Chapter XII: Part II: is dedicated to (2)

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.