The War is searching out everyone, concentrating a beam of inquisitive light upon everyone’s mind and character and publishing it for all the world to see. And the consequence to many honest folk has been a keen personal disappointment. We ignoble persons had thought we were better than we really are. We scarcely anticipated that the War was going to discover for us our emotions so despicably small by comparison, or our hearts so riddled with selfish motives. In the wild race for security during these dangerous times, men and women have all been sailing so closehauled to the wind that their eyes have been glued to their own forepeaks with never a thought for others: fathers have vied with one another in procuring safe jobs for their sons, wives have been bitter and recriminating at the security of other wives’ husbands. The men themselves plot constantly for staff appointments, and everyone is pulling strings who can. Bereavement has brought bitterness and immunity indifference.
And how pathetically some of us cling still to fragments of the old régime 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 au 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 Grasshoppers 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 represen
ts 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.fn5 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?’fn6 (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 Madame 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 a
ctivity 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 ceasing 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.
The Journal of a Disappointed Man Page 26