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 storey of a boarding house in — Road. It is 11.30 p.m. and I am leaning over on 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 T— 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 drumstick, 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!
May 23.
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 work days. There was one man a little way off throw
ing 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 in to the idea of Death. Once it terrified me and once I hated it. But now it only annoys me. Having lived with the Bogey for so long, and broken bread with him so often, I am used to his ugliness, tho’ his persistent attentions bore me. Why doesn’t he do it and have done with me? Why this deference, why does he pass me everything but the poison? Why am I such an unconscionably long time dying?
What embitters me is the humiliation of having to die, to have to be pouring out the precious juices of my life into the dull Earth, to be no longer conscious of what goes on, no longer moving abroad upon the Earth creating attraction and repulsions, pouring out one’s ego in a stream. To think that the women I have loved will be marrying and forget, and that the men I have hated will continue on their way and forget I ever hated them – the ignominy of being dead! What voluble talker likes his mouth to be stopped with earth, who relishes the idea of the carrion worm mining in the seat of the intellect?
May 29.
Renunciation
Staying at the King’s Hotel, —. Giddiness very bad. Death seems unavoidable. A tumour on the brain?
Coming down here in the train, sat in corner of the compartment, twined one leg around the other, rested my elbow on the window ledge, and gazed out helplessly at the exuberant green fields, green woods, and green hedgerows. The weather was perfect, the sun blazed down.
Certainly, I was rather sorry for myself at the thought of leaving it all. But I girded up my loins and wrapped around me for a while the mantle of a nobler sentiment; i.e. I felt sorry for the others as well – for the two brown carters in the road ambling along with a timber waggon, for the two old maids in the same compartment with me knitting bedsocks, for the beautiful Swallows darting over the stream, for the rabbit that lopped into the fern just as we passed – they too were all leaving it.
The extent of my benign compassion startled me – it was so unexpected. Perhaps for the first time in my life I forgot all about my own miserable ambitions – I forgave the successful, the time-servers, the self-satisfied, the overweening, the gracious and condescending – all, in fact, who hitherto have been thorns in my flesh and innocently enough have goaded me to still fiercer efforts to win thro’. ‘Poor people,’ I said. ‘Leave them alone. Let them be happy if they can.’ With a submissive heart, I was ready to sit down in the rows of this world’s failures and never have thought one bitter word about success. To all those persons who in one way or another had foiled my purposes I extended a pardon with Olympian gravity, and, strangest of all, I could have melted such frosty moral rectitudes with a genuine interest in the careers of my struggling contemporaries. With perfect self-abnegation, I held out my hand to them and wished them all ‘God Speed.’
It was a strange metempsychosis. Yet of a truth it is no use being niggardly over our lives. We are all of us ‘shelling out’. And we can afford to be generous, for we shall all – some early, some late – be bankrupt in the end. For my part, I’ve had a short and boisterous voyage and shan’t be sorry to get into port. I give up all my plans, all my hopes, all my loves and enthusiasms without remonstrance. I renounce all – I myself am already really dead.
May 30.
Last night the sea was as flat as a pavement, a pretty barque with all her sails out to catch the smallest puff of wind – the tiniest inspiration – was nevertheless without motion – a painted ship on a tapestry of violet. H— Hill was an immense angular mass of indigo blue. Even rowing boats made little progress and the water came off the languid paddles in syrupy clots. Everything was utterly still, the air thick – like cottonwool to the touch and very stifling; vitality in living things leaked away under a sensuous lotus influence. Intermittently after the darkness had come, Bullpoint Lighthouse shone like the wink of a lascivious eye.
Pottering about all day on the Pier and Front, listening to other people’s talk, catching snippets of conversation – not edifying. If there were seven wise men in the town, I would not save it. Damn the place!
May 31.
… I espied her first in the distance and turned my head away quickly and looked out to sea. A moment after, I began to turn my head round again slowly with the cautiousness and air of suspicion of a Tortoise poking its head out from underneath his shell. I was terrified to discover that in the meantime she had come and sat down on the seat immediately behind me with her back to mine. We sat like this back to back for some time and I enjoyed the novel experience and the tension. A few years ago, the bare sight of her gave me palpitation of the heart, and, on the first occasion that I had the courage to stop to speak, I felt livid and the skin on my face twitched uncontrollably.
Presently I got up and walked past – in the knowledge that she must now be conscious of my presence after a disappearance of three years. Later we met face to face and I broke the ice. She’s a pretty girl … So too is her sister.
Few people, except my barber, know how amorous I am. He has to shave my sinuous lips.
June 3.
Spent many dreadful hours cogitating whether to accept their invitation to dinner … I wanted to go for several reasons. I wanted to see her in a home-setting for the first time, and I wanted to spend the evening with three pretty girls. I also had the idea of displaying myself to the scrutinising gaze of the family as the hero of the old romance: and of showing Her how much I had progressed since last we met and what a treasure she had lost.
On the other hand, I was afraid that the invitation was only a casual one, I feared a snuffy reception, a frosty smile and a rigid hand. Could I go up and partake of meat at their board, among brothers and sisters taking me for an ogre of a jilt, and she herself perhaps opposite me making me blush perpetually to recall our one-time passionate kisses, our love letters and our execrable verses to each other! There seemed dreadful possibilities in such an adventure. Yet I badly wanted to experience the piquant situation.
At 7 p.m., half an hour before I was due, decided on strong measures. I entered a pub and took a stiff whisky and soda, and then set off with a stout heart to take the icy family by storm – and if need be live down my evil reputation by my amiability and urbanity!
I went – and of course everything passed off in the most normal manner. She is a very pretty girl – like velvet. Before dinner, we walked in the garden – and talked only of flowers.
June 4.
On the Hill, this morning, felt the thrill of the news of my own Death: I mean I imagined I heard the words, –
‘You’ve heard the news about B—?’
Second Voice: ‘No, what?’
‘He’s dead.’
Silence.
Won’t all this seem piffle if I don’t die after all! As an artist in life I ought to die; it is the only artistic ending – and I ought to die now or the Third Act will fizzle out in a long doctor’s bill.
June 5.
A New Pile in the Pier
Watched some men put a new pile in the pier. There was all the usual paraphernalia of chains, pulleys, cranes, and ropes, with a massive wooden pile swinging over the water at the end of a long wire hawser. Everything was in the massive style – even the men – very powerful men, slow, ruminative, silent men.
Nothing very relevant could be gathered from casual remarks. The conversation was without exception monosyllabic: ‘Let go’, or ‘Stand fast.’ But by close attention to certain obscure movements of the man on the ladder near the water’s edge, it gradually came thro’ to my consciousness that all these powerful, silent men were up against some bitter difficulty. I cannot say what it was. The burly monsters were silent about the matter … In fact they
appeared almost indifferent – and tired, oh! so very tired of the whole business. The attitude of the man nearest me was that for all he cared the pile could go on swinging in mid-air to the crack of Doom.
They continued slow, laborious efforts to overcome the secret difficulty. But these gradually slackened and finally ceased. One massive man after another abandoned his post in order to lean over the rails and gaze like a mystic into the depths of the sea. No one spoke. No one saw anything not even in the depths of the sea. One spat, and with round, sad eyes contemplated the trajectory of his brown bolus (he had been chewing) in its descent into the water.
The foreman, an original thinker, lit a cigarette, which relieved the tension. Then, slowly and with majesty, he turned on his heel, and walked away. With the sudden eclipse of the foreman’s interest, the incident closed. I should have been scarcely surprised to find him behind the Harbour-master’s Office playing ‘Shove-ha’penny’ or skittles with the pile still swinging in mid-air … After all it was only a bloody pile.
June 11.
Depression
Suffering from depression … The melancholy fit fell very suddenly. All the colour went out of my life, the world was dirty grey. On the way back to my hotel caught sight of H—, jumping into a cab, after a visit to S— Sands. But the sight of him aroused no desire in me to shout or wave. I merely wondered how on earth he could have spent a happy day at such a Sandy place. On arriving at —, sank deeper into my morass. It suffocated me to find the old familiar landmarks coming into view … the holiday-makers along the streets how I hated them – the Peg Top Hill how desolate – all as before – how dull. The very fact that they were all there as before in the morning nauseated me. The sea-coast here is magnificent, the town is pretty – I know that, of course. But all looked dreary and cheerless – just the sort of feeling one gets on entering an empty house with no fire on a winter’s day and nowhere to sit down … I felt as lonely and desolate as a man suddenly fallen from the clouds into an unknown town on the Antarctic Continent built of ice and inhabited by Penguins. Who are these people? I asked myself irritably. There perhaps on the other side of the street was my own brother. But I was not even faintly interested and told the cabman to drive on. The spray from the sea fogged my spectacles and made me weary.
The Journal of a Disappointed Man Page 9