for more, Pachmann
+meanwhile standing surrounded by his idolaters in affected despair at
+ever being able to satisfy us. Presently he walked off and a scuffle was
+half visible behind the scenes between him and his agent who sent him in
+once more.</p>
+
+<p>The applause was wonderful. As soon as he began again it ceased on the
+instant, and as soon as he left off it started again
+immediately&mdash;nothing boisterous or rapturous but a steady, determined
+thunder of applause that came regularly and evenly like the roar from
+some machine.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 20.</p>
+
+<p>Spent a quiet day. Sat at my escritoire in the Studio this morning
+writing an Essay, with a large 4-fold window on my left, looking on to
+woods and fields, with Linnets, Greenfinches, Cuckoos calling. This
+afternoon while E&mdash;&mdash; rested awhile I sat on the veranda in the sun and
+read <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>.... Yes, I'm in harbour at last. I'd be the
+last to deny it but I cannot believe it will last.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> It's too good to
+last and it's all too good to be even true. E&mdash;&mdash; is too good to be
+true, the home is too good to be true, and this quiet restful existence
+is too wonderful to last in the middle of a great war. It's just a
+little deceitful April sunshine, that's all....<a name="FNanchor_1_18" id="FNanchor_1_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_18" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p>
+
+<p>Had tea at the &mdash;&mdash;. A brilliant summer's evening. Afterwards, we
+wandered into the garden and shrubbery and sat about on the turf of the
+lawn, chatting and smoking. Mr. &mdash;&mdash; played with a rogue of a white
+Tomcat called Chatham, and E&mdash;&mdash; talked about our neighbour, "Shamble
+legs," about garden topics, etc. Then I strolled into the drawing-room
+where Cynthia was playing Chopin on a grand piano. Is it not all
+perfectly lovely?</p>
+
+<p>How delicious to be silent, lolling on the Chesterfield, gazing
+abstractedly thro' the lattice window and listening to the lulling
+charities of Nocturne No. 2, Op. 37! The melody in the latter part of
+this nocturne took me back at once to a cloudless day in an open boat in
+the Bay of Combemartin, with oars up and the water quietly and regularly
+lapping the gunwales as we rose and fell. A state of the most profound
+calm and happiness took possession of me.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 2.</p>
+
+<p>From the local paper:</p>
+
+<p>"A comrade in the Gloucesters writing to a friend at &mdash;&mdash; mentions that
+Pte. J&mdash;&mdash; has been fatally shot in action. J&mdash;&mdash; was well known here
+for years as an especially smart young newsvendor."</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 3.</p>
+
+<p>What a bitter disappointment it is to realise that people the most
+intimately in love with one another are really separated by such a
+distance. A woman is calmly knitting socks or playing Patience while her
+husband or sweetheart lies dead in Flanders. However strong the tie that
+binds them together yet they are insufficiently <i>en rapport</i> for her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> to
+sense even a catastrophe&mdash;and she must wait till the War Office forsooth
+sends her word. How humiliating that the War Office must do what Love
+cannot. Human love seems then such a superficial thing. Every person is
+a distinct egocentric being. Each for himself and the Devil take the
+hindmost. "Ah! but she didn't know." "Yes, but she <i>ought</i> to have
+known." Mental telepathy and clairvoyance should be common at least to
+all lovers.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<p>This morning in bed I heard a man with a milkcart say in the road to a
+villager at about 6.30 a.m., "... battle ... and we lost six cruisers."
+This was the first I knew of the Battle of Jutland. At 8 a.m. I read in
+the <i>Daily News</i> that the British Navy had been defeated, and thought it
+was the end of all things. The news took away our appetites. At the
+railway station, the <i>Morning Post</i> was more cheerful, even reassuring,
+and now at 6.30 p.m. the Battle has turned into a merely regrettable
+indecisive action. We breathe once more.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 4.</p>
+
+<p>It has now become a victory.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 11.</p>
+
+<p>Old systems of Classification: Rafinesc's Theory of Fives, Swainson's
+Theory of Sevens, Edward Newman's book called <i>Sphinx Vespiformis</i>
+tracing fives throughout the animal world, Sir Thomas Browne's Quincunx,
+chasing fives throughout the whole of nature&mdash;in the words of Coleridge,
+"quincunxes in Heaven above, quincunxes in the Earth below, quincunxes
+in the mind of man, in optic nerves, in roots of trees, in leaves, in
+everything!"</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Old false trails:</p>
+
+<p>The Philosopher's Stone (Balthazar Clæs).<a name="FNanchor_2_19" id="FNanchor_2_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_19" class="fnanchor">[2]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A universal catholicon (Bishop Berkeley's tar-water). Mystical numbers
+(as per above).</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>My father was Sir Thomas Browne and my mother Marie Bashkirtseff. See
+what a curious hybrid I am!</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I toss these pages in the faces of timid, furtive, respectable people
+and say: "There! that's me! You may like it or lump it, but it's true.
+And I challenge you to follow suit, to flash the searchlight of your
+self-consciousness into every remotest corner of your life and invite
+everybody's inspection. Be candid, be honest, break down the partitions
+of your cubicle, come out of your burrow, little worm." As we are all
+such worms we should at least be honest worms.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>My gratitude to E&mdash;&mdash; for plucking me out of the hideous miseries of my
+life in London is greater than I can express. If I were the cheap hero
+of a ladies' novel I should immolate my journals as a token, and you
+would have a pretty picture of a pale young man watching his days go up
+in smoke by the drawing-room fire. But I have more confidence in her
+sterling good sense, and if I cannot be loved for what I am, I do not
+wish to be loved for what I am not.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<p>Since the fateful Nov. 27th, my life has become entirely posthumous. I
+live now in the grave and am busy furnishing it with posthumous joys. I
+accept my fate with great content, my one-time restless ambition lies
+asleep now, my one-time, furious self-assertiveness is anæsthetised by
+this great War; the War and the discovery about my health together have
+plucked out of me that canker of self-obsession. I sit at home here in
+this country cottage in perfect isolation&mdash;flattened out by a steam
+hammer (tho' it took Armageddon to do it!), yet as cheerful and busy as
+a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> Dormouse laying up store for the winter. For I am almost resigned to
+the issue in the knowledge that some day, someone will know, perhaps
+somebody will understand and&mdash;immortal powers!&mdash;even sympathise, "the
+quick heart quickening from the heart that's still."</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 19.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Omniscience</i></p>
+
+<p>An omniscient Caledonian asked me to-day:</p>
+
+<p>"Where are the Celebes? Are they E. or N.E. of the Sandwich Group?"</p>
+
+<p>I marked him down at once as my legitimate prey. Sitting back in my
+chair, I replied slowly in my most offensive manner:</p>
+
+<p>"The Island of Celebes is of enormous size and curious shape situated in
+the Malay Archipelago."</p>
+
+<p>The Caledonian made no sign. Instead of grinning at his error and
+confessing to a "floater," he endeavoured to carry on by remarking,
+"That of course would be N. of Papua," just for all the world as if his
+error was a minor one of latitude and longitude.</p>
+
+<p>Ignoring his comment, I continued:</p>
+
+<p>"From the Zoogeographical point of view, Celebes is unequalled in
+importance, having the strangest fauna almost of any island on the face
+of the globe. Then there's 'Wallace's Line,'" I said, being purposely
+obscure.</p>
+
+<p>The Caledonian said nought but "looked hurt." It was so obvious that he
+didn't know, and it was so obvious that I knew that he didn't know, that
+after my farcical truculence I expected the tension to dissolve in
+laughter. Yet it is hard for a Caledonian to say "God be merciful to me,
+ignorant devil that I am." So I pursued him with more information about
+"Wallace's Line," with an insouciant air, as much as to say, "Wallace's
+Line of course you heard discussed before you were breached."</p>
+
+<p>"Some do say, you know, that the Line is 'all my eye and Betty Martin,'
+<i>e.g.</i>, R&mdash;&mdash;."</p>
+
+<p>This gave him his first opportunity of finding his feet in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> this
+perilously deep water. So he said promptly, eager to seem knowledgeable
+with an intelligent rejoinder:</p>
+
+<p>"As! yes, R&mdash;&mdash; is an authority on Fishes."</p>
+
+<p>I assented. "At the last meeting of the British Ass. he tore the idea to
+shreds."</p>
+
+<p>The drowning Caledonian seized at any straw:</p>
+
+<p>"Fishes, however, are not of paramount importance in cases of
+geographical distribution, are they?"</p>
+
+<p>I knew he was thinking of <i>marine</i> fishes, but I did not illumine him,
+and merely said:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! yes, of very great importance," at which he looked still more
+"hurt," decamped in silence and left me conqueror of the field but
+without the spoils of victory: it was impossible to bring him to say "I
+do not know"&mdash;four mono-syllables was all I wanted from the man who for
+months past has been lecturing me on all things from Music and the Drama
+to Philosophy, Painting and&mdash;Insects.</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 20.</p>
+
+<p>The cradle came a few days ago but I had not seen it until this morning
+when I unlocked the cupboard door, looked in and shuddered.</p>
+
+<p>"That's the skeleton in our cupboard," I said on coming down to
+breakfast. She laughed, but I really meant it.</p>
+
+<p>E&mdash;&mdash; keeps a blue bowl replenished with flaming Poppies in our room.
+The cottage is plagued with Ear-wigs which fly in at night and get among
+the clothes and bedlinen. This morning, dressing, she held up her
+chemise to the light saying: "I always do this&mdash;you can see their little
+heathen bodies then against the light...." Isn't she charming?</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 30.</p>
+
+<p>The other day R&mdash;&mdash; and I were sitting on a stile on the uplands in
+perfect summer weather and talking of happy days before the War&mdash;he was
+in khaki and I was resting my "gammy" leg.... As we talked, we let our
+eyes roam, resting luxuriously wherever we pleased and occasionally
+interrupting the conversation with "Look at that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> cow scratching herself
+against the Oak," or "Do you see the oats waving?" In the distance we
+saw a man and a boy walking up towards us along the path thro' the corn,
+but the eye having momentarily scrutinised them wandered away and the
+conversation never paused. When next I looked, they were much
+nearer&mdash;crossing the furrows in the potato field in fact, and we both
+stopped talking to watch&mdash;idly. The boy seemed to be about 10 years old,
+and it amused us to see his great difficulty in stepping across the
+furrows.</p>
+
+<p>"Poor little chap," R&mdash;&mdash; said, and we laughed.</p>
+
+<p>Then the boy stumbled badly and all at once the man lifted his
+walking-stick and beat him, saying ill-naturedly, "Step between the
+furrows," and again, "Step between the furrows." Our enchanting little
+picture was transfigured in an instant. The "charming little boy" was a
+natural idiot&mdash;a gross, hefty creature perhaps 30 years of age, very
+short and very thick, dressed in a little sailor suit. I said,
+"Heavens," and R&mdash;&mdash; looked positively scared. We stood aside for them
+to get over the stile, the "boy" still suffering from his over exertion,
+breathing stertorously like a horse pulling uphill and still evidently
+fearful of the big stick behind. He scrambled over the stile as best he
+could, rolling a wild eye at us as he did so&mdash;a large, bulgy eye with
+the lower lid swollen and sore, like the eye of a terrified ox on the
+way to the slaughter house. So much then for our little picture of
+charming childhood! The man followed close at his heels and looked at me
+with stern defiant eyes. "Yes, that is my son," his eyes declaimed, "and
+I'll thank you to avert your gaze or by the Lord I'll beat you too."</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>A Yellow Cat</i></p>
+
+<p>Last week, I saw a yellow cat perched up quite high on a window ledge at
+the S&mdash;&mdash; Underground Station in celestial detachment from the crowd of
+serious, black-coated gentlemen hustling along to and from the trains.
+He had his back turned to us, but as I swept past in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> stream, I was
+forced to look back a moment, and caught the outline of his whiskers&mdash;it
+made me smile intensely to myself and secretly I gave the palm to the
+cat for wisdom.</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 31.</p>
+
+<p>This War is so great and terrible that hyperbole is impossible. And yet
+my gorge rises at those fatuous journalists continually prating about
+this "Greatest War of all time," this "Great Drama," this "world
+catastrophe unparalleled in human history," because it is easy to see
+that they are really more thrilled than shocked by the immensity of the
+War. They indulge in a vulgar Yankee admiration for the Big Thing. Why
+call this shameful Filth by high sounding phrases&mdash;as if it were a
+tragedy from Euripides? We ought to hush it up, not brag about it, to
+mention it with a blush instead of spurting it out brazen-faced.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Garvin, for example, positively gloats over the War each week in the
+<i>Observer</i>: "Last week was one of those pivotal occasions on which
+destiny seems to swing"&mdash;and so on every week, you can hear him,
+historical glutton smacking his lips with an offensive relish.</p>
+
+<p>For my part, I never seem to be in the same mind about the War twice
+following. Sometimes I am wonderstruck and make out a list of all the
+amazing events I have lived to see since August, 1914, and sometimes and
+more often I am swollen with contempt for its colossal imbecility. And
+sometimes I am swept away with admiration for all the heroism of the
+War, or by some particularly noble self-sacrifice, and think it is
+really all worth while. Then&mdash;and more frequently&mdash;I remember that this
+War has let loose on the world not only barbarities, butcheries and
+crimes, but lies, lies, lies&mdash;hypocrisies, deceits, ignoble desires for
+self-aggrandizement, self-preservation such as no one before ever
+dreamed existed in embryo in the heart of human beings.</p>
+
+<p>The War rings the changes on all the emotions. It twangs all my strings
+in turn and occasionally all at once,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> so that I scarcely know how to
+react or what to think. You see, here am I, a compulsory spectator, and
+all I can do is to reflect. A Zeppelin brought down in flames that lit
+up all London&mdash;now that makes me want to write like Mr. Garvin. But a
+Foreign Correspondent's eager discussion of "Italy's aspirations in the
+Trentino," how Russia insists on a large slice of Turkey, and so forth,
+makes me splutter. How insufferably childish to be slicing up the
+earth's surface! How immeasureably "above the battle" I am at times.
+What a prig you will say I am when I sneer at such contemptible little
+devilries as the Bodies' trick of sending over a little note, "Warsaw is
+fallen," into our trenches, or as ours in reply: "Gorizia!"</p>
+
+<p>"There is no difference in principle between the case of a man who loses
+a limb in the service of his country and that of the man who loses his
+reason, both have an obvious claim to the grateful recognition of the
+State."&mdash;A morning paper.</p>
+
+<p>A jejune comment like this makes me grin like a gargoyle! Hark to the
+fellow&mdash;this leader-writer over his cup of tea. But it is a lesson to
+show how easily and quickly we have all adapted ourselves to the War.
+The War is everything; it is noble, filthy, great, petty, degrading,
+inspiring, ridiculous, glorious, mad, bad, hopeless yet full of hope. I
+don't know what to think about it.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 13.</p>
+
+<p>I hate elderly women who mention their legs. It makes me shudder.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I had two amusing conversations this morning, one with a jealous old man
+of 70 summers who, in spite of his age, is jealous&mdash;I can find no other
+term&mdash;of me in spite of mine, and the other with a social climber. I
+always tell the first of any of my little successes and regularly hand
+him all my memoirs as they appear, to which he as regularly protests
+that he reads very little now.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh! never mind," I always answer gaily, "you take it and read it going
+down in the train&mdash;it will amuse you." He submits but is always silent
+next time I see him&mdash;a little, admonitory silence. Or, I mention I am
+giving an address at &mdash;&mdash;, and he says "Oom," and at once begins his
+reminiscences, which I have heard many times before, and am sometimes
+tempted to correct him when, his memory failing, he leaves out an
+essential portion of his story. Thus do crabbed age and boastful youth
+tantalise one another.</p>
+
+<p>To the social climber I said slyly:</p>
+
+<p>"You seem to move in a very distinguished entourage during your week
+ends."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled a little self-consciously, hesitated a moment and then said:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! I have a few nice friends, you know."</p>
+
+<p>Now I am sorry, but though I scrutinised this lick-spittle and arch
+belly-truck rider very closely, I am quite unable to say whether that
+smile and unwonted diffidence meant simple pleasure at the now certain
+knowledge that I was duly impressed, or whether it was genuine confusion
+at the thought that he had perhaps been overdoing it.</p>
+
+<p>Curiously enough, all bores of whatever kind make a dead set at me. I am
+always a ready listener and my thrusts are always gentle. Hence the
+pyramids! I constantly act as phlebotomist to the vanity of the young
+and to the anecdotage of the senile and senescent.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 13.</p>
+
+<p>... I stood by his chair and looked down at him, and surveyed carefully
+the top of his head, neck, and collar, and with admirable restraint and
+calm, considered my most reasonable contempt of him. In perfect silence,
+we remained thus, while I looked down at a sore spot in the centre of
+his calvarium which he scratches occasionally, and toyed with the fine
+flower of my scorn.... But it is a dangerous license to take. One never
+knows....<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>Equilibrium Restored</i></p>
+
+<p>To clear away the cobwebs and to purge my soul of evil thoughts and
+bitter feelings, went for a walk this evening over the uplands. Among
+the stubble, I sat down for a while with my back against the corn pook
+and listened to the Partridges calling. Then wandered around the edge of
+this upland field with the wind in my face and a shower of delicious,
+fresh rain pattering down on the leaves and dry earth. Then into a wood
+among tall forest Beeches and a few giant Larches where I rested again
+and heard a Woodpecker tapping out its message aloft.</p>
+
+<p>This ramble in beautiful B&mdash;&mdash;shire country restored my mental and
+spiritual poise. I came home serene and perfectly balanced&mdash;my
+equilibrium was something like the just perceptible oscillation of tall
+Larch-tree tops on the heights of a cliff and the sea below with a just
+perceptible swell on a calm and perfect June day. I felt exquisite
+&mdash;superb. I could have walked all the way home on a tight rope.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 2.</p>
+
+<p>Just recently, I have been going fairly strong. I get frequent colds and
+sometimes show unpleasant nerve symptoms, but I take a course of arsenic
+and strychnine every month or so in tabloid form, and this helps me over
+bad patches.</p>
+
+<p>Under the beatific influence of more comfortable health, the rare flower
+of my ambition has raised its head once more: my brain has bubbled with
+projects. To wit:</p>
+
+<p>(1) An investigation of the Balancers in Larval Urodeles.</p>
+
+<p>(2) The Present Parlous State of Systematic Zoology (for "Science
+Progress").</p>
+
+<p>(3) The Anatomy of the Psocidæ.</p>
+
+<p>Etc.</p>
+
+<p>The strength of my ambition at any given moment is the measure of my
+state of health. It must really be an extraordinarily tenacious thing to
+have hung on thro' all my<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> recent experiences. Considerately enough this
+great Crab lets go of my big toe when I am sunk low in health, yet
+pinches devilishly hard as now when I am well.<a name="FNanchor_3_20" id="FNanchor_3_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_20" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>A Bad Listener</i></p>
+
+<p>When I begin to speak, T&mdash;&mdash; will sometimes interrupt with his loud,
+rasping voice. I usually submit to this from sheer lack of lung power or
+I may have a sore throat. But occasionally after the fifth or sixth
+interruption I lose my equanimity and refuse to give him ground. I keep
+straight on with what I intended to say, only in a louder voice; he
+assumes a voice louder still, but not to be denied, I pile Pelion on
+Ossa and finally overwhelm him in a thunder of sound. For example:</p>
+
+<p>"The other day"&mdash;I begin quietly collecting my thoughts to tell the
+story in detail, "I went to the&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! you must come and see my pictures&mdash;&mdash;" he breaks in; but I go on
+and he goes on and as I talk, I catch phrases: "St. Peters" or"Michael
+Angelo" or "Botticelli" in wondrous antiphon with my own "British
+Museum" and "I saw there," "two Syracusan," "tetradrachms," until very
+likely I reach the end of my sentence before he does his, or perhaps his
+rasp drives my remarks out of my head. But that makes no difference, for
+rather than give in I go on improvising in a louder and louder voice
+when suddenly, at length made aware of the fact that I am talking too,
+he stops! leaving me bellowing nonsense at the top of my voice, thus:
+"and I much admired these Syracusan tetradrachms, very charming indeed,
+I like them, the Syracusan tetradrachms I mean you know, and it will be
+good to go again and see them (louder) if possible and the weather keeps
+dry (louder) and the moon and the stars keep in their courses, if the
+slugs on the thorn (loudest)&mdash;&mdash;" he stops, hears the last few words of
+my remarks, pretends to be appreciative but wonders what in Heaven's
+name I can have been talking about.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 3.</p>
+
+<p>This is the sort of remark I like to make: Someone says to me: "You
+<i>are</i> a pessimist."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! well," I say, looking infernally deep, "pessimism is a good policy;
+it's like having your cake and eating it at the same time."</p>
+
+<p>Chorus: "Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because if the future turns out badly you can say, 'I told you so,' to
+your own satisfaction, and if all is well, why you share everyone else's
+satisfaction."</p>
+
+<p>Or I say: "No, I can't swim; and I don't want to!"</p>
+
+<p>Chorus: "Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because it is so dangerous."</p>
+
+<p>Chorus: "Why?"</p>
+
+<p>The Infernally Wise Youth: "For several reasons. If you are a swimmer
+you are likely to be oftener near water and oftener in danger than a
+non-swimmer. Further, as soon as you can swim even only a little, then
+as an honourable man, it behoves you to plunge in at once to save a
+drowning person, whereas, if you couldn't swim it would be merely
+tempting Providence."</p>
+
+<p>Isn't it sickening?</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>A Jolt</i></p>
+
+<p>Yesterday the wind was taken out of my sails. Racing along with
+spinnaker and jib, feeling pretty fit and quite excited over some
+interesting ectoparasites just collected on some Tinamous, I suddenly
+shot into a menacing dead calm: that stiflingly still atmosphere which
+precedes a Typhoon. That is to say, my eye caught the title of an
+enormous quarto memoir in the <i>Trans. Roy. Soc.</i>, Edinburgh: The
+Histology of &mdash;&mdash; &mdash;&mdash;.</p>
+
+<p>I was browsing in the library at the time when this hit me like a
+carelessly handled gaff straight in the face. I almost ran away to my
+room.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>My Pink Form just received amazes me! To be a soldier? C'est incroyable,
+ma foi! The possibility even<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> is distracting! To send me a notice
+requesting me to prepare myself for killing men! Why I should feel no
+more astonished to receive a War Office injunction under dire penalties
+to perform miracles, to move mountains, to raise from the dead: My reply
+would be: "I cannot." I should sit still and watch the whole universe
+pass to its destruction rather than raise a hand to knife a fellow. This
+may be poor, anæmic; but there it is, a positive fact.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>There are moments when I have awful misgivings: Is this blessed Journal
+worth while? I really don't know, and that's the harassing fact of the
+matter. If only I were sure of myself, if only I were capable of an
+impartial view! But I am too fond of myself to be able to see myself
+objectively. I wish I knew for certain what I am and how much I am
+worth. There are such possibilities about the situation; it may turn out
+tremendously, or else explode in a soap bubble. It is the torture of
+Tantalus to be so uncertain. I should be relieved to know even the
+worst. I would almost gladly burn my MSS. in the pleasure of having my
+curiosity satisfied. I go from the nadir of disappointment to the zenith
+of hope and back several times a week, and all the time I am
+additionally harassed by the perfect consciousness that it is all petty
+and pusillanimous to desire to be known and appreciated, that my
+ambition is a morbid diathesis of the mind. I am not such a fool either
+as not to see that there is but little satisfaction in posthumous fame,
+and I am not such a fool as not to realise that all fame is fleeting,
+and that the whole world itself is passing away.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I smile with sardonic amusement when I reflect how the War has changed
+my status. Before the War I was an interesting invalid. Now I am a lucky
+dog. Then, I was a star turn in tragedy; now I am drowned and ignored in
+an overcrowded chorus. No valetudinarian was ever more unpleasantly
+jostled out of his self-compassion. It<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> is difficult to accustom myself
+to the new role all at once: I had begun to lose the faculty for
+sympathising in others' griefs. It is hard to have to realise that in
+all this slaughter, my own superfluous life has become negligible and
+scarcely anyone's concern but my own. In this colossal <i>sauve-qui-peut</i>
+which is developing, who can stay to consider a useless mouth? Am I not
+a comfortable parasite? And, God forgive me, an Egotist to boot?</p>
+
+<p>The War is searching out everyone, concentrating a beam of inquisitive
+light upon everyone's mind and character and publishing it for all the
+world to see. And the consequence to many honest folk has been a keen
+personal disappointment. We ignoble persons had thought we were better
+than we really are. We scarcely anticipated that the War was going to
+discover for us our emotions so despicably small by comparison, or our
+hearts so riddled with selfish motives. In the wild race for security
+during these dangerous times, men and women have all been sailing so
+closehauled to the wind that their eyes have been glued to their own
+forepeaks with never a thought for others: fathers have vied with one
+another in procuring safe jobs for their sons, wives have been bitter
+and recriminating at the security of other wives' husbands. The men
+themselves plot constantly for staff appointments, and everyone is
+pulling strings who can. Bereavement has brought bitterness and immunity
+indifference.</p>
+
+<p>And how pathetically some of us cling still to fragments of the old
+regime that has already passed&mdash;like ship-wrecked mariners to floating
+wreckage, to the manner of the conservatoire amid the thunder of all
+Europe being broken up; to our newspaper gossip and parish teas, to our
+cherished aims&mdash;wealth, fame, success&mdash;in spite of all, <i>ruat coelum!</i>
+Mr. A.C. Benson and his trickling, comfortable Essays, Mr. Shaw and his
+Scintillations&mdash;they are all there as before, revolving like haggard
+windmills in a devastated landscape! A little while ago, I read in the
+local newspaper which I get up from the country two columns concerning
+the accidental death of an old woman, while two lines were used to
+record the death of a townsman at the front from an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> aerial dart. Behold
+this poor rag! staggering along under the burden of the War in a
+passionate endeavour to preserve the old-time interest in an old woman's
+decease. Yet more or less we are all in the same case: I still write my
+Journal and play Patience of an evening, and an old lady I know still
+reads as before the short items of gossip in the papers, neglecting
+articles and leaders.... We are like a nest of frightened ants when
+someone lifts the stone. That is the world just now.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 5.</p>
+
+<p>... I was so ashamed of having to fall back upon such ignominious
+publications for my literary efforts that on presenting him with two
+copies, I told the following lie to save my face:</p>
+
+<p>"They were two essays of mine left over at the beginning of the War, you
+know. My usual channel became blocked so I had to have recourse to
+these."</p>
+
+<p>"Where do you publish as a rule?" he innocently asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! several in the <i>Manchester Guardian</i>," I told him out of vanity.
+"But of course every respectable journal now has closed down to
+extra-war topics."</p>
+
+<p>I lie out of vanity. And then I confess to lying&mdash;out of vanity too. So
+that one way or another I am determined to make kudos out of myself.
+Even this last reflection is written down with an excessive appreciation
+of its wit and the intention that it shall raise a smile.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 9.</p>
+
+<p>Still nothing to report. The anxiety is telling on us all. The nurse has
+another case on the 22nd.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I looked at myself in the mirror this morning&mdash;nude, a most revolting
+picture. An emaciated human being is the most unlovely thing in
+creation. Some time ago a smart errand boy called out "Bovril" after me
+in the street.</p>
+
+<p>On my way to the Station met two robust, brawny curates on the way to
+the daily weekday service&mdash;which is attended<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> only by two decrepit old
+women in black, each with her prayer-book caught up to her breast as if
+she were afraid it might gallop off. That means a parson apiece&mdash;and in
+war time too.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 10.</p>
+
+<p>My sympathy with myself is so unfailing that I don't deserve anybody
+else's. In many respects, however, this Journal I believe gives the
+impression that I behave myself in the public gaze much worse than I
+actually do. You must remember that herein I let myself go at a stretch
+gallop: in life I rein in, I am almost another person. Would you believe
+it, E&mdash;&mdash; says I am full of quick sympathy with others and
+extraordinarily cheerful, nay gay. Verily I lead a curious double
+existence: among most people, I pass for a complaisant, amiable,
+mealy-mouthed, furry if conceited creature. Here I stand revealed as a
+contemptuous, arrogant malcontent. My life has embittered me <i>an fond</i>,
+I have the crabbed temper of the disappointed man insufficiently
+developed yet to be very plainly visible beneath my innate affable,
+unassuming, humble, diffident, cheerful characteristics. With fools on
+every hand I am becoming insolent, aggressive, self-declamatory. Last
+evening came home and got down Robert Buchanan's sonnet, "When He
+returns and finds the world so drear," and felt constrained to read it
+out to E&mdash;&mdash;. I poured out its acid sentiment with the base revenge of a
+vitriol thrower, and then became quiescent.</p>
+
+<p>It is a helpless feeling, sitting still and watching circumstances
+pounding away at my malleable character and moulding it wrongly.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 14.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>An American Neighbour</i></p>
+
+<p>We have a delightful American neighbour here whose life revolves like
+the fly-wheel of an engine. Even when not in eruption his volcanic
+energy is always rumbling and can be heard. Seeing he is a globe
+trotter, I was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> surprised to observe his most elaborate precautions for
+catching the train and getting a seat when he takes his wife and family
+to town. He first of all plants himself and all his property down at a
+certain carefully selected point along the platform as if he were in the
+wild west lying in wait for a Buffalo. Then as the train comes in, his
+eye fixes on an empty compartment as it passes and he dashes off after
+it in furious pursuit up the platform, shouting to his family to follow
+him. Having lassooed the compartment, squaw and piccaninnies are hustled
+in as if there was not a moment to lose, what time the black-coated,
+suburban Englishmen look on in pain and silence, and then slowly with
+offensive deliberation enter their respective carriages.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>The Stockbroker</i></p>
+
+<p>Another neighbour who interests me is mainly notable for his
+extraordinary gait. He is a man with a large, round head, a large round,
+dissolute looking face and fairly broad shoulders, below which
+everything tapers away to a pair of tiny feet neatly booted. These two
+little feet are excessively sensitive to road surface&mdash;one would say he
+had special sense organs on his toes, to judge by the manner in which he
+picks out his path along the country road in short, quick, fussy steps:
+his feet seem to dissect out the road as if boning a herring. A big
+bunion is as good as a sense organ, but his feet are too small and
+elegant.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 24.</p>
+
+<p>The second nurse arrived to-day. Great air raid last night of which we
+heard nothing, thank God!</p>
+
+<p>My nerves are giving way under the strain.... One leg (the left) drags
+abominably.... We shall want a bath-chair as well as a perambulator.</p>
+
+<p>Crawled up thro' the path-fields to the uplands and sat in a field in
+the sun with my back against a haystack. I was so immobile in my
+dejection that Flies and Grass-hoppers came and perched about me. This
+made me furious. "I am not dead yet," I said, "get away," and I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span> would
+suddenly drive them off.... In horrible dejection....</p>
+
+<p>Even my mental powers are disintegrating&mdash;that's the rub. Some quite
+recent incidents I cannot remember even when reminded of them: they seem
+to have passed clean out of my mind&mdash;a remarkable sensation this.</p>
+
+<p>My sensibility is dulled too. It chagrins me to find that my present
+plight by no means overwhelms me with anguish as it would have done
+once. It only worries me. I am just a worried ox.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 26.</p>
+
+<p>The numbness in my right hand is getting very trying. ... The Baby puts
+the lid on it all. Can't you see the sordid picture? I can, and it
+haunts me. To be paralysed with a wife and child and no money&mdash;ugh!</p>
+
+<p>Retribution proceeds with an almost mathematical accuracy of measure. It
+would necessitate a vernier rather than a chain. There is no mercy in
+Cause and Effect. It is inhuman clockwork. Every single act expended
+brings one its precise equivalent in return....</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 28.</p>
+
+<p>Still nothing to report.</p>
+
+<p>I am astonished at the false impression these entries give of myself.
+The picture is incomplete anyhow. It represents the cloud of forebodings
+over my inner self but does not show the outward front I present to
+others. This is one of almost constant gaiety&mdash;unforced and quite
+natural. Ask E&mdash;&mdash;, who said yesterday I was like a schoolboy.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"Camerade, I give you my hand!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">I give you my love more precious than money,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">I give you myself before preaching or law;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Will you give me yourself? Will you come, travel with me?</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>She cut this out of her copy of Walt Whitman and gave it me soon after
+our engagement. It is very precious to me.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>(On Sept. 29th, on the Doctor's advice I went away by the sea alone, my
+nerves being all unstrung. For an account of the miseries of this
+journey, see Dec. 12th <i>infra</i>).</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 3.</p>
+
+<p>A wire to say Susan arrived 2.15 p.m. All well.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 5.</p>
+
+<p>Home again with my darling. She is the most wonderful darling woman. Our
+love is for always. The Baby is a monster.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 23.</p>
+
+<p>The fact that I can't write, finally bottles me up.<a name="FNanchor_4_21" id="FNanchor_4_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_21" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> Damn! Damn! Damn!
+If only I can get my Essay on Journal Writers done. E&mdash;&mdash; goes on well.
+I have a thousand things to say.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 27.</p>
+
+<p>Still awaiting a reprieve. I hate alarming the Doctor&mdash;he's such a
+cheerful man so I conceal my symptoms, quite a collection by now.</p>
+
+<p>The prospect of breaking the news to her makes me miserable. I hide away
+as much as possible lest she should see. I <i>must</i> speak when she is well
+again.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 28.</p>
+
+<p>Life has been very treacherous to me&mdash;this, the greatest treachery of
+all. But I don't care. I exult over it. Last night I lay awake and
+listened to the wind in the trees and was full of exultation.</p>
+
+<p>Now I can only talk, but nobody to talk to. Shall hire a row of
+broomsticks. More and more, the War appears to me a tragic hoax.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 1.</p>
+
+<p>E&mdash;&mdash; has had a set-back and is in bed again. However sclerotic my nerve
+tissue, I feel as flaccid as a jelly.</p>
+
+<p>My God! how I loathe the prospect of death.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 3.</p>
+
+<p>I must have some music or I shall hear the paralysis creeping. That is
+why I lie in bed and whistle.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear Brown, what am I to do?"<a name="FNanchor_5_22" id="FNanchor_5_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_22" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> (I like to dramatise myself like
+that&mdash;it is an anodyne).</p>
+
+<p>I feel as if I were living alone on Ascension Island with the tide
+coming up continuously, up and up and up.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 6.</p>
+
+<p>She has known <i>all</i> from the beginning! M&mdash;&mdash; warned her <i>not</i> to marry
+me. How brave and loyal of her! What an ass I have been. I am
+overwhelmed with feelings of shame and self-contempt and sorrow for her.
+She is quite cheerful and an enormous help.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 12.</p>
+
+<p>What a wreck my existence has become and&mdash;dragging down others with me.</p>
+
+<p>If only I could rest assured that after I am dead these Journals will be
+tenderly cared for&mdash;as tenderly as this blessed infant! It would be
+cruel if even after I have paid the last penalty, my efforts and
+sufferings should continue to remain unknown or disregarded. What I
+would give to know the effect I shall produce when published! I am
+tortured by two doubts&mdash;whether these MSS. (the labour and hope of many
+years) will survive accidental loss and whether they really are of any
+value. I have no faith in either.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 14.</p>
+
+<p>In fits of panic, I keep saying to myself: "My dear Brown, what am I to
+do?" But where is Brown? Brown, you devil! where are you?<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>... To think how I have acted the Prince to her when really I am only a
+beggar!</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 16.</p>
+
+<p>A little better and more cheerful: altho' my impregnable colon still
+holds out.</p>
+
+<p>It would be nice if a physician from London one of these days were to
+gallop up hotspur, tether his horse to the gate post and dash in waving
+a reprieve&mdash;the discovery of a cure!</p>
+
+<p>... I was in an impish mood and said: "Oh! dear, I'm full of misery."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't be silly," she said, "so am I."</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 17.</p>
+
+<p>E&mdash;&mdash; has been telling me some of her emotions during and after her
+fateful visit to my Doctor just before our marriage. He did not spare
+her and even estimated the length of my life after I had once taken to
+my bed&mdash;about 12 months. I remember his consulting room so well&mdash;all its
+furniture and the photograph of Madam Blavatsky over the door, and I
+picture her to myself sitting opposite to him in a sullen silence
+listening to the whole lugubrious story. Then she said at last: "All
+this won't make any difference to me." She went home to her mother in a
+dream, along the streets I have followed so often. I can follow all her
+footsteps in imagination and keep on retracing them. It hurts, but I do
+so because it seems to make her some amends for my being childishly
+unconscious at the time. Poor darling woman&mdash;if only I had known! My
+instinct was right&mdash;I felt in my bones it was wrong to marry, yet here
+was M&mdash;&mdash; urging me on. "You marry," her mother said to her, "I'll stand
+by you," which was right royal of her. There followed some trying months
+of married life with this white hot secret in her bosom as a barricade
+to perfect intimacy; me she saw always under this cloud of crude
+disgusting pathos making her say a hundred times to herself: "He doesn't
+know;" then Zeppelin raids and a few symptoms began to grow obvious,
+until what before she<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> had to take on trust from the Doctor came
+diabolically true before her eyes. Thank God that's all over at last. I
+know her now for all she is worth&mdash;her loyalty and devotion, her courage
+and strength. If only I had something to give her in return! something
+more than the dregs of a life and a constitutional pessimism. I greatly
+desire to make some sacrifice, but I am so poor these days, so very much
+a pauper on her charity, there is no sacrifice I can make. Even my life
+would scarcely be a sacrifice in the circumstances&mdash;it is hard not to be
+able to give when one <i>wants</i> to give.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 20.</p>
+
+<p>In the doldrums. Tired of this damnable <i>far niente</i>,&mdash;I am being gently
+smothered under a mountain of feathers. I should like to engage upon
+some cold, hard, glittering intellectualism.</p>
+
+<p>"I want to read Kant," I said. The Baby slept, E&mdash;&mdash; was sewing and
+N&mdash;&mdash; writing letters. I leaned back in my armchair beside the bookshelf
+and began to read out the titles of my books in a loud voice.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear!" E&mdash;&mdash; said.</p>
+
+<p>"I am caressing my past," I answered. "Wiedersheim's <i>Comparative
+Anatomy of Vertebrates</i>, Smith Woodward's <i>Vertebrate Palæontology</i>&mdash;why
+it's like visiting old prospects and seeing how the moss has grown over
+the stones."</p>
+
+<p>I hummed a comic song and then said: "As I can't burn the house down, I
+shall go to bed."</p>
+
+<p>N&mdash;&mdash;: "You can talk if you like, it won't interfere."</p>
+
+<p>E&mdash;&mdash;: "He's talking to his besoms."</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly," I said to N&mdash;&mdash;, absent-mindedly.</p>
+
+<p>E&mdash;&mdash;: "You ought to have said 'Thank you.'"</p>
+
+<p>I blew out my cheeks and E&mdash;&mdash; laughed.</p>
+
+<p>N&mdash;&mdash;: "How do you spell 'regimental'?"</p>
+
+<p>I told her&mdash;wrongly, and E&mdash;&mdash; said I was in a devilish mood.</p>
+
+<p>"If we say that we have no sin" I chanted in reply, "we deceive
+ourselves and the truth is not in us." I next gave<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> a bit out of a
+speech by Disraeli with exaggerated rhetorical gestures.</p>
+
+<p>E&mdash;&mdash; (with pity): "Poor young man."</p>
+
+<p>Presently she came over and in a tired way put her arms around my neck
+so I immediately began to sing "Rock of Ages, cleft for me," in the
+bass, which immediately reminded me of dear old Dad, whose favourite
+hymn it was.... Then I imitated the Baby. And then to bed fretful and
+very bitter.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 27.</p>
+
+<p>... I wish I could die of heart failure&mdash;and at once! What a luxury that
+would be as compared with my present prospect!</p>
+
+<p>A Tomtit on the fence this morning made me dissolve in tears:&mdash;self-pity
+I believe. I remember Tomtits in &mdash;&mdash;shire. Put on a gramophone record
+and&mdash;ugh! but I'm too sick to write.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 28.</p>
+
+<p>The shock I gave my spinal column in 1915 up in the Lakes undoubtedly
+re-awakened activity among the bacteria. Luck for you! I, of all persons
+to concuss my spine!!</p>
+
+<p>... I listen to the kettle singing, I look at the pictures in the fire,
+read a bit, ask what time it is, see the Baby "topped and tailed," yawn,
+blow my nose, put on a gramophone record&mdash;I have the idea of passing on
+the midnight with no pain to the tune of some healing ragtime.</p>
+
+<p><i>November</i> 29.</p>
+
+<p>The anniversary of our engagement day two years ago. How mad the idea of
+marriage seemed to me&mdash;and my instinct was right: if only I had known!
+Yet she says she does not regret anything.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>This morning I turned to read with avidity accounts of the last hours of
+Keats, Gibbon, Oscar Wilde and Baudelaire.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> I gained astonishing comfort
+out of this, especially in the last ... who died of G.P.I. in a Brussels
+Hospital.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>E&mdash;&mdash; is awfully courageous and,&mdash;as usual ready to do everything in her
+power. How can I ever express sufficient gratitude to these two dear
+women (and my wife, above all) for casting in their lot knowingly with
+mine?</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 1.</p>
+
+<p>I believe I am good for another 12 months without abnormal worries. Just
+now, of course, the Slug ain't exactly on the thorn&mdash;on the cabbage in
+fact as E&mdash;&mdash; suggested. The Grasshopper is much of a burden and the
+voice of the Turtle has gone from my land (where did all these Bible
+phrases come from?). The first bark of the Wolf (God save us, 'tis all
+the Animal Kingdom sliding down my penholder) was heard with the
+reduction in her work to-day, and I suspect there's worse to come with a
+sovereign already only worth 12s. 6d.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 4.</p>
+
+<p>The Baby touch is the most harrowing of all. If we were childless we
+should be merely unfortunate, but an infant....</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 11.</p>
+
+<p>Am receiving ionisation treatment from an electrical therapeutist&mdash;a
+quack! He is a sort of electrician&mdash;still, if he mends my bells I'll
+kiss his boots. As for &mdash;&mdash;, he is no better than a byreman, and I call
+him Hodge. This is not the first time I have felt driven to act behind
+the back of the Profession. In 1912, being desperate, and M&mdash;&mdash; worse
+than a headache, I greedily and credulously sucked in the advice of my
+boarding-house proprietor and went to see a homœopathist in Finsbury
+Circus. He proved to be a charlatan at 10s. 6d. a time, and tho' I
+realised it at once, I religiously travelled about for a month or more
+with tinctures and drop-bottle.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> I could write a book on the Doctors I
+have known and the blunders they have made about me.... The therapeutist
+took me for 33. I feel 63. I am 27. What a wreck I am, and....</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 12.</p>
+
+<p>It is so agreeable to be able to write again that I write now for the
+sheer physical pleasure of being able to use a pen and form letters.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>An Adventure in Search of Health</i></p>
+
+<p>About the end of September, I began to feel so ill that Nurse went for
+the Doctor who assured me that E&mdash;&mdash; was all right&mdash;I need not
+worry&mdash;"You go away at once and get some fresh air," and so forth. "I
+feel quite ill," I said, struggling to break the news.</p>
+
+<p>"Sort of nervous?" he enquired good-naturedly, "run down? I should get
+right away at once."</p>
+
+<p>I began tentatively. "Well, I have a rather long medical history and
+perhaps ... you ... might care to read the certificate of my London
+Doctor?"</p>
+
+<p>I went to my escritoire and returned with M&mdash;&mdash;'s letter addressed to
+"The M.O. examining Mr. B."</p>
+
+<p>Hodge pulled out the missive, studied the brief note carefully and long,
+at the same time drawing in his breath&mdash;deeply, and gnawing the back of
+his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"I know all about it," I said to relieve him.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it quite certain? about this disease?" he said presently. "You are
+very young for it."</p>
+
+<p>"I think there is no doubt," and he began to put me thro' the usual
+tricks.</p>
+
+<p>"I should go right away at once," he said, "and go on with your arsenic.
+And whatever you do&mdash;don't worry&mdash;your wife is all right."</p>
+
+<p>After beseeching him to keep silence about it as I thought she did not
+know, I shewed him out and locked up the certificate again.</p>
+
+<p>Next morning I felt thoroughly cornered: I was not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> really fit enough to
+travel; my hand and leg were daily growing more and more paralysed and
+J&mdash;&mdash; wired to say she could not put me up as they were going away for
+the week end. So I wired back engaging rooms, as with the nurse in the
+house and E&mdash;&mdash; as she was, I simply could not stay at home....</p>
+
+<p>On the way to the Station I was still in two minds whether or not to
+pull the taxi up at the Nursing Home and go inside, but harassing debate
+as it was, our rapidly diminishing bank balance finally drove me on.</p>
+
+<p>---- came up to London with me and sought out a comfortable corner seat,
+but by the time the train left, a mother and a crying child had got in
+and everywhere else was full. A girl opposite who saw &mdash;&mdash; hand me a
+brandy flask and knew I was ill, looked at me compassionately.</p>
+
+<p>At Reading, another woman with a baby got in and both babies cried in
+chorus, jangling my nerves to bits!&mdash;until I got out into the corridor,
+by a miracle not falling down, with one leg very feeble and treacherous.
+All seats were taken, excepting a first-class compartment where I looked
+in enviously at a lucky youth stretched out asleep full length along the
+empty seat.</p>
+
+<p>All the people and the noise of the train began to make me fret, so I
+sought out the repose of a lavatory where I remained eating sandwiches
+and an apple for the best part of an hour. It was good to be alone.</p>
+
+<p>Later on, I discovered an empty seat in a compartment occupied by
+persons whose questionable appearance my short sight entirely failed to
+make me aware of until I got inside with them. They were a family of
+Sheenies, father, mother and three children, whose joint emanations in a
+closed-up railway carriage made an effluvium like to kill a regiment of
+guards. They were E. end pawnbrokers or dealers in second-hand clothes.</p>
+
+<p>I was too nervous to appear rude by immediately with-drawing, so I said
+politely to the man clad in second-hand furs: "Is that seat taken?"</p>
+
+<p>He affected to be almost asleep. So I repeated. He stared at me and then
+said:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh! yes ... but you can have it for a bit if you like."</p>
+
+<p>I sat down timorously on the extreme edge of the seat and stared at, but
+could not read, my newspaper out of sheer nervous apprehension. My sole
+idea was to get out as soon as I decorously could. Out of the corner of
+my eye, I observed the three children&mdash;two girls and a boy&mdash;all garbed
+in black clothes and wearing large clumsy boots with nails and scutes on
+the soles. The girls had large inflorescences of bushy hair which they
+swung about as they turned their heads and made me shudder. The mother's
+face was like a brown, shrivelled apple, topped with a black bonnet and
+festooned on each side with ringlets of curly dark hair. Around her neck
+a fur tippet: as I live&mdash;second-hand clothes dealers from Whitechapel.</p>
+
+<p>The man I dare not look at: I sat beside him and merely imagined.</p>
+
+<p>At &mdash;&mdash;, I got a decent seat and arrived at T&mdash;&mdash; jaded, but still
+alive, with no one to meet me. Decent rooms on the sea-front.</p>
+
+<p>Next morning J&mdash;&mdash; went away for the week end and I could not possibly
+explain how ill I was: she might have stayed at home.</p>
+
+<p>To preserve my sanity, Saturday afternoon, took a desperate remedy by
+hiring a motor-car and travelling to Torquay and back <i>via</i>
+Babbacombe....</p>
+
+<p>On the Sunday, feeling suddenly ill, I sent for the local medico whom I
+received in the drab little room by lamplight after dinner. "I've a
+tingling in my right hand," I said, "that drives me nearly silly."</p>
+
+<p>"And on the soles of your feet?" he asked at once.</p>
+
+<p>I assented, and he ran thro' at once all the symptoms in series.</p>
+
+<p>"I see you know what my trouble is," I said shyly. And we chatted a
+little about the War, about disease, and I told him of the recent memoir
+on the histology of the disease &mdash;&mdash; in the <i>Trans. Roy. Soc</i>, Edin.
+which interested him. Then he went away again&mdash;very amiable, very polite
+&mdash;an obvious <i>non possumus</i>....<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>On Monday at 4 went up to &mdash;&mdash; to tea as previously arranged, but found
+the house shut up so returned to my rooms in a rage.</p>
+
+<p>After tea, having read the newspapers inside out, sat by the open window
+looking out on to the Marine Parade. It was dusk, a fine rain was
+falling, and the parade and sea-front were deserted save for an
+occasional figure hurrying past with mackintosh and umbrella. Suddenly
+as I sat looking out on this doleful scene, a dirge from nowhere in
+particular sounded on my ears which I soon recognised as "Robin Adair,"
+sung very <i>lento</i> and very <i>maestoso</i> by a woman, with a flute obligato
+played by some second person. The tide was right up, and the little
+waves murmured listlessly at long intervals: never before I think have I
+been plunged into such an abyss of acute misery.</p>
+
+<p>Next day the wire came. But it was too late. The day after that, I was
+worse, a single ray of sunshine being the rediscovery of the
+second-hand-clothes family from Whitechapel taking the air together on
+the front. This dreary party was traipsing along, the parents in their
+furs giving an occasional glance at the sea uncomfortably, as if they
+only noticed it was wet, and the children still in black and still
+wearing their scuted boots, obviously a little uncomfortable in a place
+so clean and windswept. I think they all came to the seaside out of
+decorum and for the satisfaction of feeling that they could afford it
+like other folk, and that old-clothes was as profitable a business as
+another.</p>
+
+<p>On Thursday, returned home as I was afraid of being taken ill and having
+to go into the public hospital. Arrived home and went to bed and here we
+are till Jan. 1st on 3 months' sick leave. However, the swingeing
+urtication in my hands and feet has now almost entirely abated and
+to-day I went out with E&mdash;&mdash; and the perambulator, <i>which I pushed</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 13.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>A Baby-Girl</i></p>
+
+<p>Walked down the bottom of the road and hung over some wooden railings. A
+little village baby-girl aged not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> more than 3 was hovering about near
+me while I gazed abstractedly across the Park at the trees. Presently,
+she crawled through the railings into the field and picked up a few dead
+leaves&mdash;a baby picking up dead leaves! Then she threw them down, and
+kicked them. Then moved on again&mdash;rustling about intermittently like a
+winter Thrush in the shrubbery. At last, she had stumbled around to
+where I was leaning over the railings. She stood immediately in front of
+me and silently looked up with a steady reproachful gaze: "Ain't you
+'shamed, you lazy-bones?" till I could bear her inquisitorial gaze no
+longer, and so went and hung over some more railings further on.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Service</i></p>
+
+<p>He asked for a Tennyson. She immediately went upstairs in the dark, lit
+a match and got it for him.</p>
+
+<p>He asked for a Shakespeare. And without a moment's hesitation, she went
+upstairs again, lit another match and got that for him.</p>
+
+<p>And I believe if he had said "Rats," she would have shot out silently
+into the dark and tried to catch one for him. Only a woman is capable of
+such service.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Hardy's Poetry</i></p>
+
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 16em;">"You did not come,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">And marching time drew on and wore me numb&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Yet less for loss of your dear presence there</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Than that I thus found lacking in your make</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">That high compassion which can overbear</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Reluctance for pure loving-kindness' sake</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Grieved I, <i>when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum</i>,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 18.5em;">You did not come."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>I thoroughly enjoy Hardy's poetry for its masterfulness, for his sheer
+muscular compulsion over the words and sentences. In his rough-hewn
+lines he yokes the recalcitrant words together and drives them along
+mercilessly with something that looks like simple brute strength.
+Witness the triumphant last line in the above where the words are
+absolute bondslaves to his exact meaning, his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> indomitable will. All
+this pleases me the more for I know to my cost what stubborn, sullen,
+hephæstian beasts words and clauses can sometimes be. It is nice to see
+them punished. Hardy's poetry is Michael Angelo rather than Greek,
+Browning not Tennyson.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 14.</p>
+
+<p>What a day! After a night of fog signals, I awoke this morning to find
+it still foggy and the ground covered with a grey rime. All day the fog
+has remained: I look out now thro' the yellowish atmosphere across a
+field which is frosted over, the grass and brambles stiff and glassy. My
+back is aching and the cold is so intense that unless I crouch over the
+fire hands and feet become immediately stone-cold. All day I have
+crouched over the fire, reading newspapers, listening to fog signals and
+the screaming of the baby.... I have been in a torpor, like a Bat in a
+cavern&mdash;really dead yet automatically hanging on to life by my hind
+legs.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 15.</p>
+
+<p>"To stand upon one's guard against Death exasperates her malice and
+protracts our sufferings." W.S. Landor.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 19.</p>
+
+<p>The Parson called, over the christening of the baby. I told him I was an
+agnostic. "There are several interesting lines of thought down here," he
+said wearily, passing his hand over his eyes. I know several men more
+enthusiastic over Fleas and Worms than this phlegmatic priest, over
+Jesus Christ.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 20.</p>
+
+<p>The reason why I do not spend my days in despair and my nights in
+hopeless weeping simply is that I am in love with my own ruin. I
+therefore deserve no sympathy, and probably shan't get it: my own
+profound self-compassion is enough. I am so abominably self-conscious
+that no smallest detail in this tragedy eludes me. Day after day<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> I sit
+in the theatre of my own life and watch the drama of my own history
+proceeding to its close. Pray God the curtain falls at the right moment
+lest the play drag on into some long and tedious anticlimax.</p>
+
+<p>We all like to dramatise ourselves. Byron was dramatising himself when,
+in a fit of rhetorical self-compassion, he wrote:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! could I feel as I have felt or be what I have been, Or weep as I
+could once have wept o'er many a vanished scene."</p>
+
+<p>Shelley, too, being an artist could not stand insensible to his own
+tragedy and Francis Thompson suggests that he even anticipated his own
+end from a passage in <i>Julian and Maddalo</i>, "... if you can't swim,
+Beware of Providence." "Did no earthly <i>dixisti</i>," Thompson asks, "sound
+in his ears as he wrote it?"</p>
+
+<p>In any event, it was an admirable ending from the dramatic point of
+view; Destiny is often a superb dramatist. What more perfect than the
+death of Rupert Brooke at Scyros in the Ægean?<a name="FNanchor_6_23" id="FNanchor_6_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_23" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> The lives of some men
+are works of art, perfect in form, in development and in climax. Yet how
+frequently a life eminently successful or even eminently ruinous is also
+an unlovely, sordid, ridiculous or vulgar affair! Every one will concede
+that it must be a hard thing to be commonplace and vulgar even in
+misfortune, to discover that the tragedy of your own precious life has
+been dramatically bad, that your life even in its ruins is but a poor
+thing, and your own miseries pathetic from their very insignificance;
+that you are only Jones with chronic indigestion rather than Guy de
+Maupassant mad, or Coleridge with a great intellect being slowly
+dismantled by opium.</p>
+
+<p>If only I could order my life by line and level, if I could control or
+create my own destiny and mould it into some marble perfection! In
+short, if life were an art and not a lottery! In the lives of all of us,
+how many wasted efforts, how many wasted opportunities, false starts,
+blind<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span>&mdash;how many lost days&mdash;and man's life is but a paltry three score
+years and ten: pitiful short commons indeed.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes, as I lean over a five-barred gate or gaze stupidly into the
+fire, I garner a bitter-sweet contentment in making ideal
+reconstructions of my life, selecting my parents, the date and place of
+my birth, my gifts, my education, my mentors and what portions out of
+the infinity of knowledge shall gain a place within my mind&mdash;that sacred
+glebe-land to be zealously preserved and enthusiastically cultivated.
+Whereas, my mind is now a wilderness in which all kinds of useless
+growths have found an ineradicable foothold. I am exasperated to find I
+have by heart the long addresses of a lot of dismal business
+correspondents and yet can't remember the last chapters of Ecclesiastes:
+what a waste of mind-stuff there! It irks me to be acquainted even to
+nausea with the spot in which I live, I whose feet have never traversed
+even so much as this little island much less carried me in triumph to
+Timbuctoo, Honolulu, Rio, Rome.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 21.</p>
+
+<p>This continuous preoccupation with self sickens me&mdash;as I look back over
+these entries. It is inconceivable that I should be here steadily
+writing up my ego day by day in the middle of this disastrous war....
+Yesterday I had a move on. To-day life wearies me. I am sick of myself
+and life. This beastly world with its beastly war and hate makes me
+restless, dissatisfied, and full of a longing to be quit of it. I am as
+full of unrest as an autumn Swallow. "My soul," I said to them at
+breakfast with a sardonic grin, "is like a greyhound in the slips. I
+shall have to wear heavy boots to prevent myself from soaring. I have
+such an uplift on me that I could carry a horse, a dog, a cat, if you
+tied them on to my homing spirit and so transformed my Ascension into an
+adventure out of Baron Munchausen." With a gasconnade of contempt, I
+should like to turn on my heel and march straight out of this wretched
+world at once.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 22.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Gibbon's Autobiography</i></p>
+
+<p>This book makes me of all people (and especially just now) groan
+inwardly. "I am at a loss," he says, referring to the <i>Decline and
+Fall</i>, "how to describe the success of the work without betraying the
+vanity of the writer.... My book was on every table and almost on every
+toilette." It makes me bite my lips. Rousseau and his criticism of "I
+sighed as a lover; I obeyed as a son," and Gibbon on his dignity in
+reply make one of the most ludicrous incidents in literary history. "...
+that extraordinary man whom I admire and pity, should have been less
+precipitate in condemning the moral character and conduct of a
+stranger!" Oh my giddy Aunt! Isn't this <i>rich</i>? Still, I am glad you did
+not marry her: we could ill spare Madam de Staël, Madam Necker's
+daughter, that wonderful, vivacious and warmhearted woman.</p>
+
+<p>"After the morning has been occupied with the labours of the library, I
+wish to unbend rather than exercise my mind; and in the interval between
+tea and supper, I am far from disdaining the innocent amusement of a
+game of cards." How Jane Austen would have laughed at him! The passage
+reminds me of the Rev. Mr. Collins saying:</p>
+
+<p>"Had I been able I should have been only too pleased to give you a song,
+for I regard music as a harmless diversion and perfectly compatible with
+the profession of a clergyman."</p>
+
+<p>"When I contemplate the common lot of mortality," Gibbon writes, "I must
+acknowledge I have drawn a high prize in the lottery of life," and he
+goes on to count up all his blessings with the most offensive
+delight&mdash;his wealth, the good fortune of his birth, his ripe years, a
+cheerful temper, a moderate sensibility, health, sound and peaceful
+slumbers from infancy, his valuable friendship with Lord Sheffield, his
+rank, fame, etc., etc., <i>ad nauseam</i>. He rakes over his whole life for
+things to be grateful for. He intones his happiness in a long recitative
+of thanksgiving that his lot was not that of a savage, of a slave, or a
+peasant;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> he washes his hands with imaginary soap on reflecting on the
+bounty of Nature which cast his birth in a free and civilised country,
+in an age of science and philosophy, in a family of honourable rank and
+decently endowed with the gifts of fortune&mdash;sleek, complacent,
+oleaginous and salacious old gentleman, how I would love to have bombed
+you out of your self-satisfaction!</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Masefield's "Gallipoli"</i></p>
+
+<p>It amused me to discover the evident relish with which the author of <i>In
+the Daffodil Fields</i> emphasises the blood and the flowers in the attack
+on Achi Baba. It's all blood and beautiful flowers mixed up together to
+Masefield's great excitement.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"A swear word in a city slum</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">A simple swear word is to some&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">To Masefield something more."</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">MAX BEERBOHM.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Still, to call Gallipoli "bloody Hell" is, after all, only a
+pedantically exact description. You understand, tho', a very remarkable
+book&mdash;a work of genius.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 23.</p>
+
+<p>To be cheerful this Xmas would require a <i>coup de théâtre</i>&mdash;some sort of
+psychological sleight of hand.</p>
+
+<p>I get downstairs at 10 and spend the day reading and writing, without a
+soul to converse with. Everything comes to me second-hand&mdash;thro' the
+newspapers, the world of life thro' the halfpenny <i>Daily News</i>, and the
+world of books thro' the <i>Times Literary Supplement</i>. For the rest I
+listen to the kettle singing and make symphonies out of it, or I look
+into the fire to see the pictures there....</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 24.</p>
+
+<p>Everyone I suppose engaged in this irony of Xmas. What a solemn lunatic
+the world is.</p>
+
+<p>Walked awhile in a beautiful lane close by, washed hard<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> and clean and
+deeply channelled by the recent rain. On the hill-top, I could look
+right across the valley to the uplands, where on the sky line a few Firs
+stood in stately sequestration from common English Oaks, like a group of
+ambassadors in full dress. In the distance a hen clucked, I saw a few
+Peewits wheeling and watched the smoke rising from our cottage
+perpendicularly into the motionless air. There was a clement quiet and a
+clement warmth, and in my heart a burst of real happiness that made me
+rich even beside less unfortunate beings and beyond what I had ever
+expected to be again.</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 26.</p>
+
+<p>"In thus describing and illustrating my intellectual torpor, I use terms
+that apply more or less to every part of the years during which I was
+under the Circean spells of opium. But for misery&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>(Why do I waste my energy with this damned Journal? I stop. I hate it. I
+am going out for a walk in the fog.)</p>
+
+<p><i>December</i> 31.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Reminiscences</i></p>
+
+<p>For the past few days I have been living in a quiet hermitage of
+retrospect. My memories have gone back to the times&mdash;remote,
+inaccessible, prehistoric&mdash;before ever this Journal was begun, when I
+myself was but a jelly without form and void&mdash;that is, before I had
+developed any characteristic qualities and above all the dominant one, a
+passion for Natural History.</p>
+
+<p>One day a school friend, being covetous of certain stamps in my
+collection, induced me to "swop" them for his collection of birds' eggs
+which he showed me nestling in the bran at the bottom of a box. He was a
+cunning boy and thought he had the better of the bargain. He little
+realised&mdash;nor did I&mdash;the priceless gift he bestowed when his little fat
+dirty hands decorated, I remember, with innumerable warts, picked out
+the eggs and gave them to me. In fact, a smile momentarily crossed his
+face, he turned his head aside, he spat in happy contemplation of the
+deal.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I continued eagerly to add to the little collection of Birds' eggs, but
+for a long time it never occurred to me to go out into the country
+myself and collect them,&mdash;I just <i>swopped,</i> until one day our errand
+boy, who stuttered, had bandy legs, and walked on the outside of his
+feet with the gait of an Anthropoid, said to me, "I will sh-how you how
+to find Birds' n-nests if you like to come out to the w-woods." So one
+Saturday, when the backyard was cleaned down and the coal boxes filled,
+he and I started off together to a wood some way down the river bank,
+where he&mdash;my good and beneficent angel&mdash;presently showed me a Thrush's
+nest in the fork of a young Oak tree. Never-to-be-forgotten moment! The
+sight of those blue speckled eggs lying so unexpectedly, as I climbed up
+the tree, on the other side of an untidy tangle of dried moss and grass,
+in a neat little earthenware cup, caused probably the first tremor of
+real emotion at a beautiful object. The emotion did not last long! In a
+moment I had stolen the eggs and soon after smashed them&mdash;in trying to
+blow them, schoolboy fashion.</p>
+
+<p>Then, I rapidly became an ardent field naturalist. My delight in Birds
+and Birds' eggs spread in a benignant infection to every branch of
+Natural History. I collected Beetles, Butterflies, plants, Birds' wings,
+Birds' claws, etc. Dr. Gordon Staples in the <i>Boy's Own Paper</i>, taught
+me how to make a skin, and I got hold of a Mole and then a Squirrel (the
+latter falling to my prowess with a catapult), stuffed them and set them
+up in cases which I glazed myself. I even painted in suitable
+backgrounds, in the one case a mole-hill, looking, I fear, more like a
+mountain, and in the other, a Fir tree standing at an impossible angle
+of 45°. Then I read a book on trapping, and tried to catch Hares. Then I
+read Sir John Lubbock's <i>Ants, Bees and Wasps</i>, and constructed an
+observation Ants' nest (though the Ants escaped).</p>
+
+<p>In looking back to these days, I am chiefly struck by my extraordinary
+ignorance of the common objects of the countryside, for although we
+lived in the far west country, the house, without a garden, was in the
+middle of the town, and all my seniors were as ignorant<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> as I. Nature
+Study in the schools did not then exist, I had no benevolent
+paterfamilias to take me by the hand and point out the common British
+Birds; for my father's only interest was in politics. I can remember
+coming home once all agog with a wonderful Bird I had seen&mdash;like a tiny
+Magpie, I said. No one could tell me that it was, of course, only a
+little Pied Wagtail.</p>
+
+<p>The absence of sympathy or of congenial companionship, however, had
+absolutely no effect in damping my ardour. As I grew older my
+egg-collecting companions fell away, some took up the law, or tailoring,
+or clerking, some entered the Church, while I became yearly more
+engrossed. In my childhood my enthusiasm lay like a watch-spring, coiled
+up and hidden inside me, until that Thrush's nest and eggs seized hold
+of it by the end and pulled it out by degrees in a long silver ribbon. I
+kept live Bats in our upstairs little-used drawing-room, and Newts and
+Frogs in pans in the backyard. My mother tolerated these things because
+I had sufficiently impressed her with the importance to science of the
+observations which I was making and about to publish. Those on Bats
+indeed were thought fit to be included in a standard work
+&mdash;Barrett-Hamilton's <i>Mammals of Great Britain and Ireland</i>. The
+published articles served to bring me into correspondence with other
+naturalists, and I shall never forget my excitement on receiving for the
+first time a letter of appreciation. It was from the author of several
+natural history books, to</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 7.5em;">"W.N.P. BARBELLION, ESQ.,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 9em;">Naturalist,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 13.5em;">Downstable,"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>and illustrated with a delightful sketch of Ring Plovers feeding on the
+saltings. This letter was carefully pasted into my diary, where it still
+remains.</p>
+
+<p>After all, it is perhaps unfair to say that I had no kindred spirit with
+me in my investigations. Martha, the servant girl who had been with us
+for 30 years, loved animals<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> of all sorts and&mdash;what was strange in a
+country girl&mdash;she had no fear of handling even such things as Newts and
+Frogs. My Batrachia often used to escape from their pans in the yard
+into Martha's kitchen, and, not a bit scandalised, she would sometimes
+catch one marching across the rug or squeezing underneath a cupboard.
+"Lor'!" would be her comment as she picked the vagrant up and took it
+back to its aquarium, "can't 'em travel?" Martha had an eye for
+character in animals. In the long dynasty of cats we possessed one at
+length who by association of opposite ideas we called Marmaduke because
+he ought to have been called Jan Stewer. "A chuff old feller, 'idden
+'ee?" Martha used to ask me with pride and love in her eyes. "He purrs
+in broad Devon," I used to answer. Marmaduke need only wave the tip of
+his tail to indicate to her his imperative desire to promenade. Martha
+knew if no one else did that every spring "Pore 'Duke," underneath his
+fur, used to come out in spots. "'Tiz jus' like a cheel 'e gets a bit
+spotty as the warm weather cums along." Starlings on the washhouse roof,
+regularly fed with scraps, were ever her wonder and delight. "Don' 'em
+let it down, I zay?" In later years, when I was occupied in the top
+attic, making dissections of various animals that I collected, she would
+sometimes leave her scrubbing and cleaning in the room below to thrust
+her head up the attic stairs and enquire, "'Ow be 'ee gettin' on then?"
+Her unfeigned interest in my anatomical researches gave me real
+pleasure, and I took delight in arousing her wonder by pointing out and
+explaining the brain of a Pigeon or the nervous system of a Dog-fish, or
+a Frog's heart taken out and still beating in the dissecting dish. She,
+in reply, would add reflections upon her own experiences in preparing
+meat for dinner&mdash;anecdotes about the "maw" of an old Fowl, or the great
+"pipe" of a Goose. Then, suddenly scurrying downstairs, she would say,
+"I must be off or I shall be all be'ind like the cow's tail." Now the
+dignified interest of the average educated man would have chilled me.</p>
+
+<p>By the way, years later, when he was a miner in S. Wales, that historic
+errand-boy displayed his consciousness<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span> of the important role he once
+played by sending me on a postcard congratulations on my success in the
+B.M. appointment. It touched me to think he had not forgotten after
+years of separation.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_18" id="Footnote_1_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_18"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> So it proved. See September 26 <i>et seq.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_19" id="Footnote_2_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_19"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> In "La Recherche de l'Absolu" (Balzac).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_20" id="Footnote_3_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_20"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> See September 3 (next entry), "<i>A Jolt</i>," and September 24
+(<i>infra</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_21" id="Footnote_4_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_21"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> The handwriting is painfully laboured, very large across a
+page and so crooked as to be almost undecipherable in places.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_22" id="Footnote_5_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_22"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> This is from a letter written by the dying Keats in Naples
+to his friend Brown.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_23" id="Footnote_6_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_23"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> Contrast with it Wordsworth rotting at Rydal Mount or
+Swinburne at Putney.</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="a1917" id="a1917"></a>1917</h3>
+
+
+<p><i>January</i> 1.</p>
+
+<p>The New Year came in like a thief in the night&mdash;noiselessly; no bells,
+no syrens, no songs by order of the Government. Nothing could have been
+more appropriate than a burglarious entry like this&mdash;seeing what the
+year has come to filch from us all in the next 12 months.</p>
+
+<p><i>January</i> 20.</p>
+
+<p>I am over 6 feet high and as thin as a skeleton; every bone in my body,
+even the neck vertebrae, creak at odd intervals when I move. So that I
+am not only a skeleton but a badly articulated one to boot. If to this
+is coupled the fact of the creeping paralysis, you have the complete
+horror. Even as I sit and write, millions of bacteria are gnawing away
+my precious spinal cord, and if you put your ear to my back the sound of
+the gnawing I dare say could be heard. The other day a man came and set
+up a post in the garden for the clothes' line. As soon as I saw the post
+I said "gibbet"&mdash;it looks exactly like one, and I, for sure, must be the
+malefactor. Last night while E&mdash;&mdash; was nursing the baby I most
+delightfully remarked: "What a little parasite&mdash;why you are Cleopatra
+affixing the aspic&mdash;'Tarry, good lady, the bright day is done, and we
+are for the dark.'"</p>
+
+<p>The fact that such images arise spontaneously in my mind, show how
+rotten to the core I am.</p>
+
+<p>... The advent of the Baby was my <i>coup de grâce.</i> The little creature
+seems to focus under one head all my personal disasters and more than
+once a senseless rage has clutched me at the thought of a baby in
+exchange for my ambition, a nursery for the study. Yet, on the whole, I
+find it a good and satisfying thing to see her, healthy, new,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> intact on
+the threshold: I grow tired of my own dismal life just as one does of a
+suit of dirty clothes. My life and person are patched and greasy; hers
+is new and without a single blemish or misfortune.... Moreover, she
+makes her mother happy and consoles her grandmother too.</p>
+
+<p><i>January</i> 21.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Death</i></p>
+
+<p>What a delightful thing the state of Death would be if the dead passed
+their time haunting the places they loved in life and living over again
+the dear delightful past&mdash;if death were one long indulgence in the
+pleasures of memory! if the disembodied spirit forgot all the pains of
+its previous existence and remembered only the happiness! Think of me
+flitting about the orchards and farm-yards in &mdash;&mdash; birdsnesting, walking
+along the coast among the seabirds, climbing Exmoor, bathing in streams
+and in the sea, haunting all my old loves and passions, cutting open
+with devouring curiosity Rabbits, Pigeons, Frogs, Dogfish, Amphioxus;
+think of me, too, at length unwillingly deflected from these cherished
+pursuits in the raptures of first love, cutting her initials on trees
+and fences instead of watching birds, day-dreaming over <i>Parker and
+Haswell</i> and then bitterly reproaching myself later for much loss of
+precious time. How happy I shall be if Death is like this: to be living
+over again and again all my ecstasies, over first times&mdash;the first time
+I found a Bottle Tit's nest, the first time I succeeded in penetrating
+into the fastnesses of my El Dorado&mdash;Exmoor, the first time I gazed upon
+the internal anatomy of a Snail, the first time I read Berkeley's
+<i>Principles of Human Understanding</i> (what a soul-shaking epoch that
+was!), and the first time I kissed her! My hope is that I may haunt
+these times again, that I may haunt the places, the books, the bathes,
+the walks, the desires, the hopes, the first (and last) loves of my life
+all transfigured and beatified by sovereign Memory.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>January</i> 26.</p>
+
+<p>Out of doors to-day it's like the roaring forties! Every tree I passed
+in the lane was a great wind instrument, bellowing out a passionate
+song, and the sky was torn to ribbons. It is cold enough to freeze the
+nose off a brass Monkey, but very exhilarating. I stood on the hill and
+squared my fists to the wind and bade everything come on. I sit writing
+this by the fire and am thoroughly scourged and purified by this great
+castigating wind.... I think I will stick it out&mdash;I will sit quite still
+in my chair and defy this sculking footpad&mdash;let the paralysis creep into
+every bone, I will hang on to the last and watch it skulking with my
+most hideous grimace.</p>
+
+<p><i>January</i> 27.</p>
+
+<p>Still freezing and blowing. Coming back from the village, tho' I was
+tired and hobbling badly, decided to walk up the lane even if it meant
+crawling home on hands and knees.</p>
+
+<p>The sky was a quick-change artist to-day. Every time you looked you saw
+a different picture. From the bottom of the hill I looked up and saw
+above me&mdash;it seemed at an immense and windy height&mdash;a piece of blue,
+framed in an irregular edge of white woolly cloud seen thro' the crooked
+branches of an Oak. It was a narrow crooked lane, sunk deep in the soil
+with large smooth surfaces of stone like skulls bulging up in places
+where the rain had washed away the soil.</p>
+
+<p>Further on, the sun was lying low almost in the centre of a
+semi-circular bend in the near horizon. It frosted the wool of a few
+sheep seen in silhouette, and then slowly disappeared in mist. On the
+right-hand side was a cottage with the smoke being wrenched away from
+the chimney top, and on the left a group of stately Firs, chanting a
+requiem like a cathedral choir.</p>
+
+<p><i>January</i> 28.</p>
+
+<p>Still blowing and bitterly cold. Along the path fields in the Park I
+stopped to look at a thick clump of Firs<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span> standing aloof on some high
+ground and guarded by an outside ring of honest English Oaks, Ashes and
+Elms. They were a sombre mysterious little crowd intent, I fancied, on
+some secret ritual of the trees. The high ground on which they stood
+looked higher and more inaccessible than it really was, the clump was
+dark green, almost black, and in between their trunks where all was
+obscurity, some hardy adventurer might well have discovered a Grand Lama
+sitting within his Penetralia. But I had no taste for any such
+profanity, and even as I looked the sun came out from behind a cloud
+very slowly, bringing the picture into clearer focus, chasing away
+shadows and bringing out all the colours. The landscape resumed its
+homely aspect: an English park with Firs in it.</p>
+
+<p><i>January</i> 29.</p>
+
+<p>Last night, I pulled aside the window curtain of our front door and
+peeped out. Just below the densely black projecting gable of the house I
+saw the crescent moon lying on her back in a bed of purple sky, and I
+saw our little white frosted garden path curving up towards the garden
+gate. It was a delicious <i>coup d'Å“il</i>, and I shewed it to E&mdash;&mdash;.</p>
+
+<p><i>January</i> 31.</p>
+
+<p>Showers of snow at intervals, the little flakes rocking about lazily or
+spiralling down, while the few that eventually reached the ground would
+in a moment or so be caught up in a sudden furious puff of wind, and
+sent driving along the road with the dust.</p>
+
+<p>My usual little jaunt up the lane past the mossy farm-house. Home to
+toasted tea-cakes and a pinewood fire, with my wife chattering prettily
+to the baby. After tea, enchanted by the reading of a new book&mdash;<i>Le
+Journal de Maurice de Guérin</i>&mdash;or rather the introduction to it by
+Sainte-Beuve. I devoured it! I have spent a devouring day; under a calm
+exterior I have burnt up the hours; all of me has been athrob; every
+little cell in my brain has danced to its own little tune. For to-day,
+Death has been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> an impossibility. I have felt that anyhow to-day I could
+not die&mdash;I have laughed at the mere thought of it. If only this mood
+would last! If I could feel thus always, then I could fend off Death for
+an immortality of life.</p>
+
+<p>But suddenly, as now, the real horror of my life and future comes on me
+in a flash. For a second I am terrified by the menace of the future, but
+fortunately only for a second. For I've learnt a trick which I fear to
+reveal; it is so valuable and necessary to me that if I talked of it or
+vulgarised it my secret might be stolen away. Not a word then!</p>
+
+<p><i>Later</i>. I have just heard on the gramophone, some Grieg, and it has
+charged my happiness with disrupting voltage of desire. Oh! if only I
+had health, I could make the welkin ring! I shall leave so little behind
+me, such a few paltry pages beside what I have it in me to do. It
+shatters me.</p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 1.</p>
+
+<p>Looking back, I must say I like the splendid gusto with which I lived
+thro' yesterday: that mettlesome fashion in which I took the lane, and
+at the top, how I swung around to sweep my gaze across to the uplands
+opposite with snow falling all the time. Then in the evening, the almost
+complete absorption in the new book when I forgot everything <i>pro tem</i>.
+It was quite like the old days.</p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 2.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Crowd Fever</i></p>
+
+<p>After four months' sick leave, returned to work and London.</p>
+
+<p>An illness like mine rejuvenates one&mdash;for the time being! A pony and
+jingle from the old "Fox and Hounds Inn" took me to the Station, and I
+enjoyed the feel of the wheels rolling beneath me over the hard road. In
+the train, I looked out of the window as interested as any schoolboy. On
+the Underground I was delighted with the smooth, quiet way with which
+the "Metro" trains glide into the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span> Station. I had quite forgotten this.
+Then, when my hand began to get better, I rediscovered the pleasures of
+penmanship and kept on writing, with my tongue out. And I re-enjoyed the
+child's satisfaction in coaxing a button to slip into its hole: all
+grown-up people have forgotten how difficult and complex such operations
+are.</p>
+
+<p>This morning how desirable everything seemed to me! The world
+intoxicated me. Moving again among so many human beings gave me the
+crowd-fever, and started again all the pangs of the old familiar hunger
+for a fuller life, that centrifugal elan in which I feared for the
+disruption and scattering of my parts in all directions. Temporarily I
+lost the hegemony of my own soul. Every man and woman I met was my
+enemy, threatening me with the secession of some inward part. I was
+alarmed to discover how many women I could passionately love and with
+how many men I could form a lasting friendship. Within, all was anarchy
+and commotion, a cold fright seized me lest some extraordinary event was
+about to happen: some general histolysis of my body, some sudden
+disintegration of my personality, some madness, some strange death....
+I wanted to crush out the life of all these men and women in a great
+Bear's hug, my God! this sea of human faces whom I can never recognise,
+all of us alive together beneath this yellow catafalque of fog on the
+morning of the announcement of world famine and world war!...</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>To-night, I have lost this paroxysm. For I am home again by the
+fireside. All the multitude have disappeared from my view. I have lost
+them, every one. I have lost another day of my life and so have they,
+and we have lost each other. Meanwhile the great world spins on
+unrelentingly, frittering away lightly my precious hours (surely a small
+stock now?) while I sit discomfited by the evening fire and nurse my
+scraped hands that tingle because the spinning world has wrenched itself
+out of my feeble grasp.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 3.</p>
+
+<p>This morning on arriving at S. Kensington, went straight to a Chemist's
+shop, but finding someone inside, I drew back, and went on to another.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you any morphia tabloids?" I asked a curly-haired, nice-looking,
+smiling youth, who leaned with both hands on the counter and looked at
+me knowingly, as if he had had unlimited experience of would-be morphi
+nomaniacs.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, plenty of them," he said, fencing. And then waited.</p>
+
+<p>"Can you supply me?" I asked, feeling very conscious of myself.</p>
+
+<p>He smiled once more, shook his head and said it was contrary to the
+Defence of the Realm Act.</p>
+
+<p>I made a sorry effort to appear ingenuous, and he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, it is only a palliative."</p>
+
+<p>With a solemn countenance intended to indicate pain I answered:</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but palliatives are very necessary sometimes," and I walked out of
+the hateful shop discomfited.</p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 6.</p>
+
+<p>Am busy re-writing,<a name="FNanchor_1_24" id="FNanchor_1_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_24" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> editing and bowdlerising my journals for
+publication against the time when I shall have gone the way of all
+flesh. No one else would prepare it for publication if I don't. Reading
+it through again, I see what a remarkable book I have written. If only
+they will publish it!</p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 7.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Chinese Lanterns</i></p>
+
+<p>The other morning as I dressed, I could see the sun like a large yellow
+moon rising on a world, stiff, stark, its contours merely indicated
+beneath a winding-sheet of snow. Further around the horizon was another
+moon&mdash;the full moon itself&mdash;yellow likewise, but setting. It was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> the
+strangest picture I ever saw. I might well have been upon another
+planet; I could not have been more surprised even at a whole ring of
+yellow satellites arranged at regular intervals all around the horizon.</p>
+
+<p>In the evening of the same day, I drove home from the Station in a
+little governess-cart, over a snow-clogged road. The cautious little
+pony picked out her way so carefully in little
+strides&mdash;pat-pat-pat&mdash;wherever it was slippery, and the Landlord of the
+Inn sat opposite me extolling all the clever little creature's merits.
+It was dusk, and for some reason of the atmosphere the scraps of cloud
+appeared as blue sky and the blue sky as cloud, beneath which the full
+moon like a great Chinese lantern hung suspended so low down it seemed
+to touch the trees and hills. How have folk been able to "carry on" in a
+world so utterly strange as this one during the past few days! I marvel
+that beneath such moons and suns, the peoples of the world have not
+ceased for a while from the petty business of war during at least a few
+of our dancing revolutions around this furnace of a star. One of these
+days I should not be surprised if this fascinated earth did not fall
+into it like a moth into a candle. And where would our Great War be
+then?</p>
+
+<p><i>February</i> 28.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>The Strangeness of my Life</i></p>
+
+<p>Consider the War: and the current adventures of millions of men on land,
+sea and air; and the incessant labours of millions of men in factory and
+workshop and in the field; think of the hospitals and all they hold, of
+everyone hoping, fearing, suffering, waiting&mdash;of the concentration of
+all humanity on the one subject&mdash;the War. And then think of me, poor
+little me, deserted and forgotten, a tiny fragment sunk so deep and
+helplessly between the sheer granite walls of my environment that scarce
+an echo reaches me of the thunder among the mountains above. I read
+about the War in a ha'penny paper, and see it in the pictures of the
+<i>Daily Mirror</i>. For the rest, I live by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> counting the joints on insects'
+legs and even that much effort is almost beyond my strength.</p>
+
+<p>That is strange enough. But my life is stranger still by comparison. And
+this is the marvel: that every day I spend by the waters of Babylon,
+weeping and neglected among enthusiasts, enthusiastically counting
+joints, while every evening I return to Zion to my books, to Hardy's
+poems, to Maurice de Guérin's Journals, to my own memoirs. Mine is a
+life of consummate isolation, and I frequently marvel at it.</p>
+
+<p>The men I meet accept me as an entomologist and <i>ipso facto</i>, an
+enthusiast in the science. That is all they know of me, and all they
+want to know of me, or of any man. Surely no man's existence was ever
+quite such a duplicity as mine. I smile bitterly to myself ten times a
+day, as I engage in all the dreary technical jargon of professional talk
+with them. How they would gossip over the facts of my life if they knew!
+How scandalised they would be over my inner life's activities, how
+resentful of enthusiasm other than entomological!</p>
+
+<p>I find it very irksome to keep up this farce of concealment. I would
+love to declare myself. I loathe, hate and detest the secrecy of my real
+self: the continuous restraint enforced on me ulcerates my heart and
+makes harmonious social existence impossible with those who do not know
+me thoroughly. "On dit qu'au jugement dernier le secret des consciences
+sera révélé à tout l'univers; je voudrais qu'il en fut ainsi de moi dès
+aujourd'hui et que la vue de mon âme fut ouvert à tous venants." Maurice
+de Guérin.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 1.</p>
+
+<p>It is curious for me to look at my tubes and microscope and realise that
+I shall never require them again for serious use. Life is a dreadful
+burden to me at the Museum. I am too ill for any scientific work so I
+write labels and put things away. I am simply marking time on the edge
+of a precipice awaiting the order, "Forward."</p>
+
+<p>It is excoriating to be thus wasting the last few precious<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span> days of my
+life in such mummery merely to get bread to eat. They might at least let
+me die in peace, and with fitting decorum. It is so ignoble to be
+tinkering about in a Museum among Scarabees and insects when I ought to
+be reflecting on life and death.</p>
+
+<p>I ask myself what ought to be my most appropriate reaction in such
+circumstances as the present? Why, of course, to carry on as if all were
+normal, and the future unknown: why, so I do, to outward view, for the
+sake of the others. Yet that is no reason why in my own inward parts I
+should not at times indulge in a little relaxation. It is a relief to
+put off the mailed coat, to sit awhile by the green-room fire and have
+life as it really is, all to myself. But the necessity of living will
+not let me alone. I must be always mumming.</p>
+
+<p>My life has been all isolation and restriction. And it now appears even
+my death is to be hedged around with prohibitions. Drugs for
+example&mdash;how beneficent a little laudanum at times in a case like mine!
+and how happy I could be if I knew that in my waistcoat pocket I carried
+a kindly, easy means of shuffling off this coil when the time comes as
+come it must. It horrifies me to consider how I might break the life of
+E&mdash;&mdash; clean in two, and sap her courage by a lingering, dawdling dying.
+But there is the Defence of the Realm Act. It is a case of a Scorpion in
+a ring of fire but without any sting in its tail.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 2.</p>
+
+<p>I ask myself: what are my views on death, the next world, God? I look
+into my mind and discover I am too much of a mannikin to have any. As
+for death, I am a little bit of trembling jelly of anticipation. I am
+prepared for anything, but I am the complete agnostic; I simply don't
+know. To have views, faith, beliefs, one needs a backbone. This great
+bully of a universe overwhelms me. The stars make me cower. I am
+intimidated by the immensity surrounding my own littleness. It is futile
+and presumptuous for me to opine anything about the next world. But I
+<i>hope</i> for something much freer and more satisfying<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> after death, for
+emancipation of the spirit and above all for the obliteration of this
+puny self, this little, skulking, sharp-witted ferret.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>A Potted Novel</i></p>
+
+<p class="center">(1)</p>
+
+<p>He was an imaginative youth, and she a tragedy queen. So he fell in love
+with her because she was melancholy and her past tragic. "She is
+<i>capable</i> of tragedy, too," he said, which was a high encomium.</p>
+
+<p>But he was also an ambitious youth and all for dalliance in love.
+"Marriage," said he sententiously, "is an economic trap." And then, a
+little wistfully: "If she were a bit more melancholy and a bit more
+beautiful she would be quite irresistible."</p>
+
+<p class="center">(2)</p>
+
+<p>But he was a miserable youth, too, and in the anguish of loneliness and
+lovelessness a home tempted him sorely. Still, he dallied. <i>She</i> waited.
+Ill-health after all made marriage impossible.</p>
+
+<p class="center">(3)</p>
+
+<p>Yet love and misery drove him towards it. So one day he closed his eyes
+and offered himself up with sacrificial hands.... "Too late," she said.
+"Once perhaps ... but now...." His eyes opened again, and in a second
+Love entered his Temple once more and finally ejected the money
+changers.</p>
+
+<p class="center">(4)</p>
+
+<p>So they married after all, and he was under the impression she had made
+a good match. He had ill-health perhaps, yet who could doubt his
+ultimate fame?</p>
+
+<p>Then the War came, and he had the hardihood to open a sealed letter from
+his Doctor to the M.O. examining recruits.... Stars and staggers!! So
+it was she who was the victim in marriage! That harassing question: Did
+she know? What an ass he had been all through, what superlative egoism
+and superlative conceit!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="center">(5)</p>
+
+<p>Then a baby came. He broke under the strain and daily the symptoms grew
+more obvious. Did she know?... The question dazed him.</p>
+
+<p>Well, she <i>did</i> know, and had married him for love, nevertheless,
+against every friendly counsel, the Doctor's included.</p>
+
+<p class="center">(6)</p>
+
+<p>And now the invalid's gratitude is almost cringeing, his admiration
+boundless and his love for always. It is the perfect <i>rapprochement</i>
+between two souls, one that was honeycombed with self-love and lost in
+the labyrinthine ways of his own motives and the other straight, direct,
+almost imperious in love and altogether adorable.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Finis</i></p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 5.</p>
+
+<p>At home ill again. Yesterday was a day of utter dreariness. All my
+nerves were frozen, my heart congealed. I had no love for anyone ... no
+emotion of any sort. It was a catalepsy of the spirit harder to bear
+than fever or pain.... To-day, life is once more stirring in me, I am
+slowly awaking to the consciousness of acute but almost welcome misery.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 6.</p>
+
+<p>An affectionate letter from H&mdash;&mdash; that warmed the cockles of my
+heart&mdash;poor frozen molluscs. A&mdash;&mdash; has written only once since August.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 7.</p>
+
+<p>I am, I suppose, a whey-faced, lily-livered creature ... yet even an
+infantry subaltern has a chance....</p>
+
+<p>My dear friend &mdash;&mdash; has died and a <i>Memorial</i> Exhibition of his pictures
+is being held at the Goupil Gallery. The most fascinating man I ever
+met. I was attracted by him almost as one is attracted by a charming<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span>
+woman: by little ways, by laughing eyes, by the manner of speech. And
+now he is dead, of a lingering and painful disease.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 8.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Death</i></p>
+
+<p>Have been reading Sir Oliver Lodge's <i>Raymond</i>. I do not deny that I am
+curious about the next world, or about the condition of death. I am and
+always have been. In my early youth, I reflected continually on death
+and hated it bitterly. But now that my end is near and certain, I
+consider it less and am content to wait and see. As, for all practical
+purposes, I have done with life, and my own existence is often a burden
+to me and is like to become a burden also to others, I wish I possessed
+the wherewithal to end it at my will. With two or three tabloids in my
+waistcoat pocket, and my secret locked in my heart, how serenely I would
+move about among my friends and fellows, conscious that at some
+specially selected moment&mdash;at midnight or high noon&mdash;just when the
+spirit moved me, I could quietly slip out to sea on this Great
+Adventure. It would be well to be able to control this: the time, the
+place, and the manner of one's exit. For what disturbs me in particular
+is how I shall conduct myself; I am afraid lest I become afraid, it is a
+fear of fear. By means of my tabloids, I could arrange my death in an
+artistic setting, say underneath a big tree on a summer's day, with an
+open Homer in my hand, or more appropriately, a magnifying glass and
+Miall and Denny's <i>Cockroach.</i> It would be stage-managing my own demise
+and surely the last thing in self-conscious elegance!</p>
+
+<p>I think it was De Quincey who said Death to him seemed most awful in the
+summer. On the contrary the earth is warm then, and would welcome my old
+bones. It is on a cold night by the winter fire that the churchyard
+seems to me the least inviting: especially horrible it is the first
+evening after the funeral.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 10.</p>
+
+<p>Have had a relapse. My hand I fear is going. Food prices are leaping up.
+Woe to the unfit and the old and the poor in these coming days! We shall
+soon have nothing left in our pantries, and a piece of Wrigley's chewing
+gum will be our only comfort.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>When I come to quit this world I scarcely know which will be the greater
+regret: the people I have never met, or the places I have never seen. In
+the world of books, I rest fairly content: I have read my fair share.</p>
+
+<p>To-day I read down the column of to-morrow's preachers with the most
+ludicrous avidity, ticking off the Churches I have visited: St. Paul's
+and the Abbey, the Ethical Church in Bayswater and Westminster
+Cathedral. But the Unitarians, the Christadelphians, the Theosophists,
+the Church of Christ Scientist, the Buddhist Society, the Brompton
+Oratory, the Church of Humanity, the New Life Centre; all these
+adventures I intended one day to make.... It is not much fun ticking off
+things you have done from a list if you have done very little. I get
+more satisfaction out of a list of books. But Iona and the Hebrides,
+Edinburgh, Brussels, Buenos Ayres, Spitzbergen (when the flowers are
+out), the Niagara Falls (by moonlight), the Grindelwald, Cairo&mdash;these
+names make me growl and occasionally yelp like a hurt puppy, although to
+outward view I am sitting in an armchair blowing smoke-rings.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 11.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>The Graph of Temperament</i></p>
+
+<p>In this Journal, my pen is a delicate needle point, tracing out a graph
+of temperament so as to show its daily fluctuations: grave and gay, up
+and down, lamentation and revelry, self-love and self-disgust. You get
+here all my thoughts and opinions, always irresponsible and often
+contradictory or mutually exclusive, all my moods and vapours, all the
+varying reactions to environment of this jelly which is I.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> I snap at
+any idea that comes floating down, particularly if it is gaudy or
+quixotic, no matter if it is wholly incompatible with what I said the
+day before. People unpleasantly refer me back, and to escape I have to
+invent some sophistry. I unconsciously imitate the mannerisms of folk I
+am particularly taken with. Other people never fail to tell me of my
+simulations. If I read a book and like it very much, by a process of
+peaceful penetration, the author takes possession of my whole
+personality just as if I were a medium giving a sitting, and for some
+time subsequently his ideas come spurting up like a fountain making a
+pretty display which I take to be my own. Other people say of me, "Oh! I
+expect he read it in a book."</p>
+
+<p>I am something between a Monkey, a Chameleon, and a Jellyfish. To any
+bully with an intellect like a blunderbuss, I have always timidly held
+up my hands and afterwards gnashed my teeth for my cowardice. In
+conversation with men of alien sentiment I am self-effacing to my
+intense chagrin, often from mere shyness. I say, "Yes ... yes ... yes,"
+to nausea, when it ought to be "No ... no ... no." I become my own
+renegade, an amiable dissembler, an ass in short. It is a torture to
+have a sprightly mind blanketed by personal timidity and a feeble
+presence. The humiliating thing is that almost any strong character
+hynotises me into complacency, especially if he is a stranger; I find
+myself for the time being in really sincere agreement with him, and only
+later, discover to myself his abominable doctrines. Then I lie in bed
+and have imaginary conversations in which I get my own back.</p>
+
+<p>But, by Jove, I wreak vengeance on my familiars, and on those brethren
+even weaker than myself. They get my concentrated gall, my sulphurous
+fulminations, and would wonder to read this confession.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Cynicism</i></p>
+
+<p>For an unusually long time after I grew up, I maintained a beautiful
+confidence in the goodness of mankind. Rumours did reach me, but I
+brushed them aside as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> slanders. I was an ingénu, unsuspecting,
+credulous. I thoroughly believed that men and women and I were much
+better than we actually are. I have not come to the end of my
+disillusions even now. I still rub my eyes on occasion. I simply can't
+believe that we are such humbugs, hypocrites, self-deceivers. And
+strange to say it is the "good" people above all who most bitterly
+disappoint me. Give me a healthy liar, or a thief, or a vagabond, and he
+arouses no expectations, and so I get no heart-burning. It is the good,
+the honest, the true, who cheat me of my boyhood's beliefs.... I am a
+cynic then, but not a reckless cynic&mdash;a careworn unhappy cynic without
+the cynic's pride. "It is easy to be cynical," someone admonished me.
+"Unfortunately it is," I said.</p>
+
+<p>We are so cold, so aloof, so self-centred even the warmest friends. Men
+of piety love God, but their love for each other is so commonly but a
+poor thing. My own affections are always frosted over with the
+Englishman's reserve. I hesitate as if I were not sure of them. I am
+afraid of self-deception, I hate to find out either myself or others.
+And yet I am always doing so. Mine is a restlessly analytical brain. I
+dissect everyone, even those I love, and my discoveries frequently sting
+me to the quick. "To the pure all things are pure," whence I should
+conclude I suppose that it is the beam in my own eye. But I would not
+tolerate being deceived concerning either my own beam or other people's
+motes.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 12.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Archæopteryx and Mudflats</i></p>
+
+<p>Yesterday I collected two distinct and several twinges and hereby save
+them up. They were more than that&mdash;they were pangs, and pangs that
+twanged.</p>
+
+<p>(Why do I make fun of my suffering?)</p>
+
+<p>One was when I saw the well-known figure of the <i>Archæopteryx</i> remains
+in the slab of Lithographic sandstone of Bavaria: a reproduction in an
+illustrated encyclopædia. The other was when someone mentioned mud, and
+I thought<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> of the wide estuary of the T&mdash;&mdash;, its stretches of mudflats
+and its wild-fowl. We were turning over some pages and she said:</p>
+
+<p>"What's that?"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Archæopteryx</i>," said I.</p>
+
+<p>"Whatever is <i>Archæopteryx</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>"An extinct bird," I answered mournfully.</p>
+
+<p>Like an old amour, my love of palæontology and anatomy, and all the high
+hopes I entertained of them, came smarting to life again, so I turned
+over the page quickly.</p>
+
+<p>But why need I explain to you, O my Journal? To others, I could not
+explain. I was tongue-tied.</p>
+
+<p>"I used to get very muddy," I remarked lamentably, "in the old days when
+stalking birds on the mudflats."</p>
+
+<p>And they rather jeered at such an occupation in such a place, just as
+those beautiful sights and sounds of zostera-covered mud-banks,
+twinkling runnels, swiftly running thin-legged waders, their whistles
+and cries began to steal over my memory like a delicate pain.</p>
+
+<p>To my infinite regret, I have no description, no photograph or sketch,
+no token of any sort to remember them by. And their doom is certain.
+Heavens! how I wasted my impressions and experiences then! Swinburne has
+some lines about saltings which console me a little, but I know of no
+other descriptions by either pen or brush.</p>
+
+<p><i>March</i> 15.</p>
+
+<p>How revolting it is to see some barren old woman love-sick over a baby,
+bestowing voluptuous kisses on its nose, eyes, hands, feet, utterly
+intoxicated and chattering incessantly in the "little language," and
+hopping about like an infatuated cock grouse.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 5.</p>
+
+<p>The nurse has been here now for over five weeks. One day has been pretty
+much the same as another. I get out of bed usually about tea-time and
+sit by the window and churn over past, present, and future. However, the
+Swallows have arrived at last, though they were very late,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span> and there
+are also Cuckoos, Green Wood-peckers, Moorhens, calling from across the
+park. At night, when the moon is up, I get a great deal of fun out of an
+extremely self-inflated Brown Owl, who hoots up through the breadth and
+length of the valley, and then I am sure, listens with satisfaction to
+his echo. Still, I have much sympathy with that Brown Owl and his
+hooting.</p>
+
+<p>What I do (goodness knows what E&mdash;&mdash; does), is to drug my mind with
+print. I am just a rag-bag of Smollett, H.G. Wells, Samuel Butler, the
+<i>Daily News</i>, the Bible, the <i>Labour Leader, Joseph Vance</i>, etc., etc.
+Except for an occasional geyser of malediction when some particularly
+acrid memory comes uppermost in my mind, I find myself submitting with a
+surprising calm and even cheerfulness. That agony of frustration which
+gnawed my vitals so much in 1913 has disappeared, and I, who expected to
+go down in the smoke and sulphur of my own fulminations, am quite as
+likely to fold my hands across my chest with a truly Christian
+resignation. Joubert said, "Patience and misfortune, courage and death,
+resignation and the inevitable, generally come together. Indifference to
+life generally arises with the impossibility of preserving it"&mdash;how
+cynical that sounds.</p>
+
+<p><i>May</i> 8.</p>
+
+<p>This and another volume of my Journal are temporarily lodged in a drawer
+in my bedroom. It appears to me that as I become more static and
+moribund, they become more active and aggressive. All day they make a
+perfect uproar in their solitary confinement&mdash;although no one hears it.
+And at night they become phosphorescent, though nobody sees it. One of
+these days, with continued neglect they will blow up from spontaneous
+combustion like diseased gunpowder, the dismembered diarist being thus
+hoist upon his own petard.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 1.</p>
+
+<p>We discuss post mortem affairs quite genially and without restraint. It
+is the contempt bred of familiarity I suppose.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> E&mdash;&mdash; says widows' weeds
+have been so vulgarised by the war widows that she won't go into deep
+mourning. "But you'll wear just one weed or two for me?" I plead, and
+then we laugh. She has promised me that should a suitable chance arise,
+she will marry again. Personally, I wish I could place my hand on the
+young fellow at once, so as to put him thro' his paces&mdash;shew him where
+the water main runs and where the gas meter is, and so on.</p>
+
+<p>You will observe what a relish I have for my own <i>macabre</i>, and how
+keenly I appreciate the present situation. Nobody can say I am not
+making the best of it. One might call it pulling the hangman's beard.
+Yet I ought, I fancy, to be bewailing my poor wife and fatherless child.</p>
+
+<p><i>June</i> 15.</p>
+
+<p>I sit all day in my chair, moving 8 feet to my bed at night, and 8 feet
+from it to my chair in the morning&mdash;and wait. The assignation is
+certain. "Life is a coquetry with Death that wearies me, Too sure of the
+amour."</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 5.</p>
+
+<p>It is odd that at this time of the breaking of nations, Destiny, with
+her hands so full, should spare the time to pursue a non-combatant atom
+like me down such a labyrinthine side-track. It is odd to find her
+determined to destroy me with such tremendous thoroughness&mdash;one would
+have thought it sufficient merely to brush the dust off my wings. Why
+this deliberate, slow-moving malignity? Perhaps it is a punishment for
+the impudence of my desires. I wanted everything so I get nothing. I
+gave nothing so I receive nothing. I am not offering up my life
+willingly&mdash;it is being taken from me piece by piece, while I watch the
+pilfering with lamentable eyes.</p>
+
+<p>I have tendered my resignation and retire on a small gratuity.</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 7.</p>
+
+<p>My hand gets a little better. But it's a cat and mouse game, and so
+humiliating to be the mouse.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>... Parental affection comes to me only in spasms, and if they hurt,
+they do not last long. Curiously enough, as in the case of very old
+people, my consciousness reverts more easily to conditions long past. I
+seem unable to apprehend all the significance of having a nine-months
+old daughter, but some Bullfinches or Swallows seen thro' the window
+rouse me more. No one can deny I have loved Birds to intoxication. In my
+youth, birds' eggs, and little nestlings and chickens sent me into such
+raptures I could never tell it to you adequately.... I am too tired to
+write more.</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 23.</p>
+
+<p>Reading Pascal again. If Shelley was "gold dusty from tumbling among the
+stars," Pascal was bruised and shaken. The one was delighted, and the
+other frightened. I like Pascal's prostration before the infinities of
+Time, Space and the Unknown. Somehow, he conveys this more vividly than
+the uplift afforded him by religion.</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 25.</p>
+
+<p>I don't believe in the twin-soul theory of marriage. There are plenty of
+men any one of whom she might have married and lived with happily, and
+simpler men than I am. Methinks there are large tracts could be sliced
+off my character and she would scarcely feel the want of them. To think
+that she of all women, with a past such as hers, should be swept into my
+vicious orbit! Yet she seems to bear Destiny no resentment, so I bear it
+for her and enough for two. At our engagement I gave her my own ring to
+wear as a pledge&mdash;we thought it nicer than buying a new one. It was a
+signet ring with a dark smooth stone. Strange to say it never once
+occurred to me till now that it was a mourning ring in memory of a
+great-uncle of mine, actually with an inscription on the inside.</p>
+
+<p><i>July</i> 26.</p>
+
+<p>As long as I can hold a pen, I shall, I suppose, go on trickling ink
+into this diary!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I am amusing myself by reading the <i>Harmsworth Encyclopædia</i> in 15
+volumes, <i>i.e.</i>, I turn over the pages and read everything of interest
+that catches my eye.</p>
+
+<p>I get out of bed about ten, wash and sit by the window in my blue
+striped pyjama suit. It is so hot I need no additional clothing.
+E&mdash;&mdash; comes in, brushes my hair, sprinkles me with lavender water, lights
+my cigarette, and gives me my book-rest and books. She forgets nothing.</p>
+
+<p>From my window I look out on a field with Beech hedge down one side and
+beyond, tall trees&mdash;one showing in outline exactly like the profile of a
+Beefeater's head, more especially at sunset each evening when the tree
+next behind is in shadow. The field is full of blue Scabious plants,
+Wild Parsley and tall grass&mdash;getting brown now in the sun. Great numbers
+of White Butterflies are continually rocking themselves across&mdash;they go
+over in coveys of four or five at a time&mdash;I counted 50 in five minutes,
+which bodes ill for the cabbages. Not even the heaviest thunder showers
+seem to debilitate their kinetic ardour. They rock on like white
+aeroplanes in a hail of machine-gun bullets.</p>
+
+<p>Then there are the Swallows and Martins cutting such beautiful figures
+thro' the air that one wishes they carried a pencil in their bills as
+they fly and traced the lines of flight on a Bristol board. How I hanker
+after the Swallows! so free and gay and vigorous. This autumn, as they
+prepare to start, I shall hang on every twitter they make, and on every
+wing-beat; and when they have gone, begin sadly to set my house in
+order, as when some much loved visitors have taken their departure. I am
+appreciating things a little more the last few days.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 1.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>A Jeremiad</i></p>
+
+<p>When I resigned my appointment last month, no one knows what I had to
+give up. But I know. Tho' if I say what I know no one is compelled to
+believe me excepting out of charity. It will never be discovered whether
+what I am going to state is not simply despairing bombast. My few
+intimate friends and relatives are entirely innocent<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span> of science, not to
+say zoology, and all they realise is the significant fact that I am
+prone to go extravagant lengths in conversation. But you may take it or
+leave it: I was the ablest junior on the staff and one of the ablest
+zoologists in the place&mdash;but my ability was always muffled by the
+inferior work they gave me to do. My last memoir published last December
+was the best of its kind in treatment, method and technique that ever
+issued from the institution&mdash;I do not say the most important. It was
+trivial&mdash;my work always was trivial because they put me in a mouldy
+department where all the work was trivial and the methods used as
+primitive, slipshod and easy as those of Fabricius, the idea being that
+as I had enjoyed no academic career I was unsuited to fill other posts
+then vacant&mdash;one, work on the CÅ“lenterates and another on <i>Vermes</i>,
+both rarely favoured by amateurs and requiring laboratory training.
+Later, I had the mortification of seeing these posts filled by men whose
+powers I by no means felt inclined to estimate as greater than my own.
+Meanwhile, I who had been dissecting for dear life up and down the whole
+Animal Kingdom in a poorly equipped attic laboratory at home, with no
+adequate instruments, was bitterly disappointed to find still less
+provision made even in a so-called Scientific Institution so grandly
+styled the British Museum (N.H.). On my first arrival I was presented
+with a pen, ink, paper, ruler, and an enormous instrument of steel which
+on enquiry I found to be a paper cutter. I asked for my microscope and
+microtome. I ought to have asked what Form I was in.</p>
+
+<p>So I had to continue my struggle against odds, and only within the last
+year or so began to squeeze the authorities with any success. In time I
+should have revolutionised the study of Systematic Zoology, and the
+anonymous paper I wrote in conjunction with R&mdash;&mdash; in the <i>American
+Naturalist</i> was a rare <i>jeu d'esprit</i>, and my most important scientific
+work.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>In the literary world I have fared no better. My first published article
+appeared at the age of 15 over my father's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> name, my motive being not so
+much modesty as cunning&mdash;if the literary world (!) ragged it
+unmercifully, there was still a chance left for me to make good.</p>
+
+<p>My next achievement of any magnitude was the unexpected printing of a
+story in the <i>Academy</i> after I had unsuccessfully badgered almost every
+other newspaper. This was when I was 19. No proof had been sent me and
+no intimation of its acceptance. Moreover, there were two ugly printer's
+errors. I at once wrote off to correct them in the next issue. My letter
+was neither published nor acknowledged. I submitted, but presently wrote
+again, politely hinting that my cheque was overdue. But&mdash;screams of
+silence, and I thought it wise not to complain in view of future
+printing favours. I soon discovered that the journal had changed hands
+and was probably on its last legs at the time of my success. As soon as
+it grew financially sound again no more of my stories were accepted.</p>
+
+<p>A more recent affair I had with the American <i>Forum,</i> which delighted me
+by publishing my article, but did not pay&mdash;tho' the Editor went out of
+his way to write that "payment was on publication." I did not venture to
+remonstrate as I had another article on the stocks which they also
+printed without paying me. In spite of uniform failure, my literary
+ambition has never flagged.<a name="FNanchor_2_25" id="FNanchor_2_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_25" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> I have for years past received my
+rejected MSS. back from every conceivable kind of periodical, from
+<i>Punch</i> to the <i>Hibbert Journal</i>. At one time I used to file their
+rejection forms and meditated writing a facetious essay on them. But I
+decided they were too monotonously similar. My custom was when the
+ordinary avenues to literary fame had failed me&mdash;the half-crown Reviews
+and the sixpenny Weeklies&mdash;to seek out at a library some obscure
+publication&mdash;a Parish Magazine or the local paper&mdash;anything was grabbed
+as a last chance. On one of these occasions I discovered the
+<i>Westminster Review</i> and immediately plied them with a manuscript and
+the usual polite note. After six weeks,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> having no reply, I wrote again
+and waited for another six weeks. My second remonstrance met with a
+similar fate, so I went into the city to interview the publishers, and
+to demand my manuscript back. The manager was out, and I was asked to
+call again. After waiting about for some time, I left my card, took my
+departure and decided I would write. The same evening I told the
+publishers that the anonymous editor would neither print my article nor
+return it. Would they kindly give me his name and address so that I
+could write personally. After some delay they replied that although it
+was not the custom to disclose the editor's name, the following address
+would find her. She was a lady living in Richmond Row, Shepherd's Bush.
+I wrote to her at once and received no answer. Meanwhile, I had observed
+that no further issues of the review had appeared on the bookstalls, and
+the book-sellers were unable to give me any information. I wrote again
+to the address&mdash;this time a playful and facetious letter in which I said
+I did not propose to take the matter into court, but if it would save
+her any trouble I would call for the MS. as I lived only a few minutes'
+walk distant. I received no answer. I was busy at the time and kept
+putting off executing my firm purpose of visiting the good lady until
+one evening as I was casually reading the <i>Star</i> coming home in the
+'bus, I read an account of how some charitably disposed woman had
+recently visited the Hammersmith Workhouse and removed to her own home a
+poor soul who was once the friend of George Eliot, George Henry Lewes,
+and other well-known literary persons of the sixties and had, until it
+ceased publication a few months before, edited the once notable
+<i>Westminster Review</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Recently, however, there has been evidence of a more benevolent attitude
+towards me on the part of London editors. A certain magnificent
+quarterly has published one or two of my essays, and one of these called
+forth two pages of quotation and flattering comment in <i>Public Opinion</i>,
+which thrill me to the marrow. I fear, however, the flood-tide has come
+too late.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span></p><hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>If this achievement impressed me it did not seem to impress anyone else.
+A&mdash;&mdash; regarded it as a joke and laughed incredulously when someone told
+him of "P.O.'s" eulogy. You see I am still his foolish little brother. I
+am secretly very nettled too because E&mdash;&mdash; treated the whole matter very
+indifferently. She did not even take the trouble to read the paper's
+critique, and tho' she volunteered to buy several copies to send to
+friends, she never remembered to do so, and the whole affair has passed
+out of her mind.</p>
+
+<p>Now a pleasant paragraph that appeared in the press noticing some
+drawings of a friend of her friend, she read twice and marched off to
+Francesca with it in great glee. Another successful young person got his
+photo into the picture papers&mdash;a man we know only by hearsay, and yet it
+impressed her until I recalled, what strange to say she had quite
+forgotten, how the photographers wished to publish her own photograph in
+the picture papers at the time of our marriage. But she scornfully
+refused. (And so did I.)</p>
+
+<p>But what a queer woman!... [And I, too, a queer man, drunken with
+wormwood and gall.]</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 6.</p>
+
+<p>E&mdash;&mdash; and I were very modern in our courtship. Our candour was mutual
+and complete&mdash;parents and relatives would be shocked and staggered if
+they knew.... You see I am a biologist and we are both freethinkers.
+<i>Voilà</i>!... I hate all reticence and concealment.... There is a good
+deal of that ass, Gregers Werle, in my nature.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 7.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>My Gastrocnemius</i></p>
+
+<p>I become dreadfully emaciated. This morning, before getting off the bed
+I lifted my leg and gazed wistfully along all its length. My flabby
+<i>gastrocnemius</i> swung suspended from the <i>tibia</i> like a gondola from a
+Zeppelin. I touched it gently with the tip of my index finger and it
+oscillated.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 17.</p>
+
+<p>My beloved wife comes home this evening after a short, much needed
+holiday.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 27.</p>
+
+<p>My gratuity has turned out to be unexpectedly small. I hoped at least
+for one year's salary. And the horrible thing is I might live for
+several years longer! No one was ever more enthusiastic for death than I
+am at this moment. I hate this world with its war, and I bitterly regret
+I never managed to buy laudanum in time. There are only E&mdash;&mdash; and dear
+R&mdash;&mdash; and one or two others&mdash;the rest of the people I know I hate <i>en
+bloc</i>. If only I could get at them. I hate to have to leave them to
+themselves without getting my own back.</p>
+
+<p><i>August</i> 31.</p>
+
+<p>My darling sweetheart, you ask me why I love you. I do not know. All I
+know is that I <i>do</i> love you, and beyond measure. Why do <i>you</i> love
+me&mdash;surely a more inscrutable problem. You do not know. No one ever
+knows. "The heart has its reasons which the reason knows not of." We
+love in obedience to a powerful gravitation of our beings, and then try
+to explain it by recapitulating one another's characters just as a man
+forms his opinions first and then thinks out reasons in support.</p>
+
+<p>What delights me is to recall that our love has <i>evolved.</i> It did not
+suddenly spring into existence like some beautiful sprite. It developed
+slowly to perfection&mdash;it was forged in the white heat of our
+experiences. That is why it will always remain.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 1.</p>
+
+<p>Your love, darling, impregnates my heart, touches it into calm, strongly
+beating life so that when I am with you, I forget I am a dying man. It
+is too difficult to believe that when we die true love like ours
+disappears with our bodies. My own experience makes me feel that human<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span>
+love is the earnest after death of a great reunion of souls in God who
+is love. When as a boy I was bending the knee to Haeckel, the saying,
+"God is Love," scarcely interested me. I am wiser now. You must not
+think I am still anything but an infidel (as the churchmen say),&mdash;I
+should hate not to be taken for an infidel&mdash;and you must not be
+surprised that an embittered, angry, hateful person like myself should
+believe in a Gospel of Love. I am embittered because an intense desire
+to love has in many instances<a name="FNanchor_3_26" id="FNanchor_3_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_26" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> been baulked by my own idealising yet
+also analytical mind. I have wanted to love men blindly, yet I am always
+finding them out, and the disappointment chills the heart. Hence my
+malice and venom: which, dear, do not misconstrue. I am as greedy as an
+Octopus, ready out of love to take the whole world into my inside&mdash;that
+seat of the affections!&mdash;but I am also as sensitive as an Octopus, and
+quickly retract my arms into the rocky, impregnable recess where I live.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 2.</p>
+
+<p>But am I dying? I have no presentiments&mdash;no conviction&mdash;like the people
+you read of in books. Am I, after all, in love? "I dote yet doubt;
+suspect yet strongly love." It is all a matter of degree. Beside Abélard
+and Héloïse, our love may be just glassy affection. It is a great and
+difficult question to decide. I love no one else but E&mdash;&mdash;, that, at
+least, is a certainty, and I have never loved anyone more.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 3.</p>
+
+<p>My bedroom is on the ground floor as I cannot mount the stairs. But the
+other day when they were all out, I determined to clamber upstairs if
+possible, and search in the bedrooms for a half bottle of laudanum,
+which Mrs. &mdash;&mdash; told me she found the other day in a box&mdash;a relic of the
+time when &mdash;&mdash; had to take it to relieve pain.</p>
+
+<p>I got off the bed on to the floor and crawled around on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> hands and knees
+to the door, where I knelt up straight, reached the handle and turned
+it. Then I crawled across the hall to the foot of the stairs, where I
+sat down on the bottom step and rested. It is a short flight of only 12
+steps and I soon reached the top by sitting down on each and raising
+myself up to the next one with my hands.</p>
+
+<p>Arrived at the top, I quickly decided on the most likely room to search
+first, and painfully crawled along the passage and thro' the bathroom by
+the easiest route to the small door&mdash;there are two. The handles of all
+the doors in the house are fixed some way up above the middle, so that
+only by kneeling with a straight back could I reach them from the floor.
+This door in addition was at the top of a high but narrow step, and I
+had to climb on to this, balance myself carefully, and then carefully
+pull myself up towards the handle by means of a towel hung on the
+handle. After three attempts I reached the handle and found the door
+locked on the inside.</p>
+
+<p>
+I collapsed on the floor and could have cried. I lay on the floor of the
+bathroom resting with head on my arm, then set my teeth and crawled around the
+passage along two sides of a square, up three more steps to the other door
+which I opened and then entered. I had only examined two drawers containing
+only clothes, when a key turned in the front door lock and E&mdash;&mdash;
+entered with &mdash;&mdash; and gave her usual whistle.
+</p>
+
+<p>I closed the drawers and crawled out of the room in time to hear
+E&mdash;&mdash; say in a startled voice to her mother: "Who's that upstairs?" I
+whistled, and said that being bored I had come up to see the cot: which
+passed at that time all right.</p>
+
+<p>Next morning my darling asked me why I went upstairs. I did not answer,
+and I think she knows.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 4.</p>
+
+<p>I am getting ill again, and can scarcely hold the pen. So good-bye
+Journal&mdash;only for a time perhaps.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span></p><hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Have read this blessed old Journal out to E&mdash;&mdash;. It required some
+courage, and I boggled at one or two bits and left them out.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 5.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Leap-frog</i></p>
+
+<p>Some girls up the road spent a very wet Sunday morning playing leap-frog
+in their pyjamas around the tennis lawn. It makes me envious. To think I
+never thought of doing that! and now it is too late. They wore purple
+pyjamas too. I once hugged myself with pride for undressing in a cave by
+the sea and bathing in the pouring rain, but that seems tame in
+comparison.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Liebestod</i></p>
+
+<p>A perfect autumn morning&mdash;cool, fine and still. What sweet music a horse
+and cart make trundling slowly along a country road on a quiet morning!
+I listened to it in a happy mood of abstraction as it rolled on further
+and further away. I put my head out of the window so as to hear it up to
+the very last, until a Robin's notes relieved the nervous tension and
+helped me to resign myself to my loss. The incident reminded me of the
+Liebestod in "Tristan," with the Robin taking the part of the harp.</p>
+
+<p>For days past my emotions have been undergoing kaleidoscopic changes,
+not only from day to day but from hour to hour. For ten minutes at a
+time I am happy or miserable, or revengeful, venomous, loving, generous,
+noble, angry, or murderous&mdash;you could measure them with a stop-watch.
+Hell's phantoms course across my chest. If I could lie on this bed as
+quiet and stony as an effigy on a tomb! But a moment ago I had a sharp
+spasm at the sudden thought that never, never, never again should I walk
+thro' the path-fields to the uplands.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 7.</p>
+
+<p>My 28th birthday.</p>
+
+<p>Dear old R&mdash;&mdash; (the man I love above all others) has been in a military
+hospital for months. It is a great hardship to have our intercourse
+almost completely cut off.</p>
+
+<p>Dear old Journal, I love you! Good-bye.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 29.</p>
+
+<p>I could never have believed so great misery compatible with sanity. Yet
+I am quite sane. How long I or any man can remain sane in this condition
+God knows.... It is a consummate vengeance this inability to write.<a name="FNanchor_4_27" id="FNanchor_4_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_27" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> I
+cannot help but smile grimly at the astuteness of the thrust. To be
+sure, how cunning to deprive me of my one secret consolation! How
+amusing that in this agony of isolation such an aggressive egotist as I
+should have his last means of self-expression cut off. I am being slowly
+stifled.</p>
+
+<p><i>Later. (In E.'s handwriting.)</i></p>
+
+<p>Yesterday we shifted into a tiny cottage at half the rental of the other
+one, and situated about two miles further out from the village.... A
+wholly ideal and beautiful little cottage you may say. But a
+"camouflaged" cottage. For in spite of the happiness of its exterior it
+contains just now two of the most dejected mortals even in this present
+sorrow-laden world.</p>
+
+<p><i>September</i> 30.</p>
+
+<p>Last night, E&mdash;&mdash; sitting on the bed by me, burst into tears. It was my
+fault. "I can stand a good deal but there must come a breaking point."
+Poor, poor girl, my heart aches for you.</p>
+
+<p>I wept too, and it relieved us to cry. We blew our noses. "People who
+cry in novels," E&mdash;&mdash; observed with detachment, "never blow their noses.
+They just weep." ... But the thunder clouds soon come up again.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 1.</p>
+
+<p>The immediate future horrifies me.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 2.</p>
+
+<p>Poushkin (as we have named the cat) is coiled up on my bed, purring and
+quite happy. It does me good to see him.</p>
+
+<p>But consider: A paralytic, a screaming infant, two women, a cat and a
+canary, shut up in a tiny cottage with no money, the war still on, and
+food always scarcer day by day. "Give us this day, our daily bread."</p>
+
+<p>I want to be loved&mdash;above all, I want to love. My great danger is lest I
+grow maudlin and say petulantly, "Nobody loves me, nobody cares." I must
+have more courage and more confidence in other people's good-nature.
+Then I can love more freely.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 3.</p>
+
+<p>I am grateful to-day for some happy hours plucked triumphantly from
+under the very nose of Fate, and spent in the warm sun in the garden.
+They carried me out at 12, and I stayed till after tea-time. A Lark
+sang, but the Swallows&mdash;dear things&mdash;have gone. E&mdash;&mdash; picked two
+Primroses. I sat by some Michaelmas Daisies and watched the Bees, Flies,
+and Butterflies.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 6.</p>
+
+<p>In fits of maudlin self-compassion I try to visualise Belgium, Armenia,
+Serbia, etc., and usually cure myself thereby.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 12.</p>
+
+<p>It is winter&mdash;no autumn this year. Of an evening we sit by the fire and
+enjoy the beautiful sweet-smelling wood-smoke, and the open hearth with
+its big iron bar carrying pot-hook and hanger. E&mdash;&mdash; knits warm garments
+for the Baby, and I play Chopin, César-Franck hymns, Three Blind Mice
+(with variations) on a mouth-organ, called "The Angels' Choir," and made
+in Germany.... You would pity me would you? I am lonely, penniless,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span>
+paralysed, and just turned twenty-eight. But I snap my fingers in your
+face and with equal arrogance I pity you. I pity you your smooth-running
+good luck and the stagnant serenity of your mind. I prefer my own
+torment. I am dying, but you are already a corpse. You have never really
+lived. Your body has never been flayed into tingling life by hopeless
+desire to love, to know, to act, to achieve. I do not envy you your
+absorption in the petty cares of a commonplace existence.</p>
+
+<p>Do you think I would exchange the communion with my own heart for the
+toy balloons of your silly conversation? Or my curiosity for your
+flickering interests? Or my despair for your comfortable Hope? Or my
+present tawdry life for yours as polished and neat as a new three-penny
+bit? I would not. I gather my mantle around me and I solemnly thank God
+that I am not as some other men are.</p>
+
+<p>I am only twenty-eight, but I have telescoped into those few years a
+tolerably long life: I have loved and married, and have a family; I have
+wept and enjoyed; struggled and overcome, and when the hour comes I
+shall be content to die.</p>
+
+<p><i> October</i> 14 <i>to</i> 20.</p>
+
+<p>Miserable.</p>
+
+<p><i>October</i> 21.</p>
+
+<p>Self-disgust.</p>
+
+<p class="center">FINIS.</p>
+
+<p class="center">[Barbellion died on December 31.]</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_24" id="Footnote_1_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_24"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> John Wesley <i>rewrote</i> his journals from entries in rough
+draft.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_25" id="Footnote_2_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_25"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> I once received from an editor a very encouraging letter
+which gave me a great deal of pleasure and made me hope he was going to
+open the pages of his magazine to me. But three weeks after he committed
+suicide by jumping out of his bedroom window.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_26" id="Footnote_3_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_26"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> The Egoist explains himself again.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_27" id="Footnote_4_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_27"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Writing difficult to decipher.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span></p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3><a name="SYNOPSIS" id="SYNOPSIS"></a>SYNOPSIS</h3>
+
+
+<p>PART I: AT HOME</p>
+
+<p>
+Rambles and bathes, <a href='#Page_2'>2</a>, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>, <a href='#Page_4'>4</a>, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_11'>11</a>, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>, <a href='#Page_48'>48</a>, <a href='#Page_49'>49</a><br />
+Natural History and Zoology, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a>, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a><br />
+Leaves school, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a><br />
+Newspaper reporting, <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a><br />
+Ambition, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_26'>26</a>, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a><br />
+Calf-love, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a>, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>, <a href='#Page_28'>28</a><br />
+The Wesleyan Minister Microscopist, <a href='#Page_18'>18</a><br />
+Conversation with Prof. Herdman, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a><br />
+Ill-health, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>, <a href='#Page_35'>35</a>, <a href='#Page_42'>42</a>, <a href='#Page_48'>48</a> (Jul. 31)<br />
+Heart attacks, <a href='#Page_33'>33</a>, <a href='#Page_36'>36</a><br />
+On Death, <a href='#Page_33'>33</a>, <a href='#Page_38'>38</a>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a><br />
+Sits for British Museum exam., <a href='#Page_29'>29</a><br />
+Failure, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a>, <a href='#Page_31'>31</a>, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a><br />
+Appointment to Laboratory at Plymouth, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a><br />
+Everything "ghostly, unreal, enigmatic," <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>, <a href='#Page_33'>33</a><br />
+Self-consciousness, <a href='#Page_27'>27</a>, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a><br />
+The Poppy, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a><br />
+Appointment resigned and his father's illness, <a href='#Page_34'>34</a><br />
+His father's death, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a><br />
+Success and appointment to B.M., <a href='#Page_55'>55</a><br />
+A youthful Passion, <a href='#Page_56'>56</a>, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>PART II: IN LONDON</p>
+
+<p>
+Disillusionment, <a href='#Page_59'>59</a>, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_132'>132</a>, <a href='#Page_178'>178</a>, <a href='#Page_185'>185</a><br />
+Life in a boarding-house, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_78'>78</a>, <a href='#Page_79'>79</a>, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, <a href='#Page_107'>107</a><br />
+Ambition, <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a><br />
+An affair in a taxicab, <a href='#Page_75'>75</a><br />
+Self-disgust, <a href='#Page_77'>77</a><br />
+In love, <a href='#Page_78'>78</a>, <a href='#Page_96'>96</a>, <a href='#Page_107'>107</a><br />
+Conversations: (a) with E., <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>, <a href='#Page_75'>75</a>, <a href='#Page_76'>76</a>, <a href='#Page_79'>79</a>, <a href='#Page_95'>95</a>, <a href='#Page_96'>96</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 9.5em;"><a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_151'>151</a>, <a href='#Page_152'>152</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">(b) with H., <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_83'>83</a></span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 6em;">(c) with R., <a href='#Page_131'>131</a>, <a href='#Page_140'>140</a>, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>, <a href='#Page_142'>142</a>, <a href='#Page_154'>154</a>, <a href='#Page_155'>155</a>, <a href='#Page_165'>165</a>,</span><br />
+Ill-health, <a href='#Page_59'>59</a>, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_74'>74</a>, <a href='#Page_100'>100</a>, <a href='#Page_107'>107</a>, <a href='#Page_110'>110</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>-5, <a href='#Page_153'>153</a>, <a href='#Page_156'>156</a><br />
+On Death, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_84'>84</a>, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a><br />
+Heart attacks, <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_120'>120</a>, <a href='#Page_122'>122</a><br />
+Nervous breakdown, <a href='#Page_80'>80</a>, <a href='#Page_81'>81</a>, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a><br />
+Meets an old love, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_87'>87</a><br />
+Holidays: (<i>a</i>) at C&mdash;&mdash;, by the sea in North &mdash;&mdash;, <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>, <a href='#Page_66'>66</a>, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">(<i>b</i>) at home, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">(<i>c</i>) in Brittany and on Dartmoor (<i>riding a pony</i>),  <a href='#Page_97'>97</a></span><br />
+Life in rooms, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>, <a href='#Page_107'>107</a>, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>, <a href='#Page_138'>138</a>, <a href='#Page_148'>148</a>, <a href='#Page_149'>149</a>, <a href='#Page_153'>153</a><br />
+His brother, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a>, <a href='#Page_206'>206</a><br />
+Discussions on marriage, <a href='#Page_123'>123</a>, <a href='#Page_124'>124</a><br />
+In his sitting-room, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a><br />
+The fascination of London, <a href='#Page_74'>74</a>, <a href='#Page_142'>142</a>-<a href='#Page_145'>145</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">(<i>a</i>) Petticoat Lane, <a href='#Page_163'>163</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">(<i>b</i>) Rotten Row, <a href='#Page_176'>176</a></span><br />
+Goes to concerts, <a href='#Page_127'>127</a>, <a href='#Page_161'>161</a>, <a href='#Page_172'>172</a><br />
+A lovers' quarrel, <a href='#Page_126'>126</a><br />
+He struggles with himself, <a href='#Page_135'>135</a>, <a href='#Page_137'>137</a>, <a href='#Page_138'>138</a><br />
+Engaged, <a href='#Page_150'>150</a>, <a href='#Page_158'>158</a><br />
+Fears his inconstancy, <a href='#Page_159'>159</a>, <a href='#Page_185'>185</a><br />
+Self-analysis, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a> <i>et seq</i>., <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_183'>183</a><br />
+Day-dreams: Life a dream, <a href='#Page_178'>178</a>, <a href='#Page_179'>179</a>, <a href='#Page_188'>188</a><br />
+The War, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a><br />
+Holidays: (<i>a</i>) on a Buckinghamshire farm, <a href='#Page_191'>191</a>-<a href='#Page_205'>205</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">(<i>b</i>) at the Lakes, <a href='#Page_215'>215</a>-<a href='#Page_217'>217</a></span><br />
+Should a husband keep a private journal? <a href='#Page_210'>210</a><br />
+Marriage, <a href='#Page_205'>205</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>, <a href='#Page_215'>215</a><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>PART III: MARRIAGE</p>
+
+<p>
+Zeppelin raid and influenza, <a href='#Page_222'>222</a><br />
+Living in the country, <a href='#Page_223'>223</a>, <a href='#Page_227'>227</a>, <a href='#Page_228'>228</a><br />
+Reads his doctor's certificate after visit to recruiting-office, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>, <a href='#Page_238'>238</a><br />
+Self-disgust, <a href='#Page_223'>223</a>, <a href='#Page_224'>224</a>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>, <a href='#Page_247'>247</a>, <a href='#Page_250'>250</a> (<i>nude</i>), <a href='#Page_267'>267</a><br />
+Mental agony, <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>, <a href='#Page_227'>227</a><br />
+Conversations: with R., <a href='#Page_229'>229</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">with Scarabees, <a href='#Page_230'>230</a>, <a href='#Page_239'>239</a>, <a href='#Page_243'>243</a></span><br />
+Halcyon days, <a href='#Page_233'>233</a>, <a href='#Page_235'>235</a>, <a href='#Page_238'>238</a><br />
+A natural idiot climbs a stile on uplands, <a href='#Page_240'>240</a><br />
+Tension, <a href='#Page_250'>250</a>, <a href='#Page_252'>252</a><br />
+The War, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a> (<i>Jutland</i>), <a href='#Page_242'>242</a>, <a href='#Page_247'>247</a>, <a href='#Page_248'>248</a>, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span>Another nervous breakdown, <a href='#Page_253'>253</a><br />
+How E. knew all the time, <a href='#Page_255'>255</a>, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a><br />
+Self-compassion, <a href='#Page_251'>251</a>, <a href='#Page_304'>304</a><br />
+Home ill, <a href='#Page_257'>257</a> ("<i>in the doldrums</i>"), <a href='#Page_259'>259</a>, <a href='#Page_265'>265</a><br />
+Returns to work, <a href='#Page_278'>278</a><br />
+Ill again, <a href='#Page_285'>285</a><br />
+From an invalid's view-point, <a href='#Page_292'>292</a>, <a href='#Page_293'>293</a> (<i>by his bedroom window</i>)<br />
+Post-mortem affairs, <a href='#Page_291'>291</a><br />
+Resigns appointment, <a href='#Page_294'>294</a>, <a href='#Page_299'>299</a><br />
+Self-consciousness and self-dramatization, <a href='#Page_255'>255</a>, <a href='#Page_265'>265</a>, <a href='#Page_267'>267</a><br />
+A badly articulated skeleton, <a href='#Page_274'>274</a><br />
+Cold weather in January, <a href='#Page_276'>276</a>, <a href='#Page_277'>277</a>, <a href='#Page_278'>278</a><br />
+On Death, <a href='#Page_275'>275</a>, <a href='#Page_283'>283</a>, <a href='#Page_286'>286</a>, <a href='#Page_291'>291</a><br />
+His phosphorescent Journals, <a href='#Page_291'>291</a><br />
+Morphia and laudanum, <a href='#Page_280'>280</a>, <a href='#Page_300'>300</a><br />
+Great misery, <a href='#Page_303'>303</a>,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span> <a href='#Page_305'>305</a><br />
+</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h3><a name="INDEX_OF_NAMES" id="INDEX_OF_NAMES"></a>INDEX OF NAMES</h3>
+
+<p>
+A&mdash;&mdash;, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_97'>97</a>, <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a>, <a href='#Page_158'>158</a>, <a href='#Page_206'>206</a>, <a href='#Page_285'>285</a>, <a href='#Page_298'>298</a><br />
+<i>"Academy," The</i>, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_106'>106</a>, <a href='#Page_296'>296</a><br />
+<i>Adventure in Search of Health, An</i>, <a href='#Page_260'>260</a><br />
+A Kempis, Thomas, <a href='#Page_28'>28</a><br />
+<i>Albert Hall, Hag, The</i>, <a href='#Page_147'>147</a><br />
+<i>Ambition</i>, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a><br />
+"<i>American Naturalist</i>," <a href='#Page_295'>295</a><br />
+<i>American Neighbour, An</i>, <a href='#Page_251'>251</a><br />
+<i>Apologia pro mea vita</i>, <a href='#Page_145'>145</a><br />
+<i>Archæopteryx and Mudflats</i>, <a href='#Page_289'>289</a><br />
+<i>Aristotle's Lantern</i>, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a><br />
+<i>At a Public Dinner</i>, <a href='#Page_175'>175</a><br />
+<i>At C&mdash;&mdash;, a tiny little village by the Sea in N</i>&mdash;&mdash;, <a href='#Page_65'>65</a><br />
+<i>At Home</i>, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a><br />
+<i>At the Albert Hall</i>, <a href='#Page_127'>127</a><br />
+Austen, Jane, <a href='#Page_268'>268</a><br />
+<i>Average Day, An</i>, <a href='#Page_172'>172</a><br />
+<br />
+B&mdash;&mdash;, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>, <a href='#Page_107'>107</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>, <a href='#Page_118'>118</a>, <a href='#Page_119'>119</a><br />
+<i>Baby-Girl, A</i>, <a href='#Page_263'>263</a><br />
+<i>Bad Listener, A</i>, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a><br />
+Baring, Maurice, <a href='#Page_188'>188</a><br />
+<i>Bathing</i>, <a href='#Page_60'>60</a><br />
+Baudelaire, <a href='#Page_60'>60</a>, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>, <a href='#Page_173'>173</a>, <a href='#Page_183'>183</a>, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a><br />
+Beerbohm, Max, <a href='#Page_269'>269</a><br />
+<i>Beethoven's Fifth Symphony</i>, <a href='#Page_161'>161</a>, <a href='#Page_186'>186</a><br />
+Benson, A.C., <a href='#Page_249'>249</a><br />
+Bergson, <a href='#Page_47'>47</a>, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_78'>78</a>, <a href='#Page_183'>183</a>, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a><br />
+Berkeley, <a href='#Page_275'>275</a><br />
+Blind Mathilde, <a href='#Page_139'>139</a><br />
+Boeltzig, R., <a href='#Page_103'>103</a><br />
+Bradford, Sir John Rose, <a href='#Page_54'>54</a><br />
+Brieux, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a><br />
+<i>"Brilliant Career," A</i>, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a><br />
+British Museum, <a href='#Page_26'>26</a>, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>, <a href='#Page_49'>49</a>, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>, <a href='#Page_59'>59</a>, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_79'>79</a>, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_132'>132</a>, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>, <a href='#Page_178'>178</a>,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;"><a href='#Page_225'>225</a>, <a href='#Page_274'>274</a>, <a href='#Page_282'>282</a>, <a href='#Page_283'>283</a>, <a href='#Page_295'>295</a></span><br />
+<i>British Museum Reading Room, The</i>, <a href='#Page_100'>100</a><br />
+Brooke, Rupert, <a href='#Page_266'>266</a><br />
+Browne, Sir Thomas, <a href='#Page_146'>146</a>, <a href='#Page_183'>183</a>, <a href='#Page_238'>238</a><br />
+Buchanan, Robert, <a href='#Page_251'>251</a><br />
+Bunyan, <a href='#Page_166'>166</a><br />
+Burke, <a href='#Page_2'>2</a><br />
+Burlington House, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a><br />
+Burton, <a href='#Page_125'>125</a><br />
+Butler, Samuel, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a>, <a href='#Page_171'>171</a>, <a href='#Page_185'>185</a>, <a href='#Page_291'>291</a><br />
+<i>Buxom Rogue in Earthenware, A</i>, <a href='#Page_216'>216</a><br />
+<i>By the Sea</i>, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a><br />
+Byron, <a href='#Page_266'>266</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Camping out at S&mdash;&mdash; Sands</i>, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a><br />
+Carlyle, <a href='#Page_120'>120</a>, <a href='#Page_171'>171</a><br />
+Cassell's <i>Natural History</i>, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a><br />
+<i>Chalcidoidea, The</i>, <a href='#Page_221'>221</a><br />
+<i>Character, A</i>, <a href='#Page_39'>39</a><br />
+<i>Chinese Lanterns</i>, <a href='#Page_280'>280</a><br />
+<i>Chipples</i>, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a><br />
+<i>Chopin</i>, <a href='#Page_157'>157</a><br />
+<i>Clever Young Man, The</i>, <a href='#Page_207'>207</a><br />
+Coleridge, <a href='#Page_266'>266</a><br />
+<i>Confession, A</i>, <a href='#Page_74'>74</a><br />
+Conrad, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>, <a href='#Page_223'>223</a><br />
+<i>Crowd Fever</i>, <a href='#Page_278'>278</a><br />
+<i>Cynicism</i>, <a href='#Page_288'>288</a><br />
+<br />
+D&mdash;&mdash;, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <a href='#Page_180'>180</a><br />
+Darwin, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a><br />
+<i>Day in Autumn, A</i>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span><i>Death</i>, <a href='#Page_33'>33</a>, <a href='#Page_84'>84</a>, <a href='#Page_275'>275</a>, <a href='#Page_286'>286</a><br />
+Debussy, <a href='#Page_161'>161</a>, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a><br />
+De Goncourt, <a href='#Page_227'>227</a>, <a href='#Page_228'>228</a><br />
+De Guérin, <a href='#Page_200'>200</a>, <a href='#Page_277'>277</a>, <a href='#Page_282'>282</a><br />
+De Maupassant, Guy, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_266'>266</a><br />
+<i>Depression</i>, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a><br />
+De Quincey, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_42'>42</a>, <a href='#Page_126'>126</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_196'>196</a>, <a href='#Page_286'>286</a><br />
+Devonshire Club, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a><br />
+<i>Dinosaurs</i>, <a href='#Page_129'>129</a><br />
+Disraeli, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a><br />
+<i>Dr. Spurgeon</i>, <a href='#Page_90'>90</a><br />
+Dostoieffsky, <a href='#Page_132'>132</a>, <a href='#Page_163'>163</a>, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a><br />
+Duke, Mr., K.C., <a href='#Page_17'>17</a><br />
+<br />
+E&mdash;&mdash;, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>, <a href='#Page_78'>78</a>, <a href='#Page_79'>79</a>, <a href='#Page_107'>107</a>, <a href='#Page_171'>171</a>, <a href='#Page_191'>191</a>, <a href='#Page_192'>192</a>, <a href='#Page_193'>193</a>, <a href='#Page_194'>194</a>, <a href='#Page_201'>201</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>, <a href='#Page_220'>220</a>, <a href='#Page_223'>223</a>, <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;"><a href='#Page_228'>228</a>, <a href='#Page_233'>233</a>, <a href='#Page_235'>235</a>, <a href='#Page_236'>236</a>, <a href='#Page_238'>238</a>, <a href='#Page_240'>240</a>, <a href='#Page_251'>251</a>, <a href='#Page_253'>253</a>, <a href='#Page_254'>254</a>, <a href='#Page_255'>255</a>, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>, <a href='#Page_257'>257</a>, <a href='#Page_259'>259</a>, <a href='#Page_260'>260</a>,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;"><a href='#Page_261'>261</a>, <a href='#Page_263'>263</a>, <a href='#Page_274'>274</a>, <a href='#Page_277'>277</a>, <a href='#Page_283'>283</a>, <a href='#Page_291'>291</a>, <a href='#Page_292'>292</a>, <a href='#Page_294'>294</a>, <a href='#Page_298'>298</a>, <a href='#Page_299'>299</a>, <a href='#Page_300'>300</a>, <a href='#Page_301'>301</a>, <a href='#Page_302'>302</a>, <a href='#Page_303'>303</a>,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;"><a href='#Page_304'>304</a></span><br />
+<i>Early Boughies</i>, <a href='#Page_66'>66</a><br />
+<i>Empress of Ireland</i>, <a href='#Page_127'>127</a><br />
+<i>English Review</i>, <a href='#Page_101'>101</a>, <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <a href='#Page_142'>142</a><br />
+<i>Equilibrium Restored</i>, <a href='#Page_245'>245</a><br />
+<i>Entomological Society, The</i>, <a href='#Page_110'>110</a><br />
+<br />
+Father, <a href='#Page_34'>34</a>, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_137'>137</a><br />
+<i>Finis</i>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>, <a href='#Page_285'>285</a><br />
+<i>Fire Bogey, The</i>, <a href='#Page_170'>170</a><br />
+<i>Foolish Bird, A</i>, <a href='#Page_118'>118</a><br />
+"<i>Fortnightly</i>," <a href='#Page_61'>61</a><br />
+"<i>Forum</i>," <a href='#Page_296'>296</a><br />
+Foster, Sir Michael, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a><br />
+<i>From one Maiden Lady to another (authentic)</i>, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a><br />
+<br />
+G&mdash;&mdash;, <a href='#Page_78'>78</a>, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <a href='#Page_215'>215</a><br />
+<i>Gardening</i>,83<br />
+Gaskel, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a><br />
+Gibbon, <a href='#Page_129'>129</a>, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a><br />
+<i>Gibbon's Autobiography</i>, <a href='#Page_268'>268</a><br />
+Gissing, George, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a><br />
+Goethe, <a href='#Page_146'>146</a><br />
+<i>Graph of Temperament, The,</i> <a href='#Page_287'>287</a><br />
+<br />
+H&mdash;&mdash;, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_38'>38</a>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_60'>60</a>, <a href='#Page_75'>75</a>, <a href='#Page_76'>76</a>, <a href='#Page_77'>77</a>, <a href='#Page_78'>78</a>, <a href='#Page_79'>79</a>, <a href='#Page_80'>80</a>, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>, <a href='#Page_83'>83</a>, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;"><a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>, <a href='#Page_180'>180</a>, <a href='#Page_196'>196</a>, <a href='#Page_206'>206</a>, <a href='#Page_218'>218</a>, <a href='#Page_285'>285</a></span><br />
+Haeckel, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>, <a href='#Page_300'>300</a><br />
+<i>Harmsworth Encyclopædia</i>, <a href='#Page_294'>294</a><br />
+Harmsworth <i>Self-Educator</i>, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a><br />
+Hardy, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_282'>282</a><br />
+<i>Hardy's Poetry</i>, <a href='#Page_264'>264</a><br />
+<i>Hearing Beethoven</i>, <a href='#Page_172'>172</a><br />
+Hegel, <a href='#Page_146'>146</a><br />
+Henley, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a><br />
+Herdman, Prof., <a href='#Page_46'>46</a><br />
+Hervey, <a href='#Page_170'>170</a><br />
+Horton, Max Kennedy, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a><br />
+<i>Housefly Problem, The</i>&mdash;1916, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a><br />
+<i>Humble Confession, A</i>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a><br />
+Huxley, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>, <a href='#Page_163'>163</a><br />
+<br />
+"<i>Illustrated London News</i>," <a href='#Page_53'>53</a><br />
+<i>In a Crowd</i>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a><br />
+<i>In London</i>, <a href='#Page_59'>59</a><br />
+<i>In London again</i>, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a><br />
+<br />
+J&mdash;&mdash;, <a href='#Page_78'>78</a>, <a href='#Page_263'>263</a><br />
+James, <a href='#Page_163'>163</a>, <a href='#Page_166'>166</a><br />
+Jefferies, Richard, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>, <a href='#Page_233'>233</a><br />
+<i>Jeremiad, A</i>, <a href='#Page_294'>294</a><br />
+Johnson, <a href='#Page_2'>2</a>, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_180'>180</a>, <a href='#Page_181'>181</a>, <a href='#Page_196'>196</a>, <a href='#Page_230'>230</a><br />
+<i>Johnson</i> v. <i>Yves Delage</i>, <a href='#Page_181'>181</a><br />
+<i>Jolt, A</i>, <a href='#Page_247'>247</a><br />
+Jonson, Ben, <a href='#Page_171'>171</a><br />
+Joubert, <a href='#Page_291'>291</a><br />
+<i>Justifiable Mendacity</i>, <a href='#Page_52'>52</a><br />
+<br />
+K&mdash;&mdash;, <a href='#Page_80'>80</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, <a href='#Page_138'>138</a>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a><br />
+Kant, <a href='#Page_257'>257</a><br />
+Keats, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_145'>145</a>, <a href='#Page_146'>146</a>, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a><br />
+<br />
+L&mdash;&mdash;, <a href='#Page_1'>1</a>, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>, <a href='#Page_4'>4</a>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <a href='#Page_98'>98</a><br />
+Lacépède, <a href='#Page_146'>146</a><br />
+Lamb, Charles, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_120'>120</a>, <a href='#Page_227'>227</a>, <a href='#Page_230'>230</a><br />
+Landor, W.S., <a href='#Page_265'>265</a><br />
+La Rochefoucauld, <a href='#Page_31'>31</a><br />
+<i>Leap-frog</i>, <a href='#Page_302'>302</a><br />
+Lodge, Sir Oliver, <a href='#Page_286'>286</a><br />
+<i>Liebestod</i>, <a href='#Page_302'>302</a><br />
+<i>Lice or "Creeping Ferlies</i>," <a href='#Page_213'>213</a><br />
+<i>Looking for Lice at the Zoo</i>, <a href='#Page_177'>177</a><br />
+Lubbock, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a><br />
+<i>Ludo</i>, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a><br />
+<i>Lupus</i>, <a href='#Page_125'>125</a><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span><i>Luxury of Lunacy, The</i>, <a href='#Page_195'>195</a><br />
+<br />
+M&mdash;&mdash;, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a>, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>, <a href='#Page_80'>80</a>, <a href='#Page_81'>81</a>, <a href='#Page_96'>96</a>, <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <a href='#Page_106'>106</a>, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>, <a href='#Page_140'>140</a>, <a href='#Page_156'>156</a>,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;"><a href='#Page_222'>222</a>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>, <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>, <a href='#Page_255'>255</a>, <a href='#Page_250'>250</a>, <a href='#Page_259'>259</a>, <a href='#Page_260'>260</a></span><br />
+Macaulay, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a><br />
+Maeterlinck, <a href='#Page_42'>42</a><br />
+Malpighi, <a href='#Page_171'>171</a><br />
+<i>Marie Bashkirtseff</i>, <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>, <a href='#Page_163'>163</a>, <a href='#Page_175'>175</a>, <a href='#Page_238'>238</a><br />
+Mary, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>, <a href='#Page_28'>28</a><br />
+<i>Masefield's "Gallipoli,"</i> <a href='#Page_269'>269</a><br />
+<i>Measuring Lice</i>, <a href='#Page_125'>125</a><br />
+Moffat, <a href='#Page_161'>161</a><br />
+Moore, Tom, <a href='#Page_173'>173</a><br />
+<i>More Irony</i>, <a href='#Page_105'>105</a><br />
+Mosenthal, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a><br />
+Mother, <a href='#Page_34'>34</a>, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_59'>59</a>, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>, <a href='#Page_95'>95</a>, <a href='#Page_97'>97</a>, <a href='#Page_137'>137</a><br />
+Mozart, <a href='#Page_161'>161</a><br />
+<i>My Gastrocnemius</i>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a><br />
+<i>My Nightmare</i>, <a href='#Page_105'>105</a><br />
+<i>My Sense of Touch</i>, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a><br />
+<br />
+N&mdash;&mdash;, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>, <a href='#Page_78'>78</a>, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a>, <a href='#Page_122'>122</a>, <a href='#Page_257'>257</a>, <a href='#Page_261'>261</a><br />
+<i>Naming Cockroaches</i>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a><br />
+Natural History Museum, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a>, <a href='#Page_54'>54</a><br />
+<i>New Pile in the Pier, A</i>, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a><br />
+Newton, <a href='#Page_171'>171</a><br />
+Nietzsche, <a href='#Page_137'>137</a>, <a href='#Page_156'>156</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Old Diaries</i>, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a><br />
+<i>Omniscience</i>, <a href='#Page_239'>239</a><br />
+<i>On Lighting Chloe's Cigarette,</i> <a href='#Page_119'>119</a><br />
+<i>On Lundy Island</i>, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a><br />
+<i>On the N. Downs</i>, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a><br />
+<i>Our Simian Ancestry</i>, <a href='#Page_27'>27</a><br />
+<br />
+P&mdash;&mdash;, <a href='#Page_76'>76</a>, <a href='#Page_78'>78</a>, <a href='#Page_79'>79</a>, <a href='#Page_80'>80</a><br />
+<i>Pachmann</i>, <a href='#Page_234'>234</a><br />
+Pascal, <a href='#Page_293'>293</a><br />
+<i>Petticoat Lane</i>, <a href='#Page_163'>163</a><br />
+Piers Plowman, <a href='#Page_221'>221</a><br />
+Plymouth Marine Laboratory, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>,47, <a href='#Page_79'>79</a><br />
+<i>Pool: a Retrospect, The</i>, <a href='#Page_189'>189</a><br />
+<i>Potted Novel, A</i>, <a href='#Page_284'>284</a><br />
+<i>Prawning</i>, <a href='#Page_17'>17</a><br />
+<i>Preparing a Snake's Skull</i>, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a><br />
+"<i>Punch</i>," <a href='#Page_296'>296</a><br />
+<i>Punch and Judy Show, The,</i> <a href='#Page_180'>180</a><br />
+<br />
+R&mdash;&mdash;, <a href='#Page_81'>81</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, <a href='#Page_101'>101</a>, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_107'>107</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_119'>119</a>, <a href='#Page_120'>120</a>, <a href='#Page_122'>122</a>, <a href='#Page_123'>123</a>, <a href='#Page_124'>124</a>,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;"><a href='#Page_127'>127</a>, <a href='#Page_128'>128</a>, <a href='#Page_130'>130</a>, <a href='#Page_131'>131</a>, <a href='#Page_132'>132</a>, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a>, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>, <a href='#Page_135'>135</a>, <a href='#Page_136'>136</a>, <a href='#Page_140'>140</a>, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>, <a href='#Page_148'>148</a>,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;"><a href='#Page_151'>151</a>, <a href='#Page_154'>154</a>, <a href='#Page_166'>166</a>, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a>, <a href='#Page_169'>169</a>, <a href='#Page_172'>172</a>, <a href='#Page_173'>173</a>, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>, <a href='#Page_175'>175</a>, <a href='#Page_182'>182</a>, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <a href='#Page_205'>205</a>,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;"><a href='#Page_207'>207</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>, <a href='#Page_215'>215</a>, <a href='#Page_216'>216</a>, <a href='#Page_217'>217</a>, <a href='#Page_227'>227</a>, <a href='#Page_228'>228</a>, <a href='#Page_229'>229</a>, <a href='#Page_230'>230</a>, <a href='#Page_239'>239</a>, <a href='#Page_240'>240</a>,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;"><a href='#Page_241'>241</a>, <a href='#Page_295'>295</a>, <a href='#Page_299'>299</a>, <a href='#Page_303'>303</a></span><br />
+<i>Raemakers</i>, <a href='#Page_186'>186</a><br />
+<i>Railway Travel</i>, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a><br />
+<i>Raleigh, Sir Walter</i>, <a href='#Page_129'>129</a>, <a href='#Page_196'>196</a><br />
+<i>Reading Nietzsche</i>, <a href='#Page_156'>156</a><br />
+<i>Reminiscences</i>, <a href='#Page_270'>270</a><br />
+<i>Renunciation</i>, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a><br />
+<i>Resignation</i>, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a><br />
+<i>Restlessness of the Sea, The,</i> <a href='#Page_90'>90</a><br />
+Richepin, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a><br />
+Richelieu, Cardinal, <a href='#Page_155'>155</a><br />
+<i>Rigor Bordis</i>, <a href='#Page_148'>148</a><br />
+<i>Rodin</i>, <a href='#Page_103'>103</a>, <a href='#Page_157'>157</a>, <a href='#Page_160'>160</a><br />
+Romney, <a href='#Page_169'>169</a><br />
+Rousseau, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_181'>181</a>, <a href='#Page_268'>268</a><br />
+Ruskin, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a>, <a href='#Page_190'>190</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>, <a href='#Page_216'>216</a><br />
+<br />
+S&mdash;&mdash;, <a href='#Page_1'>1</a>, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a><br />
+Saintsbury, Prof. Geo., <a href='#Page_126'>126</a><br />
+Sainte-Beuve, <a href='#Page_200'>200</a>, <a href='#Page_277'>277</a><br />
+Schäfer, <a href='#Page_110'>110</a><br />
+Schopenhauer, <a href='#Page_34'>34</a><br />
+Schubert, <a href='#Page_173'>173</a>, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a><br />
+<i>Scots Fir, A</i>, <a href='#Page_111'>111</a><br />
+Scott, <a href='#Page_75'>75</a>, <a href='#Page_153'>153</a><br />
+<i>Service</i>, <a href='#Page_264'>264</a><br />
+Shakespeare, <a href='#Page_264'>264</a><br />
+Shaw, Bernard, <a href='#Page_59'>59</a>, <a href='#Page_150'>150</a>, <a href='#Page_166'>166</a>, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a><br />
+Shelley, <a href='#Page_196'>196</a>, <a href='#Page_266'>266</a>, <a href='#Page_293'>293</a><br />
+<i>Sir Henry Wood conducting</i>, <a href='#Page_159'>159</a><br />
+<i>Sleep</i>, <a href='#Page_206'>206</a><br />
+<i>Small Red Viper, A</i>, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a><br />
+Smiles, Samuel, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a><br />
+Smollett, <a href='#Page_291'>291</a><br />
+<i>Sollas's "Ancient Hunters,"</i> <a href='#Page_72'>72</a><br />
+Southey, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a><br />
+Spallanzani, <a href='#Page_47'>47</a>, <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>, <a href='#Page_112'>112</a><br />
+Spinoza, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a><br />
+<i>Spring in the Woods</i>, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a><br />
+<i>Staying by the Sea</i>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a><br />
+<i>Stagnancy</i>, <a href='#Page_84'>84</a><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span><i>Stagnant Day, A</i>, <a href='#Page_111'>111</a><br />
+Stevenson, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_106'>106</a>, <a href='#Page_161'>161</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a><br />
+<i>Stockbroker, The</i>, <a href='#Page_252'>252</a><br />
+<i>Strangeness of my Life, The,</i> <a href='#Page_281'>281</a><br />
+Strindberg, <a href='#Page_139'>139</a><br />
+Susan, <a href='#Page_254'>254</a><br />
+<i>Sunset in Kensington Gardens</i>, <a href='#Page_130'>130</a><br />
+Swift, <a href='#Page_230'>230</a><br />
+Swinburne, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_290'>290</a><br />
+<br />
+T&mdash;&mdash;, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_171'>171</a>, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a><br />
+<br />
+"<i>T.P.'s Weekly</i>," <a href='#Page_41'>41</a><br />
+Tennyson, <a href='#Page_154'>154</a>, <a href='#Page_264'>264</a><br />
+<i>Test for True Love, The</i>, <a href='#Page_157'>157</a><br />
+<i>Test of Happiness, A</i>, <a href='#Page_185'>185</a><br />
+Thompson, Francis, <a href='#Page_266'>266</a><br />
+Thoreau, <a href='#Page_181'>181</a><br />
+<i>Too Late</i>, <a href='#Page_144'>144</a><br />
+<i>Tschaikovsky</i>, <a href='#Page_161'>161</a>, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a><br />
+Turner, J.M.W., <a href='#Page_154'>154</a>, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a><br />
+<i>Two Adventures</i>, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a><br />
+<i>Two Months' Sick Leave</i>, <a href='#Page_80'>80</a><br />
+<i>Two People I hate in particular,</i> <a href='#Page_186'>186</a><br />
+<i>Two Young Men Talking</i>, <a href='#Page_60'>60</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Une Caractère</i>, <a href='#Page_53'>53</a><br />
+<br />
+Verlaine, <a href='#Page_60'>60</a><br />
+Villon, Francois, <a href='#Page_173'>173</a><br />
+Voltaire, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_163'>163</a><br />
+<br />
+Wagner, <a href='#Page_166'>166</a><br />
+Wallace, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a><br />
+Walton, Isaac, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a><br />
+Wasmann, Father, <a href='#Page_47'>47</a><br />
+Waterton, <a href='#Page_159'>159</a><br />
+Wells, H.G., <a href='#Page_291'>291</a><br />
+Whistler, <a href='#Page_222'>222</a><br />
+White, Gilbert, <a href='#Page_159'>159</a><br />
+Whitman, Walt, <a href='#Page_189'>189</a>, <a href='#Page_253'>253</a><br />
+Wilde, Oscar, <a href='#Page_76'>76</a>, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a>, <a href='#Page_152'>152</a>, <a href='#Page_175'>175</a>, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a><br />
+<i>Windy Ash</i>,35<br />
+<i>Wiedersheim</i>, <a href='#Page_106'>106</a>, <a href='#Page_145'>145</a>, <a href='#Page_159'>159</a>, <a href='#Page_257'>257</a><br />
+<i>Woman and a Child, A</i>, <a href='#Page_146'>146</a><br />
+Wood, Sir Henry, <a href='#Page_157'>157</a>, <a href='#Page_159'>159</a>, <a href='#Page_172'>172</a>, <a href='#Page_201'>201</a><br />
+Woodward, Dr. Smith, <a href='#Page_145'>145</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Yellow Cat, A</i>, <a href='#Page_241'>241</a><br />
+<br />
+Zola, <a href='#Page_17'>17</a><br />
+</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+<p class="caption"><a name="Contents" id="Contents"></a>Contents</p>
+
+<p>
+<a href="#INTRODUCTION">INTRODUCTION</a><br />
+<a href="#PART_I_THE_JOURNAL_BEGINS_WHEN_ITS_AUTHOR_IS_A_LITTLE_OVER_13_YEARS">PART I&mdash;THE JOURNAL BEGINS WHEN ITS AUTHOR IS A LITTLE OVER 13 YEARS</a><br />
+<a href="#a1903">1903</a><br />
+<a href="#a1904">1904</a><br />
+<a href="#a1905">1905</a><br />
+<a href="#a1906">1906</a><br />
+<a href="#a1907">1907</a><br />
+<a href="#a1908">1908</a><br />
+<a href="#a1909">1909</a><br />
+<a href="#a1910">1910</a><br />
+<a href="#a1911">1911</a><br />
+<a href="#PART_II_IN_LONDON">PART II&mdash;IN LONDON</a><br />
+<a href="#a1912">1912</a><br />
+<a href="#a1913">1913</a><br />
+<a href="#a1914">1914</a><br />
+<a href="#a1915">1915</a><br />
+<a href="#PART_III_MARRIAGE">PART III&mdash;MARRIAGE</a><br />
+<a href="#a1916">1916</a><br />
+<a href="#a1917">1917</a><br />
+<a href="#SYNOPSIS">SYNOPSIS</a><br />
+<a href="#INDEX_OF_NAMES">INDEX OF NAMES</a>
+</p>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE JOURNAL OF A DISAPPOINTED MAN ***</div>
+<div style='text-align:left'>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #39585 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39585)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Journal of a Disappointed Man, by 
+Wilhelm Nero Pilate Barbellion
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+Title: The Journal of a Disappointed Man
+
+Author: Wilhelm Nero Pilate Barbellion
+
+Release Date: April 30, 2012 [EBook #39585]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE JOURNAL OF A DISAPPOINTED MAN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org
+(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive.)
+
+
+
+
+
+THE JOURNAL OF A DISAPPOINTED MAN
+
+BY
+
+W.N.P. BARBELLION
+
+
+
+WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY H.G. WELLS
+
+
+
+NEW YORK
+
+GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
+
+1919
+
+
+"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift,
+nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet
+riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time
+and chance happeneth to them all.
+
+"For man also knoweth not his time; as the fishes that are taken in an
+evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons
+of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them."
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+By H.G. WELLS
+
+Your egoist, like the solitary beasts, lives only for himself; your
+altruist declares that he lives only for others; for either there may be
+success or failure but for neither can there be tragedy. For even if the
+altruist meets nothing but ingratitude, what has he to complain of? His
+premises abolish his grounds of complaint. But both egoist and altruist
+are philosophical abstractions. The human being by nature and necessity
+is neither egoist nor altruist; he trims a difficult course between the
+two; for the most part we are, within the limits of our powers of
+expression, _egotists_, and our desire is to think and if possible talk
+and write about this marvellous experiment of ourselves, with all the
+world--or as much as we can conveniently assemble--for audience. There
+is variety in our styles. Some drape the central figure; some let it
+rather appear than call attention to it; some affect a needless
+frankness: "_I_ am an egotist, mind you, and I pretend nothing else";
+some by adopting a pose with accessories do at least develop so great
+and passionate an interest in the accessories as to generalise and
+escape more or less completely from self. An egotism like an eggshell is
+a thing from which to escape; the art of life is that escape. The
+fundamental art of life is to recover the sense of that great
+self-forgetful continuous life from which we have individually budded
+off. Many people have done this through religion, which begins with a
+tremendous clamour to some saviour god or other to recognise us and ends
+in our recognition of him; or through science, when your egotist begins
+with: "Behold me! I, I your humble servant, am a scientific man, devoted
+to the clear statement of truth," and ends with so passionate a
+statement of truth that self is forgotten altogether.
+
+In this diary of an intensely egotistical young naturalist, tragically
+caught by the creeping approach of death, we have one of the most moving
+records of the youthful aspects of our universal struggle. We begin with
+one of those bright schoolboys that most of us like to fancy we once
+were, that many of us have come to love as sons or nephews or younger
+brothers, and this youngster is attracted by natural science, by the
+employments of the naturalist and by the thought of being himself some
+day a naturalist. From the very beginning we find in this diary the
+three qualities, from the narrowest to broadest. "Observe me," he says
+to himself, "I am observing nature." There is the self-conscious,
+self-centred boy. But he also says "I am observing nature!" And at
+moments comes the clear light. He forgets himself in the twilight cave
+with the bats or watching the starlings in the evening sky, he becomes
+just you and I and the mind of mankind gathering knowledge. And the
+diary, as the keen edge of untimely fate cuts down into the sensitive
+tissue, shows us presently, after outcries and sorrow and darkness of
+spirit, the habits of the observer rising to the occasion. Not for him,
+he realises, are the long life, the honours of science, the Croonian
+lecture, the listening Royal Society, one's memory embalmed in specific
+or generic names, the sure place in the temple of fame, that once filled
+his boyish dreams. But here is something close at hand to go on
+observing manfully to the end, in which self may be forgotten, and that
+is his own tormented self, with desire still great and power and hope
+receding. "I will go on with this diary," I read between the lines. "You
+shall have at least one specimen, carefully displayed and labelled. Here
+is a recorded unhappiness. When you talk about life and the rewards of
+life and the justice of life and its penalties, what you say must square
+with this."
+
+Such is what we have here. It will be going beyond the necessities of
+this preface to expatiate upon a certain thread of unpremeditated and
+exquisite beauty that runs through the story this diary tells. To all
+sensitive readers it will be plain enough, and those who cannot see it
+plain do not deserve to have it underlined for them, that, still
+unseeing, they may pretend to see. Nor need we dilate upon the
+development of the quality of this diary from the rather fussy egotism
+of the earlier half. But it may be well to add a few explanatory facts
+that the opening chapters rather take for granted. Barbellion began life
+at a material as well as a physical disadvantage; neither of his parents
+were sturdy people, his mother died at last of constitutional heart
+weakness, and his father belonged to that most unfortunate class, the
+poor educated, who live lives of worry in straitened circumstances.
+Barbellion's father was a newspaper reporter in a west country town, his
+income rarely exceeded a couple of hundred pounds a year; the
+educational facilities of the place were poor, and young Barbellion had
+to get such learning as he could as a day boy at a small private school,
+his father supplementing this meagre training and presently taking him
+on as an apprentice reporter. How the passion for natural science arose
+does not appear in this diary; we already find the naturalist formed in
+the first schoolboy entries. An uncle, a chemist, seems to have
+encouraged the tendency, and to have given him textbooks and other help.
+Somehow at any rate he acquired a considerable amount of knowledge; by
+the time he was eighteen he was already publishing quite excellent
+observations of his own in such periodicals as the _Zoologist_, and by
+the time he was twenty he could secure an appointment as assistant
+naturalist to the director of a well-known marine biological station. It
+was a success, as the reader will learn, gained only to be renounced.
+His father was ill and he had to stand by his family; our economical
+country cannot afford to make biologists out of men who can earn a
+living as hack reporters. Poverty and science are sisters wherever the
+flag of Britain waves; for how could the rich live if we wasted money on
+that sort of thing? But the dream was not altogether abandoned, and in
+1911 Barbellion got a post, one of the dozen or so of rare and coveted
+opportunities to toil in a scientific atmosphere that our Empire
+affords; he secured an assistantship at the Natural History Museum,
+South Kensington, to which a living wage was attached, a fair equivalent
+to a reporter's earnings. The rest of the story needs no helping out.
+Let me only add that since 1911 Barbellion, in spite of his steadily
+diminishing strength, has published articles in both British and
+American periodicals, that entirely justify the statement that in him
+biological science loses one of the most promising of its recent
+recruits. His scientific work is not only full and exact but it has
+those literary qualities, the grace, the power of handling, the breadth
+of reference, which have always distinguished the best English
+biological work, and which mark off at once the true scientific man from
+the mere collector and recorder of items. With this much introduction
+Barbellion may be left to tell the tragedy of his hopes and of the dark,
+unforeseen, unforeseeable, and inexplicable fate that has overtaken
+him.
+
+
+
+
+PART I--THE JOURNAL BEGINS WHEN ITS AUTHOR IS A LITTLE OVER 13 YEARS
+OLD.
+
+_[The Following are Selected Entries.]_
+
+
+
+
+1903
+
+
+_January_ 3.
+
+Am writing an essay on the life-history of insects and have abandoned
+the idea of writing on "How Cats Spend their Time."
+
+_January_ 17.
+
+Went with L---- out catapult shooting. While walking down the main road
+saw a Goldfinch, but very indistinctly--it might not have been one. Had
+some wonderful shots at a tree creeper in the hedge about a foot away
+from me. While near a stream, L---- spotted what he thought to be some
+Wild Duck and brought one down, hitting it right in the head. He is a
+splendid shot. We discovered on examining it that it was _not_ Wild Duck
+at all but an ordinary tame Wild Duck--a hen. We ran away, and to-night
+L---- tells me he saw the Farmer enter the poulterer's shop with the
+bird in his hand.
+
+_January_ 19.
+
+Went to A---- Wood with S---- and L----. Saw a Barn Owl (_Strix
+flammea_) flying in broad daylight. At A---- Woods, be it known, there
+is a steep cliff where we were all out climbing to inspect and find all
+the likely places for birds to build in, next spring. S-and I got along
+all right, but L----, being a bit too careless, let go his hold on a
+tree and fell headlong down. He turned over and over and seemed to us to
+pitch on the back of his neck. However, he got up as cheerfully as ever,
+saying, "I don't like that--a bit of a nasty knock."
+
+_February_ 8.
+
+Joe became the mother of one kitten to-day. It was born at 1.20. It is
+a tiny little thing. One would almost call it deformed. It is gray.
+
+_March_ 18.
+
+Our Goldfinch roosts at 5.30. Joe's kitten is a very small one. "Magpie"
+is its name.
+
+_March_ 28.
+
+Went our usual ramble. But we were unfortunate from the very beginning.
+First, when we reached the "Nightjar Field," we found there were two men
+at the bottom of it cutting the hedge, so we decided not to venture on,
+as Gimbo and Bounce were with us, and it would look like poaching. Later
+on, we came to a splendid wood, but had to withdraw hastily from it, an
+old farmer giving us a severe chase. There were innumerable rabbits in
+the wood, so, of course, the dogs barked hard. I gave them a sound
+beating when we got back out of danger, The old farmer is known as "Bale
+the Bell-hanger."
+
+_April_ 2.
+
+I was glad yesterday to see the egg season so well in. I shall have to
+get blow-pipes and egg drills. Spring has really arrived and even the
+grasshoppers are beginning to stridulate, yet Burke describes these
+little creatures as being "loud and troublesome" and the chirp
+unpleasant. Like Samuel Johnson, he must have preferred brick walls to
+green hedges. Many people go for a walk and yet are unable to admire
+Nature simply because their power of observation is untrained. Of course
+some are not suited to the study at all and do not trouble themselves
+about it. In that case they should not talk of what they do not
+understand.... I might have noticed that I have used the term "Study of
+Nature." But it cannot be called a _study_. It _is_ a pastime of sheer
+delight, with naught but beautiful dreams and lovely thoughts, where we
+are urged forward by the fact that we are in God's world which He made
+for us to be our comfort in time of trouble.... Language cannot express
+the joy and happy forgetfulness during a ramble in the country. I do
+not mean that all the ins and outs and exact knowledge of a naturalist
+are necessary to produce such delight, but merely the common
+objects--Sun, Thrush, Grasshopper, Primrose, and Dew.
+
+_April_ 21.
+
+S---- and I have made a little hut in the woods out of a large natural
+hole in the ground by a big tree. We have pulled down branches all
+around it and stuck in upright sticks as a paling. We are training ivy
+to grow over the sticks. We smoke "Pioneer" cigarettes here and hide the
+packets in a hole under the roots of the tree. It's like a sort of
+cupboard.
+
+_August_ 6.
+
+In the evening, S---- and I cycled to S----, and when it was dark we
+went down on the rocks and lit a fire which crackled and burnt in the
+dusk of the evening.... Intend to do a bit to Beetles these hols. Rev.
+J. Wood in the _B.O.P_. has incited me to take them up, and it is really
+time, for at present I am as ignorant as I can hang together of the
+Coleoptera.
+
+_December_ 24.
+
+Went out with L---- to try to see the squirrels again. We could not find
+one and were just wondering if we should draw blank when L---- noticed
+one clinging to the bark of a tree with a nut in its mouth. We gave it a
+good chase, but it escaped into the thickest part of the fir tree, still
+carrying the nut, and we gave up firing at it. Later on, L---- got
+foolishly mischievous--owing, I suppose, to our lack of sport--and
+unhinged a gate which he carried two yards into a copse, and threw it on
+the ground. Just then, he saw the Squirrel again and jumped over the
+hedge into the copse, chasing it from tree to tree with his catty.
+Having lost it, he climbed a fir tree into a Squirrel's drey at the top
+and sat there on the three top, and I, below, was just going to lift the
+gate back when I looked up and saw a farmer watching me, menacing and
+silent. I promptly dropped the gate and fled. L---- from his Squirrel's
+drey, not knowing what had happened, called out to me about the
+nest--that there was nothing in it. The man looked up and asked him who
+he was and who I was. L---- would not say and would not come down. The
+farmer said he would come up. L---- answered that if he did he would
+"gob" [_i.e_. spit] on him. Eventually L---- climbed down and asked the
+farmer for a glass of cider. The latter gave him his boot and L---- ran
+away.
+
+
+
+
+1904
+
+
+_January_ 23.
+
+Went to the meet of the Stag hounds. Saw a hind in the stream at
+L----with not a horse, hound, or man in sight. It looked quite
+unconcerned and did not seem to have been hunted. I tried to head it,
+but a confounded sheep-dog got there before me and drove it off in the
+wrong direction. I _was_ mad, because if I had succeeded in heading it
+and had there been a kill, I should have got a slot. Got home at 6.30,
+after running and walking fifteen miles--tired out.
+
+_April_ 5.
+
+Just read _Stalky & Co_. Of Stalky, Beetle, and McTurk. I like Beetle
+best.
+
+_April_ 14.
+
+Won the School Gymnasium championship (under fifteen).
+
+_August_ 25.
+
+Had quite an adventure to-day. D---- and I cycled to the Lighthouse at
+----. On the way, in crossing the sands near the Hospital Ship we espied
+a lame Curlew which could hardly fly. I gave chase, but it managed to
+scramble over a gut full of water about two yards wide. D---- took off
+his boots and stockings and carried me over on his back, and we both
+raced across the sands to where the Curlew lay in an exhausted state. I
+picked him up and carried him off under my arm, like the boy with the
+Goose that laid the golden eggs. All the time, the bird screamed loudly,
+opening its enormously long bill and struggling to escape. Arrived at
+the gut again, we found that the incoming tide had made the gut wider
+and deeper so that we were cut off from the mainland, and found it.
+necessary to wade across at once before it got deeper. As I had to carry
+a pair of field-glasses as well as my boots and stockings, I handed over
+the struggling bird to D----. While wading across, I suddenly sank to my
+waist in a sandpit. This frightened me, and I was glad to reach the
+other side in safety. But on arrival I found D----, but no Curlew. In
+wading across the current, he grew flurried and let it go. The tide
+swept it upstream, and the poor bird, I fear, perished by drowning....
+Knocked up my friend P----, who is skipper of the ship _N_---- and asked
+him if he had a fire so that I could dry myself. He replied that they
+had no fire but that his "missus" would look out a pair of pants for me.
+Before falling in with this plan unconditionally, I thought it best to
+inspect the garment. However, it was quite clean--a pair of blue serge
+seaman's trousers, very baggy in the seat and far too long. But I turned
+up the bottoms and hid the baggy part underneath my overcoat. So, I got
+back home!
+
+_September_ 8.
+
+Wet all day. Toothache.
+
+_September_ 9.
+
+Toothache.
+
+_September_ 10.
+
+Toothache.
+
+_September_ 11.
+
+Toothache.
+
+_Xmas Day._
+
+Mother and Dad wanted to give me one of G.A. Henty's, but, fearing lest
+I did not want it, they did not put my name in it, so that if I wished I
+could change it. Intend doing this. Am reading the _Origin of Species_.
+It requires careful study, but I understand it so far and shall go on.
+
+_December_ 26.
+
+I have caught nothing in my traps yet. A little while ago I set a
+springe and two horse-hair nooses in the reed bed for water rails. I
+have bought a book on practical trapping.
+
+
+
+
+1905
+
+
+_January_ 15.
+
+I am thinking that on the whole I am a most discontented mortal. I get
+fits of what I call "What's the good of anything" mania. I keep asking
+myself incessantly till the question wears me out: "What's the good of
+going into the country _naturalising_? what's the good of studying so
+hard? where is it going to end? will it lead anywhere?"
+
+_February_ 17.
+
+When I can get hold of any one interested in Natural History I talk away
+in the most garrulous manner and afterwards feel ashamed of myself for
+doing it.
+
+_May_ 15.
+
+_The Captain_, in answer to my letter, advises me to join one of the
+ordinary professions and then follow up Nat. History as a recreation, or
+else join Science Classes at S. Kensington, or else by influence get a
+post in the Natural History Museum. But I shall see.
+
+_June_ 9.
+
+During dinner hour, between morning and afternoon school, went out on
+the S---- B---- River Bank, and found another Sedge Warbler's nest. This
+is the fifth I have found this year. People who live opposite on the
+T---- V---- hear them sing at night and think they are Nightingales!
+
+_June_ 27.
+
+On reviewing the past egg-season, I find in all I have discovered 232
+nests belonging to forty-four species. I only hope I shall be as
+successful with the beetle-season.
+
+_August_ 15.
+
+A hot, sultry afternoon, during most of which I was stretched out on the
+grass beside an upturned stone where a battle royal was fought between
+Yellow and Black Ants. The victory went to the hardy little Yellows....
+By the way, I held a Newt by the tail to-day and it emitted a squeak! So
+that the Newt has a voice after all.
+
+_August_ 26.
+
+In bed with a feverish cold. I am afraid I have very few Nat. His.
+observations to make. It is hard to observe anything at all when lying
+in bed in a dull bedroom with one small window. Gulls and Starlings
+pass, steam engines whistle, horses' feet clatter down the street, and
+sometimes the voice of a passer-by reaches me, and often the loud laugh
+that speaks the vacant mind. I can also hear my own cough echoing
+through my head, and, by the evening, the few pages of Lubbock's _Ants,
+Bees, and Wasps_ which I struggled to get through during the day rattle
+through my brain till I am disgusted to find I have them by heart. The
+clock strikes midnight and I wait for the morning. Oh! what a weary
+world.
+
+_October_ 13.
+
+Down with another cold. Feeling pretty useless. It's a wonder I don't
+develop melancholia.
+
+_November_ 6.
+
+By 7 a.m. H---- and I were down on the mudflats of the River with
+field-glasses, watching Waders. Ringed Plover in great numbers.
+
+
+
+
+1906
+
+_January_ 13.
+
+I have always had one ambition to be a great naturalist. That is, I
+suppose, a child's fancy, and I can see my folly in hoping for such
+great things. Still, there is no reason why I should not become a
+_learned_ naturalist if I study hard. I hope that whatever I do I shall
+do in the hope of increasing knowledge of truth and not for my own fame.
+This entry may suggest that I am horribly conceited. But really I am as
+humble as possible. I know I have advanced beyond many others, and I
+know I shall advance further, but why be conceited?... What a short life
+we have, and what heaps of glorious work to be done! Supper bell--so I
+am off.... This reads like Isaac Walton's funny mixtures of the sublime
+with the ridiculous. He discusses abstract happiness and the best salmon
+sauce all in one breath.
+
+_February_ 26.
+
+Although it is a grand achievement to have added but one jot or tittle
+to the sum of human knowledge it is grander still to have added a
+thought. It is best for a man to try to be both poet and naturalist--not
+to be too much of a naturalist and so overlook the beauty of things, or
+too much of a poet and so fail to understand them or even perceive those
+hidden beauties only revealed by close observation.
+
+_March_ 17.
+
+Woke up this morning covered with spots, chest inflamed, and bad cough.
+H---- carted me down from the Attic to the Lower Bedroom, and when the
+Dr. came he confirmed the general opinion that I had measles. It is
+simply disgusting, I have somewhere near 10,000 spots on me.
+
+_April_ 27.
+
+Went to A---- Woods, where, strange to say, I again saw Mary. But she
+had a tribe of friends with her, so did not speak, but watched her from
+a distance through my field-glasses.
+
+_May_ 8.
+
+On interviewing my old friend Dr. H----, found I had chickenpox. This
+instead of being a Diary of a Naturalist's observations[1] will be one
+of infectious diseases.
+
+_May_ 28.
+
+[Letter from Editor of _Countryside_ to my brother saying that if the
+_Countryside_ grew he might be able to offer me a billet. "Meanwhile he
+will be able to get along with his pen ... he will soon make a living
+and in time too a name."] This is a bit of all right. I shall always be
+on the look-out for a job on a N.H. Journal.
+
+_December_ 7.
+
+Went to F---- Duckponds. Flocks of Wigeon and Teal on the water. Taking
+advantage of a dip in the land managed to stalk them splendidly, and for
+quite a long time I lay among the long grass watching them through my
+field-glasses. But during the day Wild Duck are not particularly lively
+or interesting birds. They just rest serenely on the water like floating
+corks on a sheet of glass. Occasionally one will paddle around lazily.
+But for the most part they show a great ennui and seem so sleepy and
+tired that one would almost think to be able to approach and feed them
+out of the hand. But I moved one hand carelessly and the whole flock was
+up in a minute and whizzing across the river. Afterwards, at dusk, on
+returning to the ponds, they had come back; but now that the sun was
+down, those dozy, flapdoodle creatures of the afternoon were transformed
+into quacking, quarrelsome, blustering birds that squabbled and chivvied
+each other, every moment seizing the chance of a luxurious dip, flinging
+the ice-cold water off their backs with a shake of the tail that seemed
+to indicate the keenest-edged delight.
+
+It was now quite dark. A Snipe rose at my feet and disappeared into the
+darkness. Coots and Moorhens clekked, and a Little Grebe grew bold and
+began to dive and fish quite close to me, methodically working its way
+upstream and so quartering out its feeding area.
+
+A happy half-hour! Alas! I enjoy these moments the more as they recede.
+Not often do I realise the living present. That is always difficult. It
+is the mere shades--the ghosts of the dead days--that are dearest to me.
+
+Spent my last day at school. De Quincey says (or was it Johnson?) that
+whenever we do anything for the last time, provided we have done it
+regularly for years before, we are a little melancholy, even though it
+has been distasteful to us.... True.
+
+_December_ 14.
+
+Signed my Death Warrant, _i.e._, my articles apprenticing me to
+journalism for five years. By Jove! I shall work frantically during the
+next five years so as to be ready at the end of them to take up a
+Natural History appointment.
+
+
+[1] Up to 1911, the Journal is mainly devoted to records of observations
+in general Natural History and latterly in Zoology alone.
+
+
+
+
+1907
+
+
+_March_ 1.
+
+As long as he has good health, a man need never despair. Without good
+health, I _might_ keep a long while in the race, yet as the goal of my
+ambition grew more and more unattainable I should surely remember the
+words of Keats and give up: "There is no fiercer Hell than the failure
+of a great ambition."
+
+_March_ 14.
+
+Have been reading through the Chemistry Course in the Harmsworth
+_Self-Educator_ and learning all the latest facts and ideas about
+radium. I would rather have a clear comprehension of the atom as a solar
+system than a private income of £100 a year. If only I had eyes to go on
+reading without a stop!
+
+_May_ 1.
+
+Met an old gentleman in E----, a naturalist with a great contempt for
+the Book of Genesis. He wanted to know how the Kangaroo leapt from
+Australia to Palestine and how Noah fed the animals in the Ark. He
+rejects the Old T. theogony and advised me to read "Darwin and J.G.
+Wood!" Silly old man!
+
+_May_ 22.
+
+To Challacombe and then walked across Exmoor. This is the first time I
+have been on Exmoor. My first experience of the Moors came bursting in
+on me with a flood of ideas, impressions, and delights. I cannot write
+out the history of to-day. It would take too long and my mind is a
+palpitating tangle. I have so many things to record that I cannot record
+one of them. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to draw up an
+inventory of things seen and heard and trust to my memory to fill in the
+details when in the future I revert to this date. Too much joy, like too
+much pain, simply makes me prostrate. It wounds the organism. It is too
+much. I shall try to forget it all as quickly as possible so as to be
+able to return to egg-collecting and bird-watching the sooner as a calm
+and dispassionate observer. Yet these dear old hills. How I love them. I
+cannot leave them without one friendly word. I wish I were a shepherd!
+
+At the "Ring of Bells" had a long yarn with the landlord, who, as he
+told us the story of his life, was constantly interrupted but never
+disconcerted by the exuberant loyalty and devotion of his wife--a stout,
+florid, creamy woman, who capped every story with: "Ees quite honest,
+sir; no 'arm at all in old Joshua."
+
+_June_ 5.
+
+A half-an-hour of to-day I spent in a punt under a copper beech out of
+the pouring rain listening to Lady ----'s gamekeeper at A---- talk about
+beasts and local politics--just after a visit of inspection to the
+Heronry in the firs on the island in the middle of the Lake. It was
+delightful to hear him describing a Heron killing an Eel with "a dap on
+the niddick," helping out the figure with a pat on the nape of his thick
+bull neck.
+
+_July_ 22.
+
+Am reading Huxley's _Crayfish_. H---- brought me in that magnificent
+aculeate _Chrysis ignita_.
+
+_August_ 15.
+
+Met _her_ in the market with M----. I just lifted my hat and passed on.
+She has the most marvellous brown eyes I have ever seen. She is
+perfectly self-possessed. A bad sign this.
+
+_August_ 18.
+
+When I feel ill, cinema pictures of the circumstances of my death flit
+across my mind's eye. I cannot prevent them. I consider the nature of
+the disease and all I said before I died--something heroic, of course!
+
+_August_ 31.
+
+She is a ripping girl. Her eyes are magnificent. I have never seen any
+one better looking.
+
+_October_ 1.
+
+In the afternoon dissected a Frog, following Milnes Marshall's Book. Am
+studying Chemistry and attending classes at the Evening School and
+reading Physiology (Foster's). Am also teaching myself German. I wish I
+had a microscope.
+
+_October_ 3.
+
+What heaps of things to be done! How short the time to do them in! An
+appetite for knowledge is apt to rush one off one's feet, like any other
+appetite if not curbed. I often stand in the centre of the Library here
+and think despairingly how impossible it is ever to become possessed of
+all the wealth of facts and ideas contained in the books surrounding me
+on every hand. I pull out one volume from its place and feel as if I
+were no more than giving one dig with a pick in an enormous quarry. The
+Porter spends his days in the Library keeping strict vigil over this
+catacomb of books, passing along between the shelves and yet never
+paying heed to the almost audible susurrus of desire--the desire every
+book has to be taken down and read, to live, to come into being in
+somebody's mind. He even hands the volumes over the counter, seeks them
+out in their proper places or returns them there without once realising
+that a Book is a Person and not a Thing. It makes me shudder to think of
+Lamb's _Essays_ being carted about as if they were fardels.
+
+_October_ 16.
+
+Dissected an Eel. Cassell's _Natural History_ says the Air-bladder is
+divided. This is not so in the one I opened. Found what I believe to be
+the lymphatic heart in the tail beneath the vent.
+
+
+
+
+1908
+
+
+_March_ 10.
+
+Am working frantically so as to keep up my own work with the daily
+business of reporting. Shorthand, type-writing, German, Chemistry
+classes, Electricity lectures, Zoology (including dissections) and field
+work. Am reading Mosenthal's _Muscle and Nerve_.
+
+_April_ 7.
+
+Sectioned a leech. H---- has lent me a hand microtome and I have
+borrowed an old razor. My table in the Attic is now fitted up quite like
+a Laboratory. I get up every morning at 6 a.m. to dissect. Have worked
+at the Anatomy of _Dytiscus, Lumbricus_, another Leech, and _Petromyzon
+fluviatilis_ all collected by myself. The "branchial basket" of
+_Petromyzon_ interested me vastly. But it's a brute to dissect.[1]
+
+_May_ 1.
+
+Cycled to the Lighthouse at the mouth of the Estuary. Underneath some
+telegraph wires, picked up a Landrail in excellent condition. The colour
+of the wings is a beautiful warm chestnut. While sweeping the sandhills
+with my field-glasses in search of Ring Plover, which nest there in the
+shingle beaches, I espied a Shelduck (_Tadorna_) squatting on a piece of
+level ground. On walking up cautiously, found it was dead--a Drake in
+splendid plumage and quite fresh and uninjured. Put him in my poacher's
+pocket, alongside of the Landrail. My coat looked rather bulgy, for a
+Shelduck is nearly as big as a Goose. Heard a Grasshopper Warbler--a
+rare bird in North ----. Later, after much patient watching, saw the
+bird in a bramble bush, creeping about like a mouse.
+
+On the sea-shore picked up a number of Sea Mice (_Aphrodite_) and
+bottled them in my jar of 70 per cent., as they will come in useful for
+dissection. Also found the cranium of a _Scyllium_, which I will
+describe later on.
+
+Near the Lighthouse watched some fishermen bring in a large Salmon in a
+seine net worked from the shore. It was most exciting. Cycled down three
+miles of hard sand with the wind behind me to the village where I had
+tea and--as if nothing could stay to-day's good luck--met Margaret ----.
+I showed her one by one all my treasures--Rail, Duck, Skull, Sea Mice,
+etc., and felt like Thomas Edward, beloved of Samuel Smiles. To her I
+must have appeared a very ridiculous person.
+
+"How do you know it's the skull of a dog-fish?" she asked, incredulous.
+
+"How do I know anything?" I said, a little piqued.
+
+On arriving home found T---- awaiting me with the news that he had
+discovered a Woodpecker's nest. When will the luck cease? I have never
+had such a flawless ten hours in _le grand air_. These summer days eat
+into my being. The sea has been roaring into my ears and the sun blazing
+down so that even the backs of my hands are sunburnt. And then: those
+coal-black eyes. Ah! me, she _is_ pretty.
+
+_May_ 2.
+
+Dissected the Sheldrake. Very entertained to discover the extraordinary
+asymmetry of the syrinx....
+
+_May_ 3.
+
+Dissected Corncrake, examining carefully the pessulus, bronchidesmus
+(incomplete), _tympani-form and semi-lunar_ membranes of a very
+interesting syrinx....
+
+_May_ 6.
+
+Dissected one of the Sea Mice. It has a remarkable series of hepatic
+ducts running into the alimentary canal as in Nudibranchs....
+
+_May_ 9.
+
+_Spring in the Woods_
+
+Among the Oak Saplings we seemed enveloped in a cloud of green. The tall
+green grasses threw up a green light against the young green of the
+Oaks, and the sun managed to trickle through only here and there. Bevies
+of swinging bluebells grew in patches among the grass. Overhead in the
+oaks I heard secret leaf whispers--those little noiseless noises. Birds
+and trees and flowers were secretive and mysterious like expectant
+motherhood. All the live things plotted together, having the same big
+business in hand. Out in the sunlit meadows, there was a different
+influence abroad. Here everything was gay, lively, irresponsible. The
+brook prattled like an inconsequential schoolgirl. The Marsh Marigolds
+in flamboyant yellow sunbonnets played ring-a-ring-a-roses.
+
+An Oak Sapling should make an elderly man avuncular. There are so many
+tremendous possibilities about a well-behaved young oak that it is
+tempting to put a hand upon its shoulder and give some seasoned,
+timberly advice.
+
+_June_ 1.
+
+_A Small Red Viper_
+
+Went to L---- Sessions. After the Court rose, I transcribed my notes
+quickly and walked out to the famous Valley of Rocks which Southey
+described as the ribs of the old Earth poking through. At the bottom of
+one of the hills saw a snake, a Red Viper. Put my boot on him quickly so
+that he couldn't get away and then recognised him as a specimen of what
+I consider to be the fourth species of British Serpent--_Vipera rubra_.
+The difficulty was to know how to secure him. This species is more
+ferocious than the ordinary _V. bera_, and I did not like the idea of
+putting my hand down to seize him by the neck. I stood for some time
+with my foot so firmly pressed down on its back that my leg ached and I
+began to wonder if I had been bitten. I held on and presently hailed a
+baker's cart coming along the road. The man got out and ran across the
+grass to where I stood. I showed him what I had beneath my boot and he
+produced a piece of string which I fastened around the snake's tail and
+so gently hauled the little brute up. It already appeared moribund, but
+I squashed its head on the grass with my heel to make certain. After
+parting with the baker, to whom all thanks be given, I remember that
+Adders are tenacious of life and so I continue to carry him at string's
+length and occasionally wallop him against a stone. As he was lifeless I
+wrapped him in paper and put him in my pocket--though to make assurance
+doubly sure I left the string on and let its end hang out over my
+pocket. So home by a two hours' railway journey with the adder in the
+pocket of my overcoat and the overcoat on the rack over my head. Settled
+down to the reading of a book on Spinoza's _Ethics_. At home it proved
+to be quite alive, and, on being pulled out by the string, coiled up on
+the drawing-room floor and hissed in a fury, to my infinite surprise.
+Finished him off with the poker and so spoilt the skin.
+
+_July_ 18.
+
+Have had toothache for a week. Too much of a coward to have it out.
+Started for P---- early in the morning to report Mr. Duke, K.C. After a
+week's pain, felt a little dicky. All the way in the train kept
+hardening myself to the task in front of me by recollecting the example
+of Zola, who killed pain with work. So all day to-day I have endeavoured
+to act as if I had no pain--the worst of all pains--toothache. By the
+time I got home I was rather done up, but the pain was actually less.
+This gave me a furious joy, and, after days of morose silence, to-night
+at supper I made them all laugh by bursting out violently with, "I don't
+know whether you know it but I've had a horrible day to-day." I
+explained at length and received the healing ointment of much sympathy.
+Went to bed happy with tooth still aching. I fear it was scarcely
+playing the strict Zolaesque game to divulge the story of my
+sufferings.... No, I am not a martyr or a saint. Just an ordinary devil
+who's having a rough time.
+
+_August_ 17.
+
+_Prawning_
+
+Had a glorious time on the rocks at low tide prawning. Caught some
+Five-Bearded Rocklings and a large _Cottus bubalis_. The sun did not
+simply shine to-day--it came rushing down from the sky in a cataract and
+flooded the sands with light. Sitting on a rock, with prawning net over
+my knees I looked along three miles of flat hard and yellow sands. The
+sun poured down on them so heavily that it seemed to raise a luminous
+golden yellow dust for about three feet high.
+
+On the rocks was a pretty flapper in a pink sunbonnet--also prawning in
+company of S----, the artist, who has sent her picture to the Royal
+Academy. They saw I was a naturalist, so my services were secured to
+pronounce my judgment on a "fish" she had caught. It was a Squid, "an
+odd little beast," in truth, as she said. "The same class of animal," I
+volunteered, "as the Cuttlefish and Octopus."
+
+"Does it sting?"
+
+"Oh, no!"
+
+"Well, it ought to with a face like that." She laughed merrily, and the
+bearded but youthful artist laughed too.
+
+"I don't know anything about these things," he said hopelessly.
+
+"Nor I," said the naturalist modestly. "I study fish."
+
+This was puzzling. "Fish?" What was a Squid then?
+
+... The artist would stop now and then and raise his glasses at a
+passing ship, and Maud's face occasionally disappeared in the pink
+sunbonnet as she stooped over a pool to examine a seaweed or crab.
+
+She's a dear--and she gave me the Squid. What a merry little cuss!
+
+_September_ 1.
+
+Went with Uncle to see a Wesleyan minister whose fame as a microscopist,
+according to Uncle, made it worth my while to visit him. As I expected,
+he was just a silly old man, a diatomaniac fond of pretty-pretty slides
+and not a scientific man at all. He lectures Bands of Hope on the
+Butterfly's Life History and hates his next-door neighbour, who is also
+a microscopist and incidentally a scientific man, because he interests
+himself in "parasites and those beastly things."
+
+I remarked that his friend next door had shown me an Amphioxus.
+
+"Oh! I expect that's some beastly bacteria thing," he said petulantly.
+"I can't understand Wilkinson. He's a pervert."
+
+I told him what _Amphioxus_ was and laughed up my sleeve. He likes to
+think of Zoology as a series of pretty pictures illustrating beautiful
+moral truths. The old fellow's saving grace was enthusiasm.... Having
+focused an object for us, he would stand by, breathless, while we
+squinted down his gas-tube, and gave vent to tremendous expletives of
+surprise such as "Heavens," or "Jupiter." His eyes would twinkle with
+delight and straightway another miracle is selected for us to view.
+"They are all miracles," he said.
+
+"Those are the valves"--washing his hands with invisible soap--"no one
+has yet been able to solve the problem of the Diatom's valves. No one
+knows what they are--no, nor ever will know--why?--why can't we see
+behind the valves?--because God is behind the valves--that is why!"
+Amen.
+
+_October_ 1.
+
+Telegraphed 1,000 words of Lord ----'s speech at T----.
+
+Spent the night at a comfortable country inn and read Moore's lyrics.
+"Row gently here, my Gondolier," ran through my head continuously. The
+Inn is an old one with a long narrow passage that leads straight from
+front door to back with wainscoted smoke room and parlours on each side.
+China dogs, bran on the floor, and the picture of Derby Day with horses
+galloping incredibly, the drone of an old crony in the bar, and a
+pleasant barmy smell. Slept in a remarkable bedroom full of massive
+furniture, draped with cloth and covered with trinkets. The bed had a
+tremendous hood over it like a catafalque, and lying in it made me think
+I was an effigy. Read Moore till the small hours and then found I had
+left my handbag downstairs. Lit a candle and went on a voyage of
+discovery. Made a considerable noise, but roused no one. Entered
+drawing-room, kitchen, pantries, parlour, bar--everywhere looking for my
+bag and dropping candle grease everywhere! Slept in my day shirt. Tired
+out and slept like a top.
+
+_November_ 3.
+
+_Aristotle's Lantern_
+
+Dissected the Sea Urchin (_Echinus esculentus_). Very excited over my
+first view of Aristotle's Lantern. These complicated pieces of animal
+mechanism never smell of musty age--after æons of evolution. When I open
+a Sea Urchin and see the Lantern, or dissect a Lamprey and cast eyes on
+the branchial basket, such structures strike me as being as finished and
+exquisite as if they had just a moment before been tossed me fresh from
+the hands of the Creator. They are fresh, young, they smell _new_.
+
+_December_ 3.
+
+Hard at work dissecting a Dogfish. Ruridecanal Conference in the
+afternoon. I enjoy this double life I lead. It amazes me to be laying
+bare the brain of a dogfish in the morning and in the afternoon to be
+taking down in shorthand what the Bishop says on Mission Work.
+
+_December_4.
+
+Went to the Veterinary Surgeon and begged of him the skull of a horse.
+Carried the trophy home under my arm--bare to the public view. "Why,
+Lor', 'tis an ole 'orse's jib," M---- said when I got back.
+
+
+[1] There are numerous drawings of dissections scattered through the
+Journal about this period.
+
+
+
+
+1909
+
+
+_March_ 7.
+
+My programme of work is: (1) Continue German. (2) Sectioning embryo of
+(_a_) Fowl, (_b_) Newt. (3) Paper on Arterial System of Newts. (4)
+Psychology of Newts. (5) General Zoological Reading.
+
+_May_ 2.
+
+To C---- Hill. Too much taken with the beauty of the Woods to be able to
+do any nesting. Here are some of the things I saw: the bark on several
+of the trees in the mazzard orchards rubbed into a beautifully smooth,
+polished surface by the Red Devon Cows when scratching where it itched;
+I put my hand on the smooth almost cherry-red patch of bark and felt
+delighted and grateful that cows had fleas: the young shoots of the
+whortle-berry plants on the hill were red tipped with the gold of an
+almost horizontal sun. I caught a little lizard which slipped across my
+path.... Afar off down in the valley I had come through, in a convenient
+break in a holly bush, I could just see a Cow sitting on her matronly
+haunches in a field. She flicked her ears and two starlings settled on
+her back. A Rabbit swept out of a sweet-brier bush, and a Magpie flew
+out of the hedge on my right.
+
+In another direction I could see a field full of luscious, tall, green
+grass. Every stalk was so full of sap that had I cut one I am sure it
+would have bled great green drops. In the field some lambs were
+sleeping; one woke up and looked at me with the back of its head to the
+low sun, which shone through its two small ears and gave them a
+transparent pink appearance.
+
+No sooner am I rebaptized in the sun than I have to be turning home
+again. No sooner do "the sudden lilies push between the loosening fibres
+of the heart" than I am whisked back into the old groove--the daily
+round. If only I had more time!--more time in which to think, to love,
+to observe, to frame my disposition, to direct as far as in me lies the
+development and unfolding of my character, if only I could direct all my
+energies to the great and difficult profession of life, of being man
+instead of trifling with one profession that bores me and dabbling in
+another.
+
+_June_ 5.
+
+_On Lundy Island_
+
+Frankie is blowing Seagulls' eggs in the scullery. His father, after a
+day's work at the farm, is at his supper very hungry, yet immensely
+interested, and calls out occasionally,--
+
+"'Ow you're getting on, Foreman?"
+
+"All right, Capt.," says Frankie affectionately, and the unpleasant
+asthmatic, wheezy noise of the egg-blowing goes on.... There are three
+dogs asleep under the kitchen table; all three belong to different
+owners and neither one to A----.
+
+_June_ 6.
+
+Our egg-collecting with the Lighthouse Keepers. They walk about the
+cliffs as surefooted as cats, and feed their dogs on birds' eggs
+collected in a little bag at the end of a long pole. One dog ate three
+right off in as many minutes, putting his teeth through and cracking the
+shell, then lapping up the contents. Crab for tea.
+
+_June_ 7.
+
+After a glorious day at the N. end of the Island with the Puffins, was
+forced to-night to take another walk, as the smell of Albert's tobacco,
+together with that of his stockinged feet and his boots removed, was
+asphyxiating.
+
+_June_ 9.
+
+The governess is an awfully pretty girl. We have been talking together
+to-day and she asked me if I were a naturalist. I said "Yes." She said,
+"Well, I found a funny little beetle yesterday and Mr. S---- said I
+ought to have given it to you." Later, I felt she was looking at me, so
+I looked at her, across the beach. Yes! it was true. When our eyes met
+she gave me one of the most provokingly pretty smiles, then turned and
+went up the cliff path and so out of my life--to my everlasting regret.
+
+Return to-night in a cattle steamer.
+
+_June_ 18.
+
+Dr.----, M.A., F.R.S., D.C.L., LL.D., called in the office to-day, and
+seeing Dad typing, said, "Are you Mr. Barbellion?" Dad replied in the
+affirmative, whereupon the Doctor handed him his card, and Dad said he
+thought it was his son he wanted to see. He is an old gentleman aged
+eighty or thereabouts, with elastic-sided boots, an umbrella, and a
+guardian nephew--a youngster of about sixty. But I paid him due
+reverence as a celebrated zoologist and at his invitation [and to my
+infinite pride] accompanied him on an excursion to the coast, where he
+wanted to see _Philoscia Couchii_, which I readily turned up for him.
+
+I chanced to remark that I thought torsion in gastropods one of the most
+fascinating and difficult problems in Zoology. Why should a snail be
+twisted round?
+
+"Humph," said he, "why do we stand upright?" I was not such a fool as to
+argue with him, so pretended his reply was a knock-out. But it enabled
+me to size him up intellectually.
+
+In the evening dined with him at his hotel.... He knows Wallace and
+Haeckel personally, and I sat at his feet with my tongue out listening
+to personal reminiscences of these great men. However, he seemed never
+to have heard of Gaskell's Theory on the Origin of Vertebrates.
+
+_June_ 27.
+
+Walked to V----. As usual, Nature with clockwork regularity had all her
+taps turned on--larks singing, cherries ripening, and bees humming. It
+all bored me a little. Why doesn't she vary it a little?
+
+_August_ 8.
+
+A cold note from Dr. ---- saying that he cannot undertake the
+responsibility of advising me to give up journalism for zoology.
+
+A hellish cold in the head. Also a swingeing inflammation of the eyes.
+Just heard them singing in the Chapel over the way: "God shall wipe away
+all tears from their eyes." Hope so, I'm sure.
+
+_August_ 9.
+
+A transformation. After a long series of drab experiences in Sheffield,
+etc., the last being the climax of yesterday, an anti-cyclone arrived
+this morning and I sailed like an Eagle into cloudless, windless
+weather! _The Academy_ has published my article, my cold is suddenly
+better, and going down by the sea this afternoon met Mary ----!
+
+_August_ 20.
+
+Had an amusing letter from my maiden-aunt F----, who does not like "the
+agnostic atmosphere" in my _Academy_ article. Poor dear! She is sorry if
+I really feel like that, and, if I do, what a pity to put it into print.
+Then a Bible reference to the Epistle to the Romans.
+
+_Xmas Day_.
+
+Feeling ill--like a sloppy Tadpole. My will is paralysed. I visit the
+Doctor regularly to be stethoscoped, ramble about the streets, idly scan
+magazines in the Library and occasionally rink--with palpitation of the
+heart as a consequence. In view of the shortness, bitterness, and
+uncertainty of life, all scientific labour for me seems futile.
+
+
+
+
+1910
+
+
+_January_ 10.
+
+Better, but still very dicky: a pallid animal: a weevil in a nut. I have
+a weak heart, an enervated nervous system; I suffer from lack of funds
+with which to carry on my studies; I hate
+newspaper-reporting--particularly some skinny-witted speaker like ----;
+and last, but not least, there are women; all these worries fight over
+my body like jackals over carrion. Yet Zoology is all I want. Why won't
+Life leave me alone?
+
+_January_ 15.
+
+Reading Hardy's novels. He is altogether delightful in the subtlety with
+which he lets you perceive the first tiny love presentiments between his
+heroes and heroines--the casual touch of the hands, the peep of a foot
+or ankle underneath the skirt--all these in Hardy signify the cloud no
+bigger than a man's hand. They are the susurrus of the breeze before the
+storm, and you await what is to follow with palpitating heart.
+
+_February_ 3.
+
+For days past have been living in a state of mental ebullition. All
+kinds of pictures of Love, Life, and Death have been passing through my
+mind. Now I am too indolent and nerveless to set them down. Physically I
+am such a wreck that to carry out the least intention, such as putting
+on my boots, I have to flog my will like an Arab with a slave "in a sand
+of Ayaman." Three months ago when I got up before breakfast to dissect
+rabbits, dogfish, frogs, newts, etc., this would have seemed impossible.
+
+_February_ 6.
+
+Still visit Dr. ----'s surgery each week. I have two dull spots at the
+bottom of each lung. What a fine expressive word is _gloom_. Let me
+write it: GLOOM....
+
+One evening coming home in the train from L---- County Sessions I
+noticed a horrible, wheezy sound whenever I breathed deep. I was scared
+out of my life, and at once thought of consumption. Went to the Doctor's
+next day, and he sounded me and reassured me. I was afraid to tell him
+of the little wheezy sound at the apex of each lung, and I believed he
+overlooked it. So next day, very harassed, I went back to him again and
+told him. He _hadn't_ noticed it and looked glum. Have to keep out of
+doors as much as possible.
+
+The intense internal life I lead, worrying about my health, reading
+(eternally reading), reflecting, observing, feeling, loving and
+hating--with no outlet for superfluous steam, cramped and confined on
+every side, without any friends or influence of any sort, without even
+any acquaintances excepting my colleagues in journalism (whom I
+contemn)--all this will turn me into the most self-conscious, conceited,
+mawkish, gauche creature in existence.
+
+_March_ 6.
+
+The facts are undeniable: Life is pain. No sophistry can win me over to
+any other view. And yet years ago I set out so hopefully and
+healthfully--what are birds' eggs to me _now_? My ambition is enormous
+but vague. I am too distributed in my abilities ever to achieve
+distinction.
+
+_March_ 22.
+
+Had a letter from the Keeper of Zoology at the British Museum, advising
+me of three vacancies in his Dept., and asking me if I would like to
+try, etc.... So that Dr. ----'s visit to me bore some fruit.[1] Spent
+the morning day-dreaming.... Perhaps this is the flood tide at last! I
+shall work like a drayhorse to pull through if I am nominated.... I
+await developments in a frightfully turbulent state of mind. I have a
+frantic desire to control the factors which are going to affect my
+future so permanently. And this ferocious desire, of course, collides
+with a crash all day long with the fact that however much I desire there
+will still remain the unalterable logic of events.
+
+_April_ 7.
+
+... How delicious all this seemed! To be alive--thinking, seeing,
+enjoying, walking, eating--all quite apart from the amount of money in
+your purse or the prospects of a career. I revelled in the sensuous
+enjoyment of my animal existence.
+
+_June_ 2.
+
+Up to now my life has been one of great internal strife and
+struggle--the struggle with a great ambition and a weak will--unequal to
+the task of coping with it. I have planned on too big a scale, perhaps.
+I have put too great a strain on my talents, I have whipped a flagging
+will, I have been for ever cogitating, worrying, devising means of
+escape. Meanwhile, the moments have gone by unheeded and unenjoyed.
+
+_June_ 10.
+
+Legginess is bad enough in a woman, but bandy legginess is impossible.
+
+Solitude is good for the soul. After an hour of it, I feel as lofty and
+imperial as Marcus Aurelius.
+
+The best girl in the best dress immediately looks disreputable if her
+stockings be downgyved.
+
+Some old people on reaching a certain age go on living out of habit--a
+bad habit too.
+
+How much I can learn of a stranger by his laugh.
+
+Bees, Poppies, and Swallows!--and all they mean to him who really knows
+them! Or a White Gull on a piece of floating timber, or a troop of shiny
+Rooks close on the heels of a ploughman on a sunny autumn day.
+
+_June_ 30.
+
+My egoism appals me. Likewise the extreme intensification of the
+consciousness of myself. Whenever I walk down the High Street on a
+market day, my self-consciousness magnifies my proportions to the size
+of a Gulliver--so that it is grievous to reflect that in spite of that
+the townsfolk see me only as an insignificant bourgeois youth who
+reports meetings in shorthand.
+
+_July_ 17.
+
+We sang to-night in Church, "But when I know Thee as Thou art, I'll
+praise Thee as I ought." Exactly! Till then, farewell. We are a great
+little people, we humans. If there be no next world, still the Spirit of
+Man will have lived and uttered its protest.
+
+_July_ 22.
+
+_Our Simian Ancestry_
+
+How I hate the man who talks about the "brute creation," with an ugly
+emphasis on _brute_. Only Christians are capable of it. As for me, I am
+proud of my close kinship with other animals. I take a jealous pride in
+my Simian ancestry. I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy
+fellow living in the trees and that my frame has come down through
+geological time _via_ sea jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish,
+Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in
+the Garden of Eden?
+
+_August_ 9.
+
+I do not ever like going to bed. For me each day ends in a little
+sorrow. I hate the time when it comes to put my books away, to knock out
+my pipe and say "Good-night," exchanging the vivid pleasures of the day
+for the darkness of sleep and oblivion.
+
+_August_ 23.
+
+Spent the afternoon and evening till ten in the woods with Mary ----.
+Had tea in the Haunted House, and after sat in the Green Arbor until
+dark, when I kissed her. "Achilles was not the worse warrior for his
+probation in petticoats."
+
+_September_ 1.
+
+I hope to goodness she doesn't think I want to marry her. In the Park in
+the dark, kissing her. I was testing and experimenting with a new
+experience.
+
+_September_ 4.
+
+Last evening, after much mellifluous cajolery, induced her to _kiss me_.
+My private opinion about this whole affair is that all the time I have
+been at least twenty degrees below real love heat. In any case I am
+constitutionally and emotionally unfaithful. I said things which I did
+not believe just because it was dark and she was charming.
+
+_September_ 5.
+
+Read Thomas à Kempis in the train. It made me so angry I nearly flung it
+out of the window. "Meddle not with things that be too deep for thee,"
+he says, "but read such things as yield compunction to the heart rather
+than elevation to the head." Forsooth! Can't you see me?
+
+_September_ 15.
+
+A puzzling afternoon: weather perfect, the earth green and humming like
+a top, yet a web of dream overlaid the great hill, and at certain
+moments, which recurred in a kind of pulsation, accompanied by
+subjective feelings of vague strife and effort, I easily succeeded in
+letting all I saw--the field and the blackberry bush, the whole valley
+and the apple orchards--change into something unreal, flimsy, gauzelike,
+immaterial, and totally unexperienced. Suddenly when the impression was
+most vivid, the whole of this mysterious tapestry would vanish away and
+I was back where 2 and 2 make 4. Oh! Earth! how jealously you guard your
+secrets!
+
+_October_ 4.
+
+Sat at the Civil Service Commission in Burlington House for the exam,
+for the vacancy in the B.M. No luck at all with the papers. The whole of
+my nine months' assiduous preparation helped me in only two questions.
+In fine, I have not succeeded, I shall not obtain the appointment, and
+in a few weeks I shall be back in the wilds of
+
+N---- again under the old regime, reporting platitudes from greasy
+guardians of the poor, and receiving condolences from people not
+altogether displeased at some one else's misfortune.
+
+_October_ 14.
+
+Returned home from London. Felt horribly defeated in crossing the
+threshold. It was so obviously _returning_ after an unsuccessful flight.
+
+_October_ 22.
+
+Dissected a _Squilla_ for which I paid 2s. 6d. to the Plymouth Marine
+Laboratory.
+
+_October_ 23.
+
+_Ambition_
+
+Am attempting to feel after some practical philosophy of
+living--something that will enable me to accept disappointment with
+equanimity and Town Council meetings with a broad and tolerant smile. At
+present, ambition consumes me. I was ambitious before I was breeched. I
+can remember wondering as a child if I were a young Macaulay or Ruskin
+and secretly deciding that I was. My infant mind even was bitter with
+those who insisted on regarding me as a normal child and not as a
+prodigy. Since then I have struggled with this canker for many a day,
+and as success fails to arrive it becomes more gnawing.
+
+_October_ 24.
+
+In the morning a Town Council and in the afternoon a Rural Council. With
+this abominable trash in my notebook waiting to be written up and turned
+into "copy," and with the dream pictures of a quiet studious life in
+Cromwell Road not yet faded from my mind, where can I turn for
+consolation? That I have done my best? That's only a mother's saying to
+her child.
+
+Perhaps after all it is a narrow life--this diving and delving among
+charming little secrets, plying diligently scalpel and microscope and
+then weaving the facts obtained into theoretic finespun. It is all
+vastly entertaining to the naturalist but it leaves the world unmoved. I
+sometimes envy the zealot with a definite mission in life. Life without
+one seems void. The monotonous pursuit of our daily vocations--the
+soldier, sailor, candlestick-maker--so they go on, never living but only
+working, never thinking but only hypnotising themselves by the routine
+and punctuality of their lives into just so many mechanical toys
+warranted to go for so long and then stop when Death takes them.... It
+amazes me that men must spend their precious days of existence for the
+most part in slaving for food and clothing and the bare necessaries of
+existence.
+
+To sum up my despondency, what's the good of such a life? Where does it
+lead? Where am I going? Why should I work? What means this procession of
+nights and days wherein we are all seen moving along intent and stern as
+if we had some purpose or a goal?... Of course to the man who believes
+in the next world and a personal God, it is quite another matter. The
+Christian is the Egoist _par excellence_. He does not mind annihilation
+by arduous labour in this world if in the next he shall have won eternal
+life.... He is reckless of to-day, extravagant in the expenditure of his
+life. This intolerable fellow will be cheerful in a dungeon. For he
+flatters himself that God Almighty up in Heaven is all the time watching
+through the keyhole and marking him down for eternal life.
+
+_October_ 26.
+
+The nose-snuffling, cynical man who studies La Rochefoucauld, and prides
+himself on a knowledge of human motives, is pleased to point out that
+every action and every motive is selfish, from the philanthropist who
+advertises himself by his charities to the fanatic who lays down his
+life for a cause. Even secret charities, for they give pleasure to the
+doer. So your cynic thinks he has thus, with one stroke of his
+psychological scalpel, laid human nature bare in all its depravities.
+All he has done really is to reclassify motives--instead of grouping
+them as selfish and unselfish (which is more convenient) he lumps them
+together as selfish, a method by which even he is forced to recognise
+different grades of selfishness. For example, the selfishness of a
+wife-beater is lower than the selfishness of a man who gives up his life
+for another.
+
+_October_ 28.
+
+The result arrived. As I thought, I have failed, being fourth with only
+three vacancies.
+
+_November_ 7.
+
+It is useless to bewail the course of fortune. It cannot be much credit
+to possess--though we may covet--those precious things, to possess which
+depends on circumstances outside our control.
+
+_November_ 9.
+
+Dined at the Devonshire Club in St. James's Street, W., with Dr.
+H----and Mr. ----, the latter showing the grave symptomatic phenomena of
+a monocle and spats. A dinner of eight courses. Only made one mistake
+--put my salad on my dish instead of on the side dish. Horribly nervous
+and reticent. I was apparently expected to give an account of myself and
+my abilities--and with that end in view, they gave me a few pokes in my
+cranial ribs. But I am a peculiar animal, and, before unbosoming myself,
+I would require a happier _mise-en-scène_ than a West End Club, and a
+more tactful method of approach than ogling by two professors, who
+seemed to think I was a simple penny-in-the-slot machine. I froze from
+sheer nervousness and nothing resulted.
+
+_November_ 11.
+
+Returned home and found a letter awaiting me from Dr. A---- offering me
+£60 a year for a temporary job as assistant at the Plymouth Marine
+Laboratory.
+
+Left London horribly depressed. They evidently intend to shuffle me off.
+
+Read Geo. Gissing's novel, _Born in Exile_. Godwin Peak, with his
+intense pride of individuality, self-torturing capacities, and
+sentimental languishment, reminds me of myself.
+
+_November_ 20.
+
+A purulent cold in the nose. My heart is weak. Palpitation after the
+least exertion. But I shall soon be swinging my cudgels in the battle of
+life, so it won't do to be hypochondriacal.... Let all the powers of the
+world and the Devil attack me, yet I will win in the end--though the
+conquest may very well be one which no one but myself will view.
+
+Have accepted the Plymouth appointment.
+
+_November_ 30.
+
+Struggling in the depths again within the past few days with heart
+attacks. Am slowly getting better of them and trying to forget as soon
+as may be visions of sudden death, coffins, and obituary notices.
+
+_December_ 2.
+
+_Death_
+
+At first, when we are very young, Death arouses our curiosity, as it did
+Cain in the beginning.[2] It is a strange and very rare phenomenon which
+we cannot comprehend, and every time we hear of some one's death, we try
+to recall that person's appearance in life and are disappointed if we
+can't. The endeavour is to discover what it is, this Death, to compare
+two things, the idea of the person alive and the idea of him dead. At
+last some one we know well dies--and that is the first shock.... I shall
+never forget when our Matron died at the D---- School.... As the years
+roll on, we get used to the man with the scythe and an acquaintance's
+death is only a bit of gossip.
+
+Suppose the Hellfire of the orthodox really existed! We have no
+assurance that it does not! It seems incredible, but many incredible
+things are true. We do not _know_ that God is not as cruel as a Spanish
+inquisitor. Suppose, then, He is! If, after Death, we wicked ones were
+shovelled into a furnace of fire--we should have to burn. There would be
+no redress. It would simply be the Divine Order of things. It is
+outrageous that we should be so helpless and so dependent on any
+one--even God.
+
+_December_ 9.
+
+Sometimes I think I am going mad. I live for days in the mystery and
+tears of things so that the commonest object, the most familiar
+face--even my own--become ghostly, unreal, enigmatic. I get into an
+attitude of almost total scepticism, nescience, solipsism even, in a
+world of dumb, sphinx-like things that cannot explain themselves. The
+discovery of how I am situated--a sentient being on a globe in space
+overshadows me. I wish I were just nothing.
+
+_Later_: While at a public meeting, the office-boy approached me and
+immediately whispered without hesitation,--
+
+"Just had a telephone message to say that your father is at the
+T----Railway Station, lying senseless. He has evidently had an
+apoplectic fit."
+
+(How those brutal words, "lying senseless," banged and bullied and
+knocked me down. Mother was waiting for me at the door in a dreadful
+state and expecting the worst.)
+
+Met the train with the Doctor, and took him home in the cab--still
+alive, thank God, but helpless. He was brave enough to smile and shake
+me by the hand--with his left, though he was speechless and the right
+side of his body helpless. A porter discovered him at the railway
+terminus lying on the floor of a second-class carriage.
+
+_December_ 10.
+
+He is a trifle better. It is fifteen years since he had the first
+paralytic stroke.
+
+Am taking over all his work and have written at once resigning the
+Plymouth appointment.
+
+_December_ 23.
+
+It really did require an effort to go upstairs to-day to his bedroom and
+say cheerfully I was not going to P. after all, and that the matter was
+of no consequence to me. I laughed gaily and Dad was relieved. A
+thundering good joke. What annoys me is that other folk--the brainless,
+heartless mob, as Schopenhauer remarks, still continue to regard me as
+one of themselves.... I had nearly escaped into a seaside laboratory,
+and now suddenly to be flung back into the dirt and sweat of the
+newspaper world seems very hard, and it _is_ very hard.
+
+_December_ 26.
+
+_Windy Ash_
+
+With the dog for a walk around Windy Ash. It was a beautiful winter's
+morning--a low sun giving out a pale light but no warmth--a luminant,
+not a fire--the hedgerows bare and well trimmed, an Elm lopped close
+showing white stumps which glistened liquidly in the sun, a Curlew
+whistling overhead, a deeply cut lane washed hard and clean by the
+winter rains, a gunshot from a distant cover, a creeping Wren, silent
+and tame, in a bramble bush, and over the five-barred gate the granite
+roller with vacant shafts. I leaned on the gate and saw the great whisps
+of cloud in the sky like comets' tails. Everything cold, crystalline.
+
+
+[1] He had spoken about me to the Museum authorities, and it was his
+influence which got me the nomination to sit for the examination.
+
+[2] In Byron's poem.
+
+1911
+
+
+_January_ 2.
+
+As a young man--a _very_ young man--my purpose was to plough up all
+obstacles, brook no delays, and without let or hindrance win through to
+an almost immediate success! But witness 1910! "My career" so far has
+been like the White Knight's, who fell off behind when the horse
+started, in front when it stopped, and sideways occasionally to vary the
+monotony.
+
+_January_ 30.
+
+Feeling ill and suffering from attacks of faintness. My ill health has
+produced a change in my attitude towards work. As soon as I begin to
+feel the least bit down, I am bound to stop at once as the idea of
+bending over a desk or a dissecting dish, of reading or studying,
+nauseates me when I think that perhaps to-morrow or next day or next
+week, next month, next year I may be dead. What a waste of life it seems
+to work! Zoology is repugnant and philosophy superfluous beside the
+bliss of sheer living--out in the cold polar air or indoors in a chair
+before a roaring fire with hands clasped, watching the bustling,
+soothing activity of the flames.
+
+Then, as soon as I am well again, I forget all this, grow discontented
+with doing nothing and work like a Tiger.
+
+_February_ 11.
+
+Walked in the country. Coming home, terrified by a really violent attack
+of palpitation. Almost every one I met I thought would be the
+unfortunate person who would have to pick me up. As each one in the
+street approached me, I weighed him in the balance and considered if he
+had presence of mind and how he would render first aid. After my friend,
+P.C. ----, had passed, I felt sorry that the tragedy had not already
+happened, for he knows me and where I live. At length, after sundry
+leanings over the river wall, arrived at the Library, which I entered,
+and sat down, when the full force of the palpitation was immediately
+felt. My face burned with the hot blood, my hand holding the paper shook
+with the angry pulse, and my heart went bang! bang! bang! and I could
+feel its beat in the carotids of the neck and up along the Torcular
+herophili and big vessels in the occipital region of the head. Drew in
+each breath very gently for fear of aggravating the fiend. Got home
+(don't know how) and had some sal volatile. Am better now but very
+demoralised.
+
+_February_ 13.
+
+Feel like a piece of drawn threadwork, or an undeveloped negative, or a
+jelly fish on stilts, or a sloppy tadpole, or a weevil in a nut, or a
+spitchcocked eel. In other words and in short--ill.
+
+_February_ 16.
+
+After some days with the vision of sudden death constantly before me,
+have come to the conclusion that it's a long way to go to die. Am coming
+back anyhow. Yet these are a few terrible pages in my history.
+
+_March_ 4.
+
+... The Doctor's orders "Cease Work" have brought on in an aggravated
+form my infatuation for zoological research. I lie in bed and
+manufacture rolling periods in praise of it, I get dithyrambic over the
+zoologists themselves--Huxley, Wallace, Brooks, Lankester. I chortle to
+reflect that in zoology there are no stock exchange ambitions, there is
+no mention of slum life, Tariff Reform is not included. In the repose of
+the spacious laboratory by the seaside or in the halls of some great
+Museum, life with its vulgar struggles, its hustle and obscenity,
+scarcely penetrates. Behind those doors, life flows slowly, deeply. I am
+ascetic and long for the monastic seclusion of a student's life.
+
+_March_ 5.
+
+_From One Maiden Lady to Another_. (_Authentic_)
+
+"My dear Sister,--You have been expecting to hear from me I know, I have
+had inflammation to my eyes twice in 3 weeks so I thought I had better
+let the Doctor see and he says it is catarrh of the eyes and windpipe. I
+am inhaling and taking lozenges and medicine. You will be sorry to learn
+Leonora Mims has been taken to a Sanatorium with Diptheria, we heard
+yesterday, she is better, poor Mrs. Mims herself quite an invalid, she
+has to walk with a stick, I believe you know she has had to have her
+breast cut off, they keep a servant as she can't do anything, old Mrs.
+Point is 87 I think it is so they too have a lot of trouble, Fred Mims
+has just got married....
+
+"Poor old Mrs. Seemsoe is just the same, she doesn't know anybody but
+she talks, the nurse put a grape in her mouth but she didn't know what
+to do with it, I think it is very sad. She was taken about a fortnight
+before Easter. Will you tell me dear if this is right receipt for
+clothes 1/2 oz. carbolic in 1/2 pint of rose water. Harry Gammon's 2
+little children have measles, poor Maisie has gone with her Aunt Susan,
+poor old Joe Gammon they say had very little to leave, we don't know
+where Robert gets his money from. I dare say you saw that Tom Sagg has
+married another of Ned Smith's daughters and we hear these Smith girls
+are rare housekeepers and this girl that has married Tom Sagg has made
+all her own linen. Mrs. Wilkins, the butcher's wife is going to have a
+little one after 15 years, our Vicar has been laid up with an abscess,
+he told us about his brother the other day, he says as brothers they
+love each other very much. We have 3 very sad cases of men ill in the
+village. We had 4 but one man died of cancer.
+
+"Yr loving Sister Amy."
+
+Voilà!
+
+_March_ 7.
+
+If I die I should like to be buried in the cherry orchards at V----.
+
+How the beastly mob loves a tragedy! The sudden death of the Bank
+Manager is simply thrilling the town, and the newspapers sell like hot
+cakes. Scarcely before the body is cold the coincidence of his death on
+the anniversary of his birth is discussed in every household; every one
+tells everybody else where they saw him last "he looked all right then."
+The policeman and the housemaid, the Mayor and the Town Clerk, the
+cabman and the billposter, stand and discuss the deceased gentleman's
+last words or what the widow's left with. "Ah! well, it is very sad,"
+they remark to one another with no emotion and continue on their way.
+
+_March_ 10.
+
+On coming downstairs in the evening played Ludo with H----. At one stage
+I laughed so much in conjunction with that harlequin H---- that I got
+cramp in the abdominal muscles and the tears trickled down my face.
+
+_March_ 13.
+
+H---- and I play Ludo incessantly. We've developed the gambling fever,
+and our pent-up excitement every now and then explodes in fiendish
+cackles, and Mother looks up over her spectacles and says, "William,
+William, they'll hear in the street presently."
+
+_A Character_
+
+For this world's unfortunates, his is the ripe sympathy of a
+well-developed nature, standing in strong contrast with the rest of his
+personality, which is wholly self-centred, a little ungenerous, and what
+strong men of impeccable character call "weak." If you are ill he is
+delightful, if you are robust or successful he can be very
+objectionable. To an influenza victim he goes out of his way to carry a
+book, but if you tell him with gusto you have passed your exam, he says,
+"Oh, but there's not much behind it, is there?" "Oh! no," I answer,
+comforting him, "it is really a misfortune to be a success." And so only
+the bankrupts, dipsos (as he calls them), ne'er-do-weels, and sudden
+deaths ever touch his heart or tap his sympathy. He is a short, queery,
+dressy little fellow, always spruce and clean. His joy consists in a
+glass of beer, a full stomach, a good cigar, or a pretty girl to flirt
+with. He frequents drinking saloons and billiard rooms, goes to dances
+and likes to be thought a lady's man. "Urn," he will say, with the air
+of a connoisseur, "a little too broad in the beam," as some attractive
+damsel walks down the street. Any day about twelve you can see both of
+us, "the long and the short of it" (he is only half my height and I call
+him .5), walking together in the Park, and engaged in the most heated
+discussion over some entirely trivial matter, such as whether he would
+marry a woman with sore eyes, etc., etc. More than once we have caught
+cabmen idle on the cab-rank or policemen on point duty jerking their
+thumbs backward at us and expressing some facetious remarks which we
+longed to overhear. I usually walk in the gutter to bring my height down
+a bit.
+
+A good raconteur himself, he does not willingly suffer a story from
+another. The varmint on occasion finishes your joke off for you, which
+is his delicate way of intimating that he has heard it before. He is a
+first-class mimic, and sends every one into a thousand fits while he
+gives you in succession the Mayor and all the Corporation He also
+delights me at times by mimicking me. His mind is receptive rather than
+creative: it picks up all sorts of gaudy ideas by the wayside like a
+magpie, and I sometimes enjoy the exquisite sensation of hearing some of
+these petty pilferings (which he has filched from me) laid at my feet as
+if they were his own. The ideas which are his own are always
+unmistakable.
+
+His favourite poems are Omar and the Ballad of Reading Jail, his
+favourite drinks Medoc or a Cherry Mixture. Me he describes as
+_serpentilous_ with _Gibbon-like arms,_ pinheaded, and so on. He amuses
+me. In fact I love him.
+
+_March_ 16.
+
+No one will ever understand without personal experience that an
+exceedingly self-conscious creature like myself driven in on himself to
+consume himself is the unhappiest of men. I have come to loathe myself:
+my finicking, hypersensitive, morbid nature, always thinking, talking,
+writing about myself for all the world as if the world beyond did not
+exist! I am rings within rings, circles concentric and intersecting, a
+maze, a tangle: watching myself behave or misbehave, always reflecting
+on what impression I am making on others or what they think of me.
+Introduce me to a stranger and I swell out as big as Alice.
+Self-consciousness makes me pneumatic, and consequently so awkward and
+clumsy and swollen that I don't know how to converse--and God help the
+other fellow.
+
+_Later_: Youth is an intoxication without wine, some one says. Life is
+an intoxication. The only sober man is the melancholiac, who,
+disenchanted, looks at life, sees it as it really is, and cuts his
+throat. If this be so, I want to be very drunk. The great thing is to
+live, to clutch at our existence and race away with it in some great
+and enthralling pursuit. Above all, I must beware of all ultimate
+questions--they are too maddeningly unanswerable--let me eschew
+philosophy and burn Omar.
+
+In this week's _T.P.'s Weekly_ a youth advertises:--"Young thinkers
+interested in philosophy, religion, social reform, the future of
+humanity, and all freethought, please communicate with 'Evolution,' aged
+21!" All right for 21.
+
+_Later_: I have in mind some work on the vascular system of larval
+newts. In the autumn I see a large piece of work to be done in animal
+psychology--namely, frequency of stimulus and its relation to habit
+formation. Yet the doctor advises long rest and the office work remains
+to be done. I must hack my way through somehow. I sit trying to
+disentangle these knots; then some one plays a dreamy waltz and all my
+fine edifices of the will vanish in mist. Is it worth while? Why not
+float with the tide? But I soon throw off these temptations. If I live,
+I shall play a fine game! I am determined. A lame-dog life is of no use.
+
+_April_ 17.
+
+_Railway Travel_
+
+A journey in a railway train makes me sentimental. If I enter the
+compartment a robust-minded, cheerful youth, fresh and whistling from a
+walk by the sea, yet, as soon as I am settled down in one corner and the
+train is rattling along past fields, woods, towns, and painted stations,
+I find myself indulging in a saccharine sadness--very toothsome and
+jolly. I pull a long face and gaze out of the window wistfully and look
+sad. But I am really happy--and incredibly sentimental.
+
+The effect is produced, I suppose, by the quickly changing panoramic
+view of the country, and as I see everything sliding swiftly by, and
+feel myself being hurtled forward willy-nilly, I am sub-conscious of the
+flight of Time, of the eternal flux, of the trajectory of my own
+life.... Timid folk, of course, want some Rock of Ages, something
+static. They want life a mill pond rather than the torrent which it is,
+a homely affair of teacups and tabby cats rather than a dangerous
+expedition.
+
+_April_ 22.
+
+Who will rid me of the body of this death? My body is chained to me--a
+dead weight. It is my warder. I can do nothing without first consulting
+it and seeking its permission. I jeer at its grotesqueness. I chafe at
+the thongs it binds on me. On this bully I am dependent for everything
+the world can give me. How can I preserve my _amour propre_ when I must
+needs be for ever wheedling and cajoling a despot with delicate meats
+and soft couches?--I who am proud, ambitious, and full of energy! In the
+end, too, I know it intends to carry me off.... I should like though to
+have the last kick and, copying De Quincey, arrange to hand it over for
+dissection to the medical men--out of revenge.
+
+"Hope thou not much; fear thou not at all"--my motto of late.
+
+_April_ 30.
+
+I can well imagine looking back on these entries later on and blushing
+at the pettiness of my soul herein revealed.... Only be charitable, kind
+reader. There are three Johns, and I am much mistaken if in these pages
+there will not be found something of the John known to himself, and an
+inkling, perhaps, of the man as he is known to his Creator. As a timid
+showman afraid that unless he emphasises the feature of his exhibit,
+they will be overlooked, let me, hat in hand, point out that I know I am
+an ass, that I am still hoping (in spite of ill health) that I am an
+enthusiast.
+
+_May_ 2.
+
+Maeterlinck's _Wisdom and Destiny_ is distilled Marcus Aurelius. I am
+rather tired of these comfortable philosophers. If a man be harassed by
+Fate with a red rag and a picador let him turn and rend him--or try to,
+anyway.
+
+_May_ 8.
+
+_Staying by the Sea_
+
+I have been living out of doors a lot lately and am getting sunburnt. It
+gives me infinite pleasure to be sunburnt--to appear the man of the open
+air, the open road, and the wild life. The sun intoxicates me to-day.
+The sea is not big enough to hold me nor the sky for me to breathe in. I
+feel I should like to be swaying with all the passions, throbbing with
+life and a vast activity of heart and sinew--to live magnificently--with
+an unquenchable thirst to drink to the lees, to plumb the depth of every
+joy and every sorrow, to see my life flash in the heat. Ah! Youth!
+Youth! Youth!!! In these moments of ecstasy my happiness is torrential.
+I have the soul of the poppy flaming in me then. I am rather like the
+poppy in many ways.... It is peculiarly appropriate. It must be my
+flower! I am the poppy!!
+
+_May_ 9.
+
+L---- was digging up the ground in his garden to-day and one shovelful
+came up thick and shapely. He laid the sod on its back gently without
+breaking it and said simply, "Doesn't it come up nice?" His face was
+radiant!--Real happiness lies in the little things, in a bit of garden
+work, in the rattle of the teacups in the next room, in the last chapter
+of a book.
+
+_May_ 14.
+
+Returned home. I hate living in this little town. If some one dies, he
+is sure to be some one you had a joke with the night before. A
+suicide--ten to one--implicates your bosom friend, or else the little
+man at the bookshop cut him down. There have been three deaths since I
+came home--I knew them all. It depresses me. The town seems a mortuary
+with all these dead bodies lying in it. Lucky for you, if you're a fat,
+rubicund, unimaginative physician.
+
+_May_ 16.
+
+Two more people dead--one a school friend. Sat on a seat on the river
+bank and read the _Journal of Animal Behaviour_. It made me long to be
+at work. I foamed at the mouth to be sitting there perforce in an
+overcoat on a seat doing nothing like a pet dove. A weak heart makes
+crossing a road an adventure and turns each day into a dangerous
+expedition.
+
+_May_ 18.
+
+A dirty ragamuffin on the river's bank held up a tin can to me with the
+softly persuasive words,--
+
+"'Ere, Mister, BAIT."
+
+"What are you going to do with it?"
+
+"Fish."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Salmon."
+
+We have all tried to catch salmon with a bent pin. No matter though if
+no salmon be caught. Richard Jefferies said, "If there be no immortality
+still we shall have had the glory of that thought."
+
+_May_ 19.
+
+_Old Diaries_
+
+Spent some happy time reading over old diaries. I was grieved and
+surprised to find how much I had forgotten. To forget the past so easily
+seems scarcely loyal to oneself. I am so selfishly absorbed in my
+present self that I have grown not to care a damn about that ever
+increasing collection of past selves--those dear, dead gentlemen who one
+after the other have tenanted the temple of this flesh and handed on the
+torch of my life and personal identity before creeping away silently and
+modestly to rest.
+
+_June_ 6.
+
+Brilliantly fine and warm. Unable to resist the sun, so I caught the ten
+train to S---- and walked across the meadow (buttercups,
+forget-me-nots, ragged robins) to the Dipper stream and the ivy bridge.
+Read ardently in Geology till twelve. Then took off my boots and socks,
+and waded underneath the right arch of the bridge in deep water, and
+eventually sat on a dry stone at the top of the masonry just where the
+water drops into the green salmon pool in a solid bar. Next I waded
+upstream to a big slab of rock tilted at a comfortable angle. I lay flat
+on this with my nether extremities in water up to my knees. The sun
+bathed my face and dragon flies chased up and down intent on murder. But
+I cared not a tinker's Demetrius about Nature red in tooth and claw. I
+was quite satisfied with Nature under a June sun in the cool atmosphere
+of a Dipper stream. I lay on the slab completely relaxed, and the cool
+water ran strongly between my toes. Surely I was never again going to be
+miserable. The voices of children playing in the wood made me extra
+happy. As a rule I loathe children. I am too much of a youth still. But
+not this morning. For these were fairy voices ringing through enchanted
+woods.
+
+_June_ 8.
+
+Brilliantly fine and warm. Went by train to C---- Woods. Took
+first-class return on account of the heat. Crossed the meadow and up the
+hill to the mill leat, where we bathed our feet and read. Ate a powerful
+lunch and made several unsuccessful grabs at Caddie flies. I want one to
+examine the mouth parts. After lunch we sat on the foot-bridge over the
+stream, and I rested on it flat in the face of the sun. The sun seemed
+to burn into my very bones, purging away everything that may be dark or
+threatening there. The physical sensation of the blood flow beneath the
+skin was good to feel, and the heat made every tissue glow with a
+radiant well-being. When I got up and opened my eyes all the colours of
+the landscape vanished under the silvery whiteness of the intense
+sunlight.
+
+We put on our boots and socks (our feet seemed to have swollen to a very
+large size) and wandered downstream to a little white house, a
+gamekeeper's cottage, where the old woman gave us cream and milk and
+home-made bread in her beautiful old kitchen with open hearth. China
+dogs, of course, and on the wall an old painting representing the person
+of a page boy (so she said) who was once employed up at the squire's. An
+unwholesome atmosphere of pigs pervaded the garden, but as this is not
+pretty I ought to leave it out....
+
+_June_ 14.
+
+Brilliantly fine. Went by the early train to S----. Walked to the ivy
+bridge and then waded upstream to the great slab of rock where I spread
+myself in the sun as before. The experiment was so delightful it is
+worth repeating a hundred times. In this position I read of the decline
+and fall of Trilobites, of the Stratigraphy of the Lias and so on.
+Geology is a very crushing science, yet I enjoyed my existence this
+morning with the other flies about that stream.
+
+_June_ 20.
+
+Sat at Liverpool University for the practical exam. Zoology, Board of
+Education.
+
+At the close the other students left but I went on working. Prof.
+Herdman asked me if I had finished. I said "No," so he gave me a little
+more time. Later he came up again, and again I said "No," but he replied
+that he was afraid I must stop. "What could you do further?" he asked,
+picking up a dish of plankton. I pointed out a _Sagitta_, an
+_Oikopleura_, and a _Noctiluca_, and he replied, "Of course I put in
+more than you were expected to identify in the time, so as to make a
+choice possible." Then he complimented me on my written papers which
+were sent in some weeks ago, and looking at my practical work he added,
+"And this, too, seems to be quite excellent."
+
+I thanked him from the bottom of a greedy and grateful heart, and he
+went on, "I see you describe yourself in your papers as a journalist,
+but can you tell me exactly what has been your career in Zoology?" I
+answered of course rather proudly that I had had _no_ career in Zoology.
+
+"But what school or college have you worked at?" he persisted.
+
+"None," I said a little doggedly. "What I know I have taught myself."
+
+"So you've had no training in Zoology at all?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Well, if you've taught yourself all you know, you've done remarkably
+well."
+
+He still seemed a little incredulous, and when I explained how I got a
+great many of my marine animals for dissection and study at the Plymouth
+Marine Laboratory, he immediately asked me suspiciously if I had ever
+worked there. We shook hands, and he wished me all success in the
+future, to which I to myself devoutly said Amen.
+
+Came home very elated at having impressed some one at last.
+
+Now for Dublin.
+
+_June_30.
+
+Oeconomic biology may be very useful but I am not interested in it. Give
+me the pure science. I don't want to be worrying my head over remedies
+for potato disease nor cures for fleas in fowls. Heaven preserve me from
+ever becoming a County Council lecturer or a Government
+Entomologist![1]... Give me the recluse life of a scholar or
+investigator, full of leisure, culture, and delicate skill. I would
+rather know Bergson than be able to stay at the Ritz Hotel. I would
+rather be able to dissect a star-fish's water-vascular system than know
+the price of Consols. I should make a most industrious country gentleman
+with £5,000 a year and a deer park.... My idea is to withdraw from the
+_mobile vulgus_ and spend laborious days in the library or laboratory.
+The world is too much with us. I long for the monotony of monastic life!
+Father Wasmann and the Abbé Spallanzani are the type. Let me set my
+face towards them. Such lives afford poor material for novelists or
+dramatists, but so much the better. Hamlet makes fine reading, but I
+don't want to be Hamlet myself.
+
+_July_ 6.
+
+In the afternoon went out dredging in fifteen fathoms off the pier at
+I----, but without much success.... Got a large number of interesting
+things, however, in the tow net, including some advanced eggs of
+_Loligo_ and a _Tomopteris_....
+
+_July_ 7.
+
+Went to the trout stream again. After stretching a muslin net crosswise
+on the water for insects floating down, sat on the footbridge and read
+Geology for the Dublin Examination. Later, waded downstream to a hazel
+bush on the right bank beneath a shady oak. Squatted right down on the
+bush, which supported me like an arm-chair--and, with legs dangling in
+the cool water, opened a Meredith and enjoyed myself.
+
+_July_ 28.
+
+Had to write backing out of the Dublin Examination for which I am
+nominated to sit. I am simply not fit for the racket of such a journey
+in my present state of health. My chances of success, too, are not such
+as to warrant my drawing on Dad for the money. He is still ill, and
+secretly agitated, I fear, because I am so bent on giving up his work.
+It looks, however, as if newspaper journalism is to be my fate. It was
+the refinement of torture having to write.
+
+_July_ 31.
+
+Had a letter from Dr. S---- enough to wring tears from a monument.
+
+Sat like a valetudinarian in the Park all day getting fresh air--among
+the imbeciles, invalids, and children. Who cares? "But, gentlemen, you
+_shall_ hear."
+
+_August_ 4.
+
+Still another chance--quite unexpectedly received a second nomination
+this morning to sit for another exam, for two vacancies in the British
+Museum. Good luck this.
+
+_August_ 11.
+
+Very hot, so went to S----, and bathed in the salmon pool. Stretched
+myself out in the water, delighted to find that I had at last got to the
+very heart of the countryside. I was not just watching from the
+outside--on the bank. I was in it, and plunging in it, too, up to my
+armpits. What did I care about the British Museum or Zoology then? All
+but the last enemy and object of conquest I had overcome--for the moment
+perhaps even Death himself was under heel--I was immortal--in that
+minute I was always prostrate in the stream--sunk deep in the bosom of
+old Mother Earth who cannot die!
+
+_August_ 14.
+
+At 4 p.m. to the Salmon Pool for a bathe. 87.3 in the shade. The meadow
+was delicious in the sunshine. It made me want to hop, flirt my tail,
+sing. I felt ever such a bright-eyed wily bird!
+
+_August_ 17.
+
+Caught the afternoon train to C----, but unfortunately forgot to take
+with me either watch or tubes (for insects). So I applied to the
+station-master, a youth of about eighteen, who is also signalman,
+porter, ticket-collector, and indeed very factotal--even to the extent
+of providing me with empty match boxes. I agreed with him to be called
+by three halloos from the viaduct just before the evening train came in.
+Then I went up to the leat, set up my muslin net in it for insects
+floating down, and then went across to the stream and bathed.
+Afterwards, went back and boxed the insects caught, and returned to the
+little station, with its creepers on the walls and over the roof, all
+as delightfully quiet as ever, and the station youth as delightfully
+silly. Then the little train came around the bend of the line--green
+puffing engine and red coaches, like a crawling caterpillar of gay
+colour.
+
+_August_ 20.
+
+A trapper killed a specimen of _Tropidonotus natrix_ and brought it to
+me. I gave him sixpence for it and am just going to dissect it.
+
+_August_ 21.
+
+There are folk who notice nothing. (Witness Capt. McWhirr in Conrad's
+_Typhoon_.) They live side by side with genius or tragedy as innocent as
+babies; there are heaps of people who live on a mountain, a volcano,
+even, without knowing it. If the stars of Heaven fell and the Moon were
+turned into blood some one would have to direct their attention to
+it.... Perhaps after all, the most obvious things are the most difficult
+to see. We all recognise Keats now, but suppose he was only "the boy
+next door"--why should I read his verses?
+
+_August_ 27.
+
+_Preparing a Snake's Skull_
+
+Prepared the skull of grass snake. I fancy I scooped out the eyes with
+patent delight--I suppose symbolically, as though, on behalf of the rest
+of suffering humanity, I were wiping off the old score against the beast
+for its behaviour in the Garden of Eden.
+
+_September_ 5.
+
+At 2.30 Dad had three separate "strokes" of paralysis in as many
+minutes, the third leaving him helpless. They sent for me in the
+Library, where I was reading, and I hurried home. Just as I entered the
+bedroom where he and Mother were another attack came on, and it was with
+the utmost difficulty that with her help I managed to get him from the
+chair to the bed. He struggled with his left arm and leg and made
+inarticulate noises which sounded as if they might be groans. I don't
+know if he was in pain. Dear Mother.
+
+_September_ 14.
+
+Dad cannot live long. Mother bears up wonderfully well. Tried to do some
+examination work but failed utterly. A---- is watching in the sick-room
+with Mother who will not leave.
+
+8.30. The nurse says he will not live through the night.
+
+8.45. Telegraphed for A---- to come.
+
+11.00. A---- came downstairs and had a little supper.
+
+12.00. Went to bed. H---- and the others lit a fire and we have all sat
+around it silent, listening to its murmur. Every one felt cold. Dad has
+been unconscious for over an hour.
+
+1.45 a.m. Heard a noise, then heard Mother coming downstairs past my
+bedroom door with some one--sobbing. I knew it must be all over.
+H----was helping her down. Waited in my bedroom in the dark for three
+parts of an hour, when H---- came up, opened the door slowly and said,
+"He's gone, old man." It was a tremendous relief to know that since he
+had to die his sufferings and cruel plight were over. Fell asleep from
+sheer exhaustion and slept soundly.
+
+_September_ 18.
+
+The funeral. _It is not death but the dreadful possibilities of life
+which are so depressing_.[2]
+
+_September_ 21.
+
+_A Day in Autumn_
+
+A cool, breezy autumn day. The beach was covered with patches of soapy
+foam that shook tremulously in the wind--all the rocks and everything
+were drenched with water, and the spray came off the breaking waves like
+steam. A red sun went lower and lower and the shadows cast by the rocks
+grew very long and grotesque. Underneath the breaking waves, the hollows
+were green and dark like sea caverns. Herring gulls played about in the
+air balancing themselves as they faced the breeze, then sweeping
+suddenly around and downwards with the wind behind them. We all sat down
+on the rocks and were very quiet, almost monosyllabic. We pointed out a
+passing vessel to one another or chucked a bit of shingle into the sea.
+You would have said we were bored. Yet deep down in ourselves we were
+astir and all around us we could hear the rumours of divine passage,
+soft and mysterious as the flight of birds migrating in the dark.
+
+The wind rose and tapped the line against the flag-staff at the
+Coastguard Station. It roared through my hair and past my ears for an
+hour on end till I felt quite windswept and bleak. On the way home we
+saw the wind darting hither and thither over the long grass like a
+lunatic snake. The wind! Oh! the wind--I have an enormous faith in the
+curative properties of the wind. I feel better already.
+
+_October_ 17.
+
+Staying in Surrey. Exam, over and I feel fairly confident--after an
+agony for a few days before on account of the development of a cold
+which threatened to snatch the last chance out of my hands.
+
+_Justifiable Mendacity_
+
+Sitting on a gate on the N. Downs I saw a long way below me in the
+valley a man standing in a chalk pit and wielding a stick vigorously.
+For some reason or another the idea came to me that it would be
+interesting if he were in the act of killing a Snake--he so far away
+below and I above and unnoticed quietly watching him. At dinner
+to-night, this revised version of the story came out quite pat and
+natural and obviously interested the assembly. I added graphically that
+the man was too far away from me to be able to say what _species_ of
+Snake it was he was killing. I possess the qualifications of an
+artistic liar. Yet I can't regard such a story as a lie--it was rather a
+justifiable emendation of an otherwise uninteresting incident.
+
+_October_ 24.
+
+_Une Caractère_
+
+... She is a tiny little old lady, very frail and very delicate, with a
+tiny voice like the noise of a fretsaw. She talks incessantly about
+things which do not interest you, until your face gets stiff with
+forcing a polite smile, and your voice cracked and your throat dry with
+saying, "Yes," and "Really."
+
+To-night I attend the Zoological Society to read my first paper, so I am
+really in a fluster and want to be quiet. Therefore to prevent her from
+talking I write two letters which I represent as urgent. At 6.15
+desperate, so went out for a walk in the dark London streets. Returned
+to supper and to Her. After the wife, the husband is intellectual
+pyrotechnics. Referring to the Museum,--
+
+"Would you have there, I suppose, any insects, in a case like, what you
+might say to study to yourself when no one is by?" he inquired.
+
+6.40. It is now one hour before I need leave for the meeting, and
+whether I sigh, cough, smoke, or read the paper, she goes on. She even
+refuses to allow me to scan the lines below photos in the _Illustrated
+London News._ I write this as the last sole resource to escape her
+devastating prattle and the ceaseless hum of her tiny gnat-like mind.
+She thinks (because I told her so) that I am preparing notes for the
+evening meeting.
+
+_Later_: Spent an absolutely damnable day. Am sick, tired, bored,
+frantic with her voice which I have been able to share with no one
+except the intellectual giant, her husband, at tea time. In order to
+break the flow of chatter, I would rudely interrupt and go on talking,
+by this means keeping my end up for as long as I could, and enjoying a
+short respite from the fret-sawing voice. But I tired of this and it was
+of no permanent value. When I broke in, she still went on for a few
+sentences unable to stop, and lo! here was the spectacle of two persons
+alone together in a room both talking at the same time and neither
+listening. I persisted though--and she had to stop. Once started, I was
+afraid to stop--scared at the certain fact of the voice beginning to saw
+again. After a while the fountain of my artificial garrulity dried up,
+and the Voice at once leaped into the breach, resuming--amazing and
+incredible as it seems--at the precise point where it had left off. At 7
+I am quite exhausted and sit on the opposite side of the hearth, staring
+with glassy eyes, arms drooping at my sides and mouth druling. At 7.05
+her cough increases, and she has to stop to attend to it. With a
+fiendish smile I push back my chair, and quietly watch her cough.... She
+coughs continuously now and can talk no longer. Thank God! 8 p.m., left
+for the meeting, where I read my paper in a state of awful
+nervousness.... I read out all I had to say and kept them amused for
+about ten minutes. I was very excited when Dr. ---- got up and praised
+the paper,[3] saying it was interesting, and hoping I should continue
+the experiments. The chairman, Sir John Rose Bradford, asked a question,
+I answered it and then sat down. After the meeting we went upstairs to
+the library, had tea and chatted with some of the big people.... Zoology
+is certainly delightful, yet it seems to me the Zoologists are much as
+other people. I like Zoology. I wish I could do without Zoologists....
+
+_October_ 30.
+
+Home once more. The Natural History Museum impressed me enormously. It
+is a magnificent building--too magnificent to work there--to follow
+one's profession in a building like that seems an altogether too
+grandiose manner of life. A pious zoologist might go up to pray in
+it--but not to earn his daily bread there.
+
+_October_ 31.
+
+I'm in, in, in!!!!!!!!! being first with 141 marks to spare. Old
+M----[the servant] rushes up to my sister's bedroom with the news just
+after 7 a.m., and she says, "Fine, fine," and comes down in her
+nightgown to my bedroom, where we drink our morning cup of tea
+together--and talk! I'm delighted. What a magnificent obstacle race it
+has been! Still one ditch--the medical exam! Wired to friends.
+
+_November_ 1.
+
+This is the sort of letter which is balm to me:--"My darling W----,--I
+need hardly tell you how absolutely delighted we were at the grand news
+of this morning. You must be feeling a huge glow of satisfaction with
+the knowledge of your object attained through untold difficulties. I
+don't wish to butter you up, or to gush, but I must honestly say that I
+feel tip-top proud of my old Beano. I admire your brains more than ever,
+and also your indomitable pluck and grit, and your quiet bravery in
+disappointment and difficulty...."
+
+_November_ 14.
+
+The three most fascinating books in Science that I have so far read are
+(easily):--1. Darwin's _Expression of the Emotions_. 2. Gaskell's
+_Origin of Vertebrates_. 3. Bergson's _Le Rire_.
+
+Went to the dentist in the afternoon. Evening chiefly occupied in
+reading _Le Rire_. By my halidom, it is an extraordinarily interesting
+book!
+
+_November_ 29.
+
+... I am always looking out for new friends--assaying for friendship....
+There is no more delightful adventure than an expedition into a rich,
+many-sided personality. Gradually over a long probation--for deep minds
+are naturally reticent--piece after piece is added to the geography of
+your friend's mind, and each piece pleases or entertains, while in
+return you let him steal away piece after piece of your own territory,
+perhaps saving a bit up here and there--such as an enthusiasm for
+Francis Thompson's poetry--and then letting it go unexpectedly. It's a
+delightful reciprocity.
+
+I dream of "the honeyed ease of the Civil Servant's working day"
+(Peacock). Yet the French say _Songes sont mensonges_.
+
+_December_ 13.
+
+In the Park it was very dark and she said,--
+
+"If I lose you I shan't be able to find my way home."
+
+"Oh! I'll look after you," I said.
+
+Both being of the same mind at the same time we sat down on a seat
+together when a fortunate thing happened. It began to rain. So I offered
+her part of my overcoat. She nestled in under my arm and I kissed her
+out of hand. _Voilà_! A very pretty little girl, 'pon my word.
+
+_December_ 20.
+
+The thing is obsessing me. After an early supper called and found my
+lady ready to receive me. No one else at home. So walked into the
+oak-panelled room with the red-curtained windows, took off my coat and
+scarf. She followed and switched off the light. There was a roaring fire
+in the grate. She is very amorous and I am not Hippolytus, so we were
+soon closely engaged in the large chair before the fire. As we sailed
+thus, close hauled to the wind, with double entendres and she trembled
+in the storm (and I was at the helm) the garden gate slammed and both of
+us got up quickly. I next heard a key turn in the lock and a foot in the
+passage: "Mr. ----" she said....
+
+She switched on the light, went out swiftly into the passage, and
+meeting him conducted him to her office, while I as swiftly put on
+overcoat and scarf, and slipped out through the open door, stumbling
+over his bicycle, but of course not stopping to pick it up. Later she
+telephoned to say it was all right. Very relieved!... She recalls
+Richepin's _La Glu_.
+
+_December_ 21.
+
+She is a fine sedative. Her movements are a pleasant adagio, her voice
+piano to pianissimo, her conversation breaks off in thrilling
+aposiopoeses.
+
+An awful comedy this morning--for as soon as I was securely "gagged" the
+dentist went out of the room. She approached, leered at me helpless, and
+said provokingly, "Oh! you do look funny." Minx. On returning he said to
+her, "Would you like to hold his hand?"
+
+She: "Oh! not just now."
+
+And they grinned at one another and at me waiting to be tortured.
+
+_December_ 23.
+
+... On the Station waited for an hour for the train. Gave her a box of
+sweets and the _Bystander_. We walked up the platform to extreme end in
+the dark and kissed! But it was very windy and cold. (I noticed that!)
+So we entered an empty luggage guard's van on rail beside platform left
+there by shunters. Here we were out of the wind and far better off. But
+a shunter came along and turned us out. She gave me a silver match-box.
+But I believe for various reasons that it is one of her own and not a
+new one. Said "Good-bye."
+
+_December_ 28.
+
+At R----. Played the negligent _flaneur_, reclining on the Chesterfield,
+leaning against the grand piano, or measuring my length on the mat
+before the fire.
+
+_December_ 31.
+
+To-morrow I begin duties at the British Museum of Natural History. I
+cannot quite imagine myself a Museum assistant. Before I get there I
+know I shall be the strangest assistant on the staff. It will be
+singing my song in a Strange land and weeping--I hope not too
+bitterly--down by the waters of a very queer Babylon.
+
+Still, I have burnt my bridges like Cæsar--or burnt my ships like
+Cortez. So forward!
+
+
+[1] See entry for October 8, 1913.
+
+[2] Italics added 1917.
+
+[3] The paper was "Distant Orientation in Batrachia"--detailing
+experiments on the homing faculty in newts.
+
+
+
+
+PART II--IN LONDON
+
+
+
+
+1912
+
+
+_January_ 21.
+
+Am at last beginning to get more content with the work at the Museum, so
+that I muse on Bernard Shaw's saying, "Get what you like or you'll grow
+to like what you get." I have a terrible suspicion that the security of
+tenure here is like the lion's den in the fable--_Nulla vestiga
+retrorsum_. Of course I am wonderfully proud of being at the Museum,
+although I am disappointed and write as if I were quite blasé.
+
+_January_ 25.
+
+I should be disappointed if at the end of my career (if I live to see it
+through) I do not win the F.R.S. I should very much like it.... My
+nature is very mixed--ambitious above all things and yet soon giddy with
+the audacity of my aspirations. The B.M. and my colleagues make me feel
+most inferior in fact, but in theory--in the secrecy of my own
+bedchamber--I feel that there are few men there my equal.
+
+_April_ 26.
+
+Down with influenza. A boarding-house with the 'flue!
+
+_May_ 8.
+
+Went home to recuperate, a beef jelly in one pocket and sal volatile in
+the other. On arrival, my blanched appearance frightened Mother and the
+others, so went to bed at once. "Fate's a fiddler, life's a dance."
+
+_May_ 12.
+
+Weak enough to sit down before dressing-table while I shave and brush my
+hair. Dyspepsia appalling. The Doctor in Kensington seemed to think me
+an awful wreck and asked if I were concealing----
+
+Reading Baudelaire and Verlaine.
+
+_May_ 24.
+
+_Bathing_
+
+Sat on a seat overlooking the sand-hills with stick between my legs like
+an old man, and watched a buxom wench aet. 25 run down the path pursued
+by "Rough" and two little girls in blue. Later they emerged from a
+striped bathing tent in the glory of blue bathing dresses. It made me
+feel quite an old man to see the girl galloping out over the hard level
+sands to the breakers, a child clinging to each hand. Legs and arms
+twinkled in the sun which shone with brilliance. If life were as level
+as those sands and as beautiful as that trio of girls!
+
+_May_ 26.
+
+_Two Young Men Talking_
+
+With H---- in his garden. He is a great enthusiast.
+
+"I disapprove entirely of your taste in gardening," I said. "You object
+to the 'ragged wilderness' style, I like it. You like lawns laid out for
+croquet and your privet hedges pruned into 'God Save the King' or 'Dieu
+et mon droit.' My dear boy, if you saw Mr. ----'s wilderness at
+----you'd be so shocked you'd cut and run, and I imagine there'd be an
+affecting reunion between you and your beloved geraniums. For my part, I
+don't like geraniums: they're suburban, and all of a piece with
+antimacassars and stuffed birds under glass bells. The colour of your
+specimens, moreover," I rapped out, "is vulgar--like the muddied
+petticoats of old market women."
+
+H----, quite unmoved, replied slowly, "Well, here are some like the
+beautiful white cambric of a lady of fashion. You've got no taste in
+flowers--you're just six feet of grief and patience." We roared with
+laughing.
+
+"Do stop watering those damned plants," I exclaimed at last. But he
+went on. I exclaimed again and out of sheer ridiculousness, in reply he
+proceeded to water the cabbages, the gravel path, the oak tree--and me!
+While I writhed with laughing.
+
+_May_ 27.
+
+_By the Sea_
+
+Sat upon a comfortable jetty of rock and watched the waves without a
+glimmer of an idea in my mind about anything--though to outward view I
+might have been a philosopher in cerebral parturition with thoughts as
+big as babies. Instead, little rustling dead leaves of thoughts stirred
+and fluttered in the brain--the pimple _e.g._ I recollected on my Aunt's
+nose, or the boyishness of Dr. ----'s handwriting, or Swinburne's lines:
+"If the golden-crested wren Were a nightingale--why, then Something seen
+and heard of men Might be half as sweet as when Laughs a child of
+seven."
+
+I continued in this pleasurable coma all the afternoon and went home
+refreshed.
+
+_May_ 29.
+
+Have returned to London and the B.M. My first day at the M. Sat at my
+table in a state of awful apathy.
+
+At least temporarily, I am quite disenchanted of Zoology. I work--God
+save the mark--in the Insect Room!
+
+On the way home, purchased:--
+
+Peroxide of hydrogen (pyorrhœa threatened). One bottle of physic (for
+my appalling dyspepsia).
+
+One flask of brandy for emergencies (as my heart is intermittent again).
+
+Prussic acid next.
+
+Must have been near pneumonia at R----. Auntie was nervous, and came in
+during the night to see how I was.
+
+_June_ 20.
+
+It caused me anguish to see my article returned from the _Fortnightly_
+and lying in a big envelope on the table when I returned home this
+evening. I can't do any work because of it, and in desperation rushed
+off to the stately pleasure domes of the White City, and systematically
+went through all the thrills--from the Mountain Railway to the Wiggle
+Woggle and the 'Witching Waves.
+
+_June_ 21.
+
+To-day I am easier. The cut worm forgives the plough. But how restless
+this disappointment has made me.... I have no plans for recuperation and
+cannot settle down to work.
+
+_July_ 6.
+
+On my doctor's advice, went to see Dr. P----, a lung specialist.
+M----found a dull spot on one of my lungs, and, not feeling very sure,
+and without telling me the nature of his suspicion, he arranged for Dr.
+P---- to see me, allowing me to suppose he was a stomach authority as my
+dyspepsia is bad.
+
+Well: it is _not_ consumption, but my lungs and physique are such that
+consumption might easily supervene. As soon as Dr. P---- had gone,
+M----appended the following lugubrious yarn:--
+
+Whenever I catch cold, I must go and be treated at once, all my leisure
+must be spent out of doors, I must take cream and milk in prodigious
+quantities and get fat at all costs. There is even a question of my
+giving up work.
+
+_July_ 10.
+
+A young but fat woman sitting in the sun and oozing moisture is as nasty
+as anything in Baudelaire.
+
+_July_ 14.
+
+_A "Brilliant Career"_
+
+My old head master once prophesied for me "a brilliant career." That was
+when I was in the Third Form. Now I have more than a suspicion that I am
+one of those who, as he once pointed out, grow sometimes out of a
+brilliant boyhood into very commonplace men. This continuous ill health
+is having a very obvious effect on my work and activities. With what
+courage I possess I have to face the fact that to-day I am unable to
+think or express myself as well as when I was a boy in my teens--witness
+this Journal!
+
+I intend to go on however. I have decided that my death shall be
+disputed all the way.
+
+Oh! it is so humiliating to die! I writhe to think of being overcome by
+so unfair an enemy before I have demonstrated myself to maiden aunts who
+mistrust me, to colleagues who scorn me, and even to brothers and
+sisters who believe in me.
+
+As an Egotist I hate death because I should cease to be I.
+
+Most folk, when sick unto death, gain a little consolation over the
+notoriety gained by the fact of their decease. Criminals enjoy the pomp
+and circumstance of their execution. Voltaire said of Rousseau that he
+wouldn't mind being hanged if they'd stick his name on the gibbet. But
+my own death would be so mean and insignificant. Guy de Maupassant died
+in a grand manner--a man of intellect and splendid physique who became
+insane. Tusitala's death in the South Seas reads like a romance. Heine,
+after a life of sorrow, died with a sparkling witticism on his lips;
+Vespasian with a jest.
+
+But I cannot for the life of me rake up any excitement over my own
+immediate decease--an unobtrusive passing away of a rancorous,
+disappointed, morbid, and self-assertive entomologist in a West
+Kensington Boarding House--what a mean little tragedy! It is hard not to
+be somebody even in death.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A sing-song to-night in the drawing-room; all the boarding-house present
+in full muster. There was a German, Schulz, who sat and leered at his
+inamorata--a sensual-looking, pasty-faced girl--while she gave us
+daggers-and-moonlight recitations with the most unwarranted
+self-assurance (she boasts of a walking-on part at one of the theatres);
+there was Miss M---- listening to her fiancé, Capt. O---- (home from
+India), singing Indian Love Songs at her; there was Miss T----, a sour
+old maid, who knitted and snorted, not fully conscious of this young
+blood coursing around her; Mrs. Barclay Woods pursued her usual
+avocation of imposing on us all the great weight of her immense social
+superiority, clucking, in between, to her one chick--a fluffy girl of 18
+or 19, who was sitting now in the draught, now too close to a "common"
+musician of the Covent Garden Opera; finally our hostess, a divorcee,
+who hated all males, even Tom-cats. We were a pathetic little
+company--so motley, ill-assorted--who had come together not from love or
+regard but because man is a gregarious animal. In fact, we sat secretly
+criticising and contemning one another ... yet outside there were so
+many millions of people unknown, and overhead the multitude of the stars
+was equally comfortless.
+
+_Later_: ... Zoology on occasion still fires my ambition! Surely I
+cannot be dying yet.
+
+Whatever misfortune befalls me I do hope I shall be able to meet it
+unflinchingly. I do not fear ill-health in itself, but I do fear its
+possible effect on my mind and character.... Already I am slowly
+altering, as the Lord liveth. Already for example my sympathy with
+myself is maudlin.
+
+Whenever the blow shall fall, some sort of a reaction _must_ be given.
+Heine flamed into song. Beethoven wrote the 5th Symphony. So what shall
+I do when my time comes? I don't think I have any lyrics or symphonies
+to write, so I shall just have to grin and bear it--like a dumb
+animal.... As long as I have spirit and buoyancy I don't care what
+happens--for I know that or so long I cannot be accounted a failure. The
+only _real_ failure is one in which the victim is left spiritless,
+dazed, dejected with blackness all around, and within, a knife slowly
+and unrelentingly cutting the strings of his heart.
+
+My head whirls with conflicting emotions, struggling, desperate ideas,
+and a flood of impressions of all sorts of things that are never
+sufficiently sifted and arranged to be caught down on paper. I am
+brought into this world, hustled along it and then hustled out of it,
+with no time for anything. I want to be on a great hill and square up
+affairs.
+
+_August_ 28.
+
+... After tea, we all three walked in Kensington Gardens and sat on a
+seat by the Round Pond. My umbrella fell to the ground, and I left it
+there with its nose poking up in a cynical manner, as She remarked.
+
+"It's not cynical," I said, "only a little knowing. Won't you let yours
+fall down to keep it company? Yours is a lady umbrella and a
+good-looking one--they might flirt together."
+
+"Mine doesn't want to flirt," she answered stiffly.
+
+_September_ 13.
+
+_At C----, a tiny little village by the sea in N----._
+
+Looking up from a rockpool, where I had been watching Gobies, I saw
+three children racing across the sands to bathe, I saw a man dive from a
+boat, and I saw a horse-man gallop his mare down to the beach and plunge
+about in the line of breakers. The waters thundered, the mare whinnied,
+the children shouted to one another, and I turned my head down again to
+the rockpool with a great thumping heart of happiness: it was so lovely
+to be conscious of the fact that out there this beautiful picture was
+awaiting me whenever and as often as I chose to lift my head. I
+purposely kept my head down, for the picture was so beautiful I did not
+want to hurt it by breathing on it, and I kept my head down out of a
+playful self-cheating delight; I decided not to indulge myself.
+
+_September_ 16.
+
+Out in the Bay dredging for Echinoderms with "Carrots." Brilliantly
+fine. The haul was a failure, but, being out in a boat on a waveless sea
+under a cloudless sky, I was scarcely depressed at this! We cruised
+along from one little bay to another, past smugglers' caves and white
+pebble beaches, the dredge all the while growling along the sea bottom,
+and "Carrots" and I lying listless in the bows. I was _immensely happy_.
+My mercury was positively ringing the bell.
+
+Who, then, is "Carrots"? He is a fine brawny boat-man who jumps over the
+rocks like a Chamois, swims like a Fish, pulls like an Ox, snorts like a
+Grampus--a sort of compound zoological perfection, built eclectically.
+
+_September_ 18.
+
+_Early Boughies_
+
+Up the village, Mrs. Beavan keeps a tiny little shop and runs a very
+large garden. She showed us all about the garden, and introduced us to
+her husband, whom we discovered in an apple tree--an old man, aged 76,
+very hard of hearing, and with an impediment in his speech. He at once
+began to move his mouth, and I caught odd jingles of sound that sounded
+like nothing at all--at first, but which gradually resolved themselves
+on close attention to such familiar landmarks as "Early Boughies,"
+"Stubbits," "Ribstone Pippins" into a discourse on Apples.
+
+The following curious conversation took place between me and the deaf
+gaffer, aged 76, standing in the apple tree,--
+
+"These be all appulls from Kent--I got 'em all from Kent."
+
+"How long have you lived in C----?"
+
+"Bunyard & Son--that's the firm--they live just outside the town of
+Maidstone."
+
+"Do you keep Bees here?"
+
+"One of these yer appulls is called Bunyard after the firm--a fine fruit
+too."
+
+"Your good wife must be of great assistance to you in your work."
+
+"Little stalks maybe, but a large juishy appull for all that."
+
+Just then I heard Mrs. B---- saying to E----,--
+
+"Aw yes, he's very active for 76. A little deaf, but he manages the
+garden all 'eesulf, I bolsters 'un up wi' meat and drink--little and
+often as they zay for children.... Now there's a bootifull tree, me
+dear, that 'as almost beared itself to death, as you may say."
+
+She picked an apple off it shouting to poor Tom still aloft,--
+
+"Tom what's the name of this one?"
+
+"You should come a bit earlier, zir," replied T. "'Tis late a bit now
+doan't 'ee zee?"
+
+"No--what's its name I want," shouted his spouse.
+
+"Yes, yes, give the lady one to take home--there's plenty for all," he
+said.
+
+"What is the NAME? THE NAME OF THIS YER APPULL," screamed Mrs. B., and
+old Tom moving his bones slowly down from the tree answered quite
+unmoved,--
+
+"Aw the name? Why, 'tis a common kind of appull--there's a nice tree of
+'em up there."
+
+"Oh! never mind, 'tis a Gladstone," said Mrs. B., turning to us.
+
+"A very fine Appull," droned the old boy.
+
+_September_ 28.
+
+Back in town again. Wandered about in a somnambulistic way all the
+afternoon till I found myself taking tea in Kew Gardens. I enjoyed the
+wind in my face and hair. Otherwise there is nothing to be said--a
+colourless day.
+
+_October_ 10.
+
+Came across the following arresting sentence: "Pale, anæmic, cadaverous,
+bad teeth and disordered digestion and a morbid egotism." Yes, but my
+teeth are _not_ bad.
+
+_October_ 20.
+
+_On the N. Downs_
+
+Under the oak where I sat the ground was covered with dead leaves. I
+kicked them, and I beat them with my stick, because I was angry that
+they were dead. In the coppice, leaves were quietly and majestically
+floating earthwards in the pomp of death. It was very thrilling to
+observe them.
+
+It was a curious sensation to realise that since the last time I sat
+under the old oak I had been right up to the N. of England, then right
+down to the S.W., and back once more to London town. I bragged about my
+kinetic activity to the stationary oak and I scoffed at the old hill for
+having to remain always in the same place.
+
+It gave me a pleasing sense of infinite superiority to _come back_ and
+see everything the same as before, to sit on the same old seat under the
+same old oak. Even that same old hurdle was lying in the same position
+among the bracken. How sorry I was for it! Poor wretch--unable to
+move--to go to Whitby, to go to C----, to be totally ignorant of the
+great country of London....
+
+Day dreamed. My own life as it unrolls day by day is a source of
+constant amazement, delight, and pain. I can think of no more
+interesting volume than a detailed, intimate, psychological history of
+my own life. I want a perfect comprehension at least of myself....
+
+We are all such egotists that a sorrow or hardship--provided it is great
+enough--flatters our self-importance. We feel that a calamity by
+overtaking us has distinguished us above our fellows. A man likes not to
+be ignored even by a railway accident. A man with a grievance is always
+happy.
+
+_October_ 23.
+
+Over to see E----. Came away disillusioned.
+
+_October_ 25.
+
+Met her in Smith's book shop looking quite bewitching. Hang it all, I
+thought I had finished. Went home with her, watched her make a pudding
+in the kitchen, then we sat by the firelight in the drawing-room and had
+supper. Scrumptious (not the supper).
+
+_October_ 27.
+
+Quarrelled with D----! The atmosphere is changed at the flat--my
+character is ruined. D---- has told them I'm a loose fellow. I've always
+contrived to give him that impression--I liked to be cutting my
+throat--and now it's cut!
+
+_November_ 1.
+
+D---- came and carried me off to the flat, where they asked why I hadn't
+been over--which, of course, pleased me immensely.
+
+_November_ 6.
+
+Doctor M---- is very gloomy about my health and talks of S. Africa,
+Labrador, and so on. I'm not responding to his treatment as I should.
+
+_November_ 11.
+
+Met her this evening in Kensington Road. "I timed this well," said she,
+"I thought I should meet you." Good Heavens, I am getting embroiled.
+Returned to the flat with her and after supper called her "The Lady of
+Shalott."
+
+"I don't think you know what you're talking about"--this stiffly.
+
+"Perhaps not," I answered. "I leave it to you."
+
+"Oh! but it rests with you," she said.
+
+Am I in love? God knows--but I don't suppose God cares.
+
+_November_ 15.
+
+On M----'s advice went to see a stomach specialist--Dr. Hawkins. As I
+got there a little too early walked up the street--Portland Place--on
+the opposite side (from shyness) past an interminable and nauseating
+series of night bells and brass plates, then down again on the right
+side till I got to No. 66 which made me flutter--for ten doors ahead I
+mused is the house I must call at. It made me shiver a little.
+
+The specialist took copious notes of my evidence and after examining me
+retired to consult with M----. What a parade of ceremony! On coming
+back, the jury returned a verdict of "Not proven." I was told I ought to
+go out and live on the prairies--and in two years I should be a _giant_!
+But where are the prairies? What 'bus? If I get worse, I must take
+several months' leave. I think it will come to this.
+
+_November_ 16.
+
+Arthur came down for the week end. He likes the Lady of Shalott. She is
+"not handsome, but arresting, striking" and "capable of tragedy." That I
+believe she has achieved already.... If she were a bit more gloomy and a
+bit more beautiful, she'd be irresistible.
+
+_November_ 22.
+
+He: "Have a cigarette? I enjoy lighting your cigarettes."
+
+She: "I don't know how to smoke properly."
+
+He: "You smoke only as _you_ could."
+
+She: "How's that?"
+
+H.: "Gracefully, of course."
+
+S.: "Do you think I like pretty things being said to me?"
+
+H.: "Why not, if they are true. Flattery is when you tell an ugly woman
+she is beautiful. Have you so poor an opinion of yourself to think all I
+say of you is flattery?"
+
+S.: "Yes. I am only four bare walls,--with nothing inside."
+
+H.: "What a deliciously empty feeling that must be. ... But I don't
+think you're so simple as all that. You bewilder me sometimes."
+
+S.: "Why?"
+
+H.: "I feel like Sindbad the Sailor."
+
+S.: "Why?"
+
+H.: "Because I'm not George Meredith." The title of "husband" frightens
+me.
+
+_December_ 9.
+
+It's a fearful strain to go on endeavouring to live up to time with a
+carefully laid-out time-table of future achievements. I am hurrying on
+with my study of Italian in order to read the Life of Spallanzani in
+order to include him in my book--to be finished by the end of next year;
+I am also subsidising Jenkinson's embryological lectures at University
+College with the more detailed account of practical and experimental
+work in his text-book; I have also started a lengthy research upon the
+Trichoptera--all with a horrible sense of time fleeing swiftly and
+opportunities for work too few ever to be squandered, and, in the
+background, behind all this feverish activity, the black shadow that I
+might die suddenly with nothing done--next year, next month, next week,
+to-morrow, now!
+
+Then sometimes, as to-night, I have misgivings. Shall I do these things
+so well now as I might once have done them? Has not my ill-health
+seriously affected my mental powers? Surely the boy of 1908-10 was
+almost a genius or--seen at this distance--a very remarkable youth in
+the fanatical zeal with which he sought to pursue, and succeeded in
+gaining, his own end of a zoological education for himself.
+
+It is a terrible suspicion to cross the mind of an ambitious youth that
+perhaps, after all, he is a very commonplace mortal--that his life,
+whether comedy or tragedy, or both, or neither, is any way
+insignificant, of no account.
+
+It is still more devastating for him to have to consider whether the
+laurel wreath was not once within his grasp, and whether he must not
+ascribe his own incalculable loss to his stomach simply.
+
+_December_ 15.
+
+A very bad heart attack. As I write it intermits every three or four
+beats. Who knows if I shall live thro' to-night?
+
+_December_ 16.
+
+Here I am once more. A passable night. After breakfast the intermittency
+recommenced--it is better now, with a dropped beat only about once per
+half-hour, so that I am almost happy after yesterday, which was Hell.
+The world is too good to give up without remonstrance at the beck of a
+weak heart.
+
+Before I went to sleep last night, my watch stopped--I at once observed
+the cessation of its tick and wondered if it were an omen. I was
+genuinely surprised to find myself still ticking when I awoke this
+morning. A moment ago a hearse passed down the street.... Yes, but I'm
+damned if I haven't a right to be morbid after yesterday. To be ill like
+this in a boarding-house! I'd marry to-morrow if I had the chance.
+
+_December_ 22.
+
+_Sollas's "Ancient Hunters"_
+
+Read Sollas's book _Ancient Hunters_--very thrilling--mind full of the
+Aurignacians, Mousterians, Magdalenians! I have been peering down such
+tremendous vistas of time and change that my own troubles have been
+eclipsed into ridiculous insignificance. It has been really a Pillar of
+Strength to me--a splendid tonic. Palæontology has its comfortable words
+too. I have revelled in my littleness and irresponsibility. It has
+relieved me of the harassing desire to live, I feel content to live
+dangerously, indifferent to my fate; I have discovered I am a fly, that
+we are all flies, that nothing matters. It's a great load off my life,
+for I don't mind being such a micro-organism--to me the honour is
+sufficient of belonging to the universe--such a great universe, so grand
+a scheme of things. Not even Death can rob me of that honour. For
+nothing can alter the fact that I _have_ lived; _I have been I_, if for
+ever so short a time. And when I am dead, the matter which composes my
+body is indestructible--and eternal, so that come what may to my "Soul,"
+my dust will always be going on, each separate atom of me playing its
+separate part--I shall still have some sort of a finger in the Pie.
+When I am dead, you can boil me, burn me, drown me, scatter me--but you
+cannot destroy me: my little atoms would merely deride such heavy
+vengeance. Death can do no more than kill you.
+
+_December_ 27.
+
+"It is a pleasure to note the success attending the career of Mr. W.N.P.
+Barbellion now engaged in scientific work on the staff of the Natural
+History Museum ..." etc., etc.
+
+This is a cutting from the local paper--one of many that from time to
+time I once delightedly pasted in the pages of the Journal. Not so now.
+
+... At 23, I am a different being. Surrounded by all the stimulating
+environment of scientific research, I am cold and disdainful. I keep up
+the old appearances but underneath it is quite different. I am a
+_hypocrite_. I have to wear the mask and cothornoi, finding the part
+daily more difficult to bear. I am living on my immense initial
+momentum--while the machinery gradually slows up. My career! Gadzooks.
+
+
+
+
+1913
+
+
+_January_ 3.
+
+From the drawing-room window I see pass almost daily an old gentleman
+with white hair, a firm step, broad shoulders, healthy pink skin, a
+sunny smile--always singing to himself as he goes--a happy, rosy-cheeked
+old fellow, with a rosy-cheeked mind.... I should like to throw mud at
+him. By Jove, how I hate him. He makes me wince with my own pain. It is
+heartless, indecently so, for an _old_ man to be so blithe. Life has, I
+suppose, never lain in wait for him. The Great Anarchist has spared him
+a bomb.
+
+_January_ 19.
+
+My Aunt, aged 75, who has apparently concluded from my constant absences
+from Church that my spiritual life is in a parlous way, to-day read me
+her portion from a large book with a broad purple-tasseled bookmark. I
+looked up from "_I Promessi Sposi_" and said "Very nice." It was about
+someone whose soul was not saved and who Would not answer the door when
+it was knocked. It is jolly to be regarded as a wicked, libidinous youth
+by an aged maiden Aunt.
+
+_January_ 22.
+
+This Diary reads for all the world as if I were not living in mighty
+London. The truth is I live in a bigger, dirtier city--ill-health.
+Ill-health, when chronic, is like a permanent ligature around one's
+life. What a fine fellow I'd be if I were perfectly well. My energy for
+one thing would lift the roof off....
+
+We conversed around the text: "To travel hopefully is better than to
+arrive and true success is to labour." She is--well, so graceful. My
+God! I love her, I love her, I love her!!!
+
+_February_ 3.
+
+_A Confession_
+
+H---- B---- invited me to tea to meet his fiancée.
+
+Rather pleased with the invitation--I don't know why, for my idea of
+myself is greater than my idea of him and probably greater than his idea
+of himself.
+
+Yet I went and got shaved, and even thought of buying a new pair of
+gloves, but poverty proved greater than vanity, so I went with naked
+hands. On arriving at Turnham Green, I removed my spectacles (well
+knowing how much they damage my personal appearance). However, the
+beauty of the thing was that, tho' I waited as agreed, he never turned
+up, and so I returned home again, crestfallen--and, with my spectacles
+on again.
+
+_February_ 9.
+
+... "Now, W----, talk to me prettily," she said as soon as the door was
+closed on them.
+
+"Oh! make him read a book," whined her sister, but we talked of marriage
+instead--in all its aspects. Bless their hearts, I found these two dear
+young things simply sodden with the idea of it.
+
+In the middle I did a knee-jerk which made them scream with
+laughing--the patellar reflex was new to them, so I seized a brush from
+the grate, crossed to Her and gently tapped: out shot her foot, and
+----cried: "Oh, do do it to me as well." It was rare fun.
+
+     "Oh! pretty knee, what do I see?
+     And he stooped and he tied up my garter for me."
+
+_February_ 10.
+
+News of Scott's great adventure! Scott dead a year ago!! The news, when
+I saw it to-night in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ gave me cold thrills. I
+could have wept.... What splendid people we humans are! If there be no
+loving God to watch us, it's a pity for His sake as much as for our own.
+
+_February_ 15.
+
+Tried to kiss her in a taxi-cab on the way home from the Savoy--the
+taxi-cab danger is very present with us--but she rejected me quietly,
+sombrely. I apologised on the steps of the Flats and said I feared I had
+greatly annoyed her. "I'm not annoyed," she said, "only surprised"--in
+a thoughtful, chilly voice.
+
+We had had supper in Soho, and I took some wine, and she looked so
+bewitching it sent me in a fever, thrumming my fingers on the seat of
+the cab while she sat beside me impassive. Her shoulders are exquisitely
+modelled and a beautiful head is carried poised on a tiny neck.
+
+_February_ 16.
+
+Walking up the steps to her flat to-night made me pose to H---- (who was
+with me) as Sydney Carton in the picture in _A Tale of Two Cities_ on
+the steps of the scaffold. He laughed boisterously, as he is delighted
+to know of my last evening's misadventure.
+
+At supper, a story was told of a man who knocked at the door of his
+lady's heart four times and at last was admitted. I remarked that the
+last part of the romance was weak. She disagreed. H---- exclaimed, "Oh!
+but this man has no sentiment at all!"
+
+"So much the worse for him," chimed in the others.
+
+"He was 66 years of age," added Mrs.----.
+
+"Too old," said P. "What do you think the best age for a man to marry?"
+
+H.: "Thirty for a man, twenty-five for a woman."
+
+She: "That's right: it still gives me a little time."
+
+P.: "What do _you_ think?" (to me).
+
+I replied sardonically,--
+
+"A young man may not yet and an old man not at all."
+
+"That's right, old wet blanket," chirruped P----.
+
+"You know," I continued, delighted to seize the opportunity to assume
+the role of youthful cynic, "Cupid and Death once met at an Inn and
+exchanged arrows, since when young men have died and old men have
+doted."
+
+H---- was charming enough to opine that it was impossible to fix a time
+for love. Love simply came.
+
+We warned him to be careful on the boat going out.
+
+"Yes, I know," said H---- (who is in love with P----).
+
+"My brother had a dose of moonlight on board a boat when he sailed and
+he's been happy ever since."
+
+P.: "How romantic!"
+
+H.: "A great passion!"
+
+"The only difference," I interjected in a sombre monotone, "between a
+passion and a caprice is that the caprice lasts a little longer."
+
+"Sounds like a book," She said in contempt.
+
+It was--Oscar Wilde!
+
+P---- insisted on my taking a biscuit. "Don't mind me," she said. "Just
+think I'm a waitress and take no notice at all."
+
+H.: "Humph! I never see him taking no notice of a waitress."
+
+(Sneers and Curtain.)
+
+_February_ 24.
+
+H---- came home last night and told me that she said as he came away,
+"Tell W---- I hate him." So it's all right. I shall go over to-morrow
+again--Hurrah! My absence has been felt then.
+
+_March_ 7.
+
+Came home, lay on my bed, still dressed, and ruminated....
+
+First a suspicion then a conviction came to me that I was a cad--a
+callous, selfish, sensation-hunting cad.... For the time being the
+bottom was knocked out of my smug self-satisfaction. For several long
+half-hours I found myself drifting without compass or stars. I was quite
+di orientated, temporarily thrown off the balance of my _amour propre_.
+Then I got up, lit the gas and looking at myself in the mirror, found it
+was really true,--I was a mean creature, wholly absorbed in self.
+
+As an act of contrition, I ought to have gone out into the garden and
+eaten worms. But the mirror brought back my self-consciousness and I
+began to crawl back into my recently discarded skin--I began to be less
+loathesome to myself. For as soon as I felt interested or amused or
+curious over the fact that I had been really loathesome to myself I
+began to regain my equilibrium. _Now_, I and myself are on comparatively
+easy terms with one another. I am settled on the old swivel.... I take a
+lot of knocking off it and if shot off soon return.
+
+To-day, she was silent and melancholy but wonderfully fascinating. One
+day I am desperate and the next cold and apathetic. Am I in love? God
+knows! She came to the door to say "Good night," and I deliberately
+strangled my desire to say something.
+
+_March_ 9.
+
+In bed till 12.30 reading Bergson and the O.T.
+
+Over to the flat to supper. E---- was cold and silent. She spurned me.
+No wonder. I talked volubly and quite brilliantly with the definite
+purpose of showing up J----'s somnolence. I also pulled his leg. He
+hates me. No wonder. After supper, he went in to her studio and remained
+there alone with her while she worked. At 11 p.m. he was still there
+when I came away in a whirlwind of jealousy, regrets, and rage. G----
+said he was going to stay on until he saw "the blighter off the
+premises." Neither of us would go in to turn him out.
+
+I love her deeply and once my heart jumped when I thought I heard her
+coming into the room. But it was only P----. Did not see her again--even
+to say "Good-night."
+
+_March_ 10.
+
+Work in the evening in our bedroom--two poor miserable bachelors--H----
+reading Equity Law, a rug around his legs before an empty grate, while I
+am sitting at the table in top-coat, with collar up, and writing my
+_magnum opus,_ which is to bring me fame, fortune and--E----!
+
+H---- says that this morning I was putting on my shoes when he pointed
+out a large hole in the heel of my sock.
+
+"Damn! I shall have to wear boots," I said--at least he says I said it,
+and I am quite ready to believe him. Such unconsciousness of self is
+rare with me.
+
+_March_ 15.
+
+[At a public dinner at the Holborn Restaurant] J----replied to the toast
+of the Ladies. Feeble! H---- and I stood and had a silent toast to E----
+and N---- by just winking one eye at each other. He sat opposite me.
+
+If I had been asked to reply to this toast I should have said with the
+greatest gusto, something as follows,--
+
+[Here follows the imaginary speech in full, composed the same night
+before going to sleep.]
+
+Yet I am taken for a soft fool! My manner is soft, self-conscious, shy.
+What a lot of self-glorification I lose thereby! What a lot of
+self-torture I gain in its stead!
+
+_March_ 17.
+
+To-day went to the B.M. but did very little work. Thought over the
+matter carefully and decided to ask E---- to marry me. Relief to be able
+to decide. I was happy too.
+
+Yesterday P---- came in to us from E----'s studio and said,--
+
+"E---- sends her love."
+
+"To whom?" H---- inquired.
+
+"I don't know," P---- replied, smiling at me.
+
+_March_ 18.
+
+Had a long conversation with H---- last night. He says all E----
+intended to convey was that the quarrel was over.... I felt relieved,
+because I have no money, but--a large ambition. Then I am selfish, and
+have not forgotten that I want to spend my holidays in the Jura, and
+next year three weeks at the Plymouth Laboratory.
+
+_March_ 19.
+
+Went over to see E----. We had an awkward half-an-hour alone together.
+She was looking bewitching! I am plunging more and more into love. Had
+it on the tip of my tongue once. I am dreadfully fond of her.
+
+"I have a most profound gloom over me," I said.
+
+"Why don't you try and get rid of it?" she asked.
+
+"I can't until Zeus has pity and rolls away the clouds."
+
+_April_ 21.
+
+We are sitting up in our beds which are side by side in a room on the
+top story of a boarding house in ---- Road.
+
+It is 11.30 p.m. and I am leaning over one one side lighting the oil
+lamp so as to boil the kettle to make Ovaltine before going to sleep.
+
+"Whom have I seduced?" I screamed. "You rotter, don't you know that a
+dead passion full or regrets is as terrible as a dead body full of
+worms? There, I talk literature, my boy, if you were only Bos well
+enough to take it down.... As for K----, I shall never invite him to
+dinner again. He comes to me and whines that nobody loves him, and so I
+say, 'Oh! poor lad, never mind, if you're bored, why, come to my rooms
+of an evening and hear me talk--you'll have the time of your life.' And
+now he's cheeky."
+
+H. (sipping his drink and very much preoccupied with it) replied
+abstractedly, "When you die you'll go to Hell." (I liked his Homeric
+simplicity.) "You ought to be buried in a fireproof safe."
+
+Silence.
+
+H. (returning to the attack), "I hope she turns you down."
+
+"Thank you," I said.
+
+"As for P----," he resumed, "she's double-Dutch to me."
+
+"Go to the Berlitz School," I suggested, "and learn the language."
+
+"You bally fool.... All you do is to sit there and smile like a
+sanguinary cat. Nothing I say ever rouses you. I believe if I came to
+you and said, 'Here, Professor, is a Beetle with 99 legs that has lived
+on granite in the middle of the Sahara for 40 days and 40 nights,' you'd
+simply answer, 'Yes, and that reminds me I've forgotten to blow my
+nose.'"
+
+The two pyjamaed figures shake with laughing, the light goes out and the
+sanguinary conversation continues on similar lines until we fall asleep.
+
+_April_ 26.
+
+_Two Months' Sick Leave_
+
+In a horrible panic--the last few days--I believe I am developing
+locomotor ataxy. One leg, one arm, and my speech are affected, _i.e._
+the right side and my speech centre. M---- is serious.... I hope the
+disease, whatever it is, will be sufficiently lingering to enable me to
+complete my book.
+
+R---- is a dear man. I shall not easily forget his kindness during this
+terrible week.... Can the Fates have the audacity?... Who can say?
+
+_April_ 27.
+
+I believe there can be no doubt that I have had a slight partial
+paralysis of my right side (like Dad). I stutter a little in my speech
+when excited, I cannot write properly (look at this handwriting), and my
+right leg is rocky at the knee. My head swims.
+
+It is too inconceivably horrible to be buried in the Earth in such
+splendid spring weather. Who can tell me what is in store for me?...
+Life opens to me, I catch a glimpse of a vision, and the doors clang to
+again noiselessly. It is dark. That will be my history. Am developing a
+passionate belief in my book and a fever of haste to complete it before
+the _congé définitif_.
+
+_April_ 29.
+
+Saw M---- again, who said my symptoms were alarming certainly, but he
+was sure no definite diagnosis could be made.
+
+_April_ 30.
+
+Went with M---- to see a well-known nerve specialist--Dr. H----. He
+could find no symptoms of a definite disease, tho' he asked me
+suspiciously if I had ever been with women.
+
+Ordered two months' complete rest in the country. H---- chased me round
+his consulting room with a drum-stick, tapping my nerves and cunningly
+working my reflexes. Then he tickled the soles of my feet and pricked me
+with a pin--all of which I stood like a man. He wears a soft black hat,
+looks like a Quaker, and reads the _Verhandlungen d. Gesellschaft d.
+Nervenarzten_.
+
+M---- is religious and after I had disclosed my physique to him
+yesterday (for the 99th time) he remained on his knees by the couch in
+his consulting room (after working my reflexes) for a moment or two in
+the attitude of prayer. When the Doctor prays for you--better call in
+the undertaker. My epitaph "He played Ludo well." The game anyhow
+requires moral stamina--ask H----.
+
+_May_ 5.
+
+At R----. Mugged about all day. Put on a gramophone record--then crawled
+up into a corner of the large, empty drawing room and ate my heart out.
+Heart has a bitter taste--if it's your own.
+
+_May_ 6.
+
+Sat in the "morning room" feeling ill. In the chair opposite sat Aunt
+Fanny, aged 86, knitting. I listened to the click of her needles, while
+out in the garden a thrush sang, and there was a red sunset.
+
+_May_ 8.
+
+Before I left R----, A---- [My brother] had written to Uncle enclosing
+my doctor's letter. I don't know the details except that Dr. M----
+emphasised the seriousness and yet held out hope that two months' rest
+would allay the symptoms.
+
+_May_ 11.
+
+_At Home_
+
+I made some offensive remark to H---- whom I met in the street. This set
+him off.
+
+"You blighter, I hope you marry a loose woman. May your children be all
+bandy-legged and squint-eyed, may your teeth drop out, and your toes
+have bunions," and so on in his usual lengthy commination.
+
+I turned to the third man.
+
+"Bob--this!--after all I've done for that young man! I have even gone
+out of my Way to cultivate in him a taste for poetry--until he is now,
+in fact, quite wrapped up in it--indeed, so much so, that for a time he
+was nothing but a brown paper parcel labelled Poetry."
+
+H. (doggedly): "When are you going to die?"
+
+"That Master H----," I answered menacingly, "is on the knees of the
+Gods."
+
+H.: "I shan't believe you're dead till I see your tombstone. I shall
+then say to the Sexton, 'Is he really dead, then?' and the Sexton will
+say, 'Well, 'ee's buried onny way.'"
+
+Bob was not quite in sympathy with our boisterous spirits.
+
+_May_ 15.
+
+_Gardening_
+
+Sought out H---- as he was watering his petunias in the garden. He
+informed me he was going to London on Monday.
+
+H.: "Mother is coming too."
+
+B.: "Why?"
+
+H.: "Oh! I'm buying my kit--shirts and things. I sail at the beginning
+of July."
+
+B.: "I suppose shirts are difficult to buy. You wouldn't know what to do
+with one if you had one. Your mother will lead you by the hand into a
+shop and say, 'H----, dear, this is a shirt,' and you'll reply with
+pathos, 'Mother what are the wild shirts saying?'"
+
+H.: "You're a B.F." (goes on watering).
+
+"I wonder what you'd do if you were let loose in a big garden," I began.
+
+H.: "I should be as happy as a bird. I should hop about, chirrup and lay
+eggs. You should have seen my tomato plants last year--one was as tall
+as father."
+
+B.: "Now tell me of the Gooseberry as big as Mother."
+
+Mutual execrations. Then we grinned and cackled at each other, emitting
+weird and ferocious cachinnations. Several times a day in confidential,
+serious tones--after one of these explosions--we say, "I really believe
+we're mad." You never heard such extraordinary caterwaulings. Our snappy
+conversations are interrupted with them every minute or so!
+
+_Stagnancy_
+
+A stagnant day. Lay still in the Park all day with just sufficient
+energy to observe. The Park was almost empty. Every one but me at work.
+Nothing is more dreary than a pleasure ground on workdays. There was one
+man a little way off throwing a ball to a clever dog. Behind me on the
+path, some one came along wheeling a pram. I listened in a kind of coma
+to the scrunching of the gravel in the distance a long time after the
+pram was out of sight. Far away--the tinkle of Church bells in a village
+across the river, and, in front, the man still throwing the ball to his
+clever dog.
+
+_May_ 25.
+
+_Death_
+
+... I suppose the truth is I am at last broken to the idea of Death. Once
+it terrified me and once I hated it. But now it only annoys me. Having
+lived with the Bogey for so long, and broken bread with him so often, I
+am used to his ugliness, tho' his persistent attentions bore me. Why
+doesn't he do it and have done with me? Why this deference, why does he
+pass me everything but the poison? Why am I such an unconscionably long
+time dying?
+
+What embitters me is the humiliation of having to die, to have to be
+pouring out the precious juices of my life into the dull Earth, to be no
+longer conscious of what goes on, no longer moving abroad upon the Earth
+creating attraction and repulsions, pouring out one's ego in a stream.
+To think that the women I have loved will be marrying and forget, and
+that the men I have hated will continue on their way and forget I ever
+hated them--the ignominy of being dead! What voluble talker likes his
+mouth to be stopped with earth, who relishes the idea of the carrion
+worm mining in the seat of the intellect?
+
+_May_ 29.
+
+_Renunciation_
+
+Staying at the King's Hotel, ----. Giddiness very bad. Death seems
+unavoidable. A tumour on the brain?
+
+Coming down here in the train, sat in corner of the compartment, twined
+one leg around the other, rested my elbow on the window ledge, and gazed
+out helplessly at the exuberant green fields, green woods, and green
+hedgerows. The weather was perfect, the sun blazed down.
+
+Certainly, I was rather sorry for myself at the thought of leaving it
+all. But I girded up my loins and wrapped around me for a while the
+mantle of a nobler sentiment; _i.e._ I felt sorry for the others as
+well--for the two brown carters in the road ambling along with a timber
+waggon, for the two old maids in the same compartment with me knitting
+bedsocks, for the beautiful Swallows darting over the stream, for the
+rabbit that lopped into the fern just as we passed--they too were all
+leaving it.
+
+The extent of my benign compassion startled me--it was so unexpected.
+Perhaps for the first time in my life I forgot all about my own
+miserable ambitions--I forgave the successful, the time-servers, the
+self-satisfied, the overweening, the gracious and condescending--all, in
+fact, who hitherto have been thorns in my flesh and innocently enough
+have goaded me to still fiercer efforts to win thro'. "Poor people," I
+said. "Leave them alone. Let them be happy if they can." With a
+submissive heart, I was ready to sit down in the rows of this world's
+failures and never have thought one bitter word about success. To all
+those persons who in one way or another had foiled my purposes I
+extended a pardon with Olympian gravity, and, strangest of all, I could
+have melted such frosty moral rectitudes with a genuine interest in the
+careers of my struggling contemporaries. With perfect self-abnegation, I
+held out my hand to them and wished them all "God Speed."
+
+It was a strange metempsychosis. Yet of a truth it is no use being
+niggardly over our lives. We are all of us "shelling out." And we can
+afford to be generous, for we shall all--some early, some late--be
+bankrupt in the end. For my part, I've had a short and boisterous voyage
+and shan't be sorry to get into port. I give up all my plans, all my
+hopes, all my loves and enthusiasms without remonstrance. I renounce
+all--I myself am already really dead.
+
+_May_ 30.
+
+Last night the sea was as flat as a pavement, a pretty barque with all
+her sails out to catch the smallest puff of wind--the tiniest
+inspiration--was nevertheless without motion--a painted ship on a
+tapestry of violet. H---- Hill was an immense angular mass of indigo
+blue. Even rowing boats made little progress and the water came off the
+languid paddles in syrupy clots. Everything was utterly still, the air
+thick--like cottonwool to the touch and very stifling; vitality in
+living things leaked away under a sensuous lotus influence.
+Intermittently after the darkness had come, Bullpoint Lighthouse shone
+like the wink of a lascivious eye.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Pottering about all day on the Pier and Front, listening to other
+people's talk, catching snippets of conversation--not edifying. If there
+were seven wise men in the town, I would not save it. Damn the place!
+
+_May_ 31.
+
+... I espied her first in the distance and turned my head away quickly
+and looked out to sea. A moment after, I began to turn my head round
+again slowly with the cautiousness and air of suspicion of a Tortoise
+poking its head out from underneath his shell. I was terrified to
+discover that in the meantime she had come and sat down on the seat
+immediately behind me with her back to mine. We sat like this back to
+back for some time and I enjoyed the novel experience and the tension. A
+few years ago, the bare sight of her gave me palpitation of the heart,
+and, on the first occasion that I had the courage to stop to speak, I
+felt livid and the skin on my face twitched uncontrollably.
+
+Presently I got up and walked past--in the knowledge that she must now
+be conscious of my presence after a disappearance of three years. Later
+we met face to face and I broke the ice. She's a pretty girl.... So too
+is her sister.
+
+Few people, except my barber, know how amorous I am. He has to shave my
+sinuous lips.
+
+_June_ 3.
+
+Spent many dreadful hours cogitating whether to accept their invitation
+to dinner.... I wanted to go for several reasons. I wanted to see her in
+a home-setting for the first time, and I wanted to spend the evening
+with three pretty girls. I also had the idea of displaying myself to the
+scrutinising gaze of the family as the hero of the old romance: and of
+showing Her how much I had progressed since last we met and what a
+treasure she had lost.
+
+On the other hand, I was afraid that the invitation was only a casual
+one, I feared a snuffy reception, a frosty smile and a rigid hand. Could
+I go up and partake of meat at their board, among brothers and sisters
+taking me for an ogre of a jilt, and she herself perhaps opposite me
+making me blush perpetually to recall our one-time passionate kisses,
+our love letters and our execrable verses to each other! There seemed
+dreadful possibilities in such an adventure. Yet I badly wanted to
+experience the piquant situation.
+
+At 7 p.m., half an hour before I was due, decided on strong measures. I
+entered a pub and took a stiff whisky and soda, and then set off with a
+stout heart to take the icy family by storm--and if need be live down my
+evil reputation by my amiability and urbanity!
+
+I went--and of course everything passed off in the most normal manner.
+She is a very pretty girl--like velvet. Before dinner, we walked in the
+garden--and talked only of flowers.
+
+_June_ 4.
+
+On the Hill, this morning, felt the thrill of the news of my own Death:
+I mean I imagined I heard the words,--
+
+"You've heard the news about B----?"
+
+Second Voice: "No, what?"
+
+"He's dead."
+
+Silence.
+
+Won't all this seem piffle if I don't die after all! As an artist in
+life I _ought_ to die; it is the only artistic ending --and I ought to
+die now or the Third Act will fizzle out in a long doctor's bill.
+
+_June_ 5.
+
+_A New Pile in the Pier_
+
+Watched some men put a new pile in the pier. There was all the usual
+paraphernalia of chains, pulleys, cranes, and ropes, with a massive
+wooden pile swinging over the water at the end of a long wire hawser.
+Everything was in the massive style--even the men--very powerful men,
+slow, ruminative, silent men.
+
+Nothing very relevant could be gathered from casual remarks. The
+conversation was without exception monosyllabic: "Let go," or "Stand
+fast." But by close attention to certain obscure movements of the man on
+the ladder near the water's edge, it gradually came thro' to my
+consciousness that all these powerful, silent men were up against some
+bitter difficulty. I cannot say what it was. The burly monsters were
+silent about the matter.... In fact they appeared almost
+indifferent--and tired, oh! so very tired of the whole business. The
+attitude of the man nearest me was that for all he cared the pile could
+go on swinging in mid-air to the crack of Doom.
+
+They continued slow, laborious efforts to overcome the secret
+difficulty. But these gradually slackened and finally ceased. One
+massive man after another abandoned his post in order to lean over the
+rails and gaze like a mystic into the depths of the sea. No one spoke.
+No one saw anything not even in the depths of the sea. One spat, and
+with round, sad eyes contemplated the trajectory of his brown bolus (he
+had been chewing) in its descent into the water.
+
+The foreman, an original thinker, lit a cigarette, which relieved the
+tension. Then, slowly and with majesty, he turned on his heel, and
+walked away. With the sudden eclipse of the foreman's interest, the
+incident closed. I should have been scarcely surprised to find him
+behind the Harbour-master's Office playing "Shove-ha'penny" or skittles
+with the pile still swinging in mid-air.... After all it was only a
+bloody pile.
+
+_June_ 11.
+
+_Depression_
+
+Suffering from depression.... The melancholy fit fell very suddenly. All
+the colour went out of my life, the world was dirty gray. On the way
+back to my hotel caught sight of H----, jumping into a cab, after a
+visit to S---- Sands. But the sight of him aroused no desire in me to
+shout or wave. I merely wondered how on earth he could have spent a
+happy day at such a Sandy place.
+
+On arriving at ----, sank deeper into my morass. It suffocated me to
+find the old familiar landmarks coming into view ... the holiday-makers
+along the streets how I hated them--the Peg Top Hill how desolate--all
+as before--how dull. The very fact that they were all there as before in
+the morning nauseated me. The sea-coast here is magnificent, the town is
+pretty--I know that, of course. But all looked dreary and
+cheerless--just the sort of feeling one gets on entering an empty house
+with no fire on a winter's day and nowhere to sit down.... I felt as
+lonely and desolate as a man suddenly fallen from the clouds into an
+unknown town on the Antarctic Continent built of ice and inhabited by
+Penguins. Who are these people? I asked myself irritably. There perhaps
+on the other side of the street was my own brother. But I was not even
+faintly interested and told the cabman to drive on. The spray from the
+sea fogged my spectacles and made me weary.
+
+_June_ 14.
+
+_The Restlessness o,' the Sea_
+
+The restlessness of the sea acts as a soporific on jangled nerves. You
+gaze at its incessant activities, unwillingly at first because they
+distract your attention from your own cherished worries and griefs,--but
+later you watch with complete self-abandon--it wrenches you out of
+yourself--and eventually with a kind of stupid hypnotic stare.
+
+_Dr. Spurgeon_
+
+The day has been overcast, but to-night a soft breeze sprang up and
+swept the sky clear as softly as a mop. The sun coming out shone upon a
+white sail far out in the channel, scarcely another vessel hove in
+sight. The white sail glittered like a piece of silver paper whenever
+the mainsail swung round as the vessel tacked. Its solitariness and
+whiteness in a desert of marine blue attracted the attention and held it
+till at last I could look at nothing else. The sight of it--so clean and
+white and fair--set me yearning for all the rarest and most exquisite
+things my imagination could conjure up--a beautiful girl, with fair and
+sunburnt skin, brown eyes, dark eyebrows, and small pretty feet; a
+dewdrop in a violet's face; an orange-tip butterfly swinging on an umbel
+of a flower.
+
+The sail went on twinkling and began to exert an almost moral influence
+over me. It drew out all the good in me. I longed to follow it on white
+wings--an angel I suppose--to quit this husk of a body "as raiment put
+away," and pursue Truth and Beauty across the sea to the horizon, and
+beyond the horizon up the sky itself to its last tenuous confines, no
+doubt with a still small voice summoning me and the rest of the elect to
+an Agapemone, with Dr. Spurgeon at the door distributing tracts.
+
+I can scoff like this now. But at the time my exaltation was very real.
+My soul strained in the leash. I was full of a desire for unattainable
+spiritual beauty. I wanted something. But I don't know what I want.
+
+_June_ 16.
+
+_My Sense of Touch_
+
+My sense of touch has always been morbidly acute. I like to feel a
+cigarette locked in the extreme corner of my mouth. When I remove it
+from my mouth then I hold it probably up in the fork between two
+fingers. If I am waiting for a meal I finger the cool knives and forks.
+If I am in the country I plunge my hands with outspread fingers into a
+mass of large-topped grasses, then close my fingers, crush and
+decapitate the lot.
+
+_June_ 27.
+
+_Camping Out at S---- Sands_
+
+A brilliant summer day. Up early, breakfasted, and, clad in sweater and
+trousers, walked up the sands to the boathouse with bare feet.
+
+Everything was wonderful! I strode along over the level sands infatuated
+with the sheer ability to put one leg in front of the other and walk. I
+loved to feel the muscles of my thighs working, and to swing my arms in
+rhythm with the stride. The stiff breeze had blown the sky clear, and
+was rushing through my long hair, and bellowing into each ear. I strode
+as Alexander must have done!
+
+Then I stretched my whole length out along a flat plank on the sands,
+which was as dry as a bone and warm. There was not a soul on the sands.
+Everything was bare, clean, windswept. My plank had been washed clean
+and white. The sands--3 miles of it--were hard and purified, level. My
+eye raced along in every direction--there was nothing--not a bird or a
+man--to stop it. In that immense windswept space nothing was present
+save me and the wind and the sea--a flattering moment for the egotist.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the foot of the cliffs on the return journey met an old man gathering
+sticks. As he ambled along dropping sticks into a long sack he called
+out casually, "Do you believe in Jesus Christ?" in the tone of voice in
+which one would say, "I think we shall have some rain before night."
+"Aye, aye," came the answer without hesitation from a boy lying on his
+back in the sands a few yards distant, "and that He died to save me."
+
+Life is full of surprises like this. The only other sounds I have heard
+to-day were the Herring Gull's cackle. Your own gardener will one day
+look over his rake and give you the correct chemical formula for
+carbonic acid gas. I met a postman once reading Shelley as he walked his
+rounds.
+
+_June_ 28.
+
+I am writing this by the lamp in the cabin among the sandhills waiting
+for H---- to arrive from town with provisions. I wear a pair of bags, a
+dirty sweater, and go without hat or shoes and stockings. There is a
+"Deadwood Dick" atmosphere here. I'm a sort of bronco-breaker or rancher
+off duty writing home. In a minute I haven't the slightest doubt, H----
+will gallop into the compound, tether his colt and come in "raising
+Cain" for a belly-full of red meat.... If I am going to live after all
+(touch wood) I shall go abroad and be in the open.
+
+I eat greedily, am getting very sunburnt, am growing hairy (that means
+strength!), and utter portentous oaths. If I stayed here much longer I
+should grow a tail and climb trees.
+
+After a supper of fried eggs and fried bread done to a nicety, turned in
+at ten, and both of us lay warm and comfortable in bed, smoking
+cigarettes and listening to Hoffmann's Barcarolle on the gramophone. We
+put the lamp out, and it pleased us to watch the glow of each other's
+cigarettes in the dark.... Neither of us spoke.... Went to sleep at
+midnight. Awoke at sunrise to hear an Owl still hooting, a Lark singing,
+and several Jackdaws clattering on our tin roof with their claws as they
+walked.
+
+_July_ 1.
+
+_In London Again_
+
+Returned to London very depressed. Am not so well as I was three weeks
+ago. The sight of one eye is affected, and I am haunted by the
+possibility of blindness. Then I have a numb feeling on one side of my
+face, and my right arm is less mobile.
+
+Left darling Mother in a very weak state in bed, with neuritis and a
+weak heart. She cried when I said "Goodbye," and asked me to go to
+Church as often as I could, and to read a portion of Scripture every
+day. I promised. Then she added, "For Dad's sake;" just as if I would
+not do it for her. Poor dear, she suffers a deal of pain. She does not
+know how ill I am. I have not told her.
+
+_July_ 3.
+
+Back at work. A terrible day. Thoughts of suicide--a pistol.
+
+_July_ 8.
+
+I get thro' each day with the utmost difficulty. I have to wrestle with
+every minute. Each hour is a conquest. The three quarters of an hour at
+lunch comes as a Godsend. I look forward to it all the morning, I enter
+into it with joyful relief with no thought of the dreadful moment
+impending when I must return and re-enter my room. By being wise like
+this, I manage to husband my spirits and am relatively cheerful for one
+hour in the middle of each difficult day.
+
+_July_ 9.
+
+Several times I have gone to bed and hoped I should never wake up. Life
+grows daily more impossible. To-day I put a slide underneath the
+microscope and looked at it. It was like looking at something thro' the
+wrong end of a telescope. I sat with eye glued to the ocular, so as to
+keep up a pretence of work in case some one came in. My mind was
+occupied with quite different affairs. If one is pondering on Life and
+Death, it is a terrible task to have to study Mites.
+
+_July_ 10.
+
+Am doing no work at all.... I sit motionless in my chair and beat the
+devil's tattoo with my thumbs and think, think, think in the same
+horrible circle hour after hour. I am unable to work. I haven't the
+courage to. I've lost my nerve.
+
+At five I return "home" to the Boarding-house and get more desperate.
+
+Two old maids sat down to dinner to-night, one German youth (a
+lascivious, ranting, brainless creature), a lady typist (who takes drugs
+they say), a dipsomaniac (who has monthly bouts--H---- carried him
+upstairs and put him to bed the other night), two invertebrate
+violinists who play in the Covent Garden Orchestra, a colonial lady
+engaged in a bedroom intrigue with a man who sits at my table. What are
+these people to me? I hate them all. They know it and are offended.
+
+After dinner, put on my cap and rushed out anywhere to escape. Walked to
+the end of the street, not knowing where I was going or what doing.
+Stopped and stared with fixed eyes at the traffic in Kensington Road,
+undetermined what to do with myself and unable to make up my mind
+(volitional paralysis). Turned round, walked home, and went straight to
+bed 9 p.m., anxiously looking forward to to-morrow evening when I go to
+see her again, but at the same time wondering how on earth I am to get
+through to-morrow's round before the evening comes.... This is a
+hand-to-mouth existence. My own inner life is scorching up all outside
+interests. Zoology appears as a curious thing in a Bagdad bazaar. I sit
+in my room at the B.M. and play with it; I let it trickle thro' my
+fingers and roll away like a child playing with quicksilver.
+
+_July_ 11.
+
+Over to the flat. She was looking beautiful in a black dress, with a
+white silk blouse, and a Byron collar, negligently open in front as if
+a button had come out. She said I varied: sometimes I went up in her
+estimation, sometimes down; once I went down very low. I understood her
+to say I was now UP! Alleluia!
+
+_July_ 14.
+
+... It would take too long and I am too tired to write out all the
+varying phases of this day's life--all its impressions and petty
+miseries chasing one another across my consciousness or leap-frogging
+over my chest like gleeful fiends.[1]
+
+_July_ 21.
+
+Thoroughly enjoyed the journey up to town this morning. I secretly
+gloated over the fact that the train was dashing along over the rails to
+London bearing me and all the rest of the train's company upon their
+pursuits--wealth, fame, learning. I was inebriated with the speed,
+ferocity, and dash of living.... If the train had charged into the
+buffers I should have hung my head out of the window and cheered. If a
+man had got in my way, I'd have knocked him down. The wheels of the
+carriage were singing a lusty song in which I joined.
+
+_July_ 30.
+
+... We talked of men and women, and she said she thought men were
+neither angels nor devils but just men. I said I thought women were
+either angels or devils.
+
+"I am afraid to ask you which you think me."
+
+"You needn't," I said shortly.
+
+_August_ 9.
+
+Horribly upset with news from home. Mother is really ill. The Doctor
+fears serious nerve trouble and says she will always be an invalid. This
+is awful, poor dear! It's dreadful, and yet I have a tiny wish buried at
+the bottom of my heart that she may be removed early from us rather
+than linger in pain of body and mind. Especially do I hope she may not
+live to hear any grievous news of me.... What irony that she should lose
+the use of her right arm only two years after Dad's death from
+paralysis. It is cruel for it reminds her of Dad's illness.... What,
+too, would she think if she could have heard M----'s first words to me
+yesterday on one of my periodical visits to his consulting room, "Well,
+how's the _paralysis_?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the evening went over to see her. She was wearing a black silk gown
+and looked handsome.... She is always the same sombre, fascinating,
+lissom, soft-voiced She! She herself never changes.... What am I to do?
+I cannot give her up and yet I do not altogether wish to take her to my
+heart. It distresses me to know how to proceed. I am a wily fish.
+
+_August_ 10.
+
+Sat in the gardens with her. We sat facing the sun for a while until she
+was afraid of developing freckles and turned around, deliberately
+turning her back on good King Sol.... I said it was disrespectful.
+
+"Oh! he doesn't mind," she said. "He's a dear. He kissed me and said,
+'Turn round my dear if you like.'"
+
+Isn't she tantalising?
+
+I wanted to say sarcastically, "I wonder you let him kiss you," but
+there was a danger of the remark reviving the dead.
+
+_August_ 14.
+
+I tried my best, I've sought every loophole of escape, but I am quite
+unable to avoid the melancholy fact that her thumbs are--lamentable. I
+am genuinely upset about it for I like her. No one more than I would be
+more delighted if they were otherwise.... Poor dear! how I love her!
+That's why I'm so concerned about her thumbs.
+
+_August_ 21.
+
+A wire from A-came at 11.50 saying "Darling Mother passed peacefully
+away yesterday afternoon." ... Yesterday afternoon I was writing Zoology
+and all last night I slept soundly.... It was quite sudden. Caught the
+first train home.
+
+_August_ 23.
+
+The funeral.
+
+_August_ 31.
+
+Staying at the Hotel du Guesclin at Cancale near St. Malo with my dear
+A----.
+
+This flood of new experiences has knocked my diary habit out of gear. To
+be candid, I've forgotten all about myself. I've been too engrossed in
+living to stand the strain of setting down and in cold blood writing out
+all the things seen and heard. If I once began I should blow thro' these
+pages like a whirlwind.... But what a waste of time with M. le batelier
+waiting outside with his bisque to take us mackerel fishing!...
+
+_September_ 8.
+
+Returned to Southampton yesterday. Have spent the night at Okehampton in
+Devonshire _en route_ for T---- Rectory. This morning we hatched the
+ridiculous idea of hiring two little Dartmoor ponies and riding out from
+the town. A---- rides fairly well tho' he has not been astride a beast
+for years. As for me, I cannot ride at all! Yet I had the idea that I
+could easily manage a pretty little pony with brown eyes and a long
+tail. On going out into the Inn yard, was horrified--two horses
+saddled--one a large traction beast.... I climbed on to the smaller one,
+walked him out of the yard and down the road in good style without
+accident. Once in the country, however, my animal, the fresher of the
+two, insisted on a smart trot which shook me up a good deal so that I
+hardly kept my seat. This eventually so annoyed the animal that it
+began to fidget and zigzag across the road--no doubt preparing to break
+away at a stretch gallop when once it had rid itself of the
+incomprehensible pair of legs across its back.
+
+I got off quickly and swopped horses with A----.
+
+Walked him most of the way, while A---- cantered forward and back to
+cheer me on. Ultimately however this beast, too, got sick of walking and
+began to trot. For a time I stood this well and began to rise in my
+saddle quite nicely. After two miles, horrible soreness supervened, and
+I had to get off--very carefully, with a funny feeling in my legs--even
+looked down at them to assure myself they were not bandy! In doing so,
+the horse--this traction monster--stepped on my toe and I swore.
+
+On nearing the village, L---- arrived, riding A----'s animal and holding
+his sides for laughing at me as I crawled along holding the carthorse by
+the bridle. Got on again and rode into the Rectory grounds in fine style
+like a dashing cavalier, every one jeering at me from the lawn.
+
+_September_ 28.
+
+Having lived on this planet now for the space of 24 years, I can claim
+with some cogency that I am qualified to express some sort of opinion
+about it. I therefore hereby record that I find myself in an absorbingly
+interesting place where I live, move and have my being, dominated by one
+monstrous feature above all others--the mystery of it all! Everything is
+so astonishing, my own existence so incredible!
+
+Nothing explains itself. Every one is dumb. It is like walking about at
+a masqued Ball.... Even I myself am a mystery to me. How wonderful and
+frightening that is--to feel yourself--your innermost and most
+substantial possession to be a mystery, incomprehensible. I look at
+myself in the mirror and mock at myself. On some days I am to myself as
+strange and unfamiliar as a Pterodactyl. There is a certain grim humour
+in finding myself here possessed of a perfectly arbitrary arrangement
+of lineaments when I never asked to be here and never selected my own
+attributes. To the dignity of a human being it seems like a coarse
+practical joke.... My own freakish physique is certainly a joke.
+
+_October_ 4.
+
+_In London Again_
+
+K---- comes in from her dancing class, nods to me, hugs her sister
+around the neck and says,--
+
+"Oh! you dear thing, you've got a cold."
+
+"I shouldn't do that," I remark, green-eyed, "she's in an awful wax
+to-night."
+
+She: "Oh! I don't mind K----!"
+
+(Laughter!)
+
+_October_ 8.
+
+Heard a knock at the door last night, and, thinking it was R----, I
+unbolted it and let in a tramp who at once asked God to bless me and
+crown all my sorrow with joy. An amiable fellow to be sure--so I gave
+him some coppers and he at once repeated with wonderful fervour, "God
+bless you, sir."
+
+"I wish He would," I answered, "I have a horrible cold."
+
+"Ah, I know, I gets it myself and the hinfluenza--have you had that,
+sir?"
+
+In ten minutes I should have told him all my personal history. But he
+was thirsting for a drink and went off quickly and left me with my heart
+unburthened. London is a lonely place.
+
+To-day journeyed to--where I gave evidence as an _expert_ in Economic
+Entomology at the County Court in a case concerning damage to furniture
+by mites for which I am paid £8 8s. fee and expenses and travelled first
+class. What irony! (See June 30, 1911.)
+
+_October_ 11.
+
+I may be a weak, maundering, vacillating fool but I cannot help loving
+her on one day, being indifferent the next and on some occasions even
+disliking her.... To-day she was charming, with a certain warm glossy
+perfection on her face and hair.... And she loves me--I could swear it.
+"And when a woman woos ..." etc. How difficult for a vain and lonely man
+to resist her. She tells me many times in many dainty ways that she
+loves me without so much as stopping her work to talk.
+
+I wish I were permanently and irresistibly enamoured. I want a
+_bouleversement_....
+
+_October_ 13.
+
+Went to see a Harley Street oculist about the sight of one eye, which
+has caused a lot of trouble and worry of late and continuously haunted
+me with the possibility of blindness. At times, I see men as trees
+walking and print becomes hopelessly blurred.
+
+The Specialist however is reassuring. The eye is healthy --no
+neuritis--but the adjustment muscles have been thrown out of gear by the
+nervous troubles of last spring.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Was ever man more sorely tempted? Here am I lonely and uncomfortable in
+diggings with a heart like nascent oxygen.... Shall I? Yes, but.... And
+I have neither health nor wealth.
+
+_October_ 22.
+
+_The British Museum Reading Room_
+
+I saw it for the first time to-day! Gadzooks!! This is the only fit
+ejaculation to express my amazement! It's a pagan temple with the Gods
+in the middle and all around, various obscure dark figures prostrating
+themselves in worship.
+
+For any one who is not simply a Sheep or Cow or whose nervous
+organisation is a degree more sensitive than the village blacksmith's,
+it is a besetting peril to his peace of mind to be constantly moving
+about an independent being, with loves and hates, and a separate
+identity among other separate identities, who prowl and prowl around
+like the hosts of Midian--ready to snarl, fight, seize you, bore you,
+exasperate you, to arouse all your passions, call up all the worst from
+the depths where they have lain hidden.... A day spent among my fellows
+goads me to a frenzy by the evening. I am no longer fit for human
+companionship. People string me up to concert pitch. I develop
+suspicions of one that he is prying, of another that he patronises.
+Others make me horribly anxious to stand well in their eyes and horribly
+curious to know what they think of me. Others I hate and loathe--for no
+particular reason. There is a man I am acquainted with concerning whom I
+know nothing at all. He may be Jew, Gentile, Socinian, Pre-adamite,
+Anabaptist, Rosicrucian--I don't know, and I don't care, for I hate him.
+I should like to smash his face in. I don't know why.... In the whole
+course of our tenuous acquaintance we have spoken scarce a dozen words
+to each other. Yet I should like to blow up his face with dynamite. If I
+had £200 a year private income I should be in wait for him to-morrow
+round a corner and land him one--just to indicate my economic
+independence. He would call for the police and the policeman--discerning
+creature--on arrival, would surely say, "With a face like that, I'm not
+surprised."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+R---- said to me this morning, "Well, have you heard?" with an
+exuberance of curiosity that made my blood boil--he was referring to my
+Essay still at the bar of the opinion of the Editor of the _English
+Review_. "You beast," I snapped and walked off.
+
+R---- shouted with laughter for he realizes my anger with him is only
+semi-serious: it is meant and not meant: meant, for it is justified by
+the facts; not meant, for I can't be too serious over anything _au
+fond_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of all the grim and ridiculous odds and ends of chance that Fortune has
+rolled up to my feet, my friendship with a man like B---- is the
+grimmest and most ridiculous. He is a bachelor of sixty, rather
+good-looking, of powerful physique and a faultless constitution.... His
+ignorance is colossal and he once asked whether Australia, for example,
+tho' surrounded by water, is not connected up with other land underneath
+the sea. Being himself a child in intelligence (tho' commercially
+cunning), he has a great respect for my brains. Being himself a strong
+man, he views my ill-health with much contempt. His private opinion is
+that I am in consumption. When asked once by a lady if I were not going
+to be "a great man" one day, he replied, "Yes--if he lives." I ought to
+walk six miles a day, drink a bottle of stout with my dinner, and eat
+plenty of _onions_. His belief in the curative properties of onions is
+strong as death....
+
+His system of prophylaxis may be quickly summarised,--
+
+(1) Hot whisky _ad lib_. and off to bed.
+
+(2) A woman.
+
+These two sterling preventives he has often urged upon me at the same
+time tipping out a quantity of anathemas on doctors and physic....
+
+He is a cynic. He scoffs at the medical profession, the Law, the Church,
+the Press. Every man is guilty until he is proved innocent. The Premier
+is an unscrupulous character, the Bishop a salacious humbug. No doctor
+will cure, for it pays him to keep you ill. Every clergyman puts the
+Sunday-school teacher in the family way. His mouth is permanently
+distorted by cynicism.
+
+He is vain and believes all women are in love with him. When playing the
+Gallant, he turns on a special voice, wears white spats, and looks like
+a Newmarket "Crook."
+
+"I lost my 'bus," a girl says to him. "Lost your bust," he answers, in
+broad Scotch. "I can't see that you've done that." ... His sexual career
+has been a remarkable one, he claiming to have brought many women to
+bed, and actually to have lain with women of almost all European
+nationalities, for he has been a great traveller....
+
+This man is my devoted friend!... And truth to tell I get on with him
+better than I do with most people. I like his gamey flavour, his utter
+absence of self-consciousness, and his doggy loyalty to myself--his
+weaker brother. He may be depraved in his habits, coarse in his
+language, boorish in his manners, ludicrous in the wrongness of all his
+views. But I like him just because he is so hopeless. I get on with him
+because it is so impossible to reclaim him--my missionary spirit is not
+intrigued. If he only dabbled in vice (for an experiment), if he had
+pale, watery ideas about current literature--if--to use his own
+favourite epithet--he were _genteel_, I should quarrel.
+
+_October_ 30.
+
+Having developed a passion for a piece of sculpture by R. Boeltzig
+called the Reifenwerferin--the most beautiful figure of a woman. I am
+already devoted to Rodin's "Kiss" and have a photo of it framed in my
+bedroom. Have written to Bruciani's.
+
+I suspect that my growing appreciation of the plastic art is with me
+only distilled sensuality. I enjoy my morning bath for the same reason.
+My bath is a daily baptism. I revel in the pleasure of the pain of the
+cold water. I whistle gleefully because I am clean and cool and nude
+early in the morning with the sun still low, before the day has been
+stained by clothes, dirt, pain, exasperation, death.... How I love
+myself as I rub myself down!--the cool, pink skin--I could eat it! I
+want to be all day in a cold bath to enjoy the pain of mortifying the
+flesh--it is so beautiful, so soft, so inscrutabl--if I cut out chunks
+of it, it would only bleed.
+
+_November_ 8.
+
+The other morning R---- said hyperbolically that he hadn't slept all
+night for fear that, before he had time to put an arresting hand on my
+shoulder and say "Don't," I might have gone and become "Entangled." ...
+
+... No, I'm as firm as a rock, my dear. But in imagination the affair
+was continued as follows,--
+
+She: "I am fond of you, you know."
+
+He: "I wish you wouldn't say these things to me--they're quite
+embarrassing."
+
+She: "Oh! my dear, I'm not serious, you know--you're such a vain young
+man."
+
+He: "Well, it's equally embarrassing any way."
+
+She: "Then I _am_ serious."
+
+Tears.
+
+I say: "I wish you would take me only for what I am--a blackguard with
+no good intentions, yet no very evil ones--but still a blackguard, whom
+you seem to find has engaging manners."
+
+I breathe freely hoping to have escaped this terrible temptation and
+turn to go. But she, looking up smiling thro' a curtain of wet
+eyelashes, asks,--
+
+"Won't the blackguard stop a little longer?" In a moment my earth works,
+redoubts, and bastions fall down, I rush forward impetuously into her
+arms shouting, "I _will_, I _will_, I will as long as for eternity."
+
+(Curtain.)
+
+I dramatised this little picture and much more last night before going
+to sleep when I was in a fever. I should succumb at once to the first
+really skilful coquette.
+
+_November_ 9.
+
+_Ludo_
+
+We played Ludo together this evening and she won 2s. 6d. Handsomely
+gowned in black and wearing black ornaments, she sat with me in the
+lamplight on the sofa in the Morris Room, with the Ludo board between us
+placed on a large green cushion. Her face was white as parchment and
+her hair seemed an ebony black. I lolled in the opposite corner, a thin,
+elongated youth, with fair hair all stivvered up, dressed in a
+light-brown lounge suit with a good trouser crease, a soft linen collar
+and--a red tie! Between us, on its green cushion the Ludo board with its
+brilliantly coloured squares:--all of it set before a background formed
+by the straight-backed, rectangular, settle-like sofa, with a charming
+covering which went with the rest of the scheme.
+
+"Rather decorative,"---- remarked in an audible voice, turning her head
+on one side and quizzing. I can well believe it was. _She_ looked wholly
+admirable.
+
+_November_ 21.
+
+_My Nightmare_
+
+Can't get rid of my cough. I have so many things to do--I am living in a
+fever of haste to get them done. Yet this cough hinders me. There is
+always something which drags me back from the achievement of my desires.
+It's like a nightmare; I see myself struggling violently to escape from
+a monster which draws continuously nearer, until his shadow falls across
+my path, when I begin to run and find my legs tied, etc. The only
+difference is that mine is a nightmare from which I never wake up. The
+haven of successful accomplishment remains as far off as ever. Oh! make
+haste.
+
+_November_ 29.
+
+The _English Review_ has returned my Essay!--This is a keen
+disappointment to me. "I wish I could use this, but I am really too
+full," the Editor writes. To be faintly encouraged and delicately
+rejected--why I prefer the printed form.
+
+_December_ 1.
+
+_More Irony_
+
+Renewed my cold--I do nothing all day but blow my nose, cough, and curse
+Austin Harrison.
+
+M---- thinks the lungs are all right. "There is nothing there, I think,"
+said he, this morning. Alleluia! I've had visions of consumption for
+weeks past and M---- himself has been expecting it. I always just escape:
+I always almost get something, do something, go somewhere, I have
+dabbled in a variety of diseases, but never got one downright[2]--but
+only enough to make me feel horribly unfit and very miserable without
+the consolation of being able to regard myself as the heroic victim of
+some incurable disorder. Instead of being Stevenson with tuberculosis,
+I've only been Jones with dyspepsia. So, too, in other directions, big
+events have always just missed me: by Herculean efforts I succeeded in
+giving up newspaper journalism and breaking thro' that steel
+environment--but only to become an Entomologist! I once achieved success
+in an Essay in the _Academy_, which attracted attention--a debut,
+however, that never developed. I had not quite arrived. It is always
+_not quite_.
+
+Yesterday, I received a state visit from the Editor of the _Furniture
+Record_ seeking advice on how to eradicate mites from upholstering! I
+received him ironically--but little did he understand.
+
+I shot up like a ball on a bagatelle board all steamy into zoology (my
+once beloved science) but at once rolled dead into the very low hole of
+Economic Entomology! Curse.... Why can't I either have a first-rate
+disease or be a first-rate zoologist?
+
+Now just think what a much better figure I should have cut, from the
+artistic view point, had I remained a newspaper reporter who had taught
+himself prodigious embryology out of F.M. Balfour's Textbook, who had
+cut sections of fowls' eggs and newt embryos with a hand microtome, who
+had passionately dissected out the hidden, internal anatomy of a great
+variety of animals, who could recite Wiedersheim's _Comparative Anatomy
+of Vertebrates_ and patter off the difference between a nephridium and a
+cœlomic duct without turning a hair--or the phylogenetic history (how
+absorbing!) of the kidney--pronephros, mesonephros and metanephros and
+all the ducts!... All this, over now and wasted. My hardly-won
+knowledge wrenched away is never brought into use--it lies piled up in
+my brain rotting. I could have become a first-rate comparative
+anatomist.
+
+_December_ 3.
+
+Cold better. So back at work--gauging ale at Dunfermline as R---- puts
+it.
+
+_December_ 9.
+
+In the evening found it quite impossible to stay in the house any
+longer: some vague fear drove me out. I was alarmed to be alone or to be
+still. It is my cough, I think.
+
+Had two glasses of port at the Kensington Hotel, conversed with the
+barmaid, and then came home.
+
+_December_ 10.
+
+"Don't be an old fossil," she said to me to-night, irrelevantly.
+
+"_A propos_ of what?" I inquired.
+
+"Mother, here's W---- proposing to E----! Do come," cried ----, with
+intent to confuse. I laughed heartlessly.
+
+Dear, dear, where will it all end? It's a sad business when you fall in
+love with a girl you don't like.
+
+_December_ 26.
+
+Spent a romping day at the Flat. Kissed her sister twice under the
+mistletoe, and in the evening went to a cinema. After supper made a mock
+heroic speech and left hilarious.
+
+
+[1] "The life of the Soul is different; there is nothing more changing,
+more varied, more restless ... to describe the incidents of one hour
+would require an eternity."--_Journal of Eugénie de Guérin_.
+
+[2] See entry for November 27, 1915.
+
+
+
+
+1914
+
+
+_February_ 4.
+
+... Finally and in conclusion I have fallen ill again, have again
+resumed my periodical visits to the Doctor, and am swallowing his
+rat-poison in a blind faith as aforetime. In fact, I am in London,
+leading the same solitary life, seeing no one, talking to no one, and
+daily struggling with this demon of ill-health. Can no one exorcise him?
+The sight of _both_ my eyes is affected now. Blindness?
+
+B---- continues whoring, drinking, sneering. R---- as usual, devoid of
+emotion, cold, passionless, Shavian, and self-absorbed, still titillates
+his mind with etching, sociology, music, etc., and I have at last ceased
+to bore him with what he probably calls the febrile utterances of an
+overwrought mind.
+
+Such is my world! Oh! I forgot--on the floor below me is a corpse--that
+of an old gentleman who passed away suddenly in the night. In the small
+hours, the landlady went for the Doctor over the way, but he refused to
+come, saying the old man was too aged. So the poor gentleman died
+alone--in this rat hole of a place.
+
+_February_ 7.
+
+Intending to buy my usual 3d. packet of Goldflakes, entered a
+tobacconist's in Piccadilly, but once inside surprised to find myself in
+a classy west-end establishment, which frightened my flabby nature into
+buying De Reszke's instead. I hadn't the courage to face the aristocrat
+behind the counter with a request for Goldflakes--probably not stocked.
+What would he think of me? Besides, I shrank from letting him see I was
+not perfectly well-to-do.
+
+_February_ 14.
+
+I wonder what this year has in store for me? The first twenty-four years
+of my life have hunted me up and down the keyboard--I have been right to
+the top and also to the bottom--very happy and very miserable. Yet I
+prefer the life that is a hunt and an adventure. I don't really mind
+being chased like this. I almost thrive on the excitement. If I knew
+always where to look with any degree of certainty for my next day's life
+I should yawn! "What if to-day be sweet," I say, and never look ahead.
+To me, next week is next century.
+
+The danger and uncertainty of my life make me cherish and hug closely to
+my heart various little projects that otherwise would seem unworthy. I
+work at them quickly, frantically, sometimes, afraid to whisper to a
+living soul what expectations I dare to harbour in my heart. What if
+_now_ the end be near? Not a word! Let me go onward.
+
+_February_ 15.
+
+To-day I have reviewed the situation carefully, exhaustively. I have
+peered into every aspect of my life and achievements and everything I
+have seen nauseates me. I can find no ray of comfort in anything I have
+done or in anything I might do. My life seems to have been a wilderness
+of futile endeavour. I started wrong from the very beginning. At the
+moment of my birth I was coming into the world in the wrong place and
+under wrong conditions. Why seek to overcome such colossal initial
+disadvantages? In this mood I found fault with my parentage, my
+inheritance, all my mental and physical disabilities....
+
+This must be a form of incipient insanity. Even as a boy, I can remember
+being preternaturally absorbed in myself and preternaturally
+discontented. I was accustomed to exhaust my mind by the most harassing
+cross-examinations--no Counsel at the Bar ever treated a witness more
+mercilessly. After a day of this sort of thing, when silently and
+morbidly in every spare moment, at meals, in school, or on a walk, I
+would incessantly ply the questions, "What is the ultimate value of your
+work, _cui bono_?" etc. I went to bed in the evening with a feeling of
+hopelessness and dissatisfaction--haggard with considerations and
+reconsiderations of my outlook, my talent, my character, my future. In
+bed, I tossed from side to side, mentally exhausted with my efforts to
+obtain some satisfying conclusion--always hopeful, determined to the
+last to be able to square up my little affairs before going to sleep.
+But out of this mazy, vertiginous mass of thinking no satisfaction ever
+came. _Now_, I thought--or the _next moment_--or as soon as I review and
+revise myself in this or in that aspect, I shall be content. And so I
+went on, tearing down and reforming, revising and reviewing, till
+finally from sheer exhaustion and very unhappy I fell asleep.
+
+Next morning I was all right.
+
+_February_ 20.
+
+Am feeling very unwell. My ill-health, my isolation, baulked ambitions,
+and daily breadwinning all conspire to bring me down. The idea of a
+pistol and the end of it grows on me day by day.
+
+_February_ 21.
+
+After four days of the most profound depression of spirits, bitterness,
+self-distrust, despair, I emerged from the cloud to-day quite suddenly
+(probably the arsenic and strychnine begins to take effect) and walked
+up Exhibition Road with the intention of visiting the Science Museum
+Library so as to refer to Schafer's _Essentials of Histology_ (I have to
+watch myself carefully so that I may act _at once_ as soon as the
+balance of mind is restored). In the lobby was a woman screaming as if
+in pain, with a passer-by at her side saying sternly, "What is the
+matter with you?" as if she were making herself ridiculous by suffering
+pain in public.
+
+I passed by quickly, pretending not to notice lest--after all--I should
+be done out of my _Essentials of Histology._ Even in the Library I very
+nearly let the opportunity slide by picking up a book on squaring the
+circle, the preface and introduction of which I was forced to read.
+
+_March_ 4.
+
+_The Entomological Society_
+
+There were a great many Scarabees present who exhibited to one another
+poor little pinned insects in collecting-boxes ... It was really a
+one-man show, Prof. Poulton, a man of very considerable scientific
+attainments, being present, and shouting with a raucous voice in a way
+that must have scared some of the timid, unassuming collectors of our
+country's butterflies and moths. Like a great powerful sheep-dog, he got
+up and barked, "Mendelian characters," or "Germ plasm," what time the
+obedient flock ran together and bleated a pitiful applause. I suppose,
+having frequently heard these and similar phrases fall from the lips of
+the great man at these reunions, they have come to regard them as
+symbols of a ritual which they think it pious to accept without any
+question. So every time the Professor says, "Allelomorph," or some such
+phrase, they cross themselves and never venture to ask him what the hell
+it is all about.
+
+_March_ 7.
+
+_A Scots Fir_
+
+Have been feeling very "down" of late, but yesterday I saw a fine Scots
+Fir by the roadside--tall, erect, as straight as a Parthenon pillar. The
+sight of it restored my courage. It had a tonic effect. Quite
+unconsciously I pulled my shoulders back and walked ahead with renewed
+vows never to flinch again. It is a noble tree. It has strength as a
+giant, and a giant's height, and yet kindly withal, the branches
+drooping down graciously towards you--like a kind giant extending its
+hands to a child.
+
+_March_ 22.
+
+_A Stagnant Day_
+
+Went to bed late last night so I slept on soundly till 9 a.m. Went down
+to the bath-room, but found the door was shut, so went back to my
+bedroom again, lay down and dosed a while, thinking of nothing in
+particular. Went down again--door still locked--swore--returned once
+more to my room and reclined on the bed, with door open, so that I could
+hear as soon as the bath-room door opened.... Rang the bell, and
+Miss--brought up a jug of hot water to shave with, and a tumbler of hot
+water to drink (for my dyspepsia). She, on being interrogated, said
+there was some one in the bath-room. I said I wanted a bath too, so as
+she passed on her way down she shouted, "Hurry up, Mr. Barbellion wants
+a bath as well." Her footsteps then died away as she descended lower
+into the basement, where the family lives, sleeps, and cooks our food.
+
+At length, hearing the door open, I ejaculated, "the Lord be praised,"
+rushed down, entered the bath-room and secured it from further
+intruders. I observed that Miss ---- senior had been bathing her members,
+and that the bath, tho' empty, was covered inside with patches of soap
+--unutterably black! Oh! Miss ----!
+
+Dressed leisurely and breakfasted. When the table was cleared wrote a
+portion of my essay on _Spallanzani_....
+
+Then, being giddy and tired, rang for dinner. Miss ---- laid the table.
+She looked very clean. I said, "Good-morning," and she suitably replied,
+and I went on reading, the _Winning Post_. Felt too slack to be amiable.
+Next time she came in, I said as pleasantly as I could, "Is it all
+ready?" and being informed proceeded to eat forthwith.
+
+In the afternoon, took a 'bus to Richmond. No room outside, so had to go
+inside--curse--and sit opposite a row--curse again--of fat, ugly,
+elderly women, all off to visit their married daughters, the usual
+Sunday jaunt. At Hammersmith got on the outside, and at Turnham Green
+was caught in a hail storm. Very cold all of a sudden, so got off and
+took shelter in the doorway of a shop, which was of course closed, the
+day being Sunday. Rain, wind, and hail continued for some while, as I
+gazed at the wet, almost empty street, thinking, re-thinking and
+thinking over again the same thought, viz., that the 'bus ride along
+this route was exceptionally cheap--probably because of competition with
+the trams.
+
+The next 'bus took me to Richmond. Two young girls sat in front, and
+kept looking back to know if I was "game." I looked _through_ them.
+Walked in the Park just conscious of the singing of Larks and the
+chatter of Jays, but harassed mentally by the question, "To whom shall I
+send my essay, when finished?" To shelter from the rain sat under an oak
+where four youths joined me and said, "Worse luck," and "Not half," and
+smoked cigarettes. They gossipped and giggled like girls, put their arms
+around each other's necks. At the dinner last night, they said, they had
+Duck and Tomato Soup and Beeswax ("Beesley, you know, the chap that goes
+about with Smith a lot") wore a fancy waistcoat with a dinner jacket.
+When I got up to move on, they became convulsed with laughter. I
+scowled.
+
+Had tea in the Pagoda tea-rooms, dry toast and brown bread and butter.
+Two young men opposite me were quietly playing the fool.
+
+"Hold my hand," one said audibly enough for two lovers to hear,
+comfortably settled up in a corner. Even at a side view I could see them
+kissing each other in between mouthfuls of bread and butter and jam.
+
+On rising to go, one of the two hilarious youths removed my cap and
+playfully placed it on top of the bowler which his friend was wearing.
+
+"My cap, I think," I said sharply, and the young man apologised with a
+splutter. I glared like a kill-joy of sixty.
+
+On the 'bus, coming home, thro' streets full of motor traffic and all
+available space plastered with advertisements that screamed at you, I
+espied in front three pretty girls, who gave me the "Glad Eye." One had
+a deep, musical voice, and kept on using it, one of the others a pretty
+ankle and kept on showing it.
+
+At Kew, two Italians came aboard, one of whom went out of his way to sit
+among the girls. He sat level with them, and kept turning his head
+around, giving them a sweeping glance as he did so, to shout remarks in
+Italian to his friend behind. He thought the girls were prostitutes, I
+think, and he may have been right. I was on the seat behind this man and
+for want of anything better to do, studied his face minutely. In short,
+it was fat, round, and greasy. He wore black moustachios with curly
+ends, his eyes were dark shining, bulgy, and around his neck was wrapped
+a scarf inside a dirty linen collar, as if he had a sore throat. I sat
+behind him and hated him steadily, perseveringly.
+
+At Hammersmith the three girls got off, and the bulgy-eyed Italian
+watched them go with lascivious eyes, looking over the rail and down at
+them on the pavement--still interested. I looked down too. They crossed
+the road in front of us and disappeared.
+
+Came home and here I am writing this. This is the content of to-day's
+consciousness. This is about all I have thought, said, or done, or felt.
+A stagnant day!
+
+_March_ 26.
+
+Home with a bad influenza cold. In a deplorable condition. The best I
+could do was to sit by the fire and read newspapers one by one from the
+first page to the last till the reading became mechanical. I found
+myself reading an account of the Lincoln Handicap and a column article
+on Kleptomania, while advertisements of new books were devoured with
+relish as delicacies. My mind became a morass of current Divorce Court
+News, Society Gossip--"if Sir A. goes Romeward, if Miss B. sings
+true"--and advertisements. I went on reading because I was afraid to be
+alone with myself.
+
+B---- arrived at tea and after saying he felt very "pin-eyed" swallowed
+a glass of Bols gin--the Gin of Antony Bols--and recovered sufficiently
+to inform me delightedly that he had just won £50. He told me all the
+story; meanwhile, I, tired of wiping and blowing my nose, sat in the
+dirty armchair hunched up with elbows on knees and let it drip on to the
+dirty carpet. B----, of course, noticed nothing, which was fortunate.
+
+Some kinds of damned fool would have been kindly and sympathetic. I must
+say I like old B----. I like him for his simpleness and utter absence of
+self-consciousness, which make him as charming as a child. Moreover, he
+often makes me a present of invaluable turf tips. Of course, he is a
+liar, but his lies are harmless and on his mouth like milk on an
+infant's. My own lies are much more dangerous. And when you are ill, to
+be treated as tho' you were well is good for hypochondriacs.
+
+_April_ 15.
+
+H----'s wedding. Five minutes before time, I am told I made a dramatic
+entry into the church clad in an audaciously light pair of Cashmere
+trousers, lemon-coloured gloves, with top hat and cane. The latter
+upset the respectability frightfully--it is not _comme il faut_.
+
+_April_ 16.
+
+... If I am to admit the facts they are that I eagerly anticipate love,
+look everywhere for it, long for it, am unhappy without it. She
+fascinates me--admitted. I could, if I would, surrender myself. Her
+affection makes me long to do it. I am sick of living by myself. I am
+frightened of myself. My life is miserable alone, and sometimes
+desperately miserable when I long for a little sympathy to be close at
+hand.
+
+I have often tried to persuade R---- to share a flat with me, because I
+don't really wish to marry. I struggle against the idea, I am egotist
+enough to wish to shirk the responsibilities.
+
+But then I am a ridiculously romantic creature With a wonderful ideal of
+a woman I shall never meet or if I do she won't want me--"that (wholly)
+impossible She." R---- in a flat with me would partly solve my
+difficulties. I don't love her enough for marriage. Mine must be a grand
+passion, a _bouleversement_--for I am capable of it.
+
+_April_ 17.
+
+_A Humble Confession_
+
+The Hon. ----, son and heir of Lord ----, to-day invited me to lunch
+with him in ---- Square. He's a handsome youth of twenty-five, with fair
+hair and blue eyes.... and O! such an aristocrat. Good Lord.
+
+But to continue: the receipt of so unexpected an invitation from so
+glorious a young gentleman at first gave me palpitation of the heart. I
+was so surprised that I scarcely had enough presence of mind to listen
+to the rest of his remarks and later, it was only with the greatest
+difficulty that I could recall the place where we arranged to meet. His
+remarks, too, are not easy to follow, as he talks in a stenographic,
+Alfred-Jingle-like manner, jerking out disjected members of sentences,
+and leaving you to make the best of them or else to Hell with you--by
+the Lord, I speak English, don't I? If I said, "I beg your pardon," he
+jerked again, and left me often equally unenlightened.
+
+On arriving at his home, the first thing he did was to shout down the
+stairs to the basement: "Elsie, Elsie," while I gazed with awe at a
+parcel on the hall table addressed to "Lord ----." Before lunch we sat
+in his little room and talked about ----, but I was still quite unable
+to regain my self-composure. I couldn't for the life of me forget that
+here was I lunching with Lord ----'s son, on equal terms, with mutual
+interests, that his sisters perhaps would come in directly or even the
+noble Lord himself. I felt like a scared hare. How should I address a
+peer of the realm? I kept trying to remember and every now and then for
+some unaccountable reason my mind travelled into ----shire and I saw
+Auntie C---- serving out tea and sugar over the counter of the baker's
+shop in the little village. I luxuriated in the contrast, tho' I am not
+at all inclined to be a snob.
+
+He next offered me a cigarette, which I took and lit. It was a Turkish
+cigarette with one end plugged up with cotton-wool--to absorb the
+nicotine--a, thing I've never seen before. I was so flurried at the time
+that I did not notice this and lit the wrong end. With perfect ease and
+self-possession, the Honourable One pointed out my error to me and told
+me to throw the cigarette away and have another.
+
+By this time I had completely lost my nerve. My pride, chagrin,
+excessive self-consciousness were entangling all my movements in the
+meshes of a net. Failing to tumble to the situation, I inquired, "Why
+the _wrong_ end? Is there a right and a wrong end?" Lord ----'s son and
+heir pointed out the cotton-wool end, now blackened by my match.
+
+"That didn't burn very well, did it?"
+
+I was bound to confess that it did not, and threw the smoke away under
+the impression that these wonderful cigarettes with right and wrong ends
+must be some special brand sold only to aristocrats, and at a great
+price, and possessing some secret virtue. Once again, handsome Mr. ----
+drew out his silver cigarette-case, selected a second cigarette for me,
+and held it towards me between his long delicate fingers, at the same
+time pointing out the plug at one end and making a few staccato remarks
+which I could not catch.
+
+I was still too scared to be in full possession of my faculties, and he
+apparently was too tired to be explicit to a member of the bourgeoisie,
+stumbling about his drawing-room. The cotton-wool plug only suggested to
+me some sort of a plot on the part of a dissolute scion of a noble house
+to lure me into one of his bad habits, such as smoking opium or taking
+veronal. I again prepared to light the cigarette at the wrong end.
+
+"Try the other end," repeated the young man, smiling blandly. I blushed,
+and immediately recovered my balance, and even related my knowledge of
+pipes fitted to carry similar plugs....
+
+During lunch (at which we sat alone) after sundry visits to the top of
+the stairs to shout down to the kitchen, he announced that he thought it
+wasn't last night's affair after all which was annoying the Cook (he got
+home late without a latch-key)--it was because he called her "Cook"
+instead of Mrs. Austin. He smiled serenely and decided to indulge Mrs.
+A., his indulgent attitude betraying an objectionable satisfaction with
+the security of his own unassailable social status. There was a trace of
+gratification at the little compliment secreted in the Cook's annoyance.
+She wanted Mr. Charles to call her Mrs. Austin, forsooth. Very well! and
+he smiled down on the little weakness _de haute en bas_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I enjoyed this little experience. Turning it over in my mind (as the
+housemaid says when she decides to stay on) I have come to the
+conclusion that the social parvenu is not such a vulgar fellow after
+all. He may be a bore--particularly if he sits with his finger tips
+apposed over a spherical paunch, festooned with a gold chain, and keeps
+on relating _in extenso_ how once he gummed labels on blacking bottles.
+Often enough he is a smug fellow, yet, truth to tell, we all feel a
+little interested in him. He is a traveller from an antique land, and we
+sometimes like to listen to his tales of adventure and all he has come
+through. He has traversed large territories of human experience, he has
+met strange folk and lodged in strange caravanserai. Similarly with the
+man who has come down in the world--the fool, the drunkard, the
+embezzler--he may bore us with his maudlin sympathy with himself yet his
+stories hold us. It must be a fine experience within the limits of a
+single life to traverse the whole keyboard of our social status, whether
+up or down. I should like to be a peer who grinds a barrel organ or
+(better still) a one-time organ-grinder who now lives in Park Lane. It
+must be very dull to remain stationary--once a peer always a peer.
+
+_April_ 20.
+
+Miss ---- heard me sigh to-day and asked what it might mean. "Only the
+sparks flying upward," I answered lugubriously.
+
+A blackguard is often unconscious of a good deal of his wickedness.
+Charge him with wickedness and he will deny it quite honestly--honest
+then, perhaps, for the first time in his life.
+
+An Entomologist is a large hairy man with eyebrows like antennæ.
+
+Chronic constipation has gained for me an unrivalled knowledge of all
+laxatives, aperients, purgatives and cathartic compounds. At present I
+arrange two gunpowder plots a week. It's abominable. Best literature for
+the latrine: picture puzzles.
+
+_April_ 23.
+
+_A Foolish Bird_
+
+With a menacing politeness, B---- to-day inquired of a fat curate who
+was occupying more than his fair share of a seat on top of a 'bus,--
+
+"Are you going to get up or stay where ye are, sir?"
+
+The foolish bird was sitting nearly on top of B----, mistaking a bomb
+for an egg.
+
+"I beg your pardon," replied the fat curate.
+
+B---- repeated his inquiry with more emphasis in the hideous Scotch
+brogue.
+
+"I suppose I shall stay here till I get down presently."
+
+"I don't think you will," said B----.
+
+"What do you mean?" asked the fat one in falsetto indignation.
+
+"This," B---- grunted, and shunted sideways so that the poor fellow
+almost slid on to the floor.
+
+A posse of police walking along in single file always makes me laugh. A
+single constable is a Policeman, but several in single file are
+"Coppers." I imagine every one laughs at them and I have a shrewd
+suspicion it is one of W.S. Gilbert's legacies--the _Pirates of
+Penzance_ having become part of the national Consciousness.
+
+_On Lighting Chloe's Cigarette_
+
+R---- remarked to-day that he intended writing a lyric on lighting
+Chloe's cigarette.
+
+"Ah!" I said at once appreciative, "now tell me, do you balance your
+hand--by gently (ever so gently) resting the extreme tip of your little
+finger upon her chin, and" (I was warming up) "do you hold the match
+vertically or horizontally, and do you light it in the dark or in the
+light? If you have finesse, you won't need to be told that the thing is
+to get a steady flame and the maximum of illumination upon her face to
+last over a period for as long as possible."
+
+"Chloe," replied R----, "is wearing now a charming blouse with a
+charming V-shaped opening in front. Her Aunt asked my Mother last night
+tentatively, 'How do you like Chloe's blouse? Is it too low?' My Mother
+scrutinised the dear little furry, lop-eared thing and answered
+doubtfully, 'No, Maria, I don't think so.'"
+
+"How ridiculous! Why the V is a positive signpost. My dear fellow," I
+said to R----, "I should refuse to be bluffed by those old women. Tell
+them you _know_."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Carlyle called Lamb a despicable abortion. What a crime!
+
+_May_ 2.
+
+Developed a savage fit. Up to a certain point, perhaps, but beyond that
+anxiety changes into recklessness--you simply don't care. The aperients
+are causing dyspepsia and intermittent action of the heart, which
+frightens me. After a terrifying week, during which at crises I have
+felt like dropping suddenly in the street, in the gardens, anywhere,
+from syncope, I rebelled against this humiliating fear. I pulled my
+shoulders back and walked briskly ahead along the street with a dropped
+beat every two or three steps. I laughed bitterly at it and felt it
+could stop or go on--I was at last indifferent. In a photographer's shop
+was the picture of a very beautiful woman and I stopped to look at her.
+I glowered in thro' the glass angrily and reflected how she was gazing
+out with that same expression even at the butcher's boy or the
+lamp-lighter. It embittered me to think of having to leave her to some
+other man. To me she represented all the joy of life which at any moment
+I might have had to quit for ever. Such impotence enraged me and I
+walked off up the street with a whirling heart and the thought, "I shall
+drop, I suppose, when I get up as far as that." Yet don't think I was
+alarmed. Oh! no. The iron had entered me, and I went on with cynical
+indifference waiting to be struck down.
+
+... She is a very great deal to me. Perhaps I love her very much after
+all.
+
+_May_ 3.
+
+Bad heart attack all day. Intermittency is very refined torture to one
+who wants to live very badly. Your pump goes a "dot and carry one," or
+say "misses a stitch," what time you breathe deep, begin to shake your
+friend's hand and, make a farewell speech. Then it goes on again and you
+order another pint of beer.
+
+It is a fractious animal within the cage of my thorax, and I never know
+when it is going to escape and make off with my precious life between
+its teeth. I humour and coax and soothe it, but, God wot, I haven't much
+confidence in the little beast. My thorax it appears is an intolerable
+kennel.
+
+_May_ 10.
+
+In a very cheerful mood. Pleased with myself and everybody till a
+seagull soared overhead in Kensington Gardens and aroused my vast
+capacities for envy--I wish I could fly.
+
+_May_ 24.
+
+In L---- with my brother, A----. The great man is in great form and very
+happy in his love for N----. He is a most delightful creature and I love
+him more than any one else in the wide world. There is an almost
+feminine tenderness in my love.
+
+We spent a delightful day, talking and arguing and insulting one
+another.... At these seances we take delight in anaesthetising our
+hearts for the purposes of argument, and a third person would be bound
+to suppose we were in the throes of a bitter quarrel. We pile up one
+vindictive remark on another, ingeniously seeking out--and with
+malice--weak points in each other's armour, which previous exchange of
+confidences makes it easy to find. Neither of us hesitates to make use
+of such private confessions, yet our love is so strong that we can
+afford to take any liberty. There is, in fact, a fearful joy in testing
+the strength of our affection by searching for cutting rejoinders--to
+see the effect. We rig up one another's cherished ideals like Aunt
+Sallies and then knock them down, we wax sarcastic, satirical,
+contemptuous in turn, we wave our hands animatedly (hand-waving is a
+great trick with both of us), get flushed, point with our fingers, and
+thump the table to clinch some bit of repartee. Yet it's all smoke. Our
+love is unassailable--it's like the law of gravitation, you cannot
+dispute it, it underlies our existence, it is the air we breathe.
+
+N---- is charming, and thought we were quarrelling, and therefore
+intervened on his side!
+
+_May_ 31.
+
+R---- outlined an impression he had in Naples one day during a sirocco
+of the imminence of his own death. It was evidently an isolated
+experience and bored me a little as I could have said a lot myself about
+that. When he finished I drew from my pocket an envelope with my name
+and three addresses scribbled on it to help the police in case of
+syncope as I explained. I have carried this with me for several years
+and at one time a flask of brandy.
+
+_June_ 3.
+
+Went to see the Irish Players in _The Playboy_. Sitting in front of me
+was a charming little Irish girl accompanied by a male clod with
+red-rimmed eyes like a Bull-terrier's, a sandy, bristly moustache like a
+housemaid's broom, and a face like a gluteal mass, and a horrid voice
+that crepitated rather than spoke.
+
+She was dark, with shining blue eyes, and a delightful little nose of
+the utmost import to every male who should gaze upon her. Between the
+acts, the clod hearkened to her vivacious conversation--like an
+enchanted bullock. Her vivacity was such that the tip of her nose moved
+up and down for emphasis and by the end of the Third Act I was captured
+entirely. Lucky dog, that clod!
+
+After the play this little Irish maiden caught my eye and it became a
+physical impossibility for me to check a smile--and oh! Heavens!--she
+gave me a smile in return. Precisely five seconds later, she looked
+again to see if I was still smiling--I was--and we then smiled broadly
+and openly on one another--her smile being the timorous ingénue's not
+the glad eye of a _femme de joie_. Later, on the railway platform
+whither I followed her, I caught her eye again (was ever so lucky a
+fellow?), and we got into the same carriage. But so did the clod--ah!
+dear, was ever so unlucky a fellow? Forced to occupy a seat some way
+off, but she caught me trying to see her thro' a midnight forest of
+opera hats, lace ruffles, projecting ears and fat noses.
+
+Curse! Left her at High Street Station and probably will never see her
+again. This is a second great opportunity. The first was the girl on
+Lundy Island. These two women I shall always regret. There must be so
+many delightful and interesting persons in London if only I could get at
+them.
+
+_June_ 4.
+
+Rushed off to tell R---- about my little Irish girl. Her face has been
+"shadowing" me all day.
+
+_June_ 6.
+
+A violent argument with R---- _re_ marriage. He says Love means
+appropriation, and is taking the most elaborate precautions to forfend
+passion--just as if it were a militant suffragette. Every woman he meets
+he first puts into a long quarantine, lest perchance she carries the
+germ of the infectious disease. He quotes Hippolytus and talks like a
+mediæval ascetic. Himself, I imagine, he regards as a valuable but
+brittle piece of Dresden china which must be saved from rough handling
+and left unmolested to pursue its high and dusty destiny--an old crock
+as I warned him. By refusing to plunge into life he will live long and
+be a well preserved man, but scarcely a living man--a mummy rather. I
+told him so amid much laughter.
+
+"You're a reactionary," says he.
+
+"Yes, but why should a reactionary be a naughty boy?"
+
+_June_ 7.
+
+My ironical fate lured me this evening into another discussion on
+marriage in which I had to take up a position exactly opposite to the
+one I defended yesterday against R----. In fact, I actually subverted to
+my own pressing requirements some of R----'s own arguments! The
+argument, of course, was with Her.
+
+Marriage, I urged, was an economic trap for guileless young men, and for
+my part (to give myself some necessary stiffening) I did not intend to
+enter upon any such hazardous course, even if I had the chance. Miss
+Miss ---- said I was a funk--to me who the day before had been hammering
+into R---- my principle of "Plunge and damn the consequences." I was
+informed I was an old woman afraid to go out without an umbrella, an old
+tabby cat afraid to leave the kitchen fire, etc., etc.
+
+"Yes, I _am_ afraid to go out without an umbrella," I argued formally,
+"when it's raining cats and dogs. As long as I am dry, I shall keep dry.
+As soon as I find myself caught in the rain or victimised by a passion,
+I shan't be afraid of falling in love or getting wet. It would be a
+misadventure, but I am not going in search of one."
+
+All the same the discussion was very galling, for I was acting a part.
+
+... The truth is I have philandered abominably with her. I know it. And
+now I am jibbing at the idea of marriage.... I am such an egotist, I
+want, I believe, a Princess of the Blood Royal.
+
+_June_ 9.
+
+Some days ago sent a personal advertisement to the newspaper to try to
+find my little Irish girl who lives at Notting Hill Gate. To-day they
+return me the money and advert, no doubt mistaking me for a White Slave
+trafficker. And by this time, I'm thinking, my little Irish girl can go
+to blazes. Shall spend the P.O. on sweets or monkey nuts.
+
+_June_ 10
+
+_Lupus_
+
+It is raining heavily. I have just finished dinner. In the street an
+itinerant musician is singing dolefully, "O Rest in the Lord." In my
+dirty little sitting room I begin to feel very restless, so put on my
+hat and cloak and walk down towards the Station for a paper to read. It
+is, all very dark and dismal, and I gaze with hungry eyes in thro' some
+of the windows disclosing happy comfortable interiors. At intervals
+thunder growls and lightning brightens up the deserted dirtiness of the
+Station Waiting Room. A few bits of desolate paper lie about on the
+floor, and up in one corner on a form a crossing-sweeper, motionless and
+abject, driven in from his pitch by the rain. His hands are deep in his
+trousers' pockets, and the poor devil lies with legs sprawling out and
+eyes closed: over the lower part of his face he wears a black mask to
+hide the ravages of lupus.... He seemed the last man on earth--after
+every one else had died of the plague. Not a soul in the station. Not a
+train. And this is June!
+
+_June_ 15.
+
+_Measuring Lice_
+
+Spent the day measuring the legs and antennæ of lice to two places of
+decimals!
+
+To the lay mind how fantastic this must seem! Indeed, I hope it is
+fantastic. I do not mind being thought odd. It seems almost fitting that
+an incurable dilettante like myself should earn his livelihood by
+measuring the legs of lice. I like to believe that such a bizarre manner
+of life suits my incurable frivolousness.
+
+I am a Magpie in a Bagdad bazaar, hopping about, useless, inquisitive,
+fascinated by a lot of astonishing things: _e.g._, a book on the
+quadrature of the circle, the _gabbertushed fustilugs_ passage in
+Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, names like Mr. Portwine or Mr.
+Hogsflesh, Tweezer's Alley or Pickle Herring Street, the excellent,
+conceitful sonnets of Henry Constable or Petticoat Lane on a Sunday
+morning.
+
+Colossal things such as Art, Science, etc., frighten me. I am afraid I
+should develop a thirst that would make me wish to drink the sea dry. My
+mind is a disordered miscellany. The world is too distracting. I cannot
+apply myself for long. London bewilders me. At times it is a
+phantasmagoria, an opium dream out of De Quincey.
+
+_June_ 17.
+
+Prof. Geo. Saintsbury's book on Elizabethan literature amuses me.
+_George_, there can be no doubt, is a very refined, cultivated fellow. I
+bet he don't eat periwinkles with a pin or bite his nails--and you
+should hear him refer to folk who can't read Homer in the original or
+who haven't been to Oxford--to Merton above all. He also says _non so
+che_ for _je ne sais quoi_.
+
+_June_ 26.
+
+... I placed the volume on the mantelpiece as if it were a bottle of
+physic straight from my Dispensary, and I began to expostulate and
+expound, as if she were a sick person and I the doctor.... She seemed a
+little nettled at my proselytising demeanour and gave herself out to be
+very preoccupied--or at any rate quite uninterested in my physic. I read
+the book last night at one sitting and was boiling over with it.
+
+"I fear I have come at an inconvenient time," I said, with a sardonic
+smile and strummed on the piano.... "I must really be off. Please read
+it (which sounded like 'three times a day after meals') and tell me how
+you like it. (Facetiously.) Of course don't give up your present manual
+for it, that would be foolish and unnecessary." ... I rambled
+on--disposed to be very playful.
+
+At last calmly and horribly, in a thoughtful voice she answered,--
+
+"I think you are very rude; you play the piano after I asked you to
+stop and walk about just as if it were your own home."
+
+I remained outwardly calm but inwardly was very surprised and full of
+tremors. I said after a pause,--
+
+"Very well, if you think so.... Good-bye."
+
+No answer; and I was too proud to apologise.
+
+"Good-bye," I repeated.
+
+She went on reading her novel in silence while I got as far as the
+door--very upset.
+
+"_Au revoir_."
+
+No answer.
+
+"Oh," said I, and went out of the room leaving my lady for good and all
+and I'm not sorry.
+
+In the passage met Miss ----. "What?" she said, "going already?"
+
+"Farewell," I said sepulchrally. "A very tragic farewell," which left
+her wondering.
+
+_June_ 29.
+
+_At the Albert Hall_
+
+Went with R---- to the Albert Hall to the _Empress of Ireland_ Memorial
+Concert with massed bands. We heard the Symphonie Pathétique, Chopin's
+Funeral March, Trauermarsch from Götterdammerung, the Ride of the
+Valkyries and a solemn melody from Bach.
+
+This afternoon I regard as a mountain peak in my existence. For two
+solid hours I sat like an Eagle on a rock gazing into infinity--a very
+fine sensation for a London Sparrow....
+
+I have an idea that if it were possible to assemble the sick and
+suffering day by day in the Albert Hall and keep the Orchestra going all
+the time, then the constant exposure of sick parts to such heavenly air
+vibrations would ultimately restore to them the lost rhythm of health.
+Surely, even a single exposure to--say Beethoven's Fifth Symphony--must
+result in some permanent reconstitution of ourselves body and soul. No
+one can be quite the same after a Beethoven Symphony has streamed thro'
+him.
+
+If one could _develop_ a human soul like a negative the effect I should
+say could be seen.... I'll tell you what I wish they'd do--seriously:
+divide up the arena into a series of cubicles where, unobserved and in
+perfect privacy, a man could execute all the various movements of his
+body and limbs which the music prompts. It would be such a delicious
+self-indulgence and it's torture to be jammed into a seat where you
+can't even tap one foot or wave an arm.
+
+The concert restored my moral health. I came away in love with people I
+was hating before and full of compassion for others I usually condemn. A
+feeling of immeasurable well being--a jolly bonhomie enveloped me like
+incandescent light. At the close when we stood up to sing the National
+Anthem we all felt a genuine spirit of camaraderie. Just as when Kings
+die, we were silent musing upon the common fate, and when the time came
+to separate we were loath to go our several ways, for we were comrades
+who together had come thro' a great experience. For my part I wanted to
+shake hands all round--happy travellers, now alas! at the journey's end
+and never perhaps to meet again--never.
+
+R---- and I walked up thro' Kensington Gardens like two young Gods!
+
+"I even like that bloody thing," I said, pointing to the Albert
+Memorial.
+
+We pointed out pretty girls to one another, watched the children play
+ring-a-ring-a-roses on the grass. We laughed exultingly at the thought
+of our dismal colleagues ... tho' I said (as before!) I loved 'em
+all--God bless 'em--even old ----. R---- said it was nothing short of
+insolence on their part to have neglected the opportunity of coming to
+the Concert.
+
+Later on, an old gaffer up from the country stopped us to ask the way to
+Rotten Row--I overwhelmed him with directions and happy descriptive
+details. I felt like walking with him and showing him what a wonderful
+place the world is.
+
+After separating from R---- very reluctantly--it was horrible to be left
+alone in such high spirits, walked up towards the Round Pond, and caught
+myself avoiding the shadows of the trees--so as to be every moment out
+in the blazing sun. I scoffed inwardly at the timorousness of pale,
+anæmic folk whom I passed hiding in the shadows of the elms.
+
+At the Round Pond, came across a Bulldog who was biting out great chunks
+of water and in luxuriant waste-fulness letting it drool out again from
+each corner of his mouth. I watched this old fellow greedily (it was
+very hot), as well pleased with him and his liquid "chops" as with
+anything I saw, unless it were a girl and a man lying full length along
+the grass and kissing beneath a sunshade. I smiled; she saw me, and
+smiled, too, in return, and then fell to kissing again.
+
+_June_ 30.
+
+_Dinosaurs_
+
+There are books which are Dinosaurs--Sir Walter Raleigh's _History of
+the World_, Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_. There are
+men who are Dinosaurs--Balzac completing his Human Comedy, Napoleon,
+Roosevelt. I like them all. I like express trains and motor lorries. I
+enjoy watching an iron girder swinging in the air or great cubes of ice
+caught up between iron pincers. I must always stop and watch these
+things. I like everything that is swift or immense: London, lightning,
+Popocatepetl. I enjoy the smell of tar, of coal, of fried fish, or a
+brass band playing a Liszt Rhapsody. And why should those foolish Mænads
+shout Women's Rights just because they burn down a church? All bonfires
+are delectable. Civilisation and top hats bore me. My own life is like a
+tame rabbit's. If only I had a long tail to lash it in feline rage! I
+would return to Nature--I could almost return to Chaos. There are times
+when I feel so dour I would wreck the universe if I could.[1]
+
+(1917: I think after three years of Armageddon I feel quite ready to go
+back to top hats and civilisation.)
+
+_July_ 8.
+
+_Sunset in Kensington Gardens_
+
+The instinct for worship occurs rhythmically--at morning and evening.
+This is natural, for twice a day at sunrise and sunset--however
+work-sodden we may be, however hypnotised by daily routine--our natural
+impulse is (provided we are awake) to look to the horizon at the sun and
+stand a moment with mute lips. During the course of the day or night, we
+are too occupied or asleep--but sunrise is the great hour of the
+departure and sunset is the arrival at the end. Everything puts on a
+mysterious appearance--to-night the tops of the elms seemed
+super-naturally high and, pushing up into the sky, had secret communion
+with the clouds; the clouds seemed waiting for a ceremony, a way had
+been prepared by the tapissier, a moment of suspense while one cloud
+stretched to another like courtiers in whispered conversation; a rumour
+of the approach; then slowly the news came thro' that the sun had
+arrived for immediate departure.
+
+_July_ 14.
+
+Have finished my essay. But am written out--obviously. To-night I
+struggled with another, and spent two hours sucking the end of my pen.
+But after painfully mountainous parturition, all I brought forth were
+the two ridiculous mice of one meretricious trope and one grammatical
+solecism. I can sometimes sit before a sheet of paper, pen in hand,
+unable to produce a word.
+
+_July_ 19.
+
+For a walk with R---- in the country, calling for tea at his Uncle's
+house at ----. Played clock golf and made the acquaintance of Miss ----,
+a tall, statuesque lady, with golden hair, as graceful as an antelope
+and very comely, her two dear little feet clad in white shoes peeping
+out (as R---- said) like two white mice one after the other as she
+moved across the lawn.
+
+Coming home I said to R---- histrionically, "Some golden-haired little
+boy will some day rest his head upon her bosom, beautiful in line and
+depth, all unconscious of his luck or of his part in a beautiful
+picture--would that I were the father to make that group a _fait
+accompli_" R----, with meticulous accuracy, always refers to her as
+"that elegant virgin."
+
+_July_ 25.
+
+While sketching under Hammersmith Bridge yesterday, R---- heard a
+whistle, and, looking up, saw a charming "young thing" leaning over the
+Bridge parapet smiling like the blessed Damozel out of Heaven.
+
+"Come down," he cried.
+
+She did, and they discussed pictures while he painted. Later he walked
+with her to the Broadway, saw her into a 'bus and said "Good-bye,"
+without so much as an exchange of names.
+
+"Even if she _were_ a whore," I said, "it's a pity your curiosity was so
+sluggish. You should have seen her home, even if you did not go home
+with her. Young man, you preferred to let go of authentic life at
+Hammersmith Broadway, so as to return at once to your precious
+water-colour painting."
+
+"Perhaps," replied he enigmatically.
+
+"Whatever you do, if ever you meet her again," I rejoined, "don't
+introduce her to that abominable ----. He is abominably handsome, and I
+hate him for it. To all his other distinctions he is welcome--parentage,
+money, success, but I can never forgive him his good looks and the
+inevitable marriage to some beautiful fair-skinned woman."
+
+R. (reflectively): "Up to now, I was inclined to think that envy as a
+_passion_ did not exist."
+
+"Have you none?"
+
+"Not much," he answered, and I believe it.
+
+"Smug wretch, then. All I can say is, I may have instincts and passions
+but I am not a pale water-colour artist.... What's the matter with you,"
+I foamed, "is that you like pictures. If I showed you a real woman, you
+would exclaim contemplatively, 'How lovely;' then putting out one hand
+to touch her, unsuspectingly, you'd scream aghast, 'Oh! it's alive, I
+hear it ticking.' 'Yes, my boy,' I answer severely with a flourish,
+'_That_ is a woman's heart.'"
+
+R---- exploded with laughter and then said, "A truce to your desire for
+more life, for actual men and women. ... I know this that last night I
+would not have exchanged the quiet armchair reading the last chapter of
+Dostoieffsky's _The Possessed_ for a Balaclava Charge."
+
+"A matter of temperament, I suppose," I reflected, in cold detachment.
+"You see, I belong to the raw meat school. _You_ prefer life cooked for
+you in a book. You prefer the confectioner's shop to cutting down the
+wheat with your own scythe."
+
+_July_ 26.
+
+The B.M. is a ghastly hole. They will give me none of the apparatus I
+require. If you ask the Trustees for a thousand pounds for the
+propagation of the Gospel in foreign parts they say, "Yes." If you ask
+for twenty pounds for a new microscope they say, "No, but we'll cut off
+your nose with a big pair of scissors."
+
+_July_ 27.
+
+To a pedantic prosy little old maid who was working in my room this
+morning, I exclaimed,--
+
+"I'd sooner make a good dissection than go to a Lord Mayor's Banquet.
+Turtle Soup ain't in it."
+
+She was uninspired, and said, "Oom," and went on pinning insects. Then
+more brightly, and with great punctilio in the pronunciation of her
+words, having cleared her throat and drawn herself up with great
+deliberation to deliver herself of a remark, she volunteered,--
+
+"I whish I had nevah taken up such a brittle grooop as the Stones
+(Stoneflies). One dare not loook at a Stone."
+
+Poor dear little old maid. This was my turn to say "Oom."
+
+"Pretty dismal work," I added ambiguously. Then with malice aforethought
+I whistled a Harry Lauder tune, asked her if she had ever heard Willie
+Solar sing, "You made me love you," and then absent-mindedly and in
+succession inquired,--
+
+"What's become of all the gold?"
+
+"What's become of Waring?"
+
+"What shall I sing when all is sung?"
+
+To which several categorical interrogations she ventured no reply, but
+presently in the usual voice,--
+
+"I have placed an Agrionine in this drawer for security and, now I want
+it, cannot find it."
+
+"Life is like that," I said. "I never can find my Agrionines!"
+
+_August_ 1.
+
+All Europe is mobilising.
+
+_August_ 2.
+
+Will England join in?
+
+_August_ 12.
+
+We all await the result of a battle between two millions of men. The
+tension makes me feel physically sick.
+
+_August_ 21--_August_ 24.
+
+In bed with a fever. I never visit the flat now, but her mother kindly
+came over to see me.
+
+_September_ 25.
+
+[Living now in rooms alone.]
+
+I have--since my return from Cornwall--placed all my journals in a
+specially made cabinet. R---- came to dinner and after a glass or so of
+Beaune and a cigarette, I open my "coffin"[2] (it is a long box with a
+brass handle at each end), and with some show of deliberation select a
+volume to read to him, drawing it from its division with lavish
+punctiliousness, and inquiring with an oily voice, "A little of 1912?"
+as if we were trying wines. R---- grins at the little farce and so
+encourages me.
+
+_September_ 26.
+
+Doctor's Consulting Rooms--my life has been spent in them! Medical
+specialists--Harley Street men--I have seen four and all to no purpose.
+M---- wrote me the other day,--
+
+"Come along and see me on Tuesday; some day I dare say we shall find
+something we can patch."
+
+He regards me with the most obvious commiseration and always when I come
+away after a visit he shakes me warmly by the hand and says, "Good-bye,
+old man, and good luck." More luck than the pharmacopœia.
+
+My life has always been a continuous struggle with ill-health and
+ambition, and I have mastered neither. I try to reassure myself that
+this accursed ill-health will not affect my career. I keep flogging my
+will in the hope of winning thro' in the end. Yet at the back of my mind
+there is the great improbability that I shall ever live long enough to
+realise myself. For a long time past my hope has simply been to last
+long enough to convince others of what I might have done--had I lived.
+That will be something. But even to do that I will not allow that I have
+overmuch time. I have never at any time lived with any sense of
+security. I have never felt permanently settled in this life--nothing
+more than a shadowy _locum tenens_, a wraith, a festoon of mist likely
+to disappear any moment.
+
+At times, when I am vividly conscious of the insecurity of my tenure
+here, my desires enter on a mad race to obtain fulfilment before it is
+too late ... and as fulfilment recedes ambition obsesses me the more. I
+am daily occupied in calculating with my ill-health: trying to
+circumvent it, to carry on in spite of all. I conquer each day. Every
+week is a victory. I am always surprised that my health or will has not
+collapsed, that, by Jove! I am still working and still living.
+
+One day it looks like appendicitis, another stoppage, another threatened
+blindness, or I develop a cough and am menaced with consumption. So I go
+on in a hurricane of bad dreams. I struggle like Laocoon with the
+serpents--the serpents of nervous depression that press around the heart
+tighter than I care to admit. I must use every kind of blandishment to
+convince myself that my life and my work are worth while. Frequently I
+must smother and kill (and it calls for prompt action) the shrill voice
+that cries from the tiniest corner of my heart, "Are you quite sure you
+are such an important fellow as you imagine?" Or I fret over the
+condition of my brain, finding that I forget what I read, I lose in
+acuteness of my perceptions. My brain is a tumefaction. But I won't give
+in. I go on trying to recollect what I have forgotten, I harry my brain
+all day to recall a word or name, I attack other folk importunately. I
+write things down so as to look them up in reference books--I am always
+looking up the things I remember I have forgotten....
+
+There is another struggle, too, that often engrosses all my energies....
+It is a horrible thing that with so large an ambition, so great a love
+of life, I should nevertheless court disaster like this. Truly Sir
+Thomas Browne you say, "Every man is his own Atropos."
+
+In short, I lead an unfathomably miserable existence in this dark, gray
+street, in these drab, dirty rooms--miserable in its emptiness of home,
+love, human society. Now that I never visit the flat, I visit about two
+houses in London--the Doctor's and R----'s Hotel. I walk along the
+streets and stare in the windows of private houses, hungry for a little
+society. It creates in me a gnawing, rancorous discontent to be seeing
+people everywhere in London--millions of them--and then to realise my
+own ridiculously circumscribed knowledge of them. I am passionately
+eager to have acquaintances, to possess at least a few friends. If I die
+to-morrow, how many persons shall I have talked to? or how many men and
+women shall I have known? A few maiden aunts and one or two old fossils.
+I am burning to meet real live men, I have masses of mental stuff I am
+anxious to unload. But I am ignorant of people as of countries and live
+in celestial isolation.
+
+This, I fear, reads like a wail of self-commiseration. But I am trying
+to give myself the pleasure of describing myself at this period
+truthfully, to make a bid at least for some posthumous sympathy.
+Therefore it shall be told that I who am capable of passionate love am
+sexually starved, and endure the pangs of a fiendish solitude in rooms,
+with an ugly landlady's face when ... I despair of ever finding a woman
+to _love_. I never meet women of my own class, and am unprepossessing in
+appearance and yet I fancy that once my reserve is melted I am not
+without attractions. "He grows on you," a girl said of me once. But I am
+hypercritical and hyperfastidious. I want too much.... I search daily in
+the streets with a starved and hungry look. What a horrible and powerful
+and hateful thing this love instinct is! I hate it, hate it, hate it. It
+will not let me rest. I wish I were a eunuch.
+
+"There's a beautiful young thing," R---- and I say to one another
+sardonically, hoping thereby to conceal the canker within.
+
+I could gnash my teeth and weep in anger--baulked, frustrated as I am at
+almost every turn of life--in my profession, in my literary efforts, and
+in my love of man and woman kind. I would utter a whole commination
+service in my present state of mind.
+
+_October_ 7.
+
+To me woman is _the_ wonderful fact of existence. If there be any next
+world and it be as I hope it is, a jolly gossiping place, with people
+standing around the mantelpiece and discussing their earthly
+experiences, I shall thump my fist on the table as my friends turn to me
+on entering and exclaim in a loud voice, "WOMAN."
+
+_October_ 11.
+
+Since I grew up I have wept three times. The first time they were tears
+of exasperation. Dad and I were sitting down side by side after a wordy
+combat in which he had remained adamant and I was forced both by
+conscience and argument to give in, to relinquish my dissections, and go
+off to some inquest on a drowning fatality. The second time was when
+Mother died, and the third was _to-day._ But I am calm now. To-day they
+were tears of remorse....
+
+On occasion bald confession in this Journal is sweet for the soul and
+strengthens it. It gives me a kind of false backbone to communicate my
+secrets: for I am determined that some day some one shall know. If God
+really intervenes in our affairs, here is an opportunity. Let Him save
+me. I challenge Him to save me from perishing in this ditch.... It is
+not often I am cornered into praying but I did this morning, for I feel
+defeated this day, and almost inarticulate in my misery.
+
+Nietzsche in a newspaper I read to-day: "For myself I have felt
+exceptionally blest having Hell's phantoms inside me to thrust at in the
+dark, internal enemies to dominate till I felt myself an ecstatic
+victor, wrenching at last good triumphant joys thro' the bars of my own
+sickness and weakness--joys with which your notions of happiness, poor
+sleek smug creatures, cannot compare! You must carry a chaos inside you
+to give birth to a dancing star."
+
+But Nietzsche is no consolation to a man who has once been weak enough
+to be brought to his knees. There I am and there I think I have prayed a
+little somehow to-day. But it's all in desperation, not in faith.
+Internal chaos I have, but no dancing star. Dancing stars are the
+consolation of genius.
+
+_October_ 12.
+
+Am better to-day. My better self is convinced that it is silly and
+small-minded to think so much about my own puny destiny--especially at
+times like these when--God love us all--there is a column of casualties
+each day. The great thing to be thankful for is that I am _alive_ and
+alive _now_, that I was alive _yesterday_, and even may be to-morrow.
+Surely that is thrilling enough. What, then, have I to complain of? I'm
+a lucky dog to be alive at all. My plight is bad, but there are others
+in a worse one. I'm going to be brave and fight on the side of
+Nietzsche. Who knows but that one day the dancing star may yet be born!
+
+_October_ 13.
+
+Spent the evening in my lodgings struggling with my will. Too flabby to
+work, disinclined to read, a dreadful vague unrest possessing me. I
+couldn't sit still in my chair, so walked around the table continuously
+like a squirrel in a cage. I wanted to be going out somewhere, talking
+to some one, to be among human beings.
+
+Many an evening during the past few months, I have got up and gone down
+the road to look across at the windows of the flat, to see if there were
+a red light behind the curtains, and, if so, wonder if she were there,
+and how she was. My pride would never allow me to visit there again on
+my own initiative. K---- has managed to bring about a rapprochement but
+I go very seldom. Pride again.
+
+I wanted to do so to-night. I thought I would just go down the road to
+look up at the windows. That seemed to be some comfort. Why do I wish to
+do this? I do not know. From a mere inspection one would say that I am
+in love. But remember I am also ill. Three times to-night I nearly put
+on my boots and went down to have a look up! What ridiculous weakness!
+Yet this room can be a frightful prison. Shall I? I cannot decide. I see
+her figure constantly before me--gentle, graceful, calm, stretching
+forth both hands and to me....
+
+Seized a pack of cards and played Patience and went on playing Patience
+because I was afraid to stop. Given a weak constitution, a great
+ambition, an amorous nature, and at the same time a very fastidious one,
+I might have known I was in for trouble.
+
+_October_ 14.
+
+_Marie Bashkirtseff_
+
+Some time ago I noticed a quotation from one, Marie Bashkirtseff in a
+book on Strindberg, and was struck with the likeness to a sentiment of
+my own. Who _are_ you? I wondered.
+
+This evening went to the Library and read about her in Mathilde Blind's
+introductory essay to her Journal. I am simply astounded. It would be
+difficult in all the world's history to discover any two persons with
+temperaments so alike. She is the "very spit of me "! I devoured
+Mathilde Blind's pages more and more astonished. We are identical! Oh,
+Marie Bashkirtseff! how we should have hated one another! She feels as I
+feel. We have the same self-absorption, the same vanity and corroding
+ambition. She is impressionable, volatile, passionate--ill! So am I. Her
+journal is my journal. All mine is stale reading now. She has written
+down all my thoughts and forestalled me! Already I have found some
+heart-rending parallels. To think I am only a replica: how humiliating
+for a human being to find himself merely a duplicate of another. Is
+there anything in the transmigration of souls? She died in 1886. I was
+born in 1889.
+
+_October_ 15.
+
+A man is always looking at himself in the mirror if for no other reason
+than to tie his tie and brush his hair. What does he think of his face?
+He must have private opinions. But it is usually considered a little out
+of taste to entertain opinions about one's personal appearance.
+
+As for myself, some mirrors do me down pretty well, others depress me!
+I am bound to confess I am biassed in favour of the friendly mirror. I
+am not handsome, but I look interesting--I hope distinguished. My eyes
+are deep-set ... but my worst moments are when the barber combs my hair
+right down over my forehead, or when I see a really handsome man in Hyde
+Park. Such occasions direct my gaze reflexly, and doubt like a thief in
+the night forces the back door!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To-day, M---- sent me dancing mad by suggesting that I copied R---- in
+my manner of speech and opinions.
+
+Now R---- has a damned pervasive way of conducting himself--for all the
+world as if he were a high official of the Foreign Office. I, on the
+contrary, am shy, self-conscious, easily overlooked, and this makes me
+writhe. As we are inseparable friends--everybody assumes that I am his
+tacky-lacky, a kind of appoggiatura to his big note. He, they suppose,
+is my guide, philosopher, and Great Maecenas--Oxford befriending the
+proletariat. The thought of it makes me sick--that any one should
+believe I imbibe his ideas, echo his conceits, and even ape his gestures
+and manner of voice.
+
+"Lost yourself?" inquired a despicable creature the other morning as I
+came out of R----'s room after finding him out. I could have shot him
+dead! ... As for ---- more than one person thinks that he alone is the
+brilliant author until at last he himself has got into the way of
+thinking it.
+
+"It makes me hate you like mad," I said to him to-day. "How can I
+confront these people with the naked truth?" R---- chuckled
+complacently.
+
+"If I deny your alleged supremacy, as I did this morning, or if
+suddenly, in a fit of spleen, I'm induced to declare that I loathe you
+(as I sometimes do)"--(more chuckles) "that your breath stinks, your
+eyes bulge, that you have swollen jugulars and a platter face: they will
+think I am either jealous or insincere.... To be your Echo tho'!--my
+God!" I spat. We then grinned at one another, and I, being bored, went
+to the lavatory and read the newspaper secure from interruption.
+
+_Resignation_
+
+In the Tube, a young widow came in and sat in front of me--pale-faced,
+grief-stricken, demure--a sort of "Thy Will be Done" look. The
+adaptability of human beings has something in it that seems horrible. It
+is dreadful to think how we have all accommodated ourselves to this War.
+Christian resignation is a feeble thing. Why won't this demure widow
+with a loud voice blaspheme against this iniquitous world that permits
+this iniquitous war?
+
+_October_ 21.
+
+I myself (licking a stamp): "The taste of gum is really very nice."
+
+R.: "I hate it."
+
+I: "My dear fellow" (surprised and entreating), "envelope gum is simply
+delicious."
+
+R.: "I never lick stamps--it's dangerous--microbes."
+
+I: "I always do: I shall buy a bookful and go away to the seaside with
+them."
+
+R.: "Yes, you'll need to."
+
+(Laughter.)
+
+Thus gaily and jauntily we went on to discuss wines, whiskies, and
+Worthington's, and I rounded it up in a typical cock-eyed manner,--
+
+"Ah! yes, it's only when the day is over that the day really
+begins--what?"
+
+_October_ 23.
+
+I expressed to R---- to-day my admiration for the exploit of the brave
+and successful Submarine Commander Max Kennedy Horton. (Name for you!)
+R---- was rather cold. "His exploits," said this bloody fool, "involve
+loss of life and scarcely make me deliriously eulogistic."
+
+I cleared my throat and began,--
+
+"Your precious sociology again--it will be the ruin of your career as an
+artist. It is so interwoven into the fibre of your brain that you never
+see anything except in relation to its State value. You are afraid to
+approve of a lying, thieving rogue, however delightful a rascal he may
+be, for fear of what Karl Marx might say.... You'll soon be drawing
+landscapes with taxpayers in the foreground, or we shall get a picture
+of Ben Nevis with Keir Hardie on the summit." And so on to our own
+infinite mutual amusement.
+
+The _English Review_ returns my Essay. I am getting simply furious with
+an ambition I am unable to satisfy, among beautiful London women I
+cannot get to know, and in ill-health that I cannot cure. Shall I ever
+find any one? Shall I ever be really well? My one solace is that I do
+not submit, it infuriates me, I resent it; I will never be resigned and
+milky. I will keep my claws sharp and fight to the end.
+
+_October_ 24.
+
+Went to Mark Lane by train, then walked over the Tower Bridge, and back
+along Lower Thames Street to London Bridge, up to Whitechapel, St.
+Paul's, Fleet Street, and Charing Cross, and so home.
+
+Near Reilly's Tavern, I saw a pavement artist who had drawn a loaf with
+the inscription in both French and English: "This is easy to draw but
+hard to earn." A baby's funeral trotted briskly over the Tower Bridge
+among Pink's jam waggons, carts carrying any goods from lead pencils and
+matches to bales of cotton and chests of tea.
+
+In the St. Catherine's Way there is one part like a deep railway
+cutting, the whole of one side for a long way, consisting of the
+brickwall of a very tall warehouse with no windows in it and beautifully
+curved and producing a wonderful effect. Walked past great blocks of
+warehouses and business establishments--a wonderful sight; and
+everywhere bacon factors, coffee roasters, merchants. On London Bridge,
+paused to feed the sea-gulls and looked down at the stevedores. Outside
+Billingsgate Market was a blackboard on an easel--for market prices--but
+instead some one had drawn an enormously enlarged chalk picture of a
+cat's rear and tail with anatomical details.
+
+In Aldgate, stopped to inspect a street stall containing popular
+literature--one brochure entitled _Suspended for Life_ to indicate the
+terrible punishment meted out to ----, a League footballer. The
+frontispiece enough to make a lump come in the juveniles' throats!
+Another stall held domestic utensils with an intimation, "Anything on
+this stall _lent_ for id." A newsvendor I heard exclaim to a
+fellow-tradesman in the same line of business,--
+
+"They come and look at your bloody plakaard and then passe on."
+
+Loitered at a dirty little Fleet Street bookshop where Paul de Koch's
+_The Lady with the Three Pairs of Stays_ was displayed prominently
+beside a picture of Oscar Wilde.
+
+In Fleet Street, you exchange the Whitechapel sausage restaurants for
+Taverns with "snacks at the bar," and the chestnut roasters, with their
+buckets of red-hot coals, for Grub Street camp followers, selling
+_L'Indépendance Belge_ or pamphlets entitled, _Why We Went to War_.
+
+In the Strand you may buy war maps, buttonhole flags, etc., etc. I
+bought a penny stud. One shop was turned into a shooting gallery at
+three shots a penny where the Inner Temple Barristers in between the
+case for the defence and the case for the prosecution could come and
+keep their eye in against the time the Germans come.
+
+Outside Charing Cross Station I saw a good-looking, well-dressed woman
+in mourning clothes, grinding a barrel organ....
+
+Returned to the Library and read the _Dublin Review_ (article on Samuel
+Butler), _North American Review_(one on Henry James) and dined at seven.
+After dinner, read: _Evening Standard, Saturday Westminster_, and the
+_New Statesman_. Smoked six cigarettes and went to bed. To-morrow Fifth
+Symphony of Beethoven.
+
+_October_ 25.
+
+_Too Late_
+
+Yesterday's ramble has left me very sore in spirit. London was spread
+out before me, a vast campagne. But I felt too physically tired to
+explore. I could just amble along--a spectator merely--and automatically
+register impressions. Think of the misery of that! I want to see the
+Docks and Dockland, to enter East End public-houses and opium-dens, to
+speak to Chinamen and Lascars: I want a first-rate, first-hand knowledge
+of London, of London men, London women. I was tingling with anticipation
+yesterday and then I grew tired and fretful and morose, crawled back
+like a weevil into my nut. By 6.30 I was in a Library reading the
+_Dublin Review_!
+
+What a young fool I was to neglect those priceless opportunities of
+studying and tasting life and character in North ----, at Borough
+Council meetings, Boards of Guardians, and electioneering campaigns--not
+to mention inquests, police courts, and country fairs. Instead of
+appraising all these precious and genuine pieces of experience at their
+true value, my diary and my mind were occupied only with--Zoology, if
+you please. I ignored my exquisite chances, I ramped around, fuming and
+fretting, full of contempt for my circumscribed existence, and impatient
+as only a youth can be. What I shall never forgive myself is my present
+inability to recall that life, so that instead of being able now to push
+my chair back and entertain myself and others with descriptions of some
+of those antique and incredible happenings, my memory is rigid and
+formal: I remember only a few names and one or two isolated events. All
+that time is just as if it had never been. My recollections form only an
+indefinite smudge--odd Town Clerks, Town Criers (at least five of them
+in wonderful garb), policemen (I poached with one), ploughing match
+dinners (platters of roast beef and boiled potatoes and I, bespectacled
+student of Zoology, sitting uncomfortably among valiant trenchermen
+after their day's ploughing), election meetings in remote Exmoor
+villages (and those wonderful Inns where I had to spend the night!)--all
+are gone--too remote to bear recital--yet just sufficiently clear to
+harass the mind in my constant endeavours to raise them all again from
+the dead in my consciousness. I hate to think it is lost; that my youth
+is buried--a cemetery without even headstones. To an inquest on a
+drowned sailor--disclosing some thrilling story of the wild seas off the
+coast--with a pitiful myopia--I preferred Wiedersheim's _Comparative
+Anatomy of Vertebrates_. I used to carry Dr. Smith Woodward's
+_Paleontology_ with me to a Board of Guardians meeting, mingling
+_Pariasaurus_ and Holoptychians with tenders for repairs and reports
+from the Master. Now I take Keats or Tschekov to the Museum!
+
+London certainly lies before me. Certainly I am alive at last. Yet now
+my energy is gone. It is too late. I am ill and tired. It costs me
+infinite discomfort to write this entry, all the skin of my right hand
+is permanently "pins and needles" and in the finger tips I have lost all
+sense of touch. The sight of my right eye is also very bad and sometimes
+I can scarcely read print with it, etc., etc. But why should I go on?
+
+A trance-like condition supervenes in a semi-invalid forced to live in
+almost complete social isolation in a great whirling city like London.
+Days of routine follow each other as swiftly as the weaver's shuttle and
+numb the spirit and turn palpitating life into a silent picture show.
+Everywhere always in the street people--millions of them --whom I do not
+know, moving swiftly along. I look and look and yawn and then one day as
+to-day I wake up and race about beside myself--a swollen bag ready to
+burst with hope, love, misery, joy, desperation.
+
+_Apologia pro vita mea_
+
+How may I excuse myself for continuing to talk about my affairs and for
+continuing to write zoological memoirs during the greatest War of all
+time?
+
+Well, here are some precedents:--
+
+Goethe sat down to study the geography of China, while his fatherland
+agonised at Leipsig.
+
+Hegel wrote the last lines of the _Phenomenology of Spirit_ within sound
+of the guns of Jena.
+
+While England was being rent in twain by civil war, Sir Thomas Browne,
+ensconced in old Norwich, reflected on Cambyses and Pharaoh and on the
+song the Sirens sang.
+
+Lacépède composed his _Histoire des Poissons_ during the French
+Revolution.
+
+Then there were Diogenes and Archimedes.
+
+This defence of course implicates me in an unbounded opinion of the
+importance of my own work. "He is quite the little poet," some one said
+of Keats. "It is just as if a man remarked of Buonaparte," said Keats,
+in a pet, "that he's quite the little general."
+
+_A Woman and a Child_
+
+On the way to the Albert Hall came upon the most beautiful picture of
+young maternity that ever I saw in my life. She was a delightfully
+girlish young creature--a perfect phœnix of health and beauty. As she
+stood with her little son at the kerb waiting for a 'bus, smiling and
+chatting to him, a luminous radiance of happy, satisfied maternal love,
+maternal pride, womanliness streamed from her and enveloped me.
+
+We got on the same 'bus. The little boy, with his long hair and dressed
+in velvet like little Lord Fauntleroy, said something to her--she smiled
+delightedly, caught him up on her knees and kissed him. Two such pretty
+people never touched lips before--I'm certain of it. It was impossible
+to believe that this virginal creature was a mother--childbirth left no
+trace. She must have just budded off the baby boy like a plant. Once, in
+her glance, she took me in her purview, and I knew she knew I was
+watching her. In travelling backwards from Kensington Gardens to the boy
+again, her gaze rested on me a moment and I, of course, rendered the
+homage that was due. As a matter of fact there was no direct evidence
+that she was the mother at all.
+
+_The Albert Hall Hag_
+
+While waiting outside the Albert Hall, an extraordinarily weird contrast
+thrust itself before me--she was the most pathetic piece of human jetsam
+that ever I saw drifting about in this sea of London faces. Tall, gaunt,
+cadaverous, the skin of her face drawn tightly over her cheekbones and
+over a thin, pointed, hook-shaped nose, on her feet brown sandshoes,
+dressed in a long draggle-tailed skirt, a broken-brimmed straw hat,
+beneath which some scanty hair was scraped back and tied behind in a
+knot--this wretched soul of some thirty summers (and what summers!)
+stood in the road beside the waiting queue and weakly passed the bow
+across her violin which emitted a slight scraping sound. She could not
+play a tune and the fingers of her left hand never touched the
+strings--they merely held the handle.
+
+A policeman passed and, with an eye on the queue, muttered audibly, "Not
+'arf," but no one laughed. Then she began to rummage in her skirt,
+holding the violin by the neck in her right hand just as she must hold
+her brat by the arm when at home. Simultaneously sounds issued from her
+mouth in a high falsetto key; they were unearthly sounds, the tiny voice
+of an articulating corpse underneath the coffin lid. For a moment no one
+realised that she was reciting. For she continued to rummage in her
+skirt as she squeaked, "Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O
+sea," etc. The words were scarcely audible tho' she stood but two yards
+off. But she repeated the verse and I then made out what it was. She
+seemed ashamed of herself and of her plight, almost without the courage
+to foist this mockery of violin-playing on us--one would say she was
+frightened by her own ugliness and her own pathos.
+
+After conscientiously carrying out her programme but with the
+distracted, uncomfortable air of some one scurrying over a painful
+task--like a tired child gabbling its prayers before getting into
+bed--she at length produced from her skirt pocket a small canvas money
+bag which she started to hand around. This was the climax to this
+harrowing incident--for each time she held out the bag, she smiled,
+which stretched the skin still more tightly down over her malar
+prominence and said something--an inarticulate noise in a very high
+pitch. "A woman," I whispered to R----, "She claims to be a woman." If
+any one hesitated a moment or struggled with a purse she would wait
+patiently with bag outstretched and head turned away, the smile
+vanishing at once as if the pinched face were but too glad of the
+opportunity of a rest from smiling. She stood there, gazing
+absently--two lifeless eyes at the bottom of deep socket holes in a head
+which was almost a bare skull. She was perfunctorily carrying out an
+objectionable task because she could not kill the will to live.
+
+As she looked away and waited for you to produce the copper, she
+thought, "Why trouble? Why should I wait for this man's aid?" The clink
+of the penny recalled her to herself, and she passed on, renewing her
+terrible grimacing smile.
+
+Why didn't I do something? Why? Because I was bent on hearing
+Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, if you please.... And she may have been a
+well-to-do vagrant--well got up for the occasion--a clever
+simulator?...
+
+_October_ 28.
+
+_Rigor Bordis_
+
+Rigor bordis!--I write like this as if it were a light matter. But
+to-night I was _in extremis_.... First I read the paper; then I finished
+the book I was reading--"_Thus Spake Zarathustra_." Not knowing quite
+what next to do, I took my boots off and poured out another cup of
+coffee. But these manœuvres were only the feeble attempts of a
+cowardly wretch to evade the main issue which was:--
+
+How to occupy myself and keep myself sane during the hour and a half
+before bedtime.
+
+Before now I have tried going off to bed. But that does not work--I
+don't sleep. Moreover, I have been in the grip of a horrible mental
+unrest. To sit still in my chair, much less to lie in bed doing nothing
+seemed ghastly. I experienced all the cravings of a dissolute neurotic
+for a stimulus, but what stimulus I wanted I did not know. Had I known I
+should have gone and got it. The dipsomaniac was a man to be envied.
+
+Some mechanical means were necessary for sustaining life till bedtime. I
+sat down and played a game of Patience--no one knows how I loathe
+playing Patience and how much I despise the people who play it. Tiring
+of that, sat back in my chair, yawned, and thought of a word I wanted to
+look up in the Dictionary. This quest, forgotten until then, came like a
+beam of bright light into a dark room. So looked the word up leisurely,
+took out my watch, noted the time, and then stood up with elbows on the
+mantelpiece and stared at myself in the glass.... I was at bay at last.
+There was simply nothing I could do. I would have given worlds to have
+some one to talk to. Pride kept me from ringing for the landlady. I must
+stand motionless, back to the wall, and wait for the hour of my release.
+I had but one idea, viz., that I was surely beaten in this game of life.
+I was very miserable indeed. But being so miserable that I couldn't feel
+more so, I began to recover after a while. I began to visualise my
+lamentable situation, and rose above it as I did so. I staged it before
+my mind's eye and observed myself as hero of the plot. I saw myself
+sitting in a dirty armchair in a dirty house in a dirty London street,
+with the landlady's dirty daughter below-stairs singing, "Little Grey
+Home in the West," my head obscured in a cloud of depression, and in my
+mind the thought that if life be a test of endurance I must hang on
+grimly to the arms of the chair and sit tight till bedtime.
+
+This attitude proved a useful means of self-defence. When I had
+dramatised my misery, I enjoyed it, and acute mental pain turned into
+merely aesthetic malaise.
+
+_November_ 4.
+
+A lurid day. Suffering from the most horrible physical languor. Wrote
+the Doctor saying I was rapidly sliding down a steep place into the sea
+(like the swine I am). Could I see him?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Endured an hour's torture of indecision to-night asking myself whether I
+should go over to ask her to be my wife or should I go to the Fabian
+Society and hear Bernard Shaw. Kept putting off the decision even till
+after dinner. If I went to the flat, I must shave; to shave required hot
+water--the landlady had already cleared the table and was rapidly
+retreating. Something must be done and at once. I called the old thing
+back impulsively and ordered shaving water, consoling myself with the
+reflection that it was still unnecessary to decide; the hot water could
+be at hand in case the worst happened. If I decided on matrimony I could
+shave forthwith. Should I? (After dark I always shave in the
+sitting-room because of the better gaslight.)
+
+Drank some coffee and next found myself slowly, mournfully putting on
+hat and coat. You can't shave in hat and coat so I concluded I had
+decided on Shaw. Slowly undid the front door latch and went off.
+
+Shaw bored me. He is mid-Victorian. Sat beside a bulgy-eyed youth
+reading the _Freethinker_.
+
+_November_ 9.
+
+In the evening asked her to be my wife. She refused. Once perhaps ...
+but now....
+
+I don't think I have any moral right to propose to any woman seeing the
+state of my health and I did not actually intend or wish to.... It was
+just to get it off my mind--a plain statement.... If I don't really and
+truly love her it was a perfectly heartless comedy. But I have good
+reason to believe I do. With me, moments of headstrong passion alternate
+with moods of perfectly immobile self-introspection. It is a relief to
+have spoken.
+
+_November_ 10.
+
+Very miserable. Asked R---- three times to come and have dinner with me.
+Each time he refused. My nerves are completely jangled. _Tu l'as voulu,
+George Dandin_--that's the rub.
+
+_November_ 11.
+
+She observed me carefully--I'm looking a perfect wreck _--tu l'as voulu,
+George Dandin_--but it's mainly ill-health and not on her account.
+
+I said,--
+
+"Some things are too funny to laugh at."
+
+"Is that why you are so solemn?"
+
+"No," I answered, "I'm not solemn, I am laughing--some things are too
+solemn to be serious about."
+
+She saw me off at the door and smiled quietly--an amused faraway smile
+of feline satisfaction....
+
+_November_ 12.
+
+Horrible nervous depression. Thinking of suicide with a pistol--a
+Browning. Or of 10 days' mysterious disappearance, when I will go and
+live in a good Hotel, spend all my money, and live among human beings
+with eyes and noses and legs. This isolation. Am I going mad? If I
+disappeared, it would be interesting to see if any one missed me.
+
+_November_ 13.
+
+Still thinking of suicide. It seems the only way out. This morning my
+Essay was returned by the Editor of ----. One by one I have been
+divested of all my most cherished illusions. Once my ambitions gave me
+the fuel with which to keep myself alive. One after another they have
+been foiled, and now I've nothing to burn. I am daily facing the fact
+that my ambitions have overtaxed my abilities and health. For years, my
+whole existence has rested on a false estimate of my own value, and my
+life been revolving around a foolish self-deception. But I know myself
+as I am at last--and am not at all enamoured. The future has nothing for
+me. I am wearied of my life already. What is there for any of us to do
+but die?
+
+_November_ 14.
+
+Before going over to-night bought _London Opinion_ deliberately in order
+to find a joke or better still some cynicism about women to fire off at
+her. Rehearsed one joke, one witticism from Oscar Wilde, and one
+personal anecdote (the latter for the most part false), none of which
+came off, tho' I succeeded in carrying off a nonchalant or even jaunty
+bearing.
+
+"Don't you ever swear?" I asked. "It's a good thing you know, swearing
+is like pimples, better to come out, cleanses the moral system. The
+person who controls himself must have lots of terrible oaths circulating
+in his blood."
+
+"Swearing is not the only remedy."
+
+"I suppose you prefer the gilded pill of a curate's sermon: I prefer
+pimples to pills."
+
+Is it a wonder she does not love me?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I wonder why I paint myself in such horrid colours--why have I this
+morbid pleasure in pretending to those I love that I am a beast and a
+cynic? I suffer, I suppose, from a lacerated self-esteem, from a painful
+loneliness, from the consciousness of how ridiculous I have made myself,
+and that most people if they knew would regard me with loathing and
+disgust.
+
+I am very unhappy. I am unhappy because she does not care for me, and I
+am chiefly unhappy because I do not care for her. Instead of a passion,
+only a dragging heavy chain of attraction ... some inflexible law makes
+me gravitate to her, seizes me by the neck and suspends me over her, I
+cannot look away....
+
+In the early days when I did my best to strangle my love--as one wou'd a
+bastard child--I took courage in the fact that for a man like me the
+murder was necessary. There were books to write and to read, and name
+and fame perhaps. To these everything must be sacrificed. ... That is
+all gone now. No man could have withstood for ever that concentrated
+essence of womanhood that flowed from her....
+
+Still the declaration has made amends. She is pleased about it--it is a
+scalp.
+
+Yet how can I forgive her for saying she supposed it was a natural
+instinct for a girl not to feel drawn to an invalid like me. That was
+cruel tho' true.
+
+_November_ 19.
+
+I might be Captain Scott writing his last words amid Antarctic cold and
+desolation. It is very cold. I am sitting hunched up by the fire in my
+lodgings after a meal of tough meat and cold apple-tart. I am full of
+self-commiseration--my only pleasure now. It is very cold and I cannot
+get warm--try as I will.
+
+My various nervous derangements take different forms. This time my
+peripheral circulation is affected, and the hand, arm, and shoulder are
+permanently cold. My right hand is blue--tho' I've shut up the window
+and piled up a roaring fire. It's Antarctic cold and desolation. London
+in November from the inside of a dingy lodging-house can be very
+terrible indeed. This celestial isolation will send me out of my mind. I
+marvel how God can stick it--lonely, damp, and cold in the clouds. That
+is how I live too--but then I am not God.
+
+I fall back on this Journal just as some other poor devil takes to
+drink. I, too, have toyed with the idea of drinking hard. I have
+frequented bars and billiards saloons and in fits of depression done my
+best to forget myself. But I am not sufficiently fond of alcohol (and it
+would take a lot to make _me_ forget myself). So I plunge into these
+literary excesses and drown my sorrows in Stephens' Blue-black Ink. It
+gives me a sulky pleasure to think that some day somebody will know....
+
+It is humiliating to feel ill as I do. If I had consumption, the disease
+would act as a stimulus--I could strike an attitude feverishly and be
+histrionic. But to be merely "below par"--to feel like a Bunny rabbit
+perennially "poorly," saps my character and mental vigour. I want to
+crawl away and die like a rat in a hole. A bronzed healthy man makes me
+wince. Healthy people regard a chronic sickly man as a leper. They
+suspect him, something fishy.
+
+_November_ 20.
+
+Still at home ill.
+
+If anything, R---- is more of a précieux than I am myself. At the
+present moment he is tickling himself with the idea that he's in love
+with a certain golden-haired damsel from the States. He reports to me
+fragments of his conversations with her, how he snatches a fearful joy
+by skirting dangerous conversational territory, or he takes a pencil and
+deftly outlines her profile or the rondeur of her bosom. Or he
+discourses at length on her nose or eye. I can well imagine him driving
+a woman crazy and then collecting her tears in a bottle as mementoes.
+Then whenever he requires a little heart stimulus he could take the
+phial from his waistcoat pocket and watch the tears condensing.
+
+"Why don't you marry her out of hand and be done with all this
+dalliance? I can tell you what's the matter with you," I growled,
+"you're a landscape artist.... You'll grow to resemble, that mean, Jewy,
+secretive, petty creature, J.W.M. Turner, and allow no human being to
+interfere with your art. A fine artist perhaps--but what a man! You'll
+finish up with a Mrs. Danby."
+
+"Yes," he answered, quoting Tennyson with great aptness, "and 'lose my
+salvation for a sketch,' like Romney deserting his wife. If I were not
+married I should have no wife to desert."
+
+It is useless to argue with him. His cosmogony is wrongly centred in Art
+not life. Life interests him--he can't altogether resign himself to the
+cowl and the tonsured head, but he will not plunge. He insists on being
+a spectator, watching the maelstrom from the bank and remarking
+exquisitely, "Ah! there is a very fine sorrow," or, "What an exquisite
+sensation." The other day after one of our furious conversational bouts
+around this subject, I drew an insect, cut it out, and pinned the slip
+in a collecting box. Then suddenly producing the box, and opening it
+with a facetious grin, I said,--
+
+"Here is a jolly little sorrow I caught this morning." The joke pleased
+him and we roared, bellowed.
+
+"That terrible forefinger of yours," he smiled.
+
+"Like Cardinal Richelieu's eyes--piercing?" I suggested with
+appreciation. (It is because I tap him on his shirt front in the space
+between waistcoat and tie aggressively for emphasis in conversation.)
+
+"You must regard my passion for painting," he began once more, "as a
+sort of dipsomania--I really can't help myself."
+
+I jumped on him vehemently,--
+
+"Exactly, my pernickety friend; it's something abnormal and unnatural.
+When, for purposes of self-culture, I see a man deliberately lop off
+great branches of himself so as to divert his strength into one limb, I
+know that if he is successful he'll be something as vulgar as a fat
+woman at a country fair; and if he is unsuccessful he'll be just a
+pathetic mutilation.... You are trying to pervert a natural instinct.
+You want to paint, I believe. Quite so. But when a boy reaches the age
+of puberty he does not grow a palette on his chin but hair.... Still,
+now you recognise it as a bad habit, why need I say more?" ("Why
+indeed?") "It's a vice, and I'm very sorry for you, old boy. I'll do all
+I can--come and have some dinner with me to-night."
+
+"Oh! thank you very much," says my gentleman, "but I'm not at all sorry
+for myself."
+
+"I thought as much. So that we are not so very much agreed after all.
+We're not shaking hands after the boxing contest, but scowling at each
+other from the ropes and shaping for another round."
+
+"Your pulpit orations, my dear Barbellion, in full canonicals," he
+reflected, "are worthy of a larger audience.... To find _you_ of all
+people preaching. I thought you were philosopher enough to see the angle
+of every one's vision and broadminded so as to see every point of view.
+Besides, you are as afraid of marriage as I am, and for the same
+reasons."
+
+"I confess, when in the philosophic citadel of my own armchair," I
+began, "I _do_ see every one's point of view. You sit on the other side
+of the rug and put out the suggestion tentatively that murder may be a
+moral act. I examine your argument and am disposed to accept it. But
+when you slit up my brother's abdomen before my eyes, I am sufficiently
+weak and human to punch you on the nose.... You are too cold and
+Olympian, up above the snowline with a box of paints."
+
+"It is very beautiful among the snows."
+
+"I suppose so."
+
+(Exit.)
+
+_November_ 23.
+
+Great physical languor, especially in the morning. It is Calvary to get
+out of bed and shoulder the day's burden.
+
+"What's been the matter?" they ask.
+
+"Oh! senile decay--general histolysis of the tissues," I say, fencing.
+
+To-night, I looked at myself accidentally in the glass and noticed at
+once the alarming extent of my dejection. Quite unconsciously I turned
+my head away and shook it, making the noise with my teeth and tongue
+which means, "Dear, dear," M---- tells me these waves of ill-health are
+quite unaccountable unless I were "leading a dissolute life, which you
+do not appear to be doing." Damn his eyes.
+
+_Reading Nietzsche_
+
+Reading Nietzsche. What splendid physic he is to Pomeranian puppies like
+myself! I am a hopeless coward. Thunderstorms always frighten me. The
+smallest cut alarms for fear of blood poisoning, and I always dab on
+antiseptics at once. But Nietzsche makes me feel a perfect mastiff.
+
+_The Test for True Love_
+
+The test for true love is whether you can endure the thought of cutting
+your sweetheart's toe-nails--the onychiotomic test. Or whether you find
+your Julia's sweat as sweet as otto of roses. I told her this to-night.
+Probably she thinks I only "saw it in a book."
+
+_Chopin_
+
+On Sunday, went to the Albert Hall, and warmed myself at the Orchestra.
+It is a wonderful sight to watch an orchestra playing from the gallery.
+It spurts and flickers like a flame. Its incessant activity arrests the
+attention and holds it just as a fire does--even a deaf man would be
+fascinated. Heard Chopin's Funeral March and other things. It would be a
+rich experience to be able to be in your coffin at rest and listen to
+Chopin's Funeral March being played above you by a string orchestra with
+Sir Henry Wood conducting.
+
+Sir Henry like a melanic Messiah was crucified as usual, the Hungarian
+Rhapsody No. 2 causing him the most awful agony....
+
+_November_ 28.
+
+_Rodin_
+
+More than once lately have been to see and admire Rodin's recent gifts
+to the nation exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The "Prodigal
+Son" is Beethoven's Fifth Symphony done in stone. It was only on my
+second visit that I noticed the small pebble in each hand--a superb
+touch!--what a frenzy of remorse!
+
+The "Fallen Angel" I loved most. The legs of the woman droop lifelessly
+backwards in an intoxicating curve. The eye caresses it--down the thighs
+and over the calves to the tips of the toes--like the hind limbs of some
+beautiful dead gazelle. He has brought off exactly the same effect in
+the woman in the group called "Eternal Spring," which I have only seen
+in a photograph.
+
+This morning at 9 a.m. lay in bed on my back, warm and comfortable, and,
+for the first time for many weeks, with no pain or discomfort of any
+kind. The mattress curved up around my body and legs and held me in a
+soft warm embrace.... I shut my eyes and whistled the saccharine melody
+for solo violin in Chopin's Funeral March. I wanted the moment prolonged
+for hours. Ill-health chases the soul out of a man. He becomes a body,
+purely physical.
+
+_November_ 29.
+
+This evening she promised to be my wife after a long silent ramble
+together thro' dark London squares and streets! I am beside myself!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_December_ 6.
+
+I know now--I love her with passion. Health and ambition and sanity are
+returning. Projects in view:--
+
+(1) To make her happy and myself worthy.
+
+(2) To get married.
+
+(3) To prepare and publish a volume of this Journal.
+
+(4) To write two essays for _Corn hill_ which shall surely induce the
+Editor to publish and not write me merely long complimentary and
+encouraging letters as heretofore.
+
+Wired to A----, "The brave little pennon has been hauled down."
+
+_December_ 7.
+
+Have so many projects in view and so little time in which to get them
+done! Moreover I am always haunted by the fear that I may never finish
+them thro' physical or temperamental disabilities--a breakdown in health
+or in purpose. I am one of those who are apt to die unexpectedly and no
+one would be surprised. An inquest would probably be unnecessary. I
+badly want to live say another twelve months. Hey! nonny-no! a man's a
+fool that wants to die.
+
+_December_ 9.
+
+... I shook her angrily by the shoulders to-night and said, "Why do I
+love you?--Tell me," but she only smiled gently and said, "I cannot
+tell...." I ought not to love her, I know--every omen is against it....
+Then I am full of self-love: an intellectual Malvolio proud of his
+brains and air of distinction....
+
+Then I am fickle, passionate, polygamous ... I am haunted by the memory
+of how I have sloughed off one enthusiasm after another. I used to
+dissect snails in a pie-dish in the kitchen while Mother baked the
+cakes--the unravelling of the internal economy of a _Helix_ caused as
+great an emotional storm as to-day the Unfinished Symphony does! I look
+for the first parasol in Kensington Gardens with the same interest as
+once I sought out the first snowdrop or listened for the first Cuckoo. I
+am as anxious to identify an instrument in Sir Henry's Orchestra as once
+to identify the song of a new bird in the woods. Nothing is further from
+my intention or desire to continue my old habit of nature study. I never
+read nature books--my old favourites--Waterton's _Wanderings_, Gilbert
+White, _The Zoologist_, etc.--have no interest for me--in fact they give
+me slight mental nausea even to glance at. Wiedersheim (good old
+Wiedersheim) is now deposed by a text book on Harmony. My main desire
+just now is to hear the best music. In the country I wore blinkers and
+saw only zoology. Now in London, I've taken the bit in my mouth--and
+it's a mouth of iron--wanting a run for all my troubles before Death
+strikes me down.
+
+All this evidence of my temperamental instability alarms and distresses
+me on reflection and makes the soul weary. I wish I loved more steadily.
+I am always sidetracking myself. The title of "husband" scares me.
+
+_December_ 12.
+
+_Sir Henry Wood conducting_
+
+Went to the Queen's Hall, sat in the Orchestra and watched Sir Henry's
+statuesque figure conducting thro' a forest of bows, "which pleased me
+mightily." He would be worth watching if you were stone deaf. If you
+could not hear a sound, the animation and excitement of an orchestra in
+full swing, with the conductor cutting and slashing at invisible foes,
+make a magnificent spectacle.
+
+The face of Sir Henry Wood strikes me as very much like the traditional
+pictures of Jesus Christ, tho' Sir Henry is dark--the melanic Messiah I
+call him (very much to my own delight). Rodin ought to do him in
+stone--Chesterfield's ideal of a man--a Corinthian edifice on Tuscan
+foundations. In Sir Henry's case there can be no disputing the Tuscan
+foundations. However swift and elegant the movements of his arms, his
+splendid lower extremities remain as firm as stone columns. While the
+music is calm and serene his right hand and baton execute in concert
+with the left, perfect geometric curves around his head. Then as it
+gathers in force and volume, when the bows begin to dart swiftly across
+the fiddles and the trumpets and trombones blaze away in a
+conflagration, we are all expectant--and even a little fearful, to
+observe his sabre-like cuts. The tension grows ... I hold my breath....
+Sir Henry snatches a second to throw back a lock of his hair that has
+fallen limply across his forehead, then goes on in unrelenting pursuit,
+cutting and slashing at hordes of invisible fiends that leap howling out
+towards him. There is a great turmoil of combat, but the Conductor
+struggles on till the great explosion happens. But in spite of that, you
+see him still standing thro' a cloud of great chords, quite undaunted.
+His sword zigzags up and down the scale--suddenly the closed fist of his
+left hand shoots up straight and points to the zenith--like the arm of a
+heathen priest appealing to Baal to bring down fire from Heaven.... But
+the appeal avails nought and it looks as tho' it were all up for poor
+Sir Henry. The music is just as infuriated--his body writhes with
+it--the melanic Messiah crucified by the inappeasable desire to express
+by visible gestures all that he feels in his heart. He surrenders --so
+you think--he opens out both arms wide and baring his breast, dares them
+all to do their worst--like the picture of Moffat the missionary among
+the savages of the Dark Continent!
+
+And yet he wins after all. At the very last moment he seems to summon
+all his remaining strength and in one final and devastating sweep mows
+down the orchestra rank by rank.... You awake from the nightmare to
+discover the victor acknowledging the applause in a series of his
+inimitable bows.
+
+One ought to pack one's ears up with cotton wool at a concert where Sir
+Henry conducts. Otherwise, the music is apt to distract one's attention.
+R.L.S. wanted to be at the head of a cavalry charge--sword over
+head--but I'd rather fight an orchestra with a baton.
+
+_Beethoven's Fifth Symphony_
+
+This symphony always works me up into an ecstasy; in ecstatic sympathy
+with its dread fulness I could stand up in the balcony and fling myself
+down passionately into the arena below. Yet there were women sitting
+alongside me to-day--knitting! It so annoyed and irritated me that at
+the end of the first movement I got up and sat elsewhere. They would
+have sat knitting at the foot of the Cross, I suppose.
+
+At the end of the second movement, two or three other women got up and
+went home to tea! It would have surprised me no more to have seen a cork
+extract itself from its bottle and promenade.
+
+_Tschaikovsky_
+
+Just lately I've heard a lot of music including Tschaikovsky's
+Pathétique and Fifth Symphonies, some Debussy, and odd pieces by Dukas,
+Glinka, Smetana, Mozart. I am chock-full of impressions of all this
+precious stuff and scarcely know what to write. As usual, the third
+movement of the Pathétique produced a frenzy of exhilaration; I seemed
+to put on several inches around my chest and wished to shout in a voice
+of thunder. The conventions of a public concert hall are dreadfully
+oppressive at such times. I could have eaten "all the elephants of
+Hindustan and picked my teeth with the spire of Strassburg Cathedral."
+
+In the last movement of the Fifth Symphony of that splendid fellow
+Tschaikovsky, the orchestra seemed to gallop away leaving poor Landon
+Ronald to wave his whip in a ridiculously ineffective way. They went on
+crashing down chords, and just before the end I had the awful
+presentiment that the orchestra simply could not stop. I sat still
+straining every nerve in the expectancy that this chord or the next or
+the next was the end. But it went on pounding down--each one seemed the
+last but every time another followed as passionate and emphatic as the
+one before, until finally, whatever this inhuman orchestra was
+attempting to crush and destroy must have been reduced to shapeless
+pulp. I wanted to board the platform and plead with them, elderly
+gentlemen turned their heads nervously, everyone was breathless, we all
+wanted to call "For God's sake, stop"--to do anything to still this
+awful lust for annihilation.... The end came quickly in four drum beats
+in quick succession. I have never seen such hate, such passionate
+intensity of the will to destroy.... And Tschaikovsky was a Russian!
+
+Debussy was a welcome change. "L'Après-midi d'un Faun" is a musical
+setting to an oscitatory exercise. It is an orchestral yawn. Oh! so
+tired!
+
+Came away thoroughly delighted. Wanted to say to every one "Bally good,
+ain't it?" and then we would all shake hands and go home whistling.
+
+_December_ 14.
+
+My rooms are littered with old concert programmes and the Doctor's
+prescriptions (in the yellow envelopes of the dispenser) for my various
+ailments and diseases, and books, books, books.
+
+Among the latter those lying on my table at this moment are--
+
+Plays of M. Brieux.
+
+_Joseph Vance._
+
+The Sequel to _Pragmatism: The Meaning of Truth_, by Willam James.
+
+_Beyond Good and Evil._
+
+Dostoievsky's _The Possessed._
+
+Marie Bashkirtseff's _Journal._
+
+I have found time to read only the first chapter of this last and am
+almost afraid to go on. It would be so humiliating to find I was only
+her duplicate.
+
+On my mantelpiece stands a photograph of Huxley--the hero of my
+youth--which old B---- has always taken to be that of my grandpapa! A
+plaster-cast mask of Voltaire when first hung up made him chuckle with
+indecent laughter. "A regular all-nighter. Who is it?" he said.
+
+_December_ 15.
+
+_Petticoat Lane_
+
+This morning, being Sunday, went to Petticoat Lane and enjoyed myself.
+
+On turning the corner to go into Middlesex Street, as it it now called,
+the first thing I saw was a little girl--a Jewess--being tackled for
+selling Belgian button-hole flags by two policemen who ultimately
+marched her off to the police station.
+
+In the Lane, first of all, was a "Royal Ascot Jockey Scales" made of
+brass and upholstered in gaudy red velvet--a penny a time. A very fat
+man was being weighed and looked a little distressed on being given his
+ticket.
+
+"Another stone," he told the crowd mournfully.
+
+"You'll have to eat less pork," some one volunteered and we all laughed.
+
+Next door to the Scales was a man selling gyroscopes. "Something
+scientific, amusing as well as instructive, illustrating the principles
+of gravity and stability. What I show you is what I sell--price one
+shilling. Who?"
+
+I stopped next at a stall containing nothing but caps,--"any size, any
+colour, any pattern, a shilling apiece--now then!" This show was being
+run by two men--a Jew in a fur cap on one side of the stall and a very
+powerful-looking sort of Captain Cuttle on the other--a seafaring man,
+almost as broad as he was long, with a game leg and the voice of a
+skipper in a hurricane. Both these men were selling caps at a prodigious
+pace, and with the insouciance of tradesmen sure of their custom. The
+skipper would seize a cap, chuck it across to a timid prospective
+purchaser, and, if he dropped it, chuck him over another, crying, with a
+"yo-heave-ho" boisterousness, "Oh! what a game, what a bees' nest."
+
+Upon the small head of another customer, he would squash down his
+largest sized cap saying at once,--
+
+"There, you look the finest gentleman--oh! ah! a little too large."
+
+At which we all laughed, the customer looked silly, but took no offence.
+
+"Try this," yells the skipper above the storm, and takes off his own
+cap. "Oh! ye needn't be afraid--I washed my hair last--year."
+(Laughter.)
+
+Then to his partner, the Jew on the other side of the stall, "Oh! what a
+face you've got. Here! 6d. for any one who can tell me what it is. Why
+not take it to the trenches and get it smashed in?"
+
+The Jew wore spectacles and had a soft ingratiating voice and brown
+doe-like eyes--a Jew in every respect. "Oh!" says he, in the oleaginous
+Semitic way, and accurately taking up his cue (for all this was
+rehearsed patter), "my wife says 'my face is my fortune.'"
+
+"No wonder you're so hard up and 'ave got to take in lodgers. What's yer
+name?"
+
+"John Jones," in a demure wheedling voice.
+
+"Hoo--that's not your name in your own bloody country--I expect it's
+Hullabullinsky."
+
+"Do you know what my name really is?"
+
+"No."
+
+"It's Assenheimopoplocatdwizlinsky Kovorod." (Loud laughter.)
+
+"I shall call you 'ass' for short."
+
+I was laughing loudly at these two clowns and the skipper observing as
+much, shouted out to me,--
+
+"Parlez-vous Francois, M'sieur?"
+
+"Oui, oui," said I.
+
+"Ah! lah, you're one of us--oh! what a game! what a bees' nest," and all
+the time he went on selling caps and chucking them at the purchasers.
+
+Perhaps one of the most extraordinary things I saw was a stream of young
+men who, one after another, came up to a stall, paid a penny and
+swallowed a glass of "nerve tonic"--a green liquid syphoned out of a
+large jar--warranted a safe cure for
+
+"Inward weakness, slightest flurry or body oppressed."
+
+Another man was pulling teeth and selling tooth powder. Some of the
+little urchins' teeth, after he had cleaned them as a demonstration,
+were much whiter than their faces or his. This was "the original Chas.
+Assenheim."
+
+Mrs. Meyers, "not connected with any one else of the same name in the
+Lane" was selling eels at 2d., 3d. and 6d. and doing a brisk trade too.
+
+But I should go on for hours if I were to tell everything seen in this
+remarkable lane during an hour an a half on a Sunday morning. Each
+stall-holder sells only one kind of article--caps or clocks or songs,
+braces, shawls, indecent literature, concertinas, gramophones, coats,
+pants, reach-me-downs, epergnes. The thoroughfare was crowded with
+people (I saw two Lascars in red fez caps) inspecting the goods
+displayed and attentively observed by numerous policemen. The alarm
+clocks were all going off, each gramophone was working a record (a
+different one!) and every tradesman shouting his wares--a perfect
+pandemonium.
+
+_December_ 31.
+
+_A Conversation_
+
+"There is that easily calculable element in your nature, dear boy," I
+said, "by which you forego the dignity of a free-willed human being and
+come under an inflexible natural law. I can anticipate your movements,
+intentions, and opinions long beforehand. For example, I know quite well
+that every Saturday morning will see you with _The New Statesman_ under
+your arm; I know that the words 'Wagner' or 'Shaw' uttered slowly and
+deliberately in your ear will produce a perfectly definite reaction."
+
+"I bet you can't predict what I am going to buy now,"
+
+R---- replied gaily, advancing to the newspaper stall.
+
+He bought the _Pink 'Un_ and I laughed....
+
+"And so you read _Pragmatism_," he mused, "while the fate of the Empire
+stands in the balance."
+
+"Yes," said I, "and the Paris Academy of Sciences were discussing the
+functions of _θ_ and the Polymorphism of Antarctic diatoms last
+September when the Germans stood almost at the gates of Paris."
+
+This was a lucky stroke for me, for he knew he was rubbing me on the
+raw. We are, of course, great friends, but sometimes we get on one
+another's nerves.
+
+"I am polychromatic," I declaimed, "rhetorical, bass. You--besides being
+a bally fool--are of a pretty gray colour, a baritone and you paint in
+water-colours."
+
+"Whereas you, of course, would paint in blood?" he answered facetiously.
+
+His Oxford education has a firm hold on him. He says for example, "e
+converso" instead of "on the other hand" and "entre nous" for "between
+ourselves." He labels his paragraphs _α, β, γ_, instead of a, b, c, and
+quotes Juvenal, knows Paris and Naples, visits the Alps for the winter
+sports, all in the approved manner of dons.
+
+Not infrequently he visits the East End to Study "how the poor live," he
+lectures at Toynbee Hall, and calls the proletariat "the prolly." In
+fact, he does everything according to the regulations, being a socialist
+and an agnostic, a follower of Shaw and a devotee of Bunyan. "Erotic" he
+is careful to pronounce _eròtic_ to show he knows Greek, and the "Duma,"
+the _Dumà_, tho' he doesn't know Russian. Like any don, he is always
+ready to discuss and give an opinion on any sub- supra- or circum-lunary
+subject from bimetallism to the Symphony as an art-form.
+
+"That's a dominant fifth," I said to him the other day; no answer.
+
+"You ignorant devil," I said, "you don't know what a dominant fifth is!"
+
+We made grimaces at one another.
+
+"Who's the Master of the Mint?" I asked him. "That is an easy one."
+
+"The Chancellor of the Exchequer," was the prompt reply.
+
+"Oh! that's right," I said sarcastic and crestfallen. "Now tell me the
+shortest verse in the Bible and the date of Rameses II."
+
+We laughed. R---- is a very clever man and the most extroardinarily
+versatile man I know. He is bound to make his mark. His danger is--too
+many irons in the fire. Here are some of his occupations and
+acquirements: Art (etching, drypoint, water-colours), music (a charming
+voice), classics, French, German, Italian (both speaking and reading
+knowledge), biology, etc., etc. He is for ever titillating his mind with
+some new thing. "For God's sake, do leave it alone--you simply rag your
+mind to death. Put it out to grass--go thro' an annual season of
+complete abstinence from knowledge--an intellectual Lent."
+
+No one more than he enjoys my ragging him like this--and I do it rather
+well.
+
+
+[1] "I could eat all the elephants of Hindustan and pick my teeth with
+the Spire of Strassburg Cathedral."
+
+[2] See January 2nd, 1915.
+
+
+
+
+1915
+
+
+_January_ 1.
+
+I have grown so ridiculously hypercritical and fastidious that I will
+refuse a man's invitation to dinner because he has watery blue eyes, or
+hate him for a mannerism or an impediment or affectation in his speech.
+Some poor devil who has not heard of Turner or Debussy or Dostoieffsky I
+gird at with the arrogance of a knowledgeable youth of 17. Some oddity
+who should afford a sane mind endless amusement, I write off as a _Insus
+naturæ_ and dismiss with a flourish of contempt. My intellectual
+arrogance--excepting at such times as I become conscious of it and pull
+myself up--is incredible. It is incredible because I have no personal
+courage and all this pride boils up behind a timid exterior. I quail
+often before stupid but over-bearing persons who consequently never
+realise my contempt of them. Then afterwards, I writhe to think I never
+stood up to this fool; never uttered an appropriate word to interfere
+with another's nauseating self-love. It exasperates me to be unable to
+give a Roland for an Oliver--even servants and underlings "tick me
+off"--to fail always in sufficient presence of mind to make the
+satisfying rejoinder or riposte. I suffer from such a savage _amour
+propre_ that I fear to enter the lists with a man I dislike on account
+of the mental anguish I should suffer if he worsted me. I am therefore
+bottled up tight--both my hates and loves. For a coward is not only
+afraid to tell a man he hates him, but is nervous too of letting go of
+his feeling of affection or regard lest it be rejected or not returned.
+I shudder to think of such remarks as (referring to me), "He's one of my
+admirers, you know" (sardonically), or, "I simply can't get rid of him."
+
+If however my cork _does_ come out, there is an explosion, and placid
+people occasionally marvel to hear violent language streaming from my
+lips and nasty acid and facetious remarks.
+
+Of course, to intimate friends (only about three persons in the wide,
+wide world), I can always give free vent to my feelings, and I do so in
+privacy with that violence in which a weak character usually finds some
+compensation for his intolerable self-imposed reserve and restraint in
+public. I can never marvel enough at the ineradicable turpitude of my
+existence, at my _double-facedness_, and the remarkable contrast between
+the face I turn to the outside world and the face my friends know. It's
+like leading a double existence or artificially constructing a puppet to
+dangle before the crowd while I fulminate behind the scenes. If only I
+had the moral courage to play my part in life--to take the stage and be
+myself, to enjoy the delightful sensation of making my presence felt,
+instead of this vapourish mumming--then this Journal would be quite
+unnecessary. For to me self-expression is a necessity of life, and what
+cannot be expressed one way must be expressed in another. When colossal
+egotism is driven underground, whether by a steely surface environment
+or an unworkable temperament or as in my case by both, you get a truly
+remarkable result, and the victim a truly remarkable pain--the pain one
+might say of continuously unsuccessful attempts at parturition.
+
+It is perhaps not the whole explanation to say that my milky affability
+before, say bores or clods is sheer personal cowardice.... It is partly
+real affability. I am so glad to have opposite me some one who is making
+himself pleasant and affable and sympathetic that I forget for the
+moment that he is an unconscionable time-server, a sycophant,
+lick-spittle, toady, etc. My first impulse is always to credit folk with
+being nicer, cleverer, more honest and amiable than they are. Then, on
+reflection, I discover unpleasing characteristics, I detect their little
+motives, and hate myself for not speaking. The fellow is intolerable,
+why did I not tell him so? Bitter recriminations from my critical self
+upon my flabby amiable half.
+
+On the whole, then, I lead a pretty disgraceful inner life--excepting
+when I pull myself together and smile benignly on all things with a
+philosophical smugness, such as is by no means my mood at this present
+moment. I am so envious that a reprint of one of Romney's Ramus girls
+sends me into a dry tearless anger--for the moment till I turn over the
+next page.... Inwardly I was exacerbated this morning when R----
+recited, "Come and have a tiddle at the old Brown Bear," and explained
+how a charming "young person" sang this at breakfast the other morning.
+It was simply _too_ charming for him to hear.
+
+To-night as I brushed my hair, I decided I was quite good-looking, and
+_I believe_ I mused that E---- was really a lucky girl.... All that is
+the matter with me is a colossal conceit and a colossal discontent,
+qualities exaggerated where a man finds himself in an environment which
+....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+You observant people will notice that this explanation is something of a
+self-defence whereby the virtue goes out of my confession. I plead
+guilty, but great and unprecedented provocation as well. Intense pride
+of individuality forbids that I should ever be other than, shall I say,
+amiably disposed towards myself _au fond_, however displeased I may be
+with my environment. It is indeed impossible without sending him to a
+lunatic asylum ever to knock a man off the balance of his
+self-esteem.... A man's loyalty to himself is the most pig-headed thing
+imaginable.
+
+_January_ 2.
+
+_The Fire Bogey_
+
+"This Box contains Manuscripts. One guinea will be paid to any one who
+in case of danger from fire saves it from damage or loss."
+
+Signed: W.N.P. BARBELLION.
+
+I have had this printed in large black characters on a card, framed and
+nailed to my "coffin" of Journals. I told the printer first to say _Two
+Guineas_, but he suggested that One Guinea was quite enough. I agreed
+but wondered how the devil _he_ knew what the Journals were
+worth--nobody knows.
+
+Next month, I expect I shall have a "hand" painted on the wall and
+pointing towards the box. And the month after that I shall hire a
+fireman to be on duty night and day standing outside No. 101 in a brass
+helmet and his hatchet up at the salute.
+
+These precious Journals! Supposing I lost them! I cannot imagine the
+anguish it would cause me. It would be the death of my real self and as
+I should take no pleasure in the perpetuation of my flabby, flaccid,
+anæmic, amiable puppet-self, I should probably commit suicide.
+
+_August_ 7.
+
+Harvey who discovered the circulation of the blood also conducted a
+great many investigations into the Anatomy and development of insects.
+But all his MSS. and drawings disappeared in the fortunes of war, and
+one half of his life work thus disappeared. This makes me feverish,
+living as I do in Armageddon!
+
+Again, all Malpighi's pictures, furniture, books and MSS. were destroyed
+in a lamentable fire at his house in Bononia, occasioned it is said by
+the negligence of his old wife.
+
+About 1618, Ben Jonson suffered a similar calamity thro' a fire breaking
+out in his study. Many unpublished MSS. perished.
+
+A more modern and more tragic example I found recently in the person of
+an Australian naturalist, Dr. Walter Stimpson, who lost all his MSS.,
+drawings, and collections in the great fire of Chicago, and was so
+excoriated by this irreparable misfortune that he never recovered from
+the shock, and died the following year a broken man and unknown.
+
+Of course the housemaid who lit the fire with the _French Revolution_ is
+known to all, as well as Newton's "Fido, Fido, you little know what you
+have done."
+
+There are many dangers in preserving the labours of years in MS. form.
+Samuel Butler (of _Erewhon_) advised writing in copying ink and then
+pressing off a second copy to be kept in another and separate locality.
+My own precautions for these Journals are more elaborate. Those who know
+about it think I am mad. I wonder.... But I dare say I am a pathetic
+fool--an incredible self-deceiver!
+
+Anyhow--the "coffin" of raw material I sent down to T---- while I retain
+the two current volumes. This is to avoid Zeppelins. E---- took the
+"coffin" down for me on her way home from school, and at Taunton,
+inquisitive porters mistaking it, I suppose, for an infant's coffin
+carried it reverently outside the station and laid it down. She caught
+them looking at it just in time before her train left. Under her
+instructions they seized it by the brass handles and carried it back
+again. I sit now and with a good deal of curiosity fondle the idea of
+porters carrying about my Journals of confession. It's like being
+tickled in the palm of the hand.... Two volumes of abstracted entries I
+keep here, and, as soon as I am married, I intend to make a second copy
+of these.... Then all in God's good time I intend getting a volume ready
+for publication.
+
+_January_ 30.
+
+_Hearing Beethoven_
+
+To the Queen's Hall and heard Beethoven's Fifth and Seventh Symphonies.
+
+Before the concert began I was in a fever. I kept on saying to myself,
+"I am going to hear the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies." I regarded myself
+with the most ridiculous self-adulation--I smoothed and purred over
+myself--a great contented Tabby cat--and all because I was so splendidly
+fortunate as to be about to hear Beethoven's Fifth and Seventh
+Symphonies.
+
+It certainly upset me a little to find there were so many other people
+who were singularly fortunate as well, and it upset me still more to
+find some of them knitting and some reading newspapers as if they waited
+for sausage and mashed.
+
+How I gloried in the Seventh! I can't believe there was any one present
+who gloried in it as I did! To be processing majestically up the steps
+of a great, an unimaginable palace (in the "Staircase" introduction),
+led by Sir Henry, is to have had at least a crowded ten minutes of
+glorious life--a suspicion crossed the mind at one time "Good Heavens,
+they're going to knight me." I cannot say if that were their intentions.
+But I escaped however....
+
+I love the way in which a beautiful melody flits around the Orchestra
+and its various components like a beautiful bird.
+
+_January_ 19.
+
+_An Average Day_
+
+After a morning of very mixed emotions and more than one annoyance ...
+at last sat down to lunch and a little peace and quiet with R----. We
+began by quoting verse at one another in open competition. Of course
+neither of us listened to the other's verses. We merely enjoyed the
+pleasure of recollecting and repeating our own. I began with Tom Moore's
+"Row gently here, my Gondolier." R---- guessed the author rightly at
+once and fidgeted until he burst out with, "The Breaths of kissing night
+and day"--to me an easy one. I gave, "The Moon more indolently sleeps
+to-night" (Baudelaire), and in reply he did a great stroke by reciting
+some of the old French of Frangois Villon which entirely flummuxed me.
+
+I don't believe we really love each other, but we cling to each other
+out of ennui and discover in each other a certain cold intellectual
+sympathy.
+
+At the pay desk (Lyons' is our rendezvous) we joked with the cashier--a
+cheerful, fat little girl, who said to R---- (indicating me),--
+
+"He's a funny boy, isn't he?"
+
+"Dangerous," chirped R----, and we laughed. In the street we met an
+aged, decrepit newsvendor--very dirty and ragged--but his voice was
+unexpectedly fruity.
+
+"British Success," he called, and we stopped for the sake of the voice.
+
+"I'm not interested," I said--as an appetiser.
+
+"What! Not.... Just one sir: I haven't sold a single copy yet, and I've
+a wife and four children."
+
+"That's nothing to me--I've three wives and forty children," I remarked.
+
+"What!" in affected surprise, turning to R----, "he's Brigham Young from
+Salt Lake City. Yes I know it--I've been there myself and been dry ever
+since. Give us a drink, sir--just one."
+
+In consideration of his voice we gave him 2d. and passed on....
+
+After giving a light to a Belgian soldier whose cigarette had gone out,
+farther along we entered a queer old music shop where they sell
+flageolets, serpents, clavichords, and harps. We had previously made an
+appointment with the man to have Schubert's Unfinished Symphony played
+to us, so as to recall one or two of the melodies which we can't recall
+and it drives us crazy. "What is that one in the second movement which
+goes like this?" and R---- whistled a fragment. "I don't know," I said,
+"but let's go in here and ask." In the shop, a youth was kind enough to
+say that if we cared to call next day, Madame A----, the harp player
+would be home and would be ready to play us the symphony.
+
+So this morning, before Madame's appearance, this kind and obliging
+youth put a gramophone record of it on, to which we listened like two
+intelligent parrots with heads sideways. Presently, the fat lady harpist
+appeared and asked us just what we wanted to find out--a rather awkward
+question for us, as we did not want to "find out" anything excepting how
+the tunes went.
+
+I therefore explained that as neither of us had sisters or wives, and we
+both wanted, etc.... so would she...? In response, she smiled
+pleasantly and played us the second movement on a shop piano. Meanwhile,
+Henry the boy, hid himself behind the instruments at the rear of the
+shop and as we signed to her she would say,--
+
+"What's that, Henry?"
+
+And Henry would duly answer from his obscurity, "Wood wind," or "Solo
+oboe," or whatever it was, and the lad really spoke with authority. In
+this way, I began to find out something about the work. Before I left, I
+presented her with a copy of the score, which she did not possess and
+because she would not accept any sort of remuneration.
+
+"Won't you put your name on it?" she inquired.
+
+I pointed gaily to the words "Ecce homo," which I had scribbled across
+Schubert's name and said, "There you are." Madame smiled incredulously
+and we said, "Good-bye."
+
+It was a beautifully clement almost springlike day, and at the street
+corner, in a burst of joyousness, we each bought a bunch of violets of
+an old woman, stuck them on the ends of our walking-sticks, and marched
+off with them in triumphant protest to the B.M. Carried over our
+shoulders, our flowers amused the police and ----, who scarcely realised
+the significance of the ritual. "This is my protest," said R----,
+"against the war. It's like Oscar Wilde's Sunflower."
+
+On the way, we were both bitterly disappointed at a dramatic meeting
+between a man and woman of the artizan class which instead of beginning
+with a stormy, "Robert, where's the rent, may I ask?" fizzled out into,
+"Hullo, Charlie, why you _are_ a stranger."
+
+At tea in the A.B.C. shop, we had a violent discussion on Socialism, and
+on the station platform, going home, I said that before marriage I
+intended saving up against the possibility of divorce--a domestic
+divorce fund.
+
+"Very dreadful," said R---- with mock gravity, "to hear a recently
+affianced young man talk like that."
+
+... What should I do then? Marry? I suppose so. Shadows of the
+prison-house. At first I said I ought not to marry for two years. Then
+when I am wildly excited with her I say "next week." We could. There are
+no arrangements to be made. All her furniture--flat, etc. But I feel we
+ought to wait until the War is over.
+
+At dinner-time to-night I was feverish to do three things at once: write
+out my day's Journal, eat my food, and read the _Journal_ of Marie
+Bashkirtseff. Did all three--but unfortunately not at once, so that when
+I was occupied with one I would surreptitiously cast a glance sideways
+at the other--and repined.
+
+After dinner, paid a visit to the ---- and found Mrs. ---- playing Patience.
+I told her that 12,000 lives had been lost in the great Italian
+earthquake. Still going on dealing out the cards, she said in her gentle
+voice that that was dreadful and still absorbed in her cards inquired if
+earthquakes had aught to do with the weather.
+
+"An earthquake must be a dreadful thing," she gently piped, as she
+abstractedly dealt out the cards for a new game in a pretty
+Morris-papered room in Kensington.
+
+_January_ 20.
+
+_At a Public Dinner_
+
+... The timorous man presently took out his cigarette-case and was going
+to take out a cigarette, when he recollected that he ought first to
+offer one to the millionaire on his right. Fortunately the cigarette
+case was silver and the cigarettes appeared--from my side of the
+dinner-table--to be fat Egyptians. Yet the timorous and unassuming
+bug-hunter hesitated palpably. Ought he to offer his cigarettes? He
+thought of his own balance at the bank and then of the millionaire's and
+trembled. The case after all was only silver and the cigarettes were not
+much more than a halfpenny each. Was it not impertinent? He sat a moment
+studying the open case which he held in both hands like a hymn book,
+while the millionaire ordered not wines--but a bass! At last courage
+came, and he inoffensively pushed the cigarettes towards his friend.
+
+"No, thanks!" smiled the millionaire, "I don't smoke." And so, 'twas a
+unicorn dilemma after all.
+
+_February_ 15.
+
+Spent Xmas week at work in her studio, transcribing my Journals while
+she made drawings. All unbeknown to her I was copying out entries of
+days gone by--how scandalised she would be if...!
+
+_February_ 22.
+
+What an amazing Masque is Rotten Row on a Sunday morning! I sat on a
+seat there this morning and watched awhile.
+
+It was most exasperating to be in this kaleidoscope of human life
+without the slightest idea as to who they all were. One man in
+particular, I noticed--a first-class "swell"--whom I wanted to touch
+gently on the arm, slip a half-a-crown into his hand and whisper,
+"There, tell me all about yourself."
+
+Such "swells" there were that out in the fairway, my little cockle-shell
+boat was wellnigh swamped. To be in the wake of a really magnificent
+Duchess simply rocks a small boat in an alarming fashion. I leaned over
+my paddles and gazed up. They steamed past unheeding, but I kept my
+nerve all right and pulled in and out quizzing and observing.
+
+It is nothing less than scandalous that here I am aged 25 with no means
+of acquainting myself with contemporary men and women even of my own
+rank and station. The worst of it is, too, that I have no time to
+lose--in my state of health. This accursed ill-health cuts me off from
+everything. I make pitiful attempts to see the world around me by an
+occasional visit (wind, weather, and health permitting) to Petticoat
+Lane, the Docks, Rotten Row, Leicester Square, or the Ethical Church.
+To-morrow I purpose going to the Christian Scientists'. Meanwhile, the
+others participate in Armageddon.
+
+_February_ 23.
+
+_Looking for Lice at the Zoo_
+
+The other day went to the Zoological Gardens, and, by permission of the
+Secretary, went round with the keepers and searched the animals for
+ectoparasites.
+
+Some time this year I have to make a scientific Report to the Zoological
+Society upon all the Lice which from time to time have been collected on
+animals dying in the gardens and sent me for study and determination.
+
+We entered the cages, caught and examined several Tinamous,
+_Rhinochetus, Eurypygia_, and many more, to the tune of "The Policeman's
+Holiday" whistled by a Mynah! It was great fun.
+
+Then we went into the Ostrich House and thoroughly searched two Kiwis.
+These, being nocturnal birds, were roosting underneath a heap of straw.
+When we had finished investigating their feathers, they ran back to
+their straw at once, the keeper giving them a friendly tap on the rear
+to hurry them up a bit. They are just like little old women bundling
+along.
+
+The Penguins, of course, were the most amusing, and, after operating
+fruitlessly for some time on a troublesome Adèle, I was amused to find,
+on turning around, all the other Adèles clustered close around my feet
+in an attitude of mute supplication.
+
+The Armadillo required all the strength of two keepers to hold still
+while I went over his carcass with lens and forceps. I was also allowed
+to handle and examine the Society's two specimens of that amazing
+creature the _Echidna_.
+
+_Balœniceps rex_ like other royalty had to be approached decorously. He
+was a big, ill-tempered fellow, and quite unmanageable except by one
+keeper for whom he showed a preference. While we other conspirators hid
+ourselves outside, this man entered the house quietly and approached the
+bird with a gentle cooing sound. Then suddenly he grabbed the bill and
+held on. We entered at the same moment and secured the wings, and I
+began the search--without any luck. We must have made an amusing
+picture--three men holding on for dear life to a tall, grotesque bird
+with an imperial eye, while a fourth searched the feathers for
+parasites!
+
+_February_ 28.
+
+What a boon is Sunday! I can get out of bed just when the spirit moves
+me, dress and bath leisurely, even with punctilio. How nice to dawdle in
+the bath with a cigarette, to hear the holiday sound of Church bells!
+Then comes that supreme moment when, shaven, clean, warm and hungry for
+breakfast and coffee, I stand a moment before the looking-glass and comb
+out my towzled hair with a parting as straight as a line in Euclid. That
+gives the finishing touch of self-satisfaction, and I go down to
+breakfast ready for the day's pleasure. I hate this weekday strain of
+having to be always each day at a set time in a certain place.
+
+_March_ 3.
+
+I often sit in my room at the B.M. and look out at the traffic with a
+glassy, mesmerised face--a fainéant. How different from that extremely
+busy youth who came to London in 1912. Say--could that lad be I? How
+many hours do I waste day-dreaming. This morning I dreamed and dreamed
+and could not stop dreaming--I had not the will to shake myself down to
+my task.... My memories simply trooped the colour.
+
+It surprised me to find how many of them had gone out of my present
+consciousness and with what poignancy of feeling I recognised them
+again! How selfishly for the most part we all live in our present selves
+or in the selves that are to be.
+
+Then I raced thro' all sorts of future possibilities--oh! when and how
+is it all going to end? How do you expect me to settle down to
+scientific research with all this internal unrest! The scientific man
+above all should possess the "quiet mind in all changes of fortune"--Sir
+Henry Wotton's _How happy is he born and taught_.
+
+The truth is I am a hybrid: a mixture of two very distinct temperaments
+and they are often at war. To keep two different natures and two
+different mental habits simultaneously at work is next to impossible.
+Consequently plenty of waste and fever and--as I might have discovered
+earlier for myself--success almost out of the question. If only I were
+pure-bred science or pure-bred art!
+
+_March_ 4.
+
+Life is a dream and we are all somnambuloes. We know that for a fact at
+all times when we are most intensely alive--at crises of unprecedented
+change, in sorrow or catastrophe, or in any unusual incident brought
+swiftly to a close like a vision!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I sit here writing this--a mirage! Who am I? No one can say. What am I?
+"A soap-bubble hanging from a reed."
+
+Every man is an inexhaustible treasury of human personality. He can go
+on burrowing in it for an eternity if he have the desire--and a taste
+for introspection. I like to keep myself well within the field of the
+microscope, and, with as much detachment as I can muster, to watch
+myself live, to report my observations of what I say, feel, think. In
+default of others, I am myself my own spectator and
+self-appreciator--critical, discerning, vigilant, fond!--my own stupid
+Boswell, shrewd if silly. This spectator of mine, it seems to me, must
+be a very moral gentleman and eminently superior. His incessant
+attentions, while I go on my way misconducting myself, goad me at times
+into a surly, ill-tempered outbreak, like Dr. Johnson. I hate being
+shadowed and reported like this. Yet on the whole--like old Samuel
+again--I am rather pleased to be Boswelled. It flatters me to know that
+at least one person takes an unremitting interest in all my ways.
+
+And, mind you, there are people who have seen most things but have never
+seen themselves walking across the stage of life. If someone shows them
+glimpses of themselves they will not recognise the likeness. How do you
+walk? Do you know your own idiosyncrasies of gait, manner of speech,
+etc.?
+
+I never cease to interest myself in the Gothic architecture of my own
+fantastic soul.[1]
+
+_March_ 6.
+
+_The Punch and Judy Show_
+
+Spent a most delightful half-an-hour to-day reading an account in the
+_Encyclopædia Britannica_ (one of my favourite books--it's so "gey
+disconnekkit") the history of the Punch and Judy Show. It's a delightful
+bit of antiquarian lore and delighted me the more because it had never
+occurred to me before that it had an ancient history. I am thoroughly
+proud of this recent acquisition of knowledge and as if it were a
+valuable freehold I have been showing it off saying, "Rejoice with
+me--see what I have got here." I fired it off first in detail at ----;
+and H---- and D---- will probably be my victims to-morrow. After all, it
+is a charming little cameo of history: compact, with plenty of scope for
+conjecture, theory, research, and just that combination of all three
+which would suit my taste and capacity if I had time for a Monograph.
+
+_March_ 22
+
+I waste much time gaping and wondering. During a walk or in a book or in
+the middle of an embrace, suddenly I awake to a stark amazement at
+everything. The bare fact of existence paralyses me--holds my mind in
+mort-main. To be alive is so incredible that all I do is to lie still
+and merely breathe--like an infant on its back in a cot. It is
+impossible to be interested in anything in particular while overhead the
+sun shines or underneath my feet grows a single blade of grass. "The
+things immediate to be done," says Thoreau, "I could give them all up to
+hear this locust sing." All my energies become immobilised, even my
+self-expression frustrated. I could not exactly master and describe how
+I feel during such moments.
+
+_March_ 23.
+
+_Johnson_ v. _Yves Delage_
+
+I expect we have all of us at one time or another heard ourselves
+addressing to annoying, objectionable acquaintances some such stinging
+castigation as Hazlitt's letter to Gifford, or Burke's letter to a Noble
+Lord, or Johnson's letter to Lord Chesterfield, or Rousseau's letter to
+the Archbishop of Paris. If only I could indulge myself! At this moment
+I could glut my rancours on six different persons at least!
+
+What a raging discontent I have suffered to-day! What cynicism, what
+bitterness of spirit, what envy, hate, exasperation, childish petulance,
+what pusillanimous feelings and desires, what crude efforts to flout
+simple, ingenuous folk with my own thwarted, repressed
+self-assertiveness!
+
+A solemn fellow told me he had heard from Johnson who said he had
+already had much success from collecting in moss.[2] With an icy
+politeness I asked who Johnson was. Who the Hell is Johnson? As a _quid
+pro quo_ I began to talk of Yves Delage, which left him as much in the
+dark as he left me. Our Gods differ, we have a different hierarchy.
+
+"Well, how's your soul?" said R----, bursting in with a sardonic smile.
+
+I gave him a despairing look and said:
+
+"Oh! a pink one with blue spots," and he left me to my fate.
+
+Had tea with the ---- and was amazed to find on the music tray in the
+drawing-room of these inoffensive artists a copy of ----'s Memoir on
+_Synapta_. Within his hearing, I said, "Did you and Mrs. ---- find this
+exciting reading?" And I held it up with a sneer. I felt I had laid bare
+a nerve and forthwith proceeded to make it twinge. ----, of course, was
+glib with an explanation, yet the question remains incalculable--just
+how pleased that young man is with himself.
+
+After tea went out into the Studio and watched these two enthusiasts
+paint. I must have glowered at them. I--the energetic, ambitious,
+pushing youth--of necessity sitting down doing nought, as unconsidered
+as a child playing on the floor. I recollected my early days in my attic
+laboratory and sighed. Where is my energy now?
+
+Mrs. ---- plays Chopin divinely well. How I envied this man--to have a
+wife play you Chopin!
+
+_March_ 24.
+
+It is fortunate I am ill in one way for I need not make my mind up about
+this War. I am not interested in it--this filth and lunacy. I have not
+yet made up my mind about myself. I am so steeped in myself--in my
+moods, vapours, idiosyncrasies, so self-sodden, that I am unable to
+stand clear of the data, to marshal and classify the multitude of facts
+and thence draw the deduction what manner of man I am. I should like to
+know--if only as a matter of curiosity. So what in God's name am I? A
+fool, of course, to start with--but the rest of the diagnosis?
+
+One feature is my incredible levity about serious matters. Nothing
+matters, provided the tongue is not furred. I have coquetted with death
+for so long now, and endured such prodigious ill-health that my main
+idea when in a fair state of repair is to seize the passing moment and
+squeeze it dry. The thing that counts is to be drunken; as Baudelaire
+says, "One must be for ever drunken; that is the sole question of
+importance. If you would not feel the horrible burden of time that
+bruises your shoulders and bends you to the earth, you must be drunken
+without cease."
+
+Another feature is my insatiable curiosity. My purpose is to move about
+in this ramshackle, old curiosity shop of a world sampling existence. I
+would try everything, meddle lightly with everything. Religions and
+philosophies I devour with a relish, Pragmatism and Bishop Berkeley and
+Bergson have been my favourite bagatelles in turn. My consciousness is a
+ragbag of things: all quips, quirks, and quillets, all excellent passes
+of pate, all the "obsolete curiosities of an antiquated cabinet" take my
+eye for a moment ere I pass on. In Sir Thomas Browne's _Pseudodoxia_, I
+am interested to find "why Jews do not stink, what is the superstition
+of sneezing after saluting, wherefore negroes are black," and so forth.
+There is a poetic appropriateness that in A.D. 1915 I should be occupied
+mainly in the study of Lice. I like the insolence of it.
+
+They tell me that if the Germans won it would put back the clock of
+civilisation for a century. But what is a meagre 100 years? Consider the
+date of the first Egyptian dynasty! We are now only in A.D. 1915--surely
+we could afford to chuck away a century or two? Why not evacuate the
+whole globe and give the ball to the Boches to play with--just as an
+experiment to see what they can make of it. After all there is no
+desperate hurry. Have we a train to catch? Before I could be serious
+enough to fight, I should want God first to dictate to me his programme
+of the future of mankind.
+
+_March_ 25.
+
+Often in the middle of a quite vivid ten seconds of life, I find I have
+switched myself off from myself to make room for the person of a
+disinterested and usually vulgar spectator. Even in the thrill of a
+devotional kiss I have overheard myself saying, "Hot stuff, this witch."
+Or in a room full of agreeable and pleasant people, while I am being as
+agreeable as I know how, comes the whisper in a cynical tone, "These
+damned women." I am apparently a triple personality:
+
+(1) The respectable youth.
+
+(2) The foul-mouthed commentator and critic.
+
+(3) The real but unknown I.
+
+Curious that these three should live together amiably in the same
+tenement!
+
+_In a Crowd_
+
+A crowd makes egotists of us all. Most men find it repugnant to them to
+submerge themselves in a sea of their fellows. A silent, listening crowd
+is potentially full of commotion. Some poor devils suffocating and
+unable any longer to bear the strain will shout, "Bravo," or "Hear,
+hear," at every opportunity. At the feeblest joke we all laugh loudly,
+welcoming this means of self-survival. Hence the success of the
+Salvation Army. To be preached at and prayed for in the mass for long on
+end is what human nature can't endure in silence and a good deal of self
+can be smuggled by an experienced Salvationist into "Alleluia" or "The
+Lord be praised."
+
+_Naming Cockroaches_
+
+I had to determine the names of some exotic cockroaches to-day and
+finding it very difficult and dull raised a weak smile in two
+enthusiasts who know them as "Blattids" by rechristening them with great
+frivolity, "Fat 'eds."
+
+"These bloody insects," I said to an Australian entomologist of rare
+quality.
+
+"A good round oath," he answered quietly.
+
+"If it was a square one it wouldn't roll properly," I said. It is nice
+to find an entomologist with whom I can swear and talk bawdy.
+
+_March_ 26.
+
+_A Test of Happiness_
+
+The true test of happiness is whether you know what day of the week it
+is. A miserable man is aware of this even in his sleep. To be as
+cheerful and rosy-cheeked on Monday as on Saturday, and at breakfast as
+at dinner is to--well, make an ideal husband.
+
+... It is a strange metempsychosis, this transformation of an
+enthusiast--tense, excitable, and active, into a sceptic, nerveless,
+ironical, and idle. That's what ill-health can do for a man. To be among
+enthusiasts--zoologists, geologists, entomologists--as I frequently am,
+makes me feel a very old man, regarding them as children, and provokes
+painful retrospection and sugary sentimentality over my past flame now
+burnt out.
+
+I do wonder where I shall end up; what shall I be twenty years hence? It
+alarms me to find I am capable of such remarkable changes in character.
+I am fluid and can be poured into any mould. I have moments when I see
+in myself the most staggering possibilities. I could become a wife
+beater, and a drug-taker (especially the last). My curiosity is often
+such a ridiculous weakness that I have found myself playing Peeping Tom
+and even spying into private documents. In a railway carriage I will
+twist my neck and risk any rudeness to see the title of the book my
+neighbour is reading or how the letter she is reading begins.
+
+_April_ 10.
+
+"Why," asks Samuel Butler, "should not chicken be born and clergymen be
+laid and hatched? Or why, at any rate, should not the clergyman be born
+full grown and in Holy Orders not to say already beneficed? The present
+arrangement is not convenient ... it is not only not perfect but so much
+the reverse that we could hardly find words to express our sense of its
+awkwardness if we could look upon it with new eyes...."
+
+As soon as we are born, if we could but get up, bathe, dress, shave,
+breakfast once for all, if we could "cut" these monotonous cycles of
+routine. If once the sun rose it would stay up, or once we were alive we
+were immortal!--how much forrarder we should all get--always at the
+heart of things, working without let or hindrance in a straight line for
+the millennium! Now we waltz along instead. Even planets die off and new
+ones come in their place. How infinitely wearisome it seems. When an old
+man dies what a waste, and when a baby is born what a redundancy of
+labour in front!
+
+_Two People I hate in particular_
+
+The man walking along the pavement in front of me giving me no room to
+pass under the satisfactory impression that he is the only being on the
+pavement or in the street, city, country, world, universe: and it all
+belongs to him even the moon and sun and stars.
+
+The woman on the 'bus the other night--pouring out an interminable flow
+of poisonous chatter into the ear of her man--poor, exhausted devil who
+kept answering dreamily "Oom" and"Yes" and "Oom"--how I hated her for
+his sake!
+
+_April_ 11.
+
+_Beethoven's Fifth Symphony_
+
+If music moves me, it always generates images--a procession of
+apparently disconnected images in my mind. In the Fifth Symphony, for
+example, as soon as the first four notes are sounded and repeated, this
+magic population springs spontaneously into being. A nude,
+terror-stricken figure in headlong flight with hands pressed to the ears
+and arms bent at the elbows--a staring, bulgy-eyed mad-woman such as one
+sees in Raemakers' cartoons of the Belgian atrocities. A man in the
+first onset of mental agony on hearing sentence of death passed upon
+him. A wounded bird, fluttering and flopping in the grass. It is the
+struggle of a man with a steam-hammer--Fate. As tho' thro' the walls of
+a closed room--some mysterious room, a fearful spot--I crouch and listen
+and am conscious that inside some brutal punishment is being meted out
+--there are short intervals, then unrelenting pursuit, then hammerlike
+blows--melodramatic thuds, terrible silences (I crouch and wonder what
+has happened), and the pursuit begins again. I see clasped hands and
+appealing eyes and feel very helpless and mystified outside. An
+epileptic vision or an opium dream--_Dostoievsky_ or De Quincey set to
+music.
+
+In the Second Movement the man is broken, an unrecognisable vomit. I see
+a pale youth sitting with arms hanging limply between the knees, hands
+folded, and with sad, impenetrable eyes that have gazed on unspeakable
+horrors. I see the brave, tearful smile, the changed life after personal
+catastrophe, the Cross held before closing eyes, sudden absences of
+mind, reveries, poignant retrospects, the rustle of a dead leaf of
+thought at the bottom of the heart, the tortuous pursuit of past
+incidents down into the silence of yesterday, the droning of comfortable
+words, the painful collection of the wreckage of a life with intent to
+"carry on" for a while in duty bound, for the widow consolation in the
+child; a greyhound's cold wet nose nozzling into a listless hand, and
+outside a Thrush singing after the storm, etc., etc.
+
+In the Third Movement comes the crash by which I know something final
+and dreadful has happened. Then the resurrection with commotion in
+Heaven: tempests and human faces, scurryings to and fro, brazen
+portcullises clanging to, never to open more, the distant roll of drums
+and the sound of horses' hoofs. From behind the inmost veil of Heaven I
+faintly catch the huzzas of a great multitude. Then comes a great
+healing wind, then a few ghost-like tappings on the window pane till
+gradually the Avenue of Arches into Heaven come into view with a solemn
+cortege advancing slowly along.
+
+Above the great groundswell of woe, Hope is restored and the Unknown
+Hero enters with all pomp into his Kingdom, etc., etc.
+
+I am not surprised to learn that Beethoven was once on the verge of
+suicide.
+
+_April_ 15.
+
+There is an absurd fellow ... who insists on taking my pirouettes
+seriously. I say irresponsibly, "All men are liars," and he replies with
+jejuneness and exactitude of a pronouncing dictionary, "A liar is one
+who makes a false statement with intent to deceive." What can I do with
+him? "Did I ever meet a lady," he asked, "who wasn't afraid of mice?" "I
+don't know," I told him, "I never experiment with ladies in that way."
+
+He hates me.
+
+_May_ 11.
+
+This mysterious world makes me chilly. It is chilly to be alive among
+ghosts in a nightmare of calamity. This Titanic war reduces me to the
+size and importance of a debilitated housefly. So what is a poor egotist
+to do? To be a common soldier is to become a pawn in the game between
+ambitious dynasts and their ambitious marshals. You lose all
+individuality, you become a "bayonet" or a "machine gun," or "cannon
+fodder," or "fighting material."
+
+_May_ 22.
+
+Generosity may be only weakness, philanthropy (beautiful word),
+self-advertisement, and praise of others sheer egotism. One can almost
+hear a eulogist winding himself up to strike his eulogy that comes out
+sententious, pompous, and full of self.
+
+_May_ 23.
+
+The following is a description of Lermontov by Maurice Baring:
+
+"He had except for a few intimate friends an impossible temperament; he
+was proud, over-bearing, exasperated and exasperating, filled with a
+savage _amour-propre_ and he took a childish delight in annoying; he
+cultivated 'le plaisir aristocratique de déplaire.' ... He could not
+bear not to make himself felt and if he felt he was unsuccessful in this
+by fair means he resorted to unpleasant ones. Yet he was warm-hearted,
+thirsting for love and kindness and capable of giving himself up to love
+if he chose.... At the bottom of all this lay no doubt a deep-seated
+disgust with himself and with the world in general, and a complete
+indifference to life resulting from large aspirations which could not
+find an outlet and recoiled upon himself."
+
+This is an accurate description of Me.
+
+_May_ 26.
+
+The time will come--it's a great way off--when a joke about sex will be
+not so much objectionable as unintelligible. Thanks to Christian
+teaching, a nude body is now an obscenity, of the congress of the sexes
+it is indecent to speak and our birth is a corruption. Hence come a
+legion of evils: reticence, therefore ignorance and therefore venereal
+disease; prurience especially in adolescence, poisonous literature, and
+dirty jokes. The mind is contaminated from early youth; even the
+healthiest-minded girl will blush at the mention of _the wonder of
+creation_. Yet to the perfectly enfranchised mind it should be as
+impossible to joke about sex as about mind or digestion or physiology.
+The perfectly enfranchised poet--and Walt Whitman in "The Song of
+Myself" came near being it--should be as ready to sing of the incredible
+raptures of the sexual act between "twin souls" as of the clouds or
+sunshine. Every man or woman who has loved has a heart full of beautiful
+things to say but no man dare--for fear of the police, for fear of the
+coarse jests of others and even of a breakdown in his own
+highmindedness. I wonder just how much wonderful lyric poetry has thus
+been lost to the world!
+
+_May_ 27.
+
+_The Pool: A Retrospect_
+
+From above, the pool looked like any little innocent sheet of water. But
+down in the hollow itself it grew sinister. The villagers used to say
+and to believe that it had no bottom and certainly a very great depth
+in it could be _felt_ if not accurately gauged as one stood at the
+water's edge. A long time ago, it was a great limestone quarry, but
+to-day the large mounds of rubble on one side of it are covered with
+grass and planted with mazzard trees, grown to quite a large girth. On
+the other side one is confronted by a tall sheet of black, carboniferous
+rock, rising sheer out of the inky water--a bare sombre surface on which
+no mosses even--"tender creatures of pity," Ruskin calls them--have
+taken compassion by softening the jagged edges of the strata or nestling
+in the scars. It is an excellent example of "Contortion" as Geologists
+say, for the beds are bent into a quite regular geometrical pattern
+--syncline and anticline in waves--by deep-seated plutonic force that
+makes the mind quake in the effort to imagine it.
+
+On the top of this rock and overhanging the water--a gaunt,
+haggard-looking Fir tree impends, as it seems in a perilous balance,
+while down below, the pool, sleek and shiny, quietly waits with a
+catlike patience.
+
+In summer time, successive rows of Foxgloves one behind the other in
+barbaric splendour are ranged around the grassy rubble slopes like
+spectators in an amphitheatre awaiting the spectacle. Fire-bellied Efts
+slip here and there lazily thro' the water. Occasionally a Grass-snake
+would swim across the pool and once I caught one and on opening his
+stomach found a large fire-bellied Eft inside. The sun beats fiercely
+into this deep hollow and makes the water tepid. On the surface grows a
+glairy Alga, which was once all green but now festers in yellow patches
+and causes a horrible stench. Everything is absolutely still, air and
+water are stagnant. A large _Dytiscus_ beetle rises to the surface to
+breathe and every now and then large bubbles of marsh gas come sailing
+majestically up from the depth and explode quietly into the fetid air.
+The _horrificness_ of this place impressed me even when I was intent
+only on fishing there for bugs and efts. Now, seen in retrospect, it
+haunts me.
+
+_May_ 28.
+
+It is only by accident that certain of our bodily functions are
+distasteful. Many birds eat the faeces of their young. The vomits of
+some Owls are formed into shapely pellets, often of beautiful
+appearance, when composed of the glittering multi-coloured elytra of
+Beetles, etc. The common Eland is known to micturate on the tuft of hair
+on the crown of its head, and it does this habitually, when lying down,
+by bending its head around and down--apparently because of the aroma,
+perhaps of sexual importance during mating time, as it is a habit of the
+male alone.
+
+At lunch time, had an unpleasant intermittency period in my heart's
+action and this rather eclipsed my anxiety over a probable Zeppelin
+Raid. Went home to my rooms by 'bus, and before setting off to catch my
+train for West Wycombe to stay for the week-end at a Farm with
+E---- swallowed two teaspoonfuls of neat brandy, filled my flask, and
+took a taxi to Paddington. At 3.50 started to walk to C---- H---- Farm
+from W. Wycombe Station, where E---- has been lodging for some weeks
+taking a rest cure after a serious nervous breakdown thro' overwork. As
+soon as I stepped out of the train, I sniffed the fresh air and soon
+made off down the road, happy to have left London and the winter and the
+war far behind. The first man of whom I inquired the way happened to
+have been working at the Farm only a few weeks ago, so I relied
+implicitly on his directions, and as it was but a mile and a half
+decided that my wobbly heart could stand the strain. I set out with a
+good deal of pleasurable anticipation. I was genuinely looking forward
+to seeing E----, altho' in the past few weeks our relations had become a
+little strained, at least on my part, mainly because of her little
+scrappy notes to me scribbled in pencil, undated, and dull! Yet I could
+do with a volume of "Sonnets from the Portuguese." These letters chilled
+me. In reply, I wrote with cold steel short, lifeless formal notes, for
+I felt genuinely aggrieved that she should care so little how she wrote
+to me or how she expressed her love. I became ironical with myself over
+the prospect of marrying a girl who appeared so little to appreciate my
+education and mental habits. [What a popinjay!--1917.] My petty spirit
+grew disenchanted, out of love. I was false to her in a hundred
+inconsiderable little ways and even deliberately planned the breaking
+off of the engagement some months hence when she should be restored to
+normal health.
+
+But once in the country and, as I thought, nearing my love at every step
+and at every bend in the road, even anticipating her arms around me with
+real pleasure (for she promised to meet me half way), I on a sudden grew
+eager for her again and was assured of a happy week-end with her. Then
+the road grew puzzling and I became confused, uncertain of the way. I
+began to murmur she should have given me instructions. Every now and
+then I had to stop and rest as my heart was beating so furiously.
+Espying a farm on the left I made sure I had arrived at my destination
+and walked across a field to it and entered the yard where I heard some
+one milking a cow in a shed. I shouted over the five-barred gate into
+empty space, "Is this C---- H---- Farm?" A labourer came out of the shed
+and redirected me. It was now ten to five. I was tired and out of sorts,
+and carried a troublesome little handbag. I swore and cursed and found
+fault with E---- and the Universe.
+
+I trudged on, asking people, as I went, the way, finally emerging from
+the cover of a beautiful wood thro' a wicket gate almost at the entrance
+to the Farm I sought. At the front door we embraced affectionately and
+we entered at once, I putting a quite good face upon my afternoon's
+exertions--when I consider my unbridled fury of a short time before.
+E----, as brown as a berry, conducted me to my bedroom and I nearly
+forgot to take this obvious opportunity of kissing her again.
+
+"How are you?" I asked.
+
+"All right," she said, fencing.
+
+"But really?"
+
+"All right."
+
+(A little nettled): "My dear, that isn't going to satisfy me. You will
+have to tell me exactly how you are."
+
+After tea, I recovered myself and we went for a walk together. The
+beauty of the country warmed me up, and in the wood we kissed--I for my
+part happy and quite content with the present state of our relations,
+_i.e._, affectionate but not perfervid.
+
+_May_ 29.
+
+Got up early and walked around the Farm before breakfast. Everything
+promises to be delightful--young calves, broods of ducklings, and
+turkeys, fowls, cats and dogs. In the yard are two large Cathedral
+barns, with enormous pent roofs sloping down to within about two feet of
+the ground and entered by way of great double doors that open with the
+slowness and solemnity of a Castle's portal studded with iron knobs. It
+thrilled me to the marrow on first putting my head outside to be greeted
+with the grunt of an invisible pig that I found scraping his back on the
+other side of the garden wall.
+
+In the afternoon, E---- and I sat together in the Beech Wood: E---- on a
+deck chair and I on a rug on the ground. In spite of our beautiful
+surroundings we did not progress very well, but I attributed her slight
+aloofness to the state of her nerves. She is still far from recovered.
+These wonderful Beech Woods are quite new to me. The forest beech is a
+very different plant from the solitary tree. In the struggle to reach
+the light the Forest Beech grows lean and tall and gives an
+extraordinary suggestion of wiry powerful strength. On the margins of
+the wood, Bluebells were mobilised in serried ranks. Great Tits
+whistled--in the language of our allies--"Bijou, Bijou" and I agreed
+with every one of them.
+
+Some folk don't like to walk over Bluebells or Buttercups or other
+flowers growing on the ground. But it is foolish to try to pamper Nature
+as if she were a sickly child. She is strong and can stand it. You can
+stamp on and crush a thousand flowers--they will all come up again next
+year.
+
+By some labyrinthine way which I cannot now recall, the conversation
+worked round to a leading question by E.--if in times like these we
+ought not to cease being in love? She was quite calm and serious. I said
+"No, of course not, silly." My immediate apprehension was that she had
+perceived the coldness in my letters and I was quite satisfied that she
+was so well able to read the signs in the sky. "But you don't wish to go
+on?" she persisted. I persisted that I did, that I had no misgivings, no
+second thoughts, that I was not merely taking pity on her, etc. The wild
+temptation to seize this opportunity for a break I smothered in
+reflecting how ill she was and how necessary to wait first till she was
+well again. These thoughts passed swiftly, vaguely like wraiths thro' my
+mind: I was barely conscious of them. Then I recalled the sonnet about
+coming in the rearward of a conquered woe and mused thereon. But I took
+no action. [Fortunately--for me. 1916.]
+
+Presently with cunning I said that there was no cloud on my horizon
+whatever--only her "letters disappointed me a little--they were so
+cold," but "as soon as I saw you again, darling, those feelings
+disappeared."
+
+As soon as they were spoken I knew they were not as they might seem, the
+words of a liar and hypocrite. They _became_ true. E---- looked very
+sweet and helpless and I loved her again as much as ever.
+
+"It's funny," she said, "but I thought your letters were cold. Letters
+are so horrid."
+
+The incident shews how impossible is intellectual honesty between
+lovers. Truth is at times a hound which must to kennel.
+
+"Write as you would speak," said I. "You know I'm not one to carp about
+a spelling mistake!"
+
+The latter remark astonished me. Was it indeed I who was speaking? All
+the week I had been fuming over this. Yet I was honest: the Sun and E.'s
+presence were dispelling my ill-humours and crochets. We sealed our
+conversation with a kiss and swore never to doubt each other again. E.'s
+spell was beginning to act. It is always the same. I cannot resist the
+actual presence of this woman. Out of her sight, I can in cold blood
+plan a brutal rupture. I can pay her a visit when the first kiss is a
+duty and the embrace a formality. But after 5 minutes I am as passionate
+and devoted as before. It is always thus. After leaving her, I am angry
+to think that once more I have succumbed.
+
+In the evening we went out into a field and sat together in the grass.
+It is beautiful. We lay flat on our backs and gazed up at the sky.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+S.H. has died of enteric at Malta. In writing to Mrs. H., instead of
+dwelling on what a splendid fellow he was I belaboured the fact that I
+still remembered our boyish friendship in every detail and still kept
+his photo on my mantelpiece and altho' "in later years" I didn't suppose
+we "had a great deal in common I discovered that a friendship even
+between two small boys cannot wholly disappear into the void."
+Discussing myself when I ought to have been praising him! Ugh! She will
+think what a conceited, puff-breasted Jackanapes. These phrases have
+rankled in my mind ever since I dropped the letter into the letter-box.
+"Your Stanley, Mrs. H., was of course a very inferior sort of person and
+naturally, you could hardly expect me to remain friendly with him but
+rest assured I hadn't forgotten him," etc.
+
+_The Luxury of Lunacy_
+
+Yesterday, I read a paper at the Zoological Society about lice. There
+was a goodly baldness of sconce and some considerable length of beard
+present that listened or appeared to listen to my innocent remarks with
+great solemnity and sapience.... I badly wanted to tell them some horrid
+stories about human lice but I had not the courage. I wanted to jolt
+these middle-aged gentlemen by performing a few tricks but I am too
+timid for such adventures. But before going to sleep I imagined a
+pandemonium in which with a perfectly glacial manner I produced lice
+alive from my pockets, conjured them down from the roof in a rain, with
+the skilful sleight of hand drew them out of the chairman's beard, made
+the ladies scream as I approached, dared to say they were all lousy and
+unclean and finished up with an eloquent apostrophe after the manner of
+Thomas de Quincey (and of Sir Walter Raleigh before him) beginning:
+
+"O just, subtle and eloquent avenger, pierce the hides of these
+abominable old fogies, speckle their polished calvaria with the scarlet
+blood drops...."
+
+But I hadn't the courage. Shelley in a crowded omnibus suddenly burst
+out: "O let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of
+Kings, etc." I've always wanted to do something like that and when I
+have £5 to spare I hope to pull the communication cord of an express
+train--my hands tingle as often as I look at it. Dr. Johnson's courage
+in tapping the lamp-posts is really everyone's envy tho' we laugh at him
+for it and say, green-eyed, that he was mad. In walking along the
+pavement, I sometimes indulge myself in the unutterable, deeply rooted
+satisfaction of stepping on a separate flagstone where this is possible
+with every stride. And if this is impossible or not easy, there arises
+in me a vague mental uneasiness, some subconscious suspicion that the
+world is not properly geometrical and that the whole universe perhaps is
+working out of truth. I am also rather proud of my courageous
+self-surrender to the daemon of laughter, especially in those early days
+when H. and I used to sit opposite one another and howl like hyenas.
+After the most cacophonous cachinnations as soon as we had recovered
+ourselves he or I would regularly remark in serious and confidential
+tones, "I say--we _really_ are going mad." But what a delightful luxury
+to be thus mad amid the great, spacious, architectural solemnity with
+gargoyles and effigies of a scientific meeting! Some people never do
+more than chuckle or smile--and they are often very humorous happy
+people, ignorant nevertheless of the joy of riding themselves on the
+snaffle and losing all control.
+
+While boating on ---- last summer, we saw two persons, a man and a girl
+sitting together on the beach reading a book with heads almost touching.
+
+"I wonder what they're reading?" I said, and I was dying to know. We
+made a few facetious guesses.
+
+"Shall I ask?"
+
+"Yes, do," said Mrs. ----.
+
+The truth is we all wanted to know. We were suddenly mad with curiosity
+as we watched the happy pair turning over leaf after leaf.
+
+While R---- leaned on his oars, I stood up in the boat and threatened to
+shout out a polite enquiry--just to prove that the will is free. But
+seeing my intention the boat-load grew nervous and said seriously, "No,"
+which unnerved me at the last moment so I sat down again. Why was I so
+afraid of being thought a lunatic by two persons in the distance whom I
+had never seen and probably would never see again? Besides I _was_ a
+lunatic--we all were.
+
+In our post-prandial perambulations about S. Kensington G---- and I
+often pass the window of a photographer's shop containing always a
+profusion of bare arms, chests, necks, bosoms belonging to actresses,
+aristocrats and harlots--some very beautiful indeed. Yet on the whole
+the window annoys us, especially one picture of a young thing with an
+arum lily (ghastly plant!) laid exquisitely across her breast.
+
+"Why do we suffer this?" I asked G----, tapping the window ledge as we
+stood.
+
+"I don't know," he answered lamely--morose. (Pause while the two
+embittered young men continue to look in and the beautiful young women
+continue to look out.)
+
+Thoroughly disgruntled I said at last: "If only we had the courage of
+our innate madness, the courage of children, lunatics and men of genius,
+we should get some stamp paper, and stick a square beneath each
+photograph with our comments."
+
+Baudelaire describes how he dismissed a glass vendor because he had no
+coloured glasses--"glasses of rose and crimson, magical glasses, glasses
+of Paradise"--and, stepping out on to his balcony, threw a flowerpot
+down on the tray of glasses as soon as the man issued into the street
+below, shouting down furiously, "The Life Beautiful! The Life
+Beautiful."
+
+Bergson's theory is that laughter is a "social gesture" so that when a
+man in a top hat treads on a banana skin and slips down we laugh at him
+for his lack "of living pliableness." At this rate we ought to be
+profoundly solemn at Baudelaire's action and moreover a "social gesture"
+is more likely to be an expression of society's will to conformity in
+all its members rather than any dangerous "living pliableness." Society
+hates living pliableness and prefers drill, routine, orthodoxy,
+conformity. It hated the living pliableness of Turner, of Keats, of
+Samuel Butler and a hundred others.
+
+But to return to lunacy: the truth is we are all mad fundamentally and
+are merely schooled into sanity by education. Pascal wrote: "Men are so
+necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of
+madness." And, in fact, the man who has succeeded in extirpating this
+intoxication of life is usually said to be "temporarily insane." In
+those melancholy interludes of sanity when the mind becomes rationalised
+we all know how much we have been deceived and gulled, what an
+extraordinary spectacle humanity presents rushing on in noise and tumult
+no one knows why or whither. Look at that tailor in his shop--why does
+he do it? Some day in the future he thinks he will.... But the day
+never, comes and he is nevertheless content.
+
+_May_ 30.
+
+A brilliantly sunny day. This funny old farm-house where we are staying
+quite delights me. It is pleasant, too, to dawdle over dressing, to put
+away shaving tackle for a day or so, to jump out of bed in the morning
+and thrust my head out of the window into the fresh and stock-scented
+air of the garden, listen to the bird chorus or watch a "scrap" in the
+poultry-run. Then all unashamed, I dress myself before a dear old lady
+in a flowery print gown concealing 4 thin legs and over the top of the
+mirror a piece of lace just like a bonnet, caught up in front by a
+piece of pink ribbon. On the walls Pear's Soap Annuals, on a side table
+_Swiss Family Robinson_ and _Children of the New Forest_. Then there are
+rats under the floors, two wooden staircases which wind up out of sight,
+two white dairies, iron hapses on all the doors and a privy at the top
+of the orchard. (Tell me--how do you explain the psychosis of a being
+who on a day must have seized hammer and nail and an almanac picture of
+a woman in the snow with a basket of goodies--"An Errand of
+Mercy"--carried all three to the top of the orchard and nailed the
+picture up on the dirty wall in the semi-darkness of an earth-closet?)
+
+Got up quite early before breakfast and went birds'-nesting.... It would
+take too long and be too sentimental for me to record my feelings on
+looking into the first nest I found--a Chaffinch's, the first wild
+bird's eggs I have seen for many years. As I stood with an egg between
+thumb and forefinger, my memories flocked down like white birds and
+surrounded me. I remained still, fed them with my thoughts and let them
+perch upon my person--a second St. Francis of Assisi. Then I shoo'ed
+them all away and prepared for the more palpitating enjoyment of to-day.
+
+After breakfast we sat in the Buttercup field--my love and I--and
+"plucked up kisses by the roots that grew upon our lips." The sun was
+streaming down and the field thickly peopled with Buttercups. From where
+we sat we could see the whole of the valley below and Farmer Whaley--a
+speck in the distance--working a machine in a field. We watched him
+idly. The gamekeeper's gun went off in one of the covers. It was jolly
+to put our heads together right down deep in the Buttercups and
+luxuriously follow the pelting activities of the tiny insects crawling
+here and there in the forest of grass, clambering over a broken blade
+athwart another like a wrecked tree or busily enquiring into some low
+scrub at the roots. A chicken came our way and he seemed an enormous
+bird from the grass-blade's point of view. How nice to be a chicken in
+a field of Buttercups and see them as big as Sunflowers! or to be a
+Gulliver in the Beech Woods! to be so small as to be able to climb a
+Buttercup, tumble into the corolla and be dusted yellow or to be so big
+as to be able to pull up a Beech-tree with finger and thumb! If only a
+man were a magician, could play fast and loose with rigid Nature? what a
+multitude of rich experiences he could discover for himself!
+
+I looked long and steadily this morning at the magnificent torso of a
+high forest Beech and tried to project myself into its lithe tiger-like
+form, to feel its electric sap vitalising all my frame out to the tip of
+every tingling leaf, to possess its splendid erectness in my own bones.
+I could have flung my arms around its fascinating body but the austerity
+of the great creature forbad it. Then a Hawk fired my ambition!--to be a
+Hawk, or a Falcon, to have a Falcon's soul, a Falcon's heart--that
+splendid muscle in the cage of the thorax--and the Falcon's pride and
+sagacious eye![3]
+
+When the sun grew too hot we went into the wood where waves of Bluebells
+dashed up around the foot of the Oak in front of us.... I never knew
+before, the delight of offering oneself up--an oblation of one's whole
+being; I even longed for some self-sacrifice, to have to give up
+something for her sake. It intoxicated me to think I was making another
+happy....
+
+After a lunch of scrambled eggs and rhubarb and cream went up into the
+Beech Wood again and sat on a rug at the foot of a tree. The sun
+filtered in thro' the greenery casting a "dim, religious light."
+
+"It's like a cathedral," I chattered away, "stained glass windows,
+pillars, aisles--all complete."
+
+"It would be nice to be married in a Cathedral like this," she said.
+"At C---- Hall Cathedral, by the Rev. Canon _Beech_...."
+
+"Sir Henry Wood was the organist."
+
+"Yes," she said, "and the Rev. Blackbird the precentor."
+
+We laughed over our silliness!
+
+Shrew-mice pattered over the dead leaves and one came boldly into view
+under a bramble bush--she had never seen one before. Overhead, a ribald
+fellow of a Blackbird whistled a jaunty tune. E---- laughed. "I am sure
+that Blackbird is laughing at us," she said. "It makes me feel quite
+hot."
+
+This evening we sat on the slope of a big field where by lowering our
+eyes we could see the sun setting behind the grass blades--a very pretty
+sight which I do not remember, ever to have noted before. A large blue
+_Carabus_ beetle was stumbling about, Culvers cooed in the woods near
+by. It was delightful to be up 600 feet on a grassy field under the
+shadow of a large wood at sunset with my darling.
+
+_May_ 31.
+
+Sitting at tea in the farm house to-day E---- cried suddenly, pointing
+to a sandy cat in the garden:
+
+"There,--he's the father of the little kittens in the barn and I'll tell
+you how we know. P---- noticed the kittens had big feet and later on saw
+that old Tom stalking across the garden with big feet of exactly the
+same kind."
+
+"So you impute the paternity of the kittens to the gentleman under the
+laurel bushes?"
+
+I looked at the kittens to-night and found they had extra toes. "Mr.
+Sixtoes," as W---- calls him also possesses six toes, so the
+circumstantial evidence looks black against him.
+
+_June_ 1.
+
+In the Beech Wood all the morning. Heigh-ho! it's grand to lie out as
+straight as a line on your back, gaze upwards into the tree above, and
+with a caressing eye follow its branches out into their multitudinous
+ramifications forward and back--luxurious travel for the tired eye. ...
+Then I would shut my eyes and try to guess where her next kiss would
+descend. Then I opened my eyes and watched her face in the most
+extravagant detail, I counted the little filaments on her precious mole
+and saw the sun thro' the golden down of her throat....
+
+Sunlight and a fresh wind. A day of tiny cameos, little _coups
+d'Å“il_, fleeting impressions snapshotted on the mind: the glint on
+the keeper's gun as he crossed a field a mile away below us, sunlight
+all along a silken hawser which some Spider engineer had spun between
+the tops of two tall trees spanning the whole width of a bridle path,
+the constant patter of Shrew-mice over dead leaves, the pendulum of a
+Bumble-bee in a flower, and the just perceptible oscillation of the tree
+tops in the wind. While we are at meals the perfume of Lilac and Stocks
+pours in thro' the window and when we go to bed it is still pouring in
+by the open lattice.
+
+_June_ 2.
+
+Each day I drop a specially selected Buttercup in past the little
+"Peeler," at the apex of the "V" to lie among the blue ribbons of her
+camisoles--those dainty white leaves that wrap around her bosom like the
+petals around the heart of a Rose. Then at night when she undresses, it
+falls out and she preserves it.
+
+In the woods, hearing an extra loud patter on the leaves, we turned our
+heads and saw a Frog hopping our way. I caught him and gave an
+elementary lesson in Anatomy. I described to her the brain, the pineal
+organ in Anguis, Sphenodon's pineal eye, etc. Then we fell to kissing
+again.... Every now and then she raises her head and listens (like a
+Thrush on the lawn) thinking she hears someone approach. We neither of
+us speak much ... and at the end of the day, the nerve endings on my
+lips are tingling.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Farmer Whaley is a funny old man with a soft pious voice. When he feeds
+the Fowls, he sucks in a gentle, caressing noise between his lips for
+all the world as if he fed them because he loved them, and not because
+he wants to fatten them up for killing. His daughter Lucy, aged 22,
+loves all the animals of the farm and they all love her; the Cows stand
+monumentally still while she strokes them down the blaze or
+affectionately waggles their dewlaps. This morning, she walked up to a
+little Calf in the farm-yard scarce a fortnight old which started to
+"back" in a funny way, spraddling out its legs and lowering its head.
+Miss Lucy laughed merrily and cried "Ah! you funny little thing," and
+went off on her way to feed the Fowls who all raced to the gate as soon
+as they heard her footsteps. She brought in two double-yolked Ducks'
+eggs for us to see and marvel at. In the breakfast room stands a stuffed
+Collie dog in a glass case. I'd as soon embalm my grandmother and keep
+her on the sideboard.
+
+I asked young George, the farm-boy, what bird went like this: I whistled
+it. He looked abashed and said a Chaffinch. I told Miss Lucy who said
+George was a silly boy, and Miss Lucy told Farmer Whaley who said George
+ought to know better--it was a Mistle-Thrush.
+
+The letters are brought us each morning by a tramp with a game leg who
+secretes his Majesty's Mails in a shabby bowler hat, the small packages
+and parcels going to the roomy tail pocket of a dirty morning coat. A
+decayed gentleman of much interest to us.
+
+_June_ 3.
+
+We have made a little nest in the wood and I lead her into it by the
+hand over the briars and undergrowth as if conducting her to the grand
+piano on a concert platform. I kissed her....
+
+Then in a second we switch back to ordinary conversation. In an ordinary
+conversational voice I ask the trees, the birds, the sky.
+
+"What's become of all the gold?"
+
+"What's become of Waring?"
+
+"What is Love? 'Tis not hereafter."
+
+"Where are the snows of yesteryear?"
+
+"Who killed Cock Robin?"
+
+"Who's who?"
+
+And so on thro' all the great interrogatives that I could think of"till
+she stopped my mouth with a kiss and we both laughed.
+
+"Miss Penderkins," I say. "Miss Penderlet, Miss Pender-au-lait, Miss
+Pender-filings."
+
+What do I mean? she cries. "What's the point of the names? Why take my
+name in vain? Why? What? How?"
+
+She does not know that clever young men sometimes trade on their
+reputation among simpler folk by pretending that meaningless remarks
+conceal some subtlety or cynicism, some little Attic snap.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have been teaching her to distinguish the songs of different birds and
+often we sit a long while in the Cathedral Wood while I say, "What's
+that?" and "What's that?" and she tells me. It is delightful to watch
+her dear serious face as she listens.... This evening I gave a _viva
+voce_ examination as per below:
+
+"What does the Yellow Hammer say?"
+
+"What colour are the Hedge Sparrow's eggs?"
+
+"Describe the Nightjar's voice."
+
+"How many eggs does it lay?"
+
+"Oh! you never told me about the Nightjar," she cried outraged.
+
+"No: it's a difficult question put in for candidates taking honours."
+
+Then we rambled on into Tomfoolery. "Describe the call-note of a motor
+omnibus." "Why does the chicken cross the road?" and "What's
+that?"--when a railway engine whistled in the distance.
+
+Measure by this our happiness!
+
+_June_ 4.
+
+At a quarter past eight, this morning, the horse and trap were awaiting
+me outside, and bidding her "Goodbye" I got in and drove off--she riding
+on the step down so far, as the gate. Then we waved till we were out of
+sight. Back in London by 10 a.m. She makes slow progress, poor dear--her
+nerves are still very much of a jangle. But I am better, my heart is
+less wobbly.
+
+_June_ 5.
+
+R---- cannot make me out. He says one day I complain bitterly at not
+receiving a Portuguese sonnet once a week, and the next all is well and
+Love reigneth. "Verily a Sphinx."
+
+_June_ 7.
+
+Spent the afternoon at the Royal Army Medical College in consultation
+with the Professor of Hygiene. Amid all the paraphernalia of research,
+even when discussing a serious problem with a serious Major, I could not
+take myself seriously. I am incurably trivial and always feel myself an
+irresponsible youth, wondering and futile, among owlish grown-ups.
+
+At 4 p.m. departed and went down on Vauxhall Bridge and watched a
+flour-barge being unloaded before returning to the Museum. I could
+readily hang on behind a cart, stare at an accident, pull a face at a
+policeman and then run away.
+
+_June_ 20.
+
+... It annoys me to find the _laissez-faire_ attitude of our relatives.
+Not one with a remonstrance for us and yet all the omens are against our
+marriage. In the state of my nervous system and in the state of hers--we
+have both had serious nervous break-downs--how impossible it seems! Yet
+they say all the old conventional things to us, about our happiness and
+so on!...
+
+... Am I a moral monster? Surely a man who can combine such calculating
+callousness with really generous impulses of the heart is--what?
+
+The truth is I think I am in love with her: but I am also mightily in
+love with myself. One or the other has to give.
+
+_June_ 25.
+
+If sometimes you saw me in my room by myself, you would say I was a
+ridiculous coxcomb. For I walk about, look out of the window then at the
+mirror--turning my head sideways perhaps so as to see it in profile. Or
+I gaze down into my eyes--my eyes always impress me--and wonder what
+effect I produce on others. This, I believe, is not so much vanity as
+curiosity. I know I am not prepossessing in appearance--my nose is
+crooked and my skin is blotched. Yet my physique--because it is
+mine--interests me. I like to see myself walking and talking. I should
+like to hold myself in my hand in front of me like a Punchinello and
+carefully examine myself at my leisure.
+
+_June_ 28.
+
+Saw my brother A---- off at Waterloo en route for Armageddon. Darling
+fellow. He shook hands with P---- and H----, and P---- wished him
+"Goodbye, and good luck." Then he held my hand a moment, said "Goodbye,
+old man," and for a second gave me a queer little nervous look. I could
+only say "Goodbye," but we understand each other perfectly.... It is
+horrible. I love him tenderly.
+
+_June_ 29.
+
+_Sleep_
+
+Sleep means unconsciousness: unconsciousness is a solemn state--you get
+it for example from a blow on the head with a mallet. It always
+weightily impresses me to see someone asleep--especially someone I love
+as to-day, stretched out as still as a log--who perhaps a few minutes
+ago was alive, even animated. And there is nothing so welcome, unless it
+be the sunrise, as the first faint gleam of recognition in the
+half-opened eye when consciousness like a mighty river begins to flow in
+and restore our love to us again.
+
+When I go to bed myself, I sometimes jealously guard my faculties from
+being filched away by sleep. I almost fear sleep: it makes me
+apprehensive--this wonderful and unknowable Thing which is going to
+happen to me for which I must lay myself out on a bed and wait, with an
+elaborate preparedness. Unlike Sir Thomas Browne, I am not always so
+content to take my leave of the sun and sleep, if need be, into the
+resurrection. And I sometimes lie awake and wonder when the mysterious
+Visitor will come to me and call me away from this thrilling world, and
+how He does it, to which end I try to remain conscious of the gradual
+process and to understand it: an impossibility of course involving a
+contradiction in terms. So I shall never know, nor will anybody else.
+
+_July_ 2.
+
+I've had such a successful evening--you've no idea! The pen simply flew
+along, automatically easy, page after page in perfect sequence. My style
+trilled and bickered and rolled and ululated in an infinite variety; you
+will find in it all the subtlest modulations, inflections and suavities.
+My afflatus came down from Heaven in a bar of light like the
+Shekinah--straight from God, very God of very God. I worked in a golden
+halo of light and electric sparks came off my pen nib as I scratched the
+paper.
+
+_July_ 3.
+
+_The Clever Young Man_
+
+Argued with R---- this morning. He is a type specimen of the clever
+young man. We both are. Our flowers of speech are often forced hot-house
+plants, paradoxes and cynicisms fly as thick as driving rain and Shaw is
+our great exemplar. I could write out an exhaustive analysis of the
+clever young man, and being one myself can speak from "inspired sources"
+as the newspapers say.
+
+A common habit is to underline and memorise short, sharp, witty remarks
+he sees in books and then on future occasions dish them up for his own
+self-glorification. If the author be famous he begins, "As ---- says,
+etc." If unknown the quotation is quietly purloined. He is always very
+self-conscious and at the same time very self-possessed and very
+conceited. You tell me with tonic candour that I am insufferably
+conceited. In return, I smile, making a sardonic avowal of my good
+opinion of myself, my theory being that as conceit is, as a rule,
+implicit and, as a rule, blushingly denied, you will mistake my impudent
+confession for bluff and conclude there is really something far more
+substantial and honest beneath my apparent conceit. If, on the other
+hand, I am conceited, why I have admitted it--I agree with you--but tho'
+there is no virtue in the confession being quite detached and
+unashamed--still you haven't caught me by the tail. It is very difficult
+to circumvent a clever young man. He is as agile as a monkey.
+
+His principal concern of course is to arouse and maintain a reputation
+for profundity and wit. This is done by the simple mechanical formula of
+antithesis: if you like winkles he proves that cockles are inveterately
+better; if you admire Ruskin he tears him to ribbons. If you want to
+learn to swim--as it is safer, he shows it is more dangerous to know how
+to swim and so on. I know his whole box of tricks. I myself am now
+playing the clever young man by writing out this analysis just as if I
+were not one myself.
+
+You doubt my cleverness? Well, some years ago in R----'s presence I
+called ----"the Rev. Fastidious Brisk,"--the nickname be it recalled
+which Henley gave to Stevenson (without the addition of "Rev."). At the
+time I had no intention of appropriating the witticism as I quite
+imagined R---- was acquainted with it. His unexpected explosion of
+mirth, however, made me uncomfortably uncertain of this, yet for the
+life of me I couldn't muster the honesty to assure him that my feather
+was a borrowed one. A few weeks later he referred to it again as
+"certainly one of my better ones"--but still I remained dumb and the
+time for explanations went for once and all. Now see what a pretty
+pickle I am in: the name "Brisk" or "F.B." is in constant use by us for
+this particular person--he goes by no other name, meanwhile I sit and
+wonder how long it will be before R---- finds me out. There are all
+sorts of ways in which he might find out: he might read about it for
+himself, someone might tell him or--worst of all--one day when we are
+dining out somewhere he will announce to the whole company my brilliant
+appellation as a little after-dinner diversion: I shall at once observe
+that the person opposite me _knows_ and is about to air his knowledge;
+then I shall look sternly at him and try to hold him: he will hesitate
+and I shall land him with a left and right: "I suppose you've read
+Henley's verses on Stevenson?" I remark easily and in a moment or so
+later the conversation has moved on.
+
+_August_ 1.
+
+Am getting married at ---- Register Office on September 15th. It is
+impossible to set down here all the labyrinthine ambages of my will and
+feelings in regard to this event. Such incredible vacillations, doubts,
+fears. I have been living at a great rate below surface recently. "If
+you enjoy only twelve months' happiness," the Doctor said to me, "it is
+worth while." But he makes a recommendation.... At his suggestion E----
+went to see him and from his own mouth learnt all the truth about the
+state of my health, to prevent possible mutual recriminations in the
+future.[4] To marry an introspective dyspeptic--what a prospect for
+her!... I exercise my microscopic analysis on her now as well as on
+myself.... This power in me is growing daily more automatic and more
+repugnant. It is a nasty morbid unhealthy growth that I want to hide if
+I cannot destroy. It amounts to being able at will to switch myself in
+and out of all my most cherished emotions; it is like the case in Sir
+Michael Foster's _Physiology_ of a man who, by pressing a tumour in his
+neck could stop or at any rate control the action of his heart.
+
+_August_ 2.
+
+House pride in newly-wed folk, for example, H. and D. to-day at Golder's
+Green or the Teignmouth folk, is very trying to the bachelor visitor.
+They will carry a chair across the room as tenderly as tho' it were a
+child and until its safe transit is assured, all conversation goes by
+the board. Or the wife suddenly makes a remark to the husband _sotto
+voce_, both thereupon start up simultaneously (leaving the fate of
+Warsaw undecided) while you, silenced by this unexpected manœuvre, wilt
+away in your chair, the pregnant phrase still-born on your lips.
+Presently they re-enter the room with the kitten that was heard in the
+scullery or with a big stick used to flourish at a little Tomtit on the
+rose tree. _She_ apologises and both settle down again, recompose their
+countenances into a listening aspect and with a devastating politeness,
+pick up the poor, little, frayed-out thread of the conversation where it
+left off with: "Europe? you were saying...." I mobilise my scattered
+units of ideas but it is all a little chilly for the lady of the house
+if she listens with her face and speaks with her lips--her heart is far
+from me: she fixes a glassy eye on the tip of my cigarette, waiting to
+see if the ash will fall on her carpet.
+
+_August_ 6.
+
+The most intimate and extensive journal can only give each day a
+relatively small sifting of the almost infinite number of things that
+flow thro' the consciousness. However vigilant and artful a diarist may
+be, plenty of things escape him and in any event re-collection is not
+re-creation....
+
+To keep a journal is to have a secret liaison of a very sentimental
+kind. A _journal intime_ is a super-confidante to whom everything is
+told and confessed. For an engaged or married man to have a secret
+super-confidante who knows things which are concealed from his lady
+seems to me to be deliberate infidelity. I am as it were engaged to two
+women and one of them is being deceived. The word "Deceit" comes up
+against me in this double life I lead, and insists I shall name a plain
+thing bluntly. There is something very like sheer moral obliquity in
+these entries behind her back.... Is this journal habit slowly
+corrupting my character? Can an engaged or married man conscientiously
+continue to write his _journal intime_?
+
+This question of giving up my faithful friend after September I must
+consider.
+
+Of course most men have something to conceal from someone. Most married
+men are furtive creatures, and married women too. But I have a Gregers
+Werle-like passion for life to be lived on a foundation of truth in
+every intercourse. I would have my wife know all about me and if I
+cannot be loved for what I surely am, I do not want to be loved for what
+I am not. If I continue to write therefore she shall read what I have
+written....
+
+My Journal keeps open house to every kind of happening in my soul.
+Provided it is a veritable autochthon--I don't care how much of a
+tatterdemalion or how ugly or repulsive--I take him in and--I fear
+sponge him down with excuses to make him more creditable in other's
+eyes. You may say why trouble whether you do or whether you don't tell
+us all the beastly little subterranean atrocities that go on in your
+mind. Any eminently "right-minded" _Times_ or _Spectator_ reader will
+ask: "Who in Faith's name is interested in your introspective
+muck-rakings--in fact, who the Devil are you?" To myself, a person of
+vast importance and vast interest, I reply,--as are other men if I could
+but understand them as well. And in the firm belief that whatever is
+inexorably true however unpleasant and discreditable (in fact true
+things can never lack a certain dignity), I would have you know Mr.
+_Times_- and Mr. _Spectator-reader_ that actual crimes have many a time
+been enacted in the secrecy of my own heart and the only difference
+between me and an habitual criminal is that the habitual criminal has
+the courage and the nerve and I have not. What, then, may these crimes
+be? Nothing much--only murders, theft, rape, etc. None of them, thank
+God; fructify in action--or at all events only the lesser ones. My
+outward and visible life if I examine it is merely a series of
+commonplace, colourless and thoroughly average events. But if I analyse
+myself, my inner life, I find I am both incredibly worse and incredibly
+better than I appear. I am Christ and the Devil at the same time--or as
+my sister once called me--a child, a wise man, and the Devil all in one.
+Just as no one knows my crimes so no one knows of my good actions. A
+generous impulse seizes me round the heart and I am suddenly moved to
+give a poor devil a £5 note. But no one knows this because by the time I
+come to the point I find myself handing him a sixpenny-bit and am quite
+powerless to intervene. Similarly my murders end merely in a little
+phlegm.
+
+_August_ 7.
+
+_Two Adventures_
+
+On a 'bus the other day a woman with a baby sat opposite, the baby
+bawled, and the woman at once began to unlace herself, exposing a large,
+red udder, which she swung into the baby's face. The infant, however,
+continued to cry and the woman said,--
+
+"Come on, there's a good boy--if you don't, I shall give it to the
+gentleman opposite."
+
+Do I look ill-nourished?
+
+"'Arma virumque cano,'" a beggar said to me this morning in the High
+Street, "or as the boy said, 'Arms and the man with a dog,' mistaking
+the verb for the noun. Oh! yes, sir, I remember my Latin. Of course, I
+feel it's rather invidious my coming to you like this, but everything is
+absolutely 'non est' with me," and so on.
+
+"My dear sir," I answered expansively, "I am as poor as you are. You at
+least have seen better days you say--but I never have."
+
+He changed in a minute his cringeing manner and rejoined:
+
+"No, I shouldn't think you had," eyeing me critically and slinking off.
+
+Am I _so_ shabby?
+
+_August_ 8.
+
+By Jove! I hope I live! ... Why does an old crock like myself go on
+living? It causes me genuine amazement. I feel almost ashamed of myself
+because I am not yet dead seeing that so many of my full-blooded
+contemporaries have perished in this War. I am so grateful for being
+allowed to live so long that nothing that happens to me except death
+could upset me much. I should be happy in a coal mine.
+
+_August_12.
+
+Suffering from indigestion. The symptoms include:
+
+Excessive pandiculation,
+
+Excessive oscitation,
+
+Excessive eructation,
+
+Dyspnœa,
+
+Sphygmic flutters,
+
+Abnormal porrigo,
+
+a desiccated epidermis.
+
+_August_16.
+
+_Lice or "Creeping Ferlies"_[5]
+
+I probably know more about Lice than was ever before stored together
+within the compass of a single human mind! I know the Greek for Louse,
+the Latin, the French, the German, the Italian. I can reel off all the
+best remedies for Pediculosis: I am acquainted with the measures adopted
+for dealing with the nuisance in the field by the German Imperial Board
+of Health, by the British R.A.M.C., by the armies of the Russians, the
+French, the Austrians, the Italians. I know its life history and
+structure, how many eggs it lays and how often, the anatomy of its
+brain and stomach and the physiology of all its little parts. I have
+even pursued the Louse into ancient literature and have read old medical
+treatises about it, as, for example, the _De Phthiriasi_ of Gilbert de
+Frankenau. Mucius the lawgiver died of this disease so also did the
+Dictator Scylla, Antiochus Epiphanes, the Emperor Maximilian, the
+philosopher Pherecydes, Philip II. of Spain, the fugitive Ennius,
+Callisthenes, Alcman and many other distinguished people including the
+Emperor Arnauld in 899. In 955, the Bishop of Noyon had to be sewn up in
+a leather sack before he could be buried. (See _Des Insectes reputés
+venimeux_, par M. Amoureux Fils, Doctor of Medicine in the University of
+Montpellier, Paris, 1789.) In Mexico and Peru, a poll-tax of Lice was
+exacted and bags of these treasures were found in the Palace of
+Montezuma (see Bingley, _Animal Biog_., first edition, iii.). In the
+_United Service Magazine_ for 1842 (clix., 169) is an account of the
+wreck of the _Wager_, a vessel found adrift, the crew in dire straits
+and Captain Cheap lying on the deck--"like an ant-hill."
+
+So that as an ancient writer puts it, "you must own that for the
+quelling of human pride and to pull down the high conceits of mortal
+man, this most loathesome of all maladies (Pediculosis) has been the
+inheritance of the rich, the wise, the noble and the mighty--poets,
+philosophers, prelates, princes, Kings and Emperors."
+
+In his well-known _Bridgewater Treatise_, the Rev. Dr. Kirby, the Father
+of English Entomology, asked: "Can we believe that man in his pristine
+state of glory and beauty and dignity could be the receptacle of prey so
+loathesome as these unclean and disgusting creatures?" (Vol. I., p. 13).
+He therefore dated their creation _after_ the Fall.
+
+The other day a member of the staff of the Lister Institute called to
+see me on a lousy matter, and presently drew some live Lice from his
+waistcoat pocket for me to see. They were contained in pill boxes with
+little bits of muslin stretched across the open end thro' which the
+Lice could thrust their little hypodermic needles when placed near the
+skin. He feeds them by putting these boxes into a specially constructed
+belt and at night ties the belt around his waist and all night sleeps in
+Elysium. He is not married.
+
+In this fashion, he has bred hundreds from the egg upwards and even
+hybridised the two different species!
+
+In the enfranchised mind of the scientific naturalist, the usual
+feelings of repugnance simply do not exist. Curiosity conquers
+prejudice.
+
+_August_ 27.
+
+Am spending my summer holidays in the Lakes at Coniston with G---- and
+R----.... I am simply consumed with pride at being among the mountains
+at last! It is an enormous personal success to have arrived at Coniston!
+
+_August_ 29.
+
+Climbed a windy eminence on the other side of the Lake and had a
+splendid view of Helvellyn--like a great hog's back. It is fine to walk
+over the elastic turf with the wind bellowing into each ear and swirling
+all around me in a mighty sea of air until I was as clean-blown and
+resonant as a sea-shell. I moved along as easily as a disembodied spirit
+and felt free, almost transparent. The old earth seemed to have soaked
+me up into itself, I became dissolved into it, my separate body was
+melted away from me, and Nature received me into her deepest
+communion--until, UNTIL I got on the lee side of a hedge where the calm
+brought me back my gaol of clay.
+
+_September_ 1.
+
+Fourteen days hence I shall be a married man. But I feel most dejected
+about it. When I fell down the other day, I believe I slightly concussed
+my spinal column, with the result that my 1913 trouble has returned, but
+this time on the _left_ side! paralysis and horrible vertigo and
+presentiments of sudden collapse as I walk.
+
+_September_ 2.
+
+I fear I have been overdoing it in this tempting mountain region.
+Walking too far, etc. So I am slacking. It was fortunate I did not get
+concussion of the brain--I came within an inch of it: the hair of my
+head brushed the ground.
+
+_A Buxom Rogue in Earthenware_
+
+I knocked at the door of Sunbeam Cottage the other morning to know if
+they had a boat for hire. The door was promptly opened by a plump,
+charming little wench of about 17, and I caught a glimpse of the kitchen
+with its gunrack holding two fowling pieces, a grandfather clock in one
+corner and a dresser full of blueish china.
+
+"We don't let our boat out for hire," she answered with a smile so
+honest and natural and spontaneous that I was already saying to myself I
+had never met with anything like it at all when she stretched up her
+bare, dairy-maid arm--strong, creamy and soft, just reached a big key
+strung to a wooden block and lying on the top shelf of the dresser and
+at once handed it to me with:
+
+"But you are quite welcome to use it and here is the key to the
+boathouse."
+
+I now felt certain that she was one in a million and thanked her most
+awfully. I have never met such swiftly-moving generosity.
+
+"It's very nice on the Lake just now," she said. "I like to lie in the
+boat with a book and let her drift."
+
+I asked her if she would not come too, but this tight little fairy was
+too busy in the house. She is Clara Middleton done in earthenware.
+
+Subsequently R---- and I often visited the cottage and we became great
+friends, her mother showing us some letters she received as a girl from
+John Ruskin--a great friend of hers. The gamekeeper himself said that
+for his part he could never read Ruskin's books--it was like driving a
+springless cart over a rocky road. We all laughed and I said he was
+prejudiced in view of the letters which began: "My darling," and
+finished up "Yr loving J.R."
+
+But Mrs. ---- said he had never read them, and Madge (ah! that name!)
+said her father had never shewn the least interest in them at which we
+laughed again, and the gamekeeper laughed too. He is such a jolly
+man--they all are delightfully simple, charming folk and we talked of
+Beasts and Birds that live on the mountains.
+
+_September_ 4.
+
+Bathed in the Lake from the boat. It was brilliantly fine. R---- dipped
+her paddles in occasionally just to keep the boat from grounding. Then I
+clambered over the bows and stood up to dry myself in the sun like one
+of Mr. Tuke's young men.
+
+_September_ 7.
+
+My 26th birthday. In London again. Went straight to the Doctor and
+reported myself. I quite expected him to forbid the marriage as I could
+scarcely hobble to his house. To my amazement, he apparently made light
+of my paralysis, said it was a common accident to bruise the _os
+coccyx_, etc.
+
+_September_ 8.
+
+Am staying at ---- for a few days to rest and try to be better by that
+fateful 11th, when I am married.
+
+_Later_: My first experience of a Zeppelin raid. Bombs dropped only a
+quarter of a mile away and shrapnel from the guns fell on our roof. We
+got very pannicky and went into a neighbour's house, where we cowered
+down in our dressing-gowns in absolute darkness while bombs exploded and
+the dogs barked.
+
+I was scared out of my life and had a fit of uncontrollable trembling.
+Later we rang up ---- and ----, and thank Heavens both are safe. A great
+fire is burning in London, judging by the red glare. At midnight sat and
+drank sherry and smoked a cigar with Mr. ----, my braces depending from
+my trousers like a tail and shewing in spite of dressing-gown. Then went
+home and had some neat brandy to steady my heart. H---- arrived soon
+after midnight. A motor-omnibus in Whitechapel was blown to bits. Great
+scenes in the city.
+
+_September_ 9.
+
+Very nervy to-day. Hobbled down the road to see the damage done by the
+bombs.
+
+_September_ 10.
+
+A swingeing cold in the head thro' running about on the night of the
+raid. Too feeble to walk far, so Mrs. ---- went into the town for me and
+purchased my wedding-ring, which cost £2 5s. 0d.
+
+
+
+[1] 1917. I am now editing my own Journal--bowdlerising my own book!
+
+[2] A method of collecting insects in winter by shaking moss over white
+paper.
+
+[3] 1917. Cf. Sainte-Beuve's Essay on Maurice de Guérin: "Il aimait à se
+répandre et presque à se ramifier dans la Nature. Il a exprimé en mainte
+occasion cette sensation diffuse, errante; il y avait des jours ou, dans
+son amour ou calme, il enviait la vie forte et muette qui règne sons
+l'écorce des chênes; il rêvait à je ne sais quelle métamorphose en
+arbre...."
+
+[4] Cf. 1916, November 6.
+
+[5] Cf. Burns's poem "On a Louse."
+
+
+
+
+PART III--MARRIAGE
+
+
+_September_ 12.
+
+This evening we walked thro' the Churchyard reading tombstone
+inscriptions. What a lot of men have had wives!
+
+I can't make out what has come over folk recently: the wit, wisdom and
+irony on the old tombstones have given place to maudlin sentiment and
+pious Bible references. Then on the anniversary of the death the custom
+among poorer classes is to publish such pathetic doggerel as the
+following--cuttings I have taken from time to time from the local
+newspaper in-:
+
+     "Her wish:
+
+     "'Farewell dear brother, Mother, sisters,
+     My life was passed in love for thee.
+     Mourn not for me nor sorrow take
+     But love my husband for my sake
+     Until the call comes home to thee,
+     Live thou in peace and harmony.'"
+
+Again:
+
+     "A day of remembrance sad to recall
+     But still in my heart he is loved best of all
+     No matter how I think of him--his name I oft recall;
+     There is nothing left to answer me but his photo on the wall."
+
+Or:
+
+     "One year has passed since that sad day,
+     When one we loved was called away.
+     God took her home; it was His will,
+     Forget her?--No, we never will."
+
+These piteous screeds fill me with loving-kindness and with contempt
+alternately in a pendulum-like rhythm. What is the truth about them? Is
+the grief of these people as mean and ridiculous as their rhymes? Or is
+it a pitiful inarticulateness? Or is it merely vulgar advertisement of
+their sorrow? Or does it signify a passionate intention never to
+forget?--or a fear of forgetting, the rhymes being used as a fillip to
+the memory? Or--most miserable of all--is it just a custom, and one
+follow'ed in order to appear respectable in others' eyes? Are they poor
+souls? or contemptible fools?
+
+_September_ 14.
+
+There is a ridiculous Cocker spaniel at the house where we are staying.
+He must have had a love affair and been jilted, or else he's a sort of
+village idiot. The landlady says he's not so silly as he looks--but he
+looks very silly: he languishes sentimentally, and when we laugh at him
+he looks "hurt." To-day we took him up on the Down and it seemed to
+brighten him up. Really, he is sane enough, with plenty of commonsense
+and good manners. But he is kept at home in the garden so much, lolling
+about all day, that as E---- said, having nothing to do, he falls in love.
+
+The _Saturday Review_ writes: The effect of the "Brides and the Bath"
+Case on people with any trace of _nice feeling_ is perhaps not
+particularly mischievous, tho' the thing is repulsive and hateful to
+them.... To gloat over the details of repulsive horrors, simply _from
+motives of curiosity_--this is bad and degrading.
+
+What a lot of repulsive things the nice refined people who read the
+_Saturday Review_ must find in the world just now. For example the War.
+"Simply from motives of curiosity." Why certainly, no other than these,
+concerning one of the most remarkable murders in the annals of crime.
+And murders anyhow are damned interesting--which the _Saturday Review_
+isn't.
+
+_Chipples_
+
+I was surprised to discover the other day that when I talked of Chipples
+no one understood what I meant! It proves to be a dialect word familiar
+to all residents in Devonshire and designating spring onions. Anyway
+you won't find it in Murray's Dictionary; yet etymologically it is an
+extremely interesting word and a thoroughly good word with a splendid
+pedigree. To wit:
+
+Italian: Cipollo.
+
+Spanish: Cebolla.
+
+French: Ciboule.
+
+Latin: Cæpulla, dim. of cæpa (_cf_. cive, civot).
+
+Now how did this pretty little alien manage to settle down among simple
+Devon folk? What has been the relation between Italy and--say Appledore,
+or Plymouth?[1]
+
+_October_ 6.
+
+In London once more, living at her flat and using her furniture.
+
+_The Chalcidoidea_
+
+The Chalcidoidea are minute winged insects that parasitise other
+insects, and in the _Memoirs of the Queensland Museum_ (Vol. I., 1912)
+you shall find an enormous catalogue of them by a person named Girault
+who writes the following dedication:
+
+"I respectfully dedicate this little portion of work to science, common
+sense or true knowledge. I am convinced that human welfare is so
+dependent upon science that civilisation would not endure without it,
+and that what is meant by progress would be impossible. Also I am
+convinced that the great majority of mankind are too ignorant, that
+education is too archaic and impractical as looked at from the
+standpoint of intrinsic knowledge. There is too little known of the
+essential unity of the Universe and of things included, for instance,
+man himself. Opinions and prejudices rule in the place of what is
+true...."
+
+Part II. is dedicated to:
+
+"The genius of mankind, especially to that form of it expressed in
+monistic philosophy, whose conceived perception is the highest
+attainment reached by man."
+
+I can only echo Whistler's remark one day as he stood before an
+execrably bad drawing "God bless my soul"--uttered slowly and
+thoughtfully and then repeated.
+
+The beauty of it is that the Editor adds a serious footnote,
+dissociating himself, and a Scarabee to whom I shewed the Work, read it
+with a clouded brow and then said: "I think it rather out of place in a
+paper of this sort." (Tableau.)
+
+_October_ 12.
+
+Down with influenza.
+
+_October_ 13.
+
+A Zeppelin raid last night. I am down with a temperature, but our little
+household remained quite calm, thank God. We heard guns going off, and I
+had a fit of trembling as I lay in bed. Many dead of heart failure owing
+to the excitement.
+
+_October_ 14.
+
+Still in bed. No raid last night. There were two raids on Wednesday, one
+at 9.30, and another at midnight. The first time the caretaker of the
+flats came up very alarmed to say "Zeppelins about," so we put out the
+lights. Then at midnight when everyone else was asleep I heard a big
+voice shout up from the street: "Lights out there. They're about again."
+Lay still in bed and waited. Distant gunfire.
+
+_October_ 17.
+
+Bad heart attack.
+
+_October_ 18.
+
+Heart intermits. Every three or four minutes. M---- said that I ought to
+be getting used to it by now! Phew!! Very nervy and pusillanimous.
+Taking strychnine in strong doses. I hope dear E---- does not catch the
+'flu. She swallows quinine with large hopes.
+
+_October_ 19.
+
+Staying at R----. Had a ghastly journey down, changing trains twice at
+Clapham Junction and at Croydon, heart intermitting all the time in
+every position. Poor E---- with me. To-day surprised to find myself still
+alive.
+
+_October_ 20.
+
+Better to-day. After much persuasion, I have got E---- to let the flat so
+that we can get away into the country outside the Zeppelin zone.
+
+_October_ 24.
+
+Back in London again. Am better, bolstered up with arsenic and
+strychnine. Too nervously excited to do any work.
+
+_October_ 25.
+
+The letting of our flat is now in the hands of an agent, and E----, poor
+dear, is quite resigned to abandoning all her precious wallpapers, etc.
+
+_November_ 7.
+
+The flat is let and we are now living in rooms at ----, 20 miles out of
+London, to the Westward.
+
+_November_ 8.
+
+It is a great relief to be down in the country. Zeppelins terrify me.
+Have just had a delightful experience in reading Conrad's new book,
+_Victory_--a welcome relief from all the tension of the past two months.
+To outward view, I have been merely a youth getting married, catching
+the 'flu and giving up a London flat.
+
+Inwardly, I have been whizzing around like a Catherine Wheel. Consider
+the items:
+
+Concussion of the spine.
+
+Resulting paralysis of left leg ten days before marriage.
+
+Zeppelin raid (heard a cannon go off for the first time).
+
+Severe cold in the head day before marriage (and therefore wild
+anxiety).
+
+Successful marriage with abatement of cold.
+
+Return to our home.
+
+Ten days later, down with influenza.
+
+A second Zeppelin raid.
+
+Bad heart attack.
+
+Then flat sub-let and London evacuated.
+
+The record nauseates me. I am nauseated with myself and my
+self-centredness.... Suppose I have been "whizzing" as I call it--what
+then? They are but subjective trifles--meanwhile other men are seeing
+great adventures in Gallipoli and elsewhere. "The _Triumph_ is gone,"
+exclaimed the Admiral who in a little group of naval officers on board
+the flagship had been watching H.M.S. _Triumph_ sink in the Ægean. He
+shuts his telescope with a click and returns in great dudgeon to his own
+quarters. How I envy all these men who are participating in this
+War--soldiers, sailors, war correspondents--all who live and throb and
+are not afraid. I am a timid youth, ansemic, wear spectacles, and am
+frightened by a Zep raid! How humiliating. I hate myself for a
+white-livered craven: I am suffocated for want of more life and courage.
+My damnable body is slowly killing off all my spirit and buoyancy. Even
+my mind is becoming blurred. My memory is like an old man's exactly.
+(Ask ----.)
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Yet thro' all my nausea, here I remain happy to discuss myself and my
+little mishaps. I'm damned sick of myself and all my neurotic
+whimperings, and so I hereby and now intend to lead a new life and throw
+this Journal to the Devil. I want to mangle it, tear it to shreds. You
+smug, hypocritical readers! you'll get no more of me. All you say I know
+is true before you say it and I know _now_ all the criticism you are
+going to launch. So please spare yourself the trouble. You cannot
+enlighten me upon myself. I _know_. I disgust myself--and you, and as
+for you, you can go to the Devil with this Journal.
+
+_Finis_
+
+_November_ 27.
+
+To-day, armed with a certificate from my Doctor in a sealed envelope and
+addressed "to the Medical Officer examining Mr. W.N.P. Barbellion," I
+got leave to attend the recruiting office and offer my services to my
+King and Country. At the time, the fact that the envelope was sealed
+caused no suspicion and I had been comfortably carrying the document
+about in my pocket for days past.
+
+Of course I attended merely as a matter of form under pressure of the
+authorities, as I knew I was totally unfit--but not quite _how_ unfit.
+After receiving this precious certificate, I learnt that K---- was
+recruiting Doctor at W----, and he offered to "put me thro' in five
+minutes," as he knows the state of my health. So at a time agreed upon,
+I went to-day and was immediately rejected as soon as he had
+stethoscoped my heart. The certificate therefore was not needed, and
+coming home in the train I opened it out of curiosity....
+
+I was quite casual and thought it would be merely interesting to see
+what M---- said.
+
+It was.
+
+"Some 18 months ago," it ran, "Mr. Barbellion shewed the just visible
+symptoms of ---- ----" and altho' this fact was at once communicated to
+my relatives it was withheld from me and M---- therefore asked the M.O.
+to respect this confidence and to reject me without stating on what
+grounds. He went on to refer to my patellar and plantar reflexes, by
+which time I had had enough, tore the paper up and flung it out of the
+railway carriage window.
+
+I then returned to the Museum intending to find out what ---- ---- was
+in Clifford Allbutt's System of Medicine. I wondered whether it was
+brain or heart; and the very thought gave me palpitation. I hope it is
+heartsomething short and sharp rather than lingering. But I believe it
+must be--of the brain, the opposite process of softening occurring in
+old age. I recall M-'s words to me before geting married: that I had
+this "nerve weakness," but I was more likely to succumb to pneumonia
+than to any nervous trouble, and that only 12 months' happiness would be
+worth while.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the whole I am amazed at the calm way in which I take this news. I
+was a fool never to have suspected serious nerve trouble before. Does
+dear E---- know? What did M---- tell her when he saw her before our
+marriage?
+
+_November_ 28.
+
+As soon as I woke up in this clear, country air this morning, I thought:
+---- ----. I have decided never to find out what it is. I shall find out
+in good time by the course of events.
+
+A few years ago, the news would have scared me. But not so now. It only
+interests me. I have been happy, merry, and quite high-spirited to-day.
+
+_December_ 5.
+
+I believe it's creeping paralysis. My left leg goes lame after a short
+walk. Fortunately E---- does not take alarm.
+
+_December_ 17.
+
+Spent the last two days, both of us, in a state of unrelieved gloom. The
+clouds never lifted for a moment--it's awful. I scarcely have spoken a
+word.... And eugenically, what kind of an infant would even a Mark
+Tapley expect of a father with a medical history like mine, and a mother
+with a nervous system like hers?... Could anything be more unfortunate?
+And the War? What may not have happened by this time next year? My
+health is grotesque.
+
+_December_ 20.
+
+I wonder if she knows. I believe she does but I am afraid to broach the
+matter in case she doesn't. I think she must know something otherwise
+she would show more alarm over my leg, and when I went to the Recruiting
+Office she seemed to show no fear whatever lest they took me. Several
+times a day in the middle of a talk, or a meal, or a kiss, this problem
+flashes thro' my mind. I look at her but find no solution. However--for
+the present--the matter is not urgent.
+
+
+[1] The English Dialect Dictionary derives the word from Old French
+_chiboule_, and gives a reference to Piers Plowman. Why hasn't such an
+old and useful word become a part of the English language like others
+also brought over at the time of the Norman Conquest?
+
+
+
+
+1916
+
+
+_February_ 1.
+
+Since I last wrote--a month ago--I have recovered my buoyancy after a
+blow which kept me under water so long I thought I should never come up
+and be happy again.... I was reciting my woes to R----, and gaining
+much relief thereby, when we espied another crony on the other side of
+the street, crossed over at once, bandied words with him and then walked
+on, picking up the thread of my lugubrious story just where I had left
+off--secretly staggered at my emotional agility. I've got to this
+now,--I simply don't care.
+
+_February_ 2.
+
+"And she draiglet all her petticoatie, Coming thro' the rye." These
+words have a ridiculous fascination for me; I cannot resist their
+saccharine, affectionate, nay amorous jingle and keep repeating them
+aloud all over the house--as Lamb once kept reciting "Rose Aylmer."
+
+_February_ 16.
+
+We took possession of our country cottage to-day: very charming and
+overlooking a beautiful Park.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Have just discovered the Journal of the De Goncourts and been reading it
+greedily. Life has really been a commodity. I am boiling over with
+vitality, chattering amiably to everyone about nothing--argumentative,
+sanguine, serious, ridiculous. I called old R---- a Rapscallion, a
+Curmudgeon, and a Scaramouche, and E---- a trull, a drab, a trollop, a
+callet. "You certainly are a unique husband," said that sweet little
+lady, and I....
+
+With me, one of the symptoms of delirium is always a melodramatic
+truculence! I shake my fist in R----'s face and make him explode with
+laughing.... The sun to-day, and the great, whopping white clouds all
+bellied out, made me feel inside quite a bright young dog wriggling its
+body in ecstatic delight let loose upon the green sward.
+
+"You must come down for a week end," I said to R---- at lunch. "Come down
+as soon as you can. You will find every comfort. It is an enormous
+house--I have not succeeded in finding my way about it and--it's
+dangerous to lose yourself--makes you late for dinner. When you arrive
+our gilded janitor will say: 'I believe Mr. Barbellion is in the
+library.'"
+
+"Black eunuchs wait on you at dinner, I suppose," R---- rejoined.
+
+"Oh! yes and golden chandeliers and a marble stair-case--all in barbaric
+splendour."
+
+"Yes, I shall certainly be glad to come down," said R----,
+phlegmatically.
+
+And so on and so on. Words, idle words all day in a continuous rush. And
+I am sure that the match which fired the gun-powder was the discovery of
+the De Goncourts' Journal! It's extraordinary how I have been going on
+from week to week quite calmly for all the world as if I had read all
+the books and seen all the places and done everything according to the
+heart's desire. This book has really jolted me out of my complacency: to
+think that all this time, I have been dead to so much! Why I might have
+died unconscious that the De Goncourts had ever lived and written their
+colossal book and now I am aware of it, I am all in a fever to read it
+and take it up into my brain: I might die now before I have finished
+it--a thought that makes me wild with desire just as I once endured most
+awful pangs when I felt my health going, and believed that I might die
+before having ever been in love--to die and never to have been in love!
+--for an instant at a time this possibility used to make me writhe.
+
+_March_ 22.
+
+R---- has an unpleasant habit of making some scarifying announcement
+drawing forth an explosive query from me and then lapsing at once into
+an eleusinian silence: he appears to take a sensuous pleasure in the
+pause that keeps you expectant. I could forgive a man who keeps you on
+tenterhooks for two puffs in order to keep his pipe alight, but
+R---- shuts up out of sheer self-indulgence and goes on gazing at the
+horizon with the eyes of a seer (he thinks) trying to cod me he sees a
+portent there only revealed to God's elect.
+
+I told him this in the middle of one of his luxurious silences. "I will
+tell you," he said deliberately, "when we reach the Oratory." (We were
+in Brompton Road.)
+
+"Which side of it?" I enquired anxiously. "This or that?"
+
+"That," said he, "will depend on how you behave in the meantime."
+
+_April_ 3.
+
+We met a remarkable Bulldog to-day in the street, humbly following
+behind a tiny boy to whom it was attached by a piece of string. At the
+time we were following in the wake of three magnificent Serbian
+Officers, and I was particularly interesting myself in the curious cut
+of their top boots. But the Bulldog was the Red Herring in our path.
+
+"Is that a Dog?" I asked the little boy.
+
+He assured me that it was, and so it turned out to be, tho' Bull-frog
+would have been a better name for it, the forelegs being more bandied,
+the back broader and the mouth wider than in any Bulldog I have ever
+seen. It was a super-Bulldog.
+
+We turned and walked on. "There," said R----, "now we have lost our
+Serbian Officers."
+
+_April_ 4.
+
+"May I use your microscope?" he asked.
+
+"By all means," I said with a gesture of elaborate politeness.
+
+He sat down at my table, in my chair, and used my instrument--becoming
+at once absorbed and oblivious to my banter as per below:
+
+"As Scotchmen," I said, "are monuments rather than men, this latest raid
+on Edinboro's worthy inhabitants must be called vandalsim rather than
+murder."
+
+No answer. I continued to stand by my chair.
+
+"How pleased Swift, Johnson, Lamb, and other anti-Caledonians would
+be...."
+
+"Hope you don't mind my occupying your chair a little longer," the
+Scotchman said, "but this is a larva, has curious maxillæ...." and his
+voice faded away in abstraction.
+
+"Oh! no--go on," I said, "I fear it is a grievous absence of hospitality
+on my part in not providing you with a glass of whiskey. Can I offer you
+water, Sir?"
+
+No answer.
+
+Another enthusiast ushered himself in, was greeted with delight by the
+first and invited to sit down. I pulled out a chair for him and said:
+
+"Shave, sir, or hair cut?"
+
+"If you follow along to the top of the galea," No. I droned on
+imperturbably, "you will...." etc.
+
+I got tired of standing and talking to an empty house but at last they
+got up, apologising and making for the door.
+
+I entreated them not to mention the matter--my fee should be nominal--I
+did it out of sheer love, etc.
+
+They thanked me again and would have said more but I added blandly:
+
+"You know your way out?" They assured me they did (having worked in the
+place for 30 years and more)--I thanked God--and sat down to my table
+once more.
+
+(These reports of conversations are rather fatuous: yet they give an
+idea of the sort of person I have to deal with, and also the sort of
+person I am among this sort of person.)
+
+_April_ 6.
+
+_The Housefly Problem_--1916
+
+For weeks past we have all been in a terrible flutter scarcely
+paralleled by the outbreak of Armageddon in August, 1914. The spark
+which fired almost the whole building was a letter to the _Times_
+written by Dr. ----, making public an ignominious confession of
+ignorance on the part of Entomologists as to how the Housefly passed the
+winter. In reply, many correspondents wrote to say they hibernated, and
+one man was even so temerarious as to quote to us Entomologists the
+exact Latin name of the Housefly: viz., _Musca domestica_. We asked for
+specimens and enormous numbers of flies at once began to arrive at the
+Museum, alive and dead--and not a Housefly among them! So there was a
+terrible howdedo.
+
+One of the correspondents was named "Masefield." "Not Masefield the
+poet?" an excited dipterist asked. I reassured him.
+
+"I've a good mind," said Dr. ----, "to reply to this chap who's so
+emphatic and give him a whigging--only he's climbing down a bit in this
+second letter in to-day's issue." I strongly advocated clemency.
+
+But still the affair goes on. Every morning sees more letters and more
+flies sent by all sorts of persons--we seem to have set the whole world
+searching for Houseflies--Duchesses, signalmen, farmers, footmen. Every
+morning each fresh batch of flies is mounted on pins by experts in the
+Setting Room, and an Assistant's whole time is devoted to identifying,
+arranging, listing and reporting upon the new arrivals. At the last
+meeting of the Trustees a sample collection was displayed to show
+indubitably that the insects which hibernate in houses are not _Musca
+domestica_ but _Pollenia rudis_. I understand the Trustees were
+appreciative.
+
+An observant eye can now discover state visits to our dipterists from
+interested persons carrying their flies with them, animated discussions
+in the corridor, knots of excited enthusiasts in the Lavatory, in the
+Library, everywhere--and everywhere the subject discussed is the same:
+How does the Housefly pass the winter? As one passes one catches: "In
+Bakehouses certainly they are to be found but...." or a wistful voice,
+"I wish I had caught that one in my bathroom three winters ago--I am
+certain it was a Housefly." The Doctor himself--a gallant
+Captain--wanders from room to room stimulating his lieutenants to make
+suggestions, and examining every answer to the great interrogative on
+its merits, no matter how humble or insignificant the person who makes
+it. Then of an afternoon he will entirely disappear, and word goes round
+that he has set forth to examine a rubbish heap in Soho or Pimlico. As
+the afternoon draws to its close someone enquires if he has come back
+yet; next morning a second asks if I had seen him, then a third
+announces mournfully that he has just been holding conversation with
+him, but that nothing at all was found in the rubbish heap.
+
+The great sensation of all occurred last week when somebody ran along
+the corridor crying that Mr. ---- had just found a Housefly in his room.
+We were all soon agog with the news, and the excited Captain was
+presently espied setting out for the scene of operations with a killing
+bottle and net. The insect was promptly impounded and identified as a
+veritable _Musca domestica_. A consultation being held to sit on the
+body, a lady finally laid information that two "forced Houseflies"
+hatched the day before had escaped from her possession. She suggested
+Mr. ----'s specimen was one of them.
+
+"How would it get from your room to Mr. ----'s?" she
+
+was immediately asked. And breathless, we all heard her answer
+deliberately and quite audibly that the fugitive may have gone out of
+her window, up the garden and in by Mr. ----'s window, _or_ it may have
+gone out of her door, up the corridor and in by his door. I wanted to
+know why it should have entered Mr. ----'s room as he is not a dipterist
+but a microlepidopterist. They looked at me sternly and we slowly
+dispersed.
+
+This morning, the Dr. came to me with a newspaper cutting in his hand,
+saying, "_The Times_ is behindhand." He handed me the slip. It was a
+clipping from to-day's _Times_ about a sackful of flies which had been
+taken from Wandsworth Clock Tower in a state of hibernation.
+
+"Behindhand?" I asked timidly, for I felt that all the story was not in
+front of me.
+
+"Why, yes. Don't you know?"
+
+I knew nothing, but was prepared for anything.
+
+"_The Star_, two days ago," he informed me, "had a paragraph about
+this--headed 'Tempus fugit' "--this last in a resentful tone as tho' the
+frivolous reporter were attempting to discredit our mystery.
+
+There was a long pause. Neither of us spoke. Then he slowly said:
+
+"I wonder why _The Times_ is so behindhand. This is two days late."
+
+_May_ 5.
+
+Hulloa, old friend: how are you? I mean my Diary. I haven't written to
+you for ever so long, and my silence as usual indicates happiness. I
+have been passing thro' an unbroken succession of calm happy days,
+walking in the woods with my darling, or doing a little gentle gardening
+on coming home in the evening--and the War has been centuries away.
+Later on towards bedtime, E---- reads Richard Jefferies, I play Patience
+and Mrs. ---- makes garments for Priscilla.
+
+The only troubles have been a chimney which smokes and a neighbour's dog
+which barks at night. So to be sure, I have made port after storm at
+last--and none too soon. To-day my cheerfulness has been rising in a
+crescendo till to-night it broke in such a handsome crest of pure
+delight that I cannot think of going to bed without recording it.
+
+_Pachmann_
+
+After sitting on the wall around the fountain in the middle of Trafalgar
+Square, eating my sandwiches and feeding the Pigeons with the crumbs, I
+listened for a moment to the roar of the traffic around three sides of
+the Square as I stood in the centre quite alone, what time one fat old
+pigeon, all unconcerned, was treading another. It was an extraordinary
+experience: motor horns tooted incessantly and it seemed purposelessly,
+so that one had the fancy that all London was out for a joy-ride--it was
+a great British Victory perhaps, or Peace Day.
+
+Then walked down Whitehall to Westminster Bridge in time to see the 2
+o'clock boat start upstream for Kew. I loitered by the old fellow with
+the telescope who keeps his pitch by Boadicea: I saw a piper of the
+Scots Guards standing near gazing across the river but at nothing in
+particular--just idling as I was. I saw another man sitting on the stone
+steps and reading a dirty fragment of newspaper. I saw the genial,
+red-faced sea-faring man in charge of the landing stage strolling up and
+down his small domain,--chatting, jesting, spitting, and making fast a
+rope or so. Everything was _alive_ to the finger tips, vividly shining,
+pulsating.
+
+Arrived at Queen's Hall in time for Pachmann's Recital at 3.15.... As
+usual he kept us waiting for 10 minutes. Then a short, fat, middle-aged
+man strolled casually on to the platform and everyone clapped
+violently--so it was Pachmann: a dirty greasy looking fellow with long
+hair of dirty grey colour, reaching down to his shoulders and an ugly
+face. He beamed on us and then shrugged his shoulders and went on
+shrugging them until his eye caught the music stool, which seemed to
+fill him with amazement. He stalked it carefully, held out one hand to
+it caressingly, and finding all was well, went two steps backwards,
+clasping his hands before him and always gazing at the little stool in
+mute admiration, his eyes sparkling with pleasure, like Mr. Pickwick's
+on the discovery of the archeological treasure. He approached once more,
+bent down and ever so gently moved it about 7/8ths of an inch nearer
+the piano. He then gave it a final pat with his right hand and sat down.
+
+He played Nocturne No. 2, Prelude No. 20, a Mazurka and two Etudes of
+Chopin and Schubert's Impromptu No. 4.
+
+At the close we all crowded around the platform and gave the queer,
+old-world gentleman an ovation, one man thrusting up his hand which
+Pachmann generously shook as desired.
+
+As an encore he gave us a Valse--"Valse, Valse," he exclaimed
+ecstatically, jumping up and down in his seat in time to the music. It
+was a truly remarkable sight: on his right the clamorous crowd around
+the platform; on his left the seat holders of the Orchestra Stalls,
+while at the piano bobbed this grubby little fat man playing divine
+Chopin divinely well, at the same time rising and falling in his seat,
+turning a beaming countenance first to the right and then to the left,
+crying, "Valse, Valse." He is as entertaining as a tumbler at a variety
+hall.
+
+As soon as he had finished, we clapped and rattled for more, Pachmann
+meanwhile standing surrounded by his idolaters in affected despair at
+ever being able to satisfy us. Presently he walked off and a scuffle was
+half visible behind the scenes between him and his agent who sent him in
+once more.
+
+The applause was wonderful. As soon as he began again it ceased on the
+instant, and as soon as he left off it started again
+immediately--nothing boisterous or rapturous but a steady, determined
+thunder of applause that came regularly and evenly like the roar from
+some machine.
+
+_May_ 20.
+
+Spent a quiet day. Sat at my escritoire in the Studio this morning
+writing an Essay, with a large 4-fold window on my left, looking on to
+woods and fields, with Linnets, Greenfinches, Cuckoos calling. This
+afternoon while E---- rested awhile I sat on the veranda in the sun and
+read _Antony and Cleopatra_.... Yes, I'm in harbour at last. I'd be the
+last to deny it but I cannot believe it will last. It's too good to
+last and it's all too good to be even true. E---- is too good to be
+true, the home is too good to be true, and this quiet restful existence
+is too wonderful to last in the middle of a great war. It's just a
+little deceitful April sunshine, that's all....[1]
+
+Had tea at the ----. A brilliant summer's evening. Afterwards, we
+wandered into the garden and shrubbery and sat about on the turf of the
+lawn, chatting and smoking. Mr. ---- played with a rogue of a white
+Tomcat called Chatham, and E---- talked about our neighbour, "Shamble
+legs," about garden topics, etc. Then I strolled into the drawing-room
+where Cynthia was playing Chopin on a grand piano. Is it not all
+perfectly lovely?
+
+How delicious to be silent, lolling on the Chesterfield, gazing
+abstractedly thro' the lattice window and listening to the lulling
+charities of Nocturne No. 2, Op. 37! The melody in the latter part of
+this nocturne took me back at once to a cloudless day in an open boat in
+the Bay of Combemartin, with oars up and the water quietly and regularly
+lapping the gunwales as we rose and fell. A state of the most profound
+calm and happiness took possession of me.
+
+_June_ 2.
+
+From the local paper:
+
+"A comrade in the Gloucesters writing to a friend at ---- mentions that
+Pte. J---- has been fatally shot in action. J---- was well known here
+for years as an especially smart young newsvendor."
+
+_June_ 3.
+
+What a bitter disappointment it is to realise that people the most
+intimately in love with one another are really separated by such a
+distance. A woman is calmly knitting socks or playing Patience while her
+husband or sweetheart lies dead in Flanders. However strong the tie that
+binds them together yet they are insufficiently _en rapport_ for her to
+sense even a catastrophe--and she must wait till the War Office forsooth
+sends her word. How humiliating that the War Office must do what Love
+cannot. Human love seems then such a superficial thing. Every person is
+a distinct egocentric being. Each for himself and the Devil take the
+hindmost. "Ah! but she didn't know." "Yes, but she _ought_ to have
+known." Mental telepathy and clairvoyance should be common at least to
+all lovers.
+
+This morning in bed I heard a man with a milkcart say in the road to a
+villager at about 6.30 a.m., "... battle ... and we lost six cruisers."
+This was the first I knew of the Battle of Jutland. At 8 a.m. I read in
+the _Daily News_ that the British Navy had been defeated, and thought it
+was the end of all things. The news took away our appetites. At the
+railway station, the _Morning Post_ was more cheerful, even reassuring,
+and now at 6.30 p.m. the Battle has turned into a merely regrettable
+indecisive action. We breathe once more.
+
+_June_ 4.
+
+It has now become a victory.
+
+_June_ 11.
+
+Old systems of Classification: Rafinesc's Theory of Fives, Swainson's
+Theory of Sevens, Edward Newman's book called _Sphinx Vespiformis_
+tracing fives throughout the animal world, Sir Thomas Browne's Quincunx,
+chasing fives throughout the whole of nature--in the words of Coleridge,
+"quincunxes in Heaven above, quincunxes in the Earth below, quincunxes
+in the mind of man, in optic nerves, in roots of trees, in leaves, in
+everything!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Old false trails:
+
+The Philosopher's Stone (Balthazar Clæs).[2]
+
+A universal catholicon (Bishop Berkeley's tar-water). Mystical numbers
+(as per above).
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My father was Sir Thomas Browne and my mother Marie Bashkirtseff. See
+what a curious hybrid I am!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I toss these pages in the faces of timid, furtive, respectable people
+and say: "There! that's me! You may like it or lump it, but it's true.
+And I challenge you to follow suit, to flash the searchlight of your
+self-consciousness into every remotest corner of your life and invite
+everybody's inspection. Be candid, be honest, break down the partitions
+of your cubicle, come out of your burrow, little worm." As we are all
+such worms we should at least be honest worms.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My gratitude to E---- for plucking me out of the hideous miseries of my
+life in London is greater than I can express. If I were the cheap hero
+of a ladies' novel I should immolate my journals as a token, and you
+would have a pretty picture of a pale young man watching his days go up
+in smoke by the drawing-room fire. But I have more confidence in her
+sterling good sense, and if I cannot be loved for what I am, I do not
+wish to be loved for what I am not.
+
+Since the fateful Nov. 27th, my life has become entirely posthumous. I
+live now in the grave and am busy furnishing it with posthumous joys. I
+accept my fate with great content, my one-time restless ambition lies
+asleep now, my one-time, furious self-assertiveness is anæsthetised by
+this great War; the War and the discovery about my health together have
+plucked out of me that canker of self-obsession. I sit at home here in
+this country cottage in perfect isolation--flattened out by a steam
+hammer (tho' it took Armageddon to do it!), yet as cheerful and busy as
+a Dormouse laying up store for the winter. For I am almost resigned to
+the issue in the knowledge that some day, someone will know, perhaps
+somebody will understand and--immortal powers!--even sympathise, "the
+quick heart quickening from the heart that's still."
+
+_July_ 19.
+
+_Omniscience_
+
+An omniscient Caledonian asked me to-day:
+
+"Where are the Celebes? Are they E. or N.E. of the Sandwich Group?"
+
+I marked him down at once as my legitimate prey. Sitting back in my
+chair, I replied slowly in my most offensive manner:
+
+"The Island of Celebes is of enormous size and curious shape situated in
+the Malay Archipelago."
+
+The Caledonian made no sign. Instead of grinning at his error and
+confessing to a "floater," he endeavoured to carry on by remarking,
+"That of course would be N. of Papua," just for all the world as if his
+error was a minor one of latitude and longitude.
+
+Ignoring his comment, I continued:
+
+"From the Zoogeographical point of view, Celebes is unequalled in
+importance, having the strangest fauna almost of any island on the face
+of the globe. Then there's 'Wallace's Line,'" I said, being purposely
+obscure.
+
+The Caledonian said nought but "looked hurt." It was so obvious that he
+didn't know, and it was so obvious that I knew that he didn't know, that
+after my farcical truculence I expected the tension to dissolve in
+laughter. Yet it is hard for a Caledonian to say "God be merciful to me,
+ignorant devil that I am." So I pursued him with more information about
+"Wallace's Line," with an insouciant air, as much as to say, "Wallace's
+Line of course you heard discussed before you were breached."
+
+"Some do say, you know, that the Line is 'all my eye and Betty Martin,'
+_e.g._, R----."
+
+This gave him his first opportunity of finding his feet in this
+perilously deep water. So he said promptly, eager to seem knowledgeable
+with an intelligent rejoinder:
+
+"As! yes, R---- is an authority on Fishes."
+
+I assented. "At the last meeting of the British Ass. he tore the idea to
+shreds."
+
+The drowning Caledonian seized at any straw:
+
+"Fishes, however, are not of paramount importance in cases of
+geographical distribution, are they?"
+
+I knew he was thinking of _marine_ fishes, but I did not illumine him,
+and merely said:
+
+"Oh! yes, of very great importance," at which he looked still more
+"hurt," decamped in silence and left me conqueror of the field but
+without the spoils of victory: it was impossible to bring him to say "I
+do not know"--four mono-syllables was all I wanted from the man who for
+months past has been lecturing me on all things from Music and the Drama
+to Philosophy, Painting and--Insects.
+
+_July_ 20.
+
+The cradle came a few days ago but I had not seen it until this morning
+when I unlocked the cupboard door, looked in and shuddered.
+
+"That's the skeleton in our cupboard," I said on coming down to
+breakfast. She laughed, but I really meant it.
+
+E---- keeps a blue bowl replenished with flaming Poppies in our room.
+The cottage is plagued with Ear-wigs which fly in at night and get among
+the clothes and bedlinen. This morning, dressing, she held up her
+chemise to the light saying: "I always do this--you can see their little
+heathen bodies then against the light...." Isn't she charming?
+
+_July_ 30.
+
+The other day R---- and I were sitting on a stile on the uplands in
+perfect summer weather and talking of happy days before the War--he was
+in khaki and I was resting my "gammy" leg.... As we talked, we let our
+eyes roam, resting luxuriously wherever we pleased and occasionally
+interrupting the conversation with "Look at that cow scratching herself
+against the Oak," or "Do you see the oats waving?" In the distance we
+saw a man and a boy walking up towards us along the path thro' the corn,
+but the eye having momentarily scrutinised them wandered away and the
+conversation never paused. When next I looked, they were much
+nearer--crossing the furrows in the potato field in fact, and we both
+stopped talking to watch--idly. The boy seemed to be about 10 years old,
+and it amused us to see his great difficulty in stepping across the
+furrows.
+
+"Poor little chap," R---- said, and we laughed.
+
+Then the boy stumbled badly and all at once the man lifted his
+walking-stick and beat him, saying ill-naturedly, "Step between the
+furrows," and again, "Step between the furrows." Our enchanting little
+picture was transfigured in an instant. The "charming little boy" was a
+natural idiot--a gross, hefty creature perhaps 30 years of age, very
+short and very thick, dressed in a little sailor suit. I said,
+"Heavens," and R---- looked positively scared. We stood aside for them
+to get over the stile, the "boy" still suffering from his over exertion,
+breathing stertorously like a horse pulling uphill and still evidently
+fearful of the big stick behind. He scrambled over the stile as best he
+could, rolling a wild eye at us as he did so--a large, bulgy eye with
+the lower lid swollen and sore, like the eye of a terrified ox on the
+way to the slaughter house. So much then for our little picture of
+charming childhood! The man followed close at his heels and looked at me
+with stern defiant eyes. "Yes, that is my son," his eyes declaimed, "and
+I'll thank you to avert your gaze or by the Lord I'll beat you too."
+
+_A Yellow Cat_
+
+Last week, I saw a yellow cat perched up quite high on a window ledge at
+the S---- Underground Station in celestial detachment from the crowd of
+serious, black-coated gentlemen hustling along to and from the trains.
+He had his back turned to us, but as I swept past in the stream, I was
+forced to look back a moment, and caught the outline of his whiskers--it
+made me smile intensely to myself and secretly I gave the palm to the
+cat for wisdom.
+
+_July_ 31.
+
+This War is so great and terrible that hyperbole is impossible. And yet
+my gorge rises at those fatuous journalists continually prating about
+this "Greatest War of all time," this "Great Drama," this "world
+catastrophe unparalleled in human history," because it is easy to see
+that they are really more thrilled than shocked by the immensity of the
+War. They indulge in a vulgar Yankee admiration for the Big Thing. Why
+call this shameful Filth by high sounding phrases--as if it were a
+tragedy from Euripides? We ought to hush it up, not brag about it, to
+mention it with a blush instead of spurting it out brazen-faced.
+
+Mr. Garvin, for example, positively gloats over the War each week in the
+_Observer_: "Last week was one of those pivotal occasions on which
+destiny seems to swing"--and so on every week, you can hear him,
+historical glutton smacking his lips with an offensive relish.
+
+For my part, I never seem to be in the same mind about the War twice
+following. Sometimes I am wonderstruck and make out a list of all the
+amazing events I have lived to see since August, 1914, and sometimes and
+more often I am swollen with contempt for its colossal imbecility. And
+sometimes I am swept away with admiration for all the heroism of the
+War, or by some particularly noble self-sacrifice, and think it is
+really all worth while. Then--and more frequently--I remember that this
+War has let loose on the world not only barbarities, butcheries and
+crimes, but lies, lies, lies--hypocrisies, deceits, ignoble desires for
+self-aggrandizement, self-preservation such as no one before ever
+dreamed existed in embryo in the heart of human beings.
+
+The War rings the changes on all the emotions. It twangs all my strings
+in turn and occasionally all at once, so that I scarcely know how to
+react or what to think. You see, here am I, a compulsory spectator, and
+all I can do is to reflect. A Zeppelin brought down in flames that lit
+up all London--now that makes me want to write like Mr. Garvin. But a
+Foreign Correspondent's eager discussion of "Italy's aspirations in the
+Trentino," how Russia insists on a large slice of Turkey, and so forth,
+makes me splutter. How insufferably childish to be slicing up the
+earth's surface! How immeasureably "above the battle" I am at times.
+What a prig you will say I am when I sneer at such contemptible little
+devilries as the Bodies' trick of sending over a little note, "Warsaw is
+fallen," into our trenches, or as ours in reply: "Gorizia!"
+
+"There is no difference in principle between the case of a man who loses
+a limb in the service of his country and that of the man who loses his
+reason, both have an obvious claim to the grateful recognition of the
+State."--A morning paper.
+
+A jejune comment like this makes me grin like a gargoyle! Hark to the
+fellow--this leader-writer over his cup of tea. But it is a lesson to
+show how easily and quickly we have all adapted ourselves to the War.
+The War is everything; it is noble, filthy, great, petty, degrading,
+inspiring, ridiculous, glorious, mad, bad, hopeless yet full of hope. I
+don't know what to think about it.
+
+_August_ 13.
+
+I hate elderly women who mention their legs. It makes me shudder.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had two amusing conversations this morning, one with a jealous old man
+of 70 summers who, in spite of his age, is jealous--I can find no other
+term--of me in spite of mine, and the other with a social climber. I
+always tell the first of any of my little successes and regularly hand
+him all my memoirs as they appear, to which he as regularly protests
+that he reads very little now.
+
+"Oh! never mind," I always answer gaily, "you take it and read it going
+down in the train--it will amuse you." He submits but is always silent
+next time I see him--a little, admonitory silence. Or, I mention I am
+giving an address at ----, and he says "Oom," and at once begins his
+reminiscences, which I have heard many times before, and am sometimes
+tempted to correct him when, his memory failing, he leaves out an
+essential portion of his story. Thus do crabbed age and boastful youth
+tantalise one another.
+
+To the social climber I said slyly:
+
+"You seem to move in a very distinguished entourage during your week
+ends."
+
+He smiled a little self-consciously, hesitated a moment and then said:
+
+"Oh! I have a few nice friends, you know."
+
+Now I am sorry, but though I scrutinised this lick-spittle and arch
+belly-truck rider very closely, I am quite unable to say whether that
+smile and unwonted diffidence meant simple pleasure at the now certain
+knowledge that I was duly impressed, or whether it was genuine confusion
+at the thought that he had perhaps been overdoing it.
+
+Curiously enough, all bores of whatever kind make a dead set at me. I am
+always a ready listener and my thrusts are always gentle. Hence the
+pyramids! I constantly act as phlebotomist to the vanity of the young
+and to the anecdotage of the senile and senescent.
+
+_August_ 13.
+
+... I stood by his chair and looked down at him, and surveyed carefully
+the top of his head, neck, and collar, and with admirable restraint and
+calm, considered my most reasonable contempt of him. In perfect silence,
+we remained thus, while I looked down at a sore spot in the centre of
+his calvarium which he scratches occasionally, and toyed with the fine
+flower of my scorn.... But it is a dangerous license to take. One never
+knows....
+
+_Equilibrium Restored_
+
+To clear away the cobwebs and to purge my soul of evil thoughts and
+bitter feelings, went for a walk this evening over the uplands. Among
+the stubble, I sat down for a while with my back against the corn pook
+and listened to the Partridges calling. Then wandered around the edge of
+this upland field with the wind in my face and a shower of delicious,
+fresh rain pattering down on the leaves and dry earth. Then into a wood
+among tall forest Beeches and a few giant Larches where I rested again
+and heard a Woodpecker tapping out its message aloft.
+
+This ramble in beautiful B----shire country restored my mental and
+spiritual poise. I came home serene and perfectly balanced--my
+equilibrium was something like the just perceptible oscillation of tall
+Larch-tree tops on the heights of a cliff and the sea below with a just
+perceptible swell on a calm and perfect June day. I felt exquisite
+--superb. I could have walked all the way home on a tight rope.
+
+_September_ 2.
+
+Just recently, I have been going fairly strong. I get frequent colds and
+sometimes show unpleasant nerve symptoms, but I take a course of arsenic
+and strychnine every month or so in tabloid form, and this helps me over
+bad patches.
+
+Under the beatific influence of more comfortable health, the rare flower
+of my ambition has raised its head once more: my brain has bubbled with
+projects. To wit:
+
+(1) An investigation of the Balancers in Larval Urodeles.
+
+(2) The Present Parlous State of Systematic Zoology (for "Science
+Progress").
+
+(3) The Anatomy of the Psocidæ.
+
+Etc.
+
+The strength of my ambition at any given moment is the measure of my
+state of health. It must really be an extraordinarily tenacious thing to
+have hung on thro' all my recent experiences. Considerately enough this
+great Crab lets go of my big toe when I am sunk low in health, yet
+pinches devilishly hard as now when I am well.[3]
+
+_A Bad Listener_
+
+When I begin to speak, T---- will sometimes interrupt with his loud,
+rasping voice. I usually submit to this from sheer lack of lung power or
+I may have a sore throat. But occasionally after the fifth or sixth
+interruption I lose my equanimity and refuse to give him ground. I keep
+straight on with what I intended to say, only in a louder voice; he
+assumes a voice louder still, but not to be denied, I pile Pelion on
+Ossa and finally overwhelm him in a thunder of sound. For example:
+
+"The other day"--I begin quietly collecting my thoughts to tell the
+story in detail, "I went to the----"
+
+"Ah! you must come and see my pictures----" he breaks in; but I go on
+and he goes on and as I talk, I catch phrases: "St. Peters" or"Michael
+Angelo" or "Botticelli" in wondrous antiphon with my own "British
+Museum" and "I saw there," "two Syracusan," "tetradrachms," until very
+likely I reach the end of my sentence before he does his, or perhaps his
+rasp drives my remarks out of my head. But that makes no difference, for
+rather than give in I go on improvising in a louder and louder voice
+when suddenly, at length made aware of the fact that I am talking too,
+he stops! leaving me bellowing nonsense at the top of my voice, thus:
+"and I much admired these Syracusan tetradrachms, very charming indeed,
+I like them, the Syracusan tetradrachms I mean you know, and it will be
+good to go again and see them (louder) if possible and the weather keeps
+dry (louder) and the moon and the stars keep in their courses, if the
+slugs on the thorn (loudest)----" he stops, hears the last few words of
+my remarks, pretends to be appreciative but wonders what in Heaven's
+name I can have been talking about.
+
+_September_ 3.
+
+This is the sort of remark I like to make: Someone says to me: "You
+_are_ a pessimist."
+
+"Ah! well," I say, looking infernally deep, "pessimism is a good policy;
+it's like having your cake and eating it at the same time."
+
+Chorus: "Why?"
+
+"Because if the future turns out badly you can say, 'I told you so,' to
+your own satisfaction, and if all is well, why you share everyone else's
+satisfaction."
+
+Or I say: "No, I can't swim; and I don't want to!"
+
+Chorus: "Why?"
+
+"Because it is so dangerous."
+
+Chorus: "Why?"
+
+The Infernally Wise Youth: "For several reasons. If you are a swimmer
+you are likely to be oftener near water and oftener in danger than a
+non-swimmer. Further, as soon as you can swim even only a little, then
+as an honourable man, it behoves you to plunge in at once to save a
+drowning person, whereas, if you couldn't swim it would be merely
+tempting Providence."
+
+Isn't it sickening?
+
+_A Jolt_
+
+Yesterday the wind was taken out of my sails. Racing along with
+spinnaker and jib, feeling pretty fit and quite excited over some
+interesting ectoparasites just collected on some Tinamous, I suddenly
+shot into a menacing dead calm: that stiflingly still atmosphere which
+precedes a Typhoon. That is to say, my eye caught the title of an
+enormous quarto memoir in the _Trans. Roy. Soc._, Edinburgh: The
+Histology of ---- ----.
+
+I was browsing in the library at the time when this hit me like a
+carelessly handled gaff straight in the face. I almost ran away to my
+room.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My Pink Form just received amazes me! To be a soldier? C'est incroyable,
+ma foi! The possibility even is distracting! To send me a notice
+requesting me to prepare myself for killing men! Why I should feel no
+more astonished to receive a War Office injunction under dire penalties
+to perform miracles, to move mountains, to raise from the dead: My reply
+would be: "I cannot." I should sit still and watch the whole universe
+pass to its destruction rather than raise a hand to knife a fellow. This
+may be poor, anæmic; but there it is, a positive fact.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There are moments when I have awful misgivings: Is this blessed Journal
+worth while? I really don't know, and that's the harassing fact of the
+matter. If only I were sure of myself, if only I were capable of an
+impartial view! But I am too fond of myself to be able to see myself
+objectively. I wish I knew for certain what I am and how much I am
+worth. There are such possibilities about the situation; it may turn out
+tremendously, or else explode in a soap bubble. It is the torture of
+Tantalus to be so uncertain. I should be relieved to know even the
+worst. I would almost gladly burn my MSS. in the pleasure of having my
+curiosity satisfied. I go from the nadir of disappointment to the zenith
+of hope and back several times a week, and all the time I am
+additionally harassed by the perfect consciousness that it is all petty
+and pusillanimous to desire to be known and appreciated, that my
+ambition is a morbid diathesis of the mind. I am not such a fool either
+as not to see that there is but little satisfaction in posthumous fame,
+and I am not such a fool as not to realise that all fame is fleeting,
+and that the whole world itself is passing away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I smile with sardonic amusement when I reflect how the War has changed
+my status. Before the War I was an interesting invalid. Now I am a lucky
+dog. Then, I was a star turn in tragedy; now I am drowned and ignored in
+an overcrowded chorus. No valetudinarian was ever more unpleasantly
+jostled out of his self-compassion. It is difficult to accustom myself
+to the new role all at once: I had begun to lose the faculty for
+sympathising in others' griefs. It is hard to have to realise that in
+all this slaughter, my own superfluous life has become negligible and
+scarcely anyone's concern but my own. In this colossal _sauve-qui-peut_
+which is developing, who can stay to consider a useless mouth? Am I not
+a comfortable parasite? And, God forgive me, an Egotist to boot?
+
+The War is searching out everyone, concentrating a beam of inquisitive
+light upon everyone's mind and character and publishing it for all the
+world to see. And the consequence to many honest folk has been a keen
+personal disappointment. We ignoble persons had thought we were better
+than we really are. We scarcely anticipated that the War was going to
+discover for us our emotions so despicably small by comparison, or our
+hearts so riddled with selfish motives. In the wild race for security
+during these dangerous times, men and women have all been sailing so
+closehauled to the wind that their eyes have been glued to their own
+forepeaks with never a thought for others: fathers have vied with one
+another in procuring safe jobs for their sons, wives have been bitter
+and recriminating at the security of other wives' husbands. The men
+themselves plot constantly for staff appointments, and everyone is
+pulling strings who can. Bereavement has brought bitterness and immunity
+indifference.
+
+And how pathetically some of us cling still to fragments of the old
+regime that has already passed--like ship-wrecked mariners to floating
+wreckage, to the manner of the conservatoire amid the thunder of all
+Europe being broken up; to our newspaper gossip and parish teas, to our
+cherished aims--wealth, fame, success--in spite of all, _ruat coelum!_
+Mr. A.C. Benson and his trickling, comfortable Essays, Mr. Shaw and his
+Scintillations--they are all there as before, revolving like haggard
+windmills in a devastated landscape! A little while ago, I read in the
+local newspaper which I get up from the country two columns concerning
+the accidental death of an old woman, while two lines were used to
+record the death of a townsman at the front from an aerial dart. Behold
+this poor rag! staggering along under the burden of the War in a
+passionate endeavour to preserve the old-time interest in an old woman's
+decease. Yet more or less we are all in the same case: I still write my
+Journal and play Patience of an evening, and an old lady I know still
+reads as before the short items of gossip in the papers, neglecting
+articles and leaders.... We are like a nest of frightened ants when
+someone lifts the stone. That is the world just now.
+
+_September_ 5.
+
+... I was so ashamed of having to fall back upon such ignominious
+publications for my literary efforts that on presenting him with two
+copies, I told the following lie to save my face:
+
+"They were two essays of mine left over at the beginning of the War, you
+know. My usual channel became blocked so I had to have recourse to
+these."
+
+"Where do you publish as a rule?" he innocently asked.
+
+"Oh! several in the _Manchester Guardian_," I told him out of vanity.
+"But of course every respectable journal now has closed down to
+extra-war topics."
+
+I lie out of vanity. And then I confess to lying--out of vanity too. So
+that one way or another I am determined to make kudos out of myself.
+Even this last reflection is written down with an excessive appreciation
+of its wit and the intention that it shall raise a smile.
+
+_September_ 9.
+
+Still nothing to report. The anxiety is telling on us all. The nurse has
+another case on the 22nd.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I looked at myself in the mirror this morning--nude, a most revolting
+picture. An emaciated human being is the most unlovely thing in
+creation. Some time ago a smart errand boy called out "Bovril" after me
+in the street.
+
+On my way to the Station met two robust, brawny curates on the way to
+the daily weekday service--which is attended only by two decrepit old
+women in black, each with her prayer-book caught up to her breast as if
+she were afraid it might gallop off. That means a parson apiece--and in
+war time too.
+
+_September_ 10.
+
+My sympathy with myself is so unfailing that I don't deserve anybody
+else's. In many respects, however, this Journal I believe gives the
+impression that I behave myself in the public gaze much worse than I
+actually do. You must remember that herein I let myself go at a stretch
+gallop: in life I rein in, I am almost another person. Would you believe
+it, E---- says I am full of quick sympathy with others and
+extraordinarily cheerful, nay gay. Verily I lead a curious double
+existence: among most people, I pass for a complaisant, amiable,
+mealy-mouthed, furry if conceited creature. Here I stand revealed as a
+contemptuous, arrogant malcontent. My life has embittered me _an fond_,
+I have the crabbed temper of the disappointed man insufficiently
+developed yet to be very plainly visible beneath my innate affable,
+unassuming, humble, diffident, cheerful characteristics. With fools on
+every hand I am becoming insolent, aggressive, self-declamatory. Last
+evening came home and got down Robert Buchanan's sonnet, "When He
+returns and finds the world so drear," and felt constrained to read it
+out to E----. I poured out its acid sentiment with the base revenge of a
+vitriol thrower, and then became quiescent.
+
+It is a helpless feeling, sitting still and watching circumstances
+pounding away at my malleable character and moulding it wrongly.
+
+_September_ 14.
+
+_An American Neighbour_
+
+We have a delightful American neighbour here whose life revolves like
+the fly-wheel of an engine. Even when not in eruption his volcanic
+energy is always rumbling and can be heard. Seeing he is a globe
+trotter, I was surprised to observe his most elaborate precautions for
+catching the train and getting a seat when he takes his wife and family
+to town. He first of all plants himself and all his property down at a
+certain carefully selected point along the platform as if he were in the
+wild west lying in wait for a Buffalo. Then as the train comes in, his
+eye fixes on an empty compartment as it passes and he dashes off after
+it in furious pursuit up the platform, shouting to his family to follow
+him. Having lassooed the compartment, squaw and piccaninnies are hustled
+in as if there was not a moment to lose, what time the black-coated,
+suburban Englishmen look on in pain and silence, and then slowly with
+offensive deliberation enter their respective carriages.
+
+_The Stockbroker_
+
+Another neighbour who interests me is mainly notable for his
+extraordinary gait. He is a man with a large, round head, a large round,
+dissolute looking face and fairly broad shoulders, below which
+everything tapers away to a pair of tiny feet neatly booted. These two
+little feet are excessively sensitive to road surface--one would say he
+had special sense organs on his toes, to judge by the manner in which he
+picks out his path along the country road in short, quick, fussy steps:
+his feet seem to dissect out the road as if boning a herring. A big
+bunion is as good as a sense organ, but his feet are too small and
+elegant.
+
+_September_ 24.
+
+The second nurse arrived to-day. Great air raid last night of which we
+heard nothing, thank God!
+
+My nerves are giving way under the strain.... One leg (the left) drags
+abominably.... We shall want a bath-chair as well as a perambulator.
+
+Crawled up thro' the path-fields to the uplands and sat in a field in
+the sun with my back against a haystack. I was so immobile in my
+dejection that Flies and Grass-hoppers came and perched about me. This
+made me furious. "I am not dead yet," I said, "get away," and I would
+suddenly drive them off.... In horrible dejection....
+
+Even my mental powers are disintegrating--that's the rub. Some quite
+recent incidents I cannot remember even when reminded of them: they seem
+to have passed clean out of my mind--a remarkable sensation this.
+
+My sensibility is dulled too. It chagrins me to find that my present
+plight by no means overwhelms me with anguish as it would have done
+once. It only worries me. I am just a worried ox.
+
+_September_ 26.
+
+The numbness in my right hand is getting very trying. ... The Baby puts
+the lid on it all. Can't you see the sordid picture? I can, and it
+haunts me. To be paralysed with a wife and child and no money--ugh!
+
+Retribution proceeds with an almost mathematical accuracy of measure. It
+would necessitate a vernier rather than a chain. There is no mercy in
+Cause and Effect. It is inhuman clockwork. Every single act expended
+brings one its precise equivalent in return....
+
+_September_ 28.
+
+Still nothing to report.
+
+I am astonished at the false impression these entries give of myself.
+The picture is incomplete anyhow. It represents the cloud of forebodings
+over my inner self but does not show the outward front I present to
+others. This is one of almost constant gaiety--unforced and quite
+natural. Ask E----, who said yesterday I was like a schoolboy.
+
+     "Camerade, I give you my hand!
+     I give you my love more precious than money,
+     I give you myself before preaching or law;
+     Will you give me yourself? Will you come, travel with me?
+     Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?"
+
+She cut this out of her copy of Walt Whitman and gave it me soon after
+our engagement. It is very precious to me.
+
+(On Sept. 29th, on the Doctor's advice I went away by the sea alone, my
+nerves being all unstrung. For an account of the miseries of this
+journey, see Dec. 12th _infra_).
+
+_October_ 3.
+
+A wire to say Susan arrived 2.15 p.m. All well.
+
+_October_ 5.
+
+Home again with my darling. She is the most wonderful darling woman. Our
+love is for always. The Baby is a monster.
+
+_October_ 23.
+
+The fact that I can't write, finally bottles me up.[4] Damn! Damn! Damn!
+If only I can get my Essay on Journal Writers done. E---- goes on well.
+I have a thousand things to say.
+
+_October_ 27.
+
+Still awaiting a reprieve. I hate alarming the Doctor--he's such a
+cheerful man so I conceal my symptoms, quite a collection by now.
+
+The prospect of breaking the news to her makes me miserable. I hide away
+as much as possible lest she should see. I _must_ speak when she is well
+again.
+
+_October_ 28.
+
+Life has been very treacherous to me--this, the greatest treachery of
+all. But I don't care. I exult over it. Last night I lay awake and
+listened to the wind in the trees and was full of exultation.
+
+Now I can only talk, but nobody to talk to. Shall hire a row of
+broomsticks. More and more, the War appears to me a tragic hoax.
+
+_November_ 1.
+
+E---- has had a set-back and is in bed again. However sclerotic my nerve
+tissue, I feel as flaccid as a jelly.
+
+My God! how I loathe the prospect of death.
+
+_November_ 3.
+
+I must have some music or I shall hear the paralysis creeping. That is
+why I lie in bed and whistle.
+
+"My dear Brown, what am I to do?"[5] (I like to dramatise myself like
+that--it is an anodyne).
+
+I feel as if I were living alone on Ascension Island with the tide
+coming up continuously, up and up and up.
+
+_November_ 6.
+
+She has known _all_ from the beginning! M---- warned her _not_ to marry
+me. How brave and loyal of her! What an ass I have been. I am
+overwhelmed with feelings of shame and self-contempt and sorrow for her.
+She is quite cheerful and an enormous help.
+
+_November_ 12.
+
+What a wreck my existence has become and--dragging down others with me.
+
+If only I could rest assured that after I am dead these Journals will be
+tenderly cared for--as tenderly as this blessed infant! It would be
+cruel if even after I have paid the last penalty, my efforts and
+sufferings should continue to remain unknown or disregarded. What I
+would give to know the effect I shall produce when published! I am
+tortured by two doubts--whether these MSS. (the labour and hope of many
+years) will survive accidental loss and whether they really are of any
+value. I have no faith in either.
+
+_November_ 14.
+
+In fits of panic, I keep saying to myself: "My dear Brown, what am I to
+do?" But where is Brown? Brown, you devil! where are you?
+
+... To think how I have acted the Prince to her when really I am only a
+beggar!
+
+_November_ 16.
+
+A little better and more cheerful: altho' my impregnable colon still
+holds out.
+
+It would be nice if a physician from London one of these days were to
+gallop up hotspur, tether his horse to the gate post and dash in waving
+a reprieve--the discovery of a cure!
+
+... I was in an impish mood and said: "Oh! dear, I'm full of misery."
+
+"Don't be silly," she said, "so am I."
+
+_November_ 17.
+
+E---- has been telling me some of her emotions during and after her
+fateful visit to my Doctor just before our marriage. He did not spare
+her and even estimated the length of my life after I had once taken to
+my bed--about 12 months. I remember his consulting room so well--all its
+furniture and the photograph of Madam Blavatsky over the door, and I
+picture her to myself sitting opposite to him in a sullen silence
+listening to the whole lugubrious story. Then she said at last: "All
+this won't make any difference to me." She went home to her mother in a
+dream, along the streets I have followed so often. I can follow all her
+footsteps in imagination and keep on retracing them. It hurts, but I do
+so because it seems to make her some amends for my being childishly
+unconscious at the time. Poor darling woman--if only I had known! My
+instinct was right--I felt in my bones it was wrong to marry, yet here
+was M---- urging me on. "You marry," her mother said to her, "I'll stand
+by you," which was right royal of her. There followed some trying months
+of married life with this white hot secret in her bosom as a barricade
+to perfect intimacy; me she saw always under this cloud of crude
+disgusting pathos making her say a hundred times to herself: "He doesn't
+know;" then Zeppelin raids and a few symptoms began to grow obvious,
+until what before she had to take on trust from the Doctor came
+diabolically true before her eyes. Thank God that's all over at last. I
+know her now for all she is worth--her loyalty and devotion, her courage
+and strength. If only I had something to give her in return! something
+more than the dregs of a life and a constitutional pessimism. I greatly
+desire to make some sacrifice, but I am so poor these days, so very much
+a pauper on her charity, there is no sacrifice I can make. Even my life
+would scarcely be a sacrifice in the circumstances--it is hard not to be
+able to give when one _wants_ to give.
+
+_November_ 20.
+
+In the doldrums. Tired of this damnable _far niente_,--I am being gently
+smothered under a mountain of feathers. I should like to engage upon
+some cold, hard, glittering intellectualism.
+
+"I want to read Kant," I said. The Baby slept, E---- was sewing and
+N---- writing letters. I leaned back in my armchair beside the bookshelf
+and began to read out the titles of my books in a loud voice.
+
+"My dear!" E---- said.
+
+"I am caressing my past," I answered. "Wiedersheim's _Comparative
+Anatomy of Vertebrates_, Smith Woodward's _Vertebrate Palæontology_--why
+it's like visiting old prospects and seeing how the moss has grown over
+the stones."
+
+I hummed a comic song and then said: "As I can't burn the house down, I
+shall go to bed."
+
+N----: "You can talk if you like, it won't interfere."
+
+E----: "He's talking to his besoms."
+
+"Certainly," I said to N----, absent-mindedly.
+
+E----: "You ought to have said 'Thank you.'"
+
+I blew out my cheeks and E---- laughed.
+
+N----: "How do you spell 'regimental'?"
+
+I told her--wrongly, and E---- said I was in a devilish mood.
+
+"If we say that we have no sin" I chanted in reply, "we deceive
+ourselves and the truth is not in us." I next gave a bit out of a
+speech by Disraeli with exaggerated rhetorical gestures.
+
+E---- (with pity): "Poor young man."
+
+Presently she came over and in a tired way put her arms around my neck
+so I immediately began to sing "Rock of Ages, cleft for me," in the
+bass, which immediately reminded me of dear old Dad, whose favourite
+hymn it was.... Then I imitated the Baby. And then to bed fretful and
+very bitter.
+
+_November_ 27.
+
+... I wish I could die of heart failure--and at once! What a luxury that
+would be as compared with my present prospect!
+
+A Tomtit on the fence this morning made me dissolve in tears:--self-pity
+I believe. I remember Tomtits in ----shire. Put on a gramophone record
+and--ugh! but I'm too sick to write.
+
+_November_ 28.
+
+The shock I gave my spinal column in 1915 up in the Lakes undoubtedly
+re-awakened activity among the bacteria. Luck for you! I, of all persons
+to concuss my spine!!
+
+... I listen to the kettle singing, I look at the pictures in the fire,
+read a bit, ask what time it is, see the Baby "topped and tailed," yawn,
+blow my nose, put on a gramophone record--I have the idea of passing on
+the midnight with no pain to the tune of some healing ragtime.
+
+_November_ 29.
+
+The anniversary of our engagement day two years ago. How mad the idea of
+marriage seemed to me--and my instinct was right: if only I had known!
+Yet she says she does not regret anything.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This morning I turned to read with avidity accounts of the last hours of
+Keats, Gibbon, Oscar Wilde and Baudelaire. I gained astonishing comfort
+out of this, especially in the last ... who died of G.P.I, in a Brussels
+Hospital.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+E---- is awfully courageous and,--as usual ready to do everything in her
+power. How can I ever express sufficient gratitude to these two dear
+women (and my wife, above all) for casting in their lot knowingly with
+mine?
+
+_December_ 1.
+
+I believe I am good for another 12 months without abnormal worries. Just
+now, of course, the Slug ain't exactly on the thorn--on the cabbage in
+fact as E---- suggested. The Grasshopper is much of a burden and the
+voice of the Turtle has gone from my land (where did all these Bible
+phrases come from?). The first bark of the Wolf (God save us, 'tis all
+the Animal Kingdom sliding down my penholder) was heard with the
+reduction in her work to-day, and I suspect there's worse to come with a
+sovereign already only worth 12s. 6d.
+
+_December_ 4.
+
+The Baby touch is the most harrowing of all. If we were childless we
+should be merely unfortunate, but an infant....
+
+_December_ 11.
+
+Am receiving ionisation treatment from an electrical therapeutist--a
+quack! He is a sort of electrician--still, if he mends my bells I'll
+kiss his boots. As for ----, he is no better than a byreman, and I call
+him Hodge. This is not the first time I have felt driven to act behind
+the back of the Profession. In 1912, being desperate, and M---- worse
+than a headache, I greedily and credulously sucked in the advice of my
+boarding-house proprietor and went to see a homœopathist in Finsbury
+Circus. He proved to be a charlatan at 10s. 6d. a time, and tho' I
+realised it at once, I religiously travelled about for a month or more
+with tinctures and drop-bottle. I could write a book on the Doctors I
+have known and the blunders they have made about me.... The therapeutist
+took me for 33. I feel 63. I am 27. What a wreck I am, and....
+
+_December_ 12.
+
+It is so agreeable to be able to write again that I write now for the
+sheer physical pleasure of being able to use a pen and form letters.
+
+_An Adventure in Search of Health_
+
+About the end of September, I began to feel so ill that Nurse went for
+the Doctor who assured me that E---- was all right--I need not
+worry--"You go away at once and get some fresh air," and so forth. "I
+feel quite ill," I said, struggling to break the news.
+
+"Sort of nervous?" he enquired good-naturedly, "run down? I should get
+right away at once."
+
+I began tentatively. "Well, I have a rather long medical history and
+perhaps ... you ... might care to read the certificate of my London
+Doctor?"
+
+I went to my escritoire and returned with M----'s letter addressed to
+"The M.O. examining Mr. B."
+
+Hodge pulled out the missive, studied the brief note carefully and long,
+at the same time drawing in his breath--deeply, and gnawing the back of
+his hand.
+
+"I know all about it," I said to relieve him.
+
+"Is it quite certain? about this disease?" he said presently. "You are
+very young for it."
+
+"I think there is no doubt," and he began to put me thro' the usual
+tricks.
+
+"I should go right away at once," he said, "and go on with your arsenic.
+And whatever you do--don't worry--your wife is all right."
+
+After beseeching him to keep silence about it as I thought she did not
+know, I shewed him out and locked up the certificate again.
+
+Next morning I felt thoroughly cornered: I was not really fit enough to
+travel; my hand and leg were daily growing more and more paralysed and
+J---- wired to say she could not put me up as they were going away for
+the week end. So I wired back engaging rooms, as with the nurse in the
+house and E---- as she was, I simply could not stay at home....
+
+On the way to the Station I was still in two minds whether or not to
+pull the taxi up at the Nursing Home and go inside, but harassing debate
+as it was, our rapidly diminishing bank balance finally drove me on.
+
+---- came up to London with me and sought out a comfortable corner seat,
+but by the time the train left, a mother and a crying child had got in
+and everywhere else was full. A girl opposite who saw ---- hand me a
+brandy flask and knew I was ill, looked at me compassionately.
+
+At Reading, another woman with a baby got in and both babies cried in
+chorus, jangling my nerves to bits!--until I got out into the corridor,
+by a miracle not falling down, with one leg very feeble and treacherous.
+All seats were taken, excepting a first-class compartment where I looked
+in enviously at a lucky youth stretched out asleep full length along the
+empty seat.
+
+All the people and the noise of the train began to make me fret, so I
+sought out the repose of a lavatory where I remained eating sandwiches
+and an apple for the best part of an hour. It was good to be alone.
+
+Later on, I discovered an empty seat in a compartment occupied by
+persons whose questionable appearance my short sight entirely failed to
+make me aware of until I got inside with them. They were a family of
+Sheenies, father, mother and three children, whose joint emanations in a
+closed-up railway carriage made an effluvium like to kill a regiment of
+guards. They were E. end pawnbrokers or dealers in second-hand clothes.
+
+I was too nervous to appear rude by immediately with-drawing, so I said
+politely to the man clad in second-hand furs: "Is that seat taken?"
+
+He affected to be almost asleep. So I repeated. He stared at me and then
+said:
+
+"Oh! yes ... but you can have it for a bit if you like."
+
+I sat down timorously on the extreme edge of the seat and stared at, but
+could not read, my newspaper out of sheer nervous apprehension. My sole
+idea was to get out as soon as I decorously could. Out of the corner of
+my eye, I observed the three children--two girls and a boy--all garbed
+in black clothes and wearing large clumsy boots with nails and scutes on
+the soles. The girls had large inflorescences of bushy hair which they
+swung about as they turned their heads and made me shudder. The mother's
+face was like a brown, shrivelled apple, topped with a black bonnet and
+festooned on each side with ringlets of curly dark hair. Around her neck
+a fur tippet: as I live--second-hand clothes dealers from Whitechapel.
+
+The man I dare not look at: I sat beside him and merely imagined.
+
+At ----, I got a decent seat and arrived at T---- jaded, but still
+alive, with no one to meet me. Decent rooms on the sea-front.
+
+Next morning J---- went away for the week end and I could not possibly
+explain how ill I was: she might have stayed at home.
+
+To preserve my sanity, Saturday afternoon, took a desperate remedy by
+hiring a motor-car and travelling to Torquay and back _via_
+Babbacombe....
+
+On the Sunday, feeling suddenly ill, I sent for the local medico whom I
+received in the drab little room by lamplight after dinner. "I've a
+tingling in my right hand," I said, "that drives me nearly silly."
+
+"And on the soles of your feet?" he asked at once.
+
+I assented, and he ran thro' at once all the symptoms in series.
+
+"I see you know what my trouble is," I said shyly. And we chatted a
+little about the War, about disease, and I told him of the recent memoir
+on the histology of the disease ---- in the _Trans. Roy. Soc_, Edin.
+which interested him. Then he went away again--very amiable, very polite
+--an obvious _non possumus_....
+
+On Monday at 4 went up to ---- to tea as previously arranged, but found
+the house shut up so returned to my rooms in a rage.
+
+After tea, having read the newspapers inside out, sat by the open window
+looking out on to the Marine Parade. It was dusk, a fine rain was
+falling, and the parade and sea-front were deserted save for an
+occasional figure hurrying past with mackintosh and umbrella. Suddenly
+as I sat looking out on this doleful scene, a dirge from nowhere in
+particular sounded on my ears which I soon recognised as "Robin Adair,"
+sung very _lento_ and very _maestoso_ by a woman, with a flute obligato
+played by some second person. The tide was right up, and the little
+waves murmured listlessly at long intervals: never before I think have I
+been plunged into such an abyss of acute misery.
+
+Next day the wire came. But it was too late. The day after that, I was
+worse, a single ray of sunshine being the rediscovery of the
+second-hand-clothes family from Whitechapel taking the air together on
+the front. This dreary party was traipsing along, the parents in their
+furs giving an occasional glance at the sea uncomfortably, as if they
+only noticed it was wet, and the children still in black and still
+wearing their scuted boots, obviously a little uncomfortable in a place
+so clean and windswept. I think they all came to the seaside out of
+decorum and for the satisfaction of feeling that they could afford it
+like other folk, and that old-clothes was as profitable a business as
+another.
+
+On Thursday, returned home as I was afraid of being taken ill and having
+to go into the public hospital. Arrived home and went to bed and here we
+are till Jan. 1st on 3 months' sick leave. However, the swingeing
+urtication in my hands and feet has now almost entirely abated and
+to-day I went out with E---- and the perambulator, _which I pushed_.
+
+_December_ 13.
+
+_A Baby-Girl_
+
+Walked down the bottom of the road and hung over some wooden railings. A
+little village baby-girl aged not more than 3 was hovering about near
+me while I gazed abstractedly across the Park at the trees. Presently,
+she crawled through the railings into the field and picked up a few dead
+leaves--a baby picking up dead leaves! Then she threw them down, and
+kicked them. Then moved on again--rustling about intermittently like a
+winter Thrush in the shrubbery. At last, she had stumbled around to
+where I was leaning over the railings. She stood immediately in front of
+me and silently looked up with a steady reproachful gaze: "Ain't you
+'shamed, you lazy-bones?" till I could bear her inquisitorial gaze no
+longer, and so went and hung over some more railings further on.
+
+_Service_
+
+He asked for a Tennyson. She immediately went upstairs in the dark, lit
+a match and got it for him.
+
+He asked for a Shakespeare. And without a moment's hesitation, she went
+upstairs again, lit another match and got that for him.
+
+And I believe if he had said "Rats," she would have shot out silently
+into the dark and tried to catch one for him. Only a woman is capable of
+such service.
+
+_Hardy's Poetry_
+
+
+                                "You did not come,
+     And marching time drew on and wore me numb--
+     Yet less for loss of your dear presence there
+     Than that I thus found lacking in your make
+     That high compassion which can overbear
+     Reluctance for pure loving-kindness' sake
+     Grieved I, _when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum_,
+                                     You did not come."
+
+I thoroughly enjoy Hardy's poetry for its masterfulness, for his sheer
+muscular compulsion over the words and sentences. In his rough-hewn
+lines he yokes the recalcitrant words together and drives them along
+mercilessly with something that looks like simple brute strength.
+Witness the triumphant last line in the above where the words are
+absolute bondslaves to his exact meaning, his indomitable will. All
+this pleases me the more for I know to my cost what stubborn, sullen,
+hephæstian beasts words and clauses can sometimes be. It is nice to see
+them punished. Hardy's poetry is Michael Angelo rather than Greek,
+Browning not Tennyson.
+
+_December_ 14.
+
+What a day! After a night of fog signals, I awoke this morning to find
+it still foggy and the ground covered with a grey rime. All day the fog
+has remained: I look out now thro' the yellowish atmosphere across a
+field which is frosted over, the grass and brambles stiff and glassy. My
+back is aching and the cold is so intense that unless I crouch over the
+fire hands and feet become immediately stone-cold. All day I have
+crouched over the fire, reading newspapers, listening to fog signals and
+the screaming of the baby.... I have been in a torpor, like a Bat in a
+cavern--really dead yet automatically hanging on to life by my hind
+legs.
+
+_December_ 15.
+
+"To stand upon one's guard against Death exasperates her malice and
+protracts our sufferings." W.S. Landor.
+
+_December_ 19.
+
+The Parson called, over the christening of the baby. I told him I was an
+agnostic. "There are several interesting lines of thought down here," he
+said wearily, passing his hand over his eyes. I know several men more
+enthusiastic over Fleas and Worms than this phlegmatic priest, over
+Jesus Christ.
+
+_December_ 20.
+
+The reason why I do not spend my days in despair and my nights in
+hopeless weeping simply is that I am in love with my own ruin. I
+therefore deserve no sympathy, and probably shan't get it: my own
+profound self-compassion is enough. I am so abominably self-conscious
+that no smallest detail in this tragedy eludes me. Day after day I sit
+in the theatre of my own life and watch the drama of my own history
+proceeding to its close. Pray God the curtain falls at the right moment
+lest the play drag on into some long and tedious anticlimax.
+
+We all like to dramatise ourselves. Byron was dramatising himself when,
+in a fit of rhetorical self-compassion, he wrote:
+
+"Oh! could I feel as I have felt or be what I have been, Or weep as I
+could once have wept o'er many a vanished scene."
+
+Shelley, too, being an artist could not stand insensible to his own
+tragedy and Francis Thompson suggests that he even anticipated his own
+end from a passage in _Julian and Maddalo_, "... if you can't swim,
+Beware of Providence." "Did no earthly _dixisti_," Thompson asks, "sound
+in his ears as he wrote it?"
+
+In any event, it was an admirable ending from the dramatic point of
+view; Destiny is often a superb dramatist. What more perfect than the
+death of Rupert Brooke at Scyros in the Ægean?[6] The lives of some men
+are works of art, perfect in form, in development and in climax. Yet how
+frequently a life eminently successful or even eminently ruinous is also
+an unlovely, sordid, ridiculous or vulgar affair! Every one will concede
+that it must be a hard thing to be commonplace and vulgar even in
+misfortune, to discover that the tragedy of your own precious life has
+been dramatically bad, that your life even in its ruins is but a poor
+thing, and your own miseries pathetic from their very insignificance;
+that you are only Jones with chronic indigestion rather than Guy de
+Maupassant mad, or Coleridge with a great intellect being slowly
+dismantled by opium.
+
+If only I could order my life by line and level, if I could control or
+create my own destiny and mould it into some marble perfection! In
+short, if life were an art and not a lottery! In the lives of all of us,
+how many wasted efforts, how many wasted opportunities, false starts,
+blind--how many lost days--and man's life is but a paltry three score
+years and ten: pitiful short commons indeed.
+
+Sometimes, as I lean over a five-barred gate or gaze stupidly into the
+fire, I garner a bitter-sweet contentment in making ideal
+reconstructions of my life, selecting my parents, the date and place of
+my birth, my gifts, my education, my mentors and what portions out of
+the infinity of knowledge shall gain a place within my mind--that sacred
+glebe-land to be zealously preserved and enthusiastically cultivated.
+Whereas, my mind is now a wilderness in which all kinds of useless
+growths have found an ineradicable foothold. I am exasperated to find I
+have by heart the long addresses of a lot of dismal business
+correspondents and yet can't remember the last chapters of Ecclesiastes:
+what a waste of mind-stuff there! It irks me to be acquainted even to
+nausea with the spot in which I live, I whose feet have never traversed
+even so much as this little island much less carried me in triumph to
+Timbuctoo, Honolulu, Rio, Rome.
+
+_December_ 21.
+
+This continuous preoccupation with self sickens me--as I look back over
+these entries. It is inconceivable that I should be here steadily
+writing up my ego day by day in the middle of this disastrous war....
+Yesterday I had a move on. To-day life wearies me. I am sick of myself
+and life. This beastly world with its beastly war and hate makes me
+restless, dissatisfied, and full of a longing to be quit of it. I am as
+full of unrest as an autumn Swallow. "My soul," I said to them at
+breakfast with a sardonic grin, "is like a greyhound in the slips. I
+shall have to wear heavy boots to prevent myself from soaring. I have
+such an uplift on me that I could carry a horse, a dog, a cat, if you
+tied them on to my homing spirit and so transformed my Ascension into an
+adventure out of Baron Munchausen." With a gasconnade of contempt, I
+should like to turn on my heel and march straight out of this wretched
+world at once.
+
+_December_ 22.
+
+_Gibbon's Autobiography_
+
+This book makes me of all people (and especially just now) groan
+inwardly. "I am at a loss," he says, referring to the _Decline and
+Fall_, "how to describe the success of the work without betraying the
+vanity of the writer.... My book was on every table and almost on every
+toilette." It makes me bite my lips. Rousseau and his criticism of "I
+sighed as a lover; I obeyed as a son," and Gibbon on his dignity in
+reply make one of the most ludicrous incidents in literary history. "...
+that extraordinary man whom I admire and pity, should have been less
+precipitate in condemning the moral character and conduct of a
+stranger!" Oh my giddy Aunt! Isn't this _rich_? Still, I am glad you did
+not marry her: we could ill spare Madam de Staël, Madam Necker's
+daughter, that wonderful, vivacious and warmhearted woman.
+
+"After the morning has been occupied with the labours of the library, I
+wish to unbend rather than exercise my mind; and in the interval between
+tea and supper, I am far from disdaining the innocent amusement of a
+game of cards." How Jane Austen would have laughed at him! The passage
+reminds me of the Rev. Mr. Collins saying:
+
+"Had I been able I should have been only too pleased to give you a song,
+for I regard music as a harmless diversion and perfectly compatible with
+the profession of a clergyman."
+
+"When I contemplate the common lot of mortality," Gibbon writes, "I must
+acknowledge I have drawn a high prize in the lottery of life," and he
+goes on to count up all his blessings with the most offensive
+delight--his wealth, the good fortune of his birth, his ripe years, a
+cheerful temper, a moderate sensibility, health, sound and peaceful
+slumbers from infancy, his valuable friendship with Lord Sheffield, his
+rank, fame, etc., etc., _ad nauseam_. He rakes over his whole life for
+things to be grateful for. He intones his happiness in a long recitative
+of thanksgiving that his lot was not that of a savage, of a slave, or a
+peasant; he washes his hands with imaginary soap on reflecting on the
+bounty of Nature which cast his birth in a free and civilised country,
+in an age of science and philosophy, in a family of honourable rank and
+decently endowed with the gifts of fortune--sleek, complacent,
+oleaginous and salacious old gentleman, how I would love to have bombed
+you out of your self-satisfaction!
+
+_Masefield's "Gallipoli"_
+
+It amused me to discover the evident relish with which the author of _In
+the Daffodil Fields_ emphasises the blood and the flowers in the attack
+on Achi Baba. It's all blood and beautiful flowers mixed up together to
+Masefield's great excitement.
+
+     "A swear word in a city slum
+      A simple swear word is to some--
+      To Masefield something more."
+
+                              MAX BEERBOHM.
+
+Still, to call Gallipoli "bloody Hell" is, after all, only a
+pedantically exact description. You understand, tho', a very remarkable
+book--a work of genius.
+
+_December_ 23.
+
+To be cheerful this Xmas would require a _coup de théâtre_--some sort of
+psychological sleight of hand.
+
+I get downstairs at 10 and spend the day reading and writing, without a
+soul to converse with. Everything comes to me second-hand--thro' the
+newspapers, the world of life thro' the halfpenny _Daily News_, and the
+world of books thro' the _Times Literary Supplement_. For the rest I
+listen to the kettle singing and make symphonies out of it, or I look
+into the fire to see the pictures there....
+
+_December_ 24.
+
+Everyone I suppose engaged in this irony of Xmas. What a solemn lunatic
+the world is.
+
+Walked awhile in a beautiful lane close by, washed hard and clean and
+deeply channelled by the recent rain. On the hill-top, I could look
+right across the valley to the uplands, where on the sky line a few Firs
+stood in stately sequestration from common English Oaks, like a group of
+ambassadors in full dress. In the distance a hen clucked, I saw a few
+Peewits wheeling and watched the smoke rising from our cottage
+perpendicularly into the motionless air. There was a clement quiet and a
+clement warmth, and in my heart a burst of real happiness that made me
+rich even beside less unfortunate beings and beyond what I had ever
+expected to be again.
+
+_December_ 26.
+
+"In thus describing and illustrating my intellectual torpor, I use terms
+that apply more or less to every part of the years during which I was
+under the Circean spells of opium. But for misery--"
+
+(Why do I waste my energy with this damned Journal? I stop. I hate it. I
+am going out for a walk in the fog.)
+
+_December_ 31.
+
+_Reminiscences_
+
+For the past few days I have been living in a quiet hermitage of
+retrospect. My memories have gone back to the times--remote,
+inaccessible, prehistoric--before ever this Journal was begun, when I
+myself was but a jelly without form and void--that is, before I had
+developed any characteristic qualities and above all the dominant one, a
+passion for Natural History.
+
+One day a school friend, being covetous of certain stamps in my
+collection, induced me to "swop" them for his collection of birds' eggs
+which he showed me nestling in the bran at the bottom of a box. He was a
+cunning boy and thought he had the better of the bargain. He little
+realised--nor did I--the priceless gift he bestowed when his little fat
+dirty hands decorated, I remember, with innumerable warts, picked out
+the eggs and gave them to me. In fact, a smile momentarily crossed his
+face, he turned his head aside, he spat in happy contemplation of the
+deal.
+
+I continued eagerly to add to the little collection of Birds' eggs, but
+for a long time it never occurred to me to go out into the country
+myself and collect them,--I just _swopped,_ until one day our errand
+boy, who stuttered, had bandy legs, and walked on the outside of his
+feet with the gait of an Anthropoid, said to me, "I will sh-how you how
+to find Birds' n-nests if you like to come out to the w-woods." So one
+Saturday, when the backyard was cleaned down and the coal boxes filled,
+he and I started off together to a wood some way down the river bank,
+where he--my good and beneficent angel--presently showed me a Thrush's
+nest in the fork of a young Oak tree. Never-to-be-forgotten moment! The
+sight of those blue speckled eggs lying so unexpectedly, as I climbed up
+the tree, on the other side of an untidy tangle of dried moss and grass,
+in a neat little earthenware cup, caused probably the first tremor of
+real emotion at a beautiful object. The emotion did not last long! In a
+moment I had stolen the eggs and soon after smashed them--in trying to
+blow them, schoolboy fashion.
+
+Then, I rapidly became an ardent field naturalist. My delight in Birds
+and Birds' eggs spread in a benignant infection to every branch of
+Natural History. I collected Beetles, Butterflies, plants, Birds' wings,
+Birds' claws, etc. Dr. Gordon Staples in the _Boy's Own Paper_, taught
+me how to make a skin, and I got hold of a Mole and then a Squirrel (the
+latter falling to my prowess with a catapult), stuffed them and set them
+up in cases which I glazed myself. I even painted in suitable
+backgrounds, in the one case a mole-hill, looking, I fear, more like a
+mountain, and in the other, a Fir tree standing at an impossible angle
+of 45°. Then I read a book on trapping, and tried to catch Hares. Then I
+read Sir John Lubbock's _Ants, Bees and Wasps_, and constructed an
+observation Ants' nest (though the Ants escaped).
+
+In looking back to these days, I am chiefly struck by my extraordinary
+ignorance of the common objects of the countryside, for although we
+lived in the far west country, the house, without a garden, was in the
+middle of the town, and all my seniors were as ignorant as I. Nature
+Study in the schools did not then exist, I had no benevolent
+paterfamilias to take me by the hand and point out the common British
+Birds; for my father's only interest was in politics. I can remember
+coming home once all agog with a wonderful Bird I had seen--like a tiny
+Magpie, I said. No one could tell me that it was, of course, only a
+little Pied Wagtail.
+
+The absence of sympathy or of congenial companionship, however, had
+absolutely no effect in damping my ardour. As I grew older my
+egg-collecting companions fell away, some took up the law, or tailoring,
+or clerking, some entered the Church, while I became yearly more
+engrossed. In my childhood my enthusiasm lay like a watch-spring, coiled
+up and hidden inside me, until that Thrush's nest and eggs seized hold
+of it by the end and pulled it out by degrees in a long silver ribbon. I
+kept live Bats in our upstairs little-used drawing-room, and Newts and
+Frogs in pans in the backyard. My mother tolerated these things because
+I had sufficiently impressed her with the importance to science of the
+observations which I was making and about to publish. Those on Bats
+indeed were thought fit to be included in a standard work
+--Barrett-Hamilton's _Mammals of Great Britain and Ireland_. The
+published articles served to bring me into correspondence with other
+naturalists, and I shall never forget my excitement on receiving for the
+first time a letter of appreciation. It was from the author of several
+natural history books, to
+
+               "W.N.P. BARBELLION, ESQ.,
+                  Naturalist,
+                           Downstable,"
+
+and illustrated with a delightful sketch of Ring Plovers feeding on the
+saltings. This letter was carefully pasted into my diary, where it still
+remains.
+
+After all, it is perhaps unfair to say that I had no kindred spirit with
+me in my investigations. Martha, the servant girl who had been with us
+for 30 years, loved animals of all sorts and--what was strange in a
+country girl--she had no fear of handling even such things as Newts and
+Frogs. My Batrachia often used to escape from their pans in the yard
+into Martha's kitchen, and, not a bit scandalised, she would sometimes
+catch one marching across the rug or squeezing underneath a cupboard.
+"Lor'!" would be her comment as she picked the vagrant up and took it
+back to its aquarium, "can't 'em travel?" Martha had an eye for
+character in animals. In the long dynasty of cats we possessed one at
+length who by association of opposite ideas we called Marmaduke because
+he ought to have been called Jan Stewer. "A chuff old feller, 'idden
+'ee?" Martha used to ask me with pride and love in her eyes. "He purrs
+in broad Devon," I used to answer. Marmaduke need only wave the tip of
+his tail to indicate to her his imperative desire to promenade. Martha
+knew if no one else did that every spring "Pore 'Duke," underneath his
+fur, used to come out in spots. "'Tiz jus' like a cheel 'e gets a bit
+spotty as the warm weather cums along." Starlings on the washhouse roof,
+regularly fed with scraps, were ever her wonder and delight. "Don' 'em
+let it down, I zay?" In later years, when I was occupied in the top
+attic, making dissections of various animals that I collected, she would
+sometimes leave her scrubbing and cleaning in the room below to thrust
+her head up the attic stairs and enquire, "'Ow be 'ee gettin' on then?"
+Her unfeigned interest in my anatomical researches gave me real
+pleasure, and I took delight in arousing her wonder by pointing out and
+explaining the brain of a Pigeon or the nervous system of a Dog-fish, or
+a Frog's heart taken out and still beating in the dissecting dish. She,
+in reply, would add reflections upon her own experiences in preparing
+meat for dinner--anecdotes about the "maw" of an old Fowl, or the great
+"pipe" of a Goose. Then, suddenly scurrying downstairs, she would say,
+"I must be off or I shall be all be'ind like the cow's tail." Now the
+dignified interest of the average educated man would have chilled me.
+
+By the way, years later, when he was a miner in S. Wales, that historic
+errand-boy displayed his consciousness of the important role he once
+played by sending me on a postcard congratulations on my success in the
+B.M. appointment. It touched me to think he had not forgotten after
+years of separation.
+
+
+[1] So it proved. See September 26 _et seq._
+
+[2] In "La Recherche de l'Absolu" (Balzac).
+
+[3] See September 3 (next entry), "_A Jolt_," and September 24
+(_infra_).
+
+[4] The handwriting is painfully laboured, very large across a page and
+so crooked as to be almost undecipherable in places.
+
+[5] This is from a letter written by the dying Keats in Naples to his
+friend Brown.
+
+[6] Contrast with it Wordsworth rotting at Rydal Mount or Swinburne at
+Putney.
+
+
+
+
+1917
+
+
+_January_ 1.
+
+The New Year came in like a thief in the night--noiselessly; no bells,
+no syrens, no songs by order of the Government. Nothing could have been
+more appropriate than a burglarious entry like this--seeing what the
+year has come to filch from us all in the next 12 months.
+
+_January_ 20.
+
+I am over 6 feet high and as thin as a skeleton; every bone in my body,
+even the neck vertebrae, creak at odd intervals when I move. So that I
+am not only a skeleton but a badly articulated one to boot. If to this
+is coupled the fact of the creeping paralysis, you have the complete
+horror. Even as I sit and write, millions of bacteria are gnawing away
+my precious spinal cord, and if you put your ear to my back the sound of
+the gnawing I dare say could be heard. The other day a man came and set
+up a post in the garden for the clothes' line. As soon as I saw the post
+I said "gibbet"--it looks exactly like one, and I, for sure, must be the
+malefactor. Last night while E---- was nursing the baby I most
+delightfully remarked: "What a little parasite--why you are Cleopatra
+affixing the aspic--'Tarry, good lady, the bright day is done, and we
+are for the dark.'"
+
+The fact that such images arise spontaneously in my mind, show how
+rotten to the core I am.
+
+... The advent of the Baby was my _coup de grâce._ The little creature
+seems to focus under one head all my personal disasters and more than
+once a senseless rage has clutched me at the thought of a baby in
+exchange for my ambition, a nursery for the study. Yet, on the whole, I
+find it a good and satisfying thing to see her, healthy, new, intact on
+the threshold: I grow tired of my own dismal life just as one does of a
+suit of dirty clothes. My life and person are patched and greasy; hers
+is new and without a single blemish or misfortune.... Moreover, she
+makes her mother happy and consoles her grandmother too.
+
+_January_ 21.
+
+_Death_
+
+What a delightful thing the state of Death would be if the dead passed
+their time haunting the places they loved in life and living over again
+the dear delightful past--if death were one long indulgence in the
+pleasures of memory! if the disembodied spirit forgot all the pains of
+its previous existence and remembered only the happiness! Think of me
+flitting about the orchards and farm-yards in ---- birdsnesting, walking
+along the coast among the seabirds, climbing Exmoor, bathing in streams
+and in the sea, haunting all my old loves and passions, cutting open
+with devouring curiosity Rabbits, Pigeons, Frogs, Dogfish, Amphioxus;
+think of me, too, at length unwillingly deflected from these cherished
+pursuits in the raptures of first love, cutting her initials on trees
+and fences instead of watching birds, day-dreaming over _Parker and
+Haswell_ and then bitterly reproaching myself later for much loss of
+precious time. How happy I shall be if Death is like this: to be living
+over again and again all my ecstasies, over first times--the first time
+I found a Bottle Tit's nest, the first time I succeeded in penetrating
+into the fastnesses of my El Dorado--Exmoor, the first time I gazed upon
+the internal anatomy of a Snail, the first time I read Berkeley's
+_Principles of Human Understanding_ (what a soul-shaking epoch that
+was!), and the first time I kissed her! My hope is that I may haunt
+these times again, that I may haunt the places, the books, the bathes,
+the walks, the desires, the hopes, the first (and last) loves of my life
+all transfigured and beatified by sovereign Memory.
+
+_January_ 26.
+
+Out of doors to-day it's like the roaring forties! Every tree I passed
+in the lane was a great wind instrument, bellowing out a passionate
+song, and the sky was torn to ribbons. It is cold enough to freeze the
+nose off a brass Monkey, but very exhilarating. I stood on the hill and
+squared my fists to the wind and bade everything come on. I sit writing
+this by the fire and am thoroughly scourged and purified by this great
+castigating wind.... I think I will stick it out--I will sit quite still
+in my chair and defy this sculking footpad--let the paralysis creep into
+every bone, I will hang on to the last and watch it skulking with my
+most hideous grimace.
+
+_January_ 27.
+
+Still freezing and blowing. Coming back from the village, tho' I was
+tired and hobbling badly, decided to walk up the lane even if it meant
+crawling home on hands and knees.
+
+The sky was a quick-change artist to-day. Every time you looked you saw
+a different picture. From the bottom of the hill I looked up and saw
+above me--it seemed at an immense and windy height--a piece of blue,
+framed in an irregular edge of white woolly cloud seen thro' the crooked
+branches of an Oak. It was a narrow crooked lane, sunk deep in the soil
+with large smooth surfaces of stone like skulls bulging up in places
+where the rain had washed away the soil.
+
+Further on, the sun was lying low almost in the centre of a
+semi-circular bend in the near horizon. It frosted the wool of a few
+sheep seen in silhouette, and then slowly disappeared in mist. On the
+right-hand side was a cottage with the smoke being wrenched away from
+the chimney top, and on the left a group of stately Firs, chanting a
+requiem like a cathedral choir.
+
+_January_ 28.
+
+Still blowing and bitterly cold. Along the path fields in the Park I
+stopped to look at a thick clump of Firs standing aloof on some high
+ground and guarded by an outside ring of honest English Oaks, Ashes and
+Elms. They were a sombre mysterious little crowd intent, I fancied, on
+some secret ritual of the trees. The high ground on which they stood
+looked higher and more inaccessible than it really was, the clump was
+dark green, almost black, and in between their trunks where all was
+obscurity, some hardy adventurer might well have discovered a Grand Lama
+sitting within his Penetralia. But I had no taste for any such
+profanity, and even as I looked the sun came out from behind a cloud
+very slowly, bringing the picture into clearer focus, chasing away
+shadows and bringing out all the colours. The landscape resumed its
+homely aspect: an English park with Firs in it.
+
+_January_ 29.
+
+Last night, I pulled aside the window curtain of our front door and
+peeped out. Just below the densely black projecting gable of the house I
+saw the crescent moon lying on her back in a bed of purple sky, and I
+saw our little white frosted garden path curving up towards the garden
+gate. It was a delicious _coup d'Å“il_, and I shewed it to E----.
+
+_January_ 31.
+
+Showers of snow at intervals, the little flakes rocking about lazily or
+spiralling down, while the few that eventually reached the ground would
+in a moment or so be caught up in a sudden furious puff of wind, and
+sent driving along the road with the dust.
+
+My usual little jaunt up the lane past the mossy farm-house. Home to
+toasted tea-cakes and a pinewood fire, with my wife chattering prettily
+to the baby. After tea, enchanted by the reading of a new book--_Le
+Journal de Maurice de Guérin_--or rather the introduction to it by
+Sainte-Beuve. I devoured it! I have spent a devouring day; under a calm
+exterior I have burnt up the hours; all of me has been athrob; every
+little cell in my brain has danced to its own little tune. For to-day,
+Death has been an impossibility. I have felt that anyhow to-day I could
+not die--I have laughed at the mere thought of it. If only this mood
+would last! If I could feel thus always, then I could fend off Death for
+an immortality of life.
+
+But suddenly, as now, the real horror of my life and future comes on me
+in a flash. For a second I am terrified by the menace of the future, but
+fortunately only for a second. For I've learnt a trick which I fear to
+reveal; it is so valuable and necessary to me that if I talked of it or
+vulgarised it my secret might be stolen away. Not a word then!
+
+_Later_. I have just heard on the gramophone, some Grieg, and it has
+charged my happiness with disrupting voltage of desire. Oh! if only I
+had health, I could make the welkin ring! I shall leave so little behind
+me, such a few paltry pages beside what I have it in me to do. It
+shatters me.
+
+_February_ 1.
+
+Looking back, I must say I like the splendid gusto with which I lived
+thro' yesterday: that mettlesome fashion in which I took the lane, and
+at the top, how I swung around to sweep my gaze across to the uplands
+opposite with snow falling all the time. Then in the evening, the almost
+complete absorption in the new book when I forgot everything _pro tem_.
+It was quite like the old days.
+
+_February_ 2.
+
+_Crowd Fever_
+
+After four months' sick leave, returned to work and London.
+
+An illness like mine rejuvenates one--for the time being! A pony and
+jingle from the old "Fox and Hounds Inn" took me to the Station, and I
+enjoyed the feel of the wheels rolling beneath me over the hard road. In
+the train, I looked out of the window as interested as any schoolboy. On
+the Underground I was delighted with the smooth, quiet way with which
+the "Metro" trains glide into the Station. I had quite forgotten this.
+Then, when my hand began to get better, I rediscovered the pleasures of
+penmanship and kept on writing, with my tongue out. And I re-enjoyed the
+child's satisfaction in coaxing a button to slip into its hole: all
+grown-up people have forgotten how difficult and complex such operations
+are.
+
+This morning how desirable everything seemed to me! The world
+intoxicated me. Moving again among so many human beings gave me the
+crowd-fever, and started again all the pangs of the old familiar hunger
+for a fuller life, that centrifugal elan in which I feared for the
+disruption and scattering of my parts in all directions. Temporarily I
+lost the hegemony of my own soul. Every man and woman I met was my
+enemy, threatening me with the secession of some inward part. I was
+alarmed to discover how many women I could passionately love and with
+how many men I could form a lasting friendship. Within, all was anarchy
+and commotion, a cold fright seized me lest some extraordinary event was
+about to happen: some general histolysis of my body, some sudden
+disintegration of my personality, some madness, some strange death....
+I wanted to crush out the life of all these men and women in a great
+Bear's hug, my God! this sea of human faces whom I can never recognise,
+all of us alive together beneath this yellow catafalque of fog on the
+morning of the announcement of world famine and world war!...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To-night, I have lost this paroxysm. For I am home again by the
+fireside. All the multitude have disappeared from my view. I have lost
+them, every one. I have lost another day of my life and so have they,
+and we have lost each other. Meanwhile the great world spins on
+unrelentingly, frittering away lightly my precious hours (surely a small
+stock now?) while I sit discomfited by the evening fire and nurse my
+scraped hands that tingle because the spinning world has wrenched itself
+out of my feeble grasp.
+
+_February_ 3.
+
+This morning on arriving at S. Kensington, went straight to a Chemist's
+shop, but finding someone inside, I drew back, and went on to another.
+
+"Have you any morphia tabloids?" I asked a curly-haired, nice-looking,
+smiling youth, who leaned with both hands on the counter and looked at
+me knowingly, as if he had had unlimited experience of would-be morphi
+nomaniacs.
+
+"Yes, plenty of them," he said, fencing. And then waited.
+
+"Can you supply me?" I asked, feeling very conscious of myself.
+
+He smiled once more, shook his head and said it was contrary to the
+Defence of the Realm Act.
+
+I made a sorry effort to appear ingenuous, and he said:
+
+"Of course, it is only a palliative."
+
+With a solemn countenance intended to indicate pain I answered:
+
+"Yes, but palliatives are very necessary sometimes," and I walked out of
+the hateful shop discomfited.
+
+_February_ 6.
+
+Am busy re-writing,[1] editing and bowdlerising my journals for
+publication against the time when I shall have gone the way of all
+flesh. No one else would prepare it for publication if I don't. Reading
+it through again, I see what a remarkable book I have written. If only
+they will publish it!
+
+_February_ 7.
+
+_Chinese Lanterns_
+
+The other morning as I dressed, I could see the sun like a large yellow
+moon rising on a world, stiff, stark, its contours merely indicated
+beneath a winding-sheet of snow. Further around the horizon was another
+moon--the full moon itself--yellow likewise, but setting. It was the
+strangest picture I ever saw. I might well have been upon another
+planet; I could not have been more surprised even at a whole ring of
+yellow satellites arranged at regular intervals all around the horizon.
+
+In the evening of the same day, I drove home from the Station in a
+little governess-cart, over a snow-clogged road. The cautious little
+pony picked out her way so carefully in little
+strides--pat-pat-pat--wherever it was slippery, and the Landlord of the
+Inn sat opposite me extolling all the clever little creature's merits.
+It was dusk, and for some reason of the atmosphere the scraps of cloud
+appeared as blue sky and the blue sky as cloud, beneath which the full
+moon like a great Chinese lantern hung suspended so low down it seemed
+to touch the trees and hills. How have folk been able to "carry on" in a
+world so utterly strange as this one during the past few days! I marvel
+that beneath such moons and suns, the peoples of the world have not
+ceased for a while from the petty business of war during at least a few
+of our dancing revolutions around this furnace of a star. One of these
+days I should not be surprised if this fascinated earth did not fall
+into it like a moth into a candle. And where would our Great War be
+then?
+
+_February_ 28.
+
+_The Strangeness of my Life_
+
+Consider the War: and the current adventures of millions of men on land,
+sea and air; and the incessant labours of millions of men in factory and
+workshop and in the field; think of the hospitals and all they hold, of
+everyone hoping, fearing, suffering, waiting--of the concentration of
+all humanity on the one subject--the War. And then think of me, poor
+little me, deserted and forgotten, a tiny fragment sunk so deep and
+helplessly between the sheer granite walls of my environment that scarce
+an echo reaches me of the thunder among the mountains above. I read
+about the War in a ha'penny paper, and see it in the pictures of the
+_Daily Mirror_. For the rest, I live by counting the joints on insects'
+legs and even that much effort is almost beyond my strength.
+
+That is strange enough. But my life is stranger still by comparison. And
+this is the marvel: that every day I spend by the waters of Babylon,
+weeping and neglected among enthusiasts, enthusiastically counting
+joints, while every evening I return to Zion to my books, to Hardy's
+poems, to Maurice de Guérin's Journals, to my own memoirs. Mine is a
+life of consummate isolation, and I frequently marvel at it.
+
+The men I meet accept me as an entomologist and _ipso facto_, an
+enthusiast in the science. That is all they know of me, and all they
+want to know of me, or of any man. Surely no man's existence was ever
+quite such a duplicity as mine. I smile bitterly to myself ten times a
+day, as I engage in all the dreary technical jargon of professional talk
+with them. How they would gossip over the facts of my life if they knew!
+How scandalised they would be over my inner life's activities, how
+resentful of enthusiasm other than entomological!
+
+I find it very irksome to keep up this farce of concealment. I would
+love to declare myself. I loathe, hate and detest the secrecy of my real
+self: the continuous restraint enforced on me ulcerates my heart and
+makes harmonious social existence impossible with those who do not know
+me thoroughly. "On dit qu'au jugement dernier le secret des consciences
+sera révélé à tout l'univers; je voudrais qu'il en fut ainsi de moi dès
+aujourd'hui et que la vue de mon âme fut ouvert à tous venants." Maurice
+de Guérin.
+
+_March_ 1.
+
+It is curious for me to look at my tubes and microscope and realise that
+I shall never require them again for serious use. Life is a dreadful
+burden to me at the Museum. I am too ill for any scientific work so I
+write labels and put things away. I am simply marking time on the edge
+of a precipice awaiting the order, "Forward."
+
+It is excoriating to be thus wasting the last few precious days of my
+life in such mummery merely to get bread to eat. They might at least let
+me die in peace, and with fitting decorum. It is so ignoble to be
+tinkering about in a Museum among Scarabees and insects when I ought to
+be reflecting on life and death.
+
+I ask myself what ought to be my most appropriate reaction in such
+circumstances as the present? Why, of course, to carry on as if all were
+normal, and the future unknown: why, so I do, to outward view, for the
+sake of the others. Yet that is no reason why in my own inward parts I
+should not at times indulge in a little relaxation. It is a relief to
+put off the mailed coat, to sit awhile by the green-room fire and have
+life as it really is, all to myself. But the necessity of living will
+not let me alone. I must be always mumming.
+
+My life has been all isolation and restriction. And it now appears even
+my death is to be hedged around with prohibitions. Drugs for
+example--how beneficent a little laudanum at times in a case like mine!
+and how happy I could be if I knew that in my waistcoat pocket I carried
+a kindly, easy means of shuffling off this coil when the time comes as
+come it must. It horrifies me to consider how I might break the life of
+E---- clean in two, and sap her courage by a lingering, dawdling dying.
+But there is the Defence of the Realm Act. It is a case of a Scorpion in
+a ring of fire but without any sting in its tail.
+
+_March_ 2.
+
+I ask myself: what are my views on death, the next world, God? I look
+into my mind and discover I am too much of a mannikin to have any. As
+for death, I am a little bit of trembling jelly of anticipation. I am
+prepared for anything, but I am the complete agnostic; I simply don't
+know. To have views, faith, beliefs, one needs a backbone. This great
+bully of a universe overwhelms me. The stars make me cower. I am
+intimidated by the immensity surrounding my own littleness. It is futile
+and presumptuous for me to opine anything about the next world. But I
+_hope_ for something much freer and more satisfying after death, for
+emancipation of the spirit and above all for the obliteration of this
+puny self, this little, skulking, sharp-witted ferret.
+
+_A Potted Novel_
+
+(1)
+
+He was an imaginative youth, and she a tragedy queen. So he fell in love
+with her because she was melancholy and her past tragic. "She is
+_capable_ of tragedy, too," he said, which was a high encomium.
+
+But he was also an ambitious youth and all for dalliance in love.
+"Marriage," said he sententiously, "is an economic trap." And then, a
+little wistfully: "If she were a bit more melancholy and a bit more
+beautiful she would be quite irresistible."
+
+(2)
+
+But he was a miserable youth, too, and in the anguish of loneliness and
+lovelessness a home tempted him sorely. Still, he dallied. _She_ waited.
+Ill-health after all made marriage impossible.
+
+(3)
+
+Yet love and misery drove him towards it. So one day he closed his eyes
+and offered himself up with sacrificial hands.... "Too late," she said.
+"Once perhaps ... but now...." His eyes opened again, and in a second
+Love entered his Temple once more and finally ejected the money
+changers.
+
+(4)
+
+So they married after all, and he was under the impression she had made
+a good match. He had ill-health perhaps, yet who could doubt his
+ultimate fame?
+
+Then the War came, and he had the hardihood to open a sealed letter from
+his Doctor to the M.O. examining recruits.... Stars and staggers!! So
+it was she who was the victim in marriage! That harassing question: Did
+she know? What an ass he had been all through, what superlative egoism
+and superlative conceit!
+
+(5)
+
+Then a baby came. He broke under the strain and daily the symptoms grew
+more obvious. Did she know?... The question dazed him.
+
+Well, she _did_ know, and had married him for love, nevertheless,
+against every friendly counsel, the Doctor's included.
+
+(6)
+
+And now the invalid's gratitude is almost cringeing, his admiration
+boundless and his love for always. It is the perfect _rapprochement_
+between two souls, one that was honeycombed with self-love and lost in
+the labyrinthine ways of his own motives and the other straight, direct,
+almost imperious in love and altogether adorable.
+
+_Finis_
+
+_March_ 5.
+
+At home ill again. Yesterday was a day of utter dreariness. All my
+nerves were frozen, my heart congealed. I had no love for anyone ... no
+emotion of any sort. It was a catalepsy of the spirit harder to bear
+than fever or pain.... To-day, life is once more stirring in me, I am
+slowly awaking to the consciousness of acute but almost welcome misery.
+
+_March_ 6.
+
+An affectionate letter from H---- that warmed the cockles of my
+heart--poor frozen molluscs. A---- has written only once since August.
+
+_March_ 7.
+
+I am, I suppose, a whey-faced, lily-livered creature ... yet even an
+infantry subaltern has a chance....
+
+My dear friend ---- has died and a _Memorial_ Exhibition of his pictures
+is being held at the Goupil Gallery. The most fascinating man I ever
+met. I was attracted by him almost as one is attracted by a charming
+woman: by little ways, by laughing eyes, by the manner of speech. And
+now he is dead, of a lingering and painful disease.
+
+_March_ 8.
+
+_Death_
+
+Have been reading Sir Oliver Lodge's _Raymond_. I do not deny that I am
+curious about the next world, or about the condition of death. I am and
+always have been. In my early youth, I reflected continually on death
+and hated it bitterly. But now that my end is near and certain, I
+consider it less and am content to wait and see. As, for all practical
+purposes, I have done with life, and my own existence is often a burden
+to me and is like to become a burden also to others, I wish I possessed
+the wherewithal to end it at my will. With two or three tabloids in my
+waistcoat pocket, and my secret locked in my heart, how serenely I would
+move about among my friends and fellows, conscious that at some
+specially selected moment--at midnight or high noon--just when the
+spirit moved me, I could quietly slip out to sea on this Great
+Adventure. It would be well to be able to control this: the time, the
+place, and the manner of one's exit. For what disturbs me in particular
+is how I shall conduct myself; I am afraid lest I become afraid, it is a
+fear of fear. By means of my tabloids, I could arrange my death in an
+artistic setting, say underneath a big tree on a summer's day, with an
+open Homer in my hand, or more appropriately, a magnifying glass and
+Miall and Denny's _Cockroach._ It would be stage-managing my own demise
+and surely the last thing in self-conscious elegance!
+
+I think it was De Ouincey who said Death to him seemed most awful in the
+summer. On the contrary the earth is warm then, and would welcome my old
+bones. It is on a cold night by the winter fire that the churchyard
+seems to me the least inviting: especially horrible it is the first
+evening after the funeral.
+
+_March_ 10.
+
+Have had a relapse. My hand I fear is going. Food prices are leaping up.
+Woe to the unfit and the old and the poor in these coming days! We shall
+soon have nothing left in our pantries, and a piece of Wrigley's chewing
+gum will be our only comfort.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I come to quit this world I scarcely know which will be the greater
+regret: the people I have never met, or the places I have never seen. In
+the world of books, I rest fairly content: I have read my fair share.
+
+To-day I read down the column of to-morrow's preachers with the most
+ludicrous avidity, ticking off the Churches I have visited: St. Paul's
+and the Abbey, the Ethical Church in Bayswater and Westminster
+Cathedral. But the Unitarians, the Christadelphians, the Theosophists,
+the Church of Christ Scientist, the Buddhist Society, the Brompton
+Oratory, the Church of Humanity, the New Life Centre; all these
+adventures I intended one day to make.... It is not much fun ticking off
+things you have done from a list if you have done very little. I get
+more satisfaction out of a list of books. But Iona and the Hebrides,
+Edinburgh, Brussels, Buenos Ayres, Spitzbergen (when the flowers are
+out), the Niagara Falls (by moonlight), the Grindelwald, Cairo--these
+names make me growl and occasionally yelp like a hurt puppy, although to
+outward view I am sitting in an armchair blowing smoke-rings.
+
+_March_ 11.
+
+_The Graph of Temperament_
+
+In this Journal, my pen is a delicate needle point, tracing out a graph
+of temperament so as to show its daily fluctuations: grave and gay, up
+and down, lamentation and revelry, self-love and self-disgust. You get
+here all my thoughts and opinions, always irresponsible and often
+contradictory or mutually exclusive, all my moods and vapours, all the
+varying reactions to environment of this jelly which is I. I snap at
+any idea that comes floating down, particularly if it is gaudy or
+quixotic, no matter if it is wholly incompatible with what I said the
+day before. People unpleasantly refer me back, and to escape I have to
+invent some sophistry. I unconsciously imitate the mannerisms of folk I
+am particularly taken with. Other people never fail to tell me of my
+simulations. If I read a book and like it very much, by a process of
+peaceful penetration, the author takes possession of my whole
+personality just as if I were a medium giving a sitting, and for some
+time subsequently his ideas come spurting up like a fountain making a
+pretty display which I take to be my own. Other people say of me, "Oh! I
+expect he read it in a book."
+
+I am something between a Monkey, a Chameleon, and a Jellyfish. To any
+bully with an intellect like a blunderbuss, I have always timidly held
+up my hands and afterwards gnashed my teeth for my cowardice. In
+conversation with men of alien sentiment I am self-effacing to my
+intense chagrin, often from mere shyness. I say, "Yes ... yes ... yes,"
+to nausea, when it ought to be "No ... no ... no." I become my own
+renegade, an amiable dissembler, an ass in short. It is a torture to
+have a sprightly mind blanketed by personal timidity and a feeble
+presence. The humiliating thing is that almost any strong character
+hynotises me into complacency, especially if he is a stranger; I find
+myself for the time being in really sincere agreement with him, and only
+later, discover to myself his abominable doctrines. Then I lie in bed
+and have imaginary conversations in which I get my own back.
+
+But, by Jove, I wreak vengeance on my familiars, and on those brethren
+even weaker than myself. They get my concentrated gall, my sulphurous
+fulminations, and would wonder to read this confession.
+
+_Cynicism_
+
+For an unusually long time after I grew up, I maintained a beautiful
+confidence in the goodness of mankind. Rumours did reach me, but I
+brushed them aside as slanders. I was an ingénu, unsuspecting,
+credulous. I thoroughly believed that men and women and I were much
+better than we actually are. I have not come to the end of my
+disillusions even now. I still rub my eyes on occasion. I simply can't
+believe that we are such humbugs, hypocrites, self-deceivers. And
+strange to say it is the "good" people above all who most bitterly
+disappoint me. Give me a healthy liar, or a thief, or a vagabond, and he
+arouses no expectations, and so I get no heart-burning. It is the good,
+the honest, the true, who cheat me of my boyhood's beliefs.... I am a
+cynic then, but not a reckless cynic--a careworn unhappy cynic without
+the cynic's pride. "It is easy to be cynical," someone admonished me.
+"Unfortunately it is," I said.
+
+We are so cold, so aloof, so self-centred even the warmest friends. Men
+of piety love God, but their love for each other is so commonly but a
+poor thing. My own affections are always frosted over with the
+Englishman's reserve. I hesitate as if I were not sure of them. I am
+afraid of self-deception, I hate to find out either myself or others.
+And yet I am always doing so. Mine is a restlessly analytical brain. I
+dissect everyone, even those I love, and my discoveries frequently sting
+me to the quick. "To the pure all things are pure," whence I should
+conclude I suppose that it is the beam in my own eye. But I would not
+tolerate being deceived concerning either my own beam or other people's
+motes.
+
+_March_ 12.
+
+_Archæopteryx and Mudflats_
+
+Yesterday I collected two distinct and several twinges and hereby save
+them up. They were more than that--they were pangs, and pangs that
+twanged.
+
+(Why do I make fun of my suffering?)
+
+One was when I saw the well-known figure of the _Archæopteryx_ remains
+in the slab of Lithographic sandstone of Bavaria: a reproduction in an
+illustrated encyclopædia. The other was when someone mentioned mud, and
+I thought of the wide estuary of the T----, its stretches of mudflats
+and its wild-fowl. We were turning over some pages and she said:
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"_Archæopteryx_," said I.
+
+"Whatever is _Archæopteryx_?"
+
+"An extinct bird," I answered mournfully.
+
+Like an old amour, my love of palæontology and anatomy, and all the high
+hopes I entertained of them, came smarting to life again, so I turned
+over the page quickly.
+
+But why need I explain to you, O my Journal? To others, I could not
+explain. I was tongue-tied.
+
+"I used to get very muddy," I remarked lamentably, "in the old days when
+stalking birds on the mudflats."
+
+And they rather jeered at such an occupation in such a place, just as
+those beautiful sights and sounds of zostera-covered mud-banks,
+twinkling runnels, swiftly running thin-legged waders, their whistles
+and cries began to steal over my memory like a delicate pain.
+
+To my infinite regret, I have no description, no photograph or sketch,
+no token of any sort to remember them by. And their doom is certain.
+Heavens! how I wasted my impressions and experiences then! Swinburne has
+some lines about saltings which console me a little, but I know of no
+other descriptions by either pen or brush.
+
+_March_ 15.
+
+How revolting it is to see some barren old woman love-sick over a baby,
+bestowing voluptuous kisses on its nose, eyes, hands, feet, utterly
+intoxicated and chattering incessantly in the "little language," and
+hopping about like an infatuated cock grouse.
+
+_May_ 5.
+
+The nurse has been here now for over five weeks. One day has been pretty
+much the same as another. I get out of bed usually about tea-time and
+sit by the window and churn over past, present, and future. However, the
+Swallows have arrived at last, though they were very late, and there
+are also Cuckoos, Green Wood-peckers, Moorhens, calling from across the
+park. At night, when the moon is up, I get a great deal of fun out of an
+extremely self-inflated Brown Owl, who hoots up through the breadth and
+length of the valley, and then I am sure, listens with satisfaction to
+his echo. Still, I have much sympathy with that Brown Owl and his
+hooting.
+
+What I do (goodness knows what E---- does), is to drug my mind with
+print. I am just a rag-bag of Smollett, H.G. Wells, Samuel Butler, the
+_Daily News_, the Bible, the _Labour Leader, Joseph Vance_, etc., etc.
+Except for an occasional geyser of malediction when some particularly
+acrid memory comes uppermost in my mind, I find myself submitting with a
+surprising calm and even cheerfulness. That agony of frustration which
+gnawed my vitals so much in 1913 has disappeared, and I, who expected to
+go down in the smoke and sulphur of my own fulminations, am quite as
+likely to fold my hands across my chest with a truly Christian
+resignation. Joubert said, "Patience and misfortune, courage and death,
+resignation and the inevitable, generally come together. Indifference to
+life generally arises with the impossibility of preserving it"--how
+cynical that sounds.
+
+_May_ 8.
+
+This and another volume of my Journal are temporarily lodged in a drawer
+in my bedroom. It appears to me that as I become more static and
+moribund, they become more active and aggressive. All day they make a
+perfect uproar in their solitary confinement--although no one hears it.
+And at night they become phosphorescent, though nobody sees it. One of
+these days, with continued neglect they will blow up from spontaneous
+combustion like diseased gunpowder, the dismembered diarist being thus
+hoist upon his own petard.
+
+_June_ 1.
+
+We discuss post mortem affairs quite genially and without restraint. It
+is the contempt bred of familiarity I suppose. E---- says widows' weeds
+have been so vulgarised by the war widows that she won't go into deep
+mourning. "But you'll wear just one weed or two for me?" I plead, and
+then we laugh. She has promised me that should a suitable chance arise,
+she will marry again. Personally, I wish I could place my hand on the
+young fellow at once, so as to put him thro' his paces--shew him where
+the water main runs and where the gas meter is, and so on.
+
+You will observe what a relish I have for my own _macabre_, and how
+keenly I appreciate the present situation. Nobody can say I am not
+making the best of it. One might call it pulling the hangman's beard.
+Yet I ought, I fancy, to be bewailing my poor wife and fatherless child.
+
+_June_ 15.
+
+I sit all day in my chair, moving 8 feet to my bed at night, and 8 feet
+from it to my chair in the morning--and wait. The assignation is
+certain. "Life is a coquetry with Death that wearies me, Too sure of the
+amour."
+
+_July_ 5.
+
+It is odd that at this time of the breaking of nations, Destiny, with
+her hands so full, should spare the time to pursue a non-combatant atom
+like me down such a labyrinthine side-track. It is odd to find her
+determined to destroy me with such tremendous thoroughness--one would
+have thought it sufficient merely to brush the dust off my wings. Why
+this deliberate, slow-moving malignity? Perhaps it is a punishment for
+the impudence of my desires. I wanted everything so I get nothing. I
+gave nothing so I receive nothing. I am not offering up my life
+willingly--it is being taken from me piece by piece, while I watch the
+pilfering with lamentable eyes.
+
+I have tendered my resignation and retire on a small gratuity.
+
+_July_ 7.
+
+My hand gets a little better. But it's a cat and mouse game, and so
+humiliating to be the mouse.
+
+... Parental affection comes to me only in spasms, and if they hurt,
+they do not last long. Curiously enough, as in the case of very old
+people, my consciousness reverts more easily to conditions long past. I
+seem unable to apprehend all the significance of having a nine-months
+old daughter, but some Bullfinches or Swallows seen thro' the window
+rouse me more. No one can deny I have loved Birds to intoxication. In my
+youth, birds' eggs, and little nestlings and chickens sent me into such
+raptures I could never tell it to you adequately.... I am too tired to
+write more.
+
+_July_ 23.
+
+Reading Pascal again. If Shelley was "gold dusty from tumbling among the
+stars," Pascal was bruised and shaken. The one was delighted, and the
+other frightened. I like Pascal's prostration before the infinities of
+Time, Space and the Unknown. Somehow, he conveys this more vividly than
+the uplift afforded him by religion.
+
+_July_ 25.
+
+I don't believe in the twin-soul theory of marriage. There are plenty of
+men any one of whom she might have married and lived with happily, and
+simpler men than I am. Methinks there are large tracts could be sliced
+off my character and she would scarcely feel the want of them. To think
+that she of all women, with a past such as hers, should be swept into my
+vicious orbit! Yet she seems to bear Destiny no resentment, so I bear it
+for her and enough for two. At our engagement I gave her my own ring to
+wear as a pledge--we thought it nicer than buying a new one. It was a
+signet ring with a dark smooth stone. Strange to say it never once
+occurred to me till now that it was a mourning ring in memory of a
+great-uncle of mine, actually with an inscription on the inside.
+
+_July_ 26.
+
+As long as I can hold a pen, I shall, I suppose, go on trickling ink
+into this diary!
+
+I am amusing myself by reading the _Harmsworth Encyclopædia_ in 15
+volumes, _i.e._, I turn over the pages and read everything of interest
+that catches my eye.
+
+I get out of bed about ten, wash and sit by the window in my blue
+striped pyjama suit. It is so hot I need no additional clothing.
+E---- comes in, brushes my hair, sprinkles me with lavender water, lights
+my cigarette, and gives me my book-rest and books. She forgets nothing.
+
+From my window I look out on a field with Beech hedge down one side and
+beyond, tall trees--one showing in outline exactly like the profile of a
+Beefeater's head, more especially at sunset each evening when the tree
+next behind is in shadow. The field is full of blue Scabious plants,
+Wild Parsley and tall grass--getting brown now in the sun. Great numbers
+of White Butterflies are continually rocking themselves across--they go
+over in coveys of four or five at a time--I counted 50 in five minutes,
+which bodes ill for the cabbages. Not even the heaviest thunder showers
+seem to debilitate their kinetic ardour. They rock on like white
+aeroplanes in a hail of machine-gun bullets.
+
+Then there are the Swallows and Martins cutting such beautiful figures
+thro' the air that one wishes they carried a pencil in their bills as
+they fly and traced the lines of flight on a Bristol board. How I hanker
+after the Swallows! so free and gay and vigorous. This autumn, as they
+prepare to start, I shall hang on every twitter they make, and on every
+wing-beat; and when they have gone, begin sadly to set my house in
+order, as when some much loved visitors have taken their departure. I am
+appreciating things a little more the last few days.
+
+_August_ 1.
+
+_A Jeremiad_
+
+When I resigned my appointment last month, no one knows what I had to
+give up. But I know. Tho' if I say what I know no one is compelled to
+believe me excepting out of charity. It will never be discovered whether
+what I am going to state is not simply despairing bombast. My few
+intimate friends and relatives are entirely innocent of science, not to
+say zoology, and all they realise is the significant fact that I am
+prone to go extravagant lengths in conversation. But you may take it or
+leave it: I was the ablest junior on the staff and one of the ablest
+zoologists in the place--but my ability was always muffled by the
+inferior work they gave me to do. My last memoir published last December
+was the best of its kind in treatment, method and technique that ever
+issued from the institution--I do not say the most important. It was
+trivial--my work always was trivial because they put me in a mouldy
+department where all the work was trivial and the methods used as
+primitive, slipshod and easy as those of Fabricius, the idea being that
+as I had enjoyed no academic career I was unsuited to fill other posts
+then vacant--one, work on the CÅ“lenterates and another on _Vermes_,
+both rarely favoured by amateurs and requiring laboratory training.
+Later, I had the mortification of seeing these posts filled by men whose
+powers I by no means felt inclined to estimate as greater than my own.
+Meanwhile, I who had been dissecting for dear life up and down the whole
+Animal Kingdom in a poorly equipped attic laboratory at home, with no
+adequate instruments, was bitterly disappointed to find still less
+provision made even in a so-called Scientific Institution so grandly
+styled the British Museum (N.H.). On my first arrival I was presented
+with a pen, ink, paper, ruler, and an enormous instrument of steel which
+on enquiry I found to be a paper cutter. I asked for my microscope and
+microtome. I ought to have asked what Form I was in.
+
+So I had to continue my struggle against odds, and only within the last
+year or so began to squeeze the authorities with any success. In time I
+should have revolutionised the study of Systematic Zoology, and the
+anonymous paper I wrote in conjunction with R---- in the _American
+Naturalist_ was a rare _jeu d'esprit_, and my most important scientific
+work.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the literary world I have fared no better. My first published article
+appeared at the age of 15 over my father's name, my motive being not so
+much modesty as cunning--if the literary world (!) ragged it
+unmercifully, there was still a chance left for me to make good.
+
+My next achievement of any magnitude was the unexpected printing of a
+story in the _Academy_ after I had unsuccessfully badgered almost every
+other newspaper. This was when I was 19. No proof had been sent me and
+no intimation of its acceptance. Moreover, there were two ugly printer's
+errors. I at once wrote off to correct them in the next issue. My letter
+was neither published nor acknowledged. I submitted, but presently wrote
+again, politely hinting that my cheque was overdue. But--screams of
+silence, and I thought it wise not to complain in view of future
+printing favours. I soon discovered that the journal had changed hands
+and was probably on its last legs at the time of my success. As soon as
+it grew financially sound again no more of my stories were accepted.
+
+A more recent affair I had with the American _Forum,_ which delighted me
+by publishing my article, but did not pay--tho' the Editor went out of
+his way to write that "payment was on publication." I did not venture to
+remonstrate as I had another article on the stocks which they also
+printed without paying me. In spite of uniform failure, my literary
+ambition has never flagged.[2] I have for years past received my
+rejected MSS. back from every conceivable kind of periodical, from
+_Punch_ to the _Hibbert Journal_. At one time I used to file their
+rejection forms and meditated writing a facetious essay on them. But I
+decided they were too monotonously similar. My custom was when the
+ordinary avenues to literary fame had failed me--the half-crown Reviews
+and the sixpenny Weeklies--to seek out at a library some obscure
+publication--a Parish Magazine or the local paper--anything was grabbed
+as a last chance. On one of these occasions I discovered the
+_Westminster Review_ and immediately plied them with a manuscript and
+the usual polite note. After six weeks, having no reply, I wrote again
+and waited for another six weeks. My second remonstrance met with a
+similar fate, so I went into the city to interview the publishers, and
+to demand my manuscript back. The manager was out, and I was asked to
+call again. After waiting about for some time, I left my card, took my
+departure and decided I would write. The same evening I told the
+publishers that the anonymous editor would neither print my article nor
+return it. Would they kindly give me his name and address so that I
+could write personally. After some delay they replied that although it
+was not the custom to disclose the editor's name, the following address
+would find her. She was a lady living in Richmond Row, Shepherd's Bush.
+I wrote to her at once and received no answer. Meanwhile, I had observed
+that no further issues of the review had appeared on the bookstalls, and
+the book-sellers were unable to give me any information. I wrote again
+to the address--this time a playful and facetious letter in which I said
+I did not propose to take the matter into court, but if it would save
+her any trouble I would call for the MS. as I lived only a few minutes'
+walk distant. I received no answer. I was busy at the time and kept
+putting off executing my firm purpose of visiting the good lady until
+one evening as I was casually reading the _Star_ coming home in the
+'bus, I read an account of how some charitably disposed woman had
+recently visited the Hammersmith Workhouse and removed to her own home a
+poor soul who was once the friend of George Eliot, George Henry Lewes,
+and other well-known literary persons of the sixties and had, until it
+ceased publication a few months before, edited the once notable
+_Westminster Review_.
+
+Recently, however, there has been evidence of a more benevolent attitude
+towards me on the part of London editors. A certain magnificent
+quarterly has published one or two of my essays, and one of these called
+forth two pages of quotation and flattering comment in _Public Opinion_,
+which thrill me to the marrow. I fear, however, the flood-tide has come
+too late.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If this achievement impressed me it did not seem to impress anyone else.
+A---- regarded it as a joke and laughed incredulously when someone told
+him of "P.O.'s" eulogy. You see I am still his foolish little brother. I
+am secretly very nettled too because E---- treated the whole matter very
+indifferently. She did not even take the trouble to read the paper's
+critique, and tho' she volunteered to buy several copies to send to
+friends, she never remembered to do so, and the whole affair has passed
+out of her mind.
+
+Now a pleasant paragraph that appeared in the press noticing some
+drawings of a friend of her friend, she read twice and marched off to
+Francesca with it in great glee. Another successful young person got his
+photo into the picture papers--a man we know only by hearsay, and yet it
+impressed her until I recalled, what strange to say she had quite
+forgotten, how the photographers wished to publish her own photograph in
+the picture papers at the time of our marriage. But she scornfully
+refused. (And so did I.)
+
+But what a queer woman!... [And I, too, a queer man, drunken with
+wormwood and gall.]
+
+_August_ 6.
+
+E---- and I were very modern in our courtship. Our candour was mutual
+and complete--parents and relatives would be shocked and staggered if
+they knew.... You see I am a biologist and we are both freethinkers.
+_Voilà_!... I hate all reticence and concealment.... There is a good
+deal of that ass, Gregers Werle, in my nature.
+
+_August_ 7.
+
+_My Gastrocnemius_
+
+I become dreadfully emaciated. This morning, before getting off the bed
+I lifted my leg and gazed wistfully along all its length. My flabby
+_gastrocnemius_ swung suspended from the _tibia_ like a gondola from a
+Zeppelin. I touched it gently with the tip of my index finger and it
+oscillated.
+
+_August_ 17.
+
+My beloved wife comes home this evening after a short, much needed
+holiday.
+
+_August_ 27.
+
+My gratuity has turned out to be unexpectedly small. I hoped at least
+for one year's salary. And the horrible thing is I might live for
+several years longer! No one was ever more enthusiastic for death than I
+am at this moment. I hate this world with its war, and I bitterly regret
+I never managed to buy laudanum in time. There are only E---- and dear
+R---- and one or two others--the rest of the people I know I hate _en
+bloc_. If only I could get at them. I hate to have to leave them to
+themselves without getting my own back.
+
+_August_ 31.
+
+My darling sweetheart, you ask me why I love you. I do not know. All I
+know is that I _do_ love you, and beyond measure. Why do _you_ love
+me--surely a more inscrutable problem. You do not know. No one ever
+knows. "The heart has its reasons which the reason knows not of." We
+love in obedience to a powerful gravitation of our beings, and then try
+to explain it by recapitulating one another's characters just as a man
+forms his opinions first and then thinks out reasons in support.
+
+What delights me is to recall that our love has _evolved._ It did not
+suddenly spring into existence like some beautiful sprite. It developed
+slowly to perfection--it was forged in the white heat of our
+experiences. That is why it will always remain.
+
+_September_ 1.
+
+Your love, darling, impregnates my heart, touches it into calm, strongly
+beating life so that when I am with you, I forget I am a dying man. It
+is too difficult to believe that when we die true love like ours
+disappears with our bodies. My own experience makes me feel that human
+love is the earnest after death of a great reunion of souls in God who
+is love. When as a boy I was bending the knee to Haeckel, the saying,
+"God is Love," scarcely interested me. I am wiser now. You must not
+think I am still anything but an infidel (as the churchmen say),--I
+should hate not to be taken for an infidel--and you must not be
+surprised that an embittered, angry, hateful person like myself should
+believe in a Gospel of Love. I am embittered because an intense desire
+to love has in many instances[3] been baulked by my own idealising yet
+also analytical mind. I have wanted to love men blindly, yet I am always
+finding them out, and the disappointment chills the heart. Hence my
+malice and venom: which, dear, do not misconstrue. I am as greedy as an
+Octopus, ready out of love to take the whole world into my inside--that
+seat of the affections!--but I am also as sensitive as an Octopus, and
+quickly retract my arms into the rocky, impregnable recess where I live.
+
+_September_ 2.
+
+But am I dying? I have no presentiments--no conviction--like the people
+you read of in books. Am I, after all, in love?"I dote yet doubt;
+suspect yet strongly love." It is all a matter of degree. Beside Abélard
+and Héloïse, our love may be just glassy affection. It is a great and
+difficult question to decide. I love no one else but E----, that, at
+least, is a certainty, and I have never loved anyone more.
+
+_September_ 3.
+
+My bedroom is on the ground floor as I cannot mount the stairs. But the
+other day when they were all out, I determined to clamber upstairs if
+possible, and search in the bedrooms for a half bottle of laudanum,
+which Mrs. ---- told me she found the other day in a box--a relic of the
+time when ---- had to take it to relieve pain.
+
+I got off the bed on to the floor and crawled around on hands and knees
+to the door, where I knelt up straight, reached the handle and turned
+it. Then I crawled across the hall to the foot of the stairs, where I
+sat down on the bottom step and rested. It is a short flight of only 12
+steps and I soon reached the top by sitting down on each and raising
+myself up to the next one with my hands.
+
+Arrived at the top, I quickly decided on the most likely room to search
+first, and painfully crawled along the passage and thro' the bathroom by
+the easiest route to the small door--there are two. The handles of all
+the doors in the house are fixed some way up above the middle, so that
+only by kneeling with a straight back could I reach them from the floor.
+This door in addition was at the top of a high but narrow step, and I
+had to climb on to this, balance myself carefully, and then carefully
+pull myself up towards the handle by means of a towel hung on the
+handle. After three attempts I reached the handle and found the door
+locked on the inside.
+
+I collapsed on the floor and could have cried. I lay on the floor of the
+bathroom resting with head on my arm, then set my teeth and crawled
+around the passage along two sides of a square, up three more steps to
+the other door which I opened and then entered. I had only examined two
+drawers containing only clothes, when a key turned in the front door
+lock and E---- entered with--and gave her usual whistle.
+
+I closed the drawers and crawled out of the room in time to hear
+E---- say in a startled voice to her mother: "Who's that upstairs?" I
+whistled, and said that being bored I had come up to see the cot: which
+passed at that time all right.
+
+Next morning my darling asked me why I went upstairs. I did not answer,
+and I think she knows.
+
+_September_ 4.
+
+I am getting ill again, and can scarcely hold the pen. So good-bye
+Journal--only for a time perhaps.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Have read this blessed old Journal out to E----. It required some
+courage, and I boggled at one or two bits and left them out.
+
+_September_ 5.
+
+_Leap-frog_
+
+Some girls up the road spent a very wet Sunday morning playing leap-frog
+in their pyjamas around the tennis lawn. It makes me envious. To think I
+never thought of doing that! and now it is too late. They wore purple
+pyjamas too. I once hugged myself with pride for undressing in a cave by
+the sea and bathing in the pouring rain, but that seems tame in
+comparison.
+
+_Liebestod_
+
+A perfect autumn morning--cool, fine and still. What sweet music a horse
+and cart make trundling slowly along a country road on a quiet morning!
+I listened to it in a happy mood of abstraction as it rolled on further
+and further away. I put my head out of the window so as to hear it up to
+the very last, until a Robin's notes relieved the nervous tension and
+helped me to resign myself to my loss. The incident reminded me of the
+Liebestod in "Tristan," with the Robin taking the part of the harp.
+
+For days past my emotions have been undergoing kaleidoscopic changes,
+not only from day to day but from hour to hour. For ten minutes at a
+time I am happy or miserable, or revengeful, venomous, loving, generous,
+noble, angry, or murderous--you could measure them with a stop-watch.
+Hell's phantoms course across my chest. If I could lie on this bed as
+quiet and stony as an effigy on a tomb! But a moment ago I had a sharp
+spasm at the sudden thought that never, never, never again should I walk
+thro' the path-fields to the uplands.
+
+_September_ 7.
+
+My 28th birthday.
+
+Dear old R---- (the man I love above all others) has been in a military
+hospital for months. It is a great hardship to have our intercourse
+almost completely cut off.
+
+Dear old Journal, I love you! Good-bye.
+
+_September_ 29.
+
+I could never have believed so great misery compatible with sanity. Yet
+I am quite sane. How long I or any man can remain sane in this condition
+God knows.... It is a consummate vengeance this inability to write.[4] I
+cannot help but smile grimly at the astuteness of the thrust. To be
+sure, how cunning to deprive me of my one secret consolation! How
+amusing that in this agony of isolation such an aggressive egotist as I
+should have his last means of self-expression cut off. I am being slowly
+stifled.
+
+_Later. (In E.'s handwriting.)_
+
+Yesterday we shifted into a tiny cottage at half the rental of the other
+one, and situated about two miles further out from the village.... A
+wholly ideal and beautiful little cottage you may say. But a
+"camouflaged" cottage. For in spite of the happiness of its exterior it
+contains just now two of the most dejected mortals even in this present
+sorrow-laden world.
+
+_September_ 30.
+
+Last night, E---- sitting on the bed by me, burst into tears. It was my
+fault. "I can stand a good deal but there must come a breaking point."
+Poor, poor girl, my heart aches for you.
+
+I wept too, and it relieved us to cry. We blew our noses. "People who
+cry in novels," E---- observed with detachment, "never blow their noses.
+They just weep." ... But the thunder clouds soon come up again.
+
+_October_ 1.
+
+The immediate future horrifies me.
+
+_October_ 2.
+
+Poushkin (as we have named the cat) is coiled up on my bed, purring and
+quite happy. It does me good to see him.
+
+But consider: A paralytic, a screaming infant, two women, a cat and a
+canary, shut up in a tiny cottage with no money, the war still on, and
+food always scarcer day by day. "Give us this day, our daily bread."
+
+I want to be loved--above all, I want to love. My great danger is lest I
+grow maudlin and say petulantly, "Nobody loves me, nobody cares." I must
+have more courage and more confidence in other people's good-nature.
+Then I can love more freely.
+
+_October_ 3.
+
+I am grateful to-day for some happy hours plucked triumphantly from
+under the very nose of Fate, and spent in the warm sun in the garden.
+They carried me out at 12, and I stayed till after tea-time. A Lark
+sang, but the Swallows--dear things--have gone. E---- picked two
+Primroses. I sat by some Michaelmas Daisies and watched the Bees, Flies,
+and Butterflies.
+
+_October_ 6.
+
+In fits of maudlin self-compassion I try to visualise Belgium, Armenia,
+Serbia, etc., and usually cure myself thereby.
+
+_October_ 12.
+
+It is winter--no autumn this year. Of an evening we sit by the fire and
+enjoy the beautiful sweet-smelling wood-smoke, and the open hearth with
+its big iron bar carrying pot-hook and hanger. E---- knits warm garments
+for the Baby, and I play Chopin, César-Franck hymns, Three Blind Mice
+(with variations) on a mouth-organ, called "The Angels' Choir," and made
+in Germany.... You would pity me would you? I am lonely, penniless,
+paralysed, and just turned twenty-eight. But I snap my fingers in your
+face and with equal arrogance I pity you. I pity you your smooth-running
+good luck and the stagnant serenity of your mind. I prefer my own
+torment. I am dying, but you are already a corpse. You have never really
+lived. Your body has never been flayed into tingling life by hopeless
+desire to love, to know, to act, to achieve. I do not envy you your
+absorption in the petty cares of a commonplace existence.
+
+Do you think I would exchange the communion with my own heart for the
+toy balloons of your silly conversation? Or my curiosity for your
+flickering interests? Or my despair for your comfortable Hope? Or my
+present tawdry life for yours as polished and neat as a new three-penny
+bit? I would not. I gather my mantle around me and I solemnly thank God
+that I am not as some other men are.
+
+I am only twenty-eight, but I have telescoped into those few years a
+tolerably long life: I have loved and married, and have a family; I have
+wept and enjoyed; struggled and overcome, and when the hour comes I
+shall be content to die.
+
+_ October_ 14 _to_ 20.
+
+Miserable.
+
+_October_ 21.
+
+Self-disgust.
+
+FINIS.
+
+[Barbellion died on December 31.]
+
+
+[1] John Wesley _rewrote_ his journals from entries in rough draft.
+
+[2] I once received from an editor a very encouraging letter which gave
+me a great deal of pleasure and made me hope he was going to open the
+pages of his magazine to me. But three weeks after he committed suicide
+by jumping out of his bedroom window.
+
+[3] The Egoist explains himself again.
+
+[4] Writing difficult to decipher.
+
+
+
+
+SYNOPSIS
+
+PART I: AT HOME
+
+   Rambles and bathes, 2, 3, 4, 9, 11, 20, 37, 45, 46, 48, 49
+   Natural History and Zoology, 9, 12, 13, 20, 29
+   Leaves school, 10
+   Newspaper reporting, 17, 19
+   Ambition, 8, 10, 13, 26, 29
+   Calf-love, 8, 12, 23, 28
+   The Wesleyan Minister Microscopist, 18
+   Conversation with Prof. Herdman, 46
+   Ill-health, 10, 24, 25, 35, 42, 48 (Jul. 31)
+   Heart attacks, 33, 36
+   On Death, 33, 38, 43, 44
+   Sits for British Museum exam., 29
+   Failure, 30, 31, 32
+   Appointment to Laboratory at Plymouth, 32
+   Everything "ghostly, unreal, enigmatic," 29, 33
+   Self-consciousness, 27, 40
+   The Poppy, 43
+   Appointment resigned and his father's illness, 34
+   His father's death, 50, 51
+   Success and appointment to B.M., 55
+   A youthful Passion, 56, 57
+
+PART II: IN LONDON
+
+   Disillusionment, 59, 61, 93, 94, 132, 178, 185
+   Life in a boarding-house, 63, 78, 79, 94, 99, 107
+   Ambition, 71, 73, 109
+   An affair in a taxicab, 75
+   Self-disgust, 77
+   In love, 78, 96, 107
+   Conversations: (a) with E., 65, 69, 70, 75, 76, 79, 95, 96, 99,
+                      104, 151, 152
+                  (b) with H., 82, 83
+                  (c) with R., 131, 140, 141, 142, 154, 155, 165,
+   Ill-health, 59, 62, 69, 72, 74, 100, 107, 110, 114, 134-5, 153, 156
+   On Death, 62, 63, 84, 88
+   Heart attacks, 71, 72, 120, 122
+   Nervous breakdown, 80, 81, 82
+   Meets an old love, 86, 87
+   Holidays: (_a_) at C----, by the sea in North ----, 65, 66, 67
+             (_b_) at home, 82
+             (_c_) in Brittany and on Dartmoor (_riding a pony_), 97
+   Life in rooms, 102, 107, 108, 114, 138, 148, 149, 153
+   His brother, 121, 206
+   Discussions on marriage, 123, 124
+   In his sitting-room, 162
+   The fascination of London, 74, 142-145
+       (_a_) Petticoat Lane, 163
+       (_b_) Rotten Row, 176
+   Goes to concerts, 127, 161, 172
+   A lovers' quarrel, 126
+   He struggles with himself, 135, 137, 138
+   Engaged, 150, 158
+   Fears his inconstancy, 159, 185
+   Self-analysis, 167 _et seq_., 182, 183
+   Day-dreams: Life a dream, 178, 179, 188
+   The War, 182
+   Holidays: (_a_) on a Buckinghamshire farm, 191-205
+             (_b_) at the Lakes, 215-217
+   Should a husband keep a private journal? 210
+   Marriage, 205, 209, 215
+
+PART III: MARRIAGE
+
+   Zeppelin raid and influenza, 222
+   Living in the country, 223, 227, 228
+   Reads his doctor's certificate after visit to recruiting-office, 225, 238
+   Self-disgust, 223, 224, 225, 247, 250 (_nude_), 267
+   Mental agony, 226, 227
+   Conversations: with R., 229
+                  with Scarabees, 230, 239, 243
+   Halcyon days, 233, 235, 238
+   A natural idiot climbs a stile on uplands, 240
+   Tension, 250, 252
+   The War, 237 (_Jutland_), 242, 247, 248, 249
+   Another nervous breakdown, 253
+   How E. knew all the time, 255, 256
+   Self-compassion, 251, 304
+   Home ill, 257 ("_in the doldrums_"), 259, 265
+   Returns to work, 278
+   Ill again, 285
+   From an invalid's view-point, 292, 293 (_by his bedroom window_)
+   Post-mortem affairs, 291
+   Resigns appointment, 294, 299
+   Self-consciousness and self-dramatization, 255, 265, 267
+   A badly articulated skeleton, 274
+   Cold weather in January, 276, 277, 278
+   On Death, 275, 283, 286, 291
+   His phosphorescent Journals, 291
+   Morphia and laudanum, 280, 300
+   Great misery, 303, 305
+
+
+
+
+INDEX OF NAMES
+
+   A----, 21, 51, 82, 97, 98, 121, 158, 206, 285, 298
+   _"Academy," The_, 23, 24, 106, 296
+   _Adventure in Search of Health, An_, 260
+   A Kempis, Thomas, 28
+   _Albert Hall, Hag, The_, 147
+   _Ambition_, 29
+   "_American Naturalist_," 295
+   _American Neighbour, An_, 251
+   _Apologia pro mea vita_, 145
+   _Archæopteryx and Mudflats_, 289
+   _Aristotle's Lantern_, 19
+   _At a Public Dinner_, 175
+   _At C----, a tiny little village by the Sea in N_----, 65
+   _At Home_, 82
+   _At the Albert Hall_, 127
+   Austen, Jane, 268
+   _Average Day, An_, 172
+
+   B----, 102, 107, 114, 118, 119
+   _Baby-Girl, A_, 263
+   _Bad Listener, A_, 246
+   Baring, Maurice, 188
+   _Bathing_, 60
+   Baudelaire, 60, 62, 173, 183, 197, 198, 258
+   Beerbohm, Max, 269
+   _Beethoven's Fifth Symphony_, 161, 186
+   Benson, A.C., 249
+   Bergson, 47, 55, 78, 183, 198
+   Berkeley, 275
+   Blind Mathilde, 139
+   Boeltzig, R., 103
+   Bradford, Sir John Rose, 54
+   Brieux, 162
+   _"Brilliant Career," A_, 62
+   British Museum, 26, 29, 49, 57, 59, 61, 79, 94, 132, 174, 178,
+    225, 274, 282, 283, 295
+   _British Museum Reading Room, The_, 100
+   Brooke, Rupert, 266
+   Browne, Sir Thomas, 146, 183, 238
+   Buchanan, Robert, 251
+   Bunyan, 166
+   Burke, 2
+   Burlington House, 29
+   Burton, 125
+   Butler, Samuel, 143, 171, 185, 291
+   _Buxom Rogue in Earthenware, A_, 216
+   _By the Sea_, 61
+   Byron, 266
+
+   _Camping out at S---- Sands_, 91
+   Carlyle, 120, 171
+   Cassell's _Natural History_, 13
+   _Chalcidoidea, The_, 221
+   _Character, A_, 39
+   _Chinese Lanterns_, 280
+   _Chipples_, 220
+   _Chopin_, 157
+   _Clever Young Man, The_, 207
+   Coleridge, 266
+   _Confession, A_, 74
+   Conrad, 50, 223
+   _Crowd Fever_, 278
+   _Cynicism_, 288
+
+   D----, 69, 180
+   Darwin, 6, 55
+   _Day in Autumn, A_, 51
+   _Death_, 33, 84, 275, 286
+   Debussy, 161, 162, 167
+   De Goncourt, 227, 228
+   De Guérin, 200, 277, 282
+   De Maupassant, Guy, 63, 266
+   _Depression_, 89
+   De Quincey, 10, 42, 126, 187, 196, 286
+   Devonshire Club, 32
+   _Dinosaurs_, 129
+   Disraeli, 258
+   _Dr. Spurgeon_, 90
+   Dostoieffsky, 132, 163, 167, 187
+   Duke, Mr., K.C., 17
+
+   E----, 68, 78, 79, 107, 171, 191, 192, 193, 194, 201, 209, 220, 223, 226,
+    228, 233, 235, 236, 238, 240, 251, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 259, 260,
+    261, 263, 274, 277, 283, 291, 292, 294, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303,
+    304
+   _Early Boughies_, 66
+   _Empress of Ireland_, 127
+   _English Review_, 101, 105, 142
+   _Equilibrium Restored_, 245
+   _Entomological Society, The_, 110
+
+   Father, 34, 50, 51, 137
+   _Finis_, 225, 285
+   _Fire Bogey, The_, 170
+   _Foolish Bird, A_, 118
+   "_Fortnightly_," 61
+   "_Forum_," 296
+   Foster, Sir Michael, 209
+   _From one Maiden Lady to another (authentic)_, 37
+
+   G----, 78, 197, 215
+   _Gardening_,83
+   Gaskel, 23, 55
+   Gibbon, 129, 258
+   _Gibbon's Autobiography_, 268
+   Gissing, George, 32
+   Goethe, 146
+   _Graph of Temperament, The,_ 287
+
+   H----, 7, 8, 13, 38, 51, 60, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 89, 92,
+    94, 114, 180, 196, 206, 218, 285
+   Haeckel, 23, 300
+   _Harmsworth Encyclopædia_, 294
+   Harmsworth _Self-Educator_, 10
+   Hardy, 24, 282
+   _Hardy's Poetry_, 264
+   _Hearing Beethoven_, 172
+   Hegel, 146
+   Henley, 208, 209
+   Herdman, Prof., 46
+   Hervey, 170
+   Horton, Max Kennedy, 141
+   _Housefly Problem, The_--1916, 231
+   _Humble Confession, A_, 115
+   Huxley, 37, 163
+
+   "_Illustrated London News_," 53
+   _In a Crowd_, 184
+   _In London_, 59
+   _In London again_, 93, 99
+
+   J----, 78, 263
+   James, 163, 166
+   Jefferies, Richard, 44, 233
+   _Jeremiad, A_, 294
+   Johnson, 2, 10, 180, 181, 196, 230
+   _Johnson_ v. _Yves Delage_, 181
+   _Jolt, A_, 247
+   Jonson, Ben, 171
+   Joubert, 291
+   _Justifiable Mendacity_, 52
+
+   K----, 80, 99, 138, 225
+   Kant, 257
+   Keats, 10, 145, 146, 258
+
+   L----, 1, 3, 4, 43, 98
+   Lacépède, 146
+   Lamb, Charles, 13, 120, 227, 230
+   Landor, W.S., 265
+   La Rochefoucauld, 31
+   _Leap-frog_, 302
+   Lodge, Sir Oliver, 286
+   _Liebestod_, 302
+   _Lice or "Creeping Ferlies_," 213
+   _Looking for Lice at the Zoo_, 177
+   Lubbock, 7
+   _Ludo_, 104
+   _Lupus_, 125
+   _Luxury of Lunacy, The_, 195
+
+   M----, 12, 20, 62, 69, 70, 80, 81, 96, 105, 106, 134, 140, 156,
+    222, 225, 226, 255, 250, 259, 260
+   Macaulay, 30
+   Maeterlinck, 42
+   Malpighi, 171
+   _Marie Bashkirtseff_, 139, 163, 175, 238
+   Mary, 8, 23, 28
+   _Masefield's "Gallipoli,"_ 269
+   _Measuring Lice_, 125
+   Moffat, 161
+   Moore, Tom, 173
+   _More Irony_, 105
+   Mosenthal, 13
+   Mother, 34, 50, 51, 59, 93, 95, 97, 137
+   Mozart, 161
+   _My Gastrocnemius_, 208
+   _My Nightmare_, 105
+   _My Sense of Touch_, 91
+
+   N----, 29, 78, 121, 122, 257, 261
+   _Naming Cockroaches_, 184
+   Natural History Museum, 6, 54
+   _New Pile in the Pier, A_, 88
+   Newton, 171
+   Nietzsche, 137, 156
+
+   _Old Diaries_, 44
+   _Omniscience_, 239
+   _On Lighting Chloe's Cigarette,_ 119
+   _On Lundy Island_, 21
+   _On the N. Downs_, 68
+   _Our Simian Ancestry_, 27
+
+   P----, 76, 78, 79, 80
+   _Pachmann_, 234
+   Pascal, 293
+   _Petticoat Lane_, 163
+   Piers Plowman, 221
+   Plymouth Marine Laboratory, 29, 32,47, 79
+   _Pool: a Retrospect, The_, 189
+   _Potted Novel, A_, 284
+   _Prawning_, 17
+   _Preparing a Snake's Skull_, 50
+   "_Punch_," 296
+   _Punch and Judy Show, The,_ 180
+
+   R----, 81, 99, 101, 104, 107, 115, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124,
+    127, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 140, 141, 148,
+    151, 154, 166, 167, 169, 172, 173, 174, 175, 182, 197, 205,
+    207, 208, 209, 215, 2l6, 217, 227, 228, 229, 230, 239, 240,
+    241, 295, 299, 303
+   _Raemakers_, 186
+   _Railway Travel_, 41
+   _Raleigh, Sir Walter_, 129, 196
+   _Reading Nietzsche_, 156
+   _Reminiscences_, 270
+   _Renunciation_, 85
+   _Resignation_, 141
+   _Restlessness of the Sea, The,_ 90
+   Richepin, 57
+   Richelieu, Cardinal, 155
+   _Rigor Bordis_, 148
+   _Rodin_, 103, 157, 160
+   Romney, 169
+   Rousseau, 63, 181, 268
+   Ruskin, 30, 190, 208, 216
+
+   S----, 1, 3
+   Saintsbury, Prof. Geo., 126
+   Sainte-Beuve, 200, 277
+   Schäfer, 110
+   Schopenhauer, 34
+   Schubert, 173, 174
+   _Scots Fir, A_, 111
+   Scott, 75, 153
+   _Service_, 264
+   Shakespeare, 264
+   Shaw, Bernard, 59, 150, 166, 249
+   Shelley, 196, 266, 293
+   _Sir Henry Wood conducting_, 159
+   _Sleep_, 206
+   _Small Red Viper, A_, 16
+   Smiles, Samuel, 14
+   Smollett, 291
+   _Sollas's "Ancient Hunters,"_ 72
+   Southey, 16
+   Spallanzani, 47, 71, 112
+   Spinoza, 16
+   _Spring in the Woods_, 15
+   _Staying by the Sea_, 43
+   _Stagnancy_, 84
+   _Stagnant Day, A_, 111
+   Stevenson, 63, 106, 161, 208, 209
+   _Stockbroker, The_, 252
+   _Strangeness of my Life, The,_ 281
+   Strindberg, 139
+   Susan, 254
+   _Sunset in Kensington Gardens_, 130
+   Swift, 230
+   Swinburne, 61, 290
+
+   T----, 14, 171, 246
+
+   "_T.P.'s Weekly_," 41
+   Tennyson, 154, 264
+   _Test for True Love, The_, 157
+   _Test of Happiness, A_, 185
+   Thompson, Francis, 266
+   Thoreau, 181
+   _Too Late_, 144
+   _Tschaikovsky_, 161, 162
+   Turner, J.M.W., 154, 167
+   _Two Adventures_, 212
+   _Two Months' Sick Leave_, 80
+   _Two People I hate in particular,_ 186
+   _Two Young Men Talking_, 60
+
+   _Une Caractère_, 53
+
+   Verlaine, 60
+   Villon, Francois, 173
+   Voltaire, 63, 163
+
+   Wagner, 166
+   Wallace, 23, 37
+   Walton, Isaac, 8
+   Wasmann, Father, 47
+   Waterton, 159
+   Wells, H.G., 291
+   Whistler, 222
+   White, Gilbert, 159
+   Whitman, Walt, 189, 253
+   Wilde, Oscar, 76, 143, 152, 175, 258
+   _Windy Ash_,35
+   _Wiedersheim_, 106, 145, 159, 257
+   _Woman and a Child, A_, 146
+   Wood, Sir Henry, 157, 159, 172, 201
+   Woodward, Dr. Smith, 145
+
+   _Yellow Cat, A_, 241
+
+   Zola, 17
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Journal of a Disappointed Man, by 
+Wilhelm Nero Pilate Barbellion
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Journal of a Disappointed Man, by
+Wilhelm Nero Pilate Barbellion
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+Title: The Journal of a Disappointed Man
+
+Author: Wilhelm Nero Pilate Barbellion
+
+Release Date: April 30, 2012 [EBook #39585]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE JOURNAL OF A DISAPPOINTED MAN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org
+(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive.)
+
+
+
+
+
+THE JOURNAL OF A DISAPPOINTED MAN
+
+BY
+
+W.N.P. BARBELLION
+
+
+
+WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY H.G. WELLS
+
+
+
+NEW YORK
+
+GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
+
+1919
+
+
+"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift,
+nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet
+riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time
+and chance happeneth to them all.
+
+"For man also knoweth not his time; as the fishes that are taken in an
+evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons
+of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them."
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+By H.G. WELLS
+
+Your egoist, like the solitary beasts, lives only for himself; your
+altruist declares that he lives only for others; for either there may be
+success or failure but for neither can there be tragedy. For even if the
+altruist meets nothing but ingratitude, what has he to complain of? His
+premises abolish his grounds of complaint. But both egoist and altruist
+are philosophical abstractions. The human being by nature and necessity
+is neither egoist nor altruist; he trims a difficult course between the
+two; for the most part we are, within the limits of our powers of
+expression, _egotists_, and our desire is to think and if possible talk
+and write about this marvellous experiment of ourselves, with all the
+world--or as much as we can conveniently assemble--for audience. There
+is variety in our styles. Some drape the central figure; some let it
+rather appear than call attention to it; some affect a needless
+frankness: "_I_ am an egotist, mind you, and I pretend nothing else";
+some by adopting a pose with accessories do at least develop so great
+and passionate an interest in the accessories as to generalise and
+escape more or less completely from self. An egotism like an eggshell is
+a thing from which to escape; the art of life is that escape. The
+fundamental art of life is to recover the sense of that great
+self-forgetful continuous life from which we have individually budded
+off. Many people have done this through religion, which begins with a
+tremendous clamour to some saviour god or other to recognise us and ends
+in our recognition of him; or through science, when your egotist begins
+with: "Behold me! I, I your humble servant, am a scientific man, devoted
+to the clear statement of truth," and ends with so passionate a
+statement of truth that self is forgotten altogether.
+
+In this diary of an intensely egotistical young naturalist, tragically
+caught by the creeping approach of death, we have one of the most moving
+records of the youthful aspects of our universal struggle. We begin with
+one of those bright schoolboys that most of us like to fancy we once
+were, that many of us have come to love as sons or nephews or younger
+brothers, and this youngster is attracted by natural science, by the
+employments of the naturalist and by the thought of being himself some
+day a naturalist. From the very beginning we find in this diary the
+three qualities, from the narrowest to broadest. "Observe me," he says
+to himself, "I am observing nature." There is the self-conscious,
+self-centred boy. But he also says "I am observing nature!" And at
+moments comes the clear light. He forgets himself in the twilight cave
+with the bats or watching the starlings in the evening sky, he becomes
+just you and I and the mind of mankind gathering knowledge. And the
+diary, as the keen edge of untimely fate cuts down into the sensitive
+tissue, shows us presently, after outcries and sorrow and darkness of
+spirit, the habits of the observer rising to the occasion. Not for him,
+he realises, are the long life, the honours of science, the Croonian
+lecture, the listening Royal Society, one's memory embalmed in specific
+or generic names, the sure place in the temple of fame, that once filled
+his boyish dreams. But here is something close at hand to go on
+observing manfully to the end, in which self may be forgotten, and that
+is his own tormented self, with desire still great and power and hope
+receding. "I will go on with this diary," I read between the lines. "You
+shall have at least one specimen, carefully displayed and labelled. Here
+is a recorded unhappiness. When you talk about life and the rewards of
+life and the justice of life and its penalties, what you say must square
+with this."
+
+Such is what we have here. It will be going beyond the necessities of
+this preface to expatiate upon a certain thread of unpremeditated and
+exquisite beauty that runs through the story this diary tells. To all
+sensitive readers it will be plain enough, and those who cannot see it
+plain do not deserve to have it underlined for them, that, still
+unseeing, they may pretend to see. Nor need we dilate upon the
+development of the quality of this diary from the rather fussy egotism
+of the earlier half. But it may be well to add a few explanatory facts
+that the opening chapters rather take for granted. Barbellion began life
+at a material as well as a physical disadvantage; neither of his parents
+were sturdy people, his mother died at last of constitutional heart
+weakness, and his father belonged to that most unfortunate class, the
+poor educated, who live lives of worry in straitened circumstances.
+Barbellion's father was a newspaper reporter in a west country town, his
+income rarely exceeded a couple of hundred pounds a year; the
+educational facilities of the place were poor, and young Barbellion had
+to get such learning as he could as a day boy at a small private school,
+his father supplementing this meagre training and presently taking him
+on as an apprentice reporter. How the passion for natural science arose
+does not appear in this diary; we already find the naturalist formed in
+the first schoolboy entries. An uncle, a chemist, seems to have
+encouraged the tendency, and to have given him textbooks and other help.
+Somehow at any rate he acquired a considerable amount of knowledge; by
+the time he was eighteen he was already publishing quite excellent
+observations of his own in such periodicals as the _Zoologist_, and by
+the time he was twenty he could secure an appointment as assistant
+naturalist to the director of a well-known marine biological station. It
+was a success, as the reader will learn, gained only to be renounced.
+His father was ill and he had to stand by his family; our economical
+country cannot afford to make biologists out of men who can earn a
+living as hack reporters. Poverty and science are sisters wherever the
+flag of Britain waves; for how could the rich live if we wasted money on
+that sort of thing? But the dream was not altogether abandoned, and in
+1911 Barbellion got a post, one of the dozen or so of rare and coveted
+opportunities to toil in a scientific atmosphere that our Empire
+affords; he secured an assistantship at the Natural History Museum,
+South Kensington, to which a living wage was attached, a fair equivalent
+to a reporter's earnings. The rest of the story needs no helping out.
+Let me only add that since 1911 Barbellion, in spite of his steadily
+diminishing strength, has published articles in both British and
+American periodicals, that entirely justify the statement that in him
+biological science loses one of the most promising of its recent
+recruits. His scientific work is not only full and exact but it has
+those literary qualities, the grace, the power of handling, the breadth
+of reference, which have always distinguished the best English
+biological work, and which mark off at once the true scientific man from
+the mere collector and recorder of items. With this much introduction
+Barbellion may be left to tell the tragedy of his hopes and of the dark,
+unforeseen, unforeseeable, and inexplicable fate that has overtaken
+him.
+
+
+
+
+PART I--THE JOURNAL BEGINS WHEN ITS AUTHOR IS A LITTLE OVER 13 YEARS
+OLD.
+
+_[The Following are Selected Entries.]_
+
+
+
+
+1903
+
+
+_January_ 3.
+
+Am writing an essay on the life-history of insects and have abandoned
+the idea of writing on "How Cats Spend their Time."
+
+_January_ 17.
+
+Went with L---- out catapult shooting. While walking down the main road
+saw a Goldfinch, but very indistinctly--it might not have been one. Had
+some wonderful shots at a tree creeper in the hedge about a foot away
+from me. While near a stream, L---- spotted what he thought to be some
+Wild Duck and brought one down, hitting it right in the head. He is a
+splendid shot. We discovered on examining it that it was _not_ Wild Duck
+at all but an ordinary tame Wild Duck--a hen. We ran away, and to-night
+L---- tells me he saw the Farmer enter the poulterer's shop with the
+bird in his hand.
+
+_January_ 19.
+
+Went to A---- Wood with S---- and L----. Saw a Barn Owl (_Strix
+flammea_) flying in broad daylight. At A---- Woods, be it known, there
+is a steep cliff where we were all out climbing to inspect and find all
+the likely places for birds to build in, next spring. S-and I got along
+all right, but L----, being a bit too careless, let go his hold on a
+tree and fell headlong down. He turned over and over and seemed to us to
+pitch on the back of his neck. However, he got up as cheerfully as ever,
+saying, "I don't like that--a bit of a nasty knock."
+
+_February_ 8.
+
+Joe became the mother of one kitten to-day. It was born at 1.20. It is
+a tiny little thing. One would almost call it deformed. It is gray.
+
+_March_ 18.
+
+Our Goldfinch roosts at 5.30. Joe's kitten is a very small one. "Magpie"
+is its name.
+
+_March_ 28.
+
+Went our usual ramble. But we were unfortunate from the very beginning.
+First, when we reached the "Nightjar Field," we found there were two men
+at the bottom of it cutting the hedge, so we decided not to venture on,
+as Gimbo and Bounce were with us, and it would look like poaching. Later
+on, we came to a splendid wood, but had to withdraw hastily from it, an
+old farmer giving us a severe chase. There were innumerable rabbits in
+the wood, so, of course, the dogs barked hard. I gave them a sound
+beating when we got back out of danger, The old farmer is known as "Bale
+the Bell-hanger."
+
+_April_ 2.
+
+I was glad yesterday to see the egg season so well in. I shall have to
+get blow-pipes and egg drills. Spring has really arrived and even the
+grasshoppers are beginning to stridulate, yet Burke describes these
+little creatures as being "loud and troublesome" and the chirp
+unpleasant. Like Samuel Johnson, he must have preferred brick walls to
+green hedges. Many people go for a walk and yet are unable to admire
+Nature simply because their power of observation is untrained. Of course
+some are not suited to the study at all and do not trouble themselves
+about it. In that case they should not talk of what they do not
+understand.... I might have noticed that I have used the term "Study of
+Nature." But it cannot be called a _study_. It _is_ a pastime of sheer
+delight, with naught but beautiful dreams and lovely thoughts, where we
+are urged forward by the fact that we are in God's world which He made
+for us to be our comfort in time of trouble.... Language cannot express
+the joy and happy forgetfulness during a ramble in the country. I do
+not mean that all the ins and outs and exact knowledge of a naturalist
+are necessary to produce such delight, but merely the common
+objects--Sun, Thrush, Grasshopper, Primrose, and Dew.
+
+_April_ 21.
+
+S---- and I have made a little hut in the woods out of a large natural
+hole in the ground by a big tree. We have pulled down branches all
+around it and stuck in upright sticks as a paling. We are training ivy
+to grow over the sticks. We smoke "Pioneer" cigarettes here and hide the
+packets in a hole under the roots of the tree. It's like a sort of
+cupboard.
+
+_August_ 6.
+
+In the evening, S---- and I cycled to S----, and when it was dark we
+went down on the rocks and lit a fire which crackled and burnt in the
+dusk of the evening.... Intend to do a bit to Beetles these hols. Rev.
+J. Wood in the _B.O.P_. has incited me to take them up, and it is really
+time, for at present I am as ignorant as I can hang together of the
+Coleoptera.
+
+_December_ 24.
+
+Went out with L---- to try to see the squirrels again. We could not find
+one and were just wondering if we should draw blank when L---- noticed
+one clinging to the bark of a tree with a nut in its mouth. We gave it a
+good chase, but it escaped into the thickest part of the fir tree, still
+carrying the nut, and we gave up firing at it. Later on, L---- got
+foolishly mischievous--owing, I suppose, to our lack of sport--and
+unhinged a gate which he carried two yards into a copse, and threw it on
+the ground. Just then, he saw the Squirrel again and jumped over the
+hedge into the copse, chasing it from tree to tree with his catty.
+Having lost it, he climbed a fir tree into a Squirrel's drey at the top
+and sat there on the three top, and I, below, was just going to lift the
+gate back when I looked up and saw a farmer watching me, menacing and
+silent. I promptly dropped the gate and fled. L---- from his Squirrel's
+drey, not knowing what had happened, called out to me about the
+nest--that there was nothing in it. The man looked up and asked him who
+he was and who I was. L---- would not say and would not come down. The
+farmer said he would come up. L---- answered that if he did he would
+"gob" [_i.e_. spit] on him. Eventually L---- climbed down and asked the
+farmer for a glass of cider. The latter gave him his boot and L---- ran
+away.
+
+
+
+
+1904
+
+
+_January_ 23.
+
+Went to the meet of the Stag hounds. Saw a hind in the stream at
+L----with not a horse, hound, or man in sight. It looked quite
+unconcerned and did not seem to have been hunted. I tried to head it,
+but a confounded sheep-dog got there before me and drove it off in the
+wrong direction. I _was_ mad, because if I had succeeded in heading it
+and had there been a kill, I should have got a slot. Got home at 6.30,
+after running and walking fifteen miles--tired out.
+
+_April_ 5.
+
+Just read _Stalky & Co_. Of Stalky, Beetle, and McTurk. I like Beetle
+best.
+
+_April_ 14.
+
+Won the School Gymnasium championship (under fifteen).
+
+_August_ 25.
+
+Had quite an adventure to-day. D---- and I cycled to the Lighthouse at
+----. On the way, in crossing the sands near the Hospital Ship we espied
+a lame Curlew which could hardly fly. I gave chase, but it managed to
+scramble over a gut full of water about two yards wide. D---- took off
+his boots and stockings and carried me over on his back, and we both
+raced across the sands to where the Curlew lay in an exhausted state. I
+picked him up and carried him off under my arm, like the boy with the
+Goose that laid the golden eggs. All the time, the bird screamed loudly,
+opening its enormously long bill and struggling to escape. Arrived at
+the gut again, we found that the incoming tide had made the gut wider
+and deeper so that we were cut off from the mainland, and found it.
+necessary to wade across at once before it got deeper. As I had to carry
+a pair of field-glasses as well as my boots and stockings, I handed over
+the struggling bird to D----. While wading across, I suddenly sank to my
+waist in a sandpit. This frightened me, and I was glad to reach the
+other side in safety. But on arrival I found D----, but no Curlew. In
+wading across the current, he grew flurried and let it go. The tide
+swept it upstream, and the poor bird, I fear, perished by drowning....
+Knocked up my friend P----, who is skipper of the ship _N_---- and asked
+him if he had a fire so that I could dry myself. He replied that they
+had no fire but that his "missus" would look out a pair of pants for me.
+Before falling in with this plan unconditionally, I thought it best to
+inspect the garment. However, it was quite clean--a pair of blue serge
+seaman's trousers, very baggy in the seat and far too long. But I turned
+up the bottoms and hid the baggy part underneath my overcoat. So, I got
+back home!
+
+_September_ 8.
+
+Wet all day. Toothache.
+
+_September_ 9.
+
+Toothache.
+
+_September_ 10.
+
+Toothache.
+
+_September_ 11.
+
+Toothache.
+
+_Xmas Day._
+
+Mother and Dad wanted to give me one of G.A. Henty's, but, fearing lest
+I did not want it, they did not put my name in it, so that if I wished I
+could change it. Intend doing this. Am reading the _Origin of Species_.
+It requires careful study, but I understand it so far and shall go on.
+
+_December_ 26.
+
+I have caught nothing in my traps yet. A little while ago I set a
+springe and two horse-hair nooses in the reed bed for water rails. I
+have bought a book on practical trapping.
+
+
+
+
+1905
+
+
+_January_ 15.
+
+I am thinking that on the whole I am a most discontented mortal. I get
+fits of what I call "What's the good of anything" mania. I keep asking
+myself incessantly till the question wears me out: "What's the good of
+going into the country _naturalising_? what's the good of studying so
+hard? where is it going to end? will it lead anywhere?"
+
+_February_ 17.
+
+When I can get hold of any one interested in Natural History I talk away
+in the most garrulous manner and afterwards feel ashamed of myself for
+doing it.
+
+_May_ 15.
+
+_The Captain_, in answer to my letter, advises me to join one of the
+ordinary professions and then follow up Nat. History as a recreation, or
+else join Science Classes at S. Kensington, or else by influence get a
+post in the Natural History Museum. But I shall see.
+
+_June_ 9.
+
+During dinner hour, between morning and afternoon school, went out on
+the S---- B---- River Bank, and found another Sedge Warbler's nest. This
+is the fifth I have found this year. People who live opposite on the
+T---- V---- hear them sing at night and think they are Nightingales!
+
+_June_ 27.
+
+On reviewing the past egg-season, I find in all I have discovered 232
+nests belonging to forty-four species. I only hope I shall be as
+successful with the beetle-season.
+
+_August_ 15.
+
+A hot, sultry afternoon, during most of which I was stretched out on the
+grass beside an upturned stone where a battle royal was fought between
+Yellow and Black Ants. The victory went to the hardy little Yellows....
+By the way, I held a Newt by the tail to-day and it emitted a squeak! So
+that the Newt has a voice after all.
+
+_August_ 26.
+
+In bed with a feverish cold. I am afraid I have very few Nat. His.
+observations to make. It is hard to observe anything at all when lying
+in bed in a dull bedroom with one small window. Gulls and Starlings
+pass, steam engines whistle, horses' feet clatter down the street, and
+sometimes the voice of a passer-by reaches me, and often the loud laugh
+that speaks the vacant mind. I can also hear my own cough echoing
+through my head, and, by the evening, the few pages of Lubbock's _Ants,
+Bees, and Wasps_ which I struggled to get through during the day rattle
+through my brain till I am disgusted to find I have them by heart. The
+clock strikes midnight and I wait for the morning. Oh! what a weary
+world.
+
+_October_ 13.
+
+Down with another cold. Feeling pretty useless. It's a wonder I don't
+develop melancholia.
+
+_November_ 6.
+
+By 7 a.m. H---- and I were down on the mudflats of the River with
+field-glasses, watching Waders. Ringed Plover in great numbers.
+
+
+
+
+1906
+
+_January_ 13.
+
+I have always had one ambition to be a great naturalist. That is, I
+suppose, a child's fancy, and I can see my folly in hoping for such
+great things. Still, there is no reason why I should not become a
+_learned_ naturalist if I study hard. I hope that whatever I do I shall
+do in the hope of increasing knowledge of truth and not for my own fame.
+This entry may suggest that I am horribly conceited. But really I am as
+humble as possible. I know I have advanced beyond many others, and I
+know I shall advance further, but why be conceited?... What a short life
+we have, and what heaps of glorious work to be done! Supper bell--so I
+am off.... This reads like Isaac Walton's funny mixtures of the sublime
+with the ridiculous. He discusses abstract happiness and the best salmon
+sauce all in one breath.
+
+_February_ 26.
+
+Although it is a grand achievement to have added but one jot or tittle
+to the sum of human knowledge it is grander still to have added a
+thought. It is best for a man to try to be both poet and naturalist--not
+to be too much of a naturalist and so overlook the beauty of things, or
+too much of a poet and so fail to understand them or even perceive those
+hidden beauties only revealed by close observation.
+
+_March_ 17.
+
+Woke up this morning covered with spots, chest inflamed, and bad cough.
+H---- carted me down from the Attic to the Lower Bedroom, and when the
+Dr. came he confirmed the general opinion that I had measles. It is
+simply disgusting, I have somewhere near 10,000 spots on me.
+
+_April_ 27.
+
+Went to A---- Woods, where, strange to say, I again saw Mary. But she
+had a tribe of friends with her, so did not speak, but watched her from
+a distance through my field-glasses.
+
+_May_ 8.
+
+On interviewing my old friend Dr. H----, found I had chickenpox. This
+instead of being a Diary of a Naturalist's observations[1] will be one
+of infectious diseases.
+
+_May_ 28.
+
+[Letter from Editor of _Countryside_ to my brother saying that if the
+_Countryside_ grew he might be able to offer me a billet. "Meanwhile he
+will be able to get along with his pen ... he will soon make a living
+and in time too a name."] This is a bit of all right. I shall always be
+on the look-out for a job on a N.H. Journal.
+
+_December_ 7.
+
+Went to F---- Duckponds. Flocks of Wigeon and Teal on the water. Taking
+advantage of a dip in the land managed to stalk them splendidly, and for
+quite a long time I lay among the long grass watching them through my
+field-glasses. But during the day Wild Duck are not particularly lively
+or interesting birds. They just rest serenely on the water like floating
+corks on a sheet of glass. Occasionally one will paddle around lazily.
+But for the most part they show a great ennui and seem so sleepy and
+tired that one would almost think to be able to approach and feed them
+out of the hand. But I moved one hand carelessly and the whole flock was
+up in a minute and whizzing across the river. Afterwards, at dusk, on
+returning to the ponds, they had come back; but now that the sun was
+down, those dozy, flapdoodle creatures of the afternoon were transformed
+into quacking, quarrelsome, blustering birds that squabbled and chivvied
+each other, every moment seizing the chance of a luxurious dip, flinging
+the ice-cold water off their backs with a shake of the tail that seemed
+to indicate the keenest-edged delight.
+
+It was now quite dark. A Snipe rose at my feet and disappeared into the
+darkness. Coots and Moorhens clekked, and a Little Grebe grew bold and
+began to dive and fish quite close to me, methodically working its way
+upstream and so quartering out its feeding area.
+
+A happy half-hour! Alas! I enjoy these moments the more as they recede.
+Not often do I realise the living present. That is always difficult. It
+is the mere shades--the ghosts of the dead days--that are dearest to me.
+
+Spent my last day at school. De Quincey says (or was it Johnson?) that
+whenever we do anything for the last time, provided we have done it
+regularly for years before, we are a little melancholy, even though it
+has been distasteful to us.... True.
+
+_December_ 14.
+
+Signed my Death Warrant, _i.e._, my articles apprenticing me to
+journalism for five years. By Jove! I shall work frantically during the
+next five years so as to be ready at the end of them to take up a
+Natural History appointment.
+
+
+[1] Up to 1911, the Journal is mainly devoted to records of observations
+in general Natural History and latterly in Zoology alone.
+
+
+
+
+1907
+
+
+_March_ 1.
+
+As long as he has good health, a man need never despair. Without good
+health, I _might_ keep a long while in the race, yet as the goal of my
+ambition grew more and more unattainable I should surely remember the
+words of Keats and give up: "There is no fiercer Hell than the failure
+of a great ambition."
+
+_March_ 14.
+
+Have been reading through the Chemistry Course in the Harmsworth
+_Self-Educator_ and learning all the latest facts and ideas about
+radium. I would rather have a clear comprehension of the atom as a solar
+system than a private income of AL100 a year. If only I had eyes to go on
+reading without a stop!
+
+_May_ 1.
+
+Met an old gentleman in E----, a naturalist with a great contempt for
+the Book of Genesis. He wanted to know how the Kangaroo leapt from
+Australia to Palestine and how Noah fed the animals in the Ark. He
+rejects the Old T. theogony and advised me to read "Darwin and J.G.
+Wood!" Silly old man!
+
+_May_ 22.
+
+To Challacombe and then walked across Exmoor. This is the first time I
+have been on Exmoor. My first experience of the Moors came bursting in
+on me with a flood of ideas, impressions, and delights. I cannot write
+out the history of to-day. It would take too long and my mind is a
+palpitating tangle. I have so many things to record that I cannot record
+one of them. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to draw up an
+inventory of things seen and heard and trust to my memory to fill in the
+details when in the future I revert to this date. Too much joy, like too
+much pain, simply makes me prostrate. It wounds the organism. It is too
+much. I shall try to forget it all as quickly as possible so as to be
+able to return to egg-collecting and bird-watching the sooner as a calm
+and dispassionate observer. Yet these dear old hills. How I love them. I
+cannot leave them without one friendly word. I wish I were a shepherd!
+
+At the "Ring of Bells" had a long yarn with the landlord, who, as he
+told us the story of his life, was constantly interrupted but never
+disconcerted by the exuberant loyalty and devotion of his wife--a stout,
+florid, creamy woman, who capped every story with: "Ees quite honest,
+sir; no 'arm at all in old Joshua."
+
+_June_ 5.
+
+A half-an-hour of to-day I spent in a punt under a copper beech out of
+the pouring rain listening to Lady ----'s gamekeeper at A---- talk about
+beasts and local politics--just after a visit of inspection to the
+Heronry in the firs on the island in the middle of the Lake. It was
+delightful to hear him describing a Heron killing an Eel with "a dap on
+the niddick," helping out the figure with a pat on the nape of his thick
+bull neck.
+
+_July_ 22.
+
+Am reading Huxley's _Crayfish_. H---- brought me in that magnificent
+aculeate _Chrysis ignita_.
+
+_August_ 15.
+
+Met _her_ in the market with M----. I just lifted my hat and passed on.
+She has the most marvellous brown eyes I have ever seen. She is
+perfectly self-possessed. A bad sign this.
+
+_August_ 18.
+
+When I feel ill, cinema pictures of the circumstances of my death flit
+across my mind's eye. I cannot prevent them. I consider the nature of
+the disease and all I said before I died--something heroic, of course!
+
+_August_ 31.
+
+She is a ripping girl. Her eyes are magnificent. I have never seen any
+one better looking.
+
+_October_ 1.
+
+In the afternoon dissected a Frog, following Milnes Marshall's Book. Am
+studying Chemistry and attending classes at the Evening School and
+reading Physiology (Foster's). Am also teaching myself German. I wish I
+had a microscope.
+
+_October_ 3.
+
+What heaps of things to be done! How short the time to do them in! An
+appetite for knowledge is apt to rush one off one's feet, like any other
+appetite if not curbed. I often stand in the centre of the Library here
+and think despairingly how impossible it is ever to become possessed of
+all the wealth of facts and ideas contained in the books surrounding me
+on every hand. I pull out one volume from its place and feel as if I
+were no more than giving one dig with a pick in an enormous quarry. The
+Porter spends his days in the Library keeping strict vigil over this
+catacomb of books, passing along between the shelves and yet never
+paying heed to the almost audible susurrus of desire--the desire every
+book has to be taken down and read, to live, to come into being in
+somebody's mind. He even hands the volumes over the counter, seeks them
+out in their proper places or returns them there without once realising
+that a Book is a Person and not a Thing. It makes me shudder to think of
+Lamb's _Essays_ being carted about as if they were fardels.
+
+_October_ 16.
+
+Dissected an Eel. Cassell's _Natural History_ says the Air-bladder is
+divided. This is not so in the one I opened. Found what I believe to be
+the lymphatic heart in the tail beneath the vent.
+
+
+
+
+1908
+
+
+_March_ 10.
+
+Am working frantically so as to keep up my own work with the daily
+business of reporting. Shorthand, type-writing, German, Chemistry
+classes, Electricity lectures, Zoology (including dissections) and field
+work. Am reading Mosenthal's _Muscle and Nerve_.
+
+_April_ 7.
+
+Sectioned a leech. H---- has lent me a hand microtome and I have
+borrowed an old razor. My table in the Attic is now fitted up quite like
+a Laboratory. I get up every morning at 6 a.m. to dissect. Have worked
+at the Anatomy of _Dytiscus, Lumbricus_, another Leech, and _Petromyzon
+fluviatilis_ all collected by myself. The "branchial basket" of
+_Petromyzon_ interested me vastly. But it's a brute to dissect.[1]
+
+_May_ 1.
+
+Cycled to the Lighthouse at the mouth of the Estuary. Underneath some
+telegraph wires, picked up a Landrail in excellent condition. The colour
+of the wings is a beautiful warm chestnut. While sweeping the sandhills
+with my field-glasses in search of Ring Plover, which nest there in the
+shingle beaches, I espied a Shelduck (_Tadorna_) squatting on a piece of
+level ground. On walking up cautiously, found it was dead--a Drake in
+splendid plumage and quite fresh and uninjured. Put him in my poacher's
+pocket, alongside of the Landrail. My coat looked rather bulgy, for a
+Shelduck is nearly as big as a Goose. Heard a Grasshopper Warbler--a
+rare bird in North ----. Later, after much patient watching, saw the
+bird in a bramble bush, creeping about like a mouse.
+
+On the sea-shore picked up a number of Sea Mice (_Aphrodite_) and
+bottled them in my jar of 70 per cent., as they will come in useful for
+dissection. Also found the cranium of a _Scyllium_, which I will
+describe later on.
+
+Near the Lighthouse watched some fishermen bring in a large Salmon in a
+seine net worked from the shore. It was most exciting. Cycled down three
+miles of hard sand with the wind behind me to the village where I had
+tea and--as if nothing could stay to-day's good luck--met Margaret ----.
+I showed her one by one all my treasures--Rail, Duck, Skull, Sea Mice,
+etc., and felt like Thomas Edward, beloved of Samuel Smiles. To her I
+must have appeared a very ridiculous person.
+
+"How do you know it's the skull of a dog-fish?" she asked, incredulous.
+
+"How do I know anything?" I said, a little piqued.
+
+On arriving home found T---- awaiting me with the news that he had
+discovered a Woodpecker's nest. When will the luck cease? I have never
+had such a flawless ten hours in _le grand air_. These summer days eat
+into my being. The sea has been roaring into my ears and the sun blazing
+down so that even the backs of my hands are sunburnt. And then: those
+coal-black eyes. Ah! me, she _is_ pretty.
+
+_May_ 2.
+
+Dissected the Sheldrake. Very entertained to discover the extraordinary
+asymmetry of the syrinx....
+
+_May_ 3.
+
+Dissected Corncrake, examining carefully the pessulus, bronchidesmus
+(incomplete), _tympani-form and semi-lunar_ membranes of a very
+interesting syrinx....
+
+_May_ 6.
+
+Dissected one of the Sea Mice. It has a remarkable series of hepatic
+ducts running into the alimentary canal as in Nudibranchs....
+
+_May_ 9.
+
+_Spring in the Woods_
+
+Among the Oak Saplings we seemed enveloped in a cloud of green. The tall
+green grasses threw up a green light against the young green of the
+Oaks, and the sun managed to trickle through only here and there. Bevies
+of swinging bluebells grew in patches among the grass. Overhead in the
+oaks I heard secret leaf whispers--those little noiseless noises. Birds
+and trees and flowers were secretive and mysterious like expectant
+motherhood. All the live things plotted together, having the same big
+business in hand. Out in the sunlit meadows, there was a different
+influence abroad. Here everything was gay, lively, irresponsible. The
+brook prattled like an inconsequential schoolgirl. The Marsh Marigolds
+in flamboyant yellow sunbonnets played ring-a-ring-a-roses.
+
+An Oak Sapling should make an elderly man avuncular. There are so many
+tremendous possibilities about a well-behaved young oak that it is
+tempting to put a hand upon its shoulder and give some seasoned,
+timberly advice.
+
+_June_ 1.
+
+_A Small Red Viper_
+
+Went to L---- Sessions. After the Court rose, I transcribed my notes
+quickly and walked out to the famous Valley of Rocks which Southey
+described as the ribs of the old Earth poking through. At the bottom of
+one of the hills saw a snake, a Red Viper. Put my boot on him quickly so
+that he couldn't get away and then recognised him as a specimen of what
+I consider to be the fourth species of British Serpent--_Vipera rubra_.
+The difficulty was to know how to secure him. This species is more
+ferocious than the ordinary _V. bera_, and I did not like the idea of
+putting my hand down to seize him by the neck. I stood for some time
+with my foot so firmly pressed down on its back that my leg ached and I
+began to wonder if I had been bitten. I held on and presently hailed a
+baker's cart coming along the road. The man got out and ran across the
+grass to where I stood. I showed him what I had beneath my boot and he
+produced a piece of string which I fastened around the snake's tail and
+so gently hauled the little brute up. It already appeared moribund, but
+I squashed its head on the grass with my heel to make certain. After
+parting with the baker, to whom all thanks be given, I remember that
+Adders are tenacious of life and so I continue to carry him at string's
+length and occasionally wallop him against a stone. As he was lifeless I
+wrapped him in paper and put him in my pocket--though to make assurance
+doubly sure I left the string on and let its end hang out over my
+pocket. So home by a two hours' railway journey with the adder in the
+pocket of my overcoat and the overcoat on the rack over my head. Settled
+down to the reading of a book on Spinoza's _Ethics_. At home it proved
+to be quite alive, and, on being pulled out by the string, coiled up on
+the drawing-room floor and hissed in a fury, to my infinite surprise.
+Finished him off with the poker and so spoilt the skin.
+
+_July_ 18.
+
+Have had toothache for a week. Too much of a coward to have it out.
+Started for P---- early in the morning to report Mr. Duke, K.C. After a
+week's pain, felt a little dicky. All the way in the train kept
+hardening myself to the task in front of me by recollecting the example
+of Zola, who killed pain with work. So all day to-day I have endeavoured
+to act as if I had no pain--the worst of all pains--toothache. By the
+time I got home I was rather done up, but the pain was actually less.
+This gave me a furious joy, and, after days of morose silence, to-night
+at supper I made them all laugh by bursting out violently with, "I don't
+know whether you know it but I've had a horrible day to-day." I
+explained at length and received the healing ointment of much sympathy.
+Went to bed happy with tooth still aching. I fear it was scarcely
+playing the strict Zolaesque game to divulge the story of my
+sufferings.... No, I am not a martyr or a saint. Just an ordinary devil
+who's having a rough time.
+
+_August_ 17.
+
+_Prawning_
+
+Had a glorious time on the rocks at low tide prawning. Caught some
+Five-Bearded Rocklings and a large _Cottus bubalis_. The sun did not
+simply shine to-day--it came rushing down from the sky in a cataract and
+flooded the sands with light. Sitting on a rock, with prawning net over
+my knees I looked along three miles of flat hard and yellow sands. The
+sun poured down on them so heavily that it seemed to raise a luminous
+golden yellow dust for about three feet high.
+
+On the rocks was a pretty flapper in a pink sunbonnet--also prawning in
+company of S----, the artist, who has sent her picture to the Royal
+Academy. They saw I was a naturalist, so my services were secured to
+pronounce my judgment on a "fish" she had caught. It was a Squid, "an
+odd little beast," in truth, as she said. "The same class of animal," I
+volunteered, "as the Cuttlefish and Octopus."
+
+"Does it sting?"
+
+"Oh, no!"
+
+"Well, it ought to with a face like that." She laughed merrily, and the
+bearded but youthful artist laughed too.
+
+"I don't know anything about these things," he said hopelessly.
+
+"Nor I," said the naturalist modestly. "I study fish."
+
+This was puzzling. "Fish?" What was a Squid then?
+
+... The artist would stop now and then and raise his glasses at a
+passing ship, and Maud's face occasionally disappeared in the pink
+sunbonnet as she stooped over a pool to examine a seaweed or crab.
+
+She's a dear--and she gave me the Squid. What a merry little cuss!
+
+_September_ 1.
+
+Went with Uncle to see a Wesleyan minister whose fame as a microscopist,
+according to Uncle, made it worth my while to visit him. As I expected,
+he was just a silly old man, a diatomaniac fond of pretty-pretty slides
+and not a scientific man at all. He lectures Bands of Hope on the
+Butterfly's Life History and hates his next-door neighbour, who is also
+a microscopist and incidentally a scientific man, because he interests
+himself in "parasites and those beastly things."
+
+I remarked that his friend next door had shown me an Amphioxus.
+
+"Oh! I expect that's some beastly bacteria thing," he said petulantly.
+"I can't understand Wilkinson. He's a pervert."
+
+I told him what _Amphioxus_ was and laughed up my sleeve. He likes to
+think of Zoology as a series of pretty pictures illustrating beautiful
+moral truths. The old fellow's saving grace was enthusiasm.... Having
+focused an object for us, he would stand by, breathless, while we
+squinted down his gas-tube, and gave vent to tremendous expletives of
+surprise such as "Heavens," or "Jupiter." His eyes would twinkle with
+delight and straightway another miracle is selected for us to view.
+"They are all miracles," he said.
+
+"Those are the valves"--washing his hands with invisible soap--"no one
+has yet been able to solve the problem of the Diatom's valves. No one
+knows what they are--no, nor ever will know--why?--why can't we see
+behind the valves?--because God is behind the valves--that is why!"
+Amen.
+
+_October_ 1.
+
+Telegraphed 1,000 words of Lord ----'s speech at T----.
+
+Spent the night at a comfortable country inn and read Moore's lyrics.
+"Row gently here, my Gondolier," ran through my head continuously. The
+Inn is an old one with a long narrow passage that leads straight from
+front door to back with wainscoted smoke room and parlours on each side.
+China dogs, bran on the floor, and the picture of Derby Day with horses
+galloping incredibly, the drone of an old crony in the bar, and a
+pleasant barmy smell. Slept in a remarkable bedroom full of massive
+furniture, draped with cloth and covered with trinkets. The bed had a
+tremendous hood over it like a catafalque, and lying in it made me think
+I was an effigy. Read Moore till the small hours and then found I had
+left my handbag downstairs. Lit a candle and went on a voyage of
+discovery. Made a considerable noise, but roused no one. Entered
+drawing-room, kitchen, pantries, parlour, bar--everywhere looking for my
+bag and dropping candle grease everywhere! Slept in my day shirt. Tired
+out and slept like a top.
+
+_November_ 3.
+
+_Aristotle's Lantern_
+
+Dissected the Sea Urchin (_Echinus esculentus_). Very excited over my
+first view of Aristotle's Lantern. These complicated pieces of animal
+mechanism never smell of musty age--after A|ons of evolution. When I open
+a Sea Urchin and see the Lantern, or dissect a Lamprey and cast eyes on
+the branchial basket, such structures strike me as being as finished and
+exquisite as if they had just a moment before been tossed me fresh from
+the hands of the Creator. They are fresh, young, they smell _new_.
+
+_December_ 3.
+
+Hard at work dissecting a Dogfish. Ruridecanal Conference in the
+afternoon. I enjoy this double life I lead. It amazes me to be laying
+bare the brain of a dogfish in the morning and in the afternoon to be
+taking down in shorthand what the Bishop says on Mission Work.
+
+_December_4.
+
+Went to the Veterinary Surgeon and begged of him the skull of a horse.
+Carried the trophy home under my arm--bare to the public view. "Why,
+Lor', 'tis an ole 'orse's jib," M---- said when I got back.
+
+
+[1] There are numerous drawings of dissections scattered through the
+Journal about this period.
+
+
+
+
+1909
+
+
+_March_ 7.
+
+My programme of work is: (1) Continue German. (2) Sectioning embryo of
+(_a_) Fowl, (_b_) Newt. (3) Paper on Arterial System of Newts. (4)
+Psychology of Newts. (5) General Zoological Reading.
+
+_May_ 2.
+
+To C---- Hill. Too much taken with the beauty of the Woods to be able to
+do any nesting. Here are some of the things I saw: the bark on several
+of the trees in the mazzard orchards rubbed into a beautifully smooth,
+polished surface by the Red Devon Cows when scratching where it itched;
+I put my hand on the smooth almost cherry-red patch of bark and felt
+delighted and grateful that cows had fleas: the young shoots of the
+whortle-berry plants on the hill were red tipped with the gold of an
+almost horizontal sun. I caught a little lizard which slipped across my
+path.... Afar off down in the valley I had come through, in a convenient
+break in a holly bush, I could just see a Cow sitting on her matronly
+haunches in a field. She flicked her ears and two starlings settled on
+her back. A Rabbit swept out of a sweet-brier bush, and a Magpie flew
+out of the hedge on my right.
+
+In another direction I could see a field full of luscious, tall, green
+grass. Every stalk was so full of sap that had I cut one I am sure it
+would have bled great green drops. In the field some lambs were
+sleeping; one woke up and looked at me with the back of its head to the
+low sun, which shone through its two small ears and gave them a
+transparent pink appearance.
+
+No sooner am I rebaptized in the sun than I have to be turning home
+again. No sooner do "the sudden lilies push between the loosening fibres
+of the heart" than I am whisked back into the old groove--the daily
+round. If only I had more time!--more time in which to think, to love,
+to observe, to frame my disposition, to direct as far as in me lies the
+development and unfolding of my character, if only I could direct all my
+energies to the great and difficult profession of life, of being man
+instead of trifling with one profession that bores me and dabbling in
+another.
+
+_June_ 5.
+
+_On Lundy Island_
+
+Frankie is blowing Seagulls' eggs in the scullery. His father, after a
+day's work at the farm, is at his supper very hungry, yet immensely
+interested, and calls out occasionally,--
+
+"'Ow you're getting on, Foreman?"
+
+"All right, Capt.," says Frankie affectionately, and the unpleasant
+asthmatic, wheezy noise of the egg-blowing goes on.... There are three
+dogs asleep under the kitchen table; all three belong to different
+owners and neither one to A----.
+
+_June_ 6.
+
+Our egg-collecting with the Lighthouse Keepers. They walk about the
+cliffs as surefooted as cats, and feed their dogs on birds' eggs
+collected in a little bag at the end of a long pole. One dog ate three
+right off in as many minutes, putting his teeth through and cracking the
+shell, then lapping up the contents. Crab for tea.
+
+_June_ 7.
+
+After a glorious day at the N. end of the Island with the Puffins, was
+forced to-night to take another walk, as the smell of Albert's tobacco,
+together with that of his stockinged feet and his boots removed, was
+asphyxiating.
+
+_June_ 9.
+
+The governess is an awfully pretty girl. We have been talking together
+to-day and she asked me if I were a naturalist. I said "Yes." She said,
+"Well, I found a funny little beetle yesterday and Mr. S---- said I
+ought to have given it to you." Later, I felt she was looking at me, so
+I looked at her, across the beach. Yes! it was true. When our eyes met
+she gave me one of the most provokingly pretty smiles, then turned and
+went up the cliff path and so out of my life--to my everlasting regret.
+
+Return to-night in a cattle steamer.
+
+_June_ 18.
+
+Dr.----, M.A., F.R.S., D.C.L., LL.D., called in the office to-day, and
+seeing Dad typing, said, "Are you Mr. Barbellion?" Dad replied in the
+affirmative, whereupon the Doctor handed him his card, and Dad said he
+thought it was his son he wanted to see. He is an old gentleman aged
+eighty or thereabouts, with elastic-sided boots, an umbrella, and a
+guardian nephew--a youngster of about sixty. But I paid him due
+reverence as a celebrated zoologist and at his invitation [and to my
+infinite pride] accompanied him on an excursion to the coast, where he
+wanted to see _Philoscia Couchii_, which I readily turned up for him.
+
+I chanced to remark that I thought torsion in gastropods one of the most
+fascinating and difficult problems in Zoology. Why should a snail be
+twisted round?
+
+"Humph," said he, "why do we stand upright?" I was not such a fool as to
+argue with him, so pretended his reply was a knock-out. But it enabled
+me to size him up intellectually.
+
+In the evening dined with him at his hotel.... He knows Wallace and
+Haeckel personally, and I sat at his feet with my tongue out listening
+to personal reminiscences of these great men. However, he seemed never
+to have heard of Gaskell's Theory on the Origin of Vertebrates.
+
+_June_ 27.
+
+Walked to V----. As usual, Nature with clockwork regularity had all her
+taps turned on--larks singing, cherries ripening, and bees humming. It
+all bored me a little. Why doesn't she vary it a little?
+
+_August_ 8.
+
+A cold note from Dr. ---- saying that he cannot undertake the
+responsibility of advising me to give up journalism for zoology.
+
+A hellish cold in the head. Also a swingeing inflammation of the eyes.
+Just heard them singing in the Chapel over the way: "God shall wipe away
+all tears from their eyes." Hope so, I'm sure.
+
+_August_ 9.
+
+A transformation. After a long series of drab experiences in Sheffield,
+etc., the last being the climax of yesterday, an anti-cyclone arrived
+this morning and I sailed like an Eagle into cloudless, windless
+weather! _The Academy_ has published my article, my cold is suddenly
+better, and going down by the sea this afternoon met Mary ----!
+
+_August_ 20.
+
+Had an amusing letter from my maiden-aunt F----, who does not like "the
+agnostic atmosphere" in my _Academy_ article. Poor dear! She is sorry if
+I really feel like that, and, if I do, what a pity to put it into print.
+Then a Bible reference to the Epistle to the Romans.
+
+_Xmas Day_.
+
+Feeling ill--like a sloppy Tadpole. My will is paralysed. I visit the
+Doctor regularly to be stethoscoped, ramble about the streets, idly scan
+magazines in the Library and occasionally rink--with palpitation of the
+heart as a consequence. In view of the shortness, bitterness, and
+uncertainty of life, all scientific labour for me seems futile.
+
+
+
+
+1910
+
+
+_January_ 10.
+
+Better, but still very dicky: a pallid animal: a weevil in a nut. I have
+a weak heart, an enervated nervous system; I suffer from lack of funds
+with which to carry on my studies; I hate
+newspaper-reporting--particularly some skinny-witted speaker like ----;
+and last, but not least, there are women; all these worries fight over
+my body like jackals over carrion. Yet Zoology is all I want. Why won't
+Life leave me alone?
+
+_January_ 15.
+
+Reading Hardy's novels. He is altogether delightful in the subtlety with
+which he lets you perceive the first tiny love presentiments between his
+heroes and heroines--the casual touch of the hands, the peep of a foot
+or ankle underneath the skirt--all these in Hardy signify the cloud no
+bigger than a man's hand. They are the susurrus of the breeze before the
+storm, and you await what is to follow with palpitating heart.
+
+_February_ 3.
+
+For days past have been living in a state of mental ebullition. All
+kinds of pictures of Love, Life, and Death have been passing through my
+mind. Now I am too indolent and nerveless to set them down. Physically I
+am such a wreck that to carry out the least intention, such as putting
+on my boots, I have to flog my will like an Arab with a slave "in a sand
+of Ayaman." Three months ago when I got up before breakfast to dissect
+rabbits, dogfish, frogs, newts, etc., this would have seemed impossible.
+
+_February_ 6.
+
+Still visit Dr. ----'s surgery each week. I have two dull spots at the
+bottom of each lung. What a fine expressive word is _gloom_. Let me
+write it: GLOOM....
+
+One evening coming home in the train from L---- County Sessions I
+noticed a horrible, wheezy sound whenever I breathed deep. I was scared
+out of my life, and at once thought of consumption. Went to the Doctor's
+next day, and he sounded me and reassured me. I was afraid to tell him
+of the little wheezy sound at the apex of each lung, and I believed he
+overlooked it. So next day, very harassed, I went back to him again and
+told him. He _hadn't_ noticed it and looked glum. Have to keep out of
+doors as much as possible.
+
+The intense internal life I lead, worrying about my health, reading
+(eternally reading), reflecting, observing, feeling, loving and
+hating--with no outlet for superfluous steam, cramped and confined on
+every side, without any friends or influence of any sort, without even
+any acquaintances excepting my colleagues in journalism (whom I
+contemn)--all this will turn me into the most self-conscious, conceited,
+mawkish, gauche creature in existence.
+
+_March_ 6.
+
+The facts are undeniable: Life is pain. No sophistry can win me over to
+any other view. And yet years ago I set out so hopefully and
+healthfully--what are birds' eggs to me _now_? My ambition is enormous
+but vague. I am too distributed in my abilities ever to achieve
+distinction.
+
+_March_ 22.
+
+Had a letter from the Keeper of Zoology at the British Museum, advising
+me of three vacancies in his Dept., and asking me if I would like to
+try, etc.... So that Dr. ----'s visit to me bore some fruit.[1] Spent
+the morning day-dreaming.... Perhaps this is the flood tide at last! I
+shall work like a drayhorse to pull through if I am nominated.... I
+await developments in a frightfully turbulent state of mind. I have a
+frantic desire to control the factors which are going to affect my
+future so permanently. And this ferocious desire, of course, collides
+with a crash all day long with the fact that however much I desire there
+will still remain the unalterable logic of events.
+
+_April_ 7.
+
+... How delicious all this seemed! To be alive--thinking, seeing,
+enjoying, walking, eating--all quite apart from the amount of money in
+your purse or the prospects of a career. I revelled in the sensuous
+enjoyment of my animal existence.
+
+_June_ 2.
+
+Up to now my life has been one of great internal strife and
+struggle--the struggle with a great ambition and a weak will--unequal to
+the task of coping with it. I have planned on too big a scale, perhaps.
+I have put too great a strain on my talents, I have whipped a flagging
+will, I have been for ever cogitating, worrying, devising means of
+escape. Meanwhile, the moments have gone by unheeded and unenjoyed.
+
+_June_ 10.
+
+Legginess is bad enough in a woman, but bandy legginess is impossible.
+
+Solitude is good for the soul. After an hour of it, I feel as lofty and
+imperial as Marcus Aurelius.
+
+The best girl in the best dress immediately looks disreputable if her
+stockings be downgyved.
+
+Some old people on reaching a certain age go on living out of habit--a
+bad habit too.
+
+How much I can learn of a stranger by his laugh.
+
+Bees, Poppies, and Swallows!--and all they mean to him who really knows
+them! Or a White Gull on a piece of floating timber, or a troop of shiny
+Rooks close on the heels of a ploughman on a sunny autumn day.
+
+_June_ 30.
+
+My egoism appals me. Likewise the extreme intensification of the
+consciousness of myself. Whenever I walk down the High Street on a
+market day, my self-consciousness magnifies my proportions to the size
+of a Gulliver--so that it is grievous to reflect that in spite of that
+the townsfolk see me only as an insignificant bourgeois youth who
+reports meetings in shorthand.
+
+_July_ 17.
+
+We sang to-night in Church, "But when I know Thee as Thou art, I'll
+praise Thee as I ought." Exactly! Till then, farewell. We are a great
+little people, we humans. If there be no next world, still the Spirit of
+Man will have lived and uttered its protest.
+
+_July_ 22.
+
+_Our Simian Ancestry_
+
+How I hate the man who talks about the "brute creation," with an ugly
+emphasis on _brute_. Only Christians are capable of it. As for me, I am
+proud of my close kinship with other animals. I take a jealous pride in
+my Simian ancestry. I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy
+fellow living in the trees and that my frame has come down through
+geological time _via_ sea jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish,
+Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in
+the Garden of Eden?
+
+_August_ 9.
+
+I do not ever like going to bed. For me each day ends in a little
+sorrow. I hate the time when it comes to put my books away, to knock out
+my pipe and say "Good-night," exchanging the vivid pleasures of the day
+for the darkness of sleep and oblivion.
+
+_August_ 23.
+
+Spent the afternoon and evening till ten in the woods with Mary ----.
+Had tea in the Haunted House, and after sat in the Green Arbor until
+dark, when I kissed her. "Achilles was not the worse warrior for his
+probation in petticoats."
+
+_September_ 1.
+
+I hope to goodness she doesn't think I want to marry her. In the Park in
+the dark, kissing her. I was testing and experimenting with a new
+experience.
+
+_September_ 4.
+
+Last evening, after much mellifluous cajolery, induced her to _kiss me_.
+My private opinion about this whole affair is that all the time I have
+been at least twenty degrees below real love heat. In any case I am
+constitutionally and emotionally unfaithful. I said things which I did
+not believe just because it was dark and she was charming.
+
+_September_ 5.
+
+Read Thomas A  Kempis in the train. It made me so angry I nearly flung it
+out of the window. "Meddle not with things that be too deep for thee,"
+he says, "but read such things as yield compunction to the heart rather
+than elevation to the head." Forsooth! Can't you see me?
+
+_September_ 15.
+
+A puzzling afternoon: weather perfect, the earth green and humming like
+a top, yet a web of dream overlaid the great hill, and at certain
+moments, which recurred in a kind of pulsation, accompanied by
+subjective feelings of vague strife and effort, I easily succeeded in
+letting all I saw--the field and the blackberry bush, the whole valley
+and the apple orchards--change into something unreal, flimsy, gauzelike,
+immaterial, and totally unexperienced. Suddenly when the impression was
+most vivid, the whole of this mysterious tapestry would vanish away and
+I was back where 2 and 2 make 4. Oh! Earth! how jealously you guard your
+secrets!
+
+_October_ 4.
+
+Sat at the Civil Service Commission in Burlington House for the exam,
+for the vacancy in the B.M. No luck at all with the papers. The whole of
+my nine months' assiduous preparation helped me in only two questions.
+In fine, I have not succeeded, I shall not obtain the appointment, and
+in a few weeks I shall be back in the wilds of
+
+N---- again under the old regime, reporting platitudes from greasy
+guardians of the poor, and receiving condolences from people not
+altogether displeased at some one else's misfortune.
+
+_October_ 14.
+
+Returned home from London. Felt horribly defeated in crossing the
+threshold. It was so obviously _returning_ after an unsuccessful flight.
+
+_October_ 22.
+
+Dissected a _Squilla_ for which I paid 2s. 6d. to the Plymouth Marine
+Laboratory.
+
+_October_ 23.
+
+_Ambition_
+
+Am attempting to feel after some practical philosophy of
+living--something that will enable me to accept disappointment with
+equanimity and Town Council meetings with a broad and tolerant smile. At
+present, ambition consumes me. I was ambitious before I was breeched. I
+can remember wondering as a child if I were a young Macaulay or Ruskin
+and secretly deciding that I was. My infant mind even was bitter with
+those who insisted on regarding me as a normal child and not as a
+prodigy. Since then I have struggled with this canker for many a day,
+and as success fails to arrive it becomes more gnawing.
+
+_October_ 24.
+
+In the morning a Town Council and in the afternoon a Rural Council. With
+this abominable trash in my notebook waiting to be written up and turned
+into "copy," and with the dream pictures of a quiet studious life in
+Cromwell Road not yet faded from my mind, where can I turn for
+consolation? That I have done my best? That's only a mother's saying to
+her child.
+
+Perhaps after all it is a narrow life--this diving and delving among
+charming little secrets, plying diligently scalpel and microscope and
+then weaving the facts obtained into theoretic finespun. It is all
+vastly entertaining to the naturalist but it leaves the world unmoved. I
+sometimes envy the zealot with a definite mission in life. Life without
+one seems void. The monotonous pursuit of our daily vocations--the
+soldier, sailor, candlestick-maker--so they go on, never living but only
+working, never thinking but only hypnotising themselves by the routine
+and punctuality of their lives into just so many mechanical toys
+warranted to go for so long and then stop when Death takes them.... It
+amazes me that men must spend their precious days of existence for the
+most part in slaving for food and clothing and the bare necessaries of
+existence.
+
+To sum up my despondency, what's the good of such a life? Where does it
+lead? Where am I going? Why should I work? What means this procession of
+nights and days wherein we are all seen moving along intent and stern as
+if we had some purpose or a goal?... Of course to the man who believes
+in the next world and a personal God, it is quite another matter. The
+Christian is the Egoist _par excellence_. He does not mind annihilation
+by arduous labour in this world if in the next he shall have won eternal
+life.... He is reckless of to-day, extravagant in the expenditure of his
+life. This intolerable fellow will be cheerful in a dungeon. For he
+flatters himself that God Almighty up in Heaven is all the time watching
+through the keyhole and marking him down for eternal life.
+
+_October_ 26.
+
+The nose-snuffling, cynical man who studies La Rochefoucauld, and prides
+himself on a knowledge of human motives, is pleased to point out that
+every action and every motive is selfish, from the philanthropist who
+advertises himself by his charities to the fanatic who lays down his
+life for a cause. Even secret charities, for they give pleasure to the
+doer. So your cynic thinks he has thus, with one stroke of his
+psychological scalpel, laid human nature bare in all its depravities.
+All he has done really is to reclassify motives--instead of grouping
+them as selfish and unselfish (which is more convenient) he lumps them
+together as selfish, a method by which even he is forced to recognise
+different grades of selfishness. For example, the selfishness of a
+wife-beater is lower than the selfishness of a man who gives up his life
+for another.
+
+_October_ 28.
+
+The result arrived. As I thought, I have failed, being fourth with only
+three vacancies.
+
+_November_ 7.
+
+It is useless to bewail the course of fortune. It cannot be much credit
+to possess--though we may covet--those precious things, to possess which
+depends on circumstances outside our control.
+
+_November_ 9.
+
+Dined at the Devonshire Club in St. James's Street, W., with Dr.
+H----and Mr. ----, the latter showing the grave symptomatic phenomena of
+a monocle and spats. A dinner of eight courses. Only made one mistake
+--put my salad on my dish instead of on the side dish. Horribly nervous
+and reticent. I was apparently expected to give an account of myself and
+my abilities--and with that end in view, they gave me a few pokes in my
+cranial ribs. But I am a peculiar animal, and, before unbosoming myself,
+I would require a happier _mise-en-scA"ne_ than a West End Club, and a
+more tactful method of approach than ogling by two professors, who
+seemed to think I was a simple penny-in-the-slot machine. I froze from
+sheer nervousness and nothing resulted.
+
+_November_ 11.
+
+Returned home and found a letter awaiting me from Dr. A---- offering me
+AL60 a year for a temporary job as assistant at the Plymouth Marine
+Laboratory.
+
+Left London horribly depressed. They evidently intend to shuffle me off.
+
+Read Geo. Gissing's novel, _Born in Exile_. Godwin Peak, with his
+intense pride of individuality, self-torturing capacities, and
+sentimental languishment, reminds me of myself.
+
+_November_ 20.
+
+A purulent cold in the nose. My heart is weak. Palpitation after the
+least exertion. But I shall soon be swinging my cudgels in the battle of
+life, so it won't do to be hypochondriacal.... Let all the powers of the
+world and the Devil attack me, yet I will win in the end--though the
+conquest may very well be one which no one but myself will view.
+
+Have accepted the Plymouth appointment.
+
+_November_ 30.
+
+Struggling in the depths again within the past few days with heart
+attacks. Am slowly getting better of them and trying to forget as soon
+as may be visions of sudden death, coffins, and obituary notices.
+
+_December_ 2.
+
+_Death_
+
+At first, when we are very young, Death arouses our curiosity, as it did
+Cain in the beginning.[2] It is a strange and very rare phenomenon which
+we cannot comprehend, and every time we hear of some one's death, we try
+to recall that person's appearance in life and are disappointed if we
+can't. The endeavour is to discover what it is, this Death, to compare
+two things, the idea of the person alive and the idea of him dead. At
+last some one we know well dies--and that is the first shock.... I shall
+never forget when our Matron died at the D---- School.... As the years
+roll on, we get used to the man with the scythe and an acquaintance's
+death is only a bit of gossip.
+
+Suppose the Hellfire of the orthodox really existed! We have no
+assurance that it does not! It seems incredible, but many incredible
+things are true. We do not _know_ that God is not as cruel as a Spanish
+inquisitor. Suppose, then, He is! If, after Death, we wicked ones were
+shovelled into a furnace of fire--we should have to burn. There would be
+no redress. It would simply be the Divine Order of things. It is
+outrageous that we should be so helpless and so dependent on any
+one--even God.
+
+_December_ 9.
+
+Sometimes I think I am going mad. I live for days in the mystery and
+tears of things so that the commonest object, the most familiar
+face--even my own--become ghostly, unreal, enigmatic. I get into an
+attitude of almost total scepticism, nescience, solipsism even, in a
+world of dumb, sphinx-like things that cannot explain themselves. The
+discovery of how I am situated--a sentient being on a globe in space
+overshadows me. I wish I were just nothing.
+
+_Later_: While at a public meeting, the office-boy approached me and
+immediately whispered without hesitation,--
+
+"Just had a telephone message to say that your father is at the
+T----Railway Station, lying senseless. He has evidently had an
+apoplectic fit."
+
+(How those brutal words, "lying senseless," banged and bullied and
+knocked me down. Mother was waiting for me at the door in a dreadful
+state and expecting the worst.)
+
+Met the train with the Doctor, and took him home in the cab--still
+alive, thank God, but helpless. He was brave enough to smile and shake
+me by the hand--with his left, though he was speechless and the right
+side of his body helpless. A porter discovered him at the railway
+terminus lying on the floor of a second-class carriage.
+
+_December_ 10.
+
+He is a trifle better. It is fifteen years since he had the first
+paralytic stroke.
+
+Am taking over all his work and have written at once resigning the
+Plymouth appointment.
+
+_December_ 23.
+
+It really did require an effort to go upstairs to-day to his bedroom and
+say cheerfully I was not going to P. after all, and that the matter was
+of no consequence to me. I laughed gaily and Dad was relieved. A
+thundering good joke. What annoys me is that other folk--the brainless,
+heartless mob, as Schopenhauer remarks, still continue to regard me as
+one of themselves.... I had nearly escaped into a seaside laboratory,
+and now suddenly to be flung back into the dirt and sweat of the
+newspaper world seems very hard, and it _is_ very hard.
+
+_December_ 26.
+
+_Windy Ash_
+
+With the dog for a walk around Windy Ash. It was a beautiful winter's
+morning--a low sun giving out a pale light but no warmth--a luminant,
+not a fire--the hedgerows bare and well trimmed, an Elm lopped close
+showing white stumps which glistened liquidly in the sun, a Curlew
+whistling overhead, a deeply cut lane washed hard and clean by the
+winter rains, a gunshot from a distant cover, a creeping Wren, silent
+and tame, in a bramble bush, and over the five-barred gate the granite
+roller with vacant shafts. I leaned on the gate and saw the great whisps
+of cloud in the sky like comets' tails. Everything cold, crystalline.
+
+
+[1] He had spoken about me to the Museum authorities, and it was his
+influence which got me the nomination to sit for the examination.
+
+[2] In Byron's poem.
+
+1911
+
+
+_January_ 2.
+
+As a young man--a _very_ young man--my purpose was to plough up all
+obstacles, brook no delays, and without let or hindrance win through to
+an almost immediate success! But witness 1910! "My career" so far has
+been like the White Knight's, who fell off behind when the horse
+started, in front when it stopped, and sideways occasionally to vary the
+monotony.
+
+_January_ 30.
+
+Feeling ill and suffering from attacks of faintness. My ill health has
+produced a change in my attitude towards work. As soon as I begin to
+feel the least bit down, I am bound to stop at once as the idea of
+bending over a desk or a dissecting dish, of reading or studying,
+nauseates me when I think that perhaps to-morrow or next day or next
+week, next month, next year I may be dead. What a waste of life it seems
+to work! Zoology is repugnant and philosophy superfluous beside the
+bliss of sheer living--out in the cold polar air or indoors in a chair
+before a roaring fire with hands clasped, watching the bustling,
+soothing activity of the flames.
+
+Then, as soon as I am well again, I forget all this, grow discontented
+with doing nothing and work like a Tiger.
+
+_February_ 11.
+
+Walked in the country. Coming home, terrified by a really violent attack
+of palpitation. Almost every one I met I thought would be the
+unfortunate person who would have to pick me up. As each one in the
+street approached me, I weighed him in the balance and considered if he
+had presence of mind and how he would render first aid. After my friend,
+P.C. ----, had passed, I felt sorry that the tragedy had not already
+happened, for he knows me and where I live. At length, after sundry
+leanings over the river wall, arrived at the Library, which I entered,
+and sat down, when the full force of the palpitation was immediately
+felt. My face burned with the hot blood, my hand holding the paper shook
+with the angry pulse, and my heart went bang! bang! bang! and I could
+feel its beat in the carotids of the neck and up along the Torcular
+herophili and big vessels in the occipital region of the head. Drew in
+each breath very gently for fear of aggravating the fiend. Got home
+(don't know how) and had some sal volatile. Am better now but very
+demoralised.
+
+_February_ 13.
+
+Feel like a piece of drawn threadwork, or an undeveloped negative, or a
+jelly fish on stilts, or a sloppy tadpole, or a weevil in a nut, or a
+spitchcocked eel. In other words and in short--ill.
+
+_February_ 16.
+
+After some days with the vision of sudden death constantly before me,
+have come to the conclusion that it's a long way to go to die. Am coming
+back anyhow. Yet these are a few terrible pages in my history.
+
+_March_ 4.
+
+... The Doctor's orders "Cease Work" have brought on in an aggravated
+form my infatuation for zoological research. I lie in bed and
+manufacture rolling periods in praise of it, I get dithyrambic over the
+zoologists themselves--Huxley, Wallace, Brooks, Lankester. I chortle to
+reflect that in zoology there are no stock exchange ambitions, there is
+no mention of slum life, Tariff Reform is not included. In the repose of
+the spacious laboratory by the seaside or in the halls of some great
+Museum, life with its vulgar struggles, its hustle and obscenity,
+scarcely penetrates. Behind those doors, life flows slowly, deeply. I am
+ascetic and long for the monastic seclusion of a student's life.
+
+_March_ 5.
+
+_From One Maiden Lady to Another_. (_Authentic_)
+
+"My dear Sister,--You have been expecting to hear from me I know, I have
+had inflammation to my eyes twice in 3 weeks so I thought I had better
+let the Doctor see and he says it is catarrh of the eyes and windpipe. I
+am inhaling and taking lozenges and medicine. You will be sorry to learn
+Leonora Mims has been taken to a Sanatorium with Diptheria, we heard
+yesterday, she is better, poor Mrs. Mims herself quite an invalid, she
+has to walk with a stick, I believe you know she has had to have her
+breast cut off, they keep a servant as she can't do anything, old Mrs.
+Point is 87 I think it is so they too have a lot of trouble, Fred Mims
+has just got married....
+
+"Poor old Mrs. Seemsoe is just the same, she doesn't know anybody but
+she talks, the nurse put a grape in her mouth but she didn't know what
+to do with it, I think it is very sad. She was taken about a fortnight
+before Easter. Will you tell me dear if this is right receipt for
+clothes 1/2 oz. carbolic in 1/2 pint of rose water. Harry Gammon's 2
+little children have measles, poor Maisie has gone with her Aunt Susan,
+poor old Joe Gammon they say had very little to leave, we don't know
+where Robert gets his money from. I dare say you saw that Tom Sagg has
+married another of Ned Smith's daughters and we hear these Smith girls
+are rare housekeepers and this girl that has married Tom Sagg has made
+all her own linen. Mrs. Wilkins, the butcher's wife is going to have a
+little one after 15 years, our Vicar has been laid up with an abscess,
+he told us about his brother the other day, he says as brothers they
+love each other very much. We have 3 very sad cases of men ill in the
+village. We had 4 but one man died of cancer.
+
+"Yr loving Sister Amy."
+
+VoilA !
+
+_March_ 7.
+
+If I die I should like to be buried in the cherry orchards at V----.
+
+How the beastly mob loves a tragedy! The sudden death of the Bank
+Manager is simply thrilling the town, and the newspapers sell like hot
+cakes. Scarcely before the body is cold the coincidence of his death on
+the anniversary of his birth is discussed in every household; every one
+tells everybody else where they saw him last "he looked all right then."
+The policeman and the housemaid, the Mayor and the Town Clerk, the
+cabman and the billposter, stand and discuss the deceased gentleman's
+last words or what the widow's left with. "Ah! well, it is very sad,"
+they remark to one another with no emotion and continue on their way.
+
+_March_ 10.
+
+On coming downstairs in the evening played Ludo with H----. At one stage
+I laughed so much in conjunction with that harlequin H---- that I got
+cramp in the abdominal muscles and the tears trickled down my face.
+
+_March_ 13.
+
+H---- and I play Ludo incessantly. We've developed the gambling fever,
+and our pent-up excitement every now and then explodes in fiendish
+cackles, and Mother looks up over her spectacles and says, "William,
+William, they'll hear in the street presently."
+
+_A Character_
+
+For this world's unfortunates, his is the ripe sympathy of a
+well-developed nature, standing in strong contrast with the rest of his
+personality, which is wholly self-centred, a little ungenerous, and what
+strong men of impeccable character call "weak." If you are ill he is
+delightful, if you are robust or successful he can be very
+objectionable. To an influenza victim he goes out of his way to carry a
+book, but if you tell him with gusto you have passed your exam, he says,
+"Oh, but there's not much behind it, is there?" "Oh! no," I answer,
+comforting him, "it is really a misfortune to be a success." And so only
+the bankrupts, dipsos (as he calls them), ne'er-do-weels, and sudden
+deaths ever touch his heart or tap his sympathy. He is a short, queery,
+dressy little fellow, always spruce and clean. His joy consists in a
+glass of beer, a full stomach, a good cigar, or a pretty girl to flirt
+with. He frequents drinking saloons and billiard rooms, goes to dances
+and likes to be thought a lady's man. "Urn," he will say, with the air
+of a connoisseur, "a little too broad in the beam," as some attractive
+damsel walks down the street. Any day about twelve you can see both of
+us, "the long and the short of it" (he is only half my height and I call
+him .5), walking together in the Park, and engaged in the most heated
+discussion over some entirely trivial matter, such as whether he would
+marry a woman with sore eyes, etc., etc. More than once we have caught
+cabmen idle on the cab-rank or policemen on point duty jerking their
+thumbs backward at us and expressing some facetious remarks which we
+longed to overhear. I usually walk in the gutter to bring my height down
+a bit.
+
+A good raconteur himself, he does not willingly suffer a story from
+another. The varmint on occasion finishes your joke off for you, which
+is his delicate way of intimating that he has heard it before. He is a
+first-class mimic, and sends every one into a thousand fits while he
+gives you in succession the Mayor and all the Corporation He also
+delights me at times by mimicking me. His mind is receptive rather than
+creative: it picks up all sorts of gaudy ideas by the wayside like a
+magpie, and I sometimes enjoy the exquisite sensation of hearing some of
+these petty pilferings (which he has filched from me) laid at my feet as
+if they were his own. The ideas which are his own are always
+unmistakable.
+
+His favourite poems are Omar and the Ballad of Reading Jail, his
+favourite drinks Medoc or a Cherry Mixture. Me he describes as
+_serpentilous_ with _Gibbon-like arms,_ pinheaded, and so on. He amuses
+me. In fact I love him.
+
+_March_ 16.
+
+No one will ever understand without personal experience that an
+exceedingly self-conscious creature like myself driven in on himself to
+consume himself is the unhappiest of men. I have come to loathe myself:
+my finicking, hypersensitive, morbid nature, always thinking, talking,
+writing about myself for all the world as if the world beyond did not
+exist! I am rings within rings, circles concentric and intersecting, a
+maze, a tangle: watching myself behave or misbehave, always reflecting
+on what impression I am making on others or what they think of me.
+Introduce me to a stranger and I swell out as big as Alice.
+Self-consciousness makes me pneumatic, and consequently so awkward and
+clumsy and swollen that I don't know how to converse--and God help the
+other fellow.
+
+_Later_: Youth is an intoxication without wine, some one says. Life is
+an intoxication. The only sober man is the melancholiac, who,
+disenchanted, looks at life, sees it as it really is, and cuts his
+throat. If this be so, I want to be very drunk. The great thing is to
+live, to clutch at our existence and race away with it in some great
+and enthralling pursuit. Above all, I must beware of all ultimate
+questions--they are too maddeningly unanswerable--let me eschew
+philosophy and burn Omar.
+
+In this week's _T.P.'s Weekly_ a youth advertises:--"Young thinkers
+interested in philosophy, religion, social reform, the future of
+humanity, and all freethought, please communicate with 'Evolution,' aged
+21!" All right for 21.
+
+_Later_: I have in mind some work on the vascular system of larval
+newts. In the autumn I see a large piece of work to be done in animal
+psychology--namely, frequency of stimulus and its relation to habit
+formation. Yet the doctor advises long rest and the office work remains
+to be done. I must hack my way through somehow. I sit trying to
+disentangle these knots; then some one plays a dreamy waltz and all my
+fine edifices of the will vanish in mist. Is it worth while? Why not
+float with the tide? But I soon throw off these temptations. If I live,
+I shall play a fine game! I am determined. A lame-dog life is of no use.
+
+_April_ 17.
+
+_Railway Travel_
+
+A journey in a railway train makes me sentimental. If I enter the
+compartment a robust-minded, cheerful youth, fresh and whistling from a
+walk by the sea, yet, as soon as I am settled down in one corner and the
+train is rattling along past fields, woods, towns, and painted stations,
+I find myself indulging in a saccharine sadness--very toothsome and
+jolly. I pull a long face and gaze out of the window wistfully and look
+sad. But I am really happy--and incredibly sentimental.
+
+The effect is produced, I suppose, by the quickly changing panoramic
+view of the country, and as I see everything sliding swiftly by, and
+feel myself being hurtled forward willy-nilly, I am sub-conscious of the
+flight of Time, of the eternal flux, of the trajectory of my own
+life.... Timid folk, of course, want some Rock of Ages, something
+static. They want life a mill pond rather than the torrent which it is,
+a homely affair of teacups and tabby cats rather than a dangerous
+expedition.
+
+_April_ 22.
+
+Who will rid me of the body of this death? My body is chained to me--a
+dead weight. It is my warder. I can do nothing without first consulting
+it and seeking its permission. I jeer at its grotesqueness. I chafe at
+the thongs it binds on me. On this bully I am dependent for everything
+the world can give me. How can I preserve my _amour propre_ when I must
+needs be for ever wheedling and cajoling a despot with delicate meats
+and soft couches?--I who am proud, ambitious, and full of energy! In the
+end, too, I know it intends to carry me off.... I should like though to
+have the last kick and, copying De Quincey, arrange to hand it over for
+dissection to the medical men--out of revenge.
+
+"Hope thou not much; fear thou not at all"--my motto of late.
+
+_April_ 30.
+
+I can well imagine looking back on these entries later on and blushing
+at the pettiness of my soul herein revealed.... Only be charitable, kind
+reader. There are three Johns, and I am much mistaken if in these pages
+there will not be found something of the John known to himself, and an
+inkling, perhaps, of the man as he is known to his Creator. As a timid
+showman afraid that unless he emphasises the feature of his exhibit,
+they will be overlooked, let me, hat in hand, point out that I know I am
+an ass, that I am still hoping (in spite of ill health) that I am an
+enthusiast.
+
+_May_ 2.
+
+Maeterlinck's _Wisdom and Destiny_ is distilled Marcus Aurelius. I am
+rather tired of these comfortable philosophers. If a man be harassed by
+Fate with a red rag and a picador let him turn and rend him--or try to,
+anyway.
+
+_May_ 8.
+
+_Staying by the Sea_
+
+I have been living out of doors a lot lately and am getting sunburnt. It
+gives me infinite pleasure to be sunburnt--to appear the man of the open
+air, the open road, and the wild life. The sun intoxicates me to-day.
+The sea is not big enough to hold me nor the sky for me to breathe in. I
+feel I should like to be swaying with all the passions, throbbing with
+life and a vast activity of heart and sinew--to live magnificently--with
+an unquenchable thirst to drink to the lees, to plumb the depth of every
+joy and every sorrow, to see my life flash in the heat. Ah! Youth!
+Youth! Youth!!! In these moments of ecstasy my happiness is torrential.
+I have the soul of the poppy flaming in me then. I am rather like the
+poppy in many ways.... It is peculiarly appropriate. It must be my
+flower! I am the poppy!!
+
+_May_ 9.
+
+L---- was digging up the ground in his garden to-day and one shovelful
+came up thick and shapely. He laid the sod on its back gently without
+breaking it and said simply, "Doesn't it come up nice?" His face was
+radiant!--Real happiness lies in the little things, in a bit of garden
+work, in the rattle of the teacups in the next room, in the last chapter
+of a book.
+
+_May_ 14.
+
+Returned home. I hate living in this little town. If some one dies, he
+is sure to be some one you had a joke with the night before. A
+suicide--ten to one--implicates your bosom friend, or else the little
+man at the bookshop cut him down. There have been three deaths since I
+came home--I knew them all. It depresses me. The town seems a mortuary
+with all these dead bodies lying in it. Lucky for you, if you're a fat,
+rubicund, unimaginative physician.
+
+_May_ 16.
+
+Two more people dead--one a school friend. Sat on a seat on the river
+bank and read the _Journal of Animal Behaviour_. It made me long to be
+at work. I foamed at the mouth to be sitting there perforce in an
+overcoat on a seat doing nothing like a pet dove. A weak heart makes
+crossing a road an adventure and turns each day into a dangerous
+expedition.
+
+_May_ 18.
+
+A dirty ragamuffin on the river's bank held up a tin can to me with the
+softly persuasive words,--
+
+"'Ere, Mister, BAIT."
+
+"What are you going to do with it?"
+
+"Fish."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Salmon."
+
+We have all tried to catch salmon with a bent pin. No matter though if
+no salmon be caught. Richard Jefferies said, "If there be no immortality
+still we shall have had the glory of that thought."
+
+_May_ 19.
+
+_Old Diaries_
+
+Spent some happy time reading over old diaries. I was grieved and
+surprised to find how much I had forgotten. To forget the past so easily
+seems scarcely loyal to oneself. I am so selfishly absorbed in my
+present self that I have grown not to care a damn about that ever
+increasing collection of past selves--those dear, dead gentlemen who one
+after the other have tenanted the temple of this flesh and handed on the
+torch of my life and personal identity before creeping away silently and
+modestly to rest.
+
+_June_ 6.
+
+Brilliantly fine and warm. Unable to resist the sun, so I caught the ten
+train to S---- and walked across the meadow (buttercups,
+forget-me-nots, ragged robins) to the Dipper stream and the ivy bridge.
+Read ardently in Geology till twelve. Then took off my boots and socks,
+and waded underneath the right arch of the bridge in deep water, and
+eventually sat on a dry stone at the top of the masonry just where the
+water drops into the green salmon pool in a solid bar. Next I waded
+upstream to a big slab of rock tilted at a comfortable angle. I lay flat
+on this with my nether extremities in water up to my knees. The sun
+bathed my face and dragon flies chased up and down intent on murder. But
+I cared not a tinker's Demetrius about Nature red in tooth and claw. I
+was quite satisfied with Nature under a June sun in the cool atmosphere
+of a Dipper stream. I lay on the slab completely relaxed, and the cool
+water ran strongly between my toes. Surely I was never again going to be
+miserable. The voices of children playing in the wood made me extra
+happy. As a rule I loathe children. I am too much of a youth still. But
+not this morning. For these were fairy voices ringing through enchanted
+woods.
+
+_June_ 8.
+
+Brilliantly fine and warm. Went by train to C---- Woods. Took
+first-class return on account of the heat. Crossed the meadow and up the
+hill to the mill leat, where we bathed our feet and read. Ate a powerful
+lunch and made several unsuccessful grabs at Caddie flies. I want one to
+examine the mouth parts. After lunch we sat on the foot-bridge over the
+stream, and I rested on it flat in the face of the sun. The sun seemed
+to burn into my very bones, purging away everything that may be dark or
+threatening there. The physical sensation of the blood flow beneath the
+skin was good to feel, and the heat made every tissue glow with a
+radiant well-being. When I got up and opened my eyes all the colours of
+the landscape vanished under the silvery whiteness of the intense
+sunlight.
+
+We put on our boots and socks (our feet seemed to have swollen to a very
+large size) and wandered downstream to a little white house, a
+gamekeeper's cottage, where the old woman gave us cream and milk and
+home-made bread in her beautiful old kitchen with open hearth. China
+dogs, of course, and on the wall an old painting representing the person
+of a page boy (so she said) who was once employed up at the squire's. An
+unwholesome atmosphere of pigs pervaded the garden, but as this is not
+pretty I ought to leave it out....
+
+_June_ 14.
+
+Brilliantly fine. Went by the early train to S----. Walked to the ivy
+bridge and then waded upstream to the great slab of rock where I spread
+myself in the sun as before. The experiment was so delightful it is
+worth repeating a hundred times. In this position I read of the decline
+and fall of Trilobites, of the Stratigraphy of the Lias and so on.
+Geology is a very crushing science, yet I enjoyed my existence this
+morning with the other flies about that stream.
+
+_June_ 20.
+
+Sat at Liverpool University for the practical exam. Zoology, Board of
+Education.
+
+At the close the other students left but I went on working. Prof.
+Herdman asked me if I had finished. I said "No," so he gave me a little
+more time. Later he came up again, and again I said "No," but he replied
+that he was afraid I must stop. "What could you do further?" he asked,
+picking up a dish of plankton. I pointed out a _Sagitta_, an
+_Oikopleura_, and a _Noctiluca_, and he replied, "Of course I put in
+more than you were expected to identify in the time, so as to make a
+choice possible." Then he complimented me on my written papers which
+were sent in some weeks ago, and looking at my practical work he added,
+"And this, too, seems to be quite excellent."
+
+I thanked him from the bottom of a greedy and grateful heart, and he
+went on, "I see you describe yourself in your papers as a journalist,
+but can you tell me exactly what has been your career in Zoology?" I
+answered of course rather proudly that I had had _no_ career in Zoology.
+
+"But what school or college have you worked at?" he persisted.
+
+"None," I said a little doggedly. "What I know I have taught myself."
+
+"So you've had no training in Zoology at all?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Well, if you've taught yourself all you know, you've done remarkably
+well."
+
+He still seemed a little incredulous, and when I explained how I got a
+great many of my marine animals for dissection and study at the Plymouth
+Marine Laboratory, he immediately asked me suspiciously if I had ever
+worked there. We shook hands, and he wished me all success in the
+future, to which I to myself devoutly said Amen.
+
+Came home very elated at having impressed some one at last.
+
+Now for Dublin.
+
+_June_30.
+
+Oeconomic biology may be very useful but I am not interested in it. Give
+me the pure science. I don't want to be worrying my head over remedies
+for potato disease nor cures for fleas in fowls. Heaven preserve me from
+ever becoming a County Council lecturer or a Government
+Entomologist![1]... Give me the recluse life of a scholar or
+investigator, full of leisure, culture, and delicate skill. I would
+rather know Bergson than be able to stay at the Ritz Hotel. I would
+rather be able to dissect a star-fish's water-vascular system than know
+the price of Consols. I should make a most industrious country gentleman
+with AL5,000 a year and a deer park.... My idea is to withdraw from the
+_mobile vulgus_ and spend laborious days in the library or laboratory.
+The world is too much with us. I long for the monotony of monastic life!
+Father Wasmann and the AbbA(C) Spallanzani are the type. Let me set my
+face towards them. Such lives afford poor material for novelists or
+dramatists, but so much the better. Hamlet makes fine reading, but I
+don't want to be Hamlet myself.
+
+_July_ 6.
+
+In the afternoon went out dredging in fifteen fathoms off the pier at
+I----, but without much success.... Got a large number of interesting
+things, however, in the tow net, including some advanced eggs of
+_Loligo_ and a _Tomopteris_....
+
+_July_ 7.
+
+Went to the trout stream again. After stretching a muslin net crosswise
+on the water for insects floating down, sat on the footbridge and read
+Geology for the Dublin Examination. Later, waded downstream to a hazel
+bush on the right bank beneath a shady oak. Squatted right down on the
+bush, which supported me like an arm-chair--and, with legs dangling in
+the cool water, opened a Meredith and enjoyed myself.
+
+_July_ 28.
+
+Had to write backing out of the Dublin Examination for which I am
+nominated to sit. I am simply not fit for the racket of such a journey
+in my present state of health. My chances of success, too, are not such
+as to warrant my drawing on Dad for the money. He is still ill, and
+secretly agitated, I fear, because I am so bent on giving up his work.
+It looks, however, as if newspaper journalism is to be my fate. It was
+the refinement of torture having to write.
+
+_July_ 31.
+
+Had a letter from Dr. S---- enough to wring tears from a monument.
+
+Sat like a valetudinarian in the Park all day getting fresh air--among
+the imbeciles, invalids, and children. Who cares? "But, gentlemen, you
+_shall_ hear."
+
+_August_ 4.
+
+Still another chance--quite unexpectedly received a second nomination
+this morning to sit for another exam, for two vacancies in the British
+Museum. Good luck this.
+
+_August_ 11.
+
+Very hot, so went to S----, and bathed in the salmon pool. Stretched
+myself out in the water, delighted to find that I had at last got to the
+very heart of the countryside. I was not just watching from the
+outside--on the bank. I was in it, and plunging in it, too, up to my
+armpits. What did I care about the British Museum or Zoology then? All
+but the last enemy and object of conquest I had overcome--for the moment
+perhaps even Death himself was under heel--I was immortal--in that
+minute I was always prostrate in the stream--sunk deep in the bosom of
+old Mother Earth who cannot die!
+
+_August_ 14.
+
+At 4 p.m. to the Salmon Pool for a bathe. 87.3 in the shade. The meadow
+was delicious in the sunshine. It made me want to hop, flirt my tail,
+sing. I felt ever such a bright-eyed wily bird!
+
+_August_ 17.
+
+Caught the afternoon train to C----, but unfortunately forgot to take
+with me either watch or tubes (for insects). So I applied to the
+station-master, a youth of about eighteen, who is also signalman,
+porter, ticket-collector, and indeed very factotal--even to the extent
+of providing me with empty match boxes. I agreed with him to be called
+by three halloos from the viaduct just before the evening train came in.
+Then I went up to the leat, set up my muslin net in it for insects
+floating down, and then went across to the stream and bathed.
+Afterwards, went back and boxed the insects caught, and returned to the
+little station, with its creepers on the walls and over the roof, all
+as delightfully quiet as ever, and the station youth as delightfully
+silly. Then the little train came around the bend of the line--green
+puffing engine and red coaches, like a crawling caterpillar of gay
+colour.
+
+_August_ 20.
+
+A trapper killed a specimen of _Tropidonotus natrix_ and brought it to
+me. I gave him sixpence for it and am just going to dissect it.
+
+_August_ 21.
+
+There are folk who notice nothing. (Witness Capt. McWhirr in Conrad's
+_Typhoon_.) They live side by side with genius or tragedy as innocent as
+babies; there are heaps of people who live on a mountain, a volcano,
+even, without knowing it. If the stars of Heaven fell and the Moon were
+turned into blood some one would have to direct their attention to
+it.... Perhaps after all, the most obvious things are the most difficult
+to see. We all recognise Keats now, but suppose he was only "the boy
+next door"--why should I read his verses?
+
+_August_ 27.
+
+_Preparing a Snake's Skull_
+
+Prepared the skull of grass snake. I fancy I scooped out the eyes with
+patent delight--I suppose symbolically, as though, on behalf of the rest
+of suffering humanity, I were wiping off the old score against the beast
+for its behaviour in the Garden of Eden.
+
+_September_ 5.
+
+At 2.30 Dad had three separate "strokes" of paralysis in as many
+minutes, the third leaving him helpless. They sent for me in the
+Library, where I was reading, and I hurried home. Just as I entered the
+bedroom where he and Mother were another attack came on, and it was with
+the utmost difficulty that with her help I managed to get him from the
+chair to the bed. He struggled with his left arm and leg and made
+inarticulate noises which sounded as if they might be groans. I don't
+know if he was in pain. Dear Mother.
+
+_September_ 14.
+
+Dad cannot live long. Mother bears up wonderfully well. Tried to do some
+examination work but failed utterly. A---- is watching in the sick-room
+with Mother who will not leave.
+
+8.30. The nurse says he will not live through the night.
+
+8.45. Telegraphed for A---- to come.
+
+11.00. A---- came downstairs and had a little supper.
+
+12.00. Went to bed. H---- and the others lit a fire and we have all sat
+around it silent, listening to its murmur. Every one felt cold. Dad has
+been unconscious for over an hour.
+
+1.45 a.m. Heard a noise, then heard Mother coming downstairs past my
+bedroom door with some one--sobbing. I knew it must be all over.
+H----was helping her down. Waited in my bedroom in the dark for three
+parts of an hour, when H---- came up, opened the door slowly and said,
+"He's gone, old man." It was a tremendous relief to know that since he
+had to die his sufferings and cruel plight were over. Fell asleep from
+sheer exhaustion and slept soundly.
+
+_September_ 18.
+
+The funeral. _It is not death but the dreadful possibilities of life
+which are so depressing_.[2]
+
+_September_ 21.
+
+_A Day in Autumn_
+
+A cool, breezy autumn day. The beach was covered with patches of soapy
+foam that shook tremulously in the wind--all the rocks and everything
+were drenched with water, and the spray came off the breaking waves like
+steam. A red sun went lower and lower and the shadows cast by the rocks
+grew very long and grotesque. Underneath the breaking waves, the hollows
+were green and dark like sea caverns. Herring gulls played about in the
+air balancing themselves as they faced the breeze, then sweeping
+suddenly around and downwards with the wind behind them. We all sat down
+on the rocks and were very quiet, almost monosyllabic. We pointed out a
+passing vessel to one another or chucked a bit of shingle into the sea.
+You would have said we were bored. Yet deep down in ourselves we were
+astir and all around us we could hear the rumours of divine passage,
+soft and mysterious as the flight of birds migrating in the dark.
+
+The wind rose and tapped the line against the flag-staff at the
+Coastguard Station. It roared through my hair and past my ears for an
+hour on end till I felt quite windswept and bleak. On the way home we
+saw the wind darting hither and thither over the long grass like a
+lunatic snake. The wind! Oh! the wind--I have an enormous faith in the
+curative properties of the wind. I feel better already.
+
+_October_ 17.
+
+Staying in Surrey. Exam, over and I feel fairly confident--after an
+agony for a few days before on account of the development of a cold
+which threatened to snatch the last chance out of my hands.
+
+_Justifiable Mendacity_
+
+Sitting on a gate on the N. Downs I saw a long way below me in the
+valley a man standing in a chalk pit and wielding a stick vigorously.
+For some reason or another the idea came to me that it would be
+interesting if he were in the act of killing a Snake--he so far away
+below and I above and unnoticed quietly watching him. At dinner
+to-night, this revised version of the story came out quite pat and
+natural and obviously interested the assembly. I added graphically that
+the man was too far away from me to be able to say what _species_ of
+Snake it was he was killing. I possess the qualifications of an
+artistic liar. Yet I can't regard such a story as a lie--it was rather a
+justifiable emendation of an otherwise uninteresting incident.
+
+_October_ 24.
+
+_Une CaractA"re_
+
+... She is a tiny little old lady, very frail and very delicate, with a
+tiny voice like the noise of a fretsaw. She talks incessantly about
+things which do not interest you, until your face gets stiff with
+forcing a polite smile, and your voice cracked and your throat dry with
+saying, "Yes," and "Really."
+
+To-night I attend the Zoological Society to read my first paper, so I am
+really in a fluster and want to be quiet. Therefore to prevent her from
+talking I write two letters which I represent as urgent. At 6.15
+desperate, so went out for a walk in the dark London streets. Returned
+to supper and to Her. After the wife, the husband is intellectual
+pyrotechnics. Referring to the Museum,--
+
+"Would you have there, I suppose, any insects, in a case like, what you
+might say to study to yourself when no one is by?" he inquired.
+
+6.40. It is now one hour before I need leave for the meeting, and
+whether I sigh, cough, smoke, or read the paper, she goes on. She even
+refuses to allow me to scan the lines below photos in the _Illustrated
+London News._ I write this as the last sole resource to escape her
+devastating prattle and the ceaseless hum of her tiny gnat-like mind.
+She thinks (because I told her so) that I am preparing notes for the
+evening meeting.
+
+_Later_: Spent an absolutely damnable day. Am sick, tired, bored,
+frantic with her voice which I have been able to share with no one
+except the intellectual giant, her husband, at tea time. In order to
+break the flow of chatter, I would rudely interrupt and go on talking,
+by this means keeping my end up for as long as I could, and enjoying a
+short respite from the fret-sawing voice. But I tired of this and it was
+of no permanent value. When I broke in, she still went on for a few
+sentences unable to stop, and lo! here was the spectacle of two persons
+alone together in a room both talking at the same time and neither
+listening. I persisted though--and she had to stop. Once started, I was
+afraid to stop--scared at the certain fact of the voice beginning to saw
+again. After a while the fountain of my artificial garrulity dried up,
+and the Voice at once leaped into the breach, resuming--amazing and
+incredible as it seems--at the precise point where it had left off. At 7
+I am quite exhausted and sit on the opposite side of the hearth, staring
+with glassy eyes, arms drooping at my sides and mouth druling. At 7.05
+her cough increases, and she has to stop to attend to it. With a
+fiendish smile I push back my chair, and quietly watch her cough.... She
+coughs continuously now and can talk no longer. Thank God! 8 p.m., left
+for the meeting, where I read my paper in a state of awful
+nervousness.... I read out all I had to say and kept them amused for
+about ten minutes. I was very excited when Dr. ---- got up and praised
+the paper,[3] saying it was interesting, and hoping I should continue
+the experiments. The chairman, Sir John Rose Bradford, asked a question,
+I answered it and then sat down. After the meeting we went upstairs to
+the library, had tea and chatted with some of the big people.... Zoology
+is certainly delightful, yet it seems to me the Zoologists are much as
+other people. I like Zoology. I wish I could do without Zoologists....
+
+_October_ 30.
+
+Home once more. The Natural History Museum impressed me enormously. It
+is a magnificent building--too magnificent to work there--to follow
+one's profession in a building like that seems an altogether too
+grandiose manner of life. A pious zoologist might go up to pray in
+it--but not to earn his daily bread there.
+
+_October_ 31.
+
+I'm in, in, in!!!!!!!!! being first with 141 marks to spare. Old
+M----[the servant] rushes up to my sister's bedroom with the news just
+after 7 a.m., and she says, "Fine, fine," and comes down in her
+nightgown to my bedroom, where we drink our morning cup of tea
+together--and talk! I'm delighted. What a magnificent obstacle race it
+has been! Still one ditch--the medical exam! Wired to friends.
+
+_November_ 1.
+
+This is the sort of letter which is balm to me:--"My darling W----,--I
+need hardly tell you how absolutely delighted we were at the grand news
+of this morning. You must be feeling a huge glow of satisfaction with
+the knowledge of your object attained through untold difficulties. I
+don't wish to butter you up, or to gush, but I must honestly say that I
+feel tip-top proud of my old Beano. I admire your brains more than ever,
+and also your indomitable pluck and grit, and your quiet bravery in
+disappointment and difficulty...."
+
+_November_ 14.
+
+The three most fascinating books in Science that I have so far read are
+(easily):--1. Darwin's _Expression of the Emotions_. 2. Gaskell's
+_Origin of Vertebrates_. 3. Bergson's _Le Rire_.
+
+Went to the dentist in the afternoon. Evening chiefly occupied in
+reading _Le Rire_. By my halidom, it is an extraordinarily interesting
+book!
+
+_November_ 29.
+
+... I am always looking out for new friends--assaying for friendship....
+There is no more delightful adventure than an expedition into a rich,
+many-sided personality. Gradually over a long probation--for deep minds
+are naturally reticent--piece after piece is added to the geography of
+your friend's mind, and each piece pleases or entertains, while in
+return you let him steal away piece after piece of your own territory,
+perhaps saving a bit up here and there--such as an enthusiasm for
+Francis Thompson's poetry--and then letting it go unexpectedly. It's a
+delightful reciprocity.
+
+I dream of "the honeyed ease of the Civil Servant's working day"
+(Peacock). Yet the French say _Songes sont mensonges_.
+
+_December_ 13.
+
+In the Park it was very dark and she said,--
+
+"If I lose you I shan't be able to find my way home."
+
+"Oh! I'll look after you," I said.
+
+Both being of the same mind at the same time we sat down on a seat
+together when a fortunate thing happened. It began to rain. So I offered
+her part of my overcoat. She nestled in under my arm and I kissed her
+out of hand. _VoilA _! A very pretty little girl, 'pon my word.
+
+_December_ 20.
+
+The thing is obsessing me. After an early supper called and found my
+lady ready to receive me. No one else at home. So walked into the
+oak-panelled room with the red-curtained windows, took off my coat and
+scarf. She followed and switched off the light. There was a roaring fire
+in the grate. She is very amorous and I am not Hippolytus, so we were
+soon closely engaged in the large chair before the fire. As we sailed
+thus, close hauled to the wind, with double entendres and she trembled
+in the storm (and I was at the helm) the garden gate slammed and both of
+us got up quickly. I next heard a key turn in the lock and a foot in the
+passage: "Mr. ----" she said....
+
+She switched on the light, went out swiftly into the passage, and
+meeting him conducted him to her office, while I as swiftly put on
+overcoat and scarf, and slipped out through the open door, stumbling
+over his bicycle, but of course not stopping to pick it up. Later she
+telephoned to say it was all right. Very relieved!... She recalls
+Richepin's _La Glu_.
+
+_December_ 21.
+
+She is a fine sedative. Her movements are a pleasant adagio, her voice
+piano to pianissimo, her conversation breaks off in thrilling
+aposiopoeses.
+
+An awful comedy this morning--for as soon as I was securely "gagged" the
+dentist went out of the room. She approached, leered at me helpless, and
+said provokingly, "Oh! you do look funny." Minx. On returning he said to
+her, "Would you like to hold his hand?"
+
+She: "Oh! not just now."
+
+And they grinned at one another and at me waiting to be tortured.
+
+_December_ 23.
+
+... On the Station waited for an hour for the train. Gave her a box of
+sweets and the _Bystander_. We walked up the platform to extreme end in
+the dark and kissed! But it was very windy and cold. (I noticed that!)
+So we entered an empty luggage guard's van on rail beside platform left
+there by shunters. Here we were out of the wind and far better off. But
+a shunter came along and turned us out. She gave me a silver match-box.
+But I believe for various reasons that it is one of her own and not a
+new one. Said "Good-bye."
+
+_December_ 28.
+
+At R----. Played the negligent _flaneur_, reclining on the Chesterfield,
+leaning against the grand piano, or measuring my length on the mat
+before the fire.
+
+_December_ 31.
+
+To-morrow I begin duties at the British Museum of Natural History. I
+cannot quite imagine myself a Museum assistant. Before I get there I
+know I shall be the strangest assistant on the staff. It will be
+singing my song in a Strange land and weeping--I hope not too
+bitterly--down by the waters of a very queer Babylon.
+
+Still, I have burnt my bridges like CA|sar--or burnt my ships like
+Cortez. So forward!
+
+
+[1] See entry for October 8, 1913.
+
+[2] Italics added 1917.
+
+[3] The paper was "Distant Orientation in Batrachia"--detailing
+experiments on the homing faculty in newts.
+
+
+
+
+PART II--IN LONDON
+
+
+
+
+1912
+
+
+_January_ 21.
+
+Am at last beginning to get more content with the work at the Museum, so
+that I muse on Bernard Shaw's saying, "Get what you like or you'll grow
+to like what you get." I have a terrible suspicion that the security of
+tenure here is like the lion's den in the fable--_Nulla vestiga
+retrorsum_. Of course I am wonderfully proud of being at the Museum,
+although I am disappointed and write as if I were quite blasA(C).
+
+_January_ 25.
+
+I should be disappointed if at the end of my career (if I live to see it
+through) I do not win the F.R.S. I should very much like it.... My
+nature is very mixed--ambitious above all things and yet soon giddy with
+the audacity of my aspirations. The B.M. and my colleagues make me feel
+most inferior in fact, but in theory--in the secrecy of my own
+bedchamber--I feel that there are few men there my equal.
+
+_April_ 26.
+
+Down with influenza. A boarding-house with the 'flue!
+
+_May_ 8.
+
+Went home to recuperate, a beef jelly in one pocket and sal volatile in
+the other. On arrival, my blanched appearance frightened Mother and the
+others, so went to bed at once. "Fate's a fiddler, life's a dance."
+
+_May_ 12.
+
+Weak enough to sit down before dressing-table while I shave and brush my
+hair. Dyspepsia appalling. The Doctor in Kensington seemed to think me
+an awful wreck and asked if I were concealing----
+
+Reading Baudelaire and Verlaine.
+
+_May_ 24.
+
+_Bathing_
+
+Sat on a seat overlooking the sand-hills with stick between my legs like
+an old man, and watched a buxom wench aet. 25 run down the path pursued
+by "Rough" and two little girls in blue. Later they emerged from a
+striped bathing tent in the glory of blue bathing dresses. It made me
+feel quite an old man to see the girl galloping out over the hard level
+sands to the breakers, a child clinging to each hand. Legs and arms
+twinkled in the sun which shone with brilliance. If life were as level
+as those sands and as beautiful as that trio of girls!
+
+_May_ 26.
+
+_Two Young Men Talking_
+
+With H---- in his garden. He is a great enthusiast.
+
+"I disapprove entirely of your taste in gardening," I said. "You object
+to the 'ragged wilderness' style, I like it. You like lawns laid out for
+croquet and your privet hedges pruned into 'God Save the King' or 'Dieu
+et mon droit.' My dear boy, if you saw Mr. ----'s wilderness at
+----you'd be so shocked you'd cut and run, and I imagine there'd be an
+affecting reunion between you and your beloved geraniums. For my part, I
+don't like geraniums: they're suburban, and all of a piece with
+antimacassars and stuffed birds under glass bells. The colour of your
+specimens, moreover," I rapped out, "is vulgar--like the muddied
+petticoats of old market women."
+
+H----, quite unmoved, replied slowly, "Well, here are some like the
+beautiful white cambric of a lady of fashion. You've got no taste in
+flowers--you're just six feet of grief and patience." We roared with
+laughing.
+
+"Do stop watering those damned plants," I exclaimed at last. But he
+went on. I exclaimed again and out of sheer ridiculousness, in reply he
+proceeded to water the cabbages, the gravel path, the oak tree--and me!
+While I writhed with laughing.
+
+_May_ 27.
+
+_By the Sea_
+
+Sat upon a comfortable jetty of rock and watched the waves without a
+glimmer of an idea in my mind about anything--though to outward view I
+might have been a philosopher in cerebral parturition with thoughts as
+big as babies. Instead, little rustling dead leaves of thoughts stirred
+and fluttered in the brain--the pimple _e.g._ I recollected on my Aunt's
+nose, or the boyishness of Dr. ----'s handwriting, or Swinburne's lines:
+"If the golden-crested wren Were a nightingale--why, then Something seen
+and heard of men Might be half as sweet as when Laughs a child of
+seven."
+
+I continued in this pleasurable coma all the afternoon and went home
+refreshed.
+
+_May_ 29.
+
+Have returned to London and the B.M. My first day at the M. Sat at my
+table in a state of awful apathy.
+
+At least temporarily, I am quite disenchanted of Zoology. I work--God
+save the mark--in the Insect Room!
+
+On the way home, purchased:--
+
+Peroxide of hydrogen (pyorrhA"a threatened). One bottle of physic (for
+my appalling dyspepsia).
+
+One flask of brandy for emergencies (as my heart is intermittent again).
+
+Prussic acid next.
+
+Must have been near pneumonia at R----. Auntie was nervous, and came in
+during the night to see how I was.
+
+_June_ 20.
+
+It caused me anguish to see my article returned from the _Fortnightly_
+and lying in a big envelope on the table when I returned home this
+evening. I can't do any work because of it, and in desperation rushed
+off to the stately pleasure domes of the White City, and systematically
+went through all the thrills--from the Mountain Railway to the Wiggle
+Woggle and the 'Witching Waves.
+
+_June_ 21.
+
+To-day I am easier. The cut worm forgives the plough. But how restless
+this disappointment has made me.... I have no plans for recuperation and
+cannot settle down to work.
+
+_July_ 6.
+
+On my doctor's advice, went to see Dr. P----, a lung specialist.
+M----found a dull spot on one of my lungs, and, not feeling very sure,
+and without telling me the nature of his suspicion, he arranged for Dr.
+P---- to see me, allowing me to suppose he was a stomach authority as my
+dyspepsia is bad.
+
+Well: it is _not_ consumption, but my lungs and physique are such that
+consumption might easily supervene. As soon as Dr. P---- had gone,
+M----appended the following lugubrious yarn:--
+
+Whenever I catch cold, I must go and be treated at once, all my leisure
+must be spent out of doors, I must take cream and milk in prodigious
+quantities and get fat at all costs. There is even a question of my
+giving up work.
+
+_July_ 10.
+
+A young but fat woman sitting in the sun and oozing moisture is as nasty
+as anything in Baudelaire.
+
+_July_ 14.
+
+_A "Brilliant Career"_
+
+My old head master once prophesied for me "a brilliant career." That was
+when I was in the Third Form. Now I have more than a suspicion that I am
+one of those who, as he once pointed out, grow sometimes out of a
+brilliant boyhood into very commonplace men. This continuous ill health
+is having a very obvious effect on my work and activities. With what
+courage I possess I have to face the fact that to-day I am unable to
+think or express myself as well as when I was a boy in my teens--witness
+this Journal!
+
+I intend to go on however. I have decided that my death shall be
+disputed all the way.
+
+Oh! it is so humiliating to die! I writhe to think of being overcome by
+so unfair an enemy before I have demonstrated myself to maiden aunts who
+mistrust me, to colleagues who scorn me, and even to brothers and
+sisters who believe in me.
+
+As an Egotist I hate death because I should cease to be I.
+
+Most folk, when sick unto death, gain a little consolation over the
+notoriety gained by the fact of their decease. Criminals enjoy the pomp
+and circumstance of their execution. Voltaire said of Rousseau that he
+wouldn't mind being hanged if they'd stick his name on the gibbet. But
+my own death would be so mean and insignificant. Guy de Maupassant died
+in a grand manner--a man of intellect and splendid physique who became
+insane. Tusitala's death in the South Seas reads like a romance. Heine,
+after a life of sorrow, died with a sparkling witticism on his lips;
+Vespasian with a jest.
+
+But I cannot for the life of me rake up any excitement over my own
+immediate decease--an unobtrusive passing away of a rancorous,
+disappointed, morbid, and self-assertive entomologist in a West
+Kensington Boarding House--what a mean little tragedy! It is hard not to
+be somebody even in death.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A sing-song to-night in the drawing-room; all the boarding-house present
+in full muster. There was a German, Schulz, who sat and leered at his
+inamorata--a sensual-looking, pasty-faced girl--while she gave us
+daggers-and-moonlight recitations with the most unwarranted
+self-assurance (she boasts of a walking-on part at one of the theatres);
+there was Miss M---- listening to her fiancA(C), Capt. O---- (home from
+India), singing Indian Love Songs at her; there was Miss T----, a sour
+old maid, who knitted and snorted, not fully conscious of this young
+blood coursing around her; Mrs. Barclay Woods pursued her usual
+avocation of imposing on us all the great weight of her immense social
+superiority, clucking, in between, to her one chick--a fluffy girl of 18
+or 19, who was sitting now in the draught, now too close to a "common"
+musician of the Covent Garden Opera; finally our hostess, a divorcee,
+who hated all males, even Tom-cats. We were a pathetic little
+company--so motley, ill-assorted--who had come together not from love or
+regard but because man is a gregarious animal. In fact, we sat secretly
+criticising and contemning one another ... yet outside there were so
+many millions of people unknown, and overhead the multitude of the stars
+was equally comfortless.
+
+_Later_: ... Zoology on occasion still fires my ambition! Surely I
+cannot be dying yet.
+
+Whatever misfortune befalls me I do hope I shall be able to meet it
+unflinchingly. I do not fear ill-health in itself, but I do fear its
+possible effect on my mind and character.... Already I am slowly
+altering, as the Lord liveth. Already for example my sympathy with
+myself is maudlin.
+
+Whenever the blow shall fall, some sort of a reaction _must_ be given.
+Heine flamed into song. Beethoven wrote the 5th Symphony. So what shall
+I do when my time comes? I don't think I have any lyrics or symphonies
+to write, so I shall just have to grin and bear it--like a dumb
+animal.... As long as I have spirit and buoyancy I don't care what
+happens--for I know that or so long I cannot be accounted a failure. The
+only _real_ failure is one in which the victim is left spiritless,
+dazed, dejected with blackness all around, and within, a knife slowly
+and unrelentingly cutting the strings of his heart.
+
+My head whirls with conflicting emotions, struggling, desperate ideas,
+and a flood of impressions of all sorts of things that are never
+sufficiently sifted and arranged to be caught down on paper. I am
+brought into this world, hustled along it and then hustled out of it,
+with no time for anything. I want to be on a great hill and square up
+affairs.
+
+_August_ 28.
+
+... After tea, we all three walked in Kensington Gardens and sat on a
+seat by the Round Pond. My umbrella fell to the ground, and I left it
+there with its nose poking up in a cynical manner, as She remarked.
+
+"It's not cynical," I said, "only a little knowing. Won't you let yours
+fall down to keep it company? Yours is a lady umbrella and a
+good-looking one--they might flirt together."
+
+"Mine doesn't want to flirt," she answered stiffly.
+
+_September_ 13.
+
+_At C----, a tiny little village by the sea in N----._
+
+Looking up from a rockpool, where I had been watching Gobies, I saw
+three children racing across the sands to bathe, I saw a man dive from a
+boat, and I saw a horse-man gallop his mare down to the beach and plunge
+about in the line of breakers. The waters thundered, the mare whinnied,
+the children shouted to one another, and I turned my head down again to
+the rockpool with a great thumping heart of happiness: it was so lovely
+to be conscious of the fact that out there this beautiful picture was
+awaiting me whenever and as often as I chose to lift my head. I
+purposely kept my head down, for the picture was so beautiful I did not
+want to hurt it by breathing on it, and I kept my head down out of a
+playful self-cheating delight; I decided not to indulge myself.
+
+_September_ 16.
+
+Out in the Bay dredging for Echinoderms with "Carrots." Brilliantly
+fine. The haul was a failure, but, being out in a boat on a waveless sea
+under a cloudless sky, I was scarcely depressed at this! We cruised
+along from one little bay to another, past smugglers' caves and white
+pebble beaches, the dredge all the while growling along the sea bottom,
+and "Carrots" and I lying listless in the bows. I was _immensely happy_.
+My mercury was positively ringing the bell.
+
+Who, then, is "Carrots"? He is a fine brawny boat-man who jumps over the
+rocks like a Chamois, swims like a Fish, pulls like an Ox, snorts like a
+Grampus--a sort of compound zoological perfection, built eclectically.
+
+_September_ 18.
+
+_Early Boughies_
+
+Up the village, Mrs. Beavan keeps a tiny little shop and runs a very
+large garden. She showed us all about the garden, and introduced us to
+her husband, whom we discovered in an apple tree--an old man, aged 76,
+very hard of hearing, and with an impediment in his speech. He at once
+began to move his mouth, and I caught odd jingles of sound that sounded
+like nothing at all--at first, but which gradually resolved themselves
+on close attention to such familiar landmarks as "Early Boughies,"
+"Stubbits," "Ribstone Pippins" into a discourse on Apples.
+
+The following curious conversation took place between me and the deaf
+gaffer, aged 76, standing in the apple tree,--
+
+"These be all appulls from Kent--I got 'em all from Kent."
+
+"How long have you lived in C----?"
+
+"Bunyard & Son--that's the firm--they live just outside the town of
+Maidstone."
+
+"Do you keep Bees here?"
+
+"One of these yer appulls is called Bunyard after the firm--a fine fruit
+too."
+
+"Your good wife must be of great assistance to you in your work."
+
+"Little stalks maybe, but a large juishy appull for all that."
+
+Just then I heard Mrs. B---- saying to E----,--
+
+"Aw yes, he's very active for 76. A little deaf, but he manages the
+garden all 'eesulf, I bolsters 'un up wi' meat and drink--little and
+often as they zay for children.... Now there's a bootifull tree, me
+dear, that 'as almost beared itself to death, as you may say."
+
+She picked an apple off it shouting to poor Tom still aloft,--
+
+"Tom what's the name of this one?"
+
+"You should come a bit earlier, zir," replied T. "'Tis late a bit now
+doan't 'ee zee?"
+
+"No--what's its name I want," shouted his spouse.
+
+"Yes, yes, give the lady one to take home--there's plenty for all," he
+said.
+
+"What is the NAME? THE NAME OF THIS YER APPULL," screamed Mrs. B., and
+old Tom moving his bones slowly down from the tree answered quite
+unmoved,--
+
+"Aw the name? Why, 'tis a common kind of appull--there's a nice tree of
+'em up there."
+
+"Oh! never mind, 'tis a Gladstone," said Mrs. B., turning to us.
+
+"A very fine Appull," droned the old boy.
+
+_September_ 28.
+
+Back in town again. Wandered about in a somnambulistic way all the
+afternoon till I found myself taking tea in Kew Gardens. I enjoyed the
+wind in my face and hair. Otherwise there is nothing to be said--a
+colourless day.
+
+_October_ 10.
+
+Came across the following arresting sentence: "Pale, anA|mic, cadaverous,
+bad teeth and disordered digestion and a morbid egotism." Yes, but my
+teeth are _not_ bad.
+
+_October_ 20.
+
+_On the N. Downs_
+
+Under the oak where I sat the ground was covered with dead leaves. I
+kicked them, and I beat them with my stick, because I was angry that
+they were dead. In the coppice, leaves were quietly and majestically
+floating earthwards in the pomp of death. It was very thrilling to
+observe them.
+
+It was a curious sensation to realise that since the last time I sat
+under the old oak I had been right up to the N. of England, then right
+down to the S.W., and back once more to London town. I bragged about my
+kinetic activity to the stationary oak and I scoffed at the old hill for
+having to remain always in the same place.
+
+It gave me a pleasing sense of infinite superiority to _come back_ and
+see everything the same as before, to sit on the same old seat under the
+same old oak. Even that same old hurdle was lying in the same position
+among the bracken. How sorry I was for it! Poor wretch--unable to
+move--to go to Whitby, to go to C----, to be totally ignorant of the
+great country of London....
+
+Day dreamed. My own life as it unrolls day by day is a source of
+constant amazement, delight, and pain. I can think of no more
+interesting volume than a detailed, intimate, psychological history of
+my own life. I want a perfect comprehension at least of myself....
+
+We are all such egotists that a sorrow or hardship--provided it is great
+enough--flatters our self-importance. We feel that a calamity by
+overtaking us has distinguished us above our fellows. A man likes not to
+be ignored even by a railway accident. A man with a grievance is always
+happy.
+
+_October_ 23.
+
+Over to see E----. Came away disillusioned.
+
+_October_ 25.
+
+Met her in Smith's book shop looking quite bewitching. Hang it all, I
+thought I had finished. Went home with her, watched her make a pudding
+in the kitchen, then we sat by the firelight in the drawing-room and had
+supper. Scrumptious (not the supper).
+
+_October_ 27.
+
+Quarrelled with D----! The atmosphere is changed at the flat--my
+character is ruined. D---- has told them I'm a loose fellow. I've always
+contrived to give him that impression--I liked to be cutting my
+throat--and now it's cut!
+
+_November_ 1.
+
+D---- came and carried me off to the flat, where they asked why I hadn't
+been over--which, of course, pleased me immensely.
+
+_November_ 6.
+
+Doctor M---- is very gloomy about my health and talks of S. Africa,
+Labrador, and so on. I'm not responding to his treatment as I should.
+
+_November_ 11.
+
+Met her this evening in Kensington Road. "I timed this well," said she,
+"I thought I should meet you." Good Heavens, I am getting embroiled.
+Returned to the flat with her and after supper called her "The Lady of
+Shalott."
+
+"I don't think you know what you're talking about"--this stiffly.
+
+"Perhaps not," I answered. "I leave it to you."
+
+"Oh! but it rests with you," she said.
+
+Am I in love? God knows--but I don't suppose God cares.
+
+_November_ 15.
+
+On M----'s advice went to see a stomach specialist--Dr. Hawkins. As I
+got there a little too early walked up the street--Portland Place--on
+the opposite side (from shyness) past an interminable and nauseating
+series of night bells and brass plates, then down again on the right
+side till I got to No. 66 which made me flutter--for ten doors ahead I
+mused is the house I must call at. It made me shiver a little.
+
+The specialist took copious notes of my evidence and after examining me
+retired to consult with M----. What a parade of ceremony! On coming
+back, the jury returned a verdict of "Not proven." I was told I ought to
+go out and live on the prairies--and in two years I should be a _giant_!
+But where are the prairies? What 'bus? If I get worse, I must take
+several months' leave. I think it will come to this.
+
+_November_ 16.
+
+Arthur came down for the week end. He likes the Lady of Shalott. She is
+"not handsome, but arresting, striking" and "capable of tragedy." That I
+believe she has achieved already.... If she were a bit more gloomy and a
+bit more beautiful, she'd be irresistible.
+
+_November_ 22.
+
+He: "Have a cigarette? I enjoy lighting your cigarettes."
+
+She: "I don't know how to smoke properly."
+
+He: "You smoke only as _you_ could."
+
+She: "How's that?"
+
+H.: "Gracefully, of course."
+
+S.: "Do you think I like pretty things being said to me?"
+
+H.: "Why not, if they are true. Flattery is when you tell an ugly woman
+she is beautiful. Have you so poor an opinion of yourself to think all I
+say of you is flattery?"
+
+S.: "Yes. I am only four bare walls,--with nothing inside."
+
+H.: "What a deliciously empty feeling that must be. ... But I don't
+think you're so simple as all that. You bewilder me sometimes."
+
+S.: "Why?"
+
+H.: "I feel like Sindbad the Sailor."
+
+S.: "Why?"
+
+H.: "Because I'm not George Meredith." The title of "husband" frightens
+me.
+
+_December_ 9.
+
+It's a fearful strain to go on endeavouring to live up to time with a
+carefully laid-out time-table of future achievements. I am hurrying on
+with my study of Italian in order to read the Life of Spallanzani in
+order to include him in my book--to be finished by the end of next year;
+I am also subsidising Jenkinson's embryological lectures at University
+College with the more detailed account of practical and experimental
+work in his text-book; I have also started a lengthy research upon the
+Trichoptera--all with a horrible sense of time fleeing swiftly and
+opportunities for work too few ever to be squandered, and, in the
+background, behind all this feverish activity, the black shadow that I
+might die suddenly with nothing done--next year, next month, next week,
+to-morrow, now!
+
+Then sometimes, as to-night, I have misgivings. Shall I do these things
+so well now as I might once have done them? Has not my ill-health
+seriously affected my mental powers? Surely the boy of 1908-10 was
+almost a genius or--seen at this distance--a very remarkable youth in
+the fanatical zeal with which he sought to pursue, and succeeded in
+gaining, his own end of a zoological education for himself.
+
+It is a terrible suspicion to cross the mind of an ambitious youth that
+perhaps, after all, he is a very commonplace mortal--that his life,
+whether comedy or tragedy, or both, or neither, is any way
+insignificant, of no account.
+
+It is still more devastating for him to have to consider whether the
+laurel wreath was not once within his grasp, and whether he must not
+ascribe his own incalculable loss to his stomach simply.
+
+_December_ 15.
+
+A very bad heart attack. As I write it intermits every three or four
+beats. Who knows if I shall live thro' to-night?
+
+_December_ 16.
+
+Here I am once more. A passable night. After breakfast the intermittency
+recommenced--it is better now, with a dropped beat only about once per
+half-hour, so that I am almost happy after yesterday, which was Hell.
+The world is too good to give up without remonstrance at the beck of a
+weak heart.
+
+Before I went to sleep last night, my watch stopped--I at once observed
+the cessation of its tick and wondered if it were an omen. I was
+genuinely surprised to find myself still ticking when I awoke this
+morning. A moment ago a hearse passed down the street.... Yes, but I'm
+damned if I haven't a right to be morbid after yesterday. To be ill like
+this in a boarding-house! I'd marry to-morrow if I had the chance.
+
+_December_ 22.
+
+_Sollas's "Ancient Hunters"_
+
+Read Sollas's book _Ancient Hunters_--very thrilling--mind full of the
+Aurignacians, Mousterians, Magdalenians! I have been peering down such
+tremendous vistas of time and change that my own troubles have been
+eclipsed into ridiculous insignificance. It has been really a Pillar of
+Strength to me--a splendid tonic. PalA|ontology has its comfortable words
+too. I have revelled in my littleness and irresponsibility. It has
+relieved me of the harassing desire to live, I feel content to live
+dangerously, indifferent to my fate; I have discovered I am a fly, that
+we are all flies, that nothing matters. It's a great load off my life,
+for I don't mind being such a micro-organism--to me the honour is
+sufficient of belonging to the universe--such a great universe, so grand
+a scheme of things. Not even Death can rob me of that honour. For
+nothing can alter the fact that I _have_ lived; _I have been I_, if for
+ever so short a time. And when I am dead, the matter which composes my
+body is indestructible--and eternal, so that come what may to my "Soul,"
+my dust will always be going on, each separate atom of me playing its
+separate part--I shall still have some sort of a finger in the Pie.
+When I am dead, you can boil me, burn me, drown me, scatter me--but you
+cannot destroy me: my little atoms would merely deride such heavy
+vengeance. Death can do no more than kill you.
+
+_December_ 27.
+
+"It is a pleasure to note the success attending the career of Mr. W.N.P.
+Barbellion now engaged in scientific work on the staff of the Natural
+History Museum ..." etc., etc.
+
+This is a cutting from the local paper--one of many that from time to
+time I once delightedly pasted in the pages of the Journal. Not so now.
+
+... At 23, I am a different being. Surrounded by all the stimulating
+environment of scientific research, I am cold and disdainful. I keep up
+the old appearances but underneath it is quite different. I am a
+_hypocrite_. I have to wear the mask and cothornoi, finding the part
+daily more difficult to bear. I am living on my immense initial
+momentum--while the machinery gradually slows up. My career! Gadzooks.
+
+
+
+
+1913
+
+
+_January_ 3.
+
+From the drawing-room window I see pass almost daily an old gentleman
+with white hair, a firm step, broad shoulders, healthy pink skin, a
+sunny smile--always singing to himself as he goes--a happy, rosy-cheeked
+old fellow, with a rosy-cheeked mind.... I should like to throw mud at
+him. By Jove, how I hate him. He makes me wince with my own pain. It is
+heartless, indecently so, for an _old_ man to be so blithe. Life has, I
+suppose, never lain in wait for him. The Great Anarchist has spared him
+a bomb.
+
+_January_ 19.
+
+My Aunt, aged 75, who has apparently concluded from my constant absences
+from Church that my spiritual life is in a parlous way, to-day read me
+her portion from a large book with a broad purple-tasseled bookmark. I
+looked up from "_I Promessi Sposi_" and said "Very nice." It was about
+someone whose soul was not saved and who Would not answer the door when
+it was knocked. It is jolly to be regarded as a wicked, libidinous youth
+by an aged maiden Aunt.
+
+_January_ 22.
+
+This Diary reads for all the world as if I were not living in mighty
+London. The truth is I live in a bigger, dirtier city--ill-health.
+Ill-health, when chronic, is like a permanent ligature around one's
+life. What a fine fellow I'd be if I were perfectly well. My energy for
+one thing would lift the roof off....
+
+We conversed around the text: "To travel hopefully is better than to
+arrive and true success is to labour." She is--well, so graceful. My
+God! I love her, I love her, I love her!!!
+
+_February_ 3.
+
+_A Confession_
+
+H---- B---- invited me to tea to meet his fiancA(C)e.
+
+Rather pleased with the invitation--I don't know why, for my idea of
+myself is greater than my idea of him and probably greater than his idea
+of himself.
+
+Yet I went and got shaved, and even thought of buying a new pair of
+gloves, but poverty proved greater than vanity, so I went with naked
+hands. On arriving at Turnham Green, I removed my spectacles (well
+knowing how much they damage my personal appearance). However, the
+beauty of the thing was that, tho' I waited as agreed, he never turned
+up, and so I returned home again, crestfallen--and, with my spectacles
+on again.
+
+_February_ 9.
+
+... "Now, W----, talk to me prettily," she said as soon as the door was
+closed on them.
+
+"Oh! make him read a book," whined her sister, but we talked of marriage
+instead--in all its aspects. Bless their hearts, I found these two dear
+young things simply sodden with the idea of it.
+
+In the middle I did a knee-jerk which made them scream with
+laughing--the patellar reflex was new to them, so I seized a brush from
+the grate, crossed to Her and gently tapped: out shot her foot, and
+----cried: "Oh, do do it to me as well." It was rare fun.
+
+     "Oh! pretty knee, what do I see?
+     And he stooped and he tied up my garter for me."
+
+_February_ 10.
+
+News of Scott's great adventure! Scott dead a year ago!! The news, when
+I saw it to-night in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ gave me cold thrills. I
+could have wept.... What splendid people we humans are! If there be no
+loving God to watch us, it's a pity for His sake as much as for our own.
+
+_February_ 15.
+
+Tried to kiss her in a taxi-cab on the way home from the Savoy--the
+taxi-cab danger is very present with us--but she rejected me quietly,
+sombrely. I apologised on the steps of the Flats and said I feared I had
+greatly annoyed her. "I'm not annoyed," she said, "only surprised"--in
+a thoughtful, chilly voice.
+
+We had had supper in Soho, and I took some wine, and she looked so
+bewitching it sent me in a fever, thrumming my fingers on the seat of
+the cab while she sat beside me impassive. Her shoulders are exquisitely
+modelled and a beautiful head is carried poised on a tiny neck.
+
+_February_ 16.
+
+Walking up the steps to her flat to-night made me pose to H---- (who was
+with me) as Sydney Carton in the picture in _A Tale of Two Cities_ on
+the steps of the scaffold. He laughed boisterously, as he is delighted
+to know of my last evening's misadventure.
+
+At supper, a story was told of a man who knocked at the door of his
+lady's heart four times and at last was admitted. I remarked that the
+last part of the romance was weak. She disagreed. H---- exclaimed, "Oh!
+but this man has no sentiment at all!"
+
+"So much the worse for him," chimed in the others.
+
+"He was 66 years of age," added Mrs.----.
+
+"Too old," said P. "What do you think the best age for a man to marry?"
+
+H.: "Thirty for a man, twenty-five for a woman."
+
+She: "That's right: it still gives me a little time."
+
+P.: "What do _you_ think?" (to me).
+
+I replied sardonically,--
+
+"A young man may not yet and an old man not at all."
+
+"That's right, old wet blanket," chirruped P----.
+
+"You know," I continued, delighted to seize the opportunity to assume
+the role of youthful cynic, "Cupid and Death once met at an Inn and
+exchanged arrows, since when young men have died and old men have
+doted."
+
+H---- was charming enough to opine that it was impossible to fix a time
+for love. Love simply came.
+
+We warned him to be careful on the boat going out.
+
+"Yes, I know," said H---- (who is in love with P----).
+
+"My brother had a dose of moonlight on board a boat when he sailed and
+he's been happy ever since."
+
+P.: "How romantic!"
+
+H.: "A great passion!"
+
+"The only difference," I interjected in a sombre monotone, "between a
+passion and a caprice is that the caprice lasts a little longer."
+
+"Sounds like a book," She said in contempt.
+
+It was--Oscar Wilde!
+
+P---- insisted on my taking a biscuit. "Don't mind me," she said. "Just
+think I'm a waitress and take no notice at all."
+
+H.: "Humph! I never see him taking no notice of a waitress."
+
+(Sneers and Curtain.)
+
+_February_ 24.
+
+H---- came home last night and told me that she said as he came away,
+"Tell W---- I hate him." So it's all right. I shall go over to-morrow
+again--Hurrah! My absence has been felt then.
+
+_March_ 7.
+
+Came home, lay on my bed, still dressed, and ruminated....
+
+First a suspicion then a conviction came to me that I was a cad--a
+callous, selfish, sensation-hunting cad.... For the time being the
+bottom was knocked out of my smug self-satisfaction. For several long
+half-hours I found myself drifting without compass or stars. I was quite
+di orientated, temporarily thrown off the balance of my _amour propre_.
+Then I got up, lit the gas and looking at myself in the mirror, found it
+was really true,--I was a mean creature, wholly absorbed in self.
+
+As an act of contrition, I ought to have gone out into the garden and
+eaten worms. But the mirror brought back my self-consciousness and I
+began to crawl back into my recently discarded skin--I began to be less
+loathesome to myself. For as soon as I felt interested or amused or
+curious over the fact that I had been really loathesome to myself I
+began to regain my equilibrium. _Now_, I and myself are on comparatively
+easy terms with one another. I am settled on the old swivel.... I take a
+lot of knocking off it and if shot off soon return.
+
+To-day, she was silent and melancholy but wonderfully fascinating. One
+day I am desperate and the next cold and apathetic. Am I in love? God
+knows! She came to the door to say "Good night," and I deliberately
+strangled my desire to say something.
+
+_March_ 9.
+
+In bed till 12.30 reading Bergson and the O.T.
+
+Over to the flat to supper. E---- was cold and silent. She spurned me.
+No wonder. I talked volubly and quite brilliantly with the definite
+purpose of showing up J----'s somnolence. I also pulled his leg. He
+hates me. No wonder. After supper, he went in to her studio and remained
+there alone with her while she worked. At 11 p.m. he was still there
+when I came away in a whirlwind of jealousy, regrets, and rage. G----
+said he was going to stay on until he saw "the blighter off the
+premises." Neither of us would go in to turn him out.
+
+I love her deeply and once my heart jumped when I thought I heard her
+coming into the room. But it was only P----. Did not see her again--even
+to say "Good-night."
+
+_March_ 10.
+
+Work in the evening in our bedroom--two poor miserable bachelors--H----
+reading Equity Law, a rug around his legs before an empty grate, while I
+am sitting at the table in top-coat, with collar up, and writing my
+_magnum opus,_ which is to bring me fame, fortune and--E----!
+
+H---- says that this morning I was putting on my shoes when he pointed
+out a large hole in the heel of my sock.
+
+"Damn! I shall have to wear boots," I said--at least he says I said it,
+and I am quite ready to believe him. Such unconsciousness of self is
+rare with me.
+
+_March_ 15.
+
+[At a public dinner at the Holborn Restaurant] J----replied to the toast
+of the Ladies. Feeble! H---- and I stood and had a silent toast to E----
+and N---- by just winking one eye at each other. He sat opposite me.
+
+If I had been asked to reply to this toast I should have said with the
+greatest gusto, something as follows,--
+
+[Here follows the imaginary speech in full, composed the same night
+before going to sleep.]
+
+Yet I am taken for a soft fool! My manner is soft, self-conscious, shy.
+What a lot of self-glorification I lose thereby! What a lot of
+self-torture I gain in its stead!
+
+_March_ 17.
+
+To-day went to the B.M. but did very little work. Thought over the
+matter carefully and decided to ask E---- to marry me. Relief to be able
+to decide. I was happy too.
+
+Yesterday P---- came in to us from E----'s studio and said,--
+
+"E---- sends her love."
+
+"To whom?" H---- inquired.
+
+"I don't know," P---- replied, smiling at me.
+
+_March_ 18.
+
+Had a long conversation with H---- last night. He says all E----
+intended to convey was that the quarrel was over.... I felt relieved,
+because I have no money, but--a large ambition. Then I am selfish, and
+have not forgotten that I want to spend my holidays in the Jura, and
+next year three weeks at the Plymouth Laboratory.
+
+_March_ 19.
+
+Went over to see E----. We had an awkward half-an-hour alone together.
+She was looking bewitching! I am plunging more and more into love. Had
+it on the tip of my tongue once. I am dreadfully fond of her.
+
+"I have a most profound gloom over me," I said.
+
+"Why don't you try and get rid of it?" she asked.
+
+"I can't until Zeus has pity and rolls away the clouds."
+
+_April_ 21.
+
+We are sitting up in our beds which are side by side in a room on the
+top story of a boarding house in ---- Road.
+
+It is 11.30 p.m. and I am leaning over one one side lighting the oil
+lamp so as to boil the kettle to make Ovaltine before going to sleep.
+
+"Whom have I seduced?" I screamed. "You rotter, don't you know that a
+dead passion full or regrets is as terrible as a dead body full of
+worms? There, I talk literature, my boy, if you were only Bos well
+enough to take it down.... As for K----, I shall never invite him to
+dinner again. He comes to me and whines that nobody loves him, and so I
+say, 'Oh! poor lad, never mind, if you're bored, why, come to my rooms
+of an evening and hear me talk--you'll have the time of your life.' And
+now he's cheeky."
+
+H. (sipping his drink and very much preoccupied with it) replied
+abstractedly, "When you die you'll go to Hell." (I liked his Homeric
+simplicity.) "You ought to be buried in a fireproof safe."
+
+Silence.
+
+H. (returning to the attack), "I hope she turns you down."
+
+"Thank you," I said.
+
+"As for P----," he resumed, "she's double-Dutch to me."
+
+"Go to the Berlitz School," I suggested, "and learn the language."
+
+"You bally fool.... All you do is to sit there and smile like a
+sanguinary cat. Nothing I say ever rouses you. I believe if I came to
+you and said, 'Here, Professor, is a Beetle with 99 legs that has lived
+on granite in the middle of the Sahara for 40 days and 40 nights,' you'd
+simply answer, 'Yes, and that reminds me I've forgotten to blow my
+nose.'"
+
+The two pyjamaed figures shake with laughing, the light goes out and the
+sanguinary conversation continues on similar lines until we fall asleep.
+
+_April_ 26.
+
+_Two Months' Sick Leave_
+
+In a horrible panic--the last few days--I believe I am developing
+locomotor ataxy. One leg, one arm, and my speech are affected, _i.e._
+the right side and my speech centre. M---- is serious.... I hope the
+disease, whatever it is, will be sufficiently lingering to enable me to
+complete my book.
+
+R---- is a dear man. I shall not easily forget his kindness during this
+terrible week.... Can the Fates have the audacity?... Who can say?
+
+_April_ 27.
+
+I believe there can be no doubt that I have had a slight partial
+paralysis of my right side (like Dad). I stutter a little in my speech
+when excited, I cannot write properly (look at this handwriting), and my
+right leg is rocky at the knee. My head swims.
+
+It is too inconceivably horrible to be buried in the Earth in such
+splendid spring weather. Who can tell me what is in store for me?...
+Life opens to me, I catch a glimpse of a vision, and the doors clang to
+again noiselessly. It is dark. That will be my history. Am developing a
+passionate belief in my book and a fever of haste to complete it before
+the _congA(C) dA(C)finitif_.
+
+_April_ 29.
+
+Saw M---- again, who said my symptoms were alarming certainly, but he
+was sure no definite diagnosis could be made.
+
+_April_ 30.
+
+Went with M---- to see a well-known nerve specialist--Dr. H----. He
+could find no symptoms of a definite disease, tho' he asked me
+suspiciously if I had ever been with women.
+
+Ordered two months' complete rest in the country. H---- chased me round
+his consulting room with a drum-stick, tapping my nerves and cunningly
+working my reflexes. Then he tickled the soles of my feet and pricked me
+with a pin--all of which I stood like a man. He wears a soft black hat,
+looks like a Quaker, and reads the _Verhandlungen d. Gesellschaft d.
+Nervenarzten_.
+
+M---- is religious and after I had disclosed my physique to him
+yesterday (for the 99th time) he remained on his knees by the couch in
+his consulting room (after working my reflexes) for a moment or two in
+the attitude of prayer. When the Doctor prays for you--better call in
+the undertaker. My epitaph "He played Ludo well." The game anyhow
+requires moral stamina--ask H----.
+
+_May_ 5.
+
+At R----. Mugged about all day. Put on a gramophone record--then crawled
+up into a corner of the large, empty drawing room and ate my heart out.
+Heart has a bitter taste--if it's your own.
+
+_May_ 6.
+
+Sat in the "morning room" feeling ill. In the chair opposite sat Aunt
+Fanny, aged 86, knitting. I listened to the click of her needles, while
+out in the garden a thrush sang, and there was a red sunset.
+
+_May_ 8.
+
+Before I left R----, A---- [My brother] had written to Uncle enclosing
+my doctor's letter. I don't know the details except that Dr. M----
+emphasised the seriousness and yet held out hope that two months' rest
+would allay the symptoms.
+
+_May_ 11.
+
+_At Home_
+
+I made some offensive remark to H---- whom I met in the street. This set
+him off.
+
+"You blighter, I hope you marry a loose woman. May your children be all
+bandy-legged and squint-eyed, may your teeth drop out, and your toes
+have bunions," and so on in his usual lengthy commination.
+
+I turned to the third man.
+
+"Bob--this!--after all I've done for that young man! I have even gone
+out of my Way to cultivate in him a taste for poetry--until he is now,
+in fact, quite wrapped up in it--indeed, so much so, that for a time he
+was nothing but a brown paper parcel labelled Poetry."
+
+H. (doggedly): "When are you going to die?"
+
+"That Master H----," I answered menacingly, "is on the knees of the
+Gods."
+
+H.: "I shan't believe you're dead till I see your tombstone. I shall
+then say to the Sexton, 'Is he really dead, then?' and the Sexton will
+say, 'Well, 'ee's buried onny way.'"
+
+Bob was not quite in sympathy with our boisterous spirits.
+
+_May_ 15.
+
+_Gardening_
+
+Sought out H---- as he was watering his petunias in the garden. He
+informed me he was going to London on Monday.
+
+H.: "Mother is coming too."
+
+B.: "Why?"
+
+H.: "Oh! I'm buying my kit--shirts and things. I sail at the beginning
+of July."
+
+B.: "I suppose shirts are difficult to buy. You wouldn't know what to do
+with one if you had one. Your mother will lead you by the hand into a
+shop and say, 'H----, dear, this is a shirt,' and you'll reply with
+pathos, 'Mother what are the wild shirts saying?'"
+
+H.: "You're a B.F." (goes on watering).
+
+"I wonder what you'd do if you were let loose in a big garden," I began.
+
+H.: "I should be as happy as a bird. I should hop about, chirrup and lay
+eggs. You should have seen my tomato plants last year--one was as tall
+as father."
+
+B.: "Now tell me of the Gooseberry as big as Mother."
+
+Mutual execrations. Then we grinned and cackled at each other, emitting
+weird and ferocious cachinnations. Several times a day in confidential,
+serious tones--after one of these explosions--we say, "I really believe
+we're mad." You never heard such extraordinary caterwaulings. Our snappy
+conversations are interrupted with them every minute or so!
+
+_Stagnancy_
+
+A stagnant day. Lay still in the Park all day with just sufficient
+energy to observe. The Park was almost empty. Every one but me at work.
+Nothing is more dreary than a pleasure ground on workdays. There was one
+man a little way off throwing a ball to a clever dog. Behind me on the
+path, some one came along wheeling a pram. I listened in a kind of coma
+to the scrunching of the gravel in the distance a long time after the
+pram was out of sight. Far away--the tinkle of Church bells in a village
+across the river, and, in front, the man still throwing the ball to his
+clever dog.
+
+_May_ 25.
+
+_Death_
+
+... I suppose the truth is I am at last broken to the idea of Death. Once
+it terrified me and once I hated it. But now it only annoys me. Having
+lived with the Bogey for so long, and broken bread with him so often, I
+am used to his ugliness, tho' his persistent attentions bore me. Why
+doesn't he do it and have done with me? Why this deference, why does he
+pass me everything but the poison? Why am I such an unconscionably long
+time dying?
+
+What embitters me is the humiliation of having to die, to have to be
+pouring out the precious juices of my life into the dull Earth, to be no
+longer conscious of what goes on, no longer moving abroad upon the Earth
+creating attraction and repulsions, pouring out one's ego in a stream.
+To think that the women I have loved will be marrying and forget, and
+that the men I have hated will continue on their way and forget I ever
+hated them--the ignominy of being dead! What voluble talker likes his
+mouth to be stopped with earth, who relishes the idea of the carrion
+worm mining in the seat of the intellect?
+
+_May_ 29.
+
+_Renunciation_
+
+Staying at the King's Hotel, ----. Giddiness very bad. Death seems
+unavoidable. A tumour on the brain?
+
+Coming down here in the train, sat in corner of the compartment, twined
+one leg around the other, rested my elbow on the window ledge, and gazed
+out helplessly at the exuberant green fields, green woods, and green
+hedgerows. The weather was perfect, the sun blazed down.
+
+Certainly, I was rather sorry for myself at the thought of leaving it
+all. But I girded up my loins and wrapped around me for a while the
+mantle of a nobler sentiment; _i.e._ I felt sorry for the others as
+well--for the two brown carters in the road ambling along with a timber
+waggon, for the two old maids in the same compartment with me knitting
+bedsocks, for the beautiful Swallows darting over the stream, for the
+rabbit that lopped into the fern just as we passed--they too were all
+leaving it.
+
+The extent of my benign compassion startled me--it was so unexpected.
+Perhaps for the first time in my life I forgot all about my own
+miserable ambitions--I forgave the successful, the time-servers, the
+self-satisfied, the overweening, the gracious and condescending--all, in
+fact, who hitherto have been thorns in my flesh and innocently enough
+have goaded me to still fiercer efforts to win thro'. "Poor people," I
+said. "Leave them alone. Let them be happy if they can." With a
+submissive heart, I was ready to sit down in the rows of this world's
+failures and never have thought one bitter word about success. To all
+those persons who in one way or another had foiled my purposes I
+extended a pardon with Olympian gravity, and, strangest of all, I could
+have melted such frosty moral rectitudes with a genuine interest in the
+careers of my struggling contemporaries. With perfect self-abnegation, I
+held out my hand to them and wished them all "God Speed."
+
+It was a strange metempsychosis. Yet of a truth it is no use being
+niggardly over our lives. We are all of us "shelling out." And we can
+afford to be generous, for we shall all--some early, some late--be
+bankrupt in the end. For my part, I've had a short and boisterous voyage
+and shan't be sorry to get into port. I give up all my plans, all my
+hopes, all my loves and enthusiasms without remonstrance. I renounce
+all--I myself am already really dead.
+
+_May_ 30.
+
+Last night the sea was as flat as a pavement, a pretty barque with all
+her sails out to catch the smallest puff of wind--the tiniest
+inspiration--was nevertheless without motion--a painted ship on a
+tapestry of violet. H---- Hill was an immense angular mass of indigo
+blue. Even rowing boats made little progress and the water came off the
+languid paddles in syrupy clots. Everything was utterly still, the air
+thick--like cottonwool to the touch and very stifling; vitality in
+living things leaked away under a sensuous lotus influence.
+Intermittently after the darkness had come, Bullpoint Lighthouse shone
+like the wink of a lascivious eye.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Pottering about all day on the Pier and Front, listening to other
+people's talk, catching snippets of conversation--not edifying. If there
+were seven wise men in the town, I would not save it. Damn the place!
+
+_May_ 31.
+
+... I espied her first in the distance and turned my head away quickly
+and looked out to sea. A moment after, I began to turn my head round
+again slowly with the cautiousness and air of suspicion of a Tortoise
+poking its head out from underneath his shell. I was terrified to
+discover that in the meantime she had come and sat down on the seat
+immediately behind me with her back to mine. We sat like this back to
+back for some time and I enjoyed the novel experience and the tension. A
+few years ago, the bare sight of her gave me palpitation of the heart,
+and, on the first occasion that I had the courage to stop to speak, I
+felt livid and the skin on my face twitched uncontrollably.
+
+Presently I got up and walked past--in the knowledge that she must now
+be conscious of my presence after a disappearance of three years. Later
+we met face to face and I broke the ice. She's a pretty girl.... So too
+is her sister.
+
+Few people, except my barber, know how amorous I am. He has to shave my
+sinuous lips.
+
+_June_ 3.
+
+Spent many dreadful hours cogitating whether to accept their invitation
+to dinner.... I wanted to go for several reasons. I wanted to see her in
+a home-setting for the first time, and I wanted to spend the evening
+with three pretty girls. I also had the idea of displaying myself to the
+scrutinising gaze of the family as the hero of the old romance: and of
+showing Her how much I had progressed since last we met and what a
+treasure she had lost.
+
+On the other hand, I was afraid that the invitation was only a casual
+one, I feared a snuffy reception, a frosty smile and a rigid hand. Could
+I go up and partake of meat at their board, among brothers and sisters
+taking me for an ogre of a jilt, and she herself perhaps opposite me
+making me blush perpetually to recall our one-time passionate kisses,
+our love letters and our execrable verses to each other! There seemed
+dreadful possibilities in such an adventure. Yet I badly wanted to
+experience the piquant situation.
+
+At 7 p.m., half an hour before I was due, decided on strong measures. I
+entered a pub and took a stiff whisky and soda, and then set off with a
+stout heart to take the icy family by storm--and if need be live down my
+evil reputation by my amiability and urbanity!
+
+I went--and of course everything passed off in the most normal manner.
+She is a very pretty girl--like velvet. Before dinner, we walked in the
+garden--and talked only of flowers.
+
+_June_ 4.
+
+On the Hill, this morning, felt the thrill of the news of my own Death:
+I mean I imagined I heard the words,--
+
+"You've heard the news about B----?"
+
+Second Voice: "No, what?"
+
+"He's dead."
+
+Silence.
+
+Won't all this seem piffle if I don't die after all! As an artist in
+life I _ought_ to die; it is the only artistic ending --and I ought to
+die now or the Third Act will fizzle out in a long doctor's bill.
+
+_June_ 5.
+
+_A New Pile in the Pier_
+
+Watched some men put a new pile in the pier. There was all the usual
+paraphernalia of chains, pulleys, cranes, and ropes, with a massive
+wooden pile swinging over the water at the end of a long wire hawser.
+Everything was in the massive style--even the men--very powerful men,
+slow, ruminative, silent men.
+
+Nothing very relevant could be gathered from casual remarks. The
+conversation was without exception monosyllabic: "Let go," or "Stand
+fast." But by close attention to certain obscure movements of the man on
+the ladder near the water's edge, it gradually came thro' to my
+consciousness that all these powerful, silent men were up against some
+bitter difficulty. I cannot say what it was. The burly monsters were
+silent about the matter.... In fact they appeared almost
+indifferent--and tired, oh! so very tired of the whole business. The
+attitude of the man nearest me was that for all he cared the pile could
+go on swinging in mid-air to the crack of Doom.
+
+They continued slow, laborious efforts to overcome the secret
+difficulty. But these gradually slackened and finally ceased. One
+massive man after another abandoned his post in order to lean over the
+rails and gaze like a mystic into the depths of the sea. No one spoke.
+No one saw anything not even in the depths of the sea. One spat, and
+with round, sad eyes contemplated the trajectory of his brown bolus (he
+had been chewing) in its descent into the water.
+
+The foreman, an original thinker, lit a cigarette, which relieved the
+tension. Then, slowly and with majesty, he turned on his heel, and
+walked away. With the sudden eclipse of the foreman's interest, the
+incident closed. I should have been scarcely surprised to find him
+behind the Harbour-master's Office playing "Shove-ha'penny" or skittles
+with the pile still swinging in mid-air.... After all it was only a
+bloody pile.
+
+_June_ 11.
+
+_Depression_
+
+Suffering from depression.... The melancholy fit fell very suddenly. All
+the colour went out of my life, the world was dirty gray. On the way
+back to my hotel caught sight of H----, jumping into a cab, after a
+visit to S---- Sands. But the sight of him aroused no desire in me to
+shout or wave. I merely wondered how on earth he could have spent a
+happy day at such a Sandy place.
+
+On arriving at ----, sank deeper into my morass. It suffocated me to
+find the old familiar landmarks coming into view ... the holiday-makers
+along the streets how I hated them--the Peg Top Hill how desolate--all
+as before--how dull. The very fact that they were all there as before in
+the morning nauseated me. The sea-coast here is magnificent, the town is
+pretty--I know that, of course. But all looked dreary and
+cheerless--just the sort of feeling one gets on entering an empty house
+with no fire on a winter's day and nowhere to sit down.... I felt as
+lonely and desolate as a man suddenly fallen from the clouds into an
+unknown town on the Antarctic Continent built of ice and inhabited by
+Penguins. Who are these people? I asked myself irritably. There perhaps
+on the other side of the street was my own brother. But I was not even
+faintly interested and told the cabman to drive on. The spray from the
+sea fogged my spectacles and made me weary.
+
+_June_ 14.
+
+_The Restlessness o,' the Sea_
+
+The restlessness of the sea acts as a soporific on jangled nerves. You
+gaze at its incessant activities, unwillingly at first because they
+distract your attention from your own cherished worries and griefs,--but
+later you watch with complete self-abandon--it wrenches you out of
+yourself--and eventually with a kind of stupid hypnotic stare.
+
+_Dr. Spurgeon_
+
+The day has been overcast, but to-night a soft breeze sprang up and
+swept the sky clear as softly as a mop. The sun coming out shone upon a
+white sail far out in the channel, scarcely another vessel hove in
+sight. The white sail glittered like a piece of silver paper whenever
+the mainsail swung round as the vessel tacked. Its solitariness and
+whiteness in a desert of marine blue attracted the attention and held it
+till at last I could look at nothing else. The sight of it--so clean and
+white and fair--set me yearning for all the rarest and most exquisite
+things my imagination could conjure up--a beautiful girl, with fair and
+sunburnt skin, brown eyes, dark eyebrows, and small pretty feet; a
+dewdrop in a violet's face; an orange-tip butterfly swinging on an umbel
+of a flower.
+
+The sail went on twinkling and began to exert an almost moral influence
+over me. It drew out all the good in me. I longed to follow it on white
+wings--an angel I suppose--to quit this husk of a body "as raiment put
+away," and pursue Truth and Beauty across the sea to the horizon, and
+beyond the horizon up the sky itself to its last tenuous confines, no
+doubt with a still small voice summoning me and the rest of the elect to
+an Agapemone, with Dr. Spurgeon at the door distributing tracts.
+
+I can scoff like this now. But at the time my exaltation was very real.
+My soul strained in the leash. I was full of a desire for unattainable
+spiritual beauty. I wanted something. But I don't know what I want.
+
+_June_ 16.
+
+_My Sense of Touch_
+
+My sense of touch has always been morbidly acute. I like to feel a
+cigarette locked in the extreme corner of my mouth. When I remove it
+from my mouth then I hold it probably up in the fork between two
+fingers. If I am waiting for a meal I finger the cool knives and forks.
+If I am in the country I plunge my hands with outspread fingers into a
+mass of large-topped grasses, then close my fingers, crush and
+decapitate the lot.
+
+_June_ 27.
+
+_Camping Out at S---- Sands_
+
+A brilliant summer day. Up early, breakfasted, and, clad in sweater and
+trousers, walked up the sands to the boathouse with bare feet.
+
+Everything was wonderful! I strode along over the level sands infatuated
+with the sheer ability to put one leg in front of the other and walk. I
+loved to feel the muscles of my thighs working, and to swing my arms in
+rhythm with the stride. The stiff breeze had blown the sky clear, and
+was rushing through my long hair, and bellowing into each ear. I strode
+as Alexander must have done!
+
+Then I stretched my whole length out along a flat plank on the sands,
+which was as dry as a bone and warm. There was not a soul on the sands.
+Everything was bare, clean, windswept. My plank had been washed clean
+and white. The sands--3 miles of it--were hard and purified, level. My
+eye raced along in every direction--there was nothing--not a bird or a
+man--to stop it. In that immense windswept space nothing was present
+save me and the wind and the sea--a flattering moment for the egotist.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the foot of the cliffs on the return journey met an old man gathering
+sticks. As he ambled along dropping sticks into a long sack he called
+out casually, "Do you believe in Jesus Christ?" in the tone of voice in
+which one would say, "I think we shall have some rain before night."
+"Aye, aye," came the answer without hesitation from a boy lying on his
+back in the sands a few yards distant, "and that He died to save me."
+
+Life is full of surprises like this. The only other sounds I have heard
+to-day were the Herring Gull's cackle. Your own gardener will one day
+look over his rake and give you the correct chemical formula for
+carbonic acid gas. I met a postman once reading Shelley as he walked his
+rounds.
+
+_June_ 28.
+
+I am writing this by the lamp in the cabin among the sandhills waiting
+for H---- to arrive from town with provisions. I wear a pair of bags, a
+dirty sweater, and go without hat or shoes and stockings. There is a
+"Deadwood Dick" atmosphere here. I'm a sort of bronco-breaker or rancher
+off duty writing home. In a minute I haven't the slightest doubt, H----
+will gallop into the compound, tether his colt and come in "raising
+Cain" for a belly-full of red meat.... If I am going to live after all
+(touch wood) I shall go abroad and be in the open.
+
+I eat greedily, am getting very sunburnt, am growing hairy (that means
+strength!), and utter portentous oaths. If I stayed here much longer I
+should grow a tail and climb trees.
+
+After a supper of fried eggs and fried bread done to a nicety, turned in
+at ten, and both of us lay warm and comfortable in bed, smoking
+cigarettes and listening to Hoffmann's Barcarolle on the gramophone. We
+put the lamp out, and it pleased us to watch the glow of each other's
+cigarettes in the dark.... Neither of us spoke.... Went to sleep at
+midnight. Awoke at sunrise to hear an Owl still hooting, a Lark singing,
+and several Jackdaws clattering on our tin roof with their claws as they
+walked.
+
+_July_ 1.
+
+_In London Again_
+
+Returned to London very depressed. Am not so well as I was three weeks
+ago. The sight of one eye is affected, and I am haunted by the
+possibility of blindness. Then I have a numb feeling on one side of my
+face, and my right arm is less mobile.
+
+Left darling Mother in a very weak state in bed, with neuritis and a
+weak heart. She cried when I said "Goodbye," and asked me to go to
+Church as often as I could, and to read a portion of Scripture every
+day. I promised. Then she added, "For Dad's sake;" just as if I would
+not do it for her. Poor dear, she suffers a deal of pain. She does not
+know how ill I am. I have not told her.
+
+_July_ 3.
+
+Back at work. A terrible day. Thoughts of suicide--a pistol.
+
+_July_ 8.
+
+I get thro' each day with the utmost difficulty. I have to wrestle with
+every minute. Each hour is a conquest. The three quarters of an hour at
+lunch comes as a Godsend. I look forward to it all the morning, I enter
+into it with joyful relief with no thought of the dreadful moment
+impending when I must return and re-enter my room. By being wise like
+this, I manage to husband my spirits and am relatively cheerful for one
+hour in the middle of each difficult day.
+
+_July_ 9.
+
+Several times I have gone to bed and hoped I should never wake up. Life
+grows daily more impossible. To-day I put a slide underneath the
+microscope and looked at it. It was like looking at something thro' the
+wrong end of a telescope. I sat with eye glued to the ocular, so as to
+keep up a pretence of work in case some one came in. My mind was
+occupied with quite different affairs. If one is pondering on Life and
+Death, it is a terrible task to have to study Mites.
+
+_July_ 10.
+
+Am doing no work at all.... I sit motionless in my chair and beat the
+devil's tattoo with my thumbs and think, think, think in the same
+horrible circle hour after hour. I am unable to work. I haven't the
+courage to. I've lost my nerve.
+
+At five I return "home" to the Boarding-house and get more desperate.
+
+Two old maids sat down to dinner to-night, one German youth (a
+lascivious, ranting, brainless creature), a lady typist (who takes drugs
+they say), a dipsomaniac (who has monthly bouts--H---- carried him
+upstairs and put him to bed the other night), two invertebrate
+violinists who play in the Covent Garden Orchestra, a colonial lady
+engaged in a bedroom intrigue with a man who sits at my table. What are
+these people to me? I hate them all. They know it and are offended.
+
+After dinner, put on my cap and rushed out anywhere to escape. Walked to
+the end of the street, not knowing where I was going or what doing.
+Stopped and stared with fixed eyes at the traffic in Kensington Road,
+undetermined what to do with myself and unable to make up my mind
+(volitional paralysis). Turned round, walked home, and went straight to
+bed 9 p.m., anxiously looking forward to to-morrow evening when I go to
+see her again, but at the same time wondering how on earth I am to get
+through to-morrow's round before the evening comes.... This is a
+hand-to-mouth existence. My own inner life is scorching up all outside
+interests. Zoology appears as a curious thing in a Bagdad bazaar. I sit
+in my room at the B.M. and play with it; I let it trickle thro' my
+fingers and roll away like a child playing with quicksilver.
+
+_July_ 11.
+
+Over to the flat. She was looking beautiful in a black dress, with a
+white silk blouse, and a Byron collar, negligently open in front as if
+a button had come out. She said I varied: sometimes I went up in her
+estimation, sometimes down; once I went down very low. I understood her
+to say I was now UP! Alleluia!
+
+_July_ 14.
+
+... It would take too long and I am too tired to write out all the
+varying phases of this day's life--all its impressions and petty
+miseries chasing one another across my consciousness or leap-frogging
+over my chest like gleeful fiends.[1]
+
+_July_ 21.
+
+Thoroughly enjoyed the journey up to town this morning. I secretly
+gloated over the fact that the train was dashing along over the rails to
+London bearing me and all the rest of the train's company upon their
+pursuits--wealth, fame, learning. I was inebriated with the speed,
+ferocity, and dash of living.... If the train had charged into the
+buffers I should have hung my head out of the window and cheered. If a
+man had got in my way, I'd have knocked him down. The wheels of the
+carriage were singing a lusty song in which I joined.
+
+_July_ 30.
+
+... We talked of men and women, and she said she thought men were
+neither angels nor devils but just men. I said I thought women were
+either angels or devils.
+
+"I am afraid to ask you which you think me."
+
+"You needn't," I said shortly.
+
+_August_ 9.
+
+Horribly upset with news from home. Mother is really ill. The Doctor
+fears serious nerve trouble and says she will always be an invalid. This
+is awful, poor dear! It's dreadful, and yet I have a tiny wish buried at
+the bottom of my heart that she may be removed early from us rather
+than linger in pain of body and mind. Especially do I hope she may not
+live to hear any grievous news of me.... What irony that she should lose
+the use of her right arm only two years after Dad's death from
+paralysis. It is cruel for it reminds her of Dad's illness.... What,
+too, would she think if she could have heard M----'s first words to me
+yesterday on one of my periodical visits to his consulting room, "Well,
+how's the _paralysis_?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the evening went over to see her. She was wearing a black silk gown
+and looked handsome.... She is always the same sombre, fascinating,
+lissom, soft-voiced She! She herself never changes.... What am I to do?
+I cannot give her up and yet I do not altogether wish to take her to my
+heart. It distresses me to know how to proceed. I am a wily fish.
+
+_August_ 10.
+
+Sat in the gardens with her. We sat facing the sun for a while until she
+was afraid of developing freckles and turned around, deliberately
+turning her back on good King Sol.... I said it was disrespectful.
+
+"Oh! he doesn't mind," she said. "He's a dear. He kissed me and said,
+'Turn round my dear if you like.'"
+
+Isn't she tantalising?
+
+I wanted to say sarcastically, "I wonder you let him kiss you," but
+there was a danger of the remark reviving the dead.
+
+_August_ 14.
+
+I tried my best, I've sought every loophole of escape, but I am quite
+unable to avoid the melancholy fact that her thumbs are--lamentable. I
+am genuinely upset about it for I like her. No one more than I would be
+more delighted if they were otherwise.... Poor dear! how I love her!
+That's why I'm so concerned about her thumbs.
+
+_August_ 21.
+
+A wire from A-came at 11.50 saying "Darling Mother passed peacefully
+away yesterday afternoon." ... Yesterday afternoon I was writing Zoology
+and all last night I slept soundly.... It was quite sudden. Caught the
+first train home.
+
+_August_ 23.
+
+The funeral.
+
+_August_ 31.
+
+Staying at the Hotel du Guesclin at Cancale near St. Malo with my dear
+A----.
+
+This flood of new experiences has knocked my diary habit out of gear. To
+be candid, I've forgotten all about myself. I've been too engrossed in
+living to stand the strain of setting down and in cold blood writing out
+all the things seen and heard. If I once began I should blow thro' these
+pages like a whirlwind.... But what a waste of time with M. le batelier
+waiting outside with his bisque to take us mackerel fishing!...
+
+_September_ 8.
+
+Returned to Southampton yesterday. Have spent the night at Okehampton in
+Devonshire _en route_ for T---- Rectory. This morning we hatched the
+ridiculous idea of hiring two little Dartmoor ponies and riding out from
+the town. A---- rides fairly well tho' he has not been astride a beast
+for years. As for me, I cannot ride at all! Yet I had the idea that I
+could easily manage a pretty little pony with brown eyes and a long
+tail. On going out into the Inn yard, was horrified--two horses
+saddled--one a large traction beast.... I climbed on to the smaller one,
+walked him out of the yard and down the road in good style without
+accident. Once in the country, however, my animal, the fresher of the
+two, insisted on a smart trot which shook me up a good deal so that I
+hardly kept my seat. This eventually so annoyed the animal that it
+began to fidget and zigzag across the road--no doubt preparing to break
+away at a stretch gallop when once it had rid itself of the
+incomprehensible pair of legs across its back.
+
+I got off quickly and swopped horses with A----.
+
+Walked him most of the way, while A---- cantered forward and back to
+cheer me on. Ultimately however this beast, too, got sick of walking and
+began to trot. For a time I stood this well and began to rise in my
+saddle quite nicely. After two miles, horrible soreness supervened, and
+I had to get off--very carefully, with a funny feeling in my legs--even
+looked down at them to assure myself they were not bandy! In doing so,
+the horse--this traction monster--stepped on my toe and I swore.
+
+On nearing the village, L---- arrived, riding A----'s animal and holding
+his sides for laughing at me as I crawled along holding the carthorse by
+the bridle. Got on again and rode into the Rectory grounds in fine style
+like a dashing cavalier, every one jeering at me from the lawn.
+
+_September_ 28.
+
+Having lived on this planet now for the space of 24 years, I can claim
+with some cogency that I am qualified to express some sort of opinion
+about it. I therefore hereby record that I find myself in an absorbingly
+interesting place where I live, move and have my being, dominated by one
+monstrous feature above all others--the mystery of it all! Everything is
+so astonishing, my own existence so incredible!
+
+Nothing explains itself. Every one is dumb. It is like walking about at
+a masqued Ball.... Even I myself am a mystery to me. How wonderful and
+frightening that is--to feel yourself--your innermost and most
+substantial possession to be a mystery, incomprehensible. I look at
+myself in the mirror and mock at myself. On some days I am to myself as
+strange and unfamiliar as a Pterodactyl. There is a certain grim humour
+in finding myself here possessed of a perfectly arbitrary arrangement
+of lineaments when I never asked to be here and never selected my own
+attributes. To the dignity of a human being it seems like a coarse
+practical joke.... My own freakish physique is certainly a joke.
+
+_October_ 4.
+
+_In London Again_
+
+K---- comes in from her dancing class, nods to me, hugs her sister
+around the neck and says,--
+
+"Oh! you dear thing, you've got a cold."
+
+"I shouldn't do that," I remark, green-eyed, "she's in an awful wax
+to-night."
+
+She: "Oh! I don't mind K----!"
+
+(Laughter!)
+
+_October_ 8.
+
+Heard a knock at the door last night, and, thinking it was R----, I
+unbolted it and let in a tramp who at once asked God to bless me and
+crown all my sorrow with joy. An amiable fellow to be sure--so I gave
+him some coppers and he at once repeated with wonderful fervour, "God
+bless you, sir."
+
+"I wish He would," I answered, "I have a horrible cold."
+
+"Ah, I know, I gets it myself and the hinfluenza--have you had that,
+sir?"
+
+In ten minutes I should have told him all my personal history. But he
+was thirsting for a drink and went off quickly and left me with my heart
+unburthened. London is a lonely place.
+
+To-day journeyed to--where I gave evidence as an _expert_ in Economic
+Entomology at the County Court in a case concerning damage to furniture
+by mites for which I am paid AL8 8s. fee and expenses and travelled first
+class. What irony! (See June 30, 1911.)
+
+_October_ 11.
+
+I may be a weak, maundering, vacillating fool but I cannot help loving
+her on one day, being indifferent the next and on some occasions even
+disliking her.... To-day she was charming, with a certain warm glossy
+perfection on her face and hair.... And she loves me--I could swear it.
+"And when a woman woos ..." etc. How difficult for a vain and lonely man
+to resist her. She tells me many times in many dainty ways that she
+loves me without so much as stopping her work to talk.
+
+I wish I were permanently and irresistibly enamoured. I want a
+_bouleversement_....
+
+_October_ 13.
+
+Went to see a Harley Street oculist about the sight of one eye, which
+has caused a lot of trouble and worry of late and continuously haunted
+me with the possibility of blindness. At times, I see men as trees
+walking and print becomes hopelessly blurred.
+
+The Specialist however is reassuring. The eye is healthy --no
+neuritis--but the adjustment muscles have been thrown out of gear by the
+nervous troubles of last spring.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Was ever man more sorely tempted? Here am I lonely and uncomfortable in
+diggings with a heart like nascent oxygen.... Shall I? Yes, but.... And
+I have neither health nor wealth.
+
+_October_ 22.
+
+_The British Museum Reading Room_
+
+I saw it for the first time to-day! Gadzooks!! This is the only fit
+ejaculation to express my amazement! It's a pagan temple with the Gods
+in the middle and all around, various obscure dark figures prostrating
+themselves in worship.
+
+For any one who is not simply a Sheep or Cow or whose nervous
+organisation is a degree more sensitive than the village blacksmith's,
+it is a besetting peril to his peace of mind to be constantly moving
+about an independent being, with loves and hates, and a separate
+identity among other separate identities, who prowl and prowl around
+like the hosts of Midian--ready to snarl, fight, seize you, bore you,
+exasperate you, to arouse all your passions, call up all the worst from
+the depths where they have lain hidden.... A day spent among my fellows
+goads me to a frenzy by the evening. I am no longer fit for human
+companionship. People string me up to concert pitch. I develop
+suspicions of one that he is prying, of another that he patronises.
+Others make me horribly anxious to stand well in their eyes and horribly
+curious to know what they think of me. Others I hate and loathe--for no
+particular reason. There is a man I am acquainted with concerning whom I
+know nothing at all. He may be Jew, Gentile, Socinian, Pre-adamite,
+Anabaptist, Rosicrucian--I don't know, and I don't care, for I hate him.
+I should like to smash his face in. I don't know why.... In the whole
+course of our tenuous acquaintance we have spoken scarce a dozen words
+to each other. Yet I should like to blow up his face with dynamite. If I
+had AL200 a year private income I should be in wait for him to-morrow
+round a corner and land him one--just to indicate my economic
+independence. He would call for the police and the policeman--discerning
+creature--on arrival, would surely say, "With a face like that, I'm not
+surprised."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+R---- said to me this morning, "Well, have you heard?" with an
+exuberance of curiosity that made my blood boil--he was referring to my
+Essay still at the bar of the opinion of the Editor of the _English
+Review_. "You beast," I snapped and walked off.
+
+R---- shouted with laughter for he realizes my anger with him is only
+semi-serious: it is meant and not meant: meant, for it is justified by
+the facts; not meant, for I can't be too serious over anything _au
+fond_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of all the grim and ridiculous odds and ends of chance that Fortune has
+rolled up to my feet, my friendship with a man like B---- is the
+grimmest and most ridiculous. He is a bachelor of sixty, rather
+good-looking, of powerful physique and a faultless constitution.... His
+ignorance is colossal and he once asked whether Australia, for example,
+tho' surrounded by water, is not connected up with other land underneath
+the sea. Being himself a child in intelligence (tho' commercially
+cunning), he has a great respect for my brains. Being himself a strong
+man, he views my ill-health with much contempt. His private opinion is
+that I am in consumption. When asked once by a lady if I were not going
+to be "a great man" one day, he replied, "Yes--if he lives." I ought to
+walk six miles a day, drink a bottle of stout with my dinner, and eat
+plenty of _onions_. His belief in the curative properties of onions is
+strong as death....
+
+His system of prophylaxis may be quickly summarised,--
+
+(1) Hot whisky _ad lib_. and off to bed.
+
+(2) A woman.
+
+These two sterling preventives he has often urged upon me at the same
+time tipping out a quantity of anathemas on doctors and physic....
+
+He is a cynic. He scoffs at the medical profession, the Law, the Church,
+the Press. Every man is guilty until he is proved innocent. The Premier
+is an unscrupulous character, the Bishop a salacious humbug. No doctor
+will cure, for it pays him to keep you ill. Every clergyman puts the
+Sunday-school teacher in the family way. His mouth is permanently
+distorted by cynicism.
+
+He is vain and believes all women are in love with him. When playing the
+Gallant, he turns on a special voice, wears white spats, and looks like
+a Newmarket "Crook."
+
+"I lost my 'bus," a girl says to him. "Lost your bust," he answers, in
+broad Scotch. "I can't see that you've done that." ... His sexual career
+has been a remarkable one, he claiming to have brought many women to
+bed, and actually to have lain with women of almost all European
+nationalities, for he has been a great traveller....
+
+This man is my devoted friend!... And truth to tell I get on with him
+better than I do with most people. I like his gamey flavour, his utter
+absence of self-consciousness, and his doggy loyalty to myself--his
+weaker brother. He may be depraved in his habits, coarse in his
+language, boorish in his manners, ludicrous in the wrongness of all his
+views. But I like him just because he is so hopeless. I get on with him
+because it is so impossible to reclaim him--my missionary spirit is not
+intrigued. If he only dabbled in vice (for an experiment), if he had
+pale, watery ideas about current literature--if--to use his own
+favourite epithet--he were _genteel_, I should quarrel.
+
+_October_ 30.
+
+Having developed a passion for a piece of sculpture by R. Boeltzig
+called the Reifenwerferin--the most beautiful figure of a woman. I am
+already devoted to Rodin's "Kiss" and have a photo of it framed in my
+bedroom. Have written to Bruciani's.
+
+I suspect that my growing appreciation of the plastic art is with me
+only distilled sensuality. I enjoy my morning bath for the same reason.
+My bath is a daily baptism. I revel in the pleasure of the pain of the
+cold water. I whistle gleefully because I am clean and cool and nude
+early in the morning with the sun still low, before the day has been
+stained by clothes, dirt, pain, exasperation, death.... How I love
+myself as I rub myself down!--the cool, pink skin--I could eat it! I
+want to be all day in a cold bath to enjoy the pain of mortifying the
+flesh--it is so beautiful, so soft, so inscrutabl--if I cut out chunks
+of it, it would only bleed.
+
+_November_ 8.
+
+The other morning R---- said hyperbolically that he hadn't slept all
+night for fear that, before he had time to put an arresting hand on my
+shoulder and say "Don't," I might have gone and become "Entangled." ...
+
+... No, I'm as firm as a rock, my dear. But in imagination the affair
+was continued as follows,--
+
+She: "I am fond of you, you know."
+
+He: "I wish you wouldn't say these things to me--they're quite
+embarrassing."
+
+She: "Oh! my dear, I'm not serious, you know--you're such a vain young
+man."
+
+He: "Well, it's equally embarrassing any way."
+
+She: "Then I _am_ serious."
+
+Tears.
+
+I say: "I wish you would take me only for what I am--a blackguard with
+no good intentions, yet no very evil ones--but still a blackguard, whom
+you seem to find has engaging manners."
+
+I breathe freely hoping to have escaped this terrible temptation and
+turn to go. But she, looking up smiling thro' a curtain of wet
+eyelashes, asks,--
+
+"Won't the blackguard stop a little longer?" In a moment my earth works,
+redoubts, and bastions fall down, I rush forward impetuously into her
+arms shouting, "I _will_, I _will_, I will as long as for eternity."
+
+(Curtain.)
+
+I dramatised this little picture and much more last night before going
+to sleep when I was in a fever. I should succumb at once to the first
+really skilful coquette.
+
+_November_ 9.
+
+_Ludo_
+
+We played Ludo together this evening and she won 2s. 6d. Handsomely
+gowned in black and wearing black ornaments, she sat with me in the
+lamplight on the sofa in the Morris Room, with the Ludo board between us
+placed on a large green cushion. Her face was white as parchment and
+her hair seemed an ebony black. I lolled in the opposite corner, a thin,
+elongated youth, with fair hair all stivvered up, dressed in a
+light-brown lounge suit with a good trouser crease, a soft linen collar
+and--a red tie! Between us, on its green cushion the Ludo board with its
+brilliantly coloured squares:--all of it set before a background formed
+by the straight-backed, rectangular, settle-like sofa, with a charming
+covering which went with the rest of the scheme.
+
+"Rather decorative,"---- remarked in an audible voice, turning her head
+on one side and quizzing. I can well believe it was. _She_ looked wholly
+admirable.
+
+_November_ 21.
+
+_My Nightmare_
+
+Can't get rid of my cough. I have so many things to do--I am living in a
+fever of haste to get them done. Yet this cough hinders me. There is
+always something which drags me back from the achievement of my desires.
+It's like a nightmare; I see myself struggling violently to escape from
+a monster which draws continuously nearer, until his shadow falls across
+my path, when I begin to run and find my legs tied, etc. The only
+difference is that mine is a nightmare from which I never wake up. The
+haven of successful accomplishment remains as far off as ever. Oh! make
+haste.
+
+_November_ 29.
+
+The _English Review_ has returned my Essay!--This is a keen
+disappointment to me. "I wish I could use this, but I am really too
+full," the Editor writes. To be faintly encouraged and delicately
+rejected--why I prefer the printed form.
+
+_December_ 1.
+
+_More Irony_
+
+Renewed my cold--I do nothing all day but blow my nose, cough, and curse
+Austin Harrison.
+
+M---- thinks the lungs are all right. "There is nothing there, I think,"
+said he, this morning. Alleluia! I've had visions of consumption for
+weeks past and M---- himself has been expecting it. I always just escape:
+I always almost get something, do something, go somewhere, I have
+dabbled in a variety of diseases, but never got one downright[2]--but
+only enough to make me feel horribly unfit and very miserable without
+the consolation of being able to regard myself as the heroic victim of
+some incurable disorder. Instead of being Stevenson with tuberculosis,
+I've only been Jones with dyspepsia. So, too, in other directions, big
+events have always just missed me: by Herculean efforts I succeeded in
+giving up newspaper journalism and breaking thro' that steel
+environment--but only to become an Entomologist! I once achieved success
+in an Essay in the _Academy_, which attracted attention--a debut,
+however, that never developed. I had not quite arrived. It is always
+_not quite_.
+
+Yesterday, I received a state visit from the Editor of the _Furniture
+Record_ seeking advice on how to eradicate mites from upholstering! I
+received him ironically--but little did he understand.
+
+I shot up like a ball on a bagatelle board all steamy into zoology (my
+once beloved science) but at once rolled dead into the very low hole of
+Economic Entomology! Curse.... Why can't I either have a first-rate
+disease or be a first-rate zoologist?
+
+Now just think what a much better figure I should have cut, from the
+artistic view point, had I remained a newspaper reporter who had taught
+himself prodigious embryology out of F.M. Balfour's Textbook, who had
+cut sections of fowls' eggs and newt embryos with a hand microtome, who
+had passionately dissected out the hidden, internal anatomy of a great
+variety of animals, who could recite Wiedersheim's _Comparative Anatomy
+of Vertebrates_ and patter off the difference between a nephridium and a
+cA"lomic duct without turning a hair--or the phylogenetic history (how
+absorbing!) of the kidney--pronephros, mesonephros and metanephros and
+all the ducts!... All this, over now and wasted. My hardly-won
+knowledge wrenched away is never brought into use--it lies piled up in
+my brain rotting. I could have become a first-rate comparative
+anatomist.
+
+_December_ 3.
+
+Cold better. So back at work--gauging ale at Dunfermline as R---- puts
+it.
+
+_December_ 9.
+
+In the evening found it quite impossible to stay in the house any
+longer: some vague fear drove me out. I was alarmed to be alone or to be
+still. It is my cough, I think.
+
+Had two glasses of port at the Kensington Hotel, conversed with the
+barmaid, and then came home.
+
+_December_ 10.
+
+"Don't be an old fossil," she said to me to-night, irrelevantly.
+
+"_A propos_ of what?" I inquired.
+
+"Mother, here's W---- proposing to E----! Do come," cried ----, with
+intent to confuse. I laughed heartlessly.
+
+Dear, dear, where will it all end? It's a sad business when you fall in
+love with a girl you don't like.
+
+_December_ 26.
+
+Spent a romping day at the Flat. Kissed her sister twice under the
+mistletoe, and in the evening went to a cinema. After supper made a mock
+heroic speech and left hilarious.
+
+
+[1] "The life of the Soul is different; there is nothing more changing,
+more varied, more restless ... to describe the incidents of one hour
+would require an eternity."--_Journal of EugA(C)nie de GuA(C)rin_.
+
+[2] See entry for November 27, 1915.
+
+
+
+
+1914
+
+
+_February_ 4.
+
+... Finally and in conclusion I have fallen ill again, have again
+resumed my periodical visits to the Doctor, and am swallowing his
+rat-poison in a blind faith as aforetime. In fact, I am in London,
+leading the same solitary life, seeing no one, talking to no one, and
+daily struggling with this demon of ill-health. Can no one exorcise him?
+The sight of _both_ my eyes is affected now. Blindness?
+
+B---- continues whoring, drinking, sneering. R---- as usual, devoid of
+emotion, cold, passionless, Shavian, and self-absorbed, still titillates
+his mind with etching, sociology, music, etc., and I have at last ceased
+to bore him with what he probably calls the febrile utterances of an
+overwrought mind.
+
+Such is my world! Oh! I forgot--on the floor below me is a corpse--that
+of an old gentleman who passed away suddenly in the night. In the small
+hours, the landlady went for the Doctor over the way, but he refused to
+come, saying the old man was too aged. So the poor gentleman died
+alone--in this rat hole of a place.
+
+_February_ 7.
+
+Intending to buy my usual 3d. packet of Goldflakes, entered a
+tobacconist's in Piccadilly, but once inside surprised to find myself in
+a classy west-end establishment, which frightened my flabby nature into
+buying De Reszke's instead. I hadn't the courage to face the aristocrat
+behind the counter with a request for Goldflakes--probably not stocked.
+What would he think of me? Besides, I shrank from letting him see I was
+not perfectly well-to-do.
+
+_February_ 14.
+
+I wonder what this year has in store for me? The first twenty-four years
+of my life have hunted me up and down the keyboard--I have been right to
+the top and also to the bottom--very happy and very miserable. Yet I
+prefer the life that is a hunt and an adventure. I don't really mind
+being chased like this. I almost thrive on the excitement. If I knew
+always where to look with any degree of certainty for my next day's life
+I should yawn! "What if to-day be sweet," I say, and never look ahead.
+To me, next week is next century.
+
+The danger and uncertainty of my life make me cherish and hug closely to
+my heart various little projects that otherwise would seem unworthy. I
+work at them quickly, frantically, sometimes, afraid to whisper to a
+living soul what expectations I dare to harbour in my heart. What if
+_now_ the end be near? Not a word! Let me go onward.
+
+_February_ 15.
+
+To-day I have reviewed the situation carefully, exhaustively. I have
+peered into every aspect of my life and achievements and everything I
+have seen nauseates me. I can find no ray of comfort in anything I have
+done or in anything I might do. My life seems to have been a wilderness
+of futile endeavour. I started wrong from the very beginning. At the
+moment of my birth I was coming into the world in the wrong place and
+under wrong conditions. Why seek to overcome such colossal initial
+disadvantages? In this mood I found fault with my parentage, my
+inheritance, all my mental and physical disabilities....
+
+This must be a form of incipient insanity. Even as a boy, I can remember
+being preternaturally absorbed in myself and preternaturally
+discontented. I was accustomed to exhaust my mind by the most harassing
+cross-examinations--no Counsel at the Bar ever treated a witness more
+mercilessly. After a day of this sort of thing, when silently and
+morbidly in every spare moment, at meals, in school, or on a walk, I
+would incessantly ply the questions, "What is the ultimate value of your
+work, _cui bono_?" etc. I went to bed in the evening with a feeling of
+hopelessness and dissatisfaction--haggard with considerations and
+reconsiderations of my outlook, my talent, my character, my future. In
+bed, I tossed from side to side, mentally exhausted with my efforts to
+obtain some satisfying conclusion--always hopeful, determined to the
+last to be able to square up my little affairs before going to sleep.
+But out of this mazy, vertiginous mass of thinking no satisfaction ever
+came. _Now_, I thought--or the _next moment_--or as soon as I review and
+revise myself in this or in that aspect, I shall be content. And so I
+went on, tearing down and reforming, revising and reviewing, till
+finally from sheer exhaustion and very unhappy I fell asleep.
+
+Next morning I was all right.
+
+_February_ 20.
+
+Am feeling very unwell. My ill-health, my isolation, baulked ambitions,
+and daily breadwinning all conspire to bring me down. The idea of a
+pistol and the end of it grows on me day by day.
+
+_February_ 21.
+
+After four days of the most profound depression of spirits, bitterness,
+self-distrust, despair, I emerged from the cloud to-day quite suddenly
+(probably the arsenic and strychnine begins to take effect) and walked
+up Exhibition Road with the intention of visiting the Science Museum
+Library so as to refer to Schafer's _Essentials of Histology_ (I have to
+watch myself carefully so that I may act _at once_ as soon as the
+balance of mind is restored). In the lobby was a woman screaming as if
+in pain, with a passer-by at her side saying sternly, "What is the
+matter with you?" as if she were making herself ridiculous by suffering
+pain in public.
+
+I passed by quickly, pretending not to notice lest--after all--I should
+be done out of my _Essentials of Histology._ Even in the Library I very
+nearly let the opportunity slide by picking up a book on squaring the
+circle, the preface and introduction of which I was forced to read.
+
+_March_ 4.
+
+_The Entomological Society_
+
+There were a great many Scarabees present who exhibited to one another
+poor little pinned insects in collecting-boxes ... It was really a
+one-man show, Prof. Poulton, a man of very considerable scientific
+attainments, being present, and shouting with a raucous voice in a way
+that must have scared some of the timid, unassuming collectors of our
+country's butterflies and moths. Like a great powerful sheep-dog, he got
+up and barked, "Mendelian characters," or "Germ plasm," what time the
+obedient flock ran together and bleated a pitiful applause. I suppose,
+having frequently heard these and similar phrases fall from the lips of
+the great man at these reunions, they have come to regard them as
+symbols of a ritual which they think it pious to accept without any
+question. So every time the Professor says, "Allelomorph," or some such
+phrase, they cross themselves and never venture to ask him what the hell
+it is all about.
+
+_March_ 7.
+
+_A Scots Fir_
+
+Have been feeling very "down" of late, but yesterday I saw a fine Scots
+Fir by the roadside--tall, erect, as straight as a Parthenon pillar. The
+sight of it restored my courage. It had a tonic effect. Quite
+unconsciously I pulled my shoulders back and walked ahead with renewed
+vows never to flinch again. It is a noble tree. It has strength as a
+giant, and a giant's height, and yet kindly withal, the branches
+drooping down graciously towards you--like a kind giant extending its
+hands to a child.
+
+_March_ 22.
+
+_A Stagnant Day_
+
+Went to bed late last night so I slept on soundly till 9 a.m. Went down
+to the bath-room, but found the door was shut, so went back to my
+bedroom again, lay down and dosed a while, thinking of nothing in
+particular. Went down again--door still locked--swore--returned once
+more to my room and reclined on the bed, with door open, so that I could
+hear as soon as the bath-room door opened.... Rang the bell, and
+Miss--brought up a jug of hot water to shave with, and a tumbler of hot
+water to drink (for my dyspepsia). She, on being interrogated, said
+there was some one in the bath-room. I said I wanted a bath too, so as
+she passed on her way down she shouted, "Hurry up, Mr. Barbellion wants
+a bath as well." Her footsteps then died away as she descended lower
+into the basement, where the family lives, sleeps, and cooks our food.
+
+At length, hearing the door open, I ejaculated, "the Lord be praised,"
+rushed down, entered the bath-room and secured it from further
+intruders. I observed that Miss ---- senior had been bathing her members,
+and that the bath, tho' empty, was covered inside with patches of soap
+--unutterably black! Oh! Miss ----!
+
+Dressed leisurely and breakfasted. When the table was cleared wrote a
+portion of my essay on _Spallanzani_....
+
+Then, being giddy and tired, rang for dinner. Miss ---- laid the table.
+She looked very clean. I said, "Good-morning," and she suitably replied,
+and I went on reading, the _Winning Post_. Felt too slack to be amiable.
+Next time she came in, I said as pleasantly as I could, "Is it all
+ready?" and being informed proceeded to eat forthwith.
+
+In the afternoon, took a 'bus to Richmond. No room outside, so had to go
+inside--curse--and sit opposite a row--curse again--of fat, ugly,
+elderly women, all off to visit their married daughters, the usual
+Sunday jaunt. At Hammersmith got on the outside, and at Turnham Green
+was caught in a hail storm. Very cold all of a sudden, so got off and
+took shelter in the doorway of a shop, which was of course closed, the
+day being Sunday. Rain, wind, and hail continued for some while, as I
+gazed at the wet, almost empty street, thinking, re-thinking and
+thinking over again the same thought, viz., that the 'bus ride along
+this route was exceptionally cheap--probably because of competition with
+the trams.
+
+The next 'bus took me to Richmond. Two young girls sat in front, and
+kept looking back to know if I was "game." I looked _through_ them.
+Walked in the Park just conscious of the singing of Larks and the
+chatter of Jays, but harassed mentally by the question, "To whom shall I
+send my essay, when finished?" To shelter from the rain sat under an oak
+where four youths joined me and said, "Worse luck," and "Not half," and
+smoked cigarettes. They gossipped and giggled like girls, put their arms
+around each other's necks. At the dinner last night, they said, they had
+Duck and Tomato Soup and Beeswax ("Beesley, you know, the chap that goes
+about with Smith a lot") wore a fancy waistcoat with a dinner jacket.
+When I got up to move on, they became convulsed with laughter. I
+scowled.
+
+Had tea in the Pagoda tea-rooms, dry toast and brown bread and butter.
+Two young men opposite me were quietly playing the fool.
+
+"Hold my hand," one said audibly enough for two lovers to hear,
+comfortably settled up in a corner. Even at a side view I could see them
+kissing each other in between mouthfuls of bread and butter and jam.
+
+On rising to go, one of the two hilarious youths removed my cap and
+playfully placed it on top of the bowler which his friend was wearing.
+
+"My cap, I think," I said sharply, and the young man apologised with a
+splutter. I glared like a kill-joy of sixty.
+
+On the 'bus, coming home, thro' streets full of motor traffic and all
+available space plastered with advertisements that screamed at you, I
+espied in front three pretty girls, who gave me the "Glad Eye." One had
+a deep, musical voice, and kept on using it, one of the others a pretty
+ankle and kept on showing it.
+
+At Kew, two Italians came aboard, one of whom went out of his way to sit
+among the girls. He sat level with them, and kept turning his head
+around, giving them a sweeping glance as he did so, to shout remarks in
+Italian to his friend behind. He thought the girls were prostitutes, I
+think, and he may have been right. I was on the seat behind this man and
+for want of anything better to do, studied his face minutely. In short,
+it was fat, round, and greasy. He wore black moustachios with curly
+ends, his eyes were dark shining, bulgy, and around his neck was wrapped
+a scarf inside a dirty linen collar, as if he had a sore throat. I sat
+behind him and hated him steadily, perseveringly.
+
+At Hammersmith the three girls got off, and the bulgy-eyed Italian
+watched them go with lascivious eyes, looking over the rail and down at
+them on the pavement--still interested. I looked down too. They crossed
+the road in front of us and disappeared.
+
+Came home and here I am writing this. This is the content of to-day's
+consciousness. This is about all I have thought, said, or done, or felt.
+A stagnant day!
+
+_March_ 26.
+
+Home with a bad influenza cold. In a deplorable condition. The best I
+could do was to sit by the fire and read newspapers one by one from the
+first page to the last till the reading became mechanical. I found
+myself reading an account of the Lincoln Handicap and a column article
+on Kleptomania, while advertisements of new books were devoured with
+relish as delicacies. My mind became a morass of current Divorce Court
+News, Society Gossip--"if Sir A. goes Romeward, if Miss B. sings
+true"--and advertisements. I went on reading because I was afraid to be
+alone with myself.
+
+B---- arrived at tea and after saying he felt very "pin-eyed" swallowed
+a glass of Bols gin--the Gin of Antony Bols--and recovered sufficiently
+to inform me delightedly that he had just won AL50. He told me all the
+story; meanwhile, I, tired of wiping and blowing my nose, sat in the
+dirty armchair hunched up with elbows on knees and let it drip on to the
+dirty carpet. B----, of course, noticed nothing, which was fortunate.
+
+Some kinds of damned fool would have been kindly and sympathetic. I must
+say I like old B----. I like him for his simpleness and utter absence of
+self-consciousness, which make him as charming as a child. Moreover, he
+often makes me a present of invaluable turf tips. Of course, he is a
+liar, but his lies are harmless and on his mouth like milk on an
+infant's. My own lies are much more dangerous. And when you are ill, to
+be treated as tho' you were well is good for hypochondriacs.
+
+_April_ 15.
+
+H----'s wedding. Five minutes before time, I am told I made a dramatic
+entry into the church clad in an audaciously light pair of Cashmere
+trousers, lemon-coloured gloves, with top hat and cane. The latter
+upset the respectability frightfully--it is not _comme il faut_.
+
+_April_ 16.
+
+... If I am to admit the facts they are that I eagerly anticipate love,
+look everywhere for it, long for it, am unhappy without it. She
+fascinates me--admitted. I could, if I would, surrender myself. Her
+affection makes me long to do it. I am sick of living by myself. I am
+frightened of myself. My life is miserable alone, and sometimes
+desperately miserable when I long for a little sympathy to be close at
+hand.
+
+I have often tried to persuade R---- to share a flat with me, because I
+don't really wish to marry. I struggle against the idea, I am egotist
+enough to wish to shirk the responsibilities.
+
+But then I am a ridiculously romantic creature With a wonderful ideal of
+a woman I shall never meet or if I do she won't want me--"that (wholly)
+impossible She." R---- in a flat with me would partly solve my
+difficulties. I don't love her enough for marriage. Mine must be a grand
+passion, a _bouleversement_--for I am capable of it.
+
+_April_ 17.
+
+_A Humble Confession_
+
+The Hon. ----, son and heir of Lord ----, to-day invited me to lunch
+with him in ---- Square. He's a handsome youth of twenty-five, with fair
+hair and blue eyes.... and O! such an aristocrat. Good Lord.
+
+But to continue: the receipt of so unexpected an invitation from so
+glorious a young gentleman at first gave me palpitation of the heart. I
+was so surprised that I scarcely had enough presence of mind to listen
+to the rest of his remarks and later, it was only with the greatest
+difficulty that I could recall the place where we arranged to meet. His
+remarks, too, are not easy to follow, as he talks in a stenographic,
+Alfred-Jingle-like manner, jerking out disjected members of sentences,
+and leaving you to make the best of them or else to Hell with you--by
+the Lord, I speak English, don't I? If I said, "I beg your pardon," he
+jerked again, and left me often equally unenlightened.
+
+On arriving at his home, the first thing he did was to shout down the
+stairs to the basement: "Elsie, Elsie," while I gazed with awe at a
+parcel on the hall table addressed to "Lord ----." Before lunch we sat
+in his little room and talked about ----, but I was still quite unable
+to regain my self-composure. I couldn't for the life of me forget that
+here was I lunching with Lord ----'s son, on equal terms, with mutual
+interests, that his sisters perhaps would come in directly or even the
+noble Lord himself. I felt like a scared hare. How should I address a
+peer of the realm? I kept trying to remember and every now and then for
+some unaccountable reason my mind travelled into ----shire and I saw
+Auntie C---- serving out tea and sugar over the counter of the baker's
+shop in the little village. I luxuriated in the contrast, tho' I am not
+at all inclined to be a snob.
+
+He next offered me a cigarette, which I took and lit. It was a Turkish
+cigarette with one end plugged up with cotton-wool--to absorb the
+nicotine--a, thing I've never seen before. I was so flurried at the time
+that I did not notice this and lit the wrong end. With perfect ease and
+self-possession, the Honourable One pointed out my error to me and told
+me to throw the cigarette away and have another.
+
+By this time I had completely lost my nerve. My pride, chagrin,
+excessive self-consciousness were entangling all my movements in the
+meshes of a net. Failing to tumble to the situation, I inquired, "Why
+the _wrong_ end? Is there a right and a wrong end?" Lord ----'s son and
+heir pointed out the cotton-wool end, now blackened by my match.
+
+"That didn't burn very well, did it?"
+
+I was bound to confess that it did not, and threw the smoke away under
+the impression that these wonderful cigarettes with right and wrong ends
+must be some special brand sold only to aristocrats, and at a great
+price, and possessing some secret virtue. Once again, handsome Mr. ----
+drew out his silver cigarette-case, selected a second cigarette for me,
+and held it towards me between his long delicate fingers, at the same
+time pointing out the plug at one end and making a few staccato remarks
+which I could not catch.
+
+I was still too scared to be in full possession of my faculties, and he
+apparently was too tired to be explicit to a member of the bourgeoisie,
+stumbling about his drawing-room. The cotton-wool plug only suggested to
+me some sort of a plot on the part of a dissolute scion of a noble house
+to lure me into one of his bad habits, such as smoking opium or taking
+veronal. I again prepared to light the cigarette at the wrong end.
+
+"Try the other end," repeated the young man, smiling blandly. I blushed,
+and immediately recovered my balance, and even related my knowledge of
+pipes fitted to carry similar plugs....
+
+During lunch (at which we sat alone) after sundry visits to the top of
+the stairs to shout down to the kitchen, he announced that he thought it
+wasn't last night's affair after all which was annoying the Cook (he got
+home late without a latch-key)--it was because he called her "Cook"
+instead of Mrs. Austin. He smiled serenely and decided to indulge Mrs.
+A., his indulgent attitude betraying an objectionable satisfaction with
+the security of his own unassailable social status. There was a trace of
+gratification at the little compliment secreted in the Cook's annoyance.
+She wanted Mr. Charles to call her Mrs. Austin, forsooth. Very well! and
+he smiled down on the little weakness _de haute en bas_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I enjoyed this little experience. Turning it over in my mind (as the
+housemaid says when she decides to stay on) I have come to the
+conclusion that the social parvenu is not such a vulgar fellow after
+all. He may be a bore--particularly if he sits with his finger tips
+apposed over a spherical paunch, festooned with a gold chain, and keeps
+on relating _in extenso_ how once he gummed labels on blacking bottles.
+Often enough he is a smug fellow, yet, truth to tell, we all feel a
+little interested in him. He is a traveller from an antique land, and we
+sometimes like to listen to his tales of adventure and all he has come
+through. He has traversed large territories of human experience, he has
+met strange folk and lodged in strange caravanserai. Similarly with the
+man who has come down in the world--the fool, the drunkard, the
+embezzler--he may bore us with his maudlin sympathy with himself yet his
+stories hold us. It must be a fine experience within the limits of a
+single life to traverse the whole keyboard of our social status, whether
+up or down. I should like to be a peer who grinds a barrel organ or
+(better still) a one-time organ-grinder who now lives in Park Lane. It
+must be very dull to remain stationary--once a peer always a peer.
+
+_April_ 20.
+
+Miss ---- heard me sigh to-day and asked what it might mean. "Only the
+sparks flying upward," I answered lugubriously.
+
+A blackguard is often unconscious of a good deal of his wickedness.
+Charge him with wickedness and he will deny it quite honestly--honest
+then, perhaps, for the first time in his life.
+
+An Entomologist is a large hairy man with eyebrows like antennA|.
+
+Chronic constipation has gained for me an unrivalled knowledge of all
+laxatives, aperients, purgatives and cathartic compounds. At present I
+arrange two gunpowder plots a week. It's abominable. Best literature for
+the latrine: picture puzzles.
+
+_April_ 23.
+
+_A Foolish Bird_
+
+With a menacing politeness, B---- to-day inquired of a fat curate who
+was occupying more than his fair share of a seat on top of a 'bus,--
+
+"Are you going to get up or stay where ye are, sir?"
+
+The foolish bird was sitting nearly on top of B----, mistaking a bomb
+for an egg.
+
+"I beg your pardon," replied the fat curate.
+
+B---- repeated his inquiry with more emphasis in the hideous Scotch
+brogue.
+
+"I suppose I shall stay here till I get down presently."
+
+"I don't think you will," said B----.
+
+"What do you mean?" asked the fat one in falsetto indignation.
+
+"This," B---- grunted, and shunted sideways so that the poor fellow
+almost slid on to the floor.
+
+A posse of police walking along in single file always makes me laugh. A
+single constable is a Policeman, but several in single file are
+"Coppers." I imagine every one laughs at them and I have a shrewd
+suspicion it is one of W.S. Gilbert's legacies--the _Pirates of
+Penzance_ having become part of the national Consciousness.
+
+_On Lighting Chloe's Cigarette_
+
+R---- remarked to-day that he intended writing a lyric on lighting
+Chloe's cigarette.
+
+"Ah!" I said at once appreciative, "now tell me, do you balance your
+hand--by gently (ever so gently) resting the extreme tip of your little
+finger upon her chin, and" (I was warming up) "do you hold the match
+vertically or horizontally, and do you light it in the dark or in the
+light? If you have finesse, you won't need to be told that the thing is
+to get a steady flame and the maximum of illumination upon her face to
+last over a period for as long as possible."
+
+"Chloe," replied R----, "is wearing now a charming blouse with a
+charming V-shaped opening in front. Her Aunt asked my Mother last night
+tentatively, 'How do you like Chloe's blouse? Is it too low?' My Mother
+scrutinised the dear little furry, lop-eared thing and answered
+doubtfully, 'No, Maria, I don't think so.'"
+
+"How ridiculous! Why the V is a positive signpost. My dear fellow," I
+said to R----, "I should refuse to be bluffed by those old women. Tell
+them you _know_."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Carlyle called Lamb a despicable abortion. What a crime!
+
+_May_ 2.
+
+Developed a savage fit. Up to a certain point, perhaps, but beyond that
+anxiety changes into recklessness--you simply don't care. The aperients
+are causing dyspepsia and intermittent action of the heart, which
+frightens me. After a terrifying week, during which at crises I have
+felt like dropping suddenly in the street, in the gardens, anywhere,
+from syncope, I rebelled against this humiliating fear. I pulled my
+shoulders back and walked briskly ahead along the street with a dropped
+beat every two or three steps. I laughed bitterly at it and felt it
+could stop or go on--I was at last indifferent. In a photographer's shop
+was the picture of a very beautiful woman and I stopped to look at her.
+I glowered in thro' the glass angrily and reflected how she was gazing
+out with that same expression even at the butcher's boy or the
+lamp-lighter. It embittered me to think of having to leave her to some
+other man. To me she represented all the joy of life which at any moment
+I might have had to quit for ever. Such impotence enraged me and I
+walked off up the street with a whirling heart and the thought, "I shall
+drop, I suppose, when I get up as far as that." Yet don't think I was
+alarmed. Oh! no. The iron had entered me, and I went on with cynical
+indifference waiting to be struck down.
+
+... She is a very great deal to me. Perhaps I love her very much after
+all.
+
+_May_ 3.
+
+Bad heart attack all day. Intermittency is very refined torture to one
+who wants to live very badly. Your pump goes a "dot and carry one," or
+say "misses a stitch," what time you breathe deep, begin to shake your
+friend's hand and, make a farewell speech. Then it goes on again and you
+order another pint of beer.
+
+It is a fractious animal within the cage of my thorax, and I never know
+when it is going to escape and make off with my precious life between
+its teeth. I humour and coax and soothe it, but, God wot, I haven't much
+confidence in the little beast. My thorax it appears is an intolerable
+kennel.
+
+_May_ 10.
+
+In a very cheerful mood. Pleased with myself and everybody till a
+seagull soared overhead in Kensington Gardens and aroused my vast
+capacities for envy--I wish I could fly.
+
+_May_ 24.
+
+In L---- with my brother, A----. The great man is in great form and very
+happy in his love for N----. He is a most delightful creature and I love
+him more than any one else in the wide world. There is an almost
+feminine tenderness in my love.
+
+We spent a delightful day, talking and arguing and insulting one
+another.... At these seances we take delight in anaesthetising our
+hearts for the purposes of argument, and a third person would be bound
+to suppose we were in the throes of a bitter quarrel. We pile up one
+vindictive remark on another, ingeniously seeking out--and with
+malice--weak points in each other's armour, which previous exchange of
+confidences makes it easy to find. Neither of us hesitates to make use
+of such private confessions, yet our love is so strong that we can
+afford to take any liberty. There is, in fact, a fearful joy in testing
+the strength of our affection by searching for cutting rejoinders--to
+see the effect. We rig up one another's cherished ideals like Aunt
+Sallies and then knock them down, we wax sarcastic, satirical,
+contemptuous in turn, we wave our hands animatedly (hand-waving is a
+great trick with both of us), get flushed, point with our fingers, and
+thump the table to clinch some bit of repartee. Yet it's all smoke. Our
+love is unassailable--it's like the law of gravitation, you cannot
+dispute it, it underlies our existence, it is the air we breathe.
+
+N---- is charming, and thought we were quarrelling, and therefore
+intervened on his side!
+
+_May_ 31.
+
+R---- outlined an impression he had in Naples one day during a sirocco
+of the imminence of his own death. It was evidently an isolated
+experience and bored me a little as I could have said a lot myself about
+that. When he finished I drew from my pocket an envelope with my name
+and three addresses scribbled on it to help the police in case of
+syncope as I explained. I have carried this with me for several years
+and at one time a flask of brandy.
+
+_June_ 3.
+
+Went to see the Irish Players in _The Playboy_. Sitting in front of me
+was a charming little Irish girl accompanied by a male clod with
+red-rimmed eyes like a Bull-terrier's, a sandy, bristly moustache like a
+housemaid's broom, and a face like a gluteal mass, and a horrid voice
+that crepitated rather than spoke.
+
+She was dark, with shining blue eyes, and a delightful little nose of
+the utmost import to every male who should gaze upon her. Between the
+acts, the clod hearkened to her vivacious conversation--like an
+enchanted bullock. Her vivacity was such that the tip of her nose moved
+up and down for emphasis and by the end of the Third Act I was captured
+entirely. Lucky dog, that clod!
+
+After the play this little Irish maiden caught my eye and it became a
+physical impossibility for me to check a smile--and oh! Heavens!--she
+gave me a smile in return. Precisely five seconds later, she looked
+again to see if I was still smiling--I was--and we then smiled broadly
+and openly on one another--her smile being the timorous ingA(C)nue's not
+the glad eye of a _femme de joie_. Later, on the railway platform
+whither I followed her, I caught her eye again (was ever so lucky a
+fellow?), and we got into the same carriage. But so did the clod--ah!
+dear, was ever so unlucky a fellow? Forced to occupy a seat some way
+off, but she caught me trying to see her thro' a midnight forest of
+opera hats, lace ruffles, projecting ears and fat noses.
+
+Curse! Left her at High Street Station and probably will never see her
+again. This is a second great opportunity. The first was the girl on
+Lundy Island. These two women I shall always regret. There must be so
+many delightful and interesting persons in London if only I could get at
+them.
+
+_June_ 4.
+
+Rushed off to tell R---- about my little Irish girl. Her face has been
+"shadowing" me all day.
+
+_June_ 6.
+
+A violent argument with R---- _re_ marriage. He says Love means
+appropriation, and is taking the most elaborate precautions to forfend
+passion--just as if it were a militant suffragette. Every woman he meets
+he first puts into a long quarantine, lest perchance she carries the
+germ of the infectious disease. He quotes Hippolytus and talks like a
+mediA|val ascetic. Himself, I imagine, he regards as a valuable but
+brittle piece of Dresden china which must be saved from rough handling
+and left unmolested to pursue its high and dusty destiny--an old crock
+as I warned him. By refusing to plunge into life he will live long and
+be a well preserved man, but scarcely a living man--a mummy rather. I
+told him so amid much laughter.
+
+"You're a reactionary," says he.
+
+"Yes, but why should a reactionary be a naughty boy?"
+
+_June_ 7.
+
+My ironical fate lured me this evening into another discussion on
+marriage in which I had to take up a position exactly opposite to the
+one I defended yesterday against R----. In fact, I actually subverted to
+my own pressing requirements some of R----'s own arguments! The
+argument, of course, was with Her.
+
+Marriage, I urged, was an economic trap for guileless young men, and for
+my part (to give myself some necessary stiffening) I did not intend to
+enter upon any such hazardous course, even if I had the chance. Miss
+Miss ---- said I was a funk--to me who the day before had been hammering
+into R---- my principle of "Plunge and damn the consequences." I was
+informed I was an old woman afraid to go out without an umbrella, an old
+tabby cat afraid to leave the kitchen fire, etc., etc.
+
+"Yes, I _am_ afraid to go out without an umbrella," I argued formally,
+"when it's raining cats and dogs. As long as I am dry, I shall keep dry.
+As soon as I find myself caught in the rain or victimised by a passion,
+I shan't be afraid of falling in love or getting wet. It would be a
+misadventure, but I am not going in search of one."
+
+All the same the discussion was very galling, for I was acting a part.
+
+... The truth is I have philandered abominably with her. I know it. And
+now I am jibbing at the idea of marriage.... I am such an egotist, I
+want, I believe, a Princess of the Blood Royal.
+
+_June_ 9.
+
+Some days ago sent a personal advertisement to the newspaper to try to
+find my little Irish girl who lives at Notting Hill Gate. To-day they
+return me the money and advert, no doubt mistaking me for a White Slave
+trafficker. And by this time, I'm thinking, my little Irish girl can go
+to blazes. Shall spend the P.O. on sweets or monkey nuts.
+
+_June_ 10
+
+_Lupus_
+
+It is raining heavily. I have just finished dinner. In the street an
+itinerant musician is singing dolefully, "O Rest in the Lord." In my
+dirty little sitting room I begin to feel very restless, so put on my
+hat and cloak and walk down towards the Station for a paper to read. It
+is, all very dark and dismal, and I gaze with hungry eyes in thro' some
+of the windows disclosing happy comfortable interiors. At intervals
+thunder growls and lightning brightens up the deserted dirtiness of the
+Station Waiting Room. A few bits of desolate paper lie about on the
+floor, and up in one corner on a form a crossing-sweeper, motionless and
+abject, driven in from his pitch by the rain. His hands are deep in his
+trousers' pockets, and the poor devil lies with legs sprawling out and
+eyes closed: over the lower part of his face he wears a black mask to
+hide the ravages of lupus.... He seemed the last man on earth--after
+every one else had died of the plague. Not a soul in the station. Not a
+train. And this is June!
+
+_June_ 15.
+
+_Measuring Lice_
+
+Spent the day measuring the legs and antennA| of lice to two places of
+decimals!
+
+To the lay mind how fantastic this must seem! Indeed, I hope it is
+fantastic. I do not mind being thought odd. It seems almost fitting that
+an incurable dilettante like myself should earn his livelihood by
+measuring the legs of lice. I like to believe that such a bizarre manner
+of life suits my incurable frivolousness.
+
+I am a Magpie in a Bagdad bazaar, hopping about, useless, inquisitive,
+fascinated by a lot of astonishing things: _e.g._, a book on the
+quadrature of the circle, the _gabbertushed fustilugs_ passage in
+Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, names like Mr. Portwine or Mr.
+Hogsflesh, Tweezer's Alley or Pickle Herring Street, the excellent,
+conceitful sonnets of Henry Constable or Petticoat Lane on a Sunday
+morning.
+
+Colossal things such as Art, Science, etc., frighten me. I am afraid I
+should develop a thirst that would make me wish to drink the sea dry. My
+mind is a disordered miscellany. The world is too distracting. I cannot
+apply myself for long. London bewilders me. At times it is a
+phantasmagoria, an opium dream out of De Quincey.
+
+_June_ 17.
+
+Prof. Geo. Saintsbury's book on Elizabethan literature amuses me.
+_George_, there can be no doubt, is a very refined, cultivated fellow. I
+bet he don't eat periwinkles with a pin or bite his nails--and you
+should hear him refer to folk who can't read Homer in the original or
+who haven't been to Oxford--to Merton above all. He also says _non so
+che_ for _je ne sais quoi_.
+
+_June_ 26.
+
+... I placed the volume on the mantelpiece as if it were a bottle of
+physic straight from my Dispensary, and I began to expostulate and
+expound, as if she were a sick person and I the doctor.... She seemed a
+little nettled at my proselytising demeanour and gave herself out to be
+very preoccupied--or at any rate quite uninterested in my physic. I read
+the book last night at one sitting and was boiling over with it.
+
+"I fear I have come at an inconvenient time," I said, with a sardonic
+smile and strummed on the piano.... "I must really be off. Please read
+it (which sounded like 'three times a day after meals') and tell me how
+you like it. (Facetiously.) Of course don't give up your present manual
+for it, that would be foolish and unnecessary." ... I rambled
+on--disposed to be very playful.
+
+At last calmly and horribly, in a thoughtful voice she answered,--
+
+"I think you are very rude; you play the piano after I asked you to
+stop and walk about just as if it were your own home."
+
+I remained outwardly calm but inwardly was very surprised and full of
+tremors. I said after a pause,--
+
+"Very well, if you think so.... Good-bye."
+
+No answer; and I was too proud to apologise.
+
+"Good-bye," I repeated.
+
+She went on reading her novel in silence while I got as far as the
+door--very upset.
+
+"_Au revoir_."
+
+No answer.
+
+"Oh," said I, and went out of the room leaving my lady for good and all
+and I'm not sorry.
+
+In the passage met Miss ----. "What?" she said, "going already?"
+
+"Farewell," I said sepulchrally. "A very tragic farewell," which left
+her wondering.
+
+_June_ 29.
+
+_At the Albert Hall_
+
+Went with R---- to the Albert Hall to the _Empress of Ireland_ Memorial
+Concert with massed bands. We heard the Symphonie PathA(C)tique, Chopin's
+Funeral March, Trauermarsch from GA¶tterdammerung, the Ride of the
+Valkyries and a solemn melody from Bach.
+
+This afternoon I regard as a mountain peak in my existence. For two
+solid hours I sat like an Eagle on a rock gazing into infinity--a very
+fine sensation for a London Sparrow....
+
+I have an idea that if it were possible to assemble the sick and
+suffering day by day in the Albert Hall and keep the Orchestra going all
+the time, then the constant exposure of sick parts to such heavenly air
+vibrations would ultimately restore to them the lost rhythm of health.
+Surely, even a single exposure to--say Beethoven's Fifth Symphony--must
+result in some permanent reconstitution of ourselves body and soul. No
+one can be quite the same after a Beethoven Symphony has streamed thro'
+him.
+
+If one could _develop_ a human soul like a negative the effect I should
+say could be seen.... I'll tell you what I wish they'd do--seriously:
+divide up the arena into a series of cubicles where, unobserved and in
+perfect privacy, a man could execute all the various movements of his
+body and limbs which the music prompts. It would be such a delicious
+self-indulgence and it's torture to be jammed into a seat where you
+can't even tap one foot or wave an arm.
+
+The concert restored my moral health. I came away in love with people I
+was hating before and full of compassion for others I usually condemn. A
+feeling of immeasurable well being--a jolly bonhomie enveloped me like
+incandescent light. At the close when we stood up to sing the National
+Anthem we all felt a genuine spirit of camaraderie. Just as when Kings
+die, we were silent musing upon the common fate, and when the time came
+to separate we were loath to go our several ways, for we were comrades
+who together had come thro' a great experience. For my part I wanted to
+shake hands all round--happy travellers, now alas! at the journey's end
+and never perhaps to meet again--never.
+
+R---- and I walked up thro' Kensington Gardens like two young Gods!
+
+"I even like that bloody thing," I said, pointing to the Albert
+Memorial.
+
+We pointed out pretty girls to one another, watched the children play
+ring-a-ring-a-roses on the grass. We laughed exultingly at the thought
+of our dismal colleagues ... tho' I said (as before!) I loved 'em
+all--God bless 'em--even old ----. R---- said it was nothing short of
+insolence on their part to have neglected the opportunity of coming to
+the Concert.
+
+Later on, an old gaffer up from the country stopped us to ask the way to
+Rotten Row--I overwhelmed him with directions and happy descriptive
+details. I felt like walking with him and showing him what a wonderful
+place the world is.
+
+After separating from R---- very reluctantly--it was horrible to be left
+alone in such high spirits, walked up towards the Round Pond, and caught
+myself avoiding the shadows of the trees--so as to be every moment out
+in the blazing sun. I scoffed inwardly at the timorousness of pale,
+anA|mic folk whom I passed hiding in the shadows of the elms.
+
+At the Round Pond, came across a Bulldog who was biting out great chunks
+of water and in luxuriant waste-fulness letting it drool out again from
+each corner of his mouth. I watched this old fellow greedily (it was
+very hot), as well pleased with him and his liquid "chops" as with
+anything I saw, unless it were a girl and a man lying full length along
+the grass and kissing beneath a sunshade. I smiled; she saw me, and
+smiled, too, in return, and then fell to kissing again.
+
+_June_ 30.
+
+_Dinosaurs_
+
+There are books which are Dinosaurs--Sir Walter Raleigh's _History of
+the World_, Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_. There are
+men who are Dinosaurs--Balzac completing his Human Comedy, Napoleon,
+Roosevelt. I like them all. I like express trains and motor lorries. I
+enjoy watching an iron girder swinging in the air or great cubes of ice
+caught up between iron pincers. I must always stop and watch these
+things. I like everything that is swift or immense: London, lightning,
+Popocatepetl. I enjoy the smell of tar, of coal, of fried fish, or a
+brass band playing a Liszt Rhapsody. And why should those foolish MA|nads
+shout Women's Rights just because they burn down a church? All bonfires
+are delectable. Civilisation and top hats bore me. My own life is like a
+tame rabbit's. If only I had a long tail to lash it in feline rage! I
+would return to Nature--I could almost return to Chaos. There are times
+when I feel so dour I would wreck the universe if I could.[1]
+
+(1917: I think after three years of Armageddon I feel quite ready to go
+back to top hats and civilisation.)
+
+_July_ 8.
+
+_Sunset in Kensington Gardens_
+
+The instinct for worship occurs rhythmically--at morning and evening.
+This is natural, for twice a day at sunrise and sunset--however
+work-sodden we may be, however hypnotised by daily routine--our natural
+impulse is (provided we are awake) to look to the horizon at the sun and
+stand a moment with mute lips. During the course of the day or night, we
+are too occupied or asleep--but sunrise is the great hour of the
+departure and sunset is the arrival at the end. Everything puts on a
+mysterious appearance--to-night the tops of the elms seemed
+super-naturally high and, pushing up into the sky, had secret communion
+with the clouds; the clouds seemed waiting for a ceremony, a way had
+been prepared by the tapissier, a moment of suspense while one cloud
+stretched to another like courtiers in whispered conversation; a rumour
+of the approach; then slowly the news came thro' that the sun had
+arrived for immediate departure.
+
+_July_ 14.
+
+Have finished my essay. But am written out--obviously. To-night I
+struggled with another, and spent two hours sucking the end of my pen.
+But after painfully mountainous parturition, all I brought forth were
+the two ridiculous mice of one meretricious trope and one grammatical
+solecism. I can sometimes sit before a sheet of paper, pen in hand,
+unable to produce a word.
+
+_July_ 19.
+
+For a walk with R---- in the country, calling for tea at his Uncle's
+house at ----. Played clock golf and made the acquaintance of Miss ----,
+a tall, statuesque lady, with golden hair, as graceful as an antelope
+and very comely, her two dear little feet clad in white shoes peeping
+out (as R---- said) like two white mice one after the other as she
+moved across the lawn.
+
+Coming home I said to R---- histrionically, "Some golden-haired little
+boy will some day rest his head upon her bosom, beautiful in line and
+depth, all unconscious of his luck or of his part in a beautiful
+picture--would that I were the father to make that group a _fait
+accompli_" R----, with meticulous accuracy, always refers to her as
+"that elegant virgin."
+
+_July_ 25.
+
+While sketching under Hammersmith Bridge yesterday, R---- heard a
+whistle, and, looking up, saw a charming "young thing" leaning over the
+Bridge parapet smiling like the blessed Damozel out of Heaven.
+
+"Come down," he cried.
+
+She did, and they discussed pictures while he painted. Later he walked
+with her to the Broadway, saw her into a 'bus and said "Good-bye,"
+without so much as an exchange of names.
+
+"Even if she _were_ a whore," I said, "it's a pity your curiosity was so
+sluggish. You should have seen her home, even if you did not go home
+with her. Young man, you preferred to let go of authentic life at
+Hammersmith Broadway, so as to return at once to your precious
+water-colour painting."
+
+"Perhaps," replied he enigmatically.
+
+"Whatever you do, if ever you meet her again," I rejoined, "don't
+introduce her to that abominable ----. He is abominably handsome, and I
+hate him for it. To all his other distinctions he is welcome--parentage,
+money, success, but I can never forgive him his good looks and the
+inevitable marriage to some beautiful fair-skinned woman."
+
+R. (reflectively): "Up to now, I was inclined to think that envy as a
+_passion_ did not exist."
+
+"Have you none?"
+
+"Not much," he answered, and I believe it.
+
+"Smug wretch, then. All I can say is, I may have instincts and passions
+but I am not a pale water-colour artist.... What's the matter with you,"
+I foamed, "is that you like pictures. If I showed you a real woman, you
+would exclaim contemplatively, 'How lovely;' then putting out one hand
+to touch her, unsuspectingly, you'd scream aghast, 'Oh! it's alive, I
+hear it ticking.' 'Yes, my boy,' I answer severely with a flourish,
+'_That_ is a woman's heart.'"
+
+R---- exploded with laughter and then said, "A truce to your desire for
+more life, for actual men and women. ... I know this that last night I
+would not have exchanged the quiet armchair reading the last chapter of
+Dostoieffsky's _The Possessed_ for a Balaclava Charge."
+
+"A matter of temperament, I suppose," I reflected, in cold detachment.
+"You see, I belong to the raw meat school. _You_ prefer life cooked for
+you in a book. You prefer the confectioner's shop to cutting down the
+wheat with your own scythe."
+
+_July_ 26.
+
+The B.M. is a ghastly hole. They will give me none of the apparatus I
+require. If you ask the Trustees for a thousand pounds for the
+propagation of the Gospel in foreign parts they say, "Yes." If you ask
+for twenty pounds for a new microscope they say, "No, but we'll cut off
+your nose with a big pair of scissors."
+
+_July_ 27.
+
+To a pedantic prosy little old maid who was working in my room this
+morning, I exclaimed,--
+
+"I'd sooner make a good dissection than go to a Lord Mayor's Banquet.
+Turtle Soup ain't in it."
+
+She was uninspired, and said, "Oom," and went on pinning insects. Then
+more brightly, and with great punctilio in the pronunciation of her
+words, having cleared her throat and drawn herself up with great
+deliberation to deliver herself of a remark, she volunteered,--
+
+"I whish I had nevah taken up such a brittle grooop as the Stones
+(Stoneflies). One dare not loook at a Stone."
+
+Poor dear little old maid. This was my turn to say "Oom."
+
+"Pretty dismal work," I added ambiguously. Then with malice aforethought
+I whistled a Harry Lauder tune, asked her if she had ever heard Willie
+Solar sing, "You made me love you," and then absent-mindedly and in
+succession inquired,--
+
+"What's become of all the gold?"
+
+"What's become of Waring?"
+
+"What shall I sing when all is sung?"
+
+To which several categorical interrogations she ventured no reply, but
+presently in the usual voice,--
+
+"I have placed an Agrionine in this drawer for security and, now I want
+it, cannot find it."
+
+"Life is like that," I said. "I never can find my Agrionines!"
+
+_August_ 1.
+
+All Europe is mobilising.
+
+_August_ 2.
+
+Will England join in?
+
+_August_ 12.
+
+We all await the result of a battle between two millions of men. The
+tension makes me feel physically sick.
+
+_August_ 21--_August_ 24.
+
+In bed with a fever. I never visit the flat now, but her mother kindly
+came over to see me.
+
+_September_ 25.
+
+[Living now in rooms alone.]
+
+I have--since my return from Cornwall--placed all my journals in a
+specially made cabinet. R---- came to dinner and after a glass or so of
+Beaune and a cigarette, I open my "coffin"[2] (it is a long box with a
+brass handle at each end), and with some show of deliberation select a
+volume to read to him, drawing it from its division with lavish
+punctiliousness, and inquiring with an oily voice, "A little of 1912?"
+as if we were trying wines. R---- grins at the little farce and so
+encourages me.
+
+_September_ 26.
+
+Doctor's Consulting Rooms--my life has been spent in them! Medical
+specialists--Harley Street men--I have seen four and all to no purpose.
+M---- wrote me the other day,--
+
+"Come along and see me on Tuesday; some day I dare say we shall find
+something we can patch."
+
+He regards me with the most obvious commiseration and always when I come
+away after a visit he shakes me warmly by the hand and says, "Good-bye,
+old man, and good luck." More luck than the pharmacopA"ia.
+
+My life has always been a continuous struggle with ill-health and
+ambition, and I have mastered neither. I try to reassure myself that
+this accursed ill-health will not affect my career. I keep flogging my
+will in the hope of winning thro' in the end. Yet at the back of my mind
+there is the great improbability that I shall ever live long enough to
+realise myself. For a long time past my hope has simply been to last
+long enough to convince others of what I might have done--had I lived.
+That will be something. But even to do that I will not allow that I have
+overmuch time. I have never at any time lived with any sense of
+security. I have never felt permanently settled in this life--nothing
+more than a shadowy _locum tenens_, a wraith, a festoon of mist likely
+to disappear any moment.
+
+At times, when I am vividly conscious of the insecurity of my tenure
+here, my desires enter on a mad race to obtain fulfilment before it is
+too late ... and as fulfilment recedes ambition obsesses me the more. I
+am daily occupied in calculating with my ill-health: trying to
+circumvent it, to carry on in spite of all. I conquer each day. Every
+week is a victory. I am always surprised that my health or will has not
+collapsed, that, by Jove! I am still working and still living.
+
+One day it looks like appendicitis, another stoppage, another threatened
+blindness, or I develop a cough and am menaced with consumption. So I go
+on in a hurricane of bad dreams. I struggle like Laocoon with the
+serpents--the serpents of nervous depression that press around the heart
+tighter than I care to admit. I must use every kind of blandishment to
+convince myself that my life and my work are worth while. Frequently I
+must smother and kill (and it calls for prompt action) the shrill voice
+that cries from the tiniest corner of my heart, "Are you quite sure you
+are such an important fellow as you imagine?" Or I fret over the
+condition of my brain, finding that I forget what I read, I lose in
+acuteness of my perceptions. My brain is a tumefaction. But I won't give
+in. I go on trying to recollect what I have forgotten, I harry my brain
+all day to recall a word or name, I attack other folk importunately. I
+write things down so as to look them up in reference books--I am always
+looking up the things I remember I have forgotten....
+
+There is another struggle, too, that often engrosses all my energies....
+It is a horrible thing that with so large an ambition, so great a love
+of life, I should nevertheless court disaster like this. Truly Sir
+Thomas Browne you say, "Every man is his own Atropos."
+
+In short, I lead an unfathomably miserable existence in this dark, gray
+street, in these drab, dirty rooms--miserable in its emptiness of home,
+love, human society. Now that I never visit the flat, I visit about two
+houses in London--the Doctor's and R----'s Hotel. I walk along the
+streets and stare in the windows of private houses, hungry for a little
+society. It creates in me a gnawing, rancorous discontent to be seeing
+people everywhere in London--millions of them--and then to realise my
+own ridiculously circumscribed knowledge of them. I am passionately
+eager to have acquaintances, to possess at least a few friends. If I die
+to-morrow, how many persons shall I have talked to? or how many men and
+women shall I have known? A few maiden aunts and one or two old fossils.
+I am burning to meet real live men, I have masses of mental stuff I am
+anxious to unload. But I am ignorant of people as of countries and live
+in celestial isolation.
+
+This, I fear, reads like a wail of self-commiseration. But I am trying
+to give myself the pleasure of describing myself at this period
+truthfully, to make a bid at least for some posthumous sympathy.
+Therefore it shall be told that I who am capable of passionate love am
+sexually starved, and endure the pangs of a fiendish solitude in rooms,
+with an ugly landlady's face when ... I despair of ever finding a woman
+to _love_. I never meet women of my own class, and am unprepossessing in
+appearance and yet I fancy that once my reserve is melted I am not
+without attractions. "He grows on you," a girl said of me once. But I am
+hypercritical and hyperfastidious. I want too much.... I search daily in
+the streets with a starved and hungry look. What a horrible and powerful
+and hateful thing this love instinct is! I hate it, hate it, hate it. It
+will not let me rest. I wish I were a eunuch.
+
+"There's a beautiful young thing," R---- and I say to one another
+sardonically, hoping thereby to conceal the canker within.
+
+I could gnash my teeth and weep in anger--baulked, frustrated as I am at
+almost every turn of life--in my profession, in my literary efforts, and
+in my love of man and woman kind. I would utter a whole commination
+service in my present state of mind.
+
+_October_ 7.
+
+To me woman is _the_ wonderful fact of existence. If there be any next
+world and it be as I hope it is, a jolly gossiping place, with people
+standing around the mantelpiece and discussing their earthly
+experiences, I shall thump my fist on the table as my friends turn to me
+on entering and exclaim in a loud voice, "WOMAN."
+
+_October_ 11.
+
+Since I grew up I have wept three times. The first time they were tears
+of exasperation. Dad and I were sitting down side by side after a wordy
+combat in which he had remained adamant and I was forced both by
+conscience and argument to give in, to relinquish my dissections, and go
+off to some inquest on a drowning fatality. The second time was when
+Mother died, and the third was _to-day._ But I am calm now. To-day they
+were tears of remorse....
+
+On occasion bald confession in this Journal is sweet for the soul and
+strengthens it. It gives me a kind of false backbone to communicate my
+secrets: for I am determined that some day some one shall know. If God
+really intervenes in our affairs, here is an opportunity. Let Him save
+me. I challenge Him to save me from perishing in this ditch.... It is
+not often I am cornered into praying but I did this morning, for I feel
+defeated this day, and almost inarticulate in my misery.
+
+Nietzsche in a newspaper I read to-day: "For myself I have felt
+exceptionally blest having Hell's phantoms inside me to thrust at in the
+dark, internal enemies to dominate till I felt myself an ecstatic
+victor, wrenching at last good triumphant joys thro' the bars of my own
+sickness and weakness--joys with which your notions of happiness, poor
+sleek smug creatures, cannot compare! You must carry a chaos inside you
+to give birth to a dancing star."
+
+But Nietzsche is no consolation to a man who has once been weak enough
+to be brought to his knees. There I am and there I think I have prayed a
+little somehow to-day. But it's all in desperation, not in faith.
+Internal chaos I have, but no dancing star. Dancing stars are the
+consolation of genius.
+
+_October_ 12.
+
+Am better to-day. My better self is convinced that it is silly and
+small-minded to think so much about my own puny destiny--especially at
+times like these when--God love us all--there is a column of casualties
+each day. The great thing to be thankful for is that I am _alive_ and
+alive _now_, that I was alive _yesterday_, and even may be to-morrow.
+Surely that is thrilling enough. What, then, have I to complain of? I'm
+a lucky dog to be alive at all. My plight is bad, but there are others
+in a worse one. I'm going to be brave and fight on the side of
+Nietzsche. Who knows but that one day the dancing star may yet be born!
+
+_October_ 13.
+
+Spent the evening in my lodgings struggling with my will. Too flabby to
+work, disinclined to read, a dreadful vague unrest possessing me. I
+couldn't sit still in my chair, so walked around the table continuously
+like a squirrel in a cage. I wanted to be going out somewhere, talking
+to some one, to be among human beings.
+
+Many an evening during the past few months, I have got up and gone down
+the road to look across at the windows of the flat, to see if there were
+a red light behind the curtains, and, if so, wonder if she were there,
+and how she was. My pride would never allow me to visit there again on
+my own initiative. K---- has managed to bring about a rapprochement but
+I go very seldom. Pride again.
+
+I wanted to do so to-night. I thought I would just go down the road to
+look up at the windows. That seemed to be some comfort. Why do I wish to
+do this? I do not know. From a mere inspection one would say that I am
+in love. But remember I am also ill. Three times to-night I nearly put
+on my boots and went down to have a look up! What ridiculous weakness!
+Yet this room can be a frightful prison. Shall I? I cannot decide. I see
+her figure constantly before me--gentle, graceful, calm, stretching
+forth both hands and to me....
+
+Seized a pack of cards and played Patience and went on playing Patience
+because I was afraid to stop. Given a weak constitution, a great
+ambition, an amorous nature, and at the same time a very fastidious one,
+I might have known I was in for trouble.
+
+_October_ 14.
+
+_Marie Bashkirtseff_
+
+Some time ago I noticed a quotation from one, Marie Bashkirtseff in a
+book on Strindberg, and was struck with the likeness to a sentiment of
+my own. Who _are_ you? I wondered.
+
+This evening went to the Library and read about her in Mathilde Blind's
+introductory essay to her Journal. I am simply astounded. It would be
+difficult in all the world's history to discover any two persons with
+temperaments so alike. She is the "very spit of me "! I devoured
+Mathilde Blind's pages more and more astonished. We are identical! Oh,
+Marie Bashkirtseff! how we should have hated one another! She feels as I
+feel. We have the same self-absorption, the same vanity and corroding
+ambition. She is impressionable, volatile, passionate--ill! So am I. Her
+journal is my journal. All mine is stale reading now. She has written
+down all my thoughts and forestalled me! Already I have found some
+heart-rending parallels. To think I am only a replica: how humiliating
+for a human being to find himself merely a duplicate of another. Is
+there anything in the transmigration of souls? She died in 1886. I was
+born in 1889.
+
+_October_ 15.
+
+A man is always looking at himself in the mirror if for no other reason
+than to tie his tie and brush his hair. What does he think of his face?
+He must have private opinions. But it is usually considered a little out
+of taste to entertain opinions about one's personal appearance.
+
+As for myself, some mirrors do me down pretty well, others depress me!
+I am bound to confess I am biassed in favour of the friendly mirror. I
+am not handsome, but I look interesting--I hope distinguished. My eyes
+are deep-set ... but my worst moments are when the barber combs my hair
+right down over my forehead, or when I see a really handsome man in Hyde
+Park. Such occasions direct my gaze reflexly, and doubt like a thief in
+the night forces the back door!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To-day, M---- sent me dancing mad by suggesting that I copied R---- in
+my manner of speech and opinions.
+
+Now R---- has a damned pervasive way of conducting himself--for all the
+world as if he were a high official of the Foreign Office. I, on the
+contrary, am shy, self-conscious, easily overlooked, and this makes me
+writhe. As we are inseparable friends--everybody assumes that I am his
+tacky-lacky, a kind of appoggiatura to his big note. He, they suppose,
+is my guide, philosopher, and Great Maecenas--Oxford befriending the
+proletariat. The thought of it makes me sick--that any one should
+believe I imbibe his ideas, echo his conceits, and even ape his gestures
+and manner of voice.
+
+"Lost yourself?" inquired a despicable creature the other morning as I
+came out of R----'s room after finding him out. I could have shot him
+dead! ... As for ---- more than one person thinks that he alone is the
+brilliant author until at last he himself has got into the way of
+thinking it.
+
+"It makes me hate you like mad," I said to him to-day. "How can I
+confront these people with the naked truth?" R---- chuckled
+complacently.
+
+"If I deny your alleged supremacy, as I did this morning, or if
+suddenly, in a fit of spleen, I'm induced to declare that I loathe you
+(as I sometimes do)"--(more chuckles) "that your breath stinks, your
+eyes bulge, that you have swollen jugulars and a platter face: they will
+think I am either jealous or insincere.... To be your Echo tho'!--my
+God!" I spat. We then grinned at one another, and I, being bored, went
+to the lavatory and read the newspaper secure from interruption.
+
+_Resignation_
+
+In the Tube, a young widow came in and sat in front of me--pale-faced,
+grief-stricken, demure--a sort of "Thy Will be Done" look. The
+adaptability of human beings has something in it that seems horrible. It
+is dreadful to think how we have all accommodated ourselves to this War.
+Christian resignation is a feeble thing. Why won't this demure widow
+with a loud voice blaspheme against this iniquitous world that permits
+this iniquitous war?
+
+_October_ 21.
+
+I myself (licking a stamp): "The taste of gum is really very nice."
+
+R.: "I hate it."
+
+I: "My dear fellow" (surprised and entreating), "envelope gum is simply
+delicious."
+
+R.: "I never lick stamps--it's dangerous--microbes."
+
+I: "I always do: I shall buy a bookful and go away to the seaside with
+them."
+
+R.: "Yes, you'll need to."
+
+(Laughter.)
+
+Thus gaily and jauntily we went on to discuss wines, whiskies, and
+Worthington's, and I rounded it up in a typical cock-eyed manner,--
+
+"Ah! yes, it's only when the day is over that the day really
+begins--what?"
+
+_October_ 23.
+
+I expressed to R---- to-day my admiration for the exploit of the brave
+and successful Submarine Commander Max Kennedy Horton. (Name for you!)
+R---- was rather cold. "His exploits," said this bloody fool, "involve
+loss of life and scarcely make me deliriously eulogistic."
+
+I cleared my throat and began,--
+
+"Your precious sociology again--it will be the ruin of your career as an
+artist. It is so interwoven into the fibre of your brain that you never
+see anything except in relation to its State value. You are afraid to
+approve of a lying, thieving rogue, however delightful a rascal he may
+be, for fear of what Karl Marx might say.... You'll soon be drawing
+landscapes with taxpayers in the foreground, or we shall get a picture
+of Ben Nevis with Keir Hardie on the summit." And so on to our own
+infinite mutual amusement.
+
+The _English Review_ returns my Essay. I am getting simply furious with
+an ambition I am unable to satisfy, among beautiful London women I
+cannot get to know, and in ill-health that I cannot cure. Shall I ever
+find any one? Shall I ever be really well? My one solace is that I do
+not submit, it infuriates me, I resent it; I will never be resigned and
+milky. I will keep my claws sharp and fight to the end.
+
+_October_ 24.
+
+Went to Mark Lane by train, then walked over the Tower Bridge, and back
+along Lower Thames Street to London Bridge, up to Whitechapel, St.
+Paul's, Fleet Street, and Charing Cross, and so home.
+
+Near Reilly's Tavern, I saw a pavement artist who had drawn a loaf with
+the inscription in both French and English: "This is easy to draw but
+hard to earn." A baby's funeral trotted briskly over the Tower Bridge
+among Pink's jam waggons, carts carrying any goods from lead pencils and
+matches to bales of cotton and chests of tea.
+
+In the St. Catherine's Way there is one part like a deep railway
+cutting, the whole of one side for a long way, consisting of the
+brickwall of a very tall warehouse with no windows in it and beautifully
+curved and producing a wonderful effect. Walked past great blocks of
+warehouses and business establishments--a wonderful sight; and
+everywhere bacon factors, coffee roasters, merchants. On London Bridge,
+paused to feed the sea-gulls and looked down at the stevedores. Outside
+Billingsgate Market was a blackboard on an easel--for market prices--but
+instead some one had drawn an enormously enlarged chalk picture of a
+cat's rear and tail with anatomical details.
+
+In Aldgate, stopped to inspect a street stall containing popular
+literature--one brochure entitled _Suspended for Life_ to indicate the
+terrible punishment meted out to ----, a League footballer. The
+frontispiece enough to make a lump come in the juveniles' throats!
+Another stall held domestic utensils with an intimation, "Anything on
+this stall _lent_ for id." A newsvendor I heard exclaim to a
+fellow-tradesman in the same line of business,--
+
+"They come and look at your bloody plakaard and then passe on."
+
+Loitered at a dirty little Fleet Street bookshop where Paul de Koch's
+_The Lady with the Three Pairs of Stays_ was displayed prominently
+beside a picture of Oscar Wilde.
+
+In Fleet Street, you exchange the Whitechapel sausage restaurants for
+Taverns with "snacks at the bar," and the chestnut roasters, with their
+buckets of red-hot coals, for Grub Street camp followers, selling
+_L'IndA(C)pendance Belge_ or pamphlets entitled, _Why We Went to War_.
+
+In the Strand you may buy war maps, buttonhole flags, etc., etc. I
+bought a penny stud. One shop was turned into a shooting gallery at
+three shots a penny where the Inner Temple Barristers in between the
+case for the defence and the case for the prosecution could come and
+keep their eye in against the time the Germans come.
+
+Outside Charing Cross Station I saw a good-looking, well-dressed woman
+in mourning clothes, grinding a barrel organ....
+
+Returned to the Library and read the _Dublin Review_ (article on Samuel
+Butler), _North American Review_(one on Henry James) and dined at seven.
+After dinner, read: _Evening Standard, Saturday Westminster_, and the
+_New Statesman_. Smoked six cigarettes and went to bed. To-morrow Fifth
+Symphony of Beethoven.
+
+_October_ 25.
+
+_Too Late_
+
+Yesterday's ramble has left me very sore in spirit. London was spread
+out before me, a vast campagne. But I felt too physically tired to
+explore. I could just amble along--a spectator merely--and automatically
+register impressions. Think of the misery of that! I want to see the
+Docks and Dockland, to enter East End public-houses and opium-dens, to
+speak to Chinamen and Lascars: I want a first-rate, first-hand knowledge
+of London, of London men, London women. I was tingling with anticipation
+yesterday and then I grew tired and fretful and morose, crawled back
+like a weevil into my nut. By 6.30 I was in a Library reading the
+_Dublin Review_!
+
+What a young fool I was to neglect those priceless opportunities of
+studying and tasting life and character in North ----, at Borough
+Council meetings, Boards of Guardians, and electioneering campaigns--not
+to mention inquests, police courts, and country fairs. Instead of
+appraising all these precious and genuine pieces of experience at their
+true value, my diary and my mind were occupied only with--Zoology, if
+you please. I ignored my exquisite chances, I ramped around, fuming and
+fretting, full of contempt for my circumscribed existence, and impatient
+as only a youth can be. What I shall never forgive myself is my present
+inability to recall that life, so that instead of being able now to push
+my chair back and entertain myself and others with descriptions of some
+of those antique and incredible happenings, my memory is rigid and
+formal: I remember only a few names and one or two isolated events. All
+that time is just as if it had never been. My recollections form only an
+indefinite smudge--odd Town Clerks, Town Criers (at least five of them
+in wonderful garb), policemen (I poached with one), ploughing match
+dinners (platters of roast beef and boiled potatoes and I, bespectacled
+student of Zoology, sitting uncomfortably among valiant trenchermen
+after their day's ploughing), election meetings in remote Exmoor
+villages (and those wonderful Inns where I had to spend the night!)--all
+are gone--too remote to bear recital--yet just sufficiently clear to
+harass the mind in my constant endeavours to raise them all again from
+the dead in my consciousness. I hate to think it is lost; that my youth
+is buried--a cemetery without even headstones. To an inquest on a
+drowned sailor--disclosing some thrilling story of the wild seas off the
+coast--with a pitiful myopia--I preferred Wiedersheim's _Comparative
+Anatomy of Vertebrates_. I used to carry Dr. Smith Woodward's
+_Paleontology_ with me to a Board of Guardians meeting, mingling
+_Pariasaurus_ and Holoptychians with tenders for repairs and reports
+from the Master. Now I take Keats or Tschekov to the Museum!
+
+London certainly lies before me. Certainly I am alive at last. Yet now
+my energy is gone. It is too late. I am ill and tired. It costs me
+infinite discomfort to write this entry, all the skin of my right hand
+is permanently "pins and needles" and in the finger tips I have lost all
+sense of touch. The sight of my right eye is also very bad and sometimes
+I can scarcely read print with it, etc., etc. But why should I go on?
+
+A trance-like condition supervenes in a semi-invalid forced to live in
+almost complete social isolation in a great whirling city like London.
+Days of routine follow each other as swiftly as the weaver's shuttle and
+numb the spirit and turn palpitating life into a silent picture show.
+Everywhere always in the street people--millions of them --whom I do not
+know, moving swiftly along. I look and look and yawn and then one day as
+to-day I wake up and race about beside myself--a swollen bag ready to
+burst with hope, love, misery, joy, desperation.
+
+_Apologia pro vita mea_
+
+How may I excuse myself for continuing to talk about my affairs and for
+continuing to write zoological memoirs during the greatest War of all
+time?
+
+Well, here are some precedents:--
+
+Goethe sat down to study the geography of China, while his fatherland
+agonised at Leipsig.
+
+Hegel wrote the last lines of the _Phenomenology of Spirit_ within sound
+of the guns of Jena.
+
+While England was being rent in twain by civil war, Sir Thomas Browne,
+ensconced in old Norwich, reflected on Cambyses and Pharaoh and on the
+song the Sirens sang.
+
+LacA(C)pA"de composed his _Histoire des Poissons_ during the French
+Revolution.
+
+Then there were Diogenes and Archimedes.
+
+This defence of course implicates me in an unbounded opinion of the
+importance of my own work. "He is quite the little poet," some one said
+of Keats. "It is just as if a man remarked of Buonaparte," said Keats,
+in a pet, "that he's quite the little general."
+
+_A Woman and a Child_
+
+On the way to the Albert Hall came upon the most beautiful picture of
+young maternity that ever I saw in my life. She was a delightfully
+girlish young creature--a perfect phA"nix of health and beauty. As she
+stood with her little son at the kerb waiting for a 'bus, smiling and
+chatting to him, a luminous radiance of happy, satisfied maternal love,
+maternal pride, womanliness streamed from her and enveloped me.
+
+We got on the same 'bus. The little boy, with his long hair and dressed
+in velvet like little Lord Fauntleroy, said something to her--she smiled
+delightedly, caught him up on her knees and kissed him. Two such pretty
+people never touched lips before--I'm certain of it. It was impossible
+to believe that this virginal creature was a mother--childbirth left no
+trace. She must have just budded off the baby boy like a plant. Once, in
+her glance, she took me in her purview, and I knew she knew I was
+watching her. In travelling backwards from Kensington Gardens to the boy
+again, her gaze rested on me a moment and I, of course, rendered the
+homage that was due. As a matter of fact there was no direct evidence
+that she was the mother at all.
+
+_The Albert Hall Hag_
+
+While waiting outside the Albert Hall, an extraordinarily weird contrast
+thrust itself before me--she was the most pathetic piece of human jetsam
+that ever I saw drifting about in this sea of London faces. Tall, gaunt,
+cadaverous, the skin of her face drawn tightly over her cheekbones and
+over a thin, pointed, hook-shaped nose, on her feet brown sandshoes,
+dressed in a long draggle-tailed skirt, a broken-brimmed straw hat,
+beneath which some scanty hair was scraped back and tied behind in a
+knot--this wretched soul of some thirty summers (and what summers!)
+stood in the road beside the waiting queue and weakly passed the bow
+across her violin which emitted a slight scraping sound. She could not
+play a tune and the fingers of her left hand never touched the
+strings--they merely held the handle.
+
+A policeman passed and, with an eye on the queue, muttered audibly, "Not
+'arf," but no one laughed. Then she began to rummage in her skirt,
+holding the violin by the neck in her right hand just as she must hold
+her brat by the arm when at home. Simultaneously sounds issued from her
+mouth in a high falsetto key; they were unearthly sounds, the tiny voice
+of an articulating corpse underneath the coffin lid. For a moment no one
+realised that she was reciting. For she continued to rummage in her
+skirt as she squeaked, "Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O
+sea," etc. The words were scarcely audible tho' she stood but two yards
+off. But she repeated the verse and I then made out what it was. She
+seemed ashamed of herself and of her plight, almost without the courage
+to foist this mockery of violin-playing on us--one would say she was
+frightened by her own ugliness and her own pathos.
+
+After conscientiously carrying out her programme but with the
+distracted, uncomfortable air of some one scurrying over a painful
+task--like a tired child gabbling its prayers before getting into
+bed--she at length produced from her skirt pocket a small canvas money
+bag which she started to hand around. This was the climax to this
+harrowing incident--for each time she held out the bag, she smiled,
+which stretched the skin still more tightly down over her malar
+prominence and said something--an inarticulate noise in a very high
+pitch. "A woman," I whispered to R----, "She claims to be a woman." If
+any one hesitated a moment or struggled with a purse she would wait
+patiently with bag outstretched and head turned away, the smile
+vanishing at once as if the pinched face were but too glad of the
+opportunity of a rest from smiling. She stood there, gazing
+absently--two lifeless eyes at the bottom of deep socket holes in a head
+which was almost a bare skull. She was perfunctorily carrying out an
+objectionable task because she could not kill the will to live.
+
+As she looked away and waited for you to produce the copper, she
+thought, "Why trouble? Why should I wait for this man's aid?" The clink
+of the penny recalled her to herself, and she passed on, renewing her
+terrible grimacing smile.
+
+Why didn't I do something? Why? Because I was bent on hearing
+Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, if you please.... And she may have been a
+well-to-do vagrant--well got up for the occasion--a clever
+simulator?...
+
+_October_ 28.
+
+_Rigor Bordis_
+
+Rigor bordis!--I write like this as if it were a light matter. But
+to-night I was _in extremis_.... First I read the paper; then I finished
+the book I was reading--"_Thus Spake Zarathustra_." Not knowing quite
+what next to do, I took my boots off and poured out another cup of
+coffee. But these manA"uvres were only the feeble attempts of a
+cowardly wretch to evade the main issue which was:--
+
+How to occupy myself and keep myself sane during the hour and a half
+before bedtime.
+
+Before now I have tried going off to bed. But that does not work--I
+don't sleep. Moreover, I have been in the grip of a horrible mental
+unrest. To sit still in my chair, much less to lie in bed doing nothing
+seemed ghastly. I experienced all the cravings of a dissolute neurotic
+for a stimulus, but what stimulus I wanted I did not know. Had I known I
+should have gone and got it. The dipsomaniac was a man to be envied.
+
+Some mechanical means were necessary for sustaining life till bedtime. I
+sat down and played a game of Patience--no one knows how I loathe
+playing Patience and how much I despise the people who play it. Tiring
+of that, sat back in my chair, yawned, and thought of a word I wanted to
+look up in the Dictionary. This quest, forgotten until then, came like a
+beam of bright light into a dark room. So looked the word up leisurely,
+took out my watch, noted the time, and then stood up with elbows on the
+mantelpiece and stared at myself in the glass.... I was at bay at last.
+There was simply nothing I could do. I would have given worlds to have
+some one to talk to. Pride kept me from ringing for the landlady. I must
+stand motionless, back to the wall, and wait for the hour of my release.
+I had but one idea, viz., that I was surely beaten in this game of life.
+I was very miserable indeed. But being so miserable that I couldn't feel
+more so, I began to recover after a while. I began to visualise my
+lamentable situation, and rose above it as I did so. I staged it before
+my mind's eye and observed myself as hero of the plot. I saw myself
+sitting in a dirty armchair in a dirty house in a dirty London street,
+with the landlady's dirty daughter below-stairs singing, "Little Grey
+Home in the West," my head obscured in a cloud of depression, and in my
+mind the thought that if life be a test of endurance I must hang on
+grimly to the arms of the chair and sit tight till bedtime.
+
+This attitude proved a useful means of self-defence. When I had
+dramatised my misery, I enjoyed it, and acute mental pain turned into
+merely aesthetic malaise.
+
+_November_ 4.
+
+A lurid day. Suffering from the most horrible physical languor. Wrote
+the Doctor saying I was rapidly sliding down a steep place into the sea
+(like the swine I am). Could I see him?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Endured an hour's torture of indecision to-night asking myself whether I
+should go over to ask her to be my wife or should I go to the Fabian
+Society and hear Bernard Shaw. Kept putting off the decision even till
+after dinner. If I went to the flat, I must shave; to shave required hot
+water--the landlady had already cleared the table and was rapidly
+retreating. Something must be done and at once. I called the old thing
+back impulsively and ordered shaving water, consoling myself with the
+reflection that it was still unnecessary to decide; the hot water could
+be at hand in case the worst happened. If I decided on matrimony I could
+shave forthwith. Should I? (After dark I always shave in the
+sitting-room because of the better gaslight.)
+
+Drank some coffee and next found myself slowly, mournfully putting on
+hat and coat. You can't shave in hat and coat so I concluded I had
+decided on Shaw. Slowly undid the front door latch and went off.
+
+Shaw bored me. He is mid-Victorian. Sat beside a bulgy-eyed youth
+reading the _Freethinker_.
+
+_November_ 9.
+
+In the evening asked her to be my wife. She refused. Once perhaps ...
+but now....
+
+I don't think I have any moral right to propose to any woman seeing the
+state of my health and I did not actually intend or wish to.... It was
+just to get it off my mind--a plain statement.... If I don't really and
+truly love her it was a perfectly heartless comedy. But I have good
+reason to believe I do. With me, moments of headstrong passion alternate
+with moods of perfectly immobile self-introspection. It is a relief to
+have spoken.
+
+_November_ 10.
+
+Very miserable. Asked R---- three times to come and have dinner with me.
+Each time he refused. My nerves are completely jangled. _Tu l'as voulu,
+George Dandin_--that's the rub.
+
+_November_ 11.
+
+She observed me carefully--I'm looking a perfect wreck _--tu l'as voulu,
+George Dandin_--but it's mainly ill-health and not on her account.
+
+I said,--
+
+"Some things are too funny to laugh at."
+
+"Is that why you are so solemn?"
+
+"No," I answered, "I'm not solemn, I am laughing--some things are too
+solemn to be serious about."
+
+She saw me off at the door and smiled quietly--an amused faraway smile
+of feline satisfaction....
+
+_November_ 12.
+
+Horrible nervous depression. Thinking of suicide with a pistol--a
+Browning. Or of 10 days' mysterious disappearance, when I will go and
+live in a good Hotel, spend all my money, and live among human beings
+with eyes and noses and legs. This isolation. Am I going mad? If I
+disappeared, it would be interesting to see if any one missed me.
+
+_November_ 13.
+
+Still thinking of suicide. It seems the only way out. This morning my
+Essay was returned by the Editor of ----. One by one I have been
+divested of all my most cherished illusions. Once my ambitions gave me
+the fuel with which to keep myself alive. One after another they have
+been foiled, and now I've nothing to burn. I am daily facing the fact
+that my ambitions have overtaxed my abilities and health. For years, my
+whole existence has rested on a false estimate of my own value, and my
+life been revolving around a foolish self-deception. But I know myself
+as I am at last--and am not at all enamoured. The future has nothing for
+me. I am wearied of my life already. What is there for any of us to do
+but die?
+
+_November_ 14.
+
+Before going over to-night bought _London Opinion_ deliberately in order
+to find a joke or better still some cynicism about women to fire off at
+her. Rehearsed one joke, one witticism from Oscar Wilde, and one
+personal anecdote (the latter for the most part false), none of which
+came off, tho' I succeeded in carrying off a nonchalant or even jaunty
+bearing.
+
+"Don't you ever swear?" I asked. "It's a good thing you know, swearing
+is like pimples, better to come out, cleanses the moral system. The
+person who controls himself must have lots of terrible oaths circulating
+in his blood."
+
+"Swearing is not the only remedy."
+
+"I suppose you prefer the gilded pill of a curate's sermon: I prefer
+pimples to pills."
+
+Is it a wonder she does not love me?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I wonder why I paint myself in such horrid colours--why have I this
+morbid pleasure in pretending to those I love that I am a beast and a
+cynic? I suffer, I suppose, from a lacerated self-esteem, from a painful
+loneliness, from the consciousness of how ridiculous I have made myself,
+and that most people if they knew would regard me with loathing and
+disgust.
+
+I am very unhappy. I am unhappy because she does not care for me, and I
+am chiefly unhappy because I do not care for her. Instead of a passion,
+only a dragging heavy chain of attraction ... some inflexible law makes
+me gravitate to her, seizes me by the neck and suspends me over her, I
+cannot look away....
+
+In the early days when I did my best to strangle my love--as one wou'd a
+bastard child--I took courage in the fact that for a man like me the
+murder was necessary. There were books to write and to read, and name
+and fame perhaps. To these everything must be sacrificed. ... That is
+all gone now. No man could have withstood for ever that concentrated
+essence of womanhood that flowed from her....
+
+Still the declaration has made amends. She is pleased about it--it is a
+scalp.
+
+Yet how can I forgive her for saying she supposed it was a natural
+instinct for a girl not to feel drawn to an invalid like me. That was
+cruel tho' true.
+
+_November_ 19.
+
+I might be Captain Scott writing his last words amid Antarctic cold and
+desolation. It is very cold. I am sitting hunched up by the fire in my
+lodgings after a meal of tough meat and cold apple-tart. I am full of
+self-commiseration--my only pleasure now. It is very cold and I cannot
+get warm--try as I will.
+
+My various nervous derangements take different forms. This time my
+peripheral circulation is affected, and the hand, arm, and shoulder are
+permanently cold. My right hand is blue--tho' I've shut up the window
+and piled up a roaring fire. It's Antarctic cold and desolation. London
+in November from the inside of a dingy lodging-house can be very
+terrible indeed. This celestial isolation will send me out of my mind. I
+marvel how God can stick it--lonely, damp, and cold in the clouds. That
+is how I live too--but then I am not God.
+
+I fall back on this Journal just as some other poor devil takes to
+drink. I, too, have toyed with the idea of drinking hard. I have
+frequented bars and billiards saloons and in fits of depression done my
+best to forget myself. But I am not sufficiently fond of alcohol (and it
+would take a lot to make _me_ forget myself). So I plunge into these
+literary excesses and drown my sorrows in Stephens' Blue-black Ink. It
+gives me a sulky pleasure to think that some day somebody will know....
+
+It is humiliating to feel ill as I do. If I had consumption, the disease
+would act as a stimulus--I could strike an attitude feverishly and be
+histrionic. But to be merely "below par"--to feel like a Bunny rabbit
+perennially "poorly," saps my character and mental vigour. I want to
+crawl away and die like a rat in a hole. A bronzed healthy man makes me
+wince. Healthy people regard a chronic sickly man as a leper. They
+suspect him, something fishy.
+
+_November_ 20.
+
+Still at home ill.
+
+If anything, R---- is more of a prA(C)cieux than I am myself. At the
+present moment he is tickling himself with the idea that he's in love
+with a certain golden-haired damsel from the States. He reports to me
+fragments of his conversations with her, how he snatches a fearful joy
+by skirting dangerous conversational territory, or he takes a pencil and
+deftly outlines her profile or the rondeur of her bosom. Or he
+discourses at length on her nose or eye. I can well imagine him driving
+a woman crazy and then collecting her tears in a bottle as mementoes.
+Then whenever he requires a little heart stimulus he could take the
+phial from his waistcoat pocket and watch the tears condensing.
+
+"Why don't you marry her out of hand and be done with all this
+dalliance? I can tell you what's the matter with you," I growled,
+"you're a landscape artist.... You'll grow to resemble, that mean, Jewy,
+secretive, petty creature, J.W.M. Turner, and allow no human being to
+interfere with your art. A fine artist perhaps--but what a man! You'll
+finish up with a Mrs. Danby."
+
+"Yes," he answered, quoting Tennyson with great aptness, "and 'lose my
+salvation for a sketch,' like Romney deserting his wife. If I were not
+married I should have no wife to desert."
+
+It is useless to argue with him. His cosmogony is wrongly centred in Art
+not life. Life interests him--he can't altogether resign himself to the
+cowl and the tonsured head, but he will not plunge. He insists on being
+a spectator, watching the maelstrom from the bank and remarking
+exquisitely, "Ah! there is a very fine sorrow," or, "What an exquisite
+sensation." The other day after one of our furious conversational bouts
+around this subject, I drew an insect, cut it out, and pinned the slip
+in a collecting box. Then suddenly producing the box, and opening it
+with a facetious grin, I said,--
+
+"Here is a jolly little sorrow I caught this morning." The joke pleased
+him and we roared, bellowed.
+
+"That terrible forefinger of yours," he smiled.
+
+"Like Cardinal Richelieu's eyes--piercing?" I suggested with
+appreciation. (It is because I tap him on his shirt front in the space
+between waistcoat and tie aggressively for emphasis in conversation.)
+
+"You must regard my passion for painting," he began once more, "as a
+sort of dipsomania--I really can't help myself."
+
+I jumped on him vehemently,--
+
+"Exactly, my pernickety friend; it's something abnormal and unnatural.
+When, for purposes of self-culture, I see a man deliberately lop off
+great branches of himself so as to divert his strength into one limb, I
+know that if he is successful he'll be something as vulgar as a fat
+woman at a country fair; and if he is unsuccessful he'll be just a
+pathetic mutilation.... You are trying to pervert a natural instinct.
+You want to paint, I believe. Quite so. But when a boy reaches the age
+of puberty he does not grow a palette on his chin but hair.... Still,
+now you recognise it as a bad habit, why need I say more?" ("Why
+indeed?") "It's a vice, and I'm very sorry for you, old boy. I'll do all
+I can--come and have some dinner with me to-night."
+
+"Oh! thank you very much," says my gentleman, "but I'm not at all sorry
+for myself."
+
+"I thought as much. So that we are not so very much agreed after all.
+We're not shaking hands after the boxing contest, but scowling at each
+other from the ropes and shaping for another round."
+
+"Your pulpit orations, my dear Barbellion, in full canonicals," he
+reflected, "are worthy of a larger audience.... To find _you_ of all
+people preaching. I thought you were philosopher enough to see the angle
+of every one's vision and broadminded so as to see every point of view.
+Besides, you are as afraid of marriage as I am, and for the same
+reasons."
+
+"I confess, when in the philosophic citadel of my own armchair," I
+began, "I _do_ see every one's point of view. You sit on the other side
+of the rug and put out the suggestion tentatively that murder may be a
+moral act. I examine your argument and am disposed to accept it. But
+when you slit up my brother's abdomen before my eyes, I am sufficiently
+weak and human to punch you on the nose.... You are too cold and
+Olympian, up above the snowline with a box of paints."
+
+"It is very beautiful among the snows."
+
+"I suppose so."
+
+(Exit.)
+
+_November_ 23.
+
+Great physical languor, especially in the morning. It is Calvary to get
+out of bed and shoulder the day's burden.
+
+"What's been the matter?" they ask.
+
+"Oh! senile decay--general histolysis of the tissues," I say, fencing.
+
+To-night, I looked at myself accidentally in the glass and noticed at
+once the alarming extent of my dejection. Quite unconsciously I turned
+my head away and shook it, making the noise with my teeth and tongue
+which means, "Dear, dear," M---- tells me these waves of ill-health are
+quite unaccountable unless I were "leading a dissolute life, which you
+do not appear to be doing." Damn his eyes.
+
+_Reading Nietzsche_
+
+Reading Nietzsche. What splendid physic he is to Pomeranian puppies like
+myself! I am a hopeless coward. Thunderstorms always frighten me. The
+smallest cut alarms for fear of blood poisoning, and I always dab on
+antiseptics at once. But Nietzsche makes me feel a perfect mastiff.
+
+_The Test for True Love_
+
+The test for true love is whether you can endure the thought of cutting
+your sweetheart's toe-nails--the onychiotomic test. Or whether you find
+your Julia's sweat as sweet as otto of roses. I told her this to-night.
+Probably she thinks I only "saw it in a book."
+
+_Chopin_
+
+On Sunday, went to the Albert Hall, and warmed myself at the Orchestra.
+It is a wonderful sight to watch an orchestra playing from the gallery.
+It spurts and flickers like a flame. Its incessant activity arrests the
+attention and holds it just as a fire does--even a deaf man would be
+fascinated. Heard Chopin's Funeral March and other things. It would be a
+rich experience to be able to be in your coffin at rest and listen to
+Chopin's Funeral March being played above you by a string orchestra with
+Sir Henry Wood conducting.
+
+Sir Henry like a melanic Messiah was crucified as usual, the Hungarian
+Rhapsody No. 2 causing him the most awful agony....
+
+_November_ 28.
+
+_Rodin_
+
+More than once lately have been to see and admire Rodin's recent gifts
+to the nation exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The "Prodigal
+Son" is Beethoven's Fifth Symphony done in stone. It was only on my
+second visit that I noticed the small pebble in each hand--a superb
+touch!--what a frenzy of remorse!
+
+The "Fallen Angel" I loved most. The legs of the woman droop lifelessly
+backwards in an intoxicating curve. The eye caresses it--down the thighs
+and over the calves to the tips of the toes--like the hind limbs of some
+beautiful dead gazelle. He has brought off exactly the same effect in
+the woman in the group called "Eternal Spring," which I have only seen
+in a photograph.
+
+This morning at 9 a.m. lay in bed on my back, warm and comfortable, and,
+for the first time for many weeks, with no pain or discomfort of any
+kind. The mattress curved up around my body and legs and held me in a
+soft warm embrace.... I shut my eyes and whistled the saccharine melody
+for solo violin in Chopin's Funeral March. I wanted the moment prolonged
+for hours. Ill-health chases the soul out of a man. He becomes a body,
+purely physical.
+
+_November_ 29.
+
+This evening she promised to be my wife after a long silent ramble
+together thro' dark London squares and streets! I am beside myself!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_December_ 6.
+
+I know now--I love her with passion. Health and ambition and sanity are
+returning. Projects in view:--
+
+(1) To make her happy and myself worthy.
+
+(2) To get married.
+
+(3) To prepare and publish a volume of this Journal.
+
+(4) To write two essays for _Corn hill_ which shall surely induce the
+Editor to publish and not write me merely long complimentary and
+encouraging letters as heretofore.
+
+Wired to A----, "The brave little pennon has been hauled down."
+
+_December_ 7.
+
+Have so many projects in view and so little time in which to get them
+done! Moreover I am always haunted by the fear that I may never finish
+them thro' physical or temperamental disabilities--a breakdown in health
+or in purpose. I am one of those who are apt to die unexpectedly and no
+one would be surprised. An inquest would probably be unnecessary. I
+badly want to live say another twelve months. Hey! nonny-no! a man's a
+fool that wants to die.
+
+_December_ 9.
+
+... I shook her angrily by the shoulders to-night and said, "Why do I
+love you?--Tell me," but she only smiled gently and said, "I cannot
+tell...." I ought not to love her, I know--every omen is against it....
+Then I am full of self-love: an intellectual Malvolio proud of his
+brains and air of distinction....
+
+Then I am fickle, passionate, polygamous ... I am haunted by the memory
+of how I have sloughed off one enthusiasm after another. I used to
+dissect snails in a pie-dish in the kitchen while Mother baked the
+cakes--the unravelling of the internal economy of a _Helix_ caused as
+great an emotional storm as to-day the Unfinished Symphony does! I look
+for the first parasol in Kensington Gardens with the same interest as
+once I sought out the first snowdrop or listened for the first Cuckoo. I
+am as anxious to identify an instrument in Sir Henry's Orchestra as once
+to identify the song of a new bird in the woods. Nothing is further from
+my intention or desire to continue my old habit of nature study. I never
+read nature books--my old favourites--Waterton's _Wanderings_, Gilbert
+White, _The Zoologist_, etc.--have no interest for me--in fact they give
+me slight mental nausea even to glance at. Wiedersheim (good old
+Wiedersheim) is now deposed by a text book on Harmony. My main desire
+just now is to hear the best music. In the country I wore blinkers and
+saw only zoology. Now in London, I've taken the bit in my mouth--and
+it's a mouth of iron--wanting a run for all my troubles before Death
+strikes me down.
+
+All this evidence of my temperamental instability alarms and distresses
+me on reflection and makes the soul weary. I wish I loved more steadily.
+I am always sidetracking myself. The title of "husband" scares me.
+
+_December_ 12.
+
+_Sir Henry Wood conducting_
+
+Went to the Queen's Hall, sat in the Orchestra and watched Sir Henry's
+statuesque figure conducting thro' a forest of bows, "which pleased me
+mightily." He would be worth watching if you were stone deaf. If you
+could not hear a sound, the animation and excitement of an orchestra in
+full swing, with the conductor cutting and slashing at invisible foes,
+make a magnificent spectacle.
+
+The face of Sir Henry Wood strikes me as very much like the traditional
+pictures of Jesus Christ, tho' Sir Henry is dark--the melanic Messiah I
+call him (very much to my own delight). Rodin ought to do him in
+stone--Chesterfield's ideal of a man--a Corinthian edifice on Tuscan
+foundations. In Sir Henry's case there can be no disputing the Tuscan
+foundations. However swift and elegant the movements of his arms, his
+splendid lower extremities remain as firm as stone columns. While the
+music is calm and serene his right hand and baton execute in concert
+with the left, perfect geometric curves around his head. Then as it
+gathers in force and volume, when the bows begin to dart swiftly across
+the fiddles and the trumpets and trombones blaze away in a
+conflagration, we are all expectant--and even a little fearful, to
+observe his sabre-like cuts. The tension grows ... I hold my breath....
+Sir Henry snatches a second to throw back a lock of his hair that has
+fallen limply across his forehead, then goes on in unrelenting pursuit,
+cutting and slashing at hordes of invisible fiends that leap howling out
+towards him. There is a great turmoil of combat, but the Conductor
+struggles on till the great explosion happens. But in spite of that, you
+see him still standing thro' a cloud of great chords, quite undaunted.
+His sword zigzags up and down the scale--suddenly the closed fist of his
+left hand shoots up straight and points to the zenith--like the arm of a
+heathen priest appealing to Baal to bring down fire from Heaven.... But
+the appeal avails nought and it looks as tho' it were all up for poor
+Sir Henry. The music is just as infuriated--his body writhes with
+it--the melanic Messiah crucified by the inappeasable desire to express
+by visible gestures all that he feels in his heart. He surrenders --so
+you think--he opens out both arms wide and baring his breast, dares them
+all to do their worst--like the picture of Moffat the missionary among
+the savages of the Dark Continent!
+
+And yet he wins after all. At the very last moment he seems to summon
+all his remaining strength and in one final and devastating sweep mows
+down the orchestra rank by rank.... You awake from the nightmare to
+discover the victor acknowledging the applause in a series of his
+inimitable bows.
+
+One ought to pack one's ears up with cotton wool at a concert where Sir
+Henry conducts. Otherwise, the music is apt to distract one's attention.
+R.L.S. wanted to be at the head of a cavalry charge--sword over
+head--but I'd rather fight an orchestra with a baton.
+
+_Beethoven's Fifth Symphony_
+
+This symphony always works me up into an ecstasy; in ecstatic sympathy
+with its dread fulness I could stand up in the balcony and fling myself
+down passionately into the arena below. Yet there were women sitting
+alongside me to-day--knitting! It so annoyed and irritated me that at
+the end of the first movement I got up and sat elsewhere. They would
+have sat knitting at the foot of the Cross, I suppose.
+
+At the end of the second movement, two or three other women got up and
+went home to tea! It would have surprised me no more to have seen a cork
+extract itself from its bottle and promenade.
+
+_Tschaikovsky_
+
+Just lately I've heard a lot of music including Tschaikovsky's
+PathA(C)tique and Fifth Symphonies, some Debussy, and odd pieces by Dukas,
+Glinka, Smetana, Mozart. I am chock-full of impressions of all this
+precious stuff and scarcely know what to write. As usual, the third
+movement of the PathA(C)tique produced a frenzy of exhilaration; I seemed
+to put on several inches around my chest and wished to shout in a voice
+of thunder. The conventions of a public concert hall are dreadfully
+oppressive at such times. I could have eaten "all the elephants of
+Hindustan and picked my teeth with the spire of Strassburg Cathedral."
+
+In the last movement of the Fifth Symphony of that splendid fellow
+Tschaikovsky, the orchestra seemed to gallop away leaving poor Landon
+Ronald to wave his whip in a ridiculously ineffective way. They went on
+crashing down chords, and just before the end I had the awful
+presentiment that the orchestra simply could not stop. I sat still
+straining every nerve in the expectancy that this chord or the next or
+the next was the end. But it went on pounding down--each one seemed the
+last but every time another followed as passionate and emphatic as the
+one before, until finally, whatever this inhuman orchestra was
+attempting to crush and destroy must have been reduced to shapeless
+pulp. I wanted to board the platform and plead with them, elderly
+gentlemen turned their heads nervously, everyone was breathless, we all
+wanted to call "For God's sake, stop"--to do anything to still this
+awful lust for annihilation.... The end came quickly in four drum beats
+in quick succession. I have never seen such hate, such passionate
+intensity of the will to destroy.... And Tschaikovsky was a Russian!
+
+Debussy was a welcome change. "L'AprA"s-midi d'un Faun" is a musical
+setting to an oscitatory exercise. It is an orchestral yawn. Oh! so
+tired!
+
+Came away thoroughly delighted. Wanted to say to every one "Bally good,
+ain't it?" and then we would all shake hands and go home whistling.
+
+_December_ 14.
+
+My rooms are littered with old concert programmes and the Doctor's
+prescriptions (in the yellow envelopes of the dispenser) for my various
+ailments and diseases, and books, books, books.
+
+Among the latter those lying on my table at this moment are--
+
+Plays of M. Brieux.
+
+_Joseph Vance._
+
+The Sequel to _Pragmatism: The Meaning of Truth_, by Willam James.
+
+_Beyond Good and Evil._
+
+Dostoievsky's _The Possessed._
+
+Marie Bashkirtseff's _Journal._
+
+I have found time to read only the first chapter of this last and am
+almost afraid to go on. It would be so humiliating to find I was only
+her duplicate.
+
+On my mantelpiece stands a photograph of Huxley--the hero of my
+youth--which old B---- has always taken to be that of my grandpapa! A
+plaster-cast mask of Voltaire when first hung up made him chuckle with
+indecent laughter. "A regular all-nighter. Who is it?" he said.
+
+_December_ 15.
+
+_Petticoat Lane_
+
+This morning, being Sunday, went to Petticoat Lane and enjoyed myself.
+
+On turning the corner to go into Middlesex Street, as it it now called,
+the first thing I saw was a little girl--a Jewess--being tackled for
+selling Belgian button-hole flags by two policemen who ultimately
+marched her off to the police station.
+
+In the Lane, first of all, was a "Royal Ascot Jockey Scales" made of
+brass and upholstered in gaudy red velvet--a penny a time. A very fat
+man was being weighed and looked a little distressed on being given his
+ticket.
+
+"Another stone," he told the crowd mournfully.
+
+"You'll have to eat less pork," some one volunteered and we all laughed.
+
+Next door to the Scales was a man selling gyroscopes. "Something
+scientific, amusing as well as instructive, illustrating the principles
+of gravity and stability. What I show you is what I sell--price one
+shilling. Who?"
+
+I stopped next at a stall containing nothing but caps,--"any size, any
+colour, any pattern, a shilling apiece--now then!" This show was being
+run by two men--a Jew in a fur cap on one side of the stall and a very
+powerful-looking sort of Captain Cuttle on the other--a seafaring man,
+almost as broad as he was long, with a game leg and the voice of a
+skipper in a hurricane. Both these men were selling caps at a prodigious
+pace, and with the insouciance of tradesmen sure of their custom. The
+skipper would seize a cap, chuck it across to a timid prospective
+purchaser, and, if he dropped it, chuck him over another, crying, with a
+"yo-heave-ho" boisterousness, "Oh! what a game, what a bees' nest."
+
+Upon the small head of another customer, he would squash down his
+largest sized cap saying at once,--
+
+"There, you look the finest gentleman--oh! ah! a little too large."
+
+At which we all laughed, the customer looked silly, but took no offence.
+
+"Try this," yells the skipper above the storm, and takes off his own
+cap. "Oh! ye needn't be afraid--I washed my hair last--year."
+(Laughter.)
+
+Then to his partner, the Jew on the other side of the stall, "Oh! what a
+face you've got. Here! 6d. for any one who can tell me what it is. Why
+not take it to the trenches and get it smashed in?"
+
+The Jew wore spectacles and had a soft ingratiating voice and brown
+doe-like eyes--a Jew in every respect. "Oh!" says he, in the oleaginous
+Semitic way, and accurately taking up his cue (for all this was
+rehearsed patter), "my wife says 'my face is my fortune.'"
+
+"No wonder you're so hard up and 'ave got to take in lodgers. What's yer
+name?"
+
+"John Jones," in a demure wheedling voice.
+
+"Hoo--that's not your name in your own bloody country--I expect it's
+Hullabullinsky."
+
+"Do you know what my name really is?"
+
+"No."
+
+"It's Assenheimopoplocatdwizlinsky Kovorod." (Loud laughter.)
+
+"I shall call you 'ass' for short."
+
+I was laughing loudly at these two clowns and the skipper observing as
+much, shouted out to me,--
+
+"Parlez-vous Francois, M'sieur?"
+
+"Oui, oui," said I.
+
+"Ah! lah, you're one of us--oh! what a game! what a bees' nest," and all
+the time he went on selling caps and chucking them at the purchasers.
+
+Perhaps one of the most extraordinary things I saw was a stream of young
+men who, one after another, came up to a stall, paid a penny and
+swallowed a glass of "nerve tonic"--a green liquid syphoned out of a
+large jar--warranted a safe cure for
+
+"Inward weakness, slightest flurry or body oppressed."
+
+Another man was pulling teeth and selling tooth powder. Some of the
+little urchins' teeth, after he had cleaned them as a demonstration,
+were much whiter than their faces or his. This was "the original Chas.
+Assenheim."
+
+Mrs. Meyers, "not connected with any one else of the same name in the
+Lane" was selling eels at 2d., 3d. and 6d. and doing a brisk trade too.
+
+But I should go on for hours if I were to tell everything seen in this
+remarkable lane during an hour an a half on a Sunday morning. Each
+stall-holder sells only one kind of article--caps or clocks or songs,
+braces, shawls, indecent literature, concertinas, gramophones, coats,
+pants, reach-me-downs, epergnes. The thoroughfare was crowded with
+people (I saw two Lascars in red fez caps) inspecting the goods
+displayed and attentively observed by numerous policemen. The alarm
+clocks were all going off, each gramophone was working a record (a
+different one!) and every tradesman shouting his wares--a perfect
+pandemonium.
+
+_December_ 31.
+
+_A Conversation_
+
+"There is that easily calculable element in your nature, dear boy," I
+said, "by which you forego the dignity of a free-willed human being and
+come under an inflexible natural law. I can anticipate your movements,
+intentions, and opinions long beforehand. For example, I know quite well
+that every Saturday morning will see you with _The New Statesman_ under
+your arm; I know that the words 'Wagner' or 'Shaw' uttered slowly and
+deliberately in your ear will produce a perfectly definite reaction."
+
+"I bet you can't predict what I am going to buy now,"
+
+R---- replied gaily, advancing to the newspaper stall.
+
+He bought the _Pink 'Un_ and I laughed....
+
+"And so you read _Pragmatism_," he mused, "while the fate of the Empire
+stands in the balance."
+
+"Yes," said I, "and the Paris Academy of Sciences were discussing the
+functions of _I¸_ and the Polymorphism of Antarctic diatoms last
+September when the Germans stood almost at the gates of Paris."
+
+This was a lucky stroke for me, for he knew he was rubbing me on the
+raw. We are, of course, great friends, but sometimes we get on one
+another's nerves.
+
+"I am polychromatic," I declaimed, "rhetorical, bass. You--besides being
+a bally fool--are of a pretty gray colour, a baritone and you paint in
+water-colours."
+
+"Whereas you, of course, would paint in blood?" he answered facetiously.
+
+His Oxford education has a firm hold on him. He says for example, "e
+converso" instead of "on the other hand" and "entre nous" for "between
+ourselves." He labels his paragraphs _I+-, I squared, I cubed_, instead of a, b, c, and
+quotes Juvenal, knows Paris and Naples, visits the Alps for the winter
+sports, all in the approved manner of dons.
+
+Not infrequently he visits the East End to Study "how the poor live," he
+lectures at Toynbee Hall, and calls the proletariat "the prolly." In
+fact, he does everything according to the regulations, being a socialist
+and an agnostic, a follower of Shaw and a devotee of Bunyan. "Erotic" he
+is careful to pronounce _erA squaredtic_ to show he knows Greek, and the "Duma,"
+the _DumA _, tho' he doesn't know Russian. Like any don, he is always
+ready to discuss and give an opinion on any sub- supra- or circum-lunary
+subject from bimetallism to the Symphony as an art-form.
+
+"That's a dominant fifth," I said to him the other day; no answer.
+
+"You ignorant devil," I said, "you don't know what a dominant fifth is!"
+
+We made grimaces at one another.
+
+"Who's the Master of the Mint?" I asked him. "That is an easy one."
+
+"The Chancellor of the Exchequer," was the prompt reply.
+
+"Oh! that's right," I said sarcastic and crestfallen. "Now tell me the
+shortest verse in the Bible and the date of Rameses II."
+
+We laughed. R---- is a very clever man and the most extroardinarily
+versatile man I know. He is bound to make his mark. His danger is--too
+many irons in the fire. Here are some of his occupations and
+acquirements: Art (etching, drypoint, water-colours), music (a charming
+voice), classics, French, German, Italian (both speaking and reading
+knowledge), biology, etc., etc. He is for ever titillating his mind with
+some new thing. "For God's sake, do leave it alone--you simply rag your
+mind to death. Put it out to grass--go thro' an annual season of
+complete abstinence from knowledge--an intellectual Lent."
+
+No one more than he enjoys my ragging him like this--and I do it rather
+well.
+
+
+[1] "I could eat all the elephants of Hindustan and pick my teeth with
+the Spire of Strassburg Cathedral."
+
+[2] See January 2nd, 1915.
+
+
+
+
+1915
+
+
+_January_ 1.
+
+I have grown so ridiculously hypercritical and fastidious that I will
+refuse a man's invitation to dinner because he has watery blue eyes, or
+hate him for a mannerism or an impediment or affectation in his speech.
+Some poor devil who has not heard of Turner or Debussy or Dostoieffsky I
+gird at with the arrogance of a knowledgeable youth of 17. Some oddity
+who should afford a sane mind endless amusement, I write off as a _Insus
+naturA|_ and dismiss with a flourish of contempt. My intellectual
+arrogance--excepting at such times as I become conscious of it and pull
+myself up--is incredible. It is incredible because I have no personal
+courage and all this pride boils up behind a timid exterior. I quail
+often before stupid but over-bearing persons who consequently never
+realise my contempt of them. Then afterwards, I writhe to think I never
+stood up to this fool; never uttered an appropriate word to interfere
+with another's nauseating self-love. It exasperates me to be unable to
+give a Roland for an Oliver--even servants and underlings "tick me
+off"--to fail always in sufficient presence of mind to make the
+satisfying rejoinder or riposte. I suffer from such a savage _amour
+propre_ that I fear to enter the lists with a man I dislike on account
+of the mental anguish I should suffer if he worsted me. I am therefore
+bottled up tight--both my hates and loves. For a coward is not only
+afraid to tell a man he hates him, but is nervous too of letting go of
+his feeling of affection or regard lest it be rejected or not returned.
+I shudder to think of such remarks as (referring to me), "He's one of my
+admirers, you know" (sardonically), or, "I simply can't get rid of him."
+
+If however my cork _does_ come out, there is an explosion, and placid
+people occasionally marvel to hear violent language streaming from my
+lips and nasty acid and facetious remarks.
+
+Of course, to intimate friends (only about three persons in the wide,
+wide world), I can always give free vent to my feelings, and I do so in
+privacy with that violence in which a weak character usually finds some
+compensation for his intolerable self-imposed reserve and restraint in
+public. I can never marvel enough at the ineradicable turpitude of my
+existence, at my _double-facedness_, and the remarkable contrast between
+the face I turn to the outside world and the face my friends know. It's
+like leading a double existence or artificially constructing a puppet to
+dangle before the crowd while I fulminate behind the scenes. If only I
+had the moral courage to play my part in life--to take the stage and be
+myself, to enjoy the delightful sensation of making my presence felt,
+instead of this vapourish mumming--then this Journal would be quite
+unnecessary. For to me self-expression is a necessity of life, and what
+cannot be expressed one way must be expressed in another. When colossal
+egotism is driven underground, whether by a steely surface environment
+or an unworkable temperament or as in my case by both, you get a truly
+remarkable result, and the victim a truly remarkable pain--the pain one
+might say of continuously unsuccessful attempts at parturition.
+
+It is perhaps not the whole explanation to say that my milky affability
+before, say bores or clods is sheer personal cowardice.... It is partly
+real affability. I am so glad to have opposite me some one who is making
+himself pleasant and affable and sympathetic that I forget for the
+moment that he is an unconscionable time-server, a sycophant,
+lick-spittle, toady, etc. My first impulse is always to credit folk with
+being nicer, cleverer, more honest and amiable than they are. Then, on
+reflection, I discover unpleasing characteristics, I detect their little
+motives, and hate myself for not speaking. The fellow is intolerable,
+why did I not tell him so? Bitter recriminations from my critical self
+upon my flabby amiable half.
+
+On the whole, then, I lead a pretty disgraceful inner life--excepting
+when I pull myself together and smile benignly on all things with a
+philosophical smugness, such as is by no means my mood at this present
+moment. I am so envious that a reprint of one of Romney's Ramus girls
+sends me into a dry tearless anger--for the moment till I turn over the
+next page.... Inwardly I was exacerbated this morning when R----
+recited, "Come and have a tiddle at the old Brown Bear," and explained
+how a charming "young person" sang this at breakfast the other morning.
+It was simply _too_ charming for him to hear.
+
+To-night as I brushed my hair, I decided I was quite good-looking, and
+_I believe_ I mused that E---- was really a lucky girl.... All that is
+the matter with me is a colossal conceit and a colossal discontent,
+qualities exaggerated where a man finds himself in an environment which
+....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+You observant people will notice that this explanation is something of a
+self-defence whereby the virtue goes out of my confession. I plead
+guilty, but great and unprecedented provocation as well. Intense pride
+of individuality forbids that I should ever be other than, shall I say,
+amiably disposed towards myself _au fond_, however displeased I may be
+with my environment. It is indeed impossible without sending him to a
+lunatic asylum ever to knock a man off the balance of his
+self-esteem.... A man's loyalty to himself is the most pig-headed thing
+imaginable.
+
+_January_ 2.
+
+_The Fire Bogey_
+
+"This Box contains Manuscripts. One guinea will be paid to any one who
+in case of danger from fire saves it from damage or loss."
+
+Signed: W.N.P. BARBELLION.
+
+I have had this printed in large black characters on a card, framed and
+nailed to my "coffin" of Journals. I told the printer first to say _Two
+Guineas_, but he suggested that One Guinea was quite enough. I agreed
+but wondered how the devil _he_ knew what the Journals were
+worth--nobody knows.
+
+Next month, I expect I shall have a "hand" painted on the wall and
+pointing towards the box. And the month after that I shall hire a
+fireman to be on duty night and day standing outside No. 101 in a brass
+helmet and his hatchet up at the salute.
+
+These precious Journals! Supposing I lost them! I cannot imagine the
+anguish it would cause me. It would be the death of my real self and as
+I should take no pleasure in the perpetuation of my flabby, flaccid,
+anA|mic, amiable puppet-self, I should probably commit suicide.
+
+_August_ 7.
+
+Harvey who discovered the circulation of the blood also conducted a
+great many investigations into the Anatomy and development of insects.
+But all his MSS. and drawings disappeared in the fortunes of war, and
+one half of his life work thus disappeared. This makes me feverish,
+living as I do in Armageddon!
+
+Again, all Malpighi's pictures, furniture, books and MSS. were destroyed
+in a lamentable fire at his house in Bononia, occasioned it is said by
+the negligence of his old wife.
+
+About 1618, Ben Jonson suffered a similar calamity thro' a fire breaking
+out in his study. Many unpublished MSS. perished.
+
+A more modern and more tragic example I found recently in the person of
+an Australian naturalist, Dr. Walter Stimpson, who lost all his MSS.,
+drawings, and collections in the great fire of Chicago, and was so
+excoriated by this irreparable misfortune that he never recovered from
+the shock, and died the following year a broken man and unknown.
+
+Of course the housemaid who lit the fire with the _French Revolution_ is
+known to all, as well as Newton's "Fido, Fido, you little know what you
+have done."
+
+There are many dangers in preserving the labours of years in MS. form.
+Samuel Butler (of _Erewhon_) advised writing in copying ink and then
+pressing off a second copy to be kept in another and separate locality.
+My own precautions for these Journals are more elaborate. Those who know
+about it think I am mad. I wonder.... But I dare say I am a pathetic
+fool--an incredible self-deceiver!
+
+Anyhow--the "coffin" of raw material I sent down to T---- while I retain
+the two current volumes. This is to avoid Zeppelins. E---- took the
+"coffin" down for me on her way home from school, and at Taunton,
+inquisitive porters mistaking it, I suppose, for an infant's coffin
+carried it reverently outside the station and laid it down. She caught
+them looking at it just in time before her train left. Under her
+instructions they seized it by the brass handles and carried it back
+again. I sit now and with a good deal of curiosity fondle the idea of
+porters carrying about my Journals of confession. It's like being
+tickled in the palm of the hand.... Two volumes of abstracted entries I
+keep here, and, as soon as I am married, I intend to make a second copy
+of these.... Then all in God's good time I intend getting a volume ready
+for publication.
+
+_January_ 30.
+
+_Hearing Beethoven_
+
+To the Queen's Hall and heard Beethoven's Fifth and Seventh Symphonies.
+
+Before the concert began I was in a fever. I kept on saying to myself,
+"I am going to hear the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies." I regarded myself
+with the most ridiculous self-adulation--I smoothed and purred over
+myself--a great contented Tabby cat--and all because I was so splendidly
+fortunate as to be about to hear Beethoven's Fifth and Seventh
+Symphonies.
+
+It certainly upset me a little to find there were so many other people
+who were singularly fortunate as well, and it upset me still more to
+find some of them knitting and some reading newspapers as if they waited
+for sausage and mashed.
+
+How I gloried in the Seventh! I can't believe there was any one present
+who gloried in it as I did! To be processing majestically up the steps
+of a great, an unimaginable palace (in the "Staircase" introduction),
+led by Sir Henry, is to have had at least a crowded ten minutes of
+glorious life--a suspicion crossed the mind at one time "Good Heavens,
+they're going to knight me." I cannot say if that were their intentions.
+But I escaped however....
+
+I love the way in which a beautiful melody flits around the Orchestra
+and its various components like a beautiful bird.
+
+_January_ 19.
+
+_An Average Day_
+
+After a morning of very mixed emotions and more than one annoyance ...
+at last sat down to lunch and a little peace and quiet with R----. We
+began by quoting verse at one another in open competition. Of course
+neither of us listened to the other's verses. We merely enjoyed the
+pleasure of recollecting and repeating our own. I began with Tom Moore's
+"Row gently here, my Gondolier." R---- guessed the author rightly at
+once and fidgeted until he burst out with, "The Breaths of kissing night
+and day"--to me an easy one. I gave, "The Moon more indolently sleeps
+to-night" (Baudelaire), and in reply he did a great stroke by reciting
+some of the old French of Frangois Villon which entirely flummuxed me.
+
+I don't believe we really love each other, but we cling to each other
+out of ennui and discover in each other a certain cold intellectual
+sympathy.
+
+At the pay desk (Lyons' is our rendezvous) we joked with the cashier--a
+cheerful, fat little girl, who said to R---- (indicating me),--
+
+"He's a funny boy, isn't he?"
+
+"Dangerous," chirped R----, and we laughed. In the street we met an
+aged, decrepit newsvendor--very dirty and ragged--but his voice was
+unexpectedly fruity.
+
+"British Success," he called, and we stopped for the sake of the voice.
+
+"I'm not interested," I said--as an appetiser.
+
+"What! Not.... Just one sir: I haven't sold a single copy yet, and I've
+a wife and four children."
+
+"That's nothing to me--I've three wives and forty children," I remarked.
+
+"What!" in affected surprise, turning to R----, "he's Brigham Young from
+Salt Lake City. Yes I know it--I've been there myself and been dry ever
+since. Give us a drink, sir--just one."
+
+In consideration of his voice we gave him 2d. and passed on....
+
+After giving a light to a Belgian soldier whose cigarette had gone out,
+farther along we entered a queer old music shop where they sell
+flageolets, serpents, clavichords, and harps. We had previously made an
+appointment with the man to have Schubert's Unfinished Symphony played
+to us, so as to recall one or two of the melodies which we can't recall
+and it drives us crazy. "What is that one in the second movement which
+goes like this?" and R---- whistled a fragment. "I don't know," I said,
+"but let's go in here and ask." In the shop, a youth was kind enough to
+say that if we cared to call next day, Madame A----, the harp player
+would be home and would be ready to play us the symphony.
+
+So this morning, before Madame's appearance, this kind and obliging
+youth put a gramophone record of it on, to which we listened like two
+intelligent parrots with heads sideways. Presently, the fat lady harpist
+appeared and asked us just what we wanted to find out--a rather awkward
+question for us, as we did not want to "find out" anything excepting how
+the tunes went.
+
+I therefore explained that as neither of us had sisters or wives, and we
+both wanted, etc.... so would she...? In response, she smiled
+pleasantly and played us the second movement on a shop piano. Meanwhile,
+Henry the boy, hid himself behind the instruments at the rear of the
+shop and as we signed to her she would say,--
+
+"What's that, Henry?"
+
+And Henry would duly answer from his obscurity, "Wood wind," or "Solo
+oboe," or whatever it was, and the lad really spoke with authority. In
+this way, I began to find out something about the work. Before I left, I
+presented her with a copy of the score, which she did not possess and
+because she would not accept any sort of remuneration.
+
+"Won't you put your name on it?" she inquired.
+
+I pointed gaily to the words "Ecce homo," which I had scribbled across
+Schubert's name and said, "There you are." Madame smiled incredulously
+and we said, "Good-bye."
+
+It was a beautifully clement almost springlike day, and at the street
+corner, in a burst of joyousness, we each bought a bunch of violets of
+an old woman, stuck them on the ends of our walking-sticks, and marched
+off with them in triumphant protest to the B.M. Carried over our
+shoulders, our flowers amused the police and ----, who scarcely realised
+the significance of the ritual. "This is my protest," said R----,
+"against the war. It's like Oscar Wilde's Sunflower."
+
+On the way, we were both bitterly disappointed at a dramatic meeting
+between a man and woman of the artizan class which instead of beginning
+with a stormy, "Robert, where's the rent, may I ask?" fizzled out into,
+"Hullo, Charlie, why you _are_ a stranger."
+
+At tea in the A.B.C. shop, we had a violent discussion on Socialism, and
+on the station platform, going home, I said that before marriage I
+intended saving up against the possibility of divorce--a domestic
+divorce fund.
+
+"Very dreadful," said R---- with mock gravity, "to hear a recently
+affianced young man talk like that."
+
+... What should I do then? Marry? I suppose so. Shadows of the
+prison-house. At first I said I ought not to marry for two years. Then
+when I am wildly excited with her I say "next week." We could. There are
+no arrangements to be made. All her furniture--flat, etc. But I feel we
+ought to wait until the War is over.
+
+At dinner-time to-night I was feverish to do three things at once: write
+out my day's Journal, eat my food, and read the _Journal_ of Marie
+Bashkirtseff. Did all three--but unfortunately not at once, so that when
+I was occupied with one I would surreptitiously cast a glance sideways
+at the other--and repined.
+
+After dinner, paid a visit to the ---- and found Mrs. ---- playing Patience.
+I told her that 12,000 lives had been lost in the great Italian
+earthquake. Still going on dealing out the cards, she said in her gentle
+voice that that was dreadful and still absorbed in her cards inquired if
+earthquakes had aught to do with the weather.
+
+"An earthquake must be a dreadful thing," she gently piped, as she
+abstractedly dealt out the cards for a new game in a pretty
+Morris-papered room in Kensington.
+
+_January_ 20.
+
+_At a Public Dinner_
+
+... The timorous man presently took out his cigarette-case and was going
+to take out a cigarette, when he recollected that he ought first to
+offer one to the millionaire on his right. Fortunately the cigarette
+case was silver and the cigarettes appeared--from my side of the
+dinner-table--to be fat Egyptians. Yet the timorous and unassuming
+bug-hunter hesitated palpably. Ought he to offer his cigarettes? He
+thought of his own balance at the bank and then of the millionaire's and
+trembled. The case after all was only silver and the cigarettes were not
+much more than a halfpenny each. Was it not impertinent? He sat a moment
+studying the open case which he held in both hands like a hymn book,
+while the millionaire ordered not wines--but a bass! At last courage
+came, and he inoffensively pushed the cigarettes towards his friend.
+
+"No, thanks!" smiled the millionaire, "I don't smoke." And so, 'twas a
+unicorn dilemma after all.
+
+_February_ 15.
+
+Spent Xmas week at work in her studio, transcribing my Journals while
+she made drawings. All unbeknown to her I was copying out entries of
+days gone by--how scandalised she would be if...!
+
+_February_ 22.
+
+What an amazing Masque is Rotten Row on a Sunday morning! I sat on a
+seat there this morning and watched awhile.
+
+It was most exasperating to be in this kaleidoscope of human life
+without the slightest idea as to who they all were. One man in
+particular, I noticed--a first-class "swell"--whom I wanted to touch
+gently on the arm, slip a half-a-crown into his hand and whisper,
+"There, tell me all about yourself."
+
+Such "swells" there were that out in the fairway, my little cockle-shell
+boat was wellnigh swamped. To be in the wake of a really magnificent
+Duchess simply rocks a small boat in an alarming fashion. I leaned over
+my paddles and gazed up. They steamed past unheeding, but I kept my
+nerve all right and pulled in and out quizzing and observing.
+
+It is nothing less than scandalous that here I am aged 25 with no means
+of acquainting myself with contemporary men and women even of my own
+rank and station. The worst of it is, too, that I have no time to
+lose--in my state of health. This accursed ill-health cuts me off from
+everything. I make pitiful attempts to see the world around me by an
+occasional visit (wind, weather, and health permitting) to Petticoat
+Lane, the Docks, Rotten Row, Leicester Square, or the Ethical Church.
+To-morrow I purpose going to the Christian Scientists'. Meanwhile, the
+others participate in Armageddon.
+
+_February_ 23.
+
+_Looking for Lice at the Zoo_
+
+The other day went to the Zoological Gardens, and, by permission of the
+Secretary, went round with the keepers and searched the animals for
+ectoparasites.
+
+Some time this year I have to make a scientific Report to the Zoological
+Society upon all the Lice which from time to time have been collected on
+animals dying in the gardens and sent me for study and determination.
+
+We entered the cages, caught and examined several Tinamous,
+_Rhinochetus, Eurypygia_, and many more, to the tune of "The Policeman's
+Holiday" whistled by a Mynah! It was great fun.
+
+Then we went into the Ostrich House and thoroughly searched two Kiwis.
+These, being nocturnal birds, were roosting underneath a heap of straw.
+When we had finished investigating their feathers, they ran back to
+their straw at once, the keeper giving them a friendly tap on the rear
+to hurry them up a bit. They are just like little old women bundling
+along.
+
+The Penguins, of course, were the most amusing, and, after operating
+fruitlessly for some time on a troublesome AdA"le, I was amused to find,
+on turning around, all the other AdA"les clustered close around my feet
+in an attitude of mute supplication.
+
+The Armadillo required all the strength of two keepers to hold still
+while I went over his carcass with lens and forceps. I was also allowed
+to handle and examine the Society's two specimens of that amazing
+creature the _Echidna_.
+
+_BalA"niceps rex_ like other royalty had to be approached decorously. He
+was a big, ill-tempered fellow, and quite unmanageable except by one
+keeper for whom he showed a preference. While we other conspirators hid
+ourselves outside, this man entered the house quietly and approached the
+bird with a gentle cooing sound. Then suddenly he grabbed the bill and
+held on. We entered at the same moment and secured the wings, and I
+began the search--without any luck. We must have made an amusing
+picture--three men holding on for dear life to a tall, grotesque bird
+with an imperial eye, while a fourth searched the feathers for
+parasites!
+
+_February_ 28.
+
+What a boon is Sunday! I can get out of bed just when the spirit moves
+me, dress and bath leisurely, even with punctilio. How nice to dawdle in
+the bath with a cigarette, to hear the holiday sound of Church bells!
+Then comes that supreme moment when, shaven, clean, warm and hungry for
+breakfast and coffee, I stand a moment before the looking-glass and comb
+out my towzled hair with a parting as straight as a line in Euclid. That
+gives the finishing touch of self-satisfaction, and I go down to
+breakfast ready for the day's pleasure. I hate this weekday strain of
+having to be always each day at a set time in a certain place.
+
+_March_ 3.
+
+I often sit in my room at the B.M. and look out at the traffic with a
+glassy, mesmerised face--a fainA(C)ant. How different from that extremely
+busy youth who came to London in 1912. Say--could that lad be I? How
+many hours do I waste day-dreaming. This morning I dreamed and dreamed
+and could not stop dreaming--I had not the will to shake myself down to
+my task.... My memories simply trooped the colour.
+
+It surprised me to find how many of them had gone out of my present
+consciousness and with what poignancy of feeling I recognised them
+again! How selfishly for the most part we all live in our present selves
+or in the selves that are to be.
+
+Then I raced thro' all sorts of future possibilities--oh! when and how
+is it all going to end? How do you expect me to settle down to
+scientific research with all this internal unrest! The scientific man
+above all should possess the "quiet mind in all changes of fortune"--Sir
+Henry Wotton's _How happy is he born and taught_.
+
+The truth is I am a hybrid: a mixture of two very distinct temperaments
+and they are often at war. To keep two different natures and two
+different mental habits simultaneously at work is next to impossible.
+Consequently plenty of waste and fever and--as I might have discovered
+earlier for myself--success almost out of the question. If only I were
+pure-bred science or pure-bred art!
+
+_March_ 4.
+
+Life is a dream and we are all somnambuloes. We know that for a fact at
+all times when we are most intensely alive--at crises of unprecedented
+change, in sorrow or catastrophe, or in any unusual incident brought
+swiftly to a close like a vision!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I sit here writing this--a mirage! Who am I? No one can say. What am I?
+"A soap-bubble hanging from a reed."
+
+Every man is an inexhaustible treasury of human personality. He can go
+on burrowing in it for an eternity if he have the desire--and a taste
+for introspection. I like to keep myself well within the field of the
+microscope, and, with as much detachment as I can muster, to watch
+myself live, to report my observations of what I say, feel, think. In
+default of others, I am myself my own spectator and
+self-appreciator--critical, discerning, vigilant, fond!--my own stupid
+Boswell, shrewd if silly. This spectator of mine, it seems to me, must
+be a very moral gentleman and eminently superior. His incessant
+attentions, while I go on my way misconducting myself, goad me at times
+into a surly, ill-tempered outbreak, like Dr. Johnson. I hate being
+shadowed and reported like this. Yet on the whole--like old Samuel
+again--I am rather pleased to be Boswelled. It flatters me to know that
+at least one person takes an unremitting interest in all my ways.
+
+And, mind you, there are people who have seen most things but have never
+seen themselves walking across the stage of life. If someone shows them
+glimpses of themselves they will not recognise the likeness. How do you
+walk? Do you know your own idiosyncrasies of gait, manner of speech,
+etc.?
+
+I never cease to interest myself in the Gothic architecture of my own
+fantastic soul.[1]
+
+_March_ 6.
+
+_The Punch and Judy Show_
+
+Spent a most delightful half-an-hour to-day reading an account in the
+_EncyclopA|dia Britannica_ (one of my favourite books--it's so "gey
+disconnekkit") the history of the Punch and Judy Show. It's a delightful
+bit of antiquarian lore and delighted me the more because it had never
+occurred to me before that it had an ancient history. I am thoroughly
+proud of this recent acquisition of knowledge and as if it were a
+valuable freehold I have been showing it off saying, "Rejoice with
+me--see what I have got here." I fired it off first in detail at ----;
+and H---- and D---- will probably be my victims to-morrow. After all, it
+is a charming little cameo of history: compact, with plenty of scope for
+conjecture, theory, research, and just that combination of all three
+which would suit my taste and capacity if I had time for a Monograph.
+
+_March_ 22
+
+I waste much time gaping and wondering. During a walk or in a book or in
+the middle of an embrace, suddenly I awake to a stark amazement at
+everything. The bare fact of existence paralyses me--holds my mind in
+mort-main. To be alive is so incredible that all I do is to lie still
+and merely breathe--like an infant on its back in a cot. It is
+impossible to be interested in anything in particular while overhead the
+sun shines or underneath my feet grows a single blade of grass. "The
+things immediate to be done," says Thoreau, "I could give them all up to
+hear this locust sing." All my energies become immobilised, even my
+self-expression frustrated. I could not exactly master and describe how
+I feel during such moments.
+
+_March_ 23.
+
+_Johnson_ v. _Yves Delage_
+
+I expect we have all of us at one time or another heard ourselves
+addressing to annoying, objectionable acquaintances some such stinging
+castigation as Hazlitt's letter to Gifford, or Burke's letter to a Noble
+Lord, or Johnson's letter to Lord Chesterfield, or Rousseau's letter to
+the Archbishop of Paris. If only I could indulge myself! At this moment
+I could glut my rancours on six different persons at least!
+
+What a raging discontent I have suffered to-day! What cynicism, what
+bitterness of spirit, what envy, hate, exasperation, childish petulance,
+what pusillanimous feelings and desires, what crude efforts to flout
+simple, ingenuous folk with my own thwarted, repressed
+self-assertiveness!
+
+A solemn fellow told me he had heard from Johnson who said he had
+already had much success from collecting in moss.[2] With an icy
+politeness I asked who Johnson was. Who the Hell is Johnson? As a _quid
+pro quo_ I began to talk of Yves Delage, which left him as much in the
+dark as he left me. Our Gods differ, we have a different hierarchy.
+
+"Well, how's your soul?" said R----, bursting in with a sardonic smile.
+
+I gave him a despairing look and said:
+
+"Oh! a pink one with blue spots," and he left me to my fate.
+
+Had tea with the ---- and was amazed to find on the music tray in the
+drawing-room of these inoffensive artists a copy of ----'s Memoir on
+_Synapta_. Within his hearing, I said, "Did you and Mrs. ---- find this
+exciting reading?" And I held it up with a sneer. I felt I had laid bare
+a nerve and forthwith proceeded to make it twinge. ----, of course, was
+glib with an explanation, yet the question remains incalculable--just
+how pleased that young man is with himself.
+
+After tea went out into the Studio and watched these two enthusiasts
+paint. I must have glowered at them. I--the energetic, ambitious,
+pushing youth--of necessity sitting down doing nought, as unconsidered
+as a child playing on the floor. I recollected my early days in my attic
+laboratory and sighed. Where is my energy now?
+
+Mrs. ---- plays Chopin divinely well. How I envied this man--to have a
+wife play you Chopin!
+
+_March_ 24.
+
+It is fortunate I am ill in one way for I need not make my mind up about
+this War. I am not interested in it--this filth and lunacy. I have not
+yet made up my mind about myself. I am so steeped in myself--in my
+moods, vapours, idiosyncrasies, so self-sodden, that I am unable to
+stand clear of the data, to marshal and classify the multitude of facts
+and thence draw the deduction what manner of man I am. I should like to
+know--if only as a matter of curiosity. So what in God's name am I? A
+fool, of course, to start with--but the rest of the diagnosis?
+
+One feature is my incredible levity about serious matters. Nothing
+matters, provided the tongue is not furred. I have coquetted with death
+for so long now, and endured such prodigious ill-health that my main
+idea when in a fair state of repair is to seize the passing moment and
+squeeze it dry. The thing that counts is to be drunken; as Baudelaire
+says, "One must be for ever drunken; that is the sole question of
+importance. If you would not feel the horrible burden of time that
+bruises your shoulders and bends you to the earth, you must be drunken
+without cease."
+
+Another feature is my insatiable curiosity. My purpose is to move about
+in this ramshackle, old curiosity shop of a world sampling existence. I
+would try everything, meddle lightly with everything. Religions and
+philosophies I devour with a relish, Pragmatism and Bishop Berkeley and
+Bergson have been my favourite bagatelles in turn. My consciousness is a
+ragbag of things: all quips, quirks, and quillets, all excellent passes
+of pate, all the "obsolete curiosities of an antiquated cabinet" take my
+eye for a moment ere I pass on. In Sir Thomas Browne's _Pseudodoxia_, I
+am interested to find "why Jews do not stink, what is the superstition
+of sneezing after saluting, wherefore negroes are black," and so forth.
+There is a poetic appropriateness that in A.D. 1915 I should be occupied
+mainly in the study of Lice. I like the insolence of it.
+
+They tell me that if the Germans won it would put back the clock of
+civilisation for a century. But what is a meagre 100 years? Consider the
+date of the first Egyptian dynasty! We are now only in A.D. 1915--surely
+we could afford to chuck away a century or two? Why not evacuate the
+whole globe and give the ball to the Boches to play with--just as an
+experiment to see what they can make of it. After all there is no
+desperate hurry. Have we a train to catch? Before I could be serious
+enough to fight, I should want God first to dictate to me his programme
+of the future of mankind.
+
+_March_ 25.
+
+Often in the middle of a quite vivid ten seconds of life, I find I have
+switched myself off from myself to make room for the person of a
+disinterested and usually vulgar spectator. Even in the thrill of a
+devotional kiss I have overheard myself saying, "Hot stuff, this witch."
+Or in a room full of agreeable and pleasant people, while I am being as
+agreeable as I know how, comes the whisper in a cynical tone, "These
+damned women." I am apparently a triple personality:
+
+(1) The respectable youth.
+
+(2) The foul-mouthed commentator and critic.
+
+(3) The real but unknown I.
+
+Curious that these three should live together amiably in the same
+tenement!
+
+_In a Crowd_
+
+A crowd makes egotists of us all. Most men find it repugnant to them to
+submerge themselves in a sea of their fellows. A silent, listening crowd
+is potentially full of commotion. Some poor devils suffocating and
+unable any longer to bear the strain will shout, "Bravo," or "Hear,
+hear," at every opportunity. At the feeblest joke we all laugh loudly,
+welcoming this means of self-survival. Hence the success of the
+Salvation Army. To be preached at and prayed for in the mass for long on
+end is what human nature can't endure in silence and a good deal of self
+can be smuggled by an experienced Salvationist into "Alleluia" or "The
+Lord be praised."
+
+_Naming Cockroaches_
+
+I had to determine the names of some exotic cockroaches to-day and
+finding it very difficult and dull raised a weak smile in two
+enthusiasts who know them as "Blattids" by rechristening them with great
+frivolity, "Fat 'eds."
+
+"These bloody insects," I said to an Australian entomologist of rare
+quality.
+
+"A good round oath," he answered quietly.
+
+"If it was a square one it wouldn't roll properly," I said. It is nice
+to find an entomologist with whom I can swear and talk bawdy.
+
+_March_ 26.
+
+_A Test of Happiness_
+
+The true test of happiness is whether you know what day of the week it
+is. A miserable man is aware of this even in his sleep. To be as
+cheerful and rosy-cheeked on Monday as on Saturday, and at breakfast as
+at dinner is to--well, make an ideal husband.
+
+... It is a strange metempsychosis, this transformation of an
+enthusiast--tense, excitable, and active, into a sceptic, nerveless,
+ironical, and idle. That's what ill-health can do for a man. To be among
+enthusiasts--zoologists, geologists, entomologists--as I frequently am,
+makes me feel a very old man, regarding them as children, and provokes
+painful retrospection and sugary sentimentality over my past flame now
+burnt out.
+
+I do wonder where I shall end up; what shall I be twenty years hence? It
+alarms me to find I am capable of such remarkable changes in character.
+I am fluid and can be poured into any mould. I have moments when I see
+in myself the most staggering possibilities. I could become a wife
+beater, and a drug-taker (especially the last). My curiosity is often
+such a ridiculous weakness that I have found myself playing Peeping Tom
+and even spying into private documents. In a railway carriage I will
+twist my neck and risk any rudeness to see the title of the book my
+neighbour is reading or how the letter she is reading begins.
+
+_April_ 10.
+
+"Why," asks Samuel Butler, "should not chicken be born and clergymen be
+laid and hatched? Or why, at any rate, should not the clergyman be born
+full grown and in Holy Orders not to say already beneficed? The present
+arrangement is not convenient ... it is not only not perfect but so much
+the reverse that we could hardly find words to express our sense of its
+awkwardness if we could look upon it with new eyes...."
+
+As soon as we are born, if we could but get up, bathe, dress, shave,
+breakfast once for all, if we could "cut" these monotonous cycles of
+routine. If once the sun rose it would stay up, or once we were alive we
+were immortal!--how much forrarder we should all get--always at the
+heart of things, working without let or hindrance in a straight line for
+the millennium! Now we waltz along instead. Even planets die off and new
+ones come in their place. How infinitely wearisome it seems. When an old
+man dies what a waste, and when a baby is born what a redundancy of
+labour in front!
+
+_Two People I hate in particular_
+
+The man walking along the pavement in front of me giving me no room to
+pass under the satisfactory impression that he is the only being on the
+pavement or in the street, city, country, world, universe: and it all
+belongs to him even the moon and sun and stars.
+
+The woman on the 'bus the other night--pouring out an interminable flow
+of poisonous chatter into the ear of her man--poor, exhausted devil who
+kept answering dreamily "Oom" and"Yes" and "Oom"--how I hated her for
+his sake!
+
+_April_ 11.
+
+_Beethoven's Fifth Symphony_
+
+If music moves me, it always generates images--a procession of
+apparently disconnected images in my mind. In the Fifth Symphony, for
+example, as soon as the first four notes are sounded and repeated, this
+magic population springs spontaneously into being. A nude,
+terror-stricken figure in headlong flight with hands pressed to the ears
+and arms bent at the elbows--a staring, bulgy-eyed mad-woman such as one
+sees in Raemakers' cartoons of the Belgian atrocities. A man in the
+first onset of mental agony on hearing sentence of death passed upon
+him. A wounded bird, fluttering and flopping in the grass. It is the
+struggle of a man with a steam-hammer--Fate. As tho' thro' the walls of
+a closed room--some mysterious room, a fearful spot--I crouch and listen
+and am conscious that inside some brutal punishment is being meted out
+--there are short intervals, then unrelenting pursuit, then hammerlike
+blows--melodramatic thuds, terrible silences (I crouch and wonder what
+has happened), and the pursuit begins again. I see clasped hands and
+appealing eyes and feel very helpless and mystified outside. An
+epileptic vision or an opium dream--_Dostoievsky_ or De Quincey set to
+music.
+
+In the Second Movement the man is broken, an unrecognisable vomit. I see
+a pale youth sitting with arms hanging limply between the knees, hands
+folded, and with sad, impenetrable eyes that have gazed on unspeakable
+horrors. I see the brave, tearful smile, the changed life after personal
+catastrophe, the Cross held before closing eyes, sudden absences of
+mind, reveries, poignant retrospects, the rustle of a dead leaf of
+thought at the bottom of the heart, the tortuous pursuit of past
+incidents down into the silence of yesterday, the droning of comfortable
+words, the painful collection of the wreckage of a life with intent to
+"carry on" for a while in duty bound, for the widow consolation in the
+child; a greyhound's cold wet nose nozzling into a listless hand, and
+outside a Thrush singing after the storm, etc., etc.
+
+In the Third Movement comes the crash by which I know something final
+and dreadful has happened. Then the resurrection with commotion in
+Heaven: tempests and human faces, scurryings to and fro, brazen
+portcullises clanging to, never to open more, the distant roll of drums
+and the sound of horses' hoofs. From behind the inmost veil of Heaven I
+faintly catch the huzzas of a great multitude. Then comes a great
+healing wind, then a few ghost-like tappings on the window pane till
+gradually the Avenue of Arches into Heaven come into view with a solemn
+cortege advancing slowly along.
+
+Above the great groundswell of woe, Hope is restored and the Unknown
+Hero enters with all pomp into his Kingdom, etc., etc.
+
+I am not surprised to learn that Beethoven was once on the verge of
+suicide.
+
+_April_ 15.
+
+There is an absurd fellow ... who insists on taking my pirouettes
+seriously. I say irresponsibly, "All men are liars," and he replies with
+jejuneness and exactitude of a pronouncing dictionary, "A liar is one
+who makes a false statement with intent to deceive." What can I do with
+him? "Did I ever meet a lady," he asked, "who wasn't afraid of mice?" "I
+don't know," I told him, "I never experiment with ladies in that way."
+
+He hates me.
+
+_May_ 11.
+
+This mysterious world makes me chilly. It is chilly to be alive among
+ghosts in a nightmare of calamity. This Titanic war reduces me to the
+size and importance of a debilitated housefly. So what is a poor egotist
+to do? To be a common soldier is to become a pawn in the game between
+ambitious dynasts and their ambitious marshals. You lose all
+individuality, you become a "bayonet" or a "machine gun," or "cannon
+fodder," or "fighting material."
+
+_May_ 22.
+
+Generosity may be only weakness, philanthropy (beautiful word),
+self-advertisement, and praise of others sheer egotism. One can almost
+hear a eulogist winding himself up to strike his eulogy that comes out
+sententious, pompous, and full of self.
+
+_May_ 23.
+
+The following is a description of Lermontov by Maurice Baring:
+
+"He had except for a few intimate friends an impossible temperament; he
+was proud, over-bearing, exasperated and exasperating, filled with a
+savage _amour-propre_ and he took a childish delight in annoying; he
+cultivated 'le plaisir aristocratique de dA(C)plaire.' ... He could not
+bear not to make himself felt and if he felt he was unsuccessful in this
+by fair means he resorted to unpleasant ones. Yet he was warm-hearted,
+thirsting for love and kindness and capable of giving himself up to love
+if he chose.... At the bottom of all this lay no doubt a deep-seated
+disgust with himself and with the world in general, and a complete
+indifference to life resulting from large aspirations which could not
+find an outlet and recoiled upon himself."
+
+This is an accurate description of Me.
+
+_May_ 26.
+
+The time will come--it's a great way off--when a joke about sex will be
+not so much objectionable as unintelligible. Thanks to Christian
+teaching, a nude body is now an obscenity, of the congress of the sexes
+it is indecent to speak and our birth is a corruption. Hence come a
+legion of evils: reticence, therefore ignorance and therefore venereal
+disease; prurience especially in adolescence, poisonous literature, and
+dirty jokes. The mind is contaminated from early youth; even the
+healthiest-minded girl will blush at the mention of _the wonder of
+creation_. Yet to the perfectly enfranchised mind it should be as
+impossible to joke about sex as about mind or digestion or physiology.
+The perfectly enfranchised poet--and Walt Whitman in "The Song of
+Myself" came near being it--should be as ready to sing of the incredible
+raptures of the sexual act between "twin souls" as of the clouds or
+sunshine. Every man or woman who has loved has a heart full of beautiful
+things to say but no man dare--for fear of the police, for fear of the
+coarse jests of others and even of a breakdown in his own
+highmindedness. I wonder just how much wonderful lyric poetry has thus
+been lost to the world!
+
+_May_ 27.
+
+_The Pool: A Retrospect_
+
+From above, the pool looked like any little innocent sheet of water. But
+down in the hollow itself it grew sinister. The villagers used to say
+and to believe that it had no bottom and certainly a very great depth
+in it could be _felt_ if not accurately gauged as one stood at the
+water's edge. A long time ago, it was a great limestone quarry, but
+to-day the large mounds of rubble on one side of it are covered with
+grass and planted with mazzard trees, grown to quite a large girth. On
+the other side one is confronted by a tall sheet of black, carboniferous
+rock, rising sheer out of the inky water--a bare sombre surface on which
+no mosses even--"tender creatures of pity," Ruskin calls them--have
+taken compassion by softening the jagged edges of the strata or nestling
+in the scars. It is an excellent example of "Contortion" as Geologists
+say, for the beds are bent into a quite regular geometrical pattern
+--syncline and anticline in waves--by deep-seated plutonic force that
+makes the mind quake in the effort to imagine it.
+
+On the top of this rock and overhanging the water--a gaunt,
+haggard-looking Fir tree impends, as it seems in a perilous balance,
+while down below, the pool, sleek and shiny, quietly waits with a
+catlike patience.
+
+In summer time, successive rows of Foxgloves one behind the other in
+barbaric splendour are ranged around the grassy rubble slopes like
+spectators in an amphitheatre awaiting the spectacle. Fire-bellied Efts
+slip here and there lazily thro' the water. Occasionally a Grass-snake
+would swim across the pool and once I caught one and on opening his
+stomach found a large fire-bellied Eft inside. The sun beats fiercely
+into this deep hollow and makes the water tepid. On the surface grows a
+glairy Alga, which was once all green but now festers in yellow patches
+and causes a horrible stench. Everything is absolutely still, air and
+water are stagnant. A large _Dytiscus_ beetle rises to the surface to
+breathe and every now and then large bubbles of marsh gas come sailing
+majestically up from the depth and explode quietly into the fetid air.
+The _horrificness_ of this place impressed me even when I was intent
+only on fishing there for bugs and efts. Now, seen in retrospect, it
+haunts me.
+
+_May_ 28.
+
+It is only by accident that certain of our bodily functions are
+distasteful. Many birds eat the faeces of their young. The vomits of
+some Owls are formed into shapely pellets, often of beautiful
+appearance, when composed of the glittering multi-coloured elytra of
+Beetles, etc. The common Eland is known to micturate on the tuft of hair
+on the crown of its head, and it does this habitually, when lying down,
+by bending its head around and down--apparently because of the aroma,
+perhaps of sexual importance during mating time, as it is a habit of the
+male alone.
+
+At lunch time, had an unpleasant intermittency period in my heart's
+action and this rather eclipsed my anxiety over a probable Zeppelin
+Raid. Went home to my rooms by 'bus, and before setting off to catch my
+train for West Wycombe to stay for the week-end at a Farm with
+E---- swallowed two teaspoonfuls of neat brandy, filled my flask, and
+took a taxi to Paddington. At 3.50 started to walk to C---- H---- Farm
+from W. Wycombe Station, where E---- has been lodging for some weeks
+taking a rest cure after a serious nervous breakdown thro' overwork. As
+soon as I stepped out of the train, I sniffed the fresh air and soon
+made off down the road, happy to have left London and the winter and the
+war far behind. The first man of whom I inquired the way happened to
+have been working at the Farm only a few weeks ago, so I relied
+implicitly on his directions, and as it was but a mile and a half
+decided that my wobbly heart could stand the strain. I set out with a
+good deal of pleasurable anticipation. I was genuinely looking forward
+to seeing E----, altho' in the past few weeks our relations had become a
+little strained, at least on my part, mainly because of her little
+scrappy notes to me scribbled in pencil, undated, and dull! Yet I could
+do with a volume of "Sonnets from the Portuguese." These letters chilled
+me. In reply, I wrote with cold steel short, lifeless formal notes, for
+I felt genuinely aggrieved that she should care so little how she wrote
+to me or how she expressed her love. I became ironical with myself over
+the prospect of marrying a girl who appeared so little to appreciate my
+education and mental habits. [What a popinjay!--1917.] My petty spirit
+grew disenchanted, out of love. I was false to her in a hundred
+inconsiderable little ways and even deliberately planned the breaking
+off of the engagement some months hence when she should be restored to
+normal health.
+
+But once in the country and, as I thought, nearing my love at every step
+and at every bend in the road, even anticipating her arms around me with
+real pleasure (for she promised to meet me half way), I on a sudden grew
+eager for her again and was assured of a happy week-end with her. Then
+the road grew puzzling and I became confused, uncertain of the way. I
+began to murmur she should have given me instructions. Every now and
+then I had to stop and rest as my heart was beating so furiously.
+Espying a farm on the left I made sure I had arrived at my destination
+and walked across a field to it and entered the yard where I heard some
+one milking a cow in a shed. I shouted over the five-barred gate into
+empty space, "Is this C---- H---- Farm?" A labourer came out of the shed
+and redirected me. It was now ten to five. I was tired and out of sorts,
+and carried a troublesome little handbag. I swore and cursed and found
+fault with E---- and the Universe.
+
+I trudged on, asking people, as I went, the way, finally emerging from
+the cover of a beautiful wood thro' a wicket gate almost at the entrance
+to the Farm I sought. At the front door we embraced affectionately and
+we entered at once, I putting a quite good face upon my afternoon's
+exertions--when I consider my unbridled fury of a short time before.
+E----, as brown as a berry, conducted me to my bedroom and I nearly
+forgot to take this obvious opportunity of kissing her again.
+
+"How are you?" I asked.
+
+"All right," she said, fencing.
+
+"But really?"
+
+"All right."
+
+(A little nettled): "My dear, that isn't going to satisfy me. You will
+have to tell me exactly how you are."
+
+After tea, I recovered myself and we went for a walk together. The
+beauty of the country warmed me up, and in the wood we kissed--I for my
+part happy and quite content with the present state of our relations,
+_i.e._, affectionate but not perfervid.
+
+_May_ 29.
+
+Got up early and walked around the Farm before breakfast. Everything
+promises to be delightful--young calves, broods of ducklings, and
+turkeys, fowls, cats and dogs. In the yard are two large Cathedral
+barns, with enormous pent roofs sloping down to within about two feet of
+the ground and entered by way of great double doors that open with the
+slowness and solemnity of a Castle's portal studded with iron knobs. It
+thrilled me to the marrow on first putting my head outside to be greeted
+with the grunt of an invisible pig that I found scraping his back on the
+other side of the garden wall.
+
+In the afternoon, E---- and I sat together in the Beech Wood: E---- on a
+deck chair and I on a rug on the ground. In spite of our beautiful
+surroundings we did not progress very well, but I attributed her slight
+aloofness to the state of her nerves. She is still far from recovered.
+These wonderful Beech Woods are quite new to me. The forest beech is a
+very different plant from the solitary tree. In the struggle to reach
+the light the Forest Beech grows lean and tall and gives an
+extraordinary suggestion of wiry powerful strength. On the margins of
+the wood, Bluebells were mobilised in serried ranks. Great Tits
+whistled--in the language of our allies--"Bijou, Bijou" and I agreed
+with every one of them.
+
+Some folk don't like to walk over Bluebells or Buttercups or other
+flowers growing on the ground. But it is foolish to try to pamper Nature
+as if she were a sickly child. She is strong and can stand it. You can
+stamp on and crush a thousand flowers--they will all come up again next
+year.
+
+By some labyrinthine way which I cannot now recall, the conversation
+worked round to a leading question by E.--if in times like these we
+ought not to cease being in love? She was quite calm and serious. I said
+"No, of course not, silly." My immediate apprehension was that she had
+perceived the coldness in my letters and I was quite satisfied that she
+was so well able to read the signs in the sky. "But you don't wish to go
+on?" she persisted. I persisted that I did, that I had no misgivings, no
+second thoughts, that I was not merely taking pity on her, etc. The wild
+temptation to seize this opportunity for a break I smothered in
+reflecting how ill she was and how necessary to wait first till she was
+well again. These thoughts passed swiftly, vaguely like wraiths thro' my
+mind: I was barely conscious of them. Then I recalled the sonnet about
+coming in the rearward of a conquered woe and mused thereon. But I took
+no action. [Fortunately--for me. 1916.]
+
+Presently with cunning I said that there was no cloud on my horizon
+whatever--only her "letters disappointed me a little--they were so
+cold," but "as soon as I saw you again, darling, those feelings
+disappeared."
+
+As soon as they were spoken I knew they were not as they might seem, the
+words of a liar and hypocrite. They _became_ true. E---- looked very
+sweet and helpless and I loved her again as much as ever.
+
+"It's funny," she said, "but I thought your letters were cold. Letters
+are so horrid."
+
+The incident shews how impossible is intellectual honesty between
+lovers. Truth is at times a hound which must to kennel.
+
+"Write as you would speak," said I. "You know I'm not one to carp about
+a spelling mistake!"
+
+The latter remark astonished me. Was it indeed I who was speaking? All
+the week I had been fuming over this. Yet I was honest: the Sun and E.'s
+presence were dispelling my ill-humours and crochets. We sealed our
+conversation with a kiss and swore never to doubt each other again. E.'s
+spell was beginning to act. It is always the same. I cannot resist the
+actual presence of this woman. Out of her sight, I can in cold blood
+plan a brutal rupture. I can pay her a visit when the first kiss is a
+duty and the embrace a formality. But after 5 minutes I am as passionate
+and devoted as before. It is always thus. After leaving her, I am angry
+to think that once more I have succumbed.
+
+In the evening we went out into a field and sat together in the grass.
+It is beautiful. We lay flat on our backs and gazed up at the sky.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+S.H. has died of enteric at Malta. In writing to Mrs. H., instead of
+dwelling on what a splendid fellow he was I belaboured the fact that I
+still remembered our boyish friendship in every detail and still kept
+his photo on my mantelpiece and altho' "in later years" I didn't suppose
+we "had a great deal in common I discovered that a friendship even
+between two small boys cannot wholly disappear into the void."
+Discussing myself when I ought to have been praising him! Ugh! She will
+think what a conceited, puff-breasted Jackanapes. These phrases have
+rankled in my mind ever since I dropped the letter into the letter-box.
+"Your Stanley, Mrs. H., was of course a very inferior sort of person and
+naturally, you could hardly expect me to remain friendly with him but
+rest assured I hadn't forgotten him," etc.
+
+_The Luxury of Lunacy_
+
+Yesterday, I read a paper at the Zoological Society about lice. There
+was a goodly baldness of sconce and some considerable length of beard
+present that listened or appeared to listen to my innocent remarks with
+great solemnity and sapience.... I badly wanted to tell them some horrid
+stories about human lice but I had not the courage. I wanted to jolt
+these middle-aged gentlemen by performing a few tricks but I am too
+timid for such adventures. But before going to sleep I imagined a
+pandemonium in which with a perfectly glacial manner I produced lice
+alive from my pockets, conjured them down from the roof in a rain, with
+the skilful sleight of hand drew them out of the chairman's beard, made
+the ladies scream as I approached, dared to say they were all lousy and
+unclean and finished up with an eloquent apostrophe after the manner of
+Thomas de Quincey (and of Sir Walter Raleigh before him) beginning:
+
+"O just, subtle and eloquent avenger, pierce the hides of these
+abominable old fogies, speckle their polished calvaria with the scarlet
+blood drops...."
+
+But I hadn't the courage. Shelley in a crowded omnibus suddenly burst
+out: "O let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of
+Kings, etc." I've always wanted to do something like that and when I
+have AL5 to spare I hope to pull the communication cord of an express
+train--my hands tingle as often as I look at it. Dr. Johnson's courage
+in tapping the lamp-posts is really everyone's envy tho' we laugh at him
+for it and say, green-eyed, that he was mad. In walking along the
+pavement, I sometimes indulge myself in the unutterable, deeply rooted
+satisfaction of stepping on a separate flagstone where this is possible
+with every stride. And if this is impossible or not easy, there arises
+in me a vague mental uneasiness, some subconscious suspicion that the
+world is not properly geometrical and that the whole universe perhaps is
+working out of truth. I am also rather proud of my courageous
+self-surrender to the daemon of laughter, especially in those early days
+when H. and I used to sit opposite one another and howl like hyenas.
+After the most cacophonous cachinnations as soon as we had recovered
+ourselves he or I would regularly remark in serious and confidential
+tones, "I say--we _really_ are going mad." But what a delightful luxury
+to be thus mad amid the great, spacious, architectural solemnity with
+gargoyles and effigies of a scientific meeting! Some people never do
+more than chuckle or smile--and they are often very humorous happy
+people, ignorant nevertheless of the joy of riding themselves on the
+snaffle and losing all control.
+
+While boating on ---- last summer, we saw two persons, a man and a girl
+sitting together on the beach reading a book with heads almost touching.
+
+"I wonder what they're reading?" I said, and I was dying to know. We
+made a few facetious guesses.
+
+"Shall I ask?"
+
+"Yes, do," said Mrs. ----.
+
+The truth is we all wanted to know. We were suddenly mad with curiosity
+as we watched the happy pair turning over leaf after leaf.
+
+While R---- leaned on his oars, I stood up in the boat and threatened to
+shout out a polite enquiry--just to prove that the will is free. But
+seeing my intention the boat-load grew nervous and said seriously, "No,"
+which unnerved me at the last moment so I sat down again. Why was I so
+afraid of being thought a lunatic by two persons in the distance whom I
+had never seen and probably would never see again? Besides I _was_ a
+lunatic--we all were.
+
+In our post-prandial perambulations about S. Kensington G---- and I
+often pass the window of a photographer's shop containing always a
+profusion of bare arms, chests, necks, bosoms belonging to actresses,
+aristocrats and harlots--some very beautiful indeed. Yet on the whole
+the window annoys us, especially one picture of a young thing with an
+arum lily (ghastly plant!) laid exquisitely across her breast.
+
+"Why do we suffer this?" I asked G----, tapping the window ledge as we
+stood.
+
+"I don't know," he answered lamely--morose. (Pause while the two
+embittered young men continue to look in and the beautiful young women
+continue to look out.)
+
+Thoroughly disgruntled I said at last: "If only we had the courage of
+our innate madness, the courage of children, lunatics and men of genius,
+we should get some stamp paper, and stick a square beneath each
+photograph with our comments."
+
+Baudelaire describes how he dismissed a glass vendor because he had no
+coloured glasses--"glasses of rose and crimson, magical glasses, glasses
+of Paradise"--and, stepping out on to his balcony, threw a flowerpot
+down on the tray of glasses as soon as the man issued into the street
+below, shouting down furiously, "The Life Beautiful! The Life
+Beautiful."
+
+Bergson's theory is that laughter is a "social gesture" so that when a
+man in a top hat treads on a banana skin and slips down we laugh at him
+for his lack "of living pliableness." At this rate we ought to be
+profoundly solemn at Baudelaire's action and moreover a "social gesture"
+is more likely to be an expression of society's will to conformity in
+all its members rather than any dangerous "living pliableness." Society
+hates living pliableness and prefers drill, routine, orthodoxy,
+conformity. It hated the living pliableness of Turner, of Keats, of
+Samuel Butler and a hundred others.
+
+But to return to lunacy: the truth is we are all mad fundamentally and
+are merely schooled into sanity by education. Pascal wrote: "Men are so
+necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of
+madness." And, in fact, the man who has succeeded in extirpating this
+intoxication of life is usually said to be "temporarily insane." In
+those melancholy interludes of sanity when the mind becomes rationalised
+we all know how much we have been deceived and gulled, what an
+extraordinary spectacle humanity presents rushing on in noise and tumult
+no one knows why or whither. Look at that tailor in his shop--why does
+he do it? Some day in the future he thinks he will.... But the day
+never, comes and he is nevertheless content.
+
+_May_ 30.
+
+A brilliantly sunny day. This funny old farm-house where we are staying
+quite delights me. It is pleasant, too, to dawdle over dressing, to put
+away shaving tackle for a day or so, to jump out of bed in the morning
+and thrust my head out of the window into the fresh and stock-scented
+air of the garden, listen to the bird chorus or watch a "scrap" in the
+poultry-run. Then all unashamed, I dress myself before a dear old lady
+in a flowery print gown concealing 4 thin legs and over the top of the
+mirror a piece of lace just like a bonnet, caught up in front by a
+piece of pink ribbon. On the walls Pear's Soap Annuals, on a side table
+_Swiss Family Robinson_ and _Children of the New Forest_. Then there are
+rats under the floors, two wooden staircases which wind up out of sight,
+two white dairies, iron hapses on all the doors and a privy at the top
+of the orchard. (Tell me--how do you explain the psychosis of a being
+who on a day must have seized hammer and nail and an almanac picture of
+a woman in the snow with a basket of goodies--"An Errand of
+Mercy"--carried all three to the top of the orchard and nailed the
+picture up on the dirty wall in the semi-darkness of an earth-closet?)
+
+Got up quite early before breakfast and went birds'-nesting.... It would
+take too long and be too sentimental for me to record my feelings on
+looking into the first nest I found--a Chaffinch's, the first wild
+bird's eggs I have seen for many years. As I stood with an egg between
+thumb and forefinger, my memories flocked down like white birds and
+surrounded me. I remained still, fed them with my thoughts and let them
+perch upon my person--a second St. Francis of Assisi. Then I shoo'ed
+them all away and prepared for the more palpitating enjoyment of to-day.
+
+After breakfast we sat in the Buttercup field--my love and I--and
+"plucked up kisses by the roots that grew upon our lips." The sun was
+streaming down and the field thickly peopled with Buttercups. From where
+we sat we could see the whole of the valley below and Farmer Whaley--a
+speck in the distance--working a machine in a field. We watched him
+idly. The gamekeeper's gun went off in one of the covers. It was jolly
+to put our heads together right down deep in the Buttercups and
+luxuriously follow the pelting activities of the tiny insects crawling
+here and there in the forest of grass, clambering over a broken blade
+athwart another like a wrecked tree or busily enquiring into some low
+scrub at the roots. A chicken came our way and he seemed an enormous
+bird from the grass-blade's point of view. How nice to be a chicken in
+a field of Buttercups and see them as big as Sunflowers! or to be a
+Gulliver in the Beech Woods! to be so small as to be able to climb a
+Buttercup, tumble into the corolla and be dusted yellow or to be so big
+as to be able to pull up a Beech-tree with finger and thumb! If only a
+man were a magician, could play fast and loose with rigid Nature? what a
+multitude of rich experiences he could discover for himself!
+
+I looked long and steadily this morning at the magnificent torso of a
+high forest Beech and tried to project myself into its lithe tiger-like
+form, to feel its electric sap vitalising all my frame out to the tip of
+every tingling leaf, to possess its splendid erectness in my own bones.
+I could have flung my arms around its fascinating body but the austerity
+of the great creature forbad it. Then a Hawk fired my ambition!--to be a
+Hawk, or a Falcon, to have a Falcon's soul, a Falcon's heart--that
+splendid muscle in the cage of the thorax--and the Falcon's pride and
+sagacious eye![3]
+
+When the sun grew too hot we went into the wood where waves of Bluebells
+dashed up around the foot of the Oak in front of us.... I never knew
+before, the delight of offering oneself up--an oblation of one's whole
+being; I even longed for some self-sacrifice, to have to give up
+something for her sake. It intoxicated me to think I was making another
+happy....
+
+After a lunch of scrambled eggs and rhubarb and cream went up into the
+Beech Wood again and sat on a rug at the foot of a tree. The sun
+filtered in thro' the greenery casting a "dim, religious light."
+
+"It's like a cathedral," I chattered away, "stained glass windows,
+pillars, aisles--all complete."
+
+"It would be nice to be married in a Cathedral like this," she said.
+"At C---- Hall Cathedral, by the Rev. Canon _Beech_...."
+
+"Sir Henry Wood was the organist."
+
+"Yes," she said, "and the Rev. Blackbird the precentor."
+
+We laughed over our silliness!
+
+Shrew-mice pattered over the dead leaves and one came boldly into view
+under a bramble bush--she had never seen one before. Overhead, a ribald
+fellow of a Blackbird whistled a jaunty tune. E---- laughed. "I am sure
+that Blackbird is laughing at us," she said. "It makes me feel quite
+hot."
+
+This evening we sat on the slope of a big field where by lowering our
+eyes we could see the sun setting behind the grass blades--a very pretty
+sight which I do not remember, ever to have noted before. A large blue
+_Carabus_ beetle was stumbling about, Culvers cooed in the woods near
+by. It was delightful to be up 600 feet on a grassy field under the
+shadow of a large wood at sunset with my darling.
+
+_May_ 31.
+
+Sitting at tea in the farm house to-day E---- cried suddenly, pointing
+to a sandy cat in the garden:
+
+"There,--he's the father of the little kittens in the barn and I'll tell
+you how we know. P---- noticed the kittens had big feet and later on saw
+that old Tom stalking across the garden with big feet of exactly the
+same kind."
+
+"So you impute the paternity of the kittens to the gentleman under the
+laurel bushes?"
+
+I looked at the kittens to-night and found they had extra toes. "Mr.
+Sixtoes," as W---- calls him also possesses six toes, so the
+circumstantial evidence looks black against him.
+
+_June_ 1.
+
+In the Beech Wood all the morning. Heigh-ho! it's grand to lie out as
+straight as a line on your back, gaze upwards into the tree above, and
+with a caressing eye follow its branches out into their multitudinous
+ramifications forward and back--luxurious travel for the tired eye. ...
+Then I would shut my eyes and try to guess where her next kiss would
+descend. Then I opened my eyes and watched her face in the most
+extravagant detail, I counted the little filaments on her precious mole
+and saw the sun thro' the golden down of her throat....
+
+Sunlight and a fresh wind. A day of tiny cameos, little _coups
+d'A"il_, fleeting impressions snapshotted on the mind: the glint on
+the keeper's gun as he crossed a field a mile away below us, sunlight
+all along a silken hawser which some Spider engineer had spun between
+the tops of two tall trees spanning the whole width of a bridle path,
+the constant patter of Shrew-mice over dead leaves, the pendulum of a
+Bumble-bee in a flower, and the just perceptible oscillation of the tree
+tops in the wind. While we are at meals the perfume of Lilac and Stocks
+pours in thro' the window and when we go to bed it is still pouring in
+by the open lattice.
+
+_June_ 2.
+
+Each day I drop a specially selected Buttercup in past the little
+"Peeler," at the apex of the "V" to lie among the blue ribbons of her
+camisoles--those dainty white leaves that wrap around her bosom like the
+petals around the heart of a Rose. Then at night when she undresses, it
+falls out and she preserves it.
+
+In the woods, hearing an extra loud patter on the leaves, we turned our
+heads and saw a Frog hopping our way. I caught him and gave an
+elementary lesson in Anatomy. I described to her the brain, the pineal
+organ in Anguis, Sphenodon's pineal eye, etc. Then we fell to kissing
+again.... Every now and then she raises her head and listens (like a
+Thrush on the lawn) thinking she hears someone approach. We neither of
+us speak much ... and at the end of the day, the nerve endings on my
+lips are tingling.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Farmer Whaley is a funny old man with a soft pious voice. When he feeds
+the Fowls, he sucks in a gentle, caressing noise between his lips for
+all the world as if he fed them because he loved them, and not because
+he wants to fatten them up for killing. His daughter Lucy, aged 22,
+loves all the animals of the farm and they all love her; the Cows stand
+monumentally still while she strokes them down the blaze or
+affectionately waggles their dewlaps. This morning, she walked up to a
+little Calf in the farm-yard scarce a fortnight old which started to
+"back" in a funny way, spraddling out its legs and lowering its head.
+Miss Lucy laughed merrily and cried "Ah! you funny little thing," and
+went off on her way to feed the Fowls who all raced to the gate as soon
+as they heard her footsteps. She brought in two double-yolked Ducks'
+eggs for us to see and marvel at. In the breakfast room stands a stuffed
+Collie dog in a glass case. I'd as soon embalm my grandmother and keep
+her on the sideboard.
+
+I asked young George, the farm-boy, what bird went like this: I whistled
+it. He looked abashed and said a Chaffinch. I told Miss Lucy who said
+George was a silly boy, and Miss Lucy told Farmer Whaley who said George
+ought to know better--it was a Mistle-Thrush.
+
+The letters are brought us each morning by a tramp with a game leg who
+secretes his Majesty's Mails in a shabby bowler hat, the small packages
+and parcels going to the roomy tail pocket of a dirty morning coat. A
+decayed gentleman of much interest to us.
+
+_June_ 3.
+
+We have made a little nest in the wood and I lead her into it by the
+hand over the briars and undergrowth as if conducting her to the grand
+piano on a concert platform. I kissed her....
+
+Then in a second we switch back to ordinary conversation. In an ordinary
+conversational voice I ask the trees, the birds, the sky.
+
+"What's become of all the gold?"
+
+"What's become of Waring?"
+
+"What is Love? 'Tis not hereafter."
+
+"Where are the snows of yesteryear?"
+
+"Who killed Cock Robin?"
+
+"Who's who?"
+
+And so on thro' all the great interrogatives that I could think of"till
+she stopped my mouth with a kiss and we both laughed.
+
+"Miss Penderkins," I say. "Miss Penderlet, Miss Pender-au-lait, Miss
+Pender-filings."
+
+What do I mean? she cries. "What's the point of the names? Why take my
+name in vain? Why? What? How?"
+
+She does not know that clever young men sometimes trade on their
+reputation among simpler folk by pretending that meaningless remarks
+conceal some subtlety or cynicism, some little Attic snap.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have been teaching her to distinguish the songs of different birds and
+often we sit a long while in the Cathedral Wood while I say, "What's
+that?" and "What's that?" and she tells me. It is delightful to watch
+her dear serious face as she listens.... This evening I gave a _viva
+voce_ examination as per below:
+
+"What does the Yellow Hammer say?"
+
+"What colour are the Hedge Sparrow's eggs?"
+
+"Describe the Nightjar's voice."
+
+"How many eggs does it lay?"
+
+"Oh! you never told me about the Nightjar," she cried outraged.
+
+"No: it's a difficult question put in for candidates taking honours."
+
+Then we rambled on into Tomfoolery. "Describe the call-note of a motor
+omnibus." "Why does the chicken cross the road?" and "What's
+that?"--when a railway engine whistled in the distance.
+
+Measure by this our happiness!
+
+_June_ 4.
+
+At a quarter past eight, this morning, the horse and trap were awaiting
+me outside, and bidding her "Goodbye" I got in and drove off--she riding
+on the step down so far, as the gate. Then we waved till we were out of
+sight. Back in London by 10 a.m. She makes slow progress, poor dear--her
+nerves are still very much of a jangle. But I am better, my heart is
+less wobbly.
+
+_June_ 5.
+
+R---- cannot make me out. He says one day I complain bitterly at not
+receiving a Portuguese sonnet once a week, and the next all is well and
+Love reigneth. "Verily a Sphinx."
+
+_June_ 7.
+
+Spent the afternoon at the Royal Army Medical College in consultation
+with the Professor of Hygiene. Amid all the paraphernalia of research,
+even when discussing a serious problem with a serious Major, I could not
+take myself seriously. I am incurably trivial and always feel myself an
+irresponsible youth, wondering and futile, among owlish grown-ups.
+
+At 4 p.m. departed and went down on Vauxhall Bridge and watched a
+flour-barge being unloaded before returning to the Museum. I could
+readily hang on behind a cart, stare at an accident, pull a face at a
+policeman and then run away.
+
+_June_ 20.
+
+... It annoys me to find the _laissez-faire_ attitude of our relatives.
+Not one with a remonstrance for us and yet all the omens are against our
+marriage. In the state of my nervous system and in the state of hers--we
+have both had serious nervous break-downs--how impossible it seems! Yet
+they say all the old conventional things to us, about our happiness and
+so on!...
+
+... Am I a moral monster? Surely a man who can combine such calculating
+callousness with really generous impulses of the heart is--what?
+
+The truth is I think I am in love with her: but I am also mightily in
+love with myself. One or the other has to give.
+
+_June_ 25.
+
+If sometimes you saw me in my room by myself, you would say I was a
+ridiculous coxcomb. For I walk about, look out of the window then at the
+mirror--turning my head sideways perhaps so as to see it in profile. Or
+I gaze down into my eyes--my eyes always impress me--and wonder what
+effect I produce on others. This, I believe, is not so much vanity as
+curiosity. I know I am not prepossessing in appearance--my nose is
+crooked and my skin is blotched. Yet my physique--because it is
+mine--interests me. I like to see myself walking and talking. I should
+like to hold myself in my hand in front of me like a Punchinello and
+carefully examine myself at my leisure.
+
+_June_ 28.
+
+Saw my brother A---- off at Waterloo en route for Armageddon. Darling
+fellow. He shook hands with P---- and H----, and P---- wished him
+"Goodbye, and good luck." Then he held my hand a moment, said "Goodbye,
+old man," and for a second gave me a queer little nervous look. I could
+only say "Goodbye," but we understand each other perfectly.... It is
+horrible. I love him tenderly.
+
+_June_ 29.
+
+_Sleep_
+
+Sleep means unconsciousness: unconsciousness is a solemn state--you get
+it for example from a blow on the head with a mallet. It always
+weightily impresses me to see someone asleep--especially someone I love
+as to-day, stretched out as still as a log--who perhaps a few minutes
+ago was alive, even animated. And there is nothing so welcome, unless it
+be the sunrise, as the first faint gleam of recognition in the
+half-opened eye when consciousness like a mighty river begins to flow in
+and restore our love to us again.
+
+When I go to bed myself, I sometimes jealously guard my faculties from
+being filched away by sleep. I almost fear sleep: it makes me
+apprehensive--this wonderful and unknowable Thing which is going to
+happen to me for which I must lay myself out on a bed and wait, with an
+elaborate preparedness. Unlike Sir Thomas Browne, I am not always so
+content to take my leave of the sun and sleep, if need be, into the
+resurrection. And I sometimes lie awake and wonder when the mysterious
+Visitor will come to me and call me away from this thrilling world, and
+how He does it, to which end I try to remain conscious of the gradual
+process and to understand it: an impossibility of course involving a
+contradiction in terms. So I shall never know, nor will anybody else.
+
+_July_ 2.
+
+I've had such a successful evening--you've no idea! The pen simply flew
+along, automatically easy, page after page in perfect sequence. My style
+trilled and bickered and rolled and ululated in an infinite variety; you
+will find in it all the subtlest modulations, inflections and suavities.
+My afflatus came down from Heaven in a bar of light like the
+Shekinah--straight from God, very God of very God. I worked in a golden
+halo of light and electric sparks came off my pen nib as I scratched the
+paper.
+
+_July_ 3.
+
+_The Clever Young Man_
+
+Argued with R---- this morning. He is a type specimen of the clever
+young man. We both are. Our flowers of speech are often forced hot-house
+plants, paradoxes and cynicisms fly as thick as driving rain and Shaw is
+our great exemplar. I could write out an exhaustive analysis of the
+clever young man, and being one myself can speak from "inspired sources"
+as the newspapers say.
+
+A common habit is to underline and memorise short, sharp, witty remarks
+he sees in books and then on future occasions dish them up for his own
+self-glorification. If the author be famous he begins, "As ---- says,
+etc." If unknown the quotation is quietly purloined. He is always very
+self-conscious and at the same time very self-possessed and very
+conceited. You tell me with tonic candour that I am insufferably
+conceited. In return, I smile, making a sardonic avowal of my good
+opinion of myself, my theory being that as conceit is, as a rule,
+implicit and, as a rule, blushingly denied, you will mistake my impudent
+confession for bluff and conclude there is really something far more
+substantial and honest beneath my apparent conceit. If, on the other
+hand, I am conceited, why I have admitted it--I agree with you--but tho'
+there is no virtue in the confession being quite detached and
+unashamed--still you haven't caught me by the tail. It is very difficult
+to circumvent a clever young man. He is as agile as a monkey.
+
+His principal concern of course is to arouse and maintain a reputation
+for profundity and wit. This is done by the simple mechanical formula of
+antithesis: if you like winkles he proves that cockles are inveterately
+better; if you admire Ruskin he tears him to ribbons. If you want to
+learn to swim--as it is safer, he shows it is more dangerous to know how
+to swim and so on. I know his whole box of tricks. I myself am now
+playing the clever young man by writing out this analysis just as if I
+were not one myself.
+
+You doubt my cleverness? Well, some years ago in R----'s presence I
+called ----"the Rev. Fastidious Brisk,"--the nickname be it recalled
+which Henley gave to Stevenson (without the addition of "Rev."). At the
+time I had no intention of appropriating the witticism as I quite
+imagined R---- was acquainted with it. His unexpected explosion of
+mirth, however, made me uncomfortably uncertain of this, yet for the
+life of me I couldn't muster the honesty to assure him that my feather
+was a borrowed one. A few weeks later he referred to it again as
+"certainly one of my better ones"--but still I remained dumb and the
+time for explanations went for once and all. Now see what a pretty
+pickle I am in: the name "Brisk" or "F.B." is in constant use by us for
+this particular person--he goes by no other name, meanwhile I sit and
+wonder how long it will be before R---- finds me out. There are all
+sorts of ways in which he might find out: he might read about it for
+himself, someone might tell him or--worst of all--one day when we are
+dining out somewhere he will announce to the whole company my brilliant
+appellation as a little after-dinner diversion: I shall at once observe
+that the person opposite me _knows_ and is about to air his knowledge;
+then I shall look sternly at him and try to hold him: he will hesitate
+and I shall land him with a left and right: "I suppose you've read
+Henley's verses on Stevenson?" I remark easily and in a moment or so
+later the conversation has moved on.
+
+_August_ 1.
+
+Am getting married at ---- Register Office on September 15th. It is
+impossible to set down here all the labyrinthine ambages of my will and
+feelings in regard to this event. Such incredible vacillations, doubts,
+fears. I have been living at a great rate below surface recently. "If
+you enjoy only twelve months' happiness," the Doctor said to me, "it is
+worth while." But he makes a recommendation.... At his suggestion E----
+went to see him and from his own mouth learnt all the truth about the
+state of my health, to prevent possible mutual recriminations in the
+future.[4] To marry an introspective dyspeptic--what a prospect for
+her!... I exercise my microscopic analysis on her now as well as on
+myself.... This power in me is growing daily more automatic and more
+repugnant. It is a nasty morbid unhealthy growth that I want to hide if
+I cannot destroy. It amounts to being able at will to switch myself in
+and out of all my most cherished emotions; it is like the case in Sir
+Michael Foster's _Physiology_ of a man who, by pressing a tumour in his
+neck could stop or at any rate control the action of his heart.
+
+_August_ 2.
+
+House pride in newly-wed folk, for example, H. and D. to-day at Golder's
+Green or the Teignmouth folk, is very trying to the bachelor visitor.
+They will carry a chair across the room as tenderly as tho' it were a
+child and until its safe transit is assured, all conversation goes by
+the board. Or the wife suddenly makes a remark to the husband _sotto
+voce_, both thereupon start up simultaneously (leaving the fate of
+Warsaw undecided) while you, silenced by this unexpected manA"uvre, wilt
+away in your chair, the pregnant phrase still-born on your lips.
+Presently they re-enter the room with the kitten that was heard in the
+scullery or with a big stick used to flourish at a little Tomtit on the
+rose tree. _She_ apologises and both settle down again, recompose their
+countenances into a listening aspect and with a devastating politeness,
+pick up the poor, little, frayed-out thread of the conversation where it
+left off with: "Europe? you were saying...." I mobilise my scattered
+units of ideas but it is all a little chilly for the lady of the house
+if she listens with her face and speaks with her lips--her heart is far
+from me: she fixes a glassy eye on the tip of my cigarette, waiting to
+see if the ash will fall on her carpet.
+
+_August_ 6.
+
+The most intimate and extensive journal can only give each day a
+relatively small sifting of the almost infinite number of things that
+flow thro' the consciousness. However vigilant and artful a diarist may
+be, plenty of things escape him and in any event re-collection is not
+re-creation....
+
+To keep a journal is to have a secret liaison of a very sentimental
+kind. A _journal intime_ is a super-confidante to whom everything is
+told and confessed. For an engaged or married man to have a secret
+super-confidante who knows things which are concealed from his lady
+seems to me to be deliberate infidelity. I am as it were engaged to two
+women and one of them is being deceived. The word "Deceit" comes up
+against me in this double life I lead, and insists I shall name a plain
+thing bluntly. There is something very like sheer moral obliquity in
+these entries behind her back.... Is this journal habit slowly
+corrupting my character? Can an engaged or married man conscientiously
+continue to write his _journal intime_?
+
+This question of giving up my faithful friend after September I must
+consider.
+
+Of course most men have something to conceal from someone. Most married
+men are furtive creatures, and married women too. But I have a Gregers
+Werle-like passion for life to be lived on a foundation of truth in
+every intercourse. I would have my wife know all about me and if I
+cannot be loved for what I surely am, I do not want to be loved for what
+I am not. If I continue to write therefore she shall read what I have
+written....
+
+My Journal keeps open house to every kind of happening in my soul.
+Provided it is a veritable autochthon--I don't care how much of a
+tatterdemalion or how ugly or repulsive--I take him in and--I fear
+sponge him down with excuses to make him more creditable in other's
+eyes. You may say why trouble whether you do or whether you don't tell
+us all the beastly little subterranean atrocities that go on in your
+mind. Any eminently "right-minded" _Times_ or _Spectator_ reader will
+ask: "Who in Faith's name is interested in your introspective
+muck-rakings--in fact, who the Devil are you?" To myself, a person of
+vast importance and vast interest, I reply,--as are other men if I could
+but understand them as well. And in the firm belief that whatever is
+inexorably true however unpleasant and discreditable (in fact true
+things can never lack a certain dignity), I would have you know Mr.
+_Times_- and Mr. _Spectator-reader_ that actual crimes have many a time
+been enacted in the secrecy of my own heart and the only difference
+between me and an habitual criminal is that the habitual criminal has
+the courage and the nerve and I have not. What, then, may these crimes
+be? Nothing much--only murders, theft, rape, etc. None of them, thank
+God; fructify in action--or at all events only the lesser ones. My
+outward and visible life if I examine it is merely a series of
+commonplace, colourless and thoroughly average events. But if I analyse
+myself, my inner life, I find I am both incredibly worse and incredibly
+better than I appear. I am Christ and the Devil at the same time--or as
+my sister once called me--a child, a wise man, and the Devil all in one.
+Just as no one knows my crimes so no one knows of my good actions. A
+generous impulse seizes me round the heart and I am suddenly moved to
+give a poor devil a AL5 note. But no one knows this because by the time I
+come to the point I find myself handing him a sixpenny-bit and am quite
+powerless to intervene. Similarly my murders end merely in a little
+phlegm.
+
+_August_ 7.
+
+_Two Adventures_
+
+On a 'bus the other day a woman with a baby sat opposite, the baby
+bawled, and the woman at once began to unlace herself, exposing a large,
+red udder, which she swung into the baby's face. The infant, however,
+continued to cry and the woman said,--
+
+"Come on, there's a good boy--if you don't, I shall give it to the
+gentleman opposite."
+
+Do I look ill-nourished?
+
+"'Arma virumque cano,'" a beggar said to me this morning in the High
+Street, "or as the boy said, 'Arms and the man with a dog,' mistaking
+the verb for the noun. Oh! yes, sir, I remember my Latin. Of course, I
+feel it's rather invidious my coming to you like this, but everything is
+absolutely 'non est' with me," and so on.
+
+"My dear sir," I answered expansively, "I am as poor as you are. You at
+least have seen better days you say--but I never have."
+
+He changed in a minute his cringeing manner and rejoined:
+
+"No, I shouldn't think you had," eyeing me critically and slinking off.
+
+Am I _so_ shabby?
+
+_August_ 8.
+
+By Jove! I hope I live! ... Why does an old crock like myself go on
+living? It causes me genuine amazement. I feel almost ashamed of myself
+because I am not yet dead seeing that so many of my full-blooded
+contemporaries have perished in this War. I am so grateful for being
+allowed to live so long that nothing that happens to me except death
+could upset me much. I should be happy in a coal mine.
+
+_August_12.
+
+Suffering from indigestion. The symptoms include:
+
+Excessive pandiculation,
+
+Excessive oscitation,
+
+Excessive eructation,
+
+DyspnA"a,
+
+Sphygmic flutters,
+
+Abnormal porrigo,
+
+a desiccated epidermis.
+
+_August_16.
+
+_Lice or "Creeping Ferlies"_[5]
+
+I probably know more about Lice than was ever before stored together
+within the compass of a single human mind! I know the Greek for Louse,
+the Latin, the French, the German, the Italian. I can reel off all the
+best remedies for Pediculosis: I am acquainted with the measures adopted
+for dealing with the nuisance in the field by the German Imperial Board
+of Health, by the British R.A.M.C., by the armies of the Russians, the
+French, the Austrians, the Italians. I know its life history and
+structure, how many eggs it lays and how often, the anatomy of its
+brain and stomach and the physiology of all its little parts. I have
+even pursued the Louse into ancient literature and have read old medical
+treatises about it, as, for example, the _De Phthiriasi_ of Gilbert de
+Frankenau. Mucius the lawgiver died of this disease so also did the
+Dictator Scylla, Antiochus Epiphanes, the Emperor Maximilian, the
+philosopher Pherecydes, Philip II. of Spain, the fugitive Ennius,
+Callisthenes, Alcman and many other distinguished people including the
+Emperor Arnauld in 899. In 955, the Bishop of Noyon had to be sewn up in
+a leather sack before he could be buried. (See _Des Insectes reputA(C)s
+venimeux_, par M. Amoureux Fils, Doctor of Medicine in the University of
+Montpellier, Paris, 1789.) In Mexico and Peru, a poll-tax of Lice was
+exacted and bags of these treasures were found in the Palace of
+Montezuma (see Bingley, _Animal Biog_., first edition, iii.). In the
+_United Service Magazine_ for 1842 (clix., 169) is an account of the
+wreck of the _Wager_, a vessel found adrift, the crew in dire straits
+and Captain Cheap lying on the deck--"like an ant-hill."
+
+So that as an ancient writer puts it, "you must own that for the
+quelling of human pride and to pull down the high conceits of mortal
+man, this most loathesome of all maladies (Pediculosis) has been the
+inheritance of the rich, the wise, the noble and the mighty--poets,
+philosophers, prelates, princes, Kings and Emperors."
+
+In his well-known _Bridgewater Treatise_, the Rev. Dr. Kirby, the Father
+of English Entomology, asked: "Can we believe that man in his pristine
+state of glory and beauty and dignity could be the receptacle of prey so
+loathesome as these unclean and disgusting creatures?" (Vol. I., p. 13).
+He therefore dated their creation _after_ the Fall.
+
+The other day a member of the staff of the Lister Institute called to
+see me on a lousy matter, and presently drew some live Lice from his
+waistcoat pocket for me to see. They were contained in pill boxes with
+little bits of muslin stretched across the open end thro' which the
+Lice could thrust their little hypodermic needles when placed near the
+skin. He feeds them by putting these boxes into a specially constructed
+belt and at night ties the belt around his waist and all night sleeps in
+Elysium. He is not married.
+
+In this fashion, he has bred hundreds from the egg upwards and even
+hybridised the two different species!
+
+In the enfranchised mind of the scientific naturalist, the usual
+feelings of repugnance simply do not exist. Curiosity conquers
+prejudice.
+
+_August_ 27.
+
+Am spending my summer holidays in the Lakes at Coniston with G---- and
+R----.... I am simply consumed with pride at being among the mountains
+at last! It is an enormous personal success to have arrived at Coniston!
+
+_August_ 29.
+
+Climbed a windy eminence on the other side of the Lake and had a
+splendid view of Helvellyn--like a great hog's back. It is fine to walk
+over the elastic turf with the wind bellowing into each ear and swirling
+all around me in a mighty sea of air until I was as clean-blown and
+resonant as a sea-shell. I moved along as easily as a disembodied spirit
+and felt free, almost transparent. The old earth seemed to have soaked
+me up into itself, I became dissolved into it, my separate body was
+melted away from me, and Nature received me into her deepest
+communion--until, UNTIL I got on the lee side of a hedge where the calm
+brought me back my gaol of clay.
+
+_September_ 1.
+
+Fourteen days hence I shall be a married man. But I feel most dejected
+about it. When I fell down the other day, I believe I slightly concussed
+my spinal column, with the result that my 1913 trouble has returned, but
+this time on the _left_ side! paralysis and horrible vertigo and
+presentiments of sudden collapse as I walk.
+
+_September_ 2.
+
+I fear I have been overdoing it in this tempting mountain region.
+Walking too far, etc. So I am slacking. It was fortunate I did not get
+concussion of the brain--I came within an inch of it: the hair of my
+head brushed the ground.
+
+_A Buxom Rogue in Earthenware_
+
+I knocked at the door of Sunbeam Cottage the other morning to know if
+they had a boat for hire. The door was promptly opened by a plump,
+charming little wench of about 17, and I caught a glimpse of the kitchen
+with its gunrack holding two fowling pieces, a grandfather clock in one
+corner and a dresser full of blueish china.
+
+"We don't let our boat out for hire," she answered with a smile so
+honest and natural and spontaneous that I was already saying to myself I
+had never met with anything like it at all when she stretched up her
+bare, dairy-maid arm--strong, creamy and soft, just reached a big key
+strung to a wooden block and lying on the top shelf of the dresser and
+at once handed it to me with:
+
+"But you are quite welcome to use it and here is the key to the
+boathouse."
+
+I now felt certain that she was one in a million and thanked her most
+awfully. I have never met such swiftly-moving generosity.
+
+"It's very nice on the Lake just now," she said. "I like to lie in the
+boat with a book and let her drift."
+
+I asked her if she would not come too, but this tight little fairy was
+too busy in the house. She is Clara Middleton done in earthenware.
+
+Subsequently R---- and I often visited the cottage and we became great
+friends, her mother showing us some letters she received as a girl from
+John Ruskin--a great friend of hers. The gamekeeper himself said that
+for his part he could never read Ruskin's books--it was like driving a
+springless cart over a rocky road. We all laughed and I said he was
+prejudiced in view of the letters which began: "My darling," and
+finished up "Yr loving J.R."
+
+But Mrs. ---- said he had never read them, and Madge (ah! that name!)
+said her father had never shewn the least interest in them at which we
+laughed again, and the gamekeeper laughed too. He is such a jolly
+man--they all are delightfully simple, charming folk and we talked of
+Beasts and Birds that live on the mountains.
+
+_September_ 4.
+
+Bathed in the Lake from the boat. It was brilliantly fine. R---- dipped
+her paddles in occasionally just to keep the boat from grounding. Then I
+clambered over the bows and stood up to dry myself in the sun like one
+of Mr. Tuke's young men.
+
+_September_ 7.
+
+My 26th birthday. In London again. Went straight to the Doctor and
+reported myself. I quite expected him to forbid the marriage as I could
+scarcely hobble to his house. To my amazement, he apparently made light
+of my paralysis, said it was a common accident to bruise the _os
+coccyx_, etc.
+
+_September_ 8.
+
+Am staying at ---- for a few days to rest and try to be better by that
+fateful 11th, when I am married.
+
+_Later_: My first experience of a Zeppelin raid. Bombs dropped only a
+quarter of a mile away and shrapnel from the guns fell on our roof. We
+got very pannicky and went into a neighbour's house, where we cowered
+down in our dressing-gowns in absolute darkness while bombs exploded and
+the dogs barked.
+
+I was scared out of my life and had a fit of uncontrollable trembling.
+Later we rang up ---- and ----, and thank Heavens both are safe. A great
+fire is burning in London, judging by the red glare. At midnight sat and
+drank sherry and smoked a cigar with Mr. ----, my braces depending from
+my trousers like a tail and shewing in spite of dressing-gown. Then went
+home and had some neat brandy to steady my heart. H---- arrived soon
+after midnight. A motor-omnibus in Whitechapel was blown to bits. Great
+scenes in the city.
+
+_September_ 9.
+
+Very nervy to-day. Hobbled down the road to see the damage done by the
+bombs.
+
+_September_ 10.
+
+A swingeing cold in the head thro' running about on the night of the
+raid. Too feeble to walk far, so Mrs. ---- went into the town for me and
+purchased my wedding-ring, which cost AL2 5s. 0d.
+
+
+
+[1] 1917. I am now editing my own Journal--bowdlerising my own book!
+
+[2] A method of collecting insects in winter by shaking moss over white
+paper.
+
+[3] 1917. Cf. Sainte-Beuve's Essay on Maurice de GuA(C)rin: "Il aimait A  se
+rA(C)pandre et presque A  se ramifier dans la Nature. Il a exprimA(C) en mainte
+occasion cette sensation diffuse, errante; il y avait des jours ou, dans
+son amour ou calme, il enviait la vie forte et muette qui rA"gne sons
+l'A(C)corce des chAªnes; il rAªvait A  je ne sais quelle mA(C)tamorphose en
+arbre...."
+
+[4] Cf. 1916, November 6.
+
+[5] Cf. Burns's poem "On a Louse."
+
+
+
+
+PART III--MARRIAGE
+
+
+_September_ 12.
+
+This evening we walked thro' the Churchyard reading tombstone
+inscriptions. What a lot of men have had wives!
+
+I can't make out what has come over folk recently: the wit, wisdom and
+irony on the old tombstones have given place to maudlin sentiment and
+pious Bible references. Then on the anniversary of the death the custom
+among poorer classes is to publish such pathetic doggerel as the
+following--cuttings I have taken from time to time from the local
+newspaper in-:
+
+     "Her wish:
+
+     "'Farewell dear brother, Mother, sisters,
+     My life was passed in love for thee.
+     Mourn not for me nor sorrow take
+     But love my husband for my sake
+     Until the call comes home to thee,
+     Live thou in peace and harmony.'"
+
+Again:
+
+     "A day of remembrance sad to recall
+     But still in my heart he is loved best of all
+     No matter how I think of him--his name I oft recall;
+     There is nothing left to answer me but his photo on the wall."
+
+Or:
+
+     "One year has passed since that sad day,
+     When one we loved was called away.
+     God took her home; it was His will,
+     Forget her?--No, we never will."
+
+These piteous screeds fill me with loving-kindness and with contempt
+alternately in a pendulum-like rhythm. What is the truth about them? Is
+the grief of these people as mean and ridiculous as their rhymes? Or is
+it a pitiful inarticulateness? Or is it merely vulgar advertisement of
+their sorrow? Or does it signify a passionate intention never to
+forget?--or a fear of forgetting, the rhymes being used as a fillip to
+the memory? Or--most miserable of all--is it just a custom, and one
+follow'ed in order to appear respectable in others' eyes? Are they poor
+souls? or contemptible fools?
+
+_September_ 14.
+
+There is a ridiculous Cocker spaniel at the house where we are staying.
+He must have had a love affair and been jilted, or else he's a sort of
+village idiot. The landlady says he's not so silly as he looks--but he
+looks very silly: he languishes sentimentally, and when we laugh at him
+he looks "hurt." To-day we took him up on the Down and it seemed to
+brighten him up. Really, he is sane enough, with plenty of commonsense
+and good manners. But he is kept at home in the garden so much, lolling
+about all day, that as E---- said, having nothing to do, he falls in love.
+
+The _Saturday Review_ writes: The effect of the "Brides and the Bath"
+Case on people with any trace of _nice feeling_ is perhaps not
+particularly mischievous, tho' the thing is repulsive and hateful to
+them.... To gloat over the details of repulsive horrors, simply _from
+motives of curiosity_--this is bad and degrading.
+
+What a lot of repulsive things the nice refined people who read the
+_Saturday Review_ must find in the world just now. For example the War.
+"Simply from motives of curiosity." Why certainly, no other than these,
+concerning one of the most remarkable murders in the annals of crime.
+And murders anyhow are damned interesting--which the _Saturday Review_
+isn't.
+
+_Chipples_
+
+I was surprised to discover the other day that when I talked of Chipples
+no one understood what I meant! It proves to be a dialect word familiar
+to all residents in Devonshire and designating spring onions. Anyway
+you won't find it in Murray's Dictionary; yet etymologically it is an
+extremely interesting word and a thoroughly good word with a splendid
+pedigree. To wit:
+
+Italian: Cipollo.
+
+Spanish: Cebolla.
+
+French: Ciboule.
+
+Latin: CA|pulla, dim. of cA|pa (_cf_. cive, civot).
+
+Now how did this pretty little alien manage to settle down among simple
+Devon folk? What has been the relation between Italy and--say Appledore,
+or Plymouth?[1]
+
+_October_ 6.
+
+In London once more, living at her flat and using her furniture.
+
+_The Chalcidoidea_
+
+The Chalcidoidea are minute winged insects that parasitise other
+insects, and in the _Memoirs of the Queensland Museum_ (Vol. I., 1912)
+you shall find an enormous catalogue of them by a person named Girault
+who writes the following dedication:
+
+"I respectfully dedicate this little portion of work to science, common
+sense or true knowledge. I am convinced that human welfare is so
+dependent upon science that civilisation would not endure without it,
+and that what is meant by progress would be impossible. Also I am
+convinced that the great majority of mankind are too ignorant, that
+education is too archaic and impractical as looked at from the
+standpoint of intrinsic knowledge. There is too little known of the
+essential unity of the Universe and of things included, for instance,
+man himself. Opinions and prejudices rule in the place of what is
+true...."
+
+Part II. is dedicated to:
+
+"The genius of mankind, especially to that form of it expressed in
+monistic philosophy, whose conceived perception is the highest
+attainment reached by man."
+
+I can only echo Whistler's remark one day as he stood before an
+execrably bad drawing "God bless my soul"--uttered slowly and
+thoughtfully and then repeated.
+
+The beauty of it is that the Editor adds a serious footnote,
+dissociating himself, and a Scarabee to whom I shewed the Work, read it
+with a clouded brow and then said: "I think it rather out of place in a
+paper of this sort." (Tableau.)
+
+_October_ 12.
+
+Down with influenza.
+
+_October_ 13.
+
+A Zeppelin raid last night. I am down with a temperature, but our little
+household remained quite calm, thank God. We heard guns going off, and I
+had a fit of trembling as I lay in bed. Many dead of heart failure owing
+to the excitement.
+
+_October_ 14.
+
+Still in bed. No raid last night. There were two raids on Wednesday, one
+at 9.30, and another at midnight. The first time the caretaker of the
+flats came up very alarmed to say "Zeppelins about," so we put out the
+lights. Then at midnight when everyone else was asleep I heard a big
+voice shout up from the street: "Lights out there. They're about again."
+Lay still in bed and waited. Distant gunfire.
+
+_October_ 17.
+
+Bad heart attack.
+
+_October_ 18.
+
+Heart intermits. Every three or four minutes. M---- said that I ought to
+be getting used to it by now! Phew!! Very nervy and pusillanimous.
+Taking strychnine in strong doses. I hope dear E---- does not catch the
+'flu. She swallows quinine with large hopes.
+
+_October_ 19.
+
+Staying at R----. Had a ghastly journey down, changing trains twice at
+Clapham Junction and at Croydon, heart intermitting all the time in
+every position. Poor E---- with me. To-day surprised to find myself still
+alive.
+
+_October_ 20.
+
+Better to-day. After much persuasion, I have got E---- to let the flat so
+that we can get away into the country outside the Zeppelin zone.
+
+_October_ 24.
+
+Back in London again. Am better, bolstered up with arsenic and
+strychnine. Too nervously excited to do any work.
+
+_October_ 25.
+
+The letting of our flat is now in the hands of an agent, and E----, poor
+dear, is quite resigned to abandoning all her precious wallpapers, etc.
+
+_November_ 7.
+
+The flat is let and we are now living in rooms at ----, 20 miles out of
+London, to the Westward.
+
+_November_ 8.
+
+It is a great relief to be down in the country. Zeppelins terrify me.
+Have just had a delightful experience in reading Conrad's new book,
+_Victory_--a welcome relief from all the tension of the past two months.
+To outward view, I have been merely a youth getting married, catching
+the 'flu and giving up a London flat.
+
+Inwardly, I have been whizzing around like a Catherine Wheel. Consider
+the items:
+
+Concussion of the spine.
+
+Resulting paralysis of left leg ten days before marriage.
+
+Zeppelin raid (heard a cannon go off for the first time).
+
+Severe cold in the head day before marriage (and therefore wild
+anxiety).
+
+Successful marriage with abatement of cold.
+
+Return to our home.
+
+Ten days later, down with influenza.
+
+A second Zeppelin raid.
+
+Bad heart attack.
+
+Then flat sub-let and London evacuated.
+
+The record nauseates me. I am nauseated with myself and my
+self-centredness.... Suppose I have been "whizzing" as I call it--what
+then? They are but subjective trifles--meanwhile other men are seeing
+great adventures in Gallipoli and elsewhere. "The _Triumph_ is gone,"
+exclaimed the Admiral who in a little group of naval officers on board
+the flagship had been watching H.M.S. _Triumph_ sink in the A†gean. He
+shuts his telescope with a click and returns in great dudgeon to his own
+quarters. How I envy all these men who are participating in this
+War--soldiers, sailors, war correspondents--all who live and throb and
+are not afraid. I am a timid youth, ansemic, wear spectacles, and am
+frightened by a Zep raid! How humiliating. I hate myself for a
+white-livered craven: I am suffocated for want of more life and courage.
+My damnable body is slowly killing off all my spirit and buoyancy. Even
+my mind is becoming blurred. My memory is like an old man's exactly.
+(Ask ----.)
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Yet thro' all my nausea, here I remain happy to discuss myself and my
+little mishaps. I'm damned sick of myself and all my neurotic
+whimperings, and so I hereby and now intend to lead a new life and throw
+this Journal to the Devil. I want to mangle it, tear it to shreds. You
+smug, hypocritical readers! you'll get no more of me. All you say I know
+is true before you say it and I know _now_ all the criticism you are
+going to launch. So please spare yourself the trouble. You cannot
+enlighten me upon myself. I _know_. I disgust myself--and you, and as
+for you, you can go to the Devil with this Journal.
+
+_Finis_
+
+_November_ 27.
+
+To-day, armed with a certificate from my Doctor in a sealed envelope and
+addressed "to the Medical Officer examining Mr. W.N.P. Barbellion," I
+got leave to attend the recruiting office and offer my services to my
+King and Country. At the time, the fact that the envelope was sealed
+caused no suspicion and I had been comfortably carrying the document
+about in my pocket for days past.
+
+Of course I attended merely as a matter of form under pressure of the
+authorities, as I knew I was totally unfit--but not quite _how_ unfit.
+After receiving this precious certificate, I learnt that K---- was
+recruiting Doctor at W----, and he offered to "put me thro' in five
+minutes," as he knows the state of my health. So at a time agreed upon,
+I went to-day and was immediately rejected as soon as he had
+stethoscoped my heart. The certificate therefore was not needed, and
+coming home in the train I opened it out of curiosity....
+
+I was quite casual and thought it would be merely interesting to see
+what M---- said.
+
+It was.
+
+"Some 18 months ago," it ran, "Mr. Barbellion shewed the just visible
+symptoms of ---- ----" and altho' this fact was at once communicated to
+my relatives it was withheld from me and M---- therefore asked the M.O.
+to respect this confidence and to reject me without stating on what
+grounds. He went on to refer to my patellar and plantar reflexes, by
+which time I had had enough, tore the paper up and flung it out of the
+railway carriage window.
+
+I then returned to the Museum intending to find out what ---- ---- was
+in Clifford Allbutt's System of Medicine. I wondered whether it was
+brain or heart; and the very thought gave me palpitation. I hope it is
+heartsomething short and sharp rather than lingering. But I believe it
+must be--of the brain, the opposite process of softening occurring in
+old age. I recall M-'s words to me before geting married: that I had
+this "nerve weakness," but I was more likely to succumb to pneumonia
+than to any nervous trouble, and that only 12 months' happiness would be
+worth while.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the whole I am amazed at the calm way in which I take this news. I
+was a fool never to have suspected serious nerve trouble before. Does
+dear E---- know? What did M---- tell her when he saw her before our
+marriage?
+
+_November_ 28.
+
+As soon as I woke up in this clear, country air this morning, I thought:
+---- ----. I have decided never to find out what it is. I shall find out
+in good time by the course of events.
+
+A few years ago, the news would have scared me. But not so now. It only
+interests me. I have been happy, merry, and quite high-spirited to-day.
+
+_December_ 5.
+
+I believe it's creeping paralysis. My left leg goes lame after a short
+walk. Fortunately E---- does not take alarm.
+
+_December_ 17.
+
+Spent the last two days, both of us, in a state of unrelieved gloom. The
+clouds never lifted for a moment--it's awful. I scarcely have spoken a
+word.... And eugenically, what kind of an infant would even a Mark
+Tapley expect of a father with a medical history like mine, and a mother
+with a nervous system like hers?... Could anything be more unfortunate?
+And the War? What may not have happened by this time next year? My
+health is grotesque.
+
+_December_ 20.
+
+I wonder if she knows. I believe she does but I am afraid to broach the
+matter in case she doesn't. I think she must know something otherwise
+she would show more alarm over my leg, and when I went to the Recruiting
+Office she seemed to show no fear whatever lest they took me. Several
+times a day in the middle of a talk, or a meal, or a kiss, this problem
+flashes thro' my mind. I look at her but find no solution. However--for
+the present--the matter is not urgent.
+
+
+[1] The English Dialect Dictionary derives the word from Old French
+_chiboule_, and gives a reference to Piers Plowman. Why hasn't such an
+old and useful word become a part of the English language like others
+also brought over at the time of the Norman Conquest?
+
+
+
+
+1916
+
+
+_February_ 1.
+
+Since I last wrote--a month ago--I have recovered my buoyancy after a
+blow which kept me under water so long I thought I should never come up
+and be happy again.... I was reciting my woes to R----, and gaining
+much relief thereby, when we espied another crony on the other side of
+the street, crossed over at once, bandied words with him and then walked
+on, picking up the thread of my lugubrious story just where I had left
+off--secretly staggered at my emotional agility. I've got to this
+now,--I simply don't care.
+
+_February_ 2.
+
+"And she draiglet all her petticoatie, Coming thro' the rye." These
+words have a ridiculous fascination for me; I cannot resist their
+saccharine, affectionate, nay amorous jingle and keep repeating them
+aloud all over the house--as Lamb once kept reciting "Rose Aylmer."
+
+_February_ 16.
+
+We took possession of our country cottage to-day: very charming and
+overlooking a beautiful Park.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Have just discovered the Journal of the De Goncourts and been reading it
+greedily. Life has really been a commodity. I am boiling over with
+vitality, chattering amiably to everyone about nothing--argumentative,
+sanguine, serious, ridiculous. I called old R---- a Rapscallion, a
+Curmudgeon, and a Scaramouche, and E---- a trull, a drab, a trollop, a
+callet. "You certainly are a unique husband," said that sweet little
+lady, and I....
+
+With me, one of the symptoms of delirium is always a melodramatic
+truculence! I shake my fist in R----'s face and make him explode with
+laughing.... The sun to-day, and the great, whopping white clouds all
+bellied out, made me feel inside quite a bright young dog wriggling its
+body in ecstatic delight let loose upon the green sward.
+
+"You must come down for a week end," I said to R---- at lunch. "Come down
+as soon as you can. You will find every comfort. It is an enormous
+house--I have not succeeded in finding my way about it and--it's
+dangerous to lose yourself--makes you late for dinner. When you arrive
+our gilded janitor will say: 'I believe Mr. Barbellion is in the
+library.'"
+
+"Black eunuchs wait on you at dinner, I suppose," R---- rejoined.
+
+"Oh! yes and golden chandeliers and a marble stair-case--all in barbaric
+splendour."
+
+"Yes, I shall certainly be glad to come down," said R----,
+phlegmatically.
+
+And so on and so on. Words, idle words all day in a continuous rush. And
+I am sure that the match which fired the gun-powder was the discovery of
+the De Goncourts' Journal! It's extraordinary how I have been going on
+from week to week quite calmly for all the world as if I had read all
+the books and seen all the places and done everything according to the
+heart's desire. This book has really jolted me out of my complacency: to
+think that all this time, I have been dead to so much! Why I might have
+died unconscious that the De Goncourts had ever lived and written their
+colossal book and now I am aware of it, I am all in a fever to read it
+and take it up into my brain: I might die now before I have finished
+it--a thought that makes me wild with desire just as I once endured most
+awful pangs when I felt my health going, and believed that I might die
+before having ever been in love--to die and never to have been in love!
+--for an instant at a time this possibility used to make me writhe.
+
+_March_ 22.
+
+R---- has an unpleasant habit of making some scarifying announcement
+drawing forth an explosive query from me and then lapsing at once into
+an eleusinian silence: he appears to take a sensuous pleasure in the
+pause that keeps you expectant. I could forgive a man who keeps you on
+tenterhooks for two puffs in order to keep his pipe alight, but
+R---- shuts up out of sheer self-indulgence and goes on gazing at the
+horizon with the eyes of a seer (he thinks) trying to cod me he sees a
+portent there only revealed to God's elect.
+
+I told him this in the middle of one of his luxurious silences. "I will
+tell you," he said deliberately, "when we reach the Oratory." (We were
+in Brompton Road.)
+
+"Which side of it?" I enquired anxiously. "This or that?"
+
+"That," said he, "will depend on how you behave in the meantime."
+
+_April_ 3.
+
+We met a remarkable Bulldog to-day in the street, humbly following
+behind a tiny boy to whom it was attached by a piece of string. At the
+time we were following in the wake of three magnificent Serbian
+Officers, and I was particularly interesting myself in the curious cut
+of their top boots. But the Bulldog was the Red Herring in our path.
+
+"Is that a Dog?" I asked the little boy.
+
+He assured me that it was, and so it turned out to be, tho' Bull-frog
+would have been a better name for it, the forelegs being more bandied,
+the back broader and the mouth wider than in any Bulldog I have ever
+seen. It was a super-Bulldog.
+
+We turned and walked on. "There," said R----, "now we have lost our
+Serbian Officers."
+
+_April_ 4.
+
+"May I use your microscope?" he asked.
+
+"By all means," I said with a gesture of elaborate politeness.
+
+He sat down at my table, in my chair, and used my instrument--becoming
+at once absorbed and oblivious to my banter as per below:
+
+"As Scotchmen," I said, "are monuments rather than men, this latest raid
+on Edinboro's worthy inhabitants must be called vandalsim rather than
+murder."
+
+No answer. I continued to stand by my chair.
+
+"How pleased Swift, Johnson, Lamb, and other anti-Caledonians would
+be...."
+
+"Hope you don't mind my occupying your chair a little longer," the
+Scotchman said, "but this is a larva, has curious maxillA|...." and his
+voice faded away in abstraction.
+
+"Oh! no--go on," I said, "I fear it is a grievous absence of hospitality
+on my part in not providing you with a glass of whiskey. Can I offer you
+water, Sir?"
+
+No answer.
+
+Another enthusiast ushered himself in, was greeted with delight by the
+first and invited to sit down. I pulled out a chair for him and said:
+
+"Shave, sir, or hair cut?"
+
+"If you follow along to the top of the galea," No. I droned on
+imperturbably, "you will...." etc.
+
+I got tired of standing and talking to an empty house but at last they
+got up, apologising and making for the door.
+
+I entreated them not to mention the matter--my fee should be nominal--I
+did it out of sheer love, etc.
+
+They thanked me again and would have said more but I added blandly:
+
+"You know your way out?" They assured me they did (having worked in the
+place for 30 years and more)--I thanked God--and sat down to my table
+once more.
+
+(These reports of conversations are rather fatuous: yet they give an
+idea of the sort of person I have to deal with, and also the sort of
+person I am among this sort of person.)
+
+_April_ 6.
+
+_The Housefly Problem_--1916
+
+For weeks past we have all been in a terrible flutter scarcely
+paralleled by the outbreak of Armageddon in August, 1914. The spark
+which fired almost the whole building was a letter to the _Times_
+written by Dr. ----, making public an ignominious confession of
+ignorance on the part of Entomologists as to how the Housefly passed the
+winter. In reply, many correspondents wrote to say they hibernated, and
+one man was even so temerarious as to quote to us Entomologists the
+exact Latin name of the Housefly: viz., _Musca domestica_. We asked for
+specimens and enormous numbers of flies at once began to arrive at the
+Museum, alive and dead--and not a Housefly among them! So there was a
+terrible howdedo.
+
+One of the correspondents was named "Masefield." "Not Masefield the
+poet?" an excited dipterist asked. I reassured him.
+
+"I've a good mind," said Dr. ----, "to reply to this chap who's so
+emphatic and give him a whigging--only he's climbing down a bit in this
+second letter in to-day's issue." I strongly advocated clemency.
+
+But still the affair goes on. Every morning sees more letters and more
+flies sent by all sorts of persons--we seem to have set the whole world
+searching for Houseflies--Duchesses, signalmen, farmers, footmen. Every
+morning each fresh batch of flies is mounted on pins by experts in the
+Setting Room, and an Assistant's whole time is devoted to identifying,
+arranging, listing and reporting upon the new arrivals. At the last
+meeting of the Trustees a sample collection was displayed to show
+indubitably that the insects which hibernate in houses are not _Musca
+domestica_ but _Pollenia rudis_. I understand the Trustees were
+appreciative.
+
+An observant eye can now discover state visits to our dipterists from
+interested persons carrying their flies with them, animated discussions
+in the corridor, knots of excited enthusiasts in the Lavatory, in the
+Library, everywhere--and everywhere the subject discussed is the same:
+How does the Housefly pass the winter? As one passes one catches: "In
+Bakehouses certainly they are to be found but...." or a wistful voice,
+"I wish I had caught that one in my bathroom three winters ago--I am
+certain it was a Housefly." The Doctor himself--a gallant
+Captain--wanders from room to room stimulating his lieutenants to make
+suggestions, and examining every answer to the great interrogative on
+its merits, no matter how humble or insignificant the person who makes
+it. Then of an afternoon he will entirely disappear, and word goes round
+that he has set forth to examine a rubbish heap in Soho or Pimlico. As
+the afternoon draws to its close someone enquires if he has come back
+yet; next morning a second asks if I had seen him, then a third
+announces mournfully that he has just been holding conversation with
+him, but that nothing at all was found in the rubbish heap.
+
+The great sensation of all occurred last week when somebody ran along
+the corridor crying that Mr. ---- had just found a Housefly in his room.
+We were all soon agog with the news, and the excited Captain was
+presently espied setting out for the scene of operations with a killing
+bottle and net. The insect was promptly impounded and identified as a
+veritable _Musca domestica_. A consultation being held to sit on the
+body, a lady finally laid information that two "forced Houseflies"
+hatched the day before had escaped from her possession. She suggested
+Mr. ----'s specimen was one of them.
+
+"How would it get from your room to Mr. ----'s?" she
+
+was immediately asked. And breathless, we all heard her answer
+deliberately and quite audibly that the fugitive may have gone out of
+her window, up the garden and in by Mr. ----'s window, _or_ it may have
+gone out of her door, up the corridor and in by his door. I wanted to
+know why it should have entered Mr. ----'s room as he is not a dipterist
+but a microlepidopterist. They looked at me sternly and we slowly
+dispersed.
+
+This morning, the Dr. came to me with a newspaper cutting in his hand,
+saying, "_The Times_ is behindhand." He handed me the slip. It was a
+clipping from to-day's _Times_ about a sackful of flies which had been
+taken from Wandsworth Clock Tower in a state of hibernation.
+
+"Behindhand?" I asked timidly, for I felt that all the story was not in
+front of me.
+
+"Why, yes. Don't you know?"
+
+I knew nothing, but was prepared for anything.
+
+"_The Star_, two days ago," he informed me, "had a paragraph about
+this--headed 'Tempus fugit' "--this last in a resentful tone as tho' the
+frivolous reporter were attempting to discredit our mystery.
+
+There was a long pause. Neither of us spoke. Then he slowly said:
+
+"I wonder why _The Times_ is so behindhand. This is two days late."
+
+_May_ 5.
+
+Hulloa, old friend: how are you? I mean my Diary. I haven't written to
+you for ever so long, and my silence as usual indicates happiness. I
+have been passing thro' an unbroken succession of calm happy days,
+walking in the woods with my darling, or doing a little gentle gardening
+on coming home in the evening--and the War has been centuries away.
+Later on towards bedtime, E---- reads Richard Jefferies, I play Patience
+and Mrs. ---- makes garments for Priscilla.
+
+The only troubles have been a chimney which smokes and a neighbour's dog
+which barks at night. So to be sure, I have made port after storm at
+last--and none too soon. To-day my cheerfulness has been rising in a
+crescendo till to-night it broke in such a handsome crest of pure
+delight that I cannot think of going to bed without recording it.
+
+_Pachmann_
+
+After sitting on the wall around the fountain in the middle of Trafalgar
+Square, eating my sandwiches and feeding the Pigeons with the crumbs, I
+listened for a moment to the roar of the traffic around three sides of
+the Square as I stood in the centre quite alone, what time one fat old
+pigeon, all unconcerned, was treading another. It was an extraordinary
+experience: motor horns tooted incessantly and it seemed purposelessly,
+so that one had the fancy that all London was out for a joy-ride--it was
+a great British Victory perhaps, or Peace Day.
+
+Then walked down Whitehall to Westminster Bridge in time to see the 2
+o'clock boat start upstream for Kew. I loitered by the old fellow with
+the telescope who keeps his pitch by Boadicea: I saw a piper of the
+Scots Guards standing near gazing across the river but at nothing in
+particular--just idling as I was. I saw another man sitting on the stone
+steps and reading a dirty fragment of newspaper. I saw the genial,
+red-faced sea-faring man in charge of the landing stage strolling up and
+down his small domain,--chatting, jesting, spitting, and making fast a
+rope or so. Everything was _alive_ to the finger tips, vividly shining,
+pulsating.
+
+Arrived at Queen's Hall in time for Pachmann's Recital at 3.15.... As
+usual he kept us waiting for 10 minutes. Then a short, fat, middle-aged
+man strolled casually on to the platform and everyone clapped
+violently--so it was Pachmann: a dirty greasy looking fellow with long
+hair of dirty grey colour, reaching down to his shoulders and an ugly
+face. He beamed on us and then shrugged his shoulders and went on
+shrugging them until his eye caught the music stool, which seemed to
+fill him with amazement. He stalked it carefully, held out one hand to
+it caressingly, and finding all was well, went two steps backwards,
+clasping his hands before him and always gazing at the little stool in
+mute admiration, his eyes sparkling with pleasure, like Mr. Pickwick's
+on the discovery of the archeological treasure. He approached once more,
+bent down and ever so gently moved it about 7/8ths of an inch nearer
+the piano. He then gave it a final pat with his right hand and sat down.
+
+He played Nocturne No. 2, Prelude No. 20, a Mazurka and two Etudes of
+Chopin and Schubert's Impromptu No. 4.
+
+At the close we all crowded around the platform and gave the queer,
+old-world gentleman an ovation, one man thrusting up his hand which
+Pachmann generously shook as desired.
+
+As an encore he gave us a Valse--"Valse, Valse," he exclaimed
+ecstatically, jumping up and down in his seat in time to the music. It
+was a truly remarkable sight: on his right the clamorous crowd around
+the platform; on his left the seat holders of the Orchestra Stalls,
+while at the piano bobbed this grubby little fat man playing divine
+Chopin divinely well, at the same time rising and falling in his seat,
+turning a beaming countenance first to the right and then to the left,
+crying, "Valse, Valse." He is as entertaining as a tumbler at a variety
+hall.
+
+As soon as he had finished, we clapped and rattled for more, Pachmann
+meanwhile standing surrounded by his idolaters in affected despair at
+ever being able to satisfy us. Presently he walked off and a scuffle was
+half visible behind the scenes between him and his agent who sent him in
+once more.
+
+The applause was wonderful. As soon as he began again it ceased on the
+instant, and as soon as he left off it started again
+immediately--nothing boisterous or rapturous but a steady, determined
+thunder of applause that came regularly and evenly like the roar from
+some machine.
+
+_May_ 20.
+
+Spent a quiet day. Sat at my escritoire in the Studio this morning
+writing an Essay, with a large 4-fold window on my left, looking on to
+woods and fields, with Linnets, Greenfinches, Cuckoos calling. This
+afternoon while E---- rested awhile I sat on the veranda in the sun and
+read _Antony and Cleopatra_.... Yes, I'm in harbour at last. I'd be the
+last to deny it but I cannot believe it will last. It's too good to
+last and it's all too good to be even true. E---- is too good to be
+true, the home is too good to be true, and this quiet restful existence
+is too wonderful to last in the middle of a great war. It's just a
+little deceitful April sunshine, that's all....[1]
+
+Had tea at the ----. A brilliant summer's evening. Afterwards, we
+wandered into the garden and shrubbery and sat about on the turf of the
+lawn, chatting and smoking. Mr. ---- played with a rogue of a white
+Tomcat called Chatham, and E---- talked about our neighbour, "Shamble
+legs," about garden topics, etc. Then I strolled into the drawing-room
+where Cynthia was playing Chopin on a grand piano. Is it not all
+perfectly lovely?
+
+How delicious to be silent, lolling on the Chesterfield, gazing
+abstractedly thro' the lattice window and listening to the lulling
+charities of Nocturne No. 2, Op. 37! The melody in the latter part of
+this nocturne took me back at once to a cloudless day in an open boat in
+the Bay of Combemartin, with oars up and the water quietly and regularly
+lapping the gunwales as we rose and fell. A state of the most profound
+calm and happiness took possession of me.
+
+_June_ 2.
+
+From the local paper:
+
+"A comrade in the Gloucesters writing to a friend at ---- mentions that
+Pte. J---- has been fatally shot in action. J---- was well known here
+for years as an especially smart young newsvendor."
+
+_June_ 3.
+
+What a bitter disappointment it is to realise that people the most
+intimately in love with one another are really separated by such a
+distance. A woman is calmly knitting socks or playing Patience while her
+husband or sweetheart lies dead in Flanders. However strong the tie that
+binds them together yet they are insufficiently _en rapport_ for her to
+sense even a catastrophe--and she must wait till the War Office forsooth
+sends her word. How humiliating that the War Office must do what Love
+cannot. Human love seems then such a superficial thing. Every person is
+a distinct egocentric being. Each for himself and the Devil take the
+hindmost. "Ah! but she didn't know." "Yes, but she _ought_ to have
+known." Mental telepathy and clairvoyance should be common at least to
+all lovers.
+
+This morning in bed I heard a man with a milkcart say in the road to a
+villager at about 6.30 a.m., "... battle ... and we lost six cruisers."
+This was the first I knew of the Battle of Jutland. At 8 a.m. I read in
+the _Daily News_ that the British Navy had been defeated, and thought it
+was the end of all things. The news took away our appetites. At the
+railway station, the _Morning Post_ was more cheerful, even reassuring,
+and now at 6.30 p.m. the Battle has turned into a merely regrettable
+indecisive action. We breathe once more.
+
+_June_ 4.
+
+It has now become a victory.
+
+_June_ 11.
+
+Old systems of Classification: Rafinesc's Theory of Fives, Swainson's
+Theory of Sevens, Edward Newman's book called _Sphinx Vespiformis_
+tracing fives throughout the animal world, Sir Thomas Browne's Quincunx,
+chasing fives throughout the whole of nature--in the words of Coleridge,
+"quincunxes in Heaven above, quincunxes in the Earth below, quincunxes
+in the mind of man, in optic nerves, in roots of trees, in leaves, in
+everything!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Old false trails:
+
+The Philosopher's Stone (Balthazar ClA|s).[2]
+
+A universal catholicon (Bishop Berkeley's tar-water). Mystical numbers
+(as per above).
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My father was Sir Thomas Browne and my mother Marie Bashkirtseff. See
+what a curious hybrid I am!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I toss these pages in the faces of timid, furtive, respectable people
+and say: "There! that's me! You may like it or lump it, but it's true.
+And I challenge you to follow suit, to flash the searchlight of your
+self-consciousness into every remotest corner of your life and invite
+everybody's inspection. Be candid, be honest, break down the partitions
+of your cubicle, come out of your burrow, little worm." As we are all
+such worms we should at least be honest worms.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My gratitude to E---- for plucking me out of the hideous miseries of my
+life in London is greater than I can express. If I were the cheap hero
+of a ladies' novel I should immolate my journals as a token, and you
+would have a pretty picture of a pale young man watching his days go up
+in smoke by the drawing-room fire. But I have more confidence in her
+sterling good sense, and if I cannot be loved for what I am, I do not
+wish to be loved for what I am not.
+
+Since the fateful Nov. 27th, my life has become entirely posthumous. I
+live now in the grave and am busy furnishing it with posthumous joys. I
+accept my fate with great content, my one-time restless ambition lies
+asleep now, my one-time, furious self-assertiveness is anA|sthetised by
+this great War; the War and the discovery about my health together have
+plucked out of me that canker of self-obsession. I sit at home here in
+this country cottage in perfect isolation--flattened out by a steam
+hammer (tho' it took Armageddon to do it!), yet as cheerful and busy as
+a Dormouse laying up store for the winter. For I am almost resigned to
+the issue in the knowledge that some day, someone will know, perhaps
+somebody will understand and--immortal powers!--even sympathise, "the
+quick heart quickening from the heart that's still."
+
+_July_ 19.
+
+_Omniscience_
+
+An omniscient Caledonian asked me to-day:
+
+"Where are the Celebes? Are they E. or N.E. of the Sandwich Group?"
+
+I marked him down at once as my legitimate prey. Sitting back in my
+chair, I replied slowly in my most offensive manner:
+
+"The Island of Celebes is of enormous size and curious shape situated in
+the Malay Archipelago."
+
+The Caledonian made no sign. Instead of grinning at his error and
+confessing to a "floater," he endeavoured to carry on by remarking,
+"That of course would be N. of Papua," just for all the world as if his
+error was a minor one of latitude and longitude.
+
+Ignoring his comment, I continued:
+
+"From the Zoogeographical point of view, Celebes is unequalled in
+importance, having the strangest fauna almost of any island on the face
+of the globe. Then there's 'Wallace's Line,'" I said, being purposely
+obscure.
+
+The Caledonian said nought but "looked hurt." It was so obvious that he
+didn't know, and it was so obvious that I knew that he didn't know, that
+after my farcical truculence I expected the tension to dissolve in
+laughter. Yet it is hard for a Caledonian to say "God be merciful to me,
+ignorant devil that I am." So I pursued him with more information about
+"Wallace's Line," with an insouciant air, as much as to say, "Wallace's
+Line of course you heard discussed before you were breached."
+
+"Some do say, you know, that the Line is 'all my eye and Betty Martin,'
+_e.g._, R----."
+
+This gave him his first opportunity of finding his feet in this
+perilously deep water. So he said promptly, eager to seem knowledgeable
+with an intelligent rejoinder:
+
+"As! yes, R---- is an authority on Fishes."
+
+I assented. "At the last meeting of the British Ass. he tore the idea to
+shreds."
+
+The drowning Caledonian seized at any straw:
+
+"Fishes, however, are not of paramount importance in cases of
+geographical distribution, are they?"
+
+I knew he was thinking of _marine_ fishes, but I did not illumine him,
+and merely said:
+
+"Oh! yes, of very great importance," at which he looked still more
+"hurt," decamped in silence and left me conqueror of the field but
+without the spoils of victory: it was impossible to bring him to say "I
+do not know"--four mono-syllables was all I wanted from the man who for
+months past has been lecturing me on all things from Music and the Drama
+to Philosophy, Painting and--Insects.
+
+_July_ 20.
+
+The cradle came a few days ago but I had not seen it until this morning
+when I unlocked the cupboard door, looked in and shuddered.
+
+"That's the skeleton in our cupboard," I said on coming down to
+breakfast. She laughed, but I really meant it.
+
+E---- keeps a blue bowl replenished with flaming Poppies in our room.
+The cottage is plagued with Ear-wigs which fly in at night and get among
+the clothes and bedlinen. This morning, dressing, she held up her
+chemise to the light saying: "I always do this--you can see their little
+heathen bodies then against the light...." Isn't she charming?
+
+_July_ 30.
+
+The other day R---- and I were sitting on a stile on the uplands in
+perfect summer weather and talking of happy days before the War--he was
+in khaki and I was resting my "gammy" leg.... As we talked, we let our
+eyes roam, resting luxuriously wherever we pleased and occasionally
+interrupting the conversation with "Look at that cow scratching herself
+against the Oak," or "Do you see the oats waving?" In the distance we
+saw a man and a boy walking up towards us along the path thro' the corn,
+but the eye having momentarily scrutinised them wandered away and the
+conversation never paused. When next I looked, they were much
+nearer--crossing the furrows in the potato field in fact, and we both
+stopped talking to watch--idly. The boy seemed to be about 10 years old,
+and it amused us to see his great difficulty in stepping across the
+furrows.
+
+"Poor little chap," R---- said, and we laughed.
+
+Then the boy stumbled badly and all at once the man lifted his
+walking-stick and beat him, saying ill-naturedly, "Step between the
+furrows," and again, "Step between the furrows." Our enchanting little
+picture was transfigured in an instant. The "charming little boy" was a
+natural idiot--a gross, hefty creature perhaps 30 years of age, very
+short and very thick, dressed in a little sailor suit. I said,
+"Heavens," and R---- looked positively scared. We stood aside for them
+to get over the stile, the "boy" still suffering from his over exertion,
+breathing stertorously like a horse pulling uphill and still evidently
+fearful of the big stick behind. He scrambled over the stile as best he
+could, rolling a wild eye at us as he did so--a large, bulgy eye with
+the lower lid swollen and sore, like the eye of a terrified ox on the
+way to the slaughter house. So much then for our little picture of
+charming childhood! The man followed close at his heels and looked at me
+with stern defiant eyes. "Yes, that is my son," his eyes declaimed, "and
+I'll thank you to avert your gaze or by the Lord I'll beat you too."
+
+_A Yellow Cat_
+
+Last week, I saw a yellow cat perched up quite high on a window ledge at
+the S---- Underground Station in celestial detachment from the crowd of
+serious, black-coated gentlemen hustling along to and from the trains.
+He had his back turned to us, but as I swept past in the stream, I was
+forced to look back a moment, and caught the outline of his whiskers--it
+made me smile intensely to myself and secretly I gave the palm to the
+cat for wisdom.
+
+_July_ 31.
+
+This War is so great and terrible that hyperbole is impossible. And yet
+my gorge rises at those fatuous journalists continually prating about
+this "Greatest War of all time," this "Great Drama," this "world
+catastrophe unparalleled in human history," because it is easy to see
+that they are really more thrilled than shocked by the immensity of the
+War. They indulge in a vulgar Yankee admiration for the Big Thing. Why
+call this shameful Filth by high sounding phrases--as if it were a
+tragedy from Euripides? We ought to hush it up, not brag about it, to
+mention it with a blush instead of spurting it out brazen-faced.
+
+Mr. Garvin, for example, positively gloats over the War each week in the
+_Observer_: "Last week was one of those pivotal occasions on which
+destiny seems to swing"--and so on every week, you can hear him,
+historical glutton smacking his lips with an offensive relish.
+
+For my part, I never seem to be in the same mind about the War twice
+following. Sometimes I am wonderstruck and make out a list of all the
+amazing events I have lived to see since August, 1914, and sometimes and
+more often I am swollen with contempt for its colossal imbecility. And
+sometimes I am swept away with admiration for all the heroism of the
+War, or by some particularly noble self-sacrifice, and think it is
+really all worth while. Then--and more frequently--I remember that this
+War has let loose on the world not only barbarities, butcheries and
+crimes, but lies, lies, lies--hypocrisies, deceits, ignoble desires for
+self-aggrandizement, self-preservation such as no one before ever
+dreamed existed in embryo in the heart of human beings.
+
+The War rings the changes on all the emotions. It twangs all my strings
+in turn and occasionally all at once, so that I scarcely know how to
+react or what to think. You see, here am I, a compulsory spectator, and
+all I can do is to reflect. A Zeppelin brought down in flames that lit
+up all London--now that makes me want to write like Mr. Garvin. But a
+Foreign Correspondent's eager discussion of "Italy's aspirations in the
+Trentino," how Russia insists on a large slice of Turkey, and so forth,
+makes me splutter. How insufferably childish to be slicing up the
+earth's surface! How immeasureably "above the battle" I am at times.
+What a prig you will say I am when I sneer at such contemptible little
+devilries as the Bodies' trick of sending over a little note, "Warsaw is
+fallen," into our trenches, or as ours in reply: "Gorizia!"
+
+"There is no difference in principle between the case of a man who loses
+a limb in the service of his country and that of the man who loses his
+reason, both have an obvious claim to the grateful recognition of the
+State."--A morning paper.
+
+A jejune comment like this makes me grin like a gargoyle! Hark to the
+fellow--this leader-writer over his cup of tea. But it is a lesson to
+show how easily and quickly we have all adapted ourselves to the War.
+The War is everything; it is noble, filthy, great, petty, degrading,
+inspiring, ridiculous, glorious, mad, bad, hopeless yet full of hope. I
+don't know what to think about it.
+
+_August_ 13.
+
+I hate elderly women who mention their legs. It makes me shudder.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had two amusing conversations this morning, one with a jealous old man
+of 70 summers who, in spite of his age, is jealous--I can find no other
+term--of me in spite of mine, and the other with a social climber. I
+always tell the first of any of my little successes and regularly hand
+him all my memoirs as they appear, to which he as regularly protests
+that he reads very little now.
+
+"Oh! never mind," I always answer gaily, "you take it and read it going
+down in the train--it will amuse you." He submits but is always silent
+next time I see him--a little, admonitory silence. Or, I mention I am
+giving an address at ----, and he says "Oom," and at once begins his
+reminiscences, which I have heard many times before, and am sometimes
+tempted to correct him when, his memory failing, he leaves out an
+essential portion of his story. Thus do crabbed age and boastful youth
+tantalise one another.
+
+To the social climber I said slyly:
+
+"You seem to move in a very distinguished entourage during your week
+ends."
+
+He smiled a little self-consciously, hesitated a moment and then said:
+
+"Oh! I have a few nice friends, you know."
+
+Now I am sorry, but though I scrutinised this lick-spittle and arch
+belly-truck rider very closely, I am quite unable to say whether that
+smile and unwonted diffidence meant simple pleasure at the now certain
+knowledge that I was duly impressed, or whether it was genuine confusion
+at the thought that he had perhaps been overdoing it.
+
+Curiously enough, all bores of whatever kind make a dead set at me. I am
+always a ready listener and my thrusts are always gentle. Hence the
+pyramids! I constantly act as phlebotomist to the vanity of the young
+and to the anecdotage of the senile and senescent.
+
+_August_ 13.
+
+... I stood by his chair and looked down at him, and surveyed carefully
+the top of his head, neck, and collar, and with admirable restraint and
+calm, considered my most reasonable contempt of him. In perfect silence,
+we remained thus, while I looked down at a sore spot in the centre of
+his calvarium which he scratches occasionally, and toyed with the fine
+flower of my scorn.... But it is a dangerous license to take. One never
+knows....
+
+_Equilibrium Restored_
+
+To clear away the cobwebs and to purge my soul of evil thoughts and
+bitter feelings, went for a walk this evening over the uplands. Among
+the stubble, I sat down for a while with my back against the corn pook
+and listened to the Partridges calling. Then wandered around the edge of
+this upland field with the wind in my face and a shower of delicious,
+fresh rain pattering down on the leaves and dry earth. Then into a wood
+among tall forest Beeches and a few giant Larches where I rested again
+and heard a Woodpecker tapping out its message aloft.
+
+This ramble in beautiful B----shire country restored my mental and
+spiritual poise. I came home serene and perfectly balanced--my
+equilibrium was something like the just perceptible oscillation of tall
+Larch-tree tops on the heights of a cliff and the sea below with a just
+perceptible swell on a calm and perfect June day. I felt exquisite
+--superb. I could have walked all the way home on a tight rope.
+
+_September_ 2.
+
+Just recently, I have been going fairly strong. I get frequent colds and
+sometimes show unpleasant nerve symptoms, but I take a course of arsenic
+and strychnine every month or so in tabloid form, and this helps me over
+bad patches.
+
+Under the beatific influence of more comfortable health, the rare flower
+of my ambition has raised its head once more: my brain has bubbled with
+projects. To wit:
+
+(1) An investigation of the Balancers in Larval Urodeles.
+
+(2) The Present Parlous State of Systematic Zoology (for "Science
+Progress").
+
+(3) The Anatomy of the PsocidA|.
+
+Etc.
+
+The strength of my ambition at any given moment is the measure of my
+state of health. It must really be an extraordinarily tenacious thing to
+have hung on thro' all my recent experiences. Considerately enough this
+great Crab lets go of my big toe when I am sunk low in health, yet
+pinches devilishly hard as now when I am well.[3]
+
+_A Bad Listener_
+
+When I begin to speak, T---- will sometimes interrupt with his loud,
+rasping voice. I usually submit to this from sheer lack of lung power or
+I may have a sore throat. But occasionally after the fifth or sixth
+interruption I lose my equanimity and refuse to give him ground. I keep
+straight on with what I intended to say, only in a louder voice; he
+assumes a voice louder still, but not to be denied, I pile Pelion on
+Ossa and finally overwhelm him in a thunder of sound. For example:
+
+"The other day"--I begin quietly collecting my thoughts to tell the
+story in detail, "I went to the----"
+
+"Ah! you must come and see my pictures----" he breaks in; but I go on
+and he goes on and as I talk, I catch phrases: "St. Peters" or"Michael
+Angelo" or "Botticelli" in wondrous antiphon with my own "British
+Museum" and "I saw there," "two Syracusan," "tetradrachms," until very
+likely I reach the end of my sentence before he does his, or perhaps his
+rasp drives my remarks out of my head. But that makes no difference, for
+rather than give in I go on improvising in a louder and louder voice
+when suddenly, at length made aware of the fact that I am talking too,
+he stops! leaving me bellowing nonsense at the top of my voice, thus:
+"and I much admired these Syracusan tetradrachms, very charming indeed,
+I like them, the Syracusan tetradrachms I mean you know, and it will be
+good to go again and see them (louder) if possible and the weather keeps
+dry (louder) and the moon and the stars keep in their courses, if the
+slugs on the thorn (loudest)----" he stops, hears the last few words of
+my remarks, pretends to be appreciative but wonders what in Heaven's
+name I can have been talking about.
+
+_September_ 3.
+
+This is the sort of remark I like to make: Someone says to me: "You
+_are_ a pessimist."
+
+"Ah! well," I say, looking infernally deep, "pessimism is a good policy;
+it's like having your cake and eating it at the same time."
+
+Chorus: "Why?"
+
+"Because if the future turns out badly you can say, 'I told you so,' to
+your own satisfaction, and if all is well, why you share everyone else's
+satisfaction."
+
+Or I say: "No, I can't swim; and I don't want to!"
+
+Chorus: "Why?"
+
+"Because it is so dangerous."
+
+Chorus: "Why?"
+
+The Infernally Wise Youth: "For several reasons. If you are a swimmer
+you are likely to be oftener near water and oftener in danger than a
+non-swimmer. Further, as soon as you can swim even only a little, then
+as an honourable man, it behoves you to plunge in at once to save a
+drowning person, whereas, if you couldn't swim it would be merely
+tempting Providence."
+
+Isn't it sickening?
+
+_A Jolt_
+
+Yesterday the wind was taken out of my sails. Racing along with
+spinnaker and jib, feeling pretty fit and quite excited over some
+interesting ectoparasites just collected on some Tinamous, I suddenly
+shot into a menacing dead calm: that stiflingly still atmosphere which
+precedes a Typhoon. That is to say, my eye caught the title of an
+enormous quarto memoir in the _Trans. Roy. Soc._, Edinburgh: The
+Histology of ---- ----.
+
+I was browsing in the library at the time when this hit me like a
+carelessly handled gaff straight in the face. I almost ran away to my
+room.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My Pink Form just received amazes me! To be a soldier? C'est incroyable,
+ma foi! The possibility even is distracting! To send me a notice
+requesting me to prepare myself for killing men! Why I should feel no
+more astonished to receive a War Office injunction under dire penalties
+to perform miracles, to move mountains, to raise from the dead: My reply
+would be: "I cannot." I should sit still and watch the whole universe
+pass to its destruction rather than raise a hand to knife a fellow. This
+may be poor, anA|mic; but there it is, a positive fact.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There are moments when I have awful misgivings: Is this blessed Journal
+worth while? I really don't know, and that's the harassing fact of the
+matter. If only I were sure of myself, if only I were capable of an
+impartial view! But I am too fond of myself to be able to see myself
+objectively. I wish I knew for certain what I am and how much I am
+worth. There are such possibilities about the situation; it may turn out
+tremendously, or else explode in a soap bubble. It is the torture of
+Tantalus to be so uncertain. I should be relieved to know even the
+worst. I would almost gladly burn my MSS. in the pleasure of having my
+curiosity satisfied. I go from the nadir of disappointment to the zenith
+of hope and back several times a week, and all the time I am
+additionally harassed by the perfect consciousness that it is all petty
+and pusillanimous to desire to be known and appreciated, that my
+ambition is a morbid diathesis of the mind. I am not such a fool either
+as not to see that there is but little satisfaction in posthumous fame,
+and I am not such a fool as not to realise that all fame is fleeting,
+and that the whole world itself is passing away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I smile with sardonic amusement when I reflect how the War has changed
+my status. Before the War I was an interesting invalid. Now I am a lucky
+dog. Then, I was a star turn in tragedy; now I am drowned and ignored in
+an overcrowded chorus. No valetudinarian was ever more unpleasantly
+jostled out of his self-compassion. It is difficult to accustom myself
+to the new role all at once: I had begun to lose the faculty for
+sympathising in others' griefs. It is hard to have to realise that in
+all this slaughter, my own superfluous life has become negligible and
+scarcely anyone's concern but my own. In this colossal _sauve-qui-peut_
+which is developing, who can stay to consider a useless mouth? Am I not
+a comfortable parasite? And, God forgive me, an Egotist to boot?
+
+The War is searching out everyone, concentrating a beam of inquisitive
+light upon everyone's mind and character and publishing it for all the
+world to see. And the consequence to many honest folk has been a keen
+personal disappointment. We ignoble persons had thought we were better
+than we really are. We scarcely anticipated that the War was going to
+discover for us our emotions so despicably small by comparison, or our
+hearts so riddled with selfish motives. In the wild race for security
+during these dangerous times, men and women have all been sailing so
+closehauled to the wind that their eyes have been glued to their own
+forepeaks with never a thought for others: fathers have vied with one
+another in procuring safe jobs for their sons, wives have been bitter
+and recriminating at the security of other wives' husbands. The men
+themselves plot constantly for staff appointments, and everyone is
+pulling strings who can. Bereavement has brought bitterness and immunity
+indifference.
+
+And how pathetically some of us cling still to fragments of the old
+regime that has already passed--like ship-wrecked mariners to floating
+wreckage, to the manner of the conservatoire amid the thunder of all
+Europe being broken up; to our newspaper gossip and parish teas, to our
+cherished aims--wealth, fame, success--in spite of all, _ruat coelum!_
+Mr. A.C. Benson and his trickling, comfortable Essays, Mr. Shaw and his
+Scintillations--they are all there as before, revolving like haggard
+windmills in a devastated landscape! A little while ago, I read in the
+local newspaper which I get up from the country two columns concerning
+the accidental death of an old woman, while two lines were used to
+record the death of a townsman at the front from an aerial dart. Behold
+this poor rag! staggering along under the burden of the War in a
+passionate endeavour to preserve the old-time interest in an old woman's
+decease. Yet more or less we are all in the same case: I still write my
+Journal and play Patience of an evening, and an old lady I know still
+reads as before the short items of gossip in the papers, neglecting
+articles and leaders.... We are like a nest of frightened ants when
+someone lifts the stone. That is the world just now.
+
+_September_ 5.
+
+... I was so ashamed of having to fall back upon such ignominious
+publications for my literary efforts that on presenting him with two
+copies, I told the following lie to save my face:
+
+"They were two essays of mine left over at the beginning of the War, you
+know. My usual channel became blocked so I had to have recourse to
+these."
+
+"Where do you publish as a rule?" he innocently asked.
+
+"Oh! several in the _Manchester Guardian_," I told him out of vanity.
+"But of course every respectable journal now has closed down to
+extra-war topics."
+
+I lie out of vanity. And then I confess to lying--out of vanity too. So
+that one way or another I am determined to make kudos out of myself.
+Even this last reflection is written down with an excessive appreciation
+of its wit and the intention that it shall raise a smile.
+
+_September_ 9.
+
+Still nothing to report. The anxiety is telling on us all. The nurse has
+another case on the 22nd.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I looked at myself in the mirror this morning--nude, a most revolting
+picture. An emaciated human being is the most unlovely thing in
+creation. Some time ago a smart errand boy called out "Bovril" after me
+in the street.
+
+On my way to the Station met two robust, brawny curates on the way to
+the daily weekday service--which is attended only by two decrepit old
+women in black, each with her prayer-book caught up to her breast as if
+she were afraid it might gallop off. That means a parson apiece--and in
+war time too.
+
+_September_ 10.
+
+My sympathy with myself is so unfailing that I don't deserve anybody
+else's. In many respects, however, this Journal I believe gives the
+impression that I behave myself in the public gaze much worse than I
+actually do. You must remember that herein I let myself go at a stretch
+gallop: in life I rein in, I am almost another person. Would you believe
+it, E---- says I am full of quick sympathy with others and
+extraordinarily cheerful, nay gay. Verily I lead a curious double
+existence: among most people, I pass for a complaisant, amiable,
+mealy-mouthed, furry if conceited creature. Here I stand revealed as a
+contemptuous, arrogant malcontent. My life has embittered me _an fond_,
+I have the crabbed temper of the disappointed man insufficiently
+developed yet to be very plainly visible beneath my innate affable,
+unassuming, humble, diffident, cheerful characteristics. With fools on
+every hand I am becoming insolent, aggressive, self-declamatory. Last
+evening came home and got down Robert Buchanan's sonnet, "When He
+returns and finds the world so drear," and felt constrained to read it
+out to E----. I poured out its acid sentiment with the base revenge of a
+vitriol thrower, and then became quiescent.
+
+It is a helpless feeling, sitting still and watching circumstances
+pounding away at my malleable character and moulding it wrongly.
+
+_September_ 14.
+
+_An American Neighbour_
+
+We have a delightful American neighbour here whose life revolves like
+the fly-wheel of an engine. Even when not in eruption his volcanic
+energy is always rumbling and can be heard. Seeing he is a globe
+trotter, I was surprised to observe his most elaborate precautions for
+catching the train and getting a seat when he takes his wife and family
+to town. He first of all plants himself and all his property down at a
+certain carefully selected point along the platform as if he were in the
+wild west lying in wait for a Buffalo. Then as the train comes in, his
+eye fixes on an empty compartment as it passes and he dashes off after
+it in furious pursuit up the platform, shouting to his family to follow
+him. Having lassooed the compartment, squaw and piccaninnies are hustled
+in as if there was not a moment to lose, what time the black-coated,
+suburban Englishmen look on in pain and silence, and then slowly with
+offensive deliberation enter their respective carriages.
+
+_The Stockbroker_
+
+Another neighbour who interests me is mainly notable for his
+extraordinary gait. He is a man with a large, round head, a large round,
+dissolute looking face and fairly broad shoulders, below which
+everything tapers away to a pair of tiny feet neatly booted. These two
+little feet are excessively sensitive to road surface--one would say he
+had special sense organs on his toes, to judge by the manner in which he
+picks out his path along the country road in short, quick, fussy steps:
+his feet seem to dissect out the road as if boning a herring. A big
+bunion is as good as a sense organ, but his feet are too small and
+elegant.
+
+_September_ 24.
+
+The second nurse arrived to-day. Great air raid last night of which we
+heard nothing, thank God!
+
+My nerves are giving way under the strain.... One leg (the left) drags
+abominably.... We shall want a bath-chair as well as a perambulator.
+
+Crawled up thro' the path-fields to the uplands and sat in a field in
+the sun with my back against a haystack. I was so immobile in my
+dejection that Flies and Grass-hoppers came and perched about me. This
+made me furious. "I am not dead yet," I said, "get away," and I would
+suddenly drive them off.... In horrible dejection....
+
+Even my mental powers are disintegrating--that's the rub. Some quite
+recent incidents I cannot remember even when reminded of them: they seem
+to have passed clean out of my mind--a remarkable sensation this.
+
+My sensibility is dulled too. It chagrins me to find that my present
+plight by no means overwhelms me with anguish as it would have done
+once. It only worries me. I am just a worried ox.
+
+_September_ 26.
+
+The numbness in my right hand is getting very trying. ... The Baby puts
+the lid on it all. Can't you see the sordid picture? I can, and it
+haunts me. To be paralysed with a wife and child and no money--ugh!
+
+Retribution proceeds with an almost mathematical accuracy of measure. It
+would necessitate a vernier rather than a chain. There is no mercy in
+Cause and Effect. It is inhuman clockwork. Every single act expended
+brings one its precise equivalent in return....
+
+_September_ 28.
+
+Still nothing to report.
+
+I am astonished at the false impression these entries give of myself.
+The picture is incomplete anyhow. It represents the cloud of forebodings
+over my inner self but does not show the outward front I present to
+others. This is one of almost constant gaiety--unforced and quite
+natural. Ask E----, who said yesterday I was like a schoolboy.
+
+     "Camerade, I give you my hand!
+     I give you my love more precious than money,
+     I give you myself before preaching or law;
+     Will you give me yourself? Will you come, travel with me?
+     Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?"
+
+She cut this out of her copy of Walt Whitman and gave it me soon after
+our engagement. It is very precious to me.
+
+(On Sept. 29th, on the Doctor's advice I went away by the sea alone, my
+nerves being all unstrung. For an account of the miseries of this
+journey, see Dec. 12th _infra_).
+
+_October_ 3.
+
+A wire to say Susan arrived 2.15 p.m. All well.
+
+_October_ 5.
+
+Home again with my darling. She is the most wonderful darling woman. Our
+love is for always. The Baby is a monster.
+
+_October_ 23.
+
+The fact that I can't write, finally bottles me up.[4] Damn! Damn! Damn!
+If only I can get my Essay on Journal Writers done. E---- goes on well.
+I have a thousand things to say.
+
+_October_ 27.
+
+Still awaiting a reprieve. I hate alarming the Doctor--he's such a
+cheerful man so I conceal my symptoms, quite a collection by now.
+
+The prospect of breaking the news to her makes me miserable. I hide away
+as much as possible lest she should see. I _must_ speak when she is well
+again.
+
+_October_ 28.
+
+Life has been very treacherous to me--this, the greatest treachery of
+all. But I don't care. I exult over it. Last night I lay awake and
+listened to the wind in the trees and was full of exultation.
+
+Now I can only talk, but nobody to talk to. Shall hire a row of
+broomsticks. More and more, the War appears to me a tragic hoax.
+
+_November_ 1.
+
+E---- has had a set-back and is in bed again. However sclerotic my nerve
+tissue, I feel as flaccid as a jelly.
+
+My God! how I loathe the prospect of death.
+
+_November_ 3.
+
+I must have some music or I shall hear the paralysis creeping. That is
+why I lie in bed and whistle.
+
+"My dear Brown, what am I to do?"[5] (I like to dramatise myself like
+that--it is an anodyne).
+
+I feel as if I were living alone on Ascension Island with the tide
+coming up continuously, up and up and up.
+
+_November_ 6.
+
+She has known _all_ from the beginning! M---- warned her _not_ to marry
+me. How brave and loyal of her! What an ass I have been. I am
+overwhelmed with feelings of shame and self-contempt and sorrow for her.
+She is quite cheerful and an enormous help.
+
+_November_ 12.
+
+What a wreck my existence has become and--dragging down others with me.
+
+If only I could rest assured that after I am dead these Journals will be
+tenderly cared for--as tenderly as this blessed infant! It would be
+cruel if even after I have paid the last penalty, my efforts and
+sufferings should continue to remain unknown or disregarded. What I
+would give to know the effect I shall produce when published! I am
+tortured by two doubts--whether these MSS. (the labour and hope of many
+years) will survive accidental loss and whether they really are of any
+value. I have no faith in either.
+
+_November_ 14.
+
+In fits of panic, I keep saying to myself: "My dear Brown, what am I to
+do?" But where is Brown? Brown, you devil! where are you?
+
+... To think how I have acted the Prince to her when really I am only a
+beggar!
+
+_November_ 16.
+
+A little better and more cheerful: altho' my impregnable colon still
+holds out.
+
+It would be nice if a physician from London one of these days were to
+gallop up hotspur, tether his horse to the gate post and dash in waving
+a reprieve--the discovery of a cure!
+
+... I was in an impish mood and said: "Oh! dear, I'm full of misery."
+
+"Don't be silly," she said, "so am I."
+
+_November_ 17.
+
+E---- has been telling me some of her emotions during and after her
+fateful visit to my Doctor just before our marriage. He did not spare
+her and even estimated the length of my life after I had once taken to
+my bed--about 12 months. I remember his consulting room so well--all its
+furniture and the photograph of Madam Blavatsky over the door, and I
+picture her to myself sitting opposite to him in a sullen silence
+listening to the whole lugubrious story. Then she said at last: "All
+this won't make any difference to me." She went home to her mother in a
+dream, along the streets I have followed so often. I can follow all her
+footsteps in imagination and keep on retracing them. It hurts, but I do
+so because it seems to make her some amends for my being childishly
+unconscious at the time. Poor darling woman--if only I had known! My
+instinct was right--I felt in my bones it was wrong to marry, yet here
+was M---- urging me on. "You marry," her mother said to her, "I'll stand
+by you," which was right royal of her. There followed some trying months
+of married life with this white hot secret in her bosom as a barricade
+to perfect intimacy; me she saw always under this cloud of crude
+disgusting pathos making her say a hundred times to herself: "He doesn't
+know;" then Zeppelin raids and a few symptoms began to grow obvious,
+until what before she had to take on trust from the Doctor came
+diabolically true before her eyes. Thank God that's all over at last. I
+know her now for all she is worth--her loyalty and devotion, her courage
+and strength. If only I had something to give her in return! something
+more than the dregs of a life and a constitutional pessimism. I greatly
+desire to make some sacrifice, but I am so poor these days, so very much
+a pauper on her charity, there is no sacrifice I can make. Even my life
+would scarcely be a sacrifice in the circumstances--it is hard not to be
+able to give when one _wants_ to give.
+
+_November_ 20.
+
+In the doldrums. Tired of this damnable _far niente_,--I am being gently
+smothered under a mountain of feathers. I should like to engage upon
+some cold, hard, glittering intellectualism.
+
+"I want to read Kant," I said. The Baby slept, E---- was sewing and
+N---- writing letters. I leaned back in my armchair beside the bookshelf
+and began to read out the titles of my books in a loud voice.
+
+"My dear!" E---- said.
+
+"I am caressing my past," I answered. "Wiedersheim's _Comparative
+Anatomy of Vertebrates_, Smith Woodward's _Vertebrate PalA|ontology_--why
+it's like visiting old prospects and seeing how the moss has grown over
+the stones."
+
+I hummed a comic song and then said: "As I can't burn the house down, I
+shall go to bed."
+
+N----: "You can talk if you like, it won't interfere."
+
+E----: "He's talking to his besoms."
+
+"Certainly," I said to N----, absent-mindedly.
+
+E----: "You ought to have said 'Thank you.'"
+
+I blew out my cheeks and E---- laughed.
+
+N----: "How do you spell 'regimental'?"
+
+I told her--wrongly, and E---- said I was in a devilish mood.
+
+"If we say that we have no sin" I chanted in reply, "we deceive
+ourselves and the truth is not in us." I next gave a bit out of a
+speech by Disraeli with exaggerated rhetorical gestures.
+
+E---- (with pity): "Poor young man."
+
+Presently she came over and in a tired way put her arms around my neck
+so I immediately began to sing "Rock of Ages, cleft for me," in the
+bass, which immediately reminded me of dear old Dad, whose favourite
+hymn it was.... Then I imitated the Baby. And then to bed fretful and
+very bitter.
+
+_November_ 27.
+
+... I wish I could die of heart failure--and at once! What a luxury that
+would be as compared with my present prospect!
+
+A Tomtit on the fence this morning made me dissolve in tears:--self-pity
+I believe. I remember Tomtits in ----shire. Put on a gramophone record
+and--ugh! but I'm too sick to write.
+
+_November_ 28.
+
+The shock I gave my spinal column in 1915 up in the Lakes undoubtedly
+re-awakened activity among the bacteria. Luck for you! I, of all persons
+to concuss my spine!!
+
+... I listen to the kettle singing, I look at the pictures in the fire,
+read a bit, ask what time it is, see the Baby "topped and tailed," yawn,
+blow my nose, put on a gramophone record--I have the idea of passing on
+the midnight with no pain to the tune of some healing ragtime.
+
+_November_ 29.
+
+The anniversary of our engagement day two years ago. How mad the idea of
+marriage seemed to me--and my instinct was right: if only I had known!
+Yet she says she does not regret anything.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This morning I turned to read with avidity accounts of the last hours of
+Keats, Gibbon, Oscar Wilde and Baudelaire. I gained astonishing comfort
+out of this, especially in the last ... who died of G.P.I, in a Brussels
+Hospital.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+E---- is awfully courageous and,--as usual ready to do everything in her
+power. How can I ever express sufficient gratitude to these two dear
+women (and my wife, above all) for casting in their lot knowingly with
+mine?
+
+_December_ 1.
+
+I believe I am good for another 12 months without abnormal worries. Just
+now, of course, the Slug ain't exactly on the thorn--on the cabbage in
+fact as E---- suggested. The Grasshopper is much of a burden and the
+voice of the Turtle has gone from my land (where did all these Bible
+phrases come from?). The first bark of the Wolf (God save us, 'tis all
+the Animal Kingdom sliding down my penholder) was heard with the
+reduction in her work to-day, and I suspect there's worse to come with a
+sovereign already only worth 12s. 6d.
+
+_December_ 4.
+
+The Baby touch is the most harrowing of all. If we were childless we
+should be merely unfortunate, but an infant....
+
+_December_ 11.
+
+Am receiving ionisation treatment from an electrical therapeutist--a
+quack! He is a sort of electrician--still, if he mends my bells I'll
+kiss his boots. As for ----, he is no better than a byreman, and I call
+him Hodge. This is not the first time I have felt driven to act behind
+the back of the Profession. In 1912, being desperate, and M---- worse
+than a headache, I greedily and credulously sucked in the advice of my
+boarding-house proprietor and went to see a homA"opathist in Finsbury
+Circus. He proved to be a charlatan at 10s. 6d. a time, and tho' I
+realised it at once, I religiously travelled about for a month or more
+with tinctures and drop-bottle. I could write a book on the Doctors I
+have known and the blunders they have made about me.... The therapeutist
+took me for 33. I feel 63. I am 27. What a wreck I am, and....
+
+_December_ 12.
+
+It is so agreeable to be able to write again that I write now for the
+sheer physical pleasure of being able to use a pen and form letters.
+
+_An Adventure in Search of Health_
+
+About the end of September, I began to feel so ill that Nurse went for
+the Doctor who assured me that E---- was all right--I need not
+worry--"You go away at once and get some fresh air," and so forth. "I
+feel quite ill," I said, struggling to break the news.
+
+"Sort of nervous?" he enquired good-naturedly, "run down? I should get
+right away at once."
+
+I began tentatively. "Well, I have a rather long medical history and
+perhaps ... you ... might care to read the certificate of my London
+Doctor?"
+
+I went to my escritoire and returned with M----'s letter addressed to
+"The M.O. examining Mr. B."
+
+Hodge pulled out the missive, studied the brief note carefully and long,
+at the same time drawing in his breath--deeply, and gnawing the back of
+his hand.
+
+"I know all about it," I said to relieve him.
+
+"Is it quite certain? about this disease?" he said presently. "You are
+very young for it."
+
+"I think there is no doubt," and he began to put me thro' the usual
+tricks.
+
+"I should go right away at once," he said, "and go on with your arsenic.
+And whatever you do--don't worry--your wife is all right."
+
+After beseeching him to keep silence about it as I thought she did not
+know, I shewed him out and locked up the certificate again.
+
+Next morning I felt thoroughly cornered: I was not really fit enough to
+travel; my hand and leg were daily growing more and more paralysed and
+J---- wired to say she could not put me up as they were going away for
+the week end. So I wired back engaging rooms, as with the nurse in the
+house and E---- as she was, I simply could not stay at home....
+
+On the way to the Station I was still in two minds whether or not to
+pull the taxi up at the Nursing Home and go inside, but harassing debate
+as it was, our rapidly diminishing bank balance finally drove me on.
+
+---- came up to London with me and sought out a comfortable corner seat,
+but by the time the train left, a mother and a crying child had got in
+and everywhere else was full. A girl opposite who saw ---- hand me a
+brandy flask and knew I was ill, looked at me compassionately.
+
+At Reading, another woman with a baby got in and both babies cried in
+chorus, jangling my nerves to bits!--until I got out into the corridor,
+by a miracle not falling down, with one leg very feeble and treacherous.
+All seats were taken, excepting a first-class compartment where I looked
+in enviously at a lucky youth stretched out asleep full length along the
+empty seat.
+
+All the people and the noise of the train began to make me fret, so I
+sought out the repose of a lavatory where I remained eating sandwiches
+and an apple for the best part of an hour. It was good to be alone.
+
+Later on, I discovered an empty seat in a compartment occupied by
+persons whose questionable appearance my short sight entirely failed to
+make me aware of until I got inside with them. They were a family of
+Sheenies, father, mother and three children, whose joint emanations in a
+closed-up railway carriage made an effluvium like to kill a regiment of
+guards. They were E. end pawnbrokers or dealers in second-hand clothes.
+
+I was too nervous to appear rude by immediately with-drawing, so I said
+politely to the man clad in second-hand furs: "Is that seat taken?"
+
+He affected to be almost asleep. So I repeated. He stared at me and then
+said:
+
+"Oh! yes ... but you can have it for a bit if you like."
+
+I sat down timorously on the extreme edge of the seat and stared at, but
+could not read, my newspaper out of sheer nervous apprehension. My sole
+idea was to get out as soon as I decorously could. Out of the corner of
+my eye, I observed the three children--two girls and a boy--all garbed
+in black clothes and wearing large clumsy boots with nails and scutes on
+the soles. The girls had large inflorescences of bushy hair which they
+swung about as they turned their heads and made me shudder. The mother's
+face was like a brown, shrivelled apple, topped with a black bonnet and
+festooned on each side with ringlets of curly dark hair. Around her neck
+a fur tippet: as I live--second-hand clothes dealers from Whitechapel.
+
+The man I dare not look at: I sat beside him and merely imagined.
+
+At ----, I got a decent seat and arrived at T---- jaded, but still
+alive, with no one to meet me. Decent rooms on the sea-front.
+
+Next morning J---- went away for the week end and I could not possibly
+explain how ill I was: she might have stayed at home.
+
+To preserve my sanity, Saturday afternoon, took a desperate remedy by
+hiring a motor-car and travelling to Torquay and back _via_
+Babbacombe....
+
+On the Sunday, feeling suddenly ill, I sent for the local medico whom I
+received in the drab little room by lamplight after dinner. "I've a
+tingling in my right hand," I said, "that drives me nearly silly."
+
+"And on the soles of your feet?" he asked at once.
+
+I assented, and he ran thro' at once all the symptoms in series.
+
+"I see you know what my trouble is," I said shyly. And we chatted a
+little about the War, about disease, and I told him of the recent memoir
+on the histology of the disease ---- in the _Trans. Roy. Soc_, Edin.
+which interested him. Then he went away again--very amiable, very polite
+--an obvious _non possumus_....
+
+On Monday at 4 went up to ---- to tea as previously arranged, but found
+the house shut up so returned to my rooms in a rage.
+
+After tea, having read the newspapers inside out, sat by the open window
+looking out on to the Marine Parade. It was dusk, a fine rain was
+falling, and the parade and sea-front were deserted save for an
+occasional figure hurrying past with mackintosh and umbrella. Suddenly
+as I sat looking out on this doleful scene, a dirge from nowhere in
+particular sounded on my ears which I soon recognised as "Robin Adair,"
+sung very _lento_ and very _maestoso_ by a woman, with a flute obligato
+played by some second person. The tide was right up, and the little
+waves murmured listlessly at long intervals: never before I think have I
+been plunged into such an abyss of acute misery.
+
+Next day the wire came. But it was too late. The day after that, I was
+worse, a single ray of sunshine being the rediscovery of the
+second-hand-clothes family from Whitechapel taking the air together on
+the front. This dreary party was traipsing along, the parents in their
+furs giving an occasional glance at the sea uncomfortably, as if they
+only noticed it was wet, and the children still in black and still
+wearing their scuted boots, obviously a little uncomfortable in a place
+so clean and windswept. I think they all came to the seaside out of
+decorum and for the satisfaction of feeling that they could afford it
+like other folk, and that old-clothes was as profitable a business as
+another.
+
+On Thursday, returned home as I was afraid of being taken ill and having
+to go into the public hospital. Arrived home and went to bed and here we
+are till Jan. 1st on 3 months' sick leave. However, the swingeing
+urtication in my hands and feet has now almost entirely abated and
+to-day I went out with E---- and the perambulator, _which I pushed_.
+
+_December_ 13.
+
+_A Baby-Girl_
+
+Walked down the bottom of the road and hung over some wooden railings. A
+little village baby-girl aged not more than 3 was hovering about near
+me while I gazed abstractedly across the Park at the trees. Presently,
+she crawled through the railings into the field and picked up a few dead
+leaves--a baby picking up dead leaves! Then she threw them down, and
+kicked them. Then moved on again--rustling about intermittently like a
+winter Thrush in the shrubbery. At last, she had stumbled around to
+where I was leaning over the railings. She stood immediately in front of
+me and silently looked up with a steady reproachful gaze: "Ain't you
+'shamed, you lazy-bones?" till I could bear her inquisitorial gaze no
+longer, and so went and hung over some more railings further on.
+
+_Service_
+
+He asked for a Tennyson. She immediately went upstairs in the dark, lit
+a match and got it for him.
+
+He asked for a Shakespeare. And without a moment's hesitation, she went
+upstairs again, lit another match and got that for him.
+
+And I believe if he had said "Rats," she would have shot out silently
+into the dark and tried to catch one for him. Only a woman is capable of
+such service.
+
+_Hardy's Poetry_
+
+
+                                "You did not come,
+     And marching time drew on and wore me numb--
+     Yet less for loss of your dear presence there
+     Than that I thus found lacking in your make
+     That high compassion which can overbear
+     Reluctance for pure loving-kindness' sake
+     Grieved I, _when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum_,
+                                     You did not come."
+
+I thoroughly enjoy Hardy's poetry for its masterfulness, for his sheer
+muscular compulsion over the words and sentences. In his rough-hewn
+lines he yokes the recalcitrant words together and drives them along
+mercilessly with something that looks like simple brute strength.
+Witness the triumphant last line in the above where the words are
+absolute bondslaves to his exact meaning, his indomitable will. All
+this pleases me the more for I know to my cost what stubborn, sullen,
+hephA|stian beasts words and clauses can sometimes be. It is nice to see
+them punished. Hardy's poetry is Michael Angelo rather than Greek,
+Browning not Tennyson.
+
+_December_ 14.
+
+What a day! After a night of fog signals, I awoke this morning to find
+it still foggy and the ground covered with a grey rime. All day the fog
+has remained: I look out now thro' the yellowish atmosphere across a
+field which is frosted over, the grass and brambles stiff and glassy. My
+back is aching and the cold is so intense that unless I crouch over the
+fire hands and feet become immediately stone-cold. All day I have
+crouched over the fire, reading newspapers, listening to fog signals and
+the screaming of the baby.... I have been in a torpor, like a Bat in a
+cavern--really dead yet automatically hanging on to life by my hind
+legs.
+
+_December_ 15.
+
+"To stand upon one's guard against Death exasperates her malice and
+protracts our sufferings." W.S. Landor.
+
+_December_ 19.
+
+The Parson called, over the christening of the baby. I told him I was an
+agnostic. "There are several interesting lines of thought down here," he
+said wearily, passing his hand over his eyes. I know several men more
+enthusiastic over Fleas and Worms than this phlegmatic priest, over
+Jesus Christ.
+
+_December_ 20.
+
+The reason why I do not spend my days in despair and my nights in
+hopeless weeping simply is that I am in love with my own ruin. I
+therefore deserve no sympathy, and probably shan't get it: my own
+profound self-compassion is enough. I am so abominably self-conscious
+that no smallest detail in this tragedy eludes me. Day after day I sit
+in the theatre of my own life and watch the drama of my own history
+proceeding to its close. Pray God the curtain falls at the right moment
+lest the play drag on into some long and tedious anticlimax.
+
+We all like to dramatise ourselves. Byron was dramatising himself when,
+in a fit of rhetorical self-compassion, he wrote:
+
+"Oh! could I feel as I have felt or be what I have been, Or weep as I
+could once have wept o'er many a vanished scene."
+
+Shelley, too, being an artist could not stand insensible to his own
+tragedy and Francis Thompson suggests that he even anticipated his own
+end from a passage in _Julian and Maddalo_, "... if you can't swim,
+Beware of Providence." "Did no earthly _dixisti_," Thompson asks, "sound
+in his ears as he wrote it?"
+
+In any event, it was an admirable ending from the dramatic point of
+view; Destiny is often a superb dramatist. What more perfect than the
+death of Rupert Brooke at Scyros in the A†gean?[6] The lives of some men
+are works of art, perfect in form, in development and in climax. Yet how
+frequently a life eminently successful or even eminently ruinous is also
+an unlovely, sordid, ridiculous or vulgar affair! Every one will concede
+that it must be a hard thing to be commonplace and vulgar even in
+misfortune, to discover that the tragedy of your own precious life has
+been dramatically bad, that your life even in its ruins is but a poor
+thing, and your own miseries pathetic from their very insignificance;
+that you are only Jones with chronic indigestion rather than Guy de
+Maupassant mad, or Coleridge with a great intellect being slowly
+dismantled by opium.
+
+If only I could order my life by line and level, if I could control or
+create my own destiny and mould it into some marble perfection! In
+short, if life were an art and not a lottery! In the lives of all of us,
+how many wasted efforts, how many wasted opportunities, false starts,
+blind--how many lost days--and man's life is but a paltry three score
+years and ten: pitiful short commons indeed.
+
+Sometimes, as I lean over a five-barred gate or gaze stupidly into the
+fire, I garner a bitter-sweet contentment in making ideal
+reconstructions of my life, selecting my parents, the date and place of
+my birth, my gifts, my education, my mentors and what portions out of
+the infinity of knowledge shall gain a place within my mind--that sacred
+glebe-land to be zealously preserved and enthusiastically cultivated.
+Whereas, my mind is now a wilderness in which all kinds of useless
+growths have found an ineradicable foothold. I am exasperated to find I
+have by heart the long addresses of a lot of dismal business
+correspondents and yet can't remember the last chapters of Ecclesiastes:
+what a waste of mind-stuff there! It irks me to be acquainted even to
+nausea with the spot in which I live, I whose feet have never traversed
+even so much as this little island much less carried me in triumph to
+Timbuctoo, Honolulu, Rio, Rome.
+
+_December_ 21.
+
+This continuous preoccupation with self sickens me--as I look back over
+these entries. It is inconceivable that I should be here steadily
+writing up my ego day by day in the middle of this disastrous war....
+Yesterday I had a move on. To-day life wearies me. I am sick of myself
+and life. This beastly world with its beastly war and hate makes me
+restless, dissatisfied, and full of a longing to be quit of it. I am as
+full of unrest as an autumn Swallow. "My soul," I said to them at
+breakfast with a sardonic grin, "is like a greyhound in the slips. I
+shall have to wear heavy boots to prevent myself from soaring. I have
+such an uplift on me that I could carry a horse, a dog, a cat, if you
+tied them on to my homing spirit and so transformed my Ascension into an
+adventure out of Baron Munchausen." With a gasconnade of contempt, I
+should like to turn on my heel and march straight out of this wretched
+world at once.
+
+_December_ 22.
+
+_Gibbon's Autobiography_
+
+This book makes me of all people (and especially just now) groan
+inwardly. "I am at a loss," he says, referring to the _Decline and
+Fall_, "how to describe the success of the work without betraying the
+vanity of the writer.... My book was on every table and almost on every
+toilette." It makes me bite my lips. Rousseau and his criticism of "I
+sighed as a lover; I obeyed as a son," and Gibbon on his dignity in
+reply make one of the most ludicrous incidents in literary history. "...
+that extraordinary man whom I admire and pity, should have been less
+precipitate in condemning the moral character and conduct of a
+stranger!" Oh my giddy Aunt! Isn't this _rich_? Still, I am glad you did
+not marry her: we could ill spare Madam de StaA"l, Madam Necker's
+daughter, that wonderful, vivacious and warmhearted woman.
+
+"After the morning has been occupied with the labours of the library, I
+wish to unbend rather than exercise my mind; and in the interval between
+tea and supper, I am far from disdaining the innocent amusement of a
+game of cards." How Jane Austen would have laughed at him! The passage
+reminds me of the Rev. Mr. Collins saying:
+
+"Had I been able I should have been only too pleased to give you a song,
+for I regard music as a harmless diversion and perfectly compatible with
+the profession of a clergyman."
+
+"When I contemplate the common lot of mortality," Gibbon writes, "I must
+acknowledge I have drawn a high prize in the lottery of life," and he
+goes on to count up all his blessings with the most offensive
+delight--his wealth, the good fortune of his birth, his ripe years, a
+cheerful temper, a moderate sensibility, health, sound and peaceful
+slumbers from infancy, his valuable friendship with Lord Sheffield, his
+rank, fame, etc., etc., _ad nauseam_. He rakes over his whole life for
+things to be grateful for. He intones his happiness in a long recitative
+of thanksgiving that his lot was not that of a savage, of a slave, or a
+peasant; he washes his hands with imaginary soap on reflecting on the
+bounty of Nature which cast his birth in a free and civilised country,
+in an age of science and philosophy, in a family of honourable rank and
+decently endowed with the gifts of fortune--sleek, complacent,
+oleaginous and salacious old gentleman, how I would love to have bombed
+you out of your self-satisfaction!
+
+_Masefield's "Gallipoli"_
+
+It amused me to discover the evident relish with which the author of _In
+the Daffodil Fields_ emphasises the blood and the flowers in the attack
+on Achi Baba. It's all blood and beautiful flowers mixed up together to
+Masefield's great excitement.
+
+     "A swear word in a city slum
+      A simple swear word is to some--
+      To Masefield something more."
+
+                              MAX BEERBOHM.
+
+Still, to call Gallipoli "bloody Hell" is, after all, only a
+pedantically exact description. You understand, tho', a very remarkable
+book--a work of genius.
+
+_December_ 23.
+
+To be cheerful this Xmas would require a _coup de thA(C)Actre_--some sort of
+psychological sleight of hand.
+
+I get downstairs at 10 and spend the day reading and writing, without a
+soul to converse with. Everything comes to me second-hand--thro' the
+newspapers, the world of life thro' the halfpenny _Daily News_, and the
+world of books thro' the _Times Literary Supplement_. For the rest I
+listen to the kettle singing and make symphonies out of it, or I look
+into the fire to see the pictures there....
+
+_December_ 24.
+
+Everyone I suppose engaged in this irony of Xmas. What a solemn lunatic
+the world is.
+
+Walked awhile in a beautiful lane close by, washed hard and clean and
+deeply channelled by the recent rain. On the hill-top, I could look
+right across the valley to the uplands, where on the sky line a few Firs
+stood in stately sequestration from common English Oaks, like a group of
+ambassadors in full dress. In the distance a hen clucked, I saw a few
+Peewits wheeling and watched the smoke rising from our cottage
+perpendicularly into the motionless air. There was a clement quiet and a
+clement warmth, and in my heart a burst of real happiness that made me
+rich even beside less unfortunate beings and beyond what I had ever
+expected to be again.
+
+_December_ 26.
+
+"In thus describing and illustrating my intellectual torpor, I use terms
+that apply more or less to every part of the years during which I was
+under the Circean spells of opium. But for misery--"
+
+(Why do I waste my energy with this damned Journal? I stop. I hate it. I
+am going out for a walk in the fog.)
+
+_December_ 31.
+
+_Reminiscences_
+
+For the past few days I have been living in a quiet hermitage of
+retrospect. My memories have gone back to the times--remote,
+inaccessible, prehistoric--before ever this Journal was begun, when I
+myself was but a jelly without form and void--that is, before I had
+developed any characteristic qualities and above all the dominant one, a
+passion for Natural History.
+
+One day a school friend, being covetous of certain stamps in my
+collection, induced me to "swop" them for his collection of birds' eggs
+which he showed me nestling in the bran at the bottom of a box. He was a
+cunning boy and thought he had the better of the bargain. He little
+realised--nor did I--the priceless gift he bestowed when his little fat
+dirty hands decorated, I remember, with innumerable warts, picked out
+the eggs and gave them to me. In fact, a smile momentarily crossed his
+face, he turned his head aside, he spat in happy contemplation of the
+deal.
+
+I continued eagerly to add to the little collection of Birds' eggs, but
+for a long time it never occurred to me to go out into the country
+myself and collect them,--I just _swopped,_ until one day our errand
+boy, who stuttered, had bandy legs, and walked on the outside of his
+feet with the gait of an Anthropoid, said to me, "I will sh-how you how
+to find Birds' n-nests if you like to come out to the w-woods." So one
+Saturday, when the backyard was cleaned down and the coal boxes filled,
+he and I started off together to a wood some way down the river bank,
+where he--my good and beneficent angel--presently showed me a Thrush's
+nest in the fork of a young Oak tree. Never-to-be-forgotten moment! The
+sight of those blue speckled eggs lying so unexpectedly, as I climbed up
+the tree, on the other side of an untidy tangle of dried moss and grass,
+in a neat little earthenware cup, caused probably the first tremor of
+real emotion at a beautiful object. The emotion did not last long! In a
+moment I had stolen the eggs and soon after smashed them--in trying to
+blow them, schoolboy fashion.
+
+Then, I rapidly became an ardent field naturalist. My delight in Birds
+and Birds' eggs spread in a benignant infection to every branch of
+Natural History. I collected Beetles, Butterflies, plants, Birds' wings,
+Birds' claws, etc. Dr. Gordon Staples in the _Boy's Own Paper_, taught
+me how to make a skin, and I got hold of a Mole and then a Squirrel (the
+latter falling to my prowess with a catapult), stuffed them and set them
+up in cases which I glazed myself. I even painted in suitable
+backgrounds, in the one case a mole-hill, looking, I fear, more like a
+mountain, and in the other, a Fir tree standing at an impossible angle
+of 45A deg.. Then I read a book on trapping, and tried to catch Hares. Then I
+read Sir John Lubbock's _Ants, Bees and Wasps_, and constructed an
+observation Ants' nest (though the Ants escaped).
+
+In looking back to these days, I am chiefly struck by my extraordinary
+ignorance of the common objects of the countryside, for although we
+lived in the far west country, the house, without a garden, was in the
+middle of the town, and all my seniors were as ignorant as I. Nature
+Study in the schools did not then exist, I had no benevolent
+paterfamilias to take me by the hand and point out the common British
+Birds; for my father's only interest was in politics. I can remember
+coming home once all agog with a wonderful Bird I had seen--like a tiny
+Magpie, I said. No one could tell me that it was, of course, only a
+little Pied Wagtail.
+
+The absence of sympathy or of congenial companionship, however, had
+absolutely no effect in damping my ardour. As I grew older my
+egg-collecting companions fell away, some took up the law, or tailoring,
+or clerking, some entered the Church, while I became yearly more
+engrossed. In my childhood my enthusiasm lay like a watch-spring, coiled
+up and hidden inside me, until that Thrush's nest and eggs seized hold
+of it by the end and pulled it out by degrees in a long silver ribbon. I
+kept live Bats in our upstairs little-used drawing-room, and Newts and
+Frogs in pans in the backyard. My mother tolerated these things because
+I had sufficiently impressed her with the importance to science of the
+observations which I was making and about to publish. Those on Bats
+indeed were thought fit to be included in a standard work
+--Barrett-Hamilton's _Mammals of Great Britain and Ireland_. The
+published articles served to bring me into correspondence with other
+naturalists, and I shall never forget my excitement on receiving for the
+first time a letter of appreciation. It was from the author of several
+natural history books, to
+
+               "W.N.P. BARBELLION, ESQ.,
+                  Naturalist,
+                           Downstable,"
+
+and illustrated with a delightful sketch of Ring Plovers feeding on the
+saltings. This letter was carefully pasted into my diary, where it still
+remains.
+
+After all, it is perhaps unfair to say that I had no kindred spirit with
+me in my investigations. Martha, the servant girl who had been with us
+for 30 years, loved animals of all sorts and--what was strange in a
+country girl--she had no fear of handling even such things as Newts and
+Frogs. My Batrachia often used to escape from their pans in the yard
+into Martha's kitchen, and, not a bit scandalised, she would sometimes
+catch one marching across the rug or squeezing underneath a cupboard.
+"Lor'!" would be her comment as she picked the vagrant up and took it
+back to its aquarium, "can't 'em travel?" Martha had an eye for
+character in animals. In the long dynasty of cats we possessed one at
+length who by association of opposite ideas we called Marmaduke because
+he ought to have been called Jan Stewer. "A chuff old feller, 'idden
+'ee?" Martha used to ask me with pride and love in her eyes. "He purrs
+in broad Devon," I used to answer. Marmaduke need only wave the tip of
+his tail to indicate to her his imperative desire to promenade. Martha
+knew if no one else did that every spring "Pore 'Duke," underneath his
+fur, used to come out in spots. "'Tiz jus' like a cheel 'e gets a bit
+spotty as the warm weather cums along." Starlings on the washhouse roof,
+regularly fed with scraps, were ever her wonder and delight. "Don' 'em
+let it down, I zay?" In later years, when I was occupied in the top
+attic, making dissections of various animals that I collected, she would
+sometimes leave her scrubbing and cleaning in the room below to thrust
+her head up the attic stairs and enquire, "'Ow be 'ee gettin' on then?"
+Her unfeigned interest in my anatomical researches gave me real
+pleasure, and I took delight in arousing her wonder by pointing out and
+explaining the brain of a Pigeon or the nervous system of a Dog-fish, or
+a Frog's heart taken out and still beating in the dissecting dish. She,
+in reply, would add reflections upon her own experiences in preparing
+meat for dinner--anecdotes about the "maw" of an old Fowl, or the great
+"pipe" of a Goose. Then, suddenly scurrying downstairs, she would say,
+"I must be off or I shall be all be'ind like the cow's tail." Now the
+dignified interest of the average educated man would have chilled me.
+
+By the way, years later, when he was a miner in S. Wales, that historic
+errand-boy displayed his consciousness of the important role he once
+played by sending me on a postcard congratulations on my success in the
+B.M. appointment. It touched me to think he had not forgotten after
+years of separation.
+
+
+[1] So it proved. See September 26 _et seq._
+
+[2] In "La Recherche de l'Absolu" (Balzac).
+
+[3] See September 3 (next entry), "_A Jolt_," and September 24
+(_infra_).
+
+[4] The handwriting is painfully laboured, very large across a page and
+so crooked as to be almost undecipherable in places.
+
+[5] This is from a letter written by the dying Keats in Naples to his
+friend Brown.
+
+[6] Contrast with it Wordsworth rotting at Rydal Mount or Swinburne at
+Putney.
+
+
+
+
+1917
+
+
+_January_ 1.
+
+The New Year came in like a thief in the night--noiselessly; no bells,
+no syrens, no songs by order of the Government. Nothing could have been
+more appropriate than a burglarious entry like this--seeing what the
+year has come to filch from us all in the next 12 months.
+
+_January_ 20.
+
+I am over 6 feet high and as thin as a skeleton; every bone in my body,
+even the neck vertebrae, creak at odd intervals when I move. So that I
+am not only a skeleton but a badly articulated one to boot. If to this
+is coupled the fact of the creeping paralysis, you have the complete
+horror. Even as I sit and write, millions of bacteria are gnawing away
+my precious spinal cord, and if you put your ear to my back the sound of
+the gnawing I dare say could be heard. The other day a man came and set
+up a post in the garden for the clothes' line. As soon as I saw the post
+I said "gibbet"--it looks exactly like one, and I, for sure, must be the
+malefactor. Last night while E---- was nursing the baby I most
+delightfully remarked: "What a little parasite--why you are Cleopatra
+affixing the aspic--'Tarry, good lady, the bright day is done, and we
+are for the dark.'"
+
+The fact that such images arise spontaneously in my mind, show how
+rotten to the core I am.
+
+... The advent of the Baby was my _coup de grAcce._ The little creature
+seems to focus under one head all my personal disasters and more than
+once a senseless rage has clutched me at the thought of a baby in
+exchange for my ambition, a nursery for the study. Yet, on the whole, I
+find it a good and satisfying thing to see her, healthy, new, intact on
+the threshold: I grow tired of my own dismal life just as one does of a
+suit of dirty clothes. My life and person are patched and greasy; hers
+is new and without a single blemish or misfortune.... Moreover, she
+makes her mother happy and consoles her grandmother too.
+
+_January_ 21.
+
+_Death_
+
+What a delightful thing the state of Death would be if the dead passed
+their time haunting the places they loved in life and living over again
+the dear delightful past--if death were one long indulgence in the
+pleasures of memory! if the disembodied spirit forgot all the pains of
+its previous existence and remembered only the happiness! Think of me
+flitting about the orchards and farm-yards in ---- birdsnesting, walking
+along the coast among the seabirds, climbing Exmoor, bathing in streams
+and in the sea, haunting all my old loves and passions, cutting open
+with devouring curiosity Rabbits, Pigeons, Frogs, Dogfish, Amphioxus;
+think of me, too, at length unwillingly deflected from these cherished
+pursuits in the raptures of first love, cutting her initials on trees
+and fences instead of watching birds, day-dreaming over _Parker and
+Haswell_ and then bitterly reproaching myself later for much loss of
+precious time. How happy I shall be if Death is like this: to be living
+over again and again all my ecstasies, over first times--the first time
+I found a Bottle Tit's nest, the first time I succeeded in penetrating
+into the fastnesses of my El Dorado--Exmoor, the first time I gazed upon
+the internal anatomy of a Snail, the first time I read Berkeley's
+_Principles of Human Understanding_ (what a soul-shaking epoch that
+was!), and the first time I kissed her! My hope is that I may haunt
+these times again, that I may haunt the places, the books, the bathes,
+the walks, the desires, the hopes, the first (and last) loves of my life
+all transfigured and beatified by sovereign Memory.
+
+_January_ 26.
+
+Out of doors to-day it's like the roaring forties! Every tree I passed
+in the lane was a great wind instrument, bellowing out a passionate
+song, and the sky was torn to ribbons. It is cold enough to freeze the
+nose off a brass Monkey, but very exhilarating. I stood on the hill and
+squared my fists to the wind and bade everything come on. I sit writing
+this by the fire and am thoroughly scourged and purified by this great
+castigating wind.... I think I will stick it out--I will sit quite still
+in my chair and defy this sculking footpad--let the paralysis creep into
+every bone, I will hang on to the last and watch it skulking with my
+most hideous grimace.
+
+_January_ 27.
+
+Still freezing and blowing. Coming back from the village, tho' I was
+tired and hobbling badly, decided to walk up the lane even if it meant
+crawling home on hands and knees.
+
+The sky was a quick-change artist to-day. Every time you looked you saw
+a different picture. From the bottom of the hill I looked up and saw
+above me--it seemed at an immense and windy height--a piece of blue,
+framed in an irregular edge of white woolly cloud seen thro' the crooked
+branches of an Oak. It was a narrow crooked lane, sunk deep in the soil
+with large smooth surfaces of stone like skulls bulging up in places
+where the rain had washed away the soil.
+
+Further on, the sun was lying low almost in the centre of a
+semi-circular bend in the near horizon. It frosted the wool of a few
+sheep seen in silhouette, and then slowly disappeared in mist. On the
+right-hand side was a cottage with the smoke being wrenched away from
+the chimney top, and on the left a group of stately Firs, chanting a
+requiem like a cathedral choir.
+
+_January_ 28.
+
+Still blowing and bitterly cold. Along the path fields in the Park I
+stopped to look at a thick clump of Firs standing aloof on some high
+ground and guarded by an outside ring of honest English Oaks, Ashes and
+Elms. They were a sombre mysterious little crowd intent, I fancied, on
+some secret ritual of the trees. The high ground on which they stood
+looked higher and more inaccessible than it really was, the clump was
+dark green, almost black, and in between their trunks where all was
+obscurity, some hardy adventurer might well have discovered a Grand Lama
+sitting within his Penetralia. But I had no taste for any such
+profanity, and even as I looked the sun came out from behind a cloud
+very slowly, bringing the picture into clearer focus, chasing away
+shadows and bringing out all the colours. The landscape resumed its
+homely aspect: an English park with Firs in it.
+
+_January_ 29.
+
+Last night, I pulled aside the window curtain of our front door and
+peeped out. Just below the densely black projecting gable of the house I
+saw the crescent moon lying on her back in a bed of purple sky, and I
+saw our little white frosted garden path curving up towards the garden
+gate. It was a delicious _coup d'A"il_, and I shewed it to E----.
+
+_January_ 31.
+
+Showers of snow at intervals, the little flakes rocking about lazily or
+spiralling down, while the few that eventually reached the ground would
+in a moment or so be caught up in a sudden furious puff of wind, and
+sent driving along the road with the dust.
+
+My usual little jaunt up the lane past the mossy farm-house. Home to
+toasted tea-cakes and a pinewood fire, with my wife chattering prettily
+to the baby. After tea, enchanted by the reading of a new book--_Le
+Journal de Maurice de GuA(C)rin_--or rather the introduction to it by
+Sainte-Beuve. I devoured it! I have spent a devouring day; under a calm
+exterior I have burnt up the hours; all of me has been athrob; every
+little cell in my brain has danced to its own little tune. For to-day,
+Death has been an impossibility. I have felt that anyhow to-day I could
+not die--I have laughed at the mere thought of it. If only this mood
+would last! If I could feel thus always, then I could fend off Death for
+an immortality of life.
+
+But suddenly, as now, the real horror of my life and future comes on me
+in a flash. For a second I am terrified by the menace of the future, but
+fortunately only for a second. For I've learnt a trick which I fear to
+reveal; it is so valuable and necessary to me that if I talked of it or
+vulgarised it my secret might be stolen away. Not a word then!
+
+_Later_. I have just heard on the gramophone, some Grieg, and it has
+charged my happiness with disrupting voltage of desire. Oh! if only I
+had health, I could make the welkin ring! I shall leave so little behind
+me, such a few paltry pages beside what I have it in me to do. It
+shatters me.
+
+_February_ 1.
+
+Looking back, I must say I like the splendid gusto with which I lived
+thro' yesterday: that mettlesome fashion in which I took the lane, and
+at the top, how I swung around to sweep my gaze across to the uplands
+opposite with snow falling all the time. Then in the evening, the almost
+complete absorption in the new book when I forgot everything _pro tem_.
+It was quite like the old days.
+
+_February_ 2.
+
+_Crowd Fever_
+
+After four months' sick leave, returned to work and London.
+
+An illness like mine rejuvenates one--for the time being! A pony and
+jingle from the old "Fox and Hounds Inn" took me to the Station, and I
+enjoyed the feel of the wheels rolling beneath me over the hard road. In
+the train, I looked out of the window as interested as any schoolboy. On
+the Underground I was delighted with the smooth, quiet way with which
+the "Metro" trains glide into the Station. I had quite forgotten this.
+Then, when my hand began to get better, I rediscovered the pleasures of
+penmanship and kept on writing, with my tongue out. And I re-enjoyed the
+child's satisfaction in coaxing a button to slip into its hole: all
+grown-up people have forgotten how difficult and complex such operations
+are.
+
+This morning how desirable everything seemed to me! The world
+intoxicated me. Moving again among so many human beings gave me the
+crowd-fever, and started again all the pangs of the old familiar hunger
+for a fuller life, that centrifugal elan in which I feared for the
+disruption and scattering of my parts in all directions. Temporarily I
+lost the hegemony of my own soul. Every man and woman I met was my
+enemy, threatening me with the secession of some inward part. I was
+alarmed to discover how many women I could passionately love and with
+how many men I could form a lasting friendship. Within, all was anarchy
+and commotion, a cold fright seized me lest some extraordinary event was
+about to happen: some general histolysis of my body, some sudden
+disintegration of my personality, some madness, some strange death....
+I wanted to crush out the life of all these men and women in a great
+Bear's hug, my God! this sea of human faces whom I can never recognise,
+all of us alive together beneath this yellow catafalque of fog on the
+morning of the announcement of world famine and world war!...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To-night, I have lost this paroxysm. For I am home again by the
+fireside. All the multitude have disappeared from my view. I have lost
+them, every one. I have lost another day of my life and so have they,
+and we have lost each other. Meanwhile the great world spins on
+unrelentingly, frittering away lightly my precious hours (surely a small
+stock now?) while I sit discomfited by the evening fire and nurse my
+scraped hands that tingle because the spinning world has wrenched itself
+out of my feeble grasp.
+
+_February_ 3.
+
+This morning on arriving at S. Kensington, went straight to a Chemist's
+shop, but finding someone inside, I drew back, and went on to another.
+
+"Have you any morphia tabloids?" I asked a curly-haired, nice-looking,
+smiling youth, who leaned with both hands on the counter and looked at
+me knowingly, as if he had had unlimited experience of would-be morphi
+nomaniacs.
+
+"Yes, plenty of them," he said, fencing. And then waited.
+
+"Can you supply me?" I asked, feeling very conscious of myself.
+
+He smiled once more, shook his head and said it was contrary to the
+Defence of the Realm Act.
+
+I made a sorry effort to appear ingenuous, and he said:
+
+"Of course, it is only a palliative."
+
+With a solemn countenance intended to indicate pain I answered:
+
+"Yes, but palliatives are very necessary sometimes," and I walked out of
+the hateful shop discomfited.
+
+_February_ 6.
+
+Am busy re-writing,[1] editing and bowdlerising my journals for
+publication against the time when I shall have gone the way of all
+flesh. No one else would prepare it for publication if I don't. Reading
+it through again, I see what a remarkable book I have written. If only
+they will publish it!
+
+_February_ 7.
+
+_Chinese Lanterns_
+
+The other morning as I dressed, I could see the sun like a large yellow
+moon rising on a world, stiff, stark, its contours merely indicated
+beneath a winding-sheet of snow. Further around the horizon was another
+moon--the full moon itself--yellow likewise, but setting. It was the
+strangest picture I ever saw. I might well have been upon another
+planet; I could not have been more surprised even at a whole ring of
+yellow satellites arranged at regular intervals all around the horizon.
+
+In the evening of the same day, I drove home from the Station in a
+little governess-cart, over a snow-clogged road. The cautious little
+pony picked out her way so carefully in little
+strides--pat-pat-pat--wherever it was slippery, and the Landlord of the
+Inn sat opposite me extolling all the clever little creature's merits.
+It was dusk, and for some reason of the atmosphere the scraps of cloud
+appeared as blue sky and the blue sky as cloud, beneath which the full
+moon like a great Chinese lantern hung suspended so low down it seemed
+to touch the trees and hills. How have folk been able to "carry on" in a
+world so utterly strange as this one during the past few days! I marvel
+that beneath such moons and suns, the peoples of the world have not
+ceased for a while from the petty business of war during at least a few
+of our dancing revolutions around this furnace of a star. One of these
+days I should not be surprised if this fascinated earth did not fall
+into it like a moth into a candle. And where would our Great War be
+then?
+
+_February_ 28.
+
+_The Strangeness of my Life_
+
+Consider the War: and the current adventures of millions of men on land,
+sea and air; and the incessant labours of millions of men in factory and
+workshop and in the field; think of the hospitals and all they hold, of
+everyone hoping, fearing, suffering, waiting--of the concentration of
+all humanity on the one subject--the War. And then think of me, poor
+little me, deserted and forgotten, a tiny fragment sunk so deep and
+helplessly between the sheer granite walls of my environment that scarce
+an echo reaches me of the thunder among the mountains above. I read
+about the War in a ha'penny paper, and see it in the pictures of the
+_Daily Mirror_. For the rest, I live by counting the joints on insects'
+legs and even that much effort is almost beyond my strength.
+
+That is strange enough. But my life is stranger still by comparison. And
+this is the marvel: that every day I spend by the waters of Babylon,
+weeping and neglected among enthusiasts, enthusiastically counting
+joints, while every evening I return to Zion to my books, to Hardy's
+poems, to Maurice de GuA(C)rin's Journals, to my own memoirs. Mine is a
+life of consummate isolation, and I frequently marvel at it.
+
+The men I meet accept me as an entomologist and _ipso facto_, an
+enthusiast in the science. That is all they know of me, and all they
+want to know of me, or of any man. Surely no man's existence was ever
+quite such a duplicity as mine. I smile bitterly to myself ten times a
+day, as I engage in all the dreary technical jargon of professional talk
+with them. How they would gossip over the facts of my life if they knew!
+How scandalised they would be over my inner life's activities, how
+resentful of enthusiasm other than entomological!
+
+I find it very irksome to keep up this farce of concealment. I would
+love to declare myself. I loathe, hate and detest the secrecy of my real
+self: the continuous restraint enforced on me ulcerates my heart and
+makes harmonious social existence impossible with those who do not know
+me thoroughly. "On dit qu'au jugement dernier le secret des consciences
+sera rA(C)vA(C)lA(C) A  tout l'univers; je voudrais qu'il en fut ainsi de moi dA"s
+aujourd'hui et que la vue de mon Acme fut ouvert A  tous venants." Maurice
+de GuA(C)rin.
+
+_March_ 1.
+
+It is curious for me to look at my tubes and microscope and realise that
+I shall never require them again for serious use. Life is a dreadful
+burden to me at the Museum. I am too ill for any scientific work so I
+write labels and put things away. I am simply marking time on the edge
+of a precipice awaiting the order, "Forward."
+
+It is excoriating to be thus wasting the last few precious days of my
+life in such mummery merely to get bread to eat. They might at least let
+me die in peace, and with fitting decorum. It is so ignoble to be
+tinkering about in a Museum among Scarabees and insects when I ought to
+be reflecting on life and death.
+
+I ask myself what ought to be my most appropriate reaction in such
+circumstances as the present? Why, of course, to carry on as if all were
+normal, and the future unknown: why, so I do, to outward view, for the
+sake of the others. Yet that is no reason why in my own inward parts I
+should not at times indulge in a little relaxation. It is a relief to
+put off the mailed coat, to sit awhile by the green-room fire and have
+life as it really is, all to myself. But the necessity of living will
+not let me alone. I must be always mumming.
+
+My life has been all isolation and restriction. And it now appears even
+my death is to be hedged around with prohibitions. Drugs for
+example--how beneficent a little laudanum at times in a case like mine!
+and how happy I could be if I knew that in my waistcoat pocket I carried
+a kindly, easy means of shuffling off this coil when the time comes as
+come it must. It horrifies me to consider how I might break the life of
+E---- clean in two, and sap her courage by a lingering, dawdling dying.
+But there is the Defence of the Realm Act. It is a case of a Scorpion in
+a ring of fire but without any sting in its tail.
+
+_March_ 2.
+
+I ask myself: what are my views on death, the next world, God? I look
+into my mind and discover I am too much of a mannikin to have any. As
+for death, I am a little bit of trembling jelly of anticipation. I am
+prepared for anything, but I am the complete agnostic; I simply don't
+know. To have views, faith, beliefs, one needs a backbone. This great
+bully of a universe overwhelms me. The stars make me cower. I am
+intimidated by the immensity surrounding my own littleness. It is futile
+and presumptuous for me to opine anything about the next world. But I
+_hope_ for something much freer and more satisfying after death, for
+emancipation of the spirit and above all for the obliteration of this
+puny self, this little, skulking, sharp-witted ferret.
+
+_A Potted Novel_
+
+(1)
+
+He was an imaginative youth, and she a tragedy queen. So he fell in love
+with her because she was melancholy and her past tragic. "She is
+_capable_ of tragedy, too," he said, which was a high encomium.
+
+But he was also an ambitious youth and all for dalliance in love.
+"Marriage," said he sententiously, "is an economic trap." And then, a
+little wistfully: "If she were a bit more melancholy and a bit more
+beautiful she would be quite irresistible."
+
+(2)
+
+But he was a miserable youth, too, and in the anguish of loneliness and
+lovelessness a home tempted him sorely. Still, he dallied. _She_ waited.
+Ill-health after all made marriage impossible.
+
+(3)
+
+Yet love and misery drove him towards it. So one day he closed his eyes
+and offered himself up with sacrificial hands.... "Too late," she said.
+"Once perhaps ... but now...." His eyes opened again, and in a second
+Love entered his Temple once more and finally ejected the money
+changers.
+
+(4)
+
+So they married after all, and he was under the impression she had made
+a good match. He had ill-health perhaps, yet who could doubt his
+ultimate fame?
+
+Then the War came, and he had the hardihood to open a sealed letter from
+his Doctor to the M.O. examining recruits.... Stars and staggers!! So
+it was she who was the victim in marriage! That harassing question: Did
+she know? What an ass he had been all through, what superlative egoism
+and superlative conceit!
+
+(5)
+
+Then a baby came. He broke under the strain and daily the symptoms grew
+more obvious. Did she know?... The question dazed him.
+
+Well, she _did_ know, and had married him for love, nevertheless,
+against every friendly counsel, the Doctor's included.
+
+(6)
+
+And now the invalid's gratitude is almost cringeing, his admiration
+boundless and his love for always. It is the perfect _rapprochement_
+between two souls, one that was honeycombed with self-love and lost in
+the labyrinthine ways of his own motives and the other straight, direct,
+almost imperious in love and altogether adorable.
+
+_Finis_
+
+_March_ 5.
+
+At home ill again. Yesterday was a day of utter dreariness. All my
+nerves were frozen, my heart congealed. I had no love for anyone ... no
+emotion of any sort. It was a catalepsy of the spirit harder to bear
+than fever or pain.... To-day, life is once more stirring in me, I am
+slowly awaking to the consciousness of acute but almost welcome misery.
+
+_March_ 6.
+
+An affectionate letter from H---- that warmed the cockles of my
+heart--poor frozen molluscs. A---- has written only once since August.
+
+_March_ 7.
+
+I am, I suppose, a whey-faced, lily-livered creature ... yet even an
+infantry subaltern has a chance....
+
+My dear friend ---- has died and a _Memorial_ Exhibition of his pictures
+is being held at the Goupil Gallery. The most fascinating man I ever
+met. I was attracted by him almost as one is attracted by a charming
+woman: by little ways, by laughing eyes, by the manner of speech. And
+now he is dead, of a lingering and painful disease.
+
+_March_ 8.
+
+_Death_
+
+Have been reading Sir Oliver Lodge's _Raymond_. I do not deny that I am
+curious about the next world, or about the condition of death. I am and
+always have been. In my early youth, I reflected continually on death
+and hated it bitterly. But now that my end is near and certain, I
+consider it less and am content to wait and see. As, for all practical
+purposes, I have done with life, and my own existence is often a burden
+to me and is like to become a burden also to others, I wish I possessed
+the wherewithal to end it at my will. With two or three tabloids in my
+waistcoat pocket, and my secret locked in my heart, how serenely I would
+move about among my friends and fellows, conscious that at some
+specially selected moment--at midnight or high noon--just when the
+spirit moved me, I could quietly slip out to sea on this Great
+Adventure. It would be well to be able to control this: the time, the
+place, and the manner of one's exit. For what disturbs me in particular
+is how I shall conduct myself; I am afraid lest I become afraid, it is a
+fear of fear. By means of my tabloids, I could arrange my death in an
+artistic setting, say underneath a big tree on a summer's day, with an
+open Homer in my hand, or more appropriately, a magnifying glass and
+Miall and Denny's _Cockroach._ It would be stage-managing my own demise
+and surely the last thing in self-conscious elegance!
+
+I think it was De Ouincey who said Death to him seemed most awful in the
+summer. On the contrary the earth is warm then, and would welcome my old
+bones. It is on a cold night by the winter fire that the churchyard
+seems to me the least inviting: especially horrible it is the first
+evening after the funeral.
+
+_March_ 10.
+
+Have had a relapse. My hand I fear is going. Food prices are leaping up.
+Woe to the unfit and the old and the poor in these coming days! We shall
+soon have nothing left in our pantries, and a piece of Wrigley's chewing
+gum will be our only comfort.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I come to quit this world I scarcely know which will be the greater
+regret: the people I have never met, or the places I have never seen. In
+the world of books, I rest fairly content: I have read my fair share.
+
+To-day I read down the column of to-morrow's preachers with the most
+ludicrous avidity, ticking off the Churches I have visited: St. Paul's
+and the Abbey, the Ethical Church in Bayswater and Westminster
+Cathedral. But the Unitarians, the Christadelphians, the Theosophists,
+the Church of Christ Scientist, the Buddhist Society, the Brompton
+Oratory, the Church of Humanity, the New Life Centre; all these
+adventures I intended one day to make.... It is not much fun ticking off
+things you have done from a list if you have done very little. I get
+more satisfaction out of a list of books. But Iona and the Hebrides,
+Edinburgh, Brussels, Buenos Ayres, Spitzbergen (when the flowers are
+out), the Niagara Falls (by moonlight), the Grindelwald, Cairo--these
+names make me growl and occasionally yelp like a hurt puppy, although to
+outward view I am sitting in an armchair blowing smoke-rings.
+
+_March_ 11.
+
+_The Graph of Temperament_
+
+In this Journal, my pen is a delicate needle point, tracing out a graph
+of temperament so as to show its daily fluctuations: grave and gay, up
+and down, lamentation and revelry, self-love and self-disgust. You get
+here all my thoughts and opinions, always irresponsible and often
+contradictory or mutually exclusive, all my moods and vapours, all the
+varying reactions to environment of this jelly which is I. I snap at
+any idea that comes floating down, particularly if it is gaudy or
+quixotic, no matter if it is wholly incompatible with what I said the
+day before. People unpleasantly refer me back, and to escape I have to
+invent some sophistry. I unconsciously imitate the mannerisms of folk I
+am particularly taken with. Other people never fail to tell me of my
+simulations. If I read a book and like it very much, by a process of
+peaceful penetration, the author takes possession of my whole
+personality just as if I were a medium giving a sitting, and for some
+time subsequently his ideas come spurting up like a fountain making a
+pretty display which I take to be my own. Other people say of me, "Oh! I
+expect he read it in a book."
+
+I am something between a Monkey, a Chameleon, and a Jellyfish. To any
+bully with an intellect like a blunderbuss, I have always timidly held
+up my hands and afterwards gnashed my teeth for my cowardice. In
+conversation with men of alien sentiment I am self-effacing to my
+intense chagrin, often from mere shyness. I say, "Yes ... yes ... yes,"
+to nausea, when it ought to be "No ... no ... no." I become my own
+renegade, an amiable dissembler, an ass in short. It is a torture to
+have a sprightly mind blanketed by personal timidity and a feeble
+presence. The humiliating thing is that almost any strong character
+hynotises me into complacency, especially if he is a stranger; I find
+myself for the time being in really sincere agreement with him, and only
+later, discover to myself his abominable doctrines. Then I lie in bed
+and have imaginary conversations in which I get my own back.
+
+But, by Jove, I wreak vengeance on my familiars, and on those brethren
+even weaker than myself. They get my concentrated gall, my sulphurous
+fulminations, and would wonder to read this confession.
+
+_Cynicism_
+
+For an unusually long time after I grew up, I maintained a beautiful
+confidence in the goodness of mankind. Rumours did reach me, but I
+brushed them aside as slanders. I was an ingA(C)nu, unsuspecting,
+credulous. I thoroughly believed that men and women and I were much
+better than we actually are. I have not come to the end of my
+disillusions even now. I still rub my eyes on occasion. I simply can't
+believe that we are such humbugs, hypocrites, self-deceivers. And
+strange to say it is the "good" people above all who most bitterly
+disappoint me. Give me a healthy liar, or a thief, or a vagabond, and he
+arouses no expectations, and so I get no heart-burning. It is the good,
+the honest, the true, who cheat me of my boyhood's beliefs.... I am a
+cynic then, but not a reckless cynic--a careworn unhappy cynic without
+the cynic's pride. "It is easy to be cynical," someone admonished me.
+"Unfortunately it is," I said.
+
+We are so cold, so aloof, so self-centred even the warmest friends. Men
+of piety love God, but their love for each other is so commonly but a
+poor thing. My own affections are always frosted over with the
+Englishman's reserve. I hesitate as if I were not sure of them. I am
+afraid of self-deception, I hate to find out either myself or others.
+And yet I am always doing so. Mine is a restlessly analytical brain. I
+dissect everyone, even those I love, and my discoveries frequently sting
+me to the quick. "To the pure all things are pure," whence I should
+conclude I suppose that it is the beam in my own eye. But I would not
+tolerate being deceived concerning either my own beam or other people's
+motes.
+
+_March_ 12.
+
+_ArchA|opteryx and Mudflats_
+
+Yesterday I collected two distinct and several twinges and hereby save
+them up. They were more than that--they were pangs, and pangs that
+twanged.
+
+(Why do I make fun of my suffering?)
+
+One was when I saw the well-known figure of the _ArchA|opteryx_ remains
+in the slab of Lithographic sandstone of Bavaria: a reproduction in an
+illustrated encyclopA|dia. The other was when someone mentioned mud, and
+I thought of the wide estuary of the T----, its stretches of mudflats
+and its wild-fowl. We were turning over some pages and she said:
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"_ArchA|opteryx_," said I.
+
+"Whatever is _ArchA|opteryx_?"
+
+"An extinct bird," I answered mournfully.
+
+Like an old amour, my love of palA|ontology and anatomy, and all the high
+hopes I entertained of them, came smarting to life again, so I turned
+over the page quickly.
+
+But why need I explain to you, O my Journal? To others, I could not
+explain. I was tongue-tied.
+
+"I used to get very muddy," I remarked lamentably, "in the old days when
+stalking birds on the mudflats."
+
+And they rather jeered at such an occupation in such a place, just as
+those beautiful sights and sounds of zostera-covered mud-banks,
+twinkling runnels, swiftly running thin-legged waders, their whistles
+and cries began to steal over my memory like a delicate pain.
+
+To my infinite regret, I have no description, no photograph or sketch,
+no token of any sort to remember them by. And their doom is certain.
+Heavens! how I wasted my impressions and experiences then! Swinburne has
+some lines about saltings which console me a little, but I know of no
+other descriptions by either pen or brush.
+
+_March_ 15.
+
+How revolting it is to see some barren old woman love-sick over a baby,
+bestowing voluptuous kisses on its nose, eyes, hands, feet, utterly
+intoxicated and chattering incessantly in the "little language," and
+hopping about like an infatuated cock grouse.
+
+_May_ 5.
+
+The nurse has been here now for over five weeks. One day has been pretty
+much the same as another. I get out of bed usually about tea-time and
+sit by the window and churn over past, present, and future. However, the
+Swallows have arrived at last, though they were very late, and there
+are also Cuckoos, Green Wood-peckers, Moorhens, calling from across the
+park. At night, when the moon is up, I get a great deal of fun out of an
+extremely self-inflated Brown Owl, who hoots up through the breadth and
+length of the valley, and then I am sure, listens with satisfaction to
+his echo. Still, I have much sympathy with that Brown Owl and his
+hooting.
+
+What I do (goodness knows what E---- does), is to drug my mind with
+print. I am just a rag-bag of Smollett, H.G. Wells, Samuel Butler, the
+_Daily News_, the Bible, the _Labour Leader, Joseph Vance_, etc., etc.
+Except for an occasional geyser of malediction when some particularly
+acrid memory comes uppermost in my mind, I find myself submitting with a
+surprising calm and even cheerfulness. That agony of frustration which
+gnawed my vitals so much in 1913 has disappeared, and I, who expected to
+go down in the smoke and sulphur of my own fulminations, am quite as
+likely to fold my hands across my chest with a truly Christian
+resignation. Joubert said, "Patience and misfortune, courage and death,
+resignation and the inevitable, generally come together. Indifference to
+life generally arises with the impossibility of preserving it"--how
+cynical that sounds.
+
+_May_ 8.
+
+This and another volume of my Journal are temporarily lodged in a drawer
+in my bedroom. It appears to me that as I become more static and
+moribund, they become more active and aggressive. All day they make a
+perfect uproar in their solitary confinement--although no one hears it.
+And at night they become phosphorescent, though nobody sees it. One of
+these days, with continued neglect they will blow up from spontaneous
+combustion like diseased gunpowder, the dismembered diarist being thus
+hoist upon his own petard.
+
+_June_ 1.
+
+We discuss post mortem affairs quite genially and without restraint. It
+is the contempt bred of familiarity I suppose. E---- says widows' weeds
+have been so vulgarised by the war widows that she won't go into deep
+mourning. "But you'll wear just one weed or two for me?" I plead, and
+then we laugh. She has promised me that should a suitable chance arise,
+she will marry again. Personally, I wish I could place my hand on the
+young fellow at once, so as to put him thro' his paces--shew him where
+the water main runs and where the gas meter is, and so on.
+
+You will observe what a relish I have for my own _macabre_, and how
+keenly I appreciate the present situation. Nobody can say I am not
+making the best of it. One might call it pulling the hangman's beard.
+Yet I ought, I fancy, to be bewailing my poor wife and fatherless child.
+
+_June_ 15.
+
+I sit all day in my chair, moving 8 feet to my bed at night, and 8 feet
+from it to my chair in the morning--and wait. The assignation is
+certain. "Life is a coquetry with Death that wearies me, Too sure of the
+amour."
+
+_July_ 5.
+
+It is odd that at this time of the breaking of nations, Destiny, with
+her hands so full, should spare the time to pursue a non-combatant atom
+like me down such a labyrinthine side-track. It is odd to find her
+determined to destroy me with such tremendous thoroughness--one would
+have thought it sufficient merely to brush the dust off my wings. Why
+this deliberate, slow-moving malignity? Perhaps it is a punishment for
+the impudence of my desires. I wanted everything so I get nothing. I
+gave nothing so I receive nothing. I am not offering up my life
+willingly--it is being taken from me piece by piece, while I watch the
+pilfering with lamentable eyes.
+
+I have tendered my resignation and retire on a small gratuity.
+
+_July_ 7.
+
+My hand gets a little better. But it's a cat and mouse game, and so
+humiliating to be the mouse.
+
+... Parental affection comes to me only in spasms, and if they hurt,
+they do not last long. Curiously enough, as in the case of very old
+people, my consciousness reverts more easily to conditions long past. I
+seem unable to apprehend all the significance of having a nine-months
+old daughter, but some Bullfinches or Swallows seen thro' the window
+rouse me more. No one can deny I have loved Birds to intoxication. In my
+youth, birds' eggs, and little nestlings and chickens sent me into such
+raptures I could never tell it to you adequately.... I am too tired to
+write more.
+
+_July_ 23.
+
+Reading Pascal again. If Shelley was "gold dusty from tumbling among the
+stars," Pascal was bruised and shaken. The one was delighted, and the
+other frightened. I like Pascal's prostration before the infinities of
+Time, Space and the Unknown. Somehow, he conveys this more vividly than
+the uplift afforded him by religion.
+
+_July_ 25.
+
+I don't believe in the twin-soul theory of marriage. There are plenty of
+men any one of whom she might have married and lived with happily, and
+simpler men than I am. Methinks there are large tracts could be sliced
+off my character and she would scarcely feel the want of them. To think
+that she of all women, with a past such as hers, should be swept into my
+vicious orbit! Yet she seems to bear Destiny no resentment, so I bear it
+for her and enough for two. At our engagement I gave her my own ring to
+wear as a pledge--we thought it nicer than buying a new one. It was a
+signet ring with a dark smooth stone. Strange to say it never once
+occurred to me till now that it was a mourning ring in memory of a
+great-uncle of mine, actually with an inscription on the inside.
+
+_July_ 26.
+
+As long as I can hold a pen, I shall, I suppose, go on trickling ink
+into this diary!
+
+I am amusing myself by reading the _Harmsworth EncyclopA|dia_ in 15
+volumes, _i.e._, I turn over the pages and read everything of interest
+that catches my eye.
+
+I get out of bed about ten, wash and sit by the window in my blue
+striped pyjama suit. It is so hot I need no additional clothing.
+E---- comes in, brushes my hair, sprinkles me with lavender water, lights
+my cigarette, and gives me my book-rest and books. She forgets nothing.
+
+From my window I look out on a field with Beech hedge down one side and
+beyond, tall trees--one showing in outline exactly like the profile of a
+Beefeater's head, more especially at sunset each evening when the tree
+next behind is in shadow. The field is full of blue Scabious plants,
+Wild Parsley and tall grass--getting brown now in the sun. Great numbers
+of White Butterflies are continually rocking themselves across--they go
+over in coveys of four or five at a time--I counted 50 in five minutes,
+which bodes ill for the cabbages. Not even the heaviest thunder showers
+seem to debilitate their kinetic ardour. They rock on like white
+aeroplanes in a hail of machine-gun bullets.
+
+Then there are the Swallows and Martins cutting such beautiful figures
+thro' the air that one wishes they carried a pencil in their bills as
+they fly and traced the lines of flight on a Bristol board. How I hanker
+after the Swallows! so free and gay and vigorous. This autumn, as they
+prepare to start, I shall hang on every twitter they make, and on every
+wing-beat; and when they have gone, begin sadly to set my house in
+order, as when some much loved visitors have taken their departure. I am
+appreciating things a little more the last few days.
+
+_August_ 1.
+
+_A Jeremiad_
+
+When I resigned my appointment last month, no one knows what I had to
+give up. But I know. Tho' if I say what I know no one is compelled to
+believe me excepting out of charity. It will never be discovered whether
+what I am going to state is not simply despairing bombast. My few
+intimate friends and relatives are entirely innocent of science, not to
+say zoology, and all they realise is the significant fact that I am
+prone to go extravagant lengths in conversation. But you may take it or
+leave it: I was the ablest junior on the staff and one of the ablest
+zoologists in the place--but my ability was always muffled by the
+inferior work they gave me to do. My last memoir published last December
+was the best of its kind in treatment, method and technique that ever
+issued from the institution--I do not say the most important. It was
+trivial--my work always was trivial because they put me in a mouldy
+department where all the work was trivial and the methods used as
+primitive, slipshod and easy as those of Fabricius, the idea being that
+as I had enjoyed no academic career I was unsuited to fill other posts
+then vacant--one, work on the CA"lenterates and another on _Vermes_,
+both rarely favoured by amateurs and requiring laboratory training.
+Later, I had the mortification of seeing these posts filled by men whose
+powers I by no means felt inclined to estimate as greater than my own.
+Meanwhile, I who had been dissecting for dear life up and down the whole
+Animal Kingdom in a poorly equipped attic laboratory at home, with no
+adequate instruments, was bitterly disappointed to find still less
+provision made even in a so-called Scientific Institution so grandly
+styled the British Museum (N.H.). On my first arrival I was presented
+with a pen, ink, paper, ruler, and an enormous instrument of steel which
+on enquiry I found to be a paper cutter. I asked for my microscope and
+microtome. I ought to have asked what Form I was in.
+
+So I had to continue my struggle against odds, and only within the last
+year or so began to squeeze the authorities with any success. In time I
+should have revolutionised the study of Systematic Zoology, and the
+anonymous paper I wrote in conjunction with R---- in the _American
+Naturalist_ was a rare _jeu d'esprit_, and my most important scientific
+work.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the literary world I have fared no better. My first published article
+appeared at the age of 15 over my father's name, my motive being not so
+much modesty as cunning--if the literary world (!) ragged it
+unmercifully, there was still a chance left for me to make good.
+
+My next achievement of any magnitude was the unexpected printing of a
+story in the _Academy_ after I had unsuccessfully badgered almost every
+other newspaper. This was when I was 19. No proof had been sent me and
+no intimation of its acceptance. Moreover, there were two ugly printer's
+errors. I at once wrote off to correct them in the next issue. My letter
+was neither published nor acknowledged. I submitted, but presently wrote
+again, politely hinting that my cheque was overdue. But--screams of
+silence, and I thought it wise not to complain in view of future
+printing favours. I soon discovered that the journal had changed hands
+and was probably on its last legs at the time of my success. As soon as
+it grew financially sound again no more of my stories were accepted.
+
+A more recent affair I had with the American _Forum,_ which delighted me
+by publishing my article, but did not pay--tho' the Editor went out of
+his way to write that "payment was on publication." I did not venture to
+remonstrate as I had another article on the stocks which they also
+printed without paying me. In spite of uniform failure, my literary
+ambition has never flagged.[2] I have for years past received my
+rejected MSS. back from every conceivable kind of periodical, from
+_Punch_ to the _Hibbert Journal_. At one time I used to file their
+rejection forms and meditated writing a facetious essay on them. But I
+decided they were too monotonously similar. My custom was when the
+ordinary avenues to literary fame had failed me--the half-crown Reviews
+and the sixpenny Weeklies--to seek out at a library some obscure
+publication--a Parish Magazine or the local paper--anything was grabbed
+as a last chance. On one of these occasions I discovered the
+_Westminster Review_ and immediately plied them with a manuscript and
+the usual polite note. After six weeks, having no reply, I wrote again
+and waited for another six weeks. My second remonstrance met with a
+similar fate, so I went into the city to interview the publishers, and
+to demand my manuscript back. The manager was out, and I was asked to
+call again. After waiting about for some time, I left my card, took my
+departure and decided I would write. The same evening I told the
+publishers that the anonymous editor would neither print my article nor
+return it. Would they kindly give me his name and address so that I
+could write personally. After some delay they replied that although it
+was not the custom to disclose the editor's name, the following address
+would find her. She was a lady living in Richmond Row, Shepherd's Bush.
+I wrote to her at once and received no answer. Meanwhile, I had observed
+that no further issues of the review had appeared on the bookstalls, and
+the book-sellers were unable to give me any information. I wrote again
+to the address--this time a playful and facetious letter in which I said
+I did not propose to take the matter into court, but if it would save
+her any trouble I would call for the MS. as I lived only a few minutes'
+walk distant. I received no answer. I was busy at the time and kept
+putting off executing my firm purpose of visiting the good lady until
+one evening as I was casually reading the _Star_ coming home in the
+'bus, I read an account of how some charitably disposed woman had
+recently visited the Hammersmith Workhouse and removed to her own home a
+poor soul who was once the friend of George Eliot, George Henry Lewes,
+and other well-known literary persons of the sixties and had, until it
+ceased publication a few months before, edited the once notable
+_Westminster Review_.
+
+Recently, however, there has been evidence of a more benevolent attitude
+towards me on the part of London editors. A certain magnificent
+quarterly has published one or two of my essays, and one of these called
+forth two pages of quotation and flattering comment in _Public Opinion_,
+which thrill me to the marrow. I fear, however, the flood-tide has come
+too late.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If this achievement impressed me it did not seem to impress anyone else.
+A---- regarded it as a joke and laughed incredulously when someone told
+him of "P.O.'s" eulogy. You see I am still his foolish little brother. I
+am secretly very nettled too because E---- treated the whole matter very
+indifferently. She did not even take the trouble to read the paper's
+critique, and tho' she volunteered to buy several copies to send to
+friends, she never remembered to do so, and the whole affair has passed
+out of her mind.
+
+Now a pleasant paragraph that appeared in the press noticing some
+drawings of a friend of her friend, she read twice and marched off to
+Francesca with it in great glee. Another successful young person got his
+photo into the picture papers--a man we know only by hearsay, and yet it
+impressed her until I recalled, what strange to say she had quite
+forgotten, how the photographers wished to publish her own photograph in
+the picture papers at the time of our marriage. But she scornfully
+refused. (And so did I.)
+
+But what a queer woman!... [And I, too, a queer man, drunken with
+wormwood and gall.]
+
+_August_ 6.
+
+E---- and I were very modern in our courtship. Our candour was mutual
+and complete--parents and relatives would be shocked and staggered if
+they knew.... You see I am a biologist and we are both freethinkers.
+_VoilA _!... I hate all reticence and concealment.... There is a good
+deal of that ass, Gregers Werle, in my nature.
+
+_August_ 7.
+
+_My Gastrocnemius_
+
+I become dreadfully emaciated. This morning, before getting off the bed
+I lifted my leg and gazed wistfully along all its length. My flabby
+_gastrocnemius_ swung suspended from the _tibia_ like a gondola from a
+Zeppelin. I touched it gently with the tip of my index finger and it
+oscillated.
+
+_August_ 17.
+
+My beloved wife comes home this evening after a short, much needed
+holiday.
+
+_August_ 27.
+
+My gratuity has turned out to be unexpectedly small. I hoped at least
+for one year's salary. And the horrible thing is I might live for
+several years longer! No one was ever more enthusiastic for death than I
+am at this moment. I hate this world with its war, and I bitterly regret
+I never managed to buy laudanum in time. There are only E---- and dear
+R---- and one or two others--the rest of the people I know I hate _en
+bloc_. If only I could get at them. I hate to have to leave them to
+themselves without getting my own back.
+
+_August_ 31.
+
+My darling sweetheart, you ask me why I love you. I do not know. All I
+know is that I _do_ love you, and beyond measure. Why do _you_ love
+me--surely a more inscrutable problem. You do not know. No one ever
+knows. "The heart has its reasons which the reason knows not of." We
+love in obedience to a powerful gravitation of our beings, and then try
+to explain it by recapitulating one another's characters just as a man
+forms his opinions first and then thinks out reasons in support.
+
+What delights me is to recall that our love has _evolved._ It did not
+suddenly spring into existence like some beautiful sprite. It developed
+slowly to perfection--it was forged in the white heat of our
+experiences. That is why it will always remain.
+
+_September_ 1.
+
+Your love, darling, impregnates my heart, touches it into calm, strongly
+beating life so that when I am with you, I forget I am a dying man. It
+is too difficult to believe that when we die true love like ours
+disappears with our bodies. My own experience makes me feel that human
+love is the earnest after death of a great reunion of souls in God who
+is love. When as a boy I was bending the knee to Haeckel, the saying,
+"God is Love," scarcely interested me. I am wiser now. You must not
+think I am still anything but an infidel (as the churchmen say),--I
+should hate not to be taken for an infidel--and you must not be
+surprised that an embittered, angry, hateful person like myself should
+believe in a Gospel of Love. I am embittered because an intense desire
+to love has in many instances[3] been baulked by my own idealising yet
+also analytical mind. I have wanted to love men blindly, yet I am always
+finding them out, and the disappointment chills the heart. Hence my
+malice and venom: which, dear, do not misconstrue. I am as greedy as an
+Octopus, ready out of love to take the whole world into my inside--that
+seat of the affections!--but I am also as sensitive as an Octopus, and
+quickly retract my arms into the rocky, impregnable recess where I live.
+
+_September_ 2.
+
+But am I dying? I have no presentiments--no conviction--like the people
+you read of in books. Am I, after all, in love?"I dote yet doubt;
+suspect yet strongly love." It is all a matter of degree. Beside AbA(C)lard
+and HA(C)loA-se, our love may be just glassy affection. It is a great and
+difficult question to decide. I love no one else but E----, that, at
+least, is a certainty, and I have never loved anyone more.
+
+_September_ 3.
+
+My bedroom is on the ground floor as I cannot mount the stairs. But the
+other day when they were all out, I determined to clamber upstairs if
+possible, and search in the bedrooms for a half bottle of laudanum,
+which Mrs. ---- told me she found the other day in a box--a relic of the
+time when ---- had to take it to relieve pain.
+
+I got off the bed on to the floor and crawled around on hands and knees
+to the door, where I knelt up straight, reached the handle and turned
+it. Then I crawled across the hall to the foot of the stairs, where I
+sat down on the bottom step and rested. It is a short flight of only 12
+steps and I soon reached the top by sitting down on each and raising
+myself up to the next one with my hands.
+
+Arrived at the top, I quickly decided on the most likely room to search
+first, and painfully crawled along the passage and thro' the bathroom by
+the easiest route to the small door--there are two. The handles of all
+the doors in the house are fixed some way up above the middle, so that
+only by kneeling with a straight back could I reach them from the floor.
+This door in addition was at the top of a high but narrow step, and I
+had to climb on to this, balance myself carefully, and then carefully
+pull myself up towards the handle by means of a towel hung on the
+handle. After three attempts I reached the handle and found the door
+locked on the inside.
+
+I collapsed on the floor and could have cried. I lay on the floor of the
+bathroom resting with head on my arm, then set my teeth and crawled
+around the passage along two sides of a square, up three more steps to
+the other door which I opened and then entered. I had only examined two
+drawers containing only clothes, when a key turned in the front door
+lock and E---- entered with--and gave her usual whistle.
+
+I closed the drawers and crawled out of the room in time to hear
+E---- say in a startled voice to her mother: "Who's that upstairs?" I
+whistled, and said that being bored I had come up to see the cot: which
+passed at that time all right.
+
+Next morning my darling asked me why I went upstairs. I did not answer,
+and I think she knows.
+
+_September_ 4.
+
+I am getting ill again, and can scarcely hold the pen. So good-bye
+Journal--only for a time perhaps.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Have read this blessed old Journal out to E----. It required some
+courage, and I boggled at one or two bits and left them out.
+
+_September_ 5.
+
+_Leap-frog_
+
+Some girls up the road spent a very wet Sunday morning playing leap-frog
+in their pyjamas around the tennis lawn. It makes me envious. To think I
+never thought of doing that! and now it is too late. They wore purple
+pyjamas too. I once hugged myself with pride for undressing in a cave by
+the sea and bathing in the pouring rain, but that seems tame in
+comparison.
+
+_Liebestod_
+
+A perfect autumn morning--cool, fine and still. What sweet music a horse
+and cart make trundling slowly along a country road on a quiet morning!
+I listened to it in a happy mood of abstraction as it rolled on further
+and further away. I put my head out of the window so as to hear it up to
+the very last, until a Robin's notes relieved the nervous tension and
+helped me to resign myself to my loss. The incident reminded me of the
+Liebestod in "Tristan," with the Robin taking the part of the harp.
+
+For days past my emotions have been undergoing kaleidoscopic changes,
+not only from day to day but from hour to hour. For ten minutes at a
+time I am happy or miserable, or revengeful, venomous, loving, generous,
+noble, angry, or murderous--you could measure them with a stop-watch.
+Hell's phantoms course across my chest. If I could lie on this bed as
+quiet and stony as an effigy on a tomb! But a moment ago I had a sharp
+spasm at the sudden thought that never, never, never again should I walk
+thro' the path-fields to the uplands.
+
+_September_ 7.
+
+My 28th birthday.
+
+Dear old R---- (the man I love above all others) has been in a military
+hospital for months. It is a great hardship to have our intercourse
+almost completely cut off.
+
+Dear old Journal, I love you! Good-bye.
+
+_September_ 29.
+
+I could never have believed so great misery compatible with sanity. Yet
+I am quite sane. How long I or any man can remain sane in this condition
+God knows.... It is a consummate vengeance this inability to write.[4] I
+cannot help but smile grimly at the astuteness of the thrust. To be
+sure, how cunning to deprive me of my one secret consolation! How
+amusing that in this agony of isolation such an aggressive egotist as I
+should have his last means of self-expression cut off. I am being slowly
+stifled.
+
+_Later. (In E.'s handwriting.)_
+
+Yesterday we shifted into a tiny cottage at half the rental of the other
+one, and situated about two miles further out from the village.... A
+wholly ideal and beautiful little cottage you may say. But a
+"camouflaged" cottage. For in spite of the happiness of its exterior it
+contains just now two of the most dejected mortals even in this present
+sorrow-laden world.
+
+_September_ 30.
+
+Last night, E---- sitting on the bed by me, burst into tears. It was my
+fault. "I can stand a good deal but there must come a breaking point."
+Poor, poor girl, my heart aches for you.
+
+I wept too, and it relieved us to cry. We blew our noses. "People who
+cry in novels," E---- observed with detachment, "never blow their noses.
+They just weep." ... But the thunder clouds soon come up again.
+
+_October_ 1.
+
+The immediate future horrifies me.
+
+_October_ 2.
+
+Poushkin (as we have named the cat) is coiled up on my bed, purring and
+quite happy. It does me good to see him.
+
+But consider: A paralytic, a screaming infant, two women, a cat and a
+canary, shut up in a tiny cottage with no money, the war still on, and
+food always scarcer day by day. "Give us this day, our daily bread."
+
+I want to be loved--above all, I want to love. My great danger is lest I
+grow maudlin and say petulantly, "Nobody loves me, nobody cares." I must
+have more courage and more confidence in other people's good-nature.
+Then I can love more freely.
+
+_October_ 3.
+
+I am grateful to-day for some happy hours plucked triumphantly from
+under the very nose of Fate, and spent in the warm sun in the garden.
+They carried me out at 12, and I stayed till after tea-time. A Lark
+sang, but the Swallows--dear things--have gone. E---- picked two
+Primroses. I sat by some Michaelmas Daisies and watched the Bees, Flies,
+and Butterflies.
+
+_October_ 6.
+
+In fits of maudlin self-compassion I try to visualise Belgium, Armenia,
+Serbia, etc., and usually cure myself thereby.
+
+_October_ 12.
+
+It is winter--no autumn this year. Of an evening we sit by the fire and
+enjoy the beautiful sweet-smelling wood-smoke, and the open hearth with
+its big iron bar carrying pot-hook and hanger. E---- knits warm garments
+for the Baby, and I play Chopin, CA(C)sar-Franck hymns, Three Blind Mice
+(with variations) on a mouth-organ, called "The Angels' Choir," and made
+in Germany.... You would pity me would you? I am lonely, penniless,
+paralysed, and just turned twenty-eight. But I snap my fingers in your
+face and with equal arrogance I pity you. I pity you your smooth-running
+good luck and the stagnant serenity of your mind. I prefer my own
+torment. I am dying, but you are already a corpse. You have never really
+lived. Your body has never been flayed into tingling life by hopeless
+desire to love, to know, to act, to achieve. I do not envy you your
+absorption in the petty cares of a commonplace existence.
+
+Do you think I would exchange the communion with my own heart for the
+toy balloons of your silly conversation? Or my curiosity for your
+flickering interests? Or my despair for your comfortable Hope? Or my
+present tawdry life for yours as polished and neat as a new three-penny
+bit? I would not. I gather my mantle around me and I solemnly thank God
+that I am not as some other men are.
+
+I am only twenty-eight, but I have telescoped into those few years a
+tolerably long life: I have loved and married, and have a family; I have
+wept and enjoyed; struggled and overcome, and when the hour comes I
+shall be content to die.
+
+_ October_ 14 _to_ 20.
+
+Miserable.
+
+_October_ 21.
+
+Self-disgust.
+
+FINIS.
+
+[Barbellion died on December 31.]
+
+
+[1] John Wesley _rewrote_ his journals from entries in rough draft.
+
+[2] I once received from an editor a very encouraging letter which gave
+me a great deal of pleasure and made me hope he was going to open the
+pages of his magazine to me. But three weeks after he committed suicide
+by jumping out of his bedroom window.
+
+[3] The Egoist explains himself again.
+
+[4] Writing difficult to decipher.
+
+
+
+
+SYNOPSIS
+
+PART I: AT HOME
+
+   Rambles and bathes, 2, 3, 4, 9, 11, 20, 37, 45, 46, 48, 49
+   Natural History and Zoology, 9, 12, 13, 20, 29
+   Leaves school, 10
+   Newspaper reporting, 17, 19
+   Ambition, 8, 10, 13, 26, 29
+   Calf-love, 8, 12, 23, 28
+   The Wesleyan Minister Microscopist, 18
+   Conversation with Prof. Herdman, 46
+   Ill-health, 10, 24, 25, 35, 42, 48 (Jul. 31)
+   Heart attacks, 33, 36
+   On Death, 33, 38, 43, 44
+   Sits for British Museum exam., 29
+   Failure, 30, 31, 32
+   Appointment to Laboratory at Plymouth, 32
+   Everything "ghostly, unreal, enigmatic," 29, 33
+   Self-consciousness, 27, 40
+   The Poppy, 43
+   Appointment resigned and his father's illness, 34
+   His father's death, 50, 51
+   Success and appointment to B.M., 55
+   A youthful Passion, 56, 57
+
+PART II: IN LONDON
+
+   Disillusionment, 59, 61, 93, 94, 132, 178, 185
+   Life in a boarding-house, 63, 78, 79, 94, 99, 107
+   Ambition, 71, 73, 109
+   An affair in a taxicab, 75
+   Self-disgust, 77
+   In love, 78, 96, 107
+   Conversations: (a) with E., 65, 69, 70, 75, 76, 79, 95, 96, 99,
+                      104, 151, 152
+                  (b) with H., 82, 83
+                  (c) with R., 131, 140, 141, 142, 154, 155, 165,
+   Ill-health, 59, 62, 69, 72, 74, 100, 107, 110, 114, 134-5, 153, 156
+   On Death, 62, 63, 84, 88
+   Heart attacks, 71, 72, 120, 122
+   Nervous breakdown, 80, 81, 82
+   Meets an old love, 86, 87
+   Holidays: (_a_) at C----, by the sea in North ----, 65, 66, 67
+             (_b_) at home, 82
+             (_c_) in Brittany and on Dartmoor (_riding a pony_), 97
+   Life in rooms, 102, 107, 108, 114, 138, 148, 149, 153
+   His brother, 121, 206
+   Discussions on marriage, 123, 124
+   In his sitting-room, 162
+   The fascination of London, 74, 142-145
+       (_a_) Petticoat Lane, 163
+       (_b_) Rotten Row, 176
+   Goes to concerts, 127, 161, 172
+   A lovers' quarrel, 126
+   He struggles with himself, 135, 137, 138
+   Engaged, 150, 158
+   Fears his inconstancy, 159, 185
+   Self-analysis, 167 _et seq_., 182, 183
+   Day-dreams: Life a dream, 178, 179, 188
+   The War, 182
+   Holidays: (_a_) on a Buckinghamshire farm, 191-205
+             (_b_) at the Lakes, 215-217
+   Should a husband keep a private journal? 210
+   Marriage, 205, 209, 215
+
+PART III: MARRIAGE
+
+   Zeppelin raid and influenza, 222
+   Living in the country, 223, 227, 228
+   Reads his doctor's certificate after visit to recruiting-office, 225, 238
+   Self-disgust, 223, 224, 225, 247, 250 (_nude_), 267
+   Mental agony, 226, 227
+   Conversations: with R., 229
+                  with Scarabees, 230, 239, 243
+   Halcyon days, 233, 235, 238
+   A natural idiot climbs a stile on uplands, 240
+   Tension, 250, 252
+   The War, 237 (_Jutland_), 242, 247, 248, 249
+   Another nervous breakdown, 253
+   How E. knew all the time, 255, 256
+   Self-compassion, 251, 304
+   Home ill, 257 ("_in the doldrums_"), 259, 265
+   Returns to work, 278
+   Ill again, 285
+   From an invalid's view-point, 292, 293 (_by his bedroom window_)
+   Post-mortem affairs, 291
+   Resigns appointment, 294, 299
+   Self-consciousness and self-dramatization, 255, 265, 267
+   A badly articulated skeleton, 274
+   Cold weather in January, 276, 277, 278
+   On Death, 275, 283, 286, 291
+   His phosphorescent Journals, 291
+   Morphia and laudanum, 280, 300
+   Great misery, 303, 305
+
+
+
+
+INDEX OF NAMES
+
+   A----, 21, 51, 82, 97, 98, 121, 158, 206, 285, 298
+   _"Academy," The_, 23, 24, 106, 296
+   _Adventure in Search of Health, An_, 260
+   A Kempis, Thomas, 28
+   _Albert Hall, Hag, The_, 147
+   _Ambition_, 29
+   "_American Naturalist_," 295
+   _American Neighbour, An_, 251
+   _Apologia pro mea vita_, 145
+   _ArchA|opteryx and Mudflats_, 289
+   _Aristotle's Lantern_, 19
+   _At a Public Dinner_, 175
+   _At C----, a tiny little village by the Sea in N_----, 65
+   _At Home_, 82
+   _At the Albert Hall_, 127
+   Austen, Jane, 268
+   _Average Day, An_, 172
+
+   B----, 102, 107, 114, 118, 119
+   _Baby-Girl, A_, 263
+   _Bad Listener, A_, 246
+   Baring, Maurice, 188
+   _Bathing_, 60
+   Baudelaire, 60, 62, 173, 183, 197, 198, 258
+   Beerbohm, Max, 269
+   _Beethoven's Fifth Symphony_, 161, 186
+   Benson, A.C., 249
+   Bergson, 47, 55, 78, 183, 198
+   Berkeley, 275
+   Blind Mathilde, 139
+   Boeltzig, R., 103
+   Bradford, Sir John Rose, 54
+   Brieux, 162
+   _"Brilliant Career," A_, 62
+   British Museum, 26, 29, 49, 57, 59, 61, 79, 94, 132, 174, 178,
+    225, 274, 282, 283, 295
+   _British Museum Reading Room, The_, 100
+   Brooke, Rupert, 266
+   Browne, Sir Thomas, 146, 183, 238
+   Buchanan, Robert, 251
+   Bunyan, 166
+   Burke, 2
+   Burlington House, 29
+   Burton, 125
+   Butler, Samuel, 143, 171, 185, 291
+   _Buxom Rogue in Earthenware, A_, 216
+   _By the Sea_, 61
+   Byron, 266
+
+   _Camping out at S---- Sands_, 91
+   Carlyle, 120, 171
+   Cassell's _Natural History_, 13
+   _Chalcidoidea, The_, 221
+   _Character, A_, 39
+   _Chinese Lanterns_, 280
+   _Chipples_, 220
+   _Chopin_, 157
+   _Clever Young Man, The_, 207
+   Coleridge, 266
+   _Confession, A_, 74
+   Conrad, 50, 223
+   _Crowd Fever_, 278
+   _Cynicism_, 288
+
+   D----, 69, 180
+   Darwin, 6, 55
+   _Day in Autumn, A_, 51
+   _Death_, 33, 84, 275, 286
+   Debussy, 161, 162, 167
+   De Goncourt, 227, 228
+   De GuA(C)rin, 200, 277, 282
+   De Maupassant, Guy, 63, 266
+   _Depression_, 89
+   De Quincey, 10, 42, 126, 187, 196, 286
+   Devonshire Club, 32
+   _Dinosaurs_, 129
+   Disraeli, 258
+   _Dr. Spurgeon_, 90
+   Dostoieffsky, 132, 163, 167, 187
+   Duke, Mr., K.C., 17
+
+   E----, 68, 78, 79, 107, 171, 191, 192, 193, 194, 201, 209, 220, 223, 226,
+    228, 233, 235, 236, 238, 240, 251, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 259, 260,
+    261, 263, 274, 277, 283, 291, 292, 294, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303,
+    304
+   _Early Boughies_, 66
+   _Empress of Ireland_, 127
+   _English Review_, 101, 105, 142
+   _Equilibrium Restored_, 245
+   _Entomological Society, The_, 110
+
+   Father, 34, 50, 51, 137
+   _Finis_, 225, 285
+   _Fire Bogey, The_, 170
+   _Foolish Bird, A_, 118
+   "_Fortnightly_," 61
+   "_Forum_," 296
+   Foster, Sir Michael, 209
+   _From one Maiden Lady to another (authentic)_, 37
+
+   G----, 78, 197, 215
+   _Gardening_,83
+   Gaskel, 23, 55
+   Gibbon, 129, 258
+   _Gibbon's Autobiography_, 268
+   Gissing, George, 32
+   Goethe, 146
+   _Graph of Temperament, The,_ 287
+
+   H----, 7, 8, 13, 38, 51, 60, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 89, 92,
+    94, 114, 180, 196, 206, 218, 285
+   Haeckel, 23, 300
+   _Harmsworth EncyclopA|dia_, 294
+   Harmsworth _Self-Educator_, 10
+   Hardy, 24, 282
+   _Hardy's Poetry_, 264
+   _Hearing Beethoven_, 172
+   Hegel, 146
+   Henley, 208, 209
+   Herdman, Prof., 46
+   Hervey, 170
+   Horton, Max Kennedy, 141
+   _Housefly Problem, The_--1916, 231
+   _Humble Confession, A_, 115
+   Huxley, 37, 163
+
+   "_Illustrated London News_," 53
+   _In a Crowd_, 184
+   _In London_, 59
+   _In London again_, 93, 99
+
+   J----, 78, 263
+   James, 163, 166
+   Jefferies, Richard, 44, 233
+   _Jeremiad, A_, 294
+   Johnson, 2, 10, 180, 181, 196, 230
+   _Johnson_ v. _Yves Delage_, 181
+   _Jolt, A_, 247
+   Jonson, Ben, 171
+   Joubert, 291
+   _Justifiable Mendacity_, 52
+
+   K----, 80, 99, 138, 225
+   Kant, 257
+   Keats, 10, 145, 146, 258
+
+   L----, 1, 3, 4, 43, 98
+   LacA(C)pA"de, 146
+   Lamb, Charles, 13, 120, 227, 230
+   Landor, W.S., 265
+   La Rochefoucauld, 31
+   _Leap-frog_, 302
+   Lodge, Sir Oliver, 286
+   _Liebestod_, 302
+   _Lice or "Creeping Ferlies_," 213
+   _Looking for Lice at the Zoo_, 177
+   Lubbock, 7
+   _Ludo_, 104
+   _Lupus_, 125
+   _Luxury of Lunacy, The_, 195
+
+   M----, 12, 20, 62, 69, 70, 80, 81, 96, 105, 106, 134, 140, 156,
+    222, 225, 226, 255, 250, 259, 260
+   Macaulay, 30
+   Maeterlinck, 42
+   Malpighi, 171
+   _Marie Bashkirtseff_, 139, 163, 175, 238
+   Mary, 8, 23, 28
+   _Masefield's "Gallipoli,"_ 269
+   _Measuring Lice_, 125
+   Moffat, 161
+   Moore, Tom, 173
+   _More Irony_, 105
+   Mosenthal, 13
+   Mother, 34, 50, 51, 59, 93, 95, 97, 137
+   Mozart, 161
+   _My Gastrocnemius_, 208
+   _My Nightmare_, 105
+   _My Sense of Touch_, 91
+
+   N----, 29, 78, 121, 122, 257, 261
+   _Naming Cockroaches_, 184
+   Natural History Museum, 6, 54
+   _New Pile in the Pier, A_, 88
+   Newton, 171
+   Nietzsche, 137, 156
+
+   _Old Diaries_, 44
+   _Omniscience_, 239
+   _On Lighting Chloe's Cigarette,_ 119
+   _On Lundy Island_, 21
+   _On the N. Downs_, 68
+   _Our Simian Ancestry_, 27
+
+   P----, 76, 78, 79, 80
+   _Pachmann_, 234
+   Pascal, 293
+   _Petticoat Lane_, 163
+   Piers Plowman, 221
+   Plymouth Marine Laboratory, 29, 32,47, 79
+   _Pool: a Retrospect, The_, 189
+   _Potted Novel, A_, 284
+   _Prawning_, 17
+   _Preparing a Snake's Skull_, 50
+   "_Punch_," 296
+   _Punch and Judy Show, The,_ 180
+
+   R----, 81, 99, 101, 104, 107, 115, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124,
+    127, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 140, 141, 148,
+    151, 154, 166, 167, 169, 172, 173, 174, 175, 182, 197, 205,
+    207, 208, 209, 215, 2l6, 217, 227, 228, 229, 230, 239, 240,
+    241, 295, 299, 303
+   _Raemakers_, 186
+   _Railway Travel_, 41
+   _Raleigh, Sir Walter_, 129, 196
+   _Reading Nietzsche_, 156
+   _Reminiscences_, 270
+   _Renunciation_, 85
+   _Resignation_, 141
+   _Restlessness of the Sea, The,_ 90
+   Richepin, 57
+   Richelieu, Cardinal, 155
+   _Rigor Bordis_, 148
+   _Rodin_, 103, 157, 160
+   Romney, 169
+   Rousseau, 63, 181, 268
+   Ruskin, 30, 190, 208, 216
+
+   S----, 1, 3
+   Saintsbury, Prof. Geo., 126
+   Sainte-Beuve, 200, 277
+   SchA¤fer, 110
+   Schopenhauer, 34
+   Schubert, 173, 174
+   _Scots Fir, A_, 111
+   Scott, 75, 153
+   _Service_, 264
+   Shakespeare, 264
+   Shaw, Bernard, 59, 150, 166, 249
+   Shelley, 196, 266, 293
+   _Sir Henry Wood conducting_, 159
+   _Sleep_, 206
+   _Small Red Viper, A_, 16
+   Smiles, Samuel, 14
+   Smollett, 291
+   _Sollas's "Ancient Hunters,"_ 72
+   Southey, 16
+   Spallanzani, 47, 71, 112
+   Spinoza, 16
+   _Spring in the Woods_, 15
+   _Staying by the Sea_, 43
+   _Stagnancy_, 84
+   _Stagnant Day, A_, 111
+   Stevenson, 63, 106, 161, 208, 209
+   _Stockbroker, The_, 252
+   _Strangeness of my Life, The,_ 281
+   Strindberg, 139
+   Susan, 254
+   _Sunset in Kensington Gardens_, 130
+   Swift, 230
+   Swinburne, 61, 290
+
+   T----, 14, 171, 246
+
+   "_T.P.'s Weekly_," 41
+   Tennyson, 154, 264
+   _Test for True Love, The_, 157
+   _Test of Happiness, A_, 185
+   Thompson, Francis, 266
+   Thoreau, 181
+   _Too Late_, 144
+   _Tschaikovsky_, 161, 162
+   Turner, J.M.W., 154, 167
+   _Two Adventures_, 212
+   _Two Months' Sick Leave_, 80
+   _Two People I hate in particular,_ 186
+   _Two Young Men Talking_, 60
+
+   _Une CaractA"re_, 53
+
+   Verlaine, 60
+   Villon, Francois, 173
+   Voltaire, 63, 163
+
+   Wagner, 166
+   Wallace, 23, 37
+   Walton, Isaac, 8
+   Wasmann, Father, 47
+   Waterton, 159
+   Wells, H.G., 291
+   Whistler, 222
+   White, Gilbert, 159
+   Whitman, Walt, 189, 253
+   Wilde, Oscar, 76, 143, 152, 175, 258
+   _Windy Ash_,35
+   _Wiedersheim_, 106, 145, 159, 257
+   _Woman and a Child, A_, 146
+   Wood, Sir Henry, 157, 159, 172, 201
+   Woodward, Dr. Smith, 145
+
+   _Yellow Cat, A_, 241
+
+   Zola, 17
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Journal of a Disappointed Man, by
+Wilhelm Nero Pilate Barbellion
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