R— remarked to-day that he intended writing a lyric on lighting Chloe’s cigarette.
‘Ah!’ I said at once appreciative, ‘now tell me, do you balance your hand – by gently (ever so gently) resting the extreme tip of your little finger upon her chin, and’ (I was warming up) ‘do you hold the match vertically or horizontally, and do you light it in the dark or in the light? If you have finesse, you won’t need to be told that the thing is to get a steady flame and the maximum of illumination upon her face to last over a period for as long as possible.’
‘Chloe,’ replied R—, ‘is wearing now a charming blouse with a charming V-shaped opening in front. Her Aunt asked my Mother last night tentatively, “How do you like Chloe’s blouse? Is it too low?” My Mother scrutinised the dear little furry, lop-eared thing and answered doubtfully, “No, Maria, I don’t think so.” ’
‘How ridiculous! Why, the V is a positive signpost! My dear fellow,’ I said to R—, ‘I should refuse to be bluffed by those old women. Tell them you know.’
Carlyle called Lamb a despicable abortion. What a crime!
May 2.
Developed a savage fit. Up to a certain point, perhaps, but beyond that anxiety changes into recklessness – you simply don’t care. The aperients are causing dyspepsia and intermittent action of the heart, which frightens me. After a terrifying week, during which at crises I have felt like dropping suddenly in the street, in the gardens, anywhere, from syncope, I rebelled against this humiliating fear. I pulled my shoulders back and walked briskly ahead along the street with a dropped beat every two or three steps. I laughed bitterly at it and felt it could stop or go on – I was at last indifferent. In a photographer’s shop was the picture of a very beautiful woman and I stopped to look at her. I glowered in thro’ the glass angrily and reflected how she was gazing out with that same expression even at the butcher’s boy or the lamplighter. It embittered me to think of having to leave her to some other man. To me she represented all the joy of life which at any moment I might have had to quit for ever. Such impotence enraged me and I walked off up the street with a whirling heart and the thought, ‘I shall drop, I suppose, when I get up as far as that.’ Yet don’t think I was alarmed. Oh! no. The iron had entered me, and I went on with cynical indifference waiting to be struck down.
… She is a very great deal to me. Perhaps I love her very much after all.
May 3.
Bad heart attack all day. Intermittency is very refined torture to one who wants to live very badly. Your pump goes a ‘dot and carry one’, or say ‘misses a stitch’, what time you breathe deep, begin to shake your friend’s hand and make a farewell speech. Then it goes on again and you order another pint of beer.
It is a fractious animal within the cage of my thorax, and I never know when it is going to escape and make off with my precious life between its teeth. I humour and coax and soothe it, but, God wot, I haven’t much confidence in the little beast. My thorax it appears is an intolerable kennel.
May 10.
In a very cheerful mood. Pleased with myself and everybody till a seagull soared overhead in Kensington Gardens and aroused my vast capacities for envy – I wish I could fly.
May 24.
In L— with my brother, A—. The great man is in great form and very happy in his love for N—. He is a most delightful creature and I love him more than any one else in the wide world. There is an almost feminine tenderness in my love.
We spent a delightful day, talking and arguing and insulting one another … At these séances we take delight in anæsthetising our hearts for the purposes of argument, and a third person would be bound to suppose we were in the throes of a bitter quarrel. We pile up one vindictive remark on another, ingeniously seeking out – and with malice – weak points in each other’s armour, which previous exchange of confidences makes it easy to find. Neither of us hesitates to make use of such private confessions, yet our love is so strong that we can afford to take any liberty. There is, in fact, a fearful joy in testing the strength of our affection by searching for cutting rejoinders – to see the effect. We rig up one another’s cherished ideals like Aunt Sallies and then knock them down, we wax sarcastic, satirical, contemptuous in turn, we wave our hands animatedly (hand-waving is a great trick with both of us), get flushed, point with our fingers and thump the table to clinch some bit of repartee. Yet it’s all smoke. Our love is unassailable – it’s like the law of gravitation, you cannot dispute it, it underlies our existence, it is the air we breathe.
N— is charming, and thought we were quarrelling, and therefore intervened on his side!
May 31.
R— outlined an impression he had in Naples one day during a sirocco of the imminence of his own death. It was evidently an isolated experience and bored me a little as I could have said a lot myself about that. When he finished I drew from my pocket an envelope with my name and three addresses scribbled on it to help the police in case of syncope as I explained. I have carried this with me for several years and at one time a flask of brandy.
June 3.
Went to see the Irish Players in The Playboy. Sitting in front of me was a charming little Irish girl accompanied by a male clod with red-rimmed eyes like a Bull-terrier’s, a sandy, bristly moustache like a housemaid’s broom, and a face like a gluteal mass, and a horrid voice that crepitated rather than spoke.
She was dark, with shining blue eyes, and a delightful little nose of the utmost import to every male who should gaze upon her. Between the acts, the clod hearkened to her vivacious conversation – like an enchanted bullock. Her vivacity was such that the tip of her nose moved up and down for emphasis and by the end of the Third Act I was captured entirely. Lucky dog, that clod!
After the play this little Irish maiden caught my eye and it became a physical impossibility for me to check a smile – and oh! Heavens! – she gave me a smile in return. Precisely five seconds later, she looked again to see if I was still smiling – I was – and we then smiled broadly and openly on one another – her smile being the timorous ingénue’s not the glad eye of a femme de joie. Later, on the railway platform whither I followed her, I caught her eye again (was ever so lucky a fellow?), and we got into the same carriage. But so did the clod – ah! dear, was ever so unlucky a fellow? Forced to occupy a seat some way off, but she caught me trying to see her thro’ a midnight forest of opera hats, lace ruffles, projecting ears and fat noses.
Curse! Left her at High Street Station and probably will never see her again. This is a second great opportunity. The first was the girl on Lundy Island. These two women I shall always regret. There must be so many delightful and interesting persons in London if only I could get at them.
June 4.
Rushed off to tell R— about my little Irish girl. Her face has been ‘shadowing’ me all day.
June 6.
A violent argument with R— re marriage. He says Love means appropriation, and is taking the most elaborate precautions to forfend passion – just as if it were a militant suffragette. Every woman he meets he first puts into a long quarantine, lest perchance she carries the germ of the infectious disease. He quotes Hippolytus and talks like a mediæval ascetic. Himself, I imagine, he regards as a valuable but brittle piece of Dresden china which must be saved from rough handling and left unmolested to pursue its high and dusty destiny – an old crock as I warned him. By refusing to plunge into life he will live long and be a well preserved man, but scarcely a living man – a mummy rather. I told him so amid much laughter.
‘You’re a reactionary,’ says he.
‘Yes, but why should a reactionary be a naughty boy?’
June 7.
My ironical fate lured me this evening into another discussion on marriage in which I had to take up a position exactly opposite to the one I defended yesterday against R—. In fact, I actually subverted to my own pressing requirements some of R—’s own arguments! The argument, of course, was with Her.
Marriage, I urged, was an eco
nomic trap for guileless young men, and for my part (to give myself some necessary stiffening) I did not intend to enter upon any such hazardous course, even if I had the chance. Miss — said I was a funk – to me who the day before had been hammering into R— my principle of ‘Plunge and damn the consequences.’ I was informed I was an old woman afraid to go out without an umbrella, an old tabby cat afraid to leave the kitchen fire, etc., etc.
‘Yes, I am afraid to go out without an umbrella,’ I argued formally, ‘when it’s raining cats and dogs. As long as I am dry, I shall keep dry. As soon as I find myself caught in the rain or victimised by a passion, I shan’t be afraid of falling in love or getting wet. It would be a misadventure, but I am not going in search of one.’
All the same the discussion was very galling, for I was acting a part.
… The truth is I have philandered abominably with her. I know it. And now I am jibbing at the idea of marriage … I am such an egotist, I want, I believe, a Princess of the Blood Royal.
June 9.
Some days ago sent a personal advertisement to the newspaper to try to find my little Irish girl who lives at Notting Hill Gate. To-day they return me the money and advert., no doubt mistaking me for a White Slave trafficker. And by this time, I’m thinking, my little Irish girl can go to blazes. Shall spend the P.O. on sweets or monkey nuts.
June 10.
Lupus
It is raining heavily. I have just finished dinner. In the street an itinerant musician is singing dolefully ‘O Rest in the Lord’. In my dirty little sitting room I begin to feel very restless, so put on my hat and cloak and walk down towards the Station for a paper to read. It is all very dark and dismal, and I gaze with hungry eyes in thro’ some of the windows disclosing happy comfortable interiors. At intervals thunder growls and lightning brightens up the deserted dirtiness of the Station Waiting Room. A few bits of desolate paper lie about on the floor, and up in one corner on a form a crossing-sweeper, motionless and abject, driven in from his pitch by the rain. His hands are deep in his trousers’ pockets, and the poor devil lies with legs sprawling out and eyes closed: over the lower part of his face he wears a black mask to hide the ravages of lupus … He seemed the last man on earth – after every one else had died of the plague. Not a soul in the station. Not a train. And this is June!
June 15.
Measuring Lice
Spent the day measuring the legs and antennæ of lice to two places of decimals!
To the lay mind how fantastic this must seem. Indeed, I hope it is fantastic. I do not mind being thought odd. It seems almost fitting that an incurable dilettante like myself should earn his livelihood by measuring the legs of lice. I like to believe that such a bizarre manner of life suits my incurable frivolousness.
I am a Magpie in a Bagdad bazaar, hopping about, useless, inquisitive, fascinated by a lot of astonishing things: e.g., a book on the quadrature of the circle, the gubbertushed fustilugs passage in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, names like Mr Portwine or Mr Hogsflesh, Tweezer’s Alley or Pickle Herring Street, the excellent, conceitful sonnets of Henry Constable or Petticoat Lane on a Sunday morning.
Colossal things such as Art, Science, etc., frighten me. I am afraid I should develop a thirst that would make me wish to drink the sea dry. My mind is a disordered miscellany. The world is too distracting. I cannot apply myself for long. London bewilders me. At times it is a phantasmagoria, an opium dream out of De Quincey.
June 17.
Prof. Geo. Saintsbury’s book on Elizabethan literature amuses me. George, there can be no doubt, is a very refined, cultivated fellow. I bet he don’t eat periwinkles with a pin or bite his nails – and you should hear him refer to folk who can’t read Homer in the original or who haven’t been to Oxford – to Merton above all. He also says non so che for je ne sais quoi.
June 26.
… I placed the volume on the mantelpiece as if it were a bottle of physic straight from my Dispensary, and I began to expostulate and expound, as if she were a sick person and I the doctor … She seemed a little nettled at my proselytising demeanour and gave herself out to be very preoccupied – or at any rate quite uninterested in my physic. I read the book last night at one sitting and was boiling over with it.
‘I fear I have come at an inconvenient time,’ I said, with a sardonic smile and strummed on the piano … ‘I must really be off. Please read it (which sounded like “three times a day after meals”) and tell me how you like it. (Facetiously.) Of course don’t give up your present manual for it, that would be foolish and unnecessary.’ … I rambled on – disposed to be very playful.
At last calmly and horribly, in a thoughtful voice she answered, –
‘I think you are very rude: you play the piano after I asked you to stop and walk about just as if it were your own home.’
I remained outwardly calm but inwardly was very surprised and full of tremors. I said after a pause, –
‘Very well, if you think so … Good-bye.’
No answer; and I was too proud to apologise.
‘Good-bye,’ I repeated.
She went on reading her novel in silence while I got as far as the door – very upset.
‘Au revoir.’
No answer.
‘Oh,’ said I, and went out of the room leaving my lady for good and all and I’m not sorry.
In the passage met Miss —. ‘What?’ she said, ‘going already?’
‘Farewell,’ I said sepulchrally. ‘A very tragic farewell’, which left her wondering.
June 29.
At the Albert Hall
Went with R— to the Albert Hall to the Empress of Ireland Memorial Concert with massed bands. We heard the Symphonie Pathétique, Chopin’s Funeral March, Trauermarsch from Götterdammerung, the Ride of the Valkyries and a solemn melody from Bach.
This afternoon I regard as a mountain peak in my existence. For two solid hours I sat like an Eagle on a rock gazing into infinity – a very fine sensation for a London Sparrow …
I have an idea that if it were possible to assemble the sick and suffering day by day in the Albert Hall and keep the Orchestra going all the time, then the constant exposure of sick parts to such heavenly air vibrations would ultimately restore to them the lost rhythm of health. Surely, even a single exposure to – say Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony – must result in some permanent reconstitution of ourselves body and soul. No one can be quite the same after a Beethoven Symphony has streamed thro’ him. If one could develop a human soul like a negative the effect I should say could be seen … I’ll tell you what I wish they’d do – seriously: divide up the arena into a series of cubicles where, unobserved and in perfect privacy, a man could execute all the various movements of his body and limbs which the music prompts. It would be such a delicious self-indulgence and it’s torture to be jammed into a seat where you can’t even tap one foot or wave an arm.
The concert restored my moral health. I came away in love with people I was hating before and full of compassion for others I usually contemn. A feeling of immeasurable well being – a jolly bonhomie enveloped me like incandescent light. At the close when we stood up to sing the National Anthem we all felt a genuine spirit of camaraderie. Just as when Kings die, we were silent musing upon the common fate, and when the time came to separate we were loath to go our several ways, for we were comrades who together had come thro’ a great experience. For my part I wanted to shake hands all round – happy travellers, now alas! at the journey’s end and never perhaps to meet again – never.
R— and I walked up thro’ Kensington Gardens like two young Gods!
‘I even like that bloody thing,’ I said, pointing to the Albert Memorial.
We pointed out pretty girls to one another, watched the children play ring-a-ring-a-roses on the grass. We laughed exultingly at the thought of our dismal colleagues … tho’ I said (as before!) I loved ’em all – God bless ’em – even old —. R— said it was nothing short of insolence on their part to have neglect
ed the opportunity of coming to the Concert.
Later on, an old gaffer up from the country stopped us to ask the way to Rotten Row – I overwhelmed him with directions and happy descriptive details. I felt like walking with him and showing him what a wonderful place the world is.
After separating from R— very reluctantly – it was horrible to be left alone in such high spirits, walked up towards the Round Pond, and caught myself avoiding the shadows of the trees – so as to be every moment out in the blazing sun. I scoffed inwardly at the timorousness of pale, anæmic folk whom I passed hiding in the shadows of the elms.
At the Round Pond, came across a Bulldog who was biting out great chunks of water and in luxuriant wastefulness letting it drool out again from each corner of his mouth. I watched this old fellow greedily (it was very hot), as well pleased with him and his liquid ‘chops’ as with anything I saw, unless it were a girl and a man lying full length along the grass and kissing beneath a sunshade. I smiled; she saw me, and smiled, too, in return, and then fell to kissing again.
June 30.
Dinosaurs
There are books which are Dinosaurs – Sir Walter Ralegh’s History of the World, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. There are men who are Dinosaurs – Balzac completing his Human Comedy, Napoleon, Roosevelt. I like them all. I like express trains and motor lorries. I enjoy watching an iron girder swinging in the air or great cubes of ice caught up between iron pincers. I must always stop and watch these things. I like everything that is swift or immense: London, lightning, Popocatapetl. I enjoy the smell of tar, of coal, of fried fish, or a brass band playing a Liszt Rhapsody. And why should those foolish Mænads shout Women’s Rights just because they burn down a church? All bonfires are delectable. Civilisation and top hats bore me. My own life is like a tame rabbit’s. If only I had a long tail to lash it in feline rage! I would return to Nature – I could almost return to Chaos. There are times when I feel so dour I would wreck the universe if I could.fn3
The Journal of a Disappointed Man Page 13