December 4.
The Baby touch is the most harrowing of all. If we were childless we should be merely unfortunate, but an infant …
December 11.
Am receiving ionisation treatment from an electrical therapeutist – a quack! He is a sort of electrician – still, if he mends my bells I’ll kiss his boots. As for —, he is no better than a byreman, and I call him Hodge. This is not the first time I have felt driven to act behind the back of the Profession. In 1912, being desperate, and M— worse than a headache, I greedily and credulously sucked in the advice of my boarding-house proprietor and went to see a homœopathist in Finsbury Circus. He proved to be a charlatan at 10s. 6d. a time, and tho’ I realised it at once, I religiously travelled about for a month or more with tinctures and drop-bottle.
I could write a book on the Doctors I have known and the blunders they have made about me … The therapeutist took me for 33. I feel 63. I am 27. What a wreck I am, and …
December 12.
It is so agreeable to be able to write again that I write now for the sheer physical pleasure of being able to use a pen and form letters.
An Adventure in Search of Health
About the end of September, I began to feel so ill that Nurse went for the Doctor who assured me that E— was all right – I need not worry – ‘You go away at once and get some fresh air’, and so forth. ‘I feel quite ill,’ I said, struggling to break the news.
‘Sort of nervous?’ he enquired good-naturedly, ‘run down? I should get right away at once.’
I began tentatively. ‘Well, I have a rather long medical history and perhaps … you … might care to read the certificate of my London Doctor?’
I went to my escritoire and returned with M—’s letter addressed to ‘The M.O. examining Mr B.’fn7
Hodge pulled out the missive, studied the brief note carefully and long, at the same time drawing in his breath deeply, and gnawing the back of his hand.
‘I know all about it,’ I said to relieve him.
‘Is it quite certain? about this disease?’ he said presently. ‘You are very young for it.’
‘I think there is no doubt’, and he began to put me thro’ the usual tricks.
‘I should go right away at once,’ he said, ‘and go on with your arsenic. And whatever you do – don’t worry – your wife is all right.’
After beseeching him to keep silence about it as I thought she did not know, I shewed him out and locked up the certificate again.
Next morning I felt thoroughly cornered: I was not really fit enough to travel; my hand and leg were daily growing more and more paralysed and J— wired to say she could not put me up as they were going away for the week end. So I wired back engaging rooms, as with the nurse in the house and E— as she was, I simply could not stay at home …
On the way to the Station I was still in two minds whether or not to pull the taxi up at the Nursing Home and go inside, but harassing debate as it was, our rapidly diminishing bank balance finally drove me on.
— came up to London with me and sought out a comfortable corner seat, but by the time the train left, a mother and a crying child had got in and everywhere else was full. A girl opposite who saw — hand me a brandy flask and knew I was ill, looked at me compassionately.
At Reading, another woman with a baby got in and both babies cried in chorus, jangling my nerves to bits! – until I got out into the corridor, by a miracle not falling down, with one leg very feeble and treacherous. All seats were taken, excepting a first-class compartment where I looked in enviously at a lucky youth stretched out asleep full length along the empty seat.
All the people and the noise of the train began to make me fret, so I sought out the repose of a lavatory where I remained eating sandwiches and an apple for the best part of an hour. It was good to be alone.
Later on, I discovered an empty seat in a compartment occupied by persons whose questionable appearance my short sight entirely failed to make me aware of until I got inside with them. They were a family of Sheenies, father, mother and three children, whose joint emanations in a closed-up railway carriage made an effluvium like to kill a regiment of guards. They were E. end pawnbrokers or dealers in second-hand clothes.
I was too nervous to appear rude by immediately withdrawing, so I said politely to the man clad in second-hand furs: ‘Is that seat taken?’
He affected to be almost asleep. So I repeated. He stared at me and then said:
‘Oh! yes … but you can have it for a bit if you like.’
I sat down timorously on the extreme edge of the seat and stared at, but could not read, my newspaper out of sheer nervous apprehension. My sole idea was to get out as soon as I decorously could. Out of the corner of my eye, I observed the three children – two girls and a boy – all garbed in black clothes and wearing large clumsy boots with nails and scutes on the soles. The girls had large inflorescences of bushy hair which they swung about as they turned their heads and made me shudder. The mother’s face was like a brown, shrivelled apple, topped with a black bonnet and festooned on each side with ringlets of curly dark hair. Around her neck a fur tippet: as I live – second-hand clothes dealers from Whitechapel.
The man I dare not look at: I sat beside him and merely imagined.
At —, I got a decent seat and arrived at T— jaded, but still alive, with no one to meet me. Decent rooms on the sea-front.
Next morning J— went away for the week end and I could not possibly explain how ill I was lest she stayed at home.
To preserve my sanity, Saturday afternoon, took a desperate remedy by hiring a motor-car and travelling to Torquay and back via Babbacombe …
On the Sunday, feeling suddenly ill, I sent for the local medico whom I received in the drab little room by lamplight after dinner. ‘I’ve a tingling in my right hand,’ I said, ‘that drives me nearly silly.’
‘And on the soles of your feet?’ he asked at once.
I assented, and he ran thro’ at once all the symptoms in series.
‘I see you know what my trouble is,’ I said shyly. And we chatted a little about the War, about disease, and I told him of the recent memoir on the histology of the disease — in the Trans. Roy. Soc., Edin. which interested him. Then he went away again – very amiable, very polite – an obvious non possumus …
On Monday at 4 went up to — to tea as previously arranged, but found the house shut up so returned to my rooms in a rage.
After tea, having read the newspapers inside out, sat by the open window looking out on to the Marine Parade. It was dusk, a fine rain was falling, and the parade and sea-front were deserted save for an occasional figure hurrying past with mackintosh and umbrella. Suddenly as I sat looking out on this doleful scene, a dirge from nowhere in particular sounded on my ears which I soon recognised as ‘Robin Adair’, sung very lento and very maestoso by a woman, with a flute obbligato played by some second person. The tide was right up, and the little waves murmured listlessly at long intervals: never before I think have I been plunged into such an abyss of acute misery.
Next day the wire came. But it was too late. The day after that, I was worse, a single ray of sunshine being the rediscovery of the second-hand-clothes family from Whitechapel taking the air together on the front. This dreary party was traipsing along, the parents in their furs giving an occasional glance at the sea uncomfortably, as if they only noticed it was wet, and the children still in black and still wearing their scuted boots, obviously a little uncomfortable in a place so clean and windswept. I think they all came to the seaside out of decorum and for the satisfaction of feeling that they could afford it like other folk, and that old-clothes was as profitable a business as another.
On Thursday, returned home as I was afraid of being taken ill and having to go into the public hospital. Arrived home and went to bed and here we are till Jan. 1st on 3 months’ sick leave. However, the swingeing urtication in my hands and feet has now almost entirely abated and to-day I went out with E—
and the perambulator, which I pushed.
December 13.
A Baby-Girl
Walked down the bottom of the road and hung over some wooden railings. A little village baby-girl aged not more than 3 was hovering about near me while I gazed abstractedly across the Park at the trees. Presently, she crawled through the railings into the field and picked up a few dead leaves – a baby picking up dead leaves! Then she threw them down, and kicked them. Then moved on again – rustling about intermittently like a winter Thrush in the shrubbery. At last, she had stumbled around to where I was leaning over the railings. She stood immediately in front of me and silently looked up with a steady reproachful gaze: ‘Ain’t you ’shamed, you lazy-bones?’ till I could bear her inquisitorial gaze no longer, and so went and hung over some more railings further on.
Service
He asked for a Tennyson. She immediately went upstairs in the dark, lit a match and got it for him.
He asked for a Shakespeare. And without a moment’s hesitation, she went upstairs again, lit another match and got that for him.
And I believe if he had said ‘Rats’, she would have shot out silently into the dark and tried to catch one for him. Only a woman is capable of such service.
Hardy’s Poetry
‘You did not come,
And marching time drew on and wore me numb –
Yet less for loss of your dear presence there
Than that I thus found lacking in your make
That high compassion which can overbear
Reluctance for pure loving-kindness’ sake
Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,
You did not come.’
I thoroughly enjoy Hardy’s poetry for its masterfulness, for his sheer muscular compulsion over the words and sentences. In his rough-hewn lines he yokes the recalcitrant words together and drives them along mercilessly with something that looks like simple brute strength. Witness the triumphant last line in the above where the words are absolute bondslaves to his exact meaning, his indomitable will. All this pleases me the more for I know to my cost what stubborn, sullen, hephæstian beasts words and clauses can sometimes be. It is nice to see them punished. Hardy’s poetry is Michael Angelo rather than Greek, Browning not Tennyson.
December 14.
What a day! After a night of fog signals, I awoke this morning to find it still foggy and the ground covered with a grey rime. All day the fog has remained: I look out now thro’ the yellowish atmosphere across a field which is frosted over, the grass and brambles stiff and glassy. My back is aching and the cold is so intense that unless I crouch over the fire hands and feet become immediately stone-cold. All day I have crouched over the fire, reading newspapers, listening to fog signals and the screaming of the baby … I have been in a torpor, like a Bat in a cavern – really dead yet automatically hanging on to life by my hind legs.
December 15.
‘To stand upon one’s guard against Death exasperates her malice and protracts our sufferings.’ W. S. Landor.
December 19.
The Parson called, over the christening of the baby. I told him I was an agnostic. ‘There are several interesting lines of thought down here,’ he said wearily, passing his hand over his eyes. I know several men more enthusiastic over Fleas and Worms than this phlegmatic priest, over Jesus Christ.
December 20.
The reason why I do not spend my days in despair and my nights in hopeless weeping simply is that I am in love with my own ruin. I therefore deserve no sympathy, and probably shan’t get it: my own profound self-compassion is enough. I am so abominably self-conscious that no smallest detail in this tragedy eludes me. Day after day I sit in the theatre of my own life and watch the drama of my own history proceeding to its close. Pray God the curtain falls at the right moment lest the play drag on into some long and tedious anticlimax.
We all like to dramatise ourselves. Byron was dramatising himself when, in a fit of rhetorical self-compassion, he wrote:
‘Oh! could I feel as I have felt or be what I have been,
Or weep as I could once have wept o’er many a vanished scene.’
Shelley, too, being an artist could not stand insensible to his own tragedy and Francis Thompson suggests that he even anticipated his own end from a passage in Julian and Maddalo, ‘… if you can’t swim, Beware of Providence.’ ‘Did no earthly dixisti,’ Thompson asks, ‘sound in his ears as he wrote it?’
In any event, it was an admirable ending from the dramatic point of view; Destiny is often a superb dramatist. What more perfect than the death of Rupert Brooke at Scyros in the Ægean?fn8 The lives of some men are works of art, perfect in form, in development and in climax. Yet how frequently a life eminently successful or even eminently ruinous is also an unlovely, sordid, ridiculous or vulgar affair! Every one will concede that it must be a hard thing to be commonplace and vulgar even in misfortune, to discover that the tragedy of your own precious life has been dramatically bad, that your life even in its ruins is but a poor thing, and your own miseries pathetic from their very insignificance; that you are only Jones with chronic indigestion rather than Guy de Maupassant mad, or Coleridge with a great intellect being slowly dismantled by opium.
If only I could order my life by line and level, if I could control or create my own destiny and mould it into some marble perfection! In short, if life were an art and not a lottery! In the lives of all of us, how many wasted efforts, how many wasted opportunities, false starts, blind gropings – how many lost days – and man’s life is but a paltry three score years and ten: pitiful short commons indeed.
Sometimes, as I lean over a five-barred gate or gaze stupidly into the fire, I garner a bitter-sweet contentment in making ideal reconstructions of my life, selecting my parents, the date and place of my birth, my gifts, my education, my mentors and what portions out of the infinity of knowledge shall gain a place within my mind – that sacred glebe-land to be zealously preserved and enthusiastically cultivated. Whereas, my mind is now a wilderness in which all kinds of useless growths have found an ineradicable foothold. I am exasperated to find I have by heart the long addresses of a lot of dismal business correspondents and yet can’t remember the last chapters of Ecclesiastes: what a waste of mind-stuff there! It irks me to be acquainted even to nausea with the spot in which I live, I whose feet have never traversed even so much as this little island much less carried me in triumph to Timbuctoo, Honolulu, Rio, Rome.
December 21.
This continuous preoccupation with self sickens me – as I look back over these entries. It is inconceivable that I should be here steadily writing up my ego day by day in the middle of this disastrous war … Yesterday I had a move on. To-day life wearies me. I am sick of myself and life. This beastly world with its beastly war and hate makes me restless, dissatisfied, and full of a longing to be quit of it. I am as full of unrest as an autumn Swallow. ‘My soul,’ I said to them at breakfast with a sardonic grin, ‘is like a greyhound in the slips. I shall have to wear heavy boots to prevent myself from soaring. I have such an uplift on me that I could carry a horse, a dog, a cat, if you tied them on to my homing spirit and so transformed my Ascension into an adventure out of Baron Munchausen.’ With a gasconnade of contempt, I should like to turn on my heel and march straight out of this wretched world at once.
December 22.
Gibbon’s Autobiography
This book makes me of all people (and especially just now) groan inwardly. ‘I am at a loss,’ he says, referring to the Decline and Fall, ‘how to describe the success of the work without betraying the vanity of the writer … My book was on every table and almost on every toilette.’ It makes me bite my lip. Rousseau and his criticism of ‘I sighed as a lover; I obeyed as a son’, and Gibbon on his dignity in reply make one of the most ludicrous incidents in literary history. ‘… that extraordinary man whom I admire and pity, should have been less precipitate in condemning the moral character and conduct of a stranger!’ Oh my giddy Au
nt! Isn’t this rich? Still, I am glad you did not marry her: we could ill spare Madam de Staël, Madam Necker’s daughter, that wonderful, vivacious and warmhearted woman.
‘After the morning has been occupied with the labours of the library, I wish to unbend rather than exercise my mind; and in the interval between tea and supper, I am far from disdaining the innocent amusement of a game of cards.’ How Jane Austen would have laughed at him! The passage reminds me of the Rev. Mr Collins saying:
‘Had I been able I should have been only too pleased to give you a song, for I regard music as a harmless diversion and perfectly compatible with the profession of a clergyman.’
‘When I contemplate the common lot of mortality,’ Gibbon writes, ‘I must acknowledge I have drawn a high prize in the lottery of life’, and he goes on to count up all his blessings with the most offensive delight – his wealth, the good fortune of his birth, his ripe years, a cheerful temper, a moderate sensibility, health, sound and peaceful slumbers from infancy, his valuable friendship with Lord Sheffield, his rank, fame, etc., etc., ad nauseam. He rakes over his whole life for things to be grateful for. He intones his happiness in a long recitative of thanksgiving that his lot was not that of a savage, of a slave, or a peasant; he washes his hands with imaginary soap on reflecting on the bounty of Nature which cast his birth in a free and civilised country, in an age of science and philosophy, in a family of honourable rank and decently endowed with the gifts of fortune – sleek, complacent, oleaginous and salacious old gentleman, how I would love to have bombed you out of your self-satisfaction!
The Journal of a Disappointed Man Page 27