Masefield’s ‘Gallipoli’
It amused me to discover the evident relish with which the author of In the Daffodil Fields emphasises the blood and the flowers in the attack on Achi Baba. It’s all blood and beautiful flowers mixed up together to Masefield’s great excitement.
‘A swear word in a city slum
A simple swear word is to some –
To Masefield something more.’
MAX BEERBOHM.
Still, to call Gallipoli ‘bloody Hell’ is, after all, only a pedantically exact description. You understand, tho’, a very remarkable book – a work of genius.
December 23.
To be cheerful this Xmas would require a coup de théâtre – some sort of psychological sleight of hand.
I get downstairs at 10 and spend the day reading and writing, without a soul to converse with. Everything comes to me second-hand – thro’ the newspapers, the world of life thro’ the halfpenny Daily News, and the world of books thro’ the Times Literary Supplement. For the rest I listen to the kettle singing and make symphonies out of it, or I look into the fire to see the pictures there …
December 24.
Everyone I suppose engaged in this irony of Xmas. What a solemn lunatic the world is.
Walked awhile in a beautiful lane close by, washed hard and clean and deeply channelled by the recent rain. On the hill-top, I could look right across the valley to the uplands, where on the sky line a few Firs stood in stately sequestration from common English Oaks, like a group of ambassadors in full dress. In the distance a hen clucked, I saw a few Peewits wheeling and watched the smoke rising from our cottage perpendicularly into the motionless air. There was a clement quiet and a clement warmth, and in my heart a burst of real happiness that made me rich even beside less unfortunate beings and beyond what I had ever expected to be again.
December 26.
‘In thus describing and illustrating my intellectual torpor, I use terms that apply more or less to every part of the years during which I was under the Circean spells of opium. But for misery—’
(Why do I waste my energy with this damned Journal? I stop. I hate it. I am going out for a walk in the fog.)
December 31.
Reminiscences
For the past few days I have been living in a quiet hermitage of retrospect. My memories have gone back to the times – remote, inaccessible, prehistoric – before ever this Journal was begun, when I myself was but a jelly without form and void – that is, before I had developed any characteristic qualities and above all the dominant one, a passion for Natural History.
One day a school friend, being covetous of certain stamps in my collection, induced me to ‘swop’ them for his collection of birds’ eggs which he showed me nestling in the bran at the bottom of a box. He was a cunning boy and thought he had the better of the bargain. He little realised – nor did I – the priceless gift he bestowed when his little fat dirty hands, decorated, I remember, with innumerable warts, picked out the eggs and gave them to me. In fact, a smile momentarily crossed his face, he turned his head aside, he spat in happy contemplation of the deal.
I continued eagerly to add to the little collection of Birds’ eggs, but for a long time it never occurred to me to go out into the country myself and collect them, – I just swopped, until one day our errand boy, who stuttered, had bandy legs, and walked on the outside of his feet with the gait of an Anthropoid, said to me, ‘I will sh-show you how to find Birds’ n-nests if you like to come out to the w-woods.’ So one Saturday, when the backyard was cleaned down and the coal boxes filled, he and I started off together to a wood some way down the river bank, where he – my good and beneficent angel – presently showed me a Thrush’s nest in the fork of a young Oak tree. Never-to-be-forgotten moment! The sight of those blue speckled eggs lying so unexpectedly, as I climbed up the tree, on the other side of an untidy tangle of dried moss and grass, in a neat little earthenware cup, caused probably the first tremor of real emotion at a beautiful object. The emotion did not last long! In a moment I had stolen the eggs and soon after smashed them – in trying to blow them, schoolboy fashion.
Then, I rapidly became an ardent field naturalist. My delight in Birds and Birds’ eggs spread in a benignant infection to every branch of Natural History. I collected Beetles, Butterflies, Plants, Birds’ wings, Birds’ claws, etc. Dr Gordon Stables in the Boy’s Own Paper, taught me how to make a skin, and I got hold of a Mole and then a Squirrel (the latter falling to my prowess with a catapult), stuffed them and set them up in cases which I glazed myself. I even painted in suitable backgrounds, in the one case a mole-hill, looking, I fear, more like a mountain, and in the other, a Fir tree standing at an impossible angle of 45°. Then I read a book on trapping, and tried to catch Hares. Then I read Sir John Lubbock’s Ants, Bees and Wasps, and constructed an observation Ants’ nest (though the Ants escaped).
In looking back to these days, I am chiefly struck by my extraordinary ignorance of the common objects of the countryside, for although we lived in the far west country, the house, without a garden, was in the middle of the town, and all my seniors were as ignorant as I. Nature Study in the schools did not then exist, I had no benevolent paterfamilias to take me by the hand and point out the common British Birds; for my father’s only interest was in politics. I can remember coming home once all agog with a wonderful Bird I had seen – like a tiny Magpie, I said. No one could tell me that it was, of course, only a little Pied Wagtail.
The absence of sympathy or of congenial companionship, however, had absolutely no effect in damping my ardour. As I grew older my egg-collecting companions fell away, some took up the law, or tailoring, or clerking, some entered the Church, while I became yearly more engrossed. In my childhood my enthusiasm lay like a watch-spring, coiled up and hidden inside me, until that Thrush’s nest and eggs seized hold of it by the end and pulled it out by degrees in a long silver ribbon. I kept live Bats in our upstairs little-used drawing-room, and Newts and Frogs in pans in the backyard. My mother tolerated these things because I had sufficiently impressed her with the importance to science of the observations which I was making and about to publish. Those on Bats indeed were thought fit to be included in a standard work – Barrett-Hamilton’s Mammals of Great Britain and Ireland. The published articles served to bring me into correspondence with other naturalists, and I shall never forget my excitement on receiving for the first time a letter of appreciation. It was from the author of several natural history books, to
‘W. N. P. BARBELLION, ESQ.,
Naturalist,
Downstable’,
and illustrated with a delightful sketch of Ring Plovers feeding on the saltings. This letter was carefully pasted into my diary, where it still remains.
After all, it is perhaps unfair to say that I had no kindred spirit with me in my investigations. Martha, the servant girl who had been with us for 30 years, loved animals of all sorts and – what was strange in a country girl – she had no fear of handling even such things as Newts and Frogs. My Batrachia often used to escape from their pans in the yard into Martha’s kitchen, and, not a bit scandalised, she would sometimes catch one marching across the rug or squeezing underneath a cupboard. ‘Lor’!’ would be her comment as she picked the vagrant up and took it back to its aquarium, ‘can’t ’em travel?’ Martha had an eye for character in animals. In the long dynasty of cats we possessed one at length who by association of opposite ideas we called Marmaduke because he ought to have been called Jan Stewer. ‘A chuff old feller, ’idden ’ee?’ Martha used to ask me with pride and love in her eyes. ‘He purrs in broad Devon,’ I used to answer. Marmaduke need only wave the tip of his tail to indicate to her his imperative desire to promenade. Martha knew if no one else did that every spring ‘Pore ’Duke’, underneath his fur, used to come out in spots. ‘’Tiz jus’ like a cheel – ’e gets a bit spotty as the warm weather cums along.’ Starlings on the washhouse roof, regularly fed with scraps, were ever her wonder and delight.
‘Don’ ’em let it down, I zay?’ In later years, when I was occupied in the top attic, making dissections of various animals that I collected, she would sometimes leave her scrubbing and cleaning in the room below to thrust her head up the attic stairs and enquire, ‘’Ow be ’ee gettin’ on then?’ Her unfeigned interest in my anatomical researches gave me real pleasure, and I took delight in arousing her wonder by pointing out and explaining the brain of a Pigeon or the nervous system of a Dog-fish, or a Frog’s heart taken out and still beating in the dissecting dish. She, in reply, would add reflections upon her own experiences in preparing meat for dinner – anecdotes about the ‘maw’ of an old Fowl, or the great ‘pipe’ of a Goose. Then, suddenly scurrying downstairs, she would say, ‘I must be off or I shall be all be’ind like the cow’s tail.’ Now the dignified interest of the average educated man would have chilled me.
By the way, years later, when he was a miner in S. Wales, that historic errand-boy displayed his consciousness of the important rôle he once played by sending me on a postcard congratulations on my success in the B. M. appointment. It touched me to think he had not forgotten after years of separation.
1917
January 1.
The New Year came in like a thief in the night – noiselessly; no bells, no sirens, no songs by order of the Government. Nothing could have been more appropriate than a burglarious entry like this – seeing what the year has come to filch from us all in the next 12 months.
January 20.
I am over 6 feet high and as thin as a skeleton; every bone in my body, even the neck vertebræ, creak at odd intervals when I move. So that I am not only a skeleton but a badly articulated one to boot. If to this is coupled the fact of the creeping paralysis, you have the complete horror. Even as I sit and write, millions of bacteria are gnawing away my precious spinal cord, and if you put your ear to my back the sound of the gnawing I dare say could be heard. The other day a man came and set up a post in the garden for the clothes’ line. As soon as I saw the post I said ‘gibbet’ – it looks exactly like one, and I, for sure, must be the malefactor. Last night while E— was nursing the baby I most delightfully remarked: ‘What a little parasite – why you are Cleopatra affixing the aspic – “Tarry good lady, the bright day is done, and we are for the dark.” ’
The fact that such images arise spontaneously in my mind, show how rotten to the core I am.
… The advent of the Baby was my coup de grâce. The little creature seems to focus under one head all my personal disasters and more than once a senseless rage has clutched me at the thought of a baby in exchange for my ambition, a nursery for the study. Yet, on the whole, I find it a good and satisfying thing to see her, healthy, new, intact on the threshold: I grow tired of my own dismal life just as one does of a suit of dirty clothes. My life and person are patched and greasy; hers is new and without a single blemish or misfortune … Moreover, she makes her mother happy and consoles her grandmother too.
January 21.
Death
What a delightful thing the state of Death would be if the dead passed their time haunting the places they loved in life and living over again the dear delightful past – if death were one long indulgence in the pleasures of memory! if the disembodied spirit forgot all the pains of its previous existence and remembered only the happiness! Think of me flitting about the orchards and farmyards in — birdsnesting, walking along the coast among the seabirds, climbing Exmoor, bathing in streams and in the sea, haunting all my old loves and passions, cutting open with devouring curiosity Rabbits, Pigeons, Frogs, Dogfish, Amphioxus; think of me, too, at length unwillingly deflected from these cherished pursuits in the raptures of first love, cutting her initials on trees and fences instead of watching birds, day-dreaming over Parker and Haswell and then bitterly reproaching myself later for much loss of precious time. How happy I shall be if Death is like this: to be living over again and again all my ecstasies, over first times – the first time I found a Bottle Tit’s nest, the first time I succeeded in penetrating into the fastnesses of my El Dorado – Exmoor, the first time I gazed upon the internal anatomy of a Snail, the first time I read Berkeley’s Principles of Human Understanding (what a soul-shaking epoch that was!), and the first time I kissed her! My hope is that I may haunt these times again, that I may haunt the places, the books, the bathes, the walks, the desires, the hopes, the first (and last) loves of my life all transfigured and beatified by sovereign Memory.
January 26.
Out of doors to-day it’s like the roaring forties! Every tree I passed in the lane was a great wind instrument, bellowing out a passionate song, and the sky was torn to ribbons. It is cold enough to freeze the nose off a brass Monkey, but very exhilarating. I stood on the hill and squared my fists to the wind and bade everything come on. I sit writing this by the fire and am thoroughly scourged and purified by this great castigating wind … I think I will stick it out – I will sit quite still in my chair and defy this skulking footpad – let the paralysis creep into every bone, I will hang on to the last and watch it skulking with my most hideous grimace.
January 27.
Still freezing and blowing. Coming back from the village, tho’ I was tired and hobbling badly, decided to walk up the lane even if it meant crawling home on hands and knees.
The sky was a quick-change artist to-day. Every time you looked you saw a different picture. From the bottom of the hill I looked up and saw above me – it seemed at an immense and windy height – a piece of blue, framed in an irregular edge of white woolly cloud seen thro’ the crooked branches of an Oak. It was a narrow crooked lane, sunk deep in the soil with large smooth surfaces of stone like skulls bulging up in places where the rain had washed away the soil.
Further on, the sun was lying low almost in the centre of a semi-circular bend in the near horizon. It frosted the wool of a few sheep seen in silhouette, and then slowly disappeared in mist. On the right-hand side was a cottage with the smoke being wrenched away from the chimney top, and on the left a group of stately Firs, chanting a requiem like a cathedral choir.
January 28.
Still blowing and bitterly cold. Along the path fields in the Park I stopped to look at a thick clump of Firs standing aloof on some high ground and guarded by an outside ring of honest English Oaks, Ashes and Elms. They were a sombre mysterious little crowd intent, I fancied, on some secret ritual of the trees. The high ground on which they stood looked higher and more inaccessible than it really was, the clump was dark green, almost black, and in between their trunks where all was obscurity, some hardy adventurer might well have discovered a Grand Lama sitting within his Penetralia. But I had no taste for any such profanity, and even as I looked the sun came out from behind a cloud very slowly, bringing the picture into clearer focus, chasing away shadows and bringing out all the colours. The landscape resumed its homely aspect: an English park with Firs in it.
January 29.
Last night, I pulled aside the window curtain of our front door and peeped out. Just below the densely black projecting gable of the house I saw the crescent moon lying on her back in a bed of purple sky, and I saw our little white frosted garden path curving up towards the garden gate. It was a delicious coup d’œil, and I shewed it to E—.
January 31.
Showers of snow at intervals, the little flakes rocking about lazily or spiralling down, while the few that eventually reached the ground would in a moment or so be caught up in a sudden furious puff of wind, and sent driving along the road with the dust.
My usual little jaunt up the lane past the mossy farmhouse. Home to toasted tea-cakes and a pinewood fire, with my wife chattering prettily to the baby. After tea, enchanted by the reading of a new book – Le Journal de Maurice de Guérin – or rather the introduction to it by Sainte-Beuve. I devoured it! I have spent a devouring day; under a calm exterior I have burnt up the hours; all of me has been athrob; every little cell in my brain has danced to its own little tune. For to-day, Death has been an impossi
bility. I have felt that anyhow to-day I could not die – I have laughed at the mere thought of it. If only this mood would last! If I could feel thus always, then I could fend off Death for an immortality of life.
But suddenly, as now, the real horror of my life and future comes on me in a flash. For a second I am terrified by the menace of the future, but fortunately only for a second. For I’ve learnt a trick which I fear to reveal; it is so valuable and necessary to me that if I talked of it or vulgarised it my secret might be stolen away. Not a word then!
Later. I have just heard on the gramophone some Grieg, and it has charged my happiness with disrupting voltage of desire. Oh! if only I had health, I could make the welkin ring! I shall leave so little behind me, such a few paltry pages beside what I have it in me to do. It shatters me.
February 1.
Looking back, I must say I like the splendid gusto with which I lived thro’ yesterday: that mettlesome fashion in which I took the lane, and at the top, how I swung around to sweep my gaze across to the uplands opposite with snow falling all the time. Then in the evening, the almost complete absorption in the new book when I forgot everything pro tem. It was quite like the old days.
The Journal of a Disappointed Man Page 28