Chapter IV: Part II: In London (1)

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.