February 2.
Crowd Fever
After four months’ sick leave, returned to work and London.
An illness like mine rejuvenates one – for the time being! A pony and jingle from the old ‘Fox and Hounds Inn’ took me to the Station, and I enjoyed the feel of the wheels rolling beneath me over the hard road. In the train, I looked out of the window as interested as any schoolboy. On the Underground I was delighted with the smooth, quiet way with which the ‘Metro’ trains glide into the Station. I had quite forgotten this. Then, when my hand began to get better, I rediscovered the pleasures of penmanship and kept on writing, with my tongue out. And I re-enjoyed the child’s satisfaction in coaxing a button to slip into its hole: all grown-up people have forgotten how difficult and complex such operations are.
This morning how desirable everything seemed to me! The world intoxicated me. Moving again among so many human beings gave me the crowd-fever, and started again all the pangs of the old familiar hunger for a fuller life, that centrifugal élan in which I feared for the disruption and scattering of my parts in all directions. Temporarily I lost the hegemony of my own soul. Every man and woman I met was my enemy, threatening me with the secession of some inward part. I was alarmed to discover how many women I could passionately love and with how many men I could form a lasting friendship. Within, all was anarchy and commotion, a cold fright seized me lest some extraordinary event was about to happen: some general histolysis of my body, some sudden disintegration of my personality, some madness, some strange death … I wanted to crush out the life of all these men and women in a great Bear’s hug, my God! this sea of human faces whom I can never recognise, all of us alive together beneath this yellow catafalque of fog on the morning of the announcement of world famine and world war! …
To-night, I have lost this paroxysm. For I am home again by the fireside. All the multitude has disappeared from my view. I have lost them, every one. I have lost another day of my life and so have they, and we have lost each other. Meanwhile the great world spins on unrelentingly, frittering away lightly my precious hours (surely a small stock now?) while I sit discomfited by the evening fire and nurse my scraped hands that tingle because the spinning world has wrenched itself out of my feeble grasp.
February 3.
This morning on arriving at S. Kensington, went straight to a Chemist’s shop, but finding someone inside, I drew back, and went on to another.
‘Have you any morphia tabloids?’ I asked a curly-haired, nice-looking, smiling youth, who leaned with both hands on the counter and looked at me knowingly, as if he had had unlimited experience of would-be morphinomaniacs.
‘Yes, plenty of them,’ he said, fencing. And then waited.
‘Can you supply me?’ I asked, feeling very conscious of myself.
He smiled once more, shook his head and said it was contrary to the Defence of the Realm Act.
I made a sorry effort to appear ingenuous, and he said:
‘Of course, it is only a palliative.’
With a solemn countenance intended to indicate pain I answered:
‘Yes, but palliatives are very necessary sometimes’, and I walked out of the hateful shop discomfited.
February 6.
Am busy re-writing,fn9 editing and bowdlerising my journals for publication against the time when I shall have gone the way of all flesh. No one else would prepare it for publication if I don’t. Reading it through again, I see what a remarkable book I have written. If only they will publish it!
February 7.
Chinese Lanterns
The other morning as I dressed, I could see the sun like a large yellow moon rising on a world, stiff, stark, its contours merely indicated beneath a winding-sheet of snow. Further around the horizon was another moon – the full moon itself – yellow likewise, but setting. It was the strangest picture I ever saw. I might well have been upon another planet; I could not have been more surprised even at a whole ring of yellow satellites arranged at regular intervals all around the horizon.
In the evening of the same day, I drove home from the Station in a little governess-cart, over a snow-clogged road. The cautious little pony picked out her way so carefully in little strides – pat-pat-pat – wherever it was slippery, and the Landlord of the Inn sat opposite me extolling all the clever little creature’s merits. It was dusk, and for some reason of the atmosphere the scraps of cloud appeared as blue sky and the blue sky as cloud, beneath which the full moon like a great Chinese lantern hung suspended so low down it seemed to touch the trees and hills. How have folk been able to ‘carry on’ in a world so utterly strange as this one during the past few days! I marvel that beneath such moons and suns, the peoples of the world have not ceased for a while from the petty business of war during at least a few of our dancing revolutions around this furnace of a star. One of these days I should not be surprised if this fascinated earth did not fall into it like a moth into a candle. And where would our Great War be then?
February 28.
The Strangeness of my Life
Consider the War: and the current adventures of millions of men on land, sea and air; and the incessant labours of millions of men in factory and workshop and in the field; think of the hospitals and all they hold, of everyone hoping, fearing, suffering, waiting – of the concentration of all humanity on the one subject – the War. And then think of me, poor little me, deserted and forgotten, a tiny fragment sunk so deep and helplessly between the sheer granite walls of my environment that scarce an echo reaches me of the thunder among the mountains above. I read about the War in a ha’penny paper, and see it in the pictures of the Daily Mirror. For the rest, I live by counting the joints on insects’ legs and even that much effort is almost beyond my strength.
That is strange enough. But my life is stranger still by comparison. And this is the marvel: that every day I spend by the waters of Babylon, weeping and neglected among enthusiasts, enthusiastically counting joints, while every evening I return to Zion to my books, to Hardy’s poems, to Maurice de Guérin’s Journals, to my own memoirs. Mine is a life of consummate isolation, and I frequently marvel at it.
The men I meet accept me as an entomologist and ipso facto, an enthusiast in the science. That is all they know of me, and all they want to know of me, or of any man. Surely no man’s existence was ever quite such a duplicity as mine. I smile bitterly to myself ten times a day, as I engage in all the dreary technical jargon of professional talk with them. How they would gossip over the facts of my life if they knew! How scandalised they would be over my inner life’s activities, how resentful of enthusiasm other than entomological!
I find it very irksome to keep up this farce of concealment. I would love to declare myself. I loathe, hate and detest the secrecy of my real self: the continuous restraint enforced on me ulcerates my heart and makes harmonious social existence impossible with those who do not know me thoroughly. ‘On dit qu’au jugement dernier le secret des consciences sera révélé à tout l’univers; je voudrais qu’il en fût ainsi de moi dès aujourd’hui et que la vue de mon âme fût ouvert à tous venants.’ Maurice de Guérin.
March 1.
It is curious for me to look at my tubes and microscope and realise that I shall never require them again for serious use. Life is a dreadful burden to me at the Museum. I am too ill for any scientific work so I write labels and put things away. I am simply marking time on the edge of a precipice awaiting the order, ‘Forward.’
It is excoriating to be thus wasting the last few precious days of my life in such mummery merely to get bread to eat. They might at least let me die in peace, and with fitting decorum. It is so ignoble to be tinkering about in a Museum among Scarabees and insects when I ought to be reflecting on life and death.
I ask myself what ought to be my most appropriate reaction in such circumstances as the present? Why, of course, to carry on as if all were normal, and the future unknown: why, so I do, to outward view, for the sake of the others. Yet that is no
reason why in my own inward parts I should not at times indulge in a little relaxation. It is a relief to put off the mailed coat, to sit awhile by the green-room fire and have life as it really is, all to myself. But the necessity of living will not let me alone. I must be always mumming.
My life has been all isolation and restriction. And it now appears even my death is to be hedged around with prohibitions. Drugs for example – how beneficent a little laudanum at times in a case like mine! and how happy I could be if I knew that in my waistcoat pocket I carried a kindly, easy means of shuffling off this coil when the time comes as come it must. It horrifies me to consider how I might break the life of E— clean in two, and sap her courage by a lingering, dawdling dying. But there is the Defence of the Realm Act. It is a case of a Scorpion in a ring of fire but without any sting in its tail.
March 2.
I ask myself: what are my views on death, the next world, God? I look into my mind and discover I am too much of a mannikin to have any. As for death, I am a little bit of trembling jelly of anticipation. I am prepared for anything, but I am the complete agnostic; I simply don’t know. To have views, faith, beliefs, one needs a backbone. This great bully of a universe overwhelms me. The stars make me cower. I am intimidated by the immensity surrounding my own littleness. It is futile and presumptuous for me to opine anything about the next world. But I hope for something much freer and more satisfying after death, for emancipation of the spirit and above all for the obliteration of this puny self, this little, skulking, sharp-witted ferret.
A Potted Novel
(1)
He was an imaginative youth, and she a tragedy queen. So he fell in love with her because she was melancholy and her past tragic. ‘She is capable of tragedy, too,’ he said, which was a high encomium.
But he was also an ambitious youth and all for dalliance in love. ‘Marriage,’ said he sententiously, ‘is an economic trap.’ And then, a little wistfully: ‘If she were a bit more melancholy and a bit more beautiful she would be quite irresistible.’
(2)
But he was a miserable youth, too, and in the anguish of loneliness and lovelessness a home tempted him sorely. Still, he dallied. She waited. Ill-health after all made marriage impossible.
(3)
Yet love and misery drove him towards it. So one day he closed his eyes and offered himself up with sacrificial hands … ‘Too late,’ she said. ‘Once perhaps … but now …’ His eyes opened again, and in a second Love entered his Temple once more and finally ejected the money changers.
(4)
So they married after all, and he was under the impression she had made a good match. He had ill-health perhaps, yet who could doubt his ultimate fame?
Then the War came, and he had the hardihood to open a sealed letter from his Doctor to the M.O. examining recruits … Stars and staggers!! So it was she who was the victim in marriage! That harassing question: Did she know? What an ass he had been all through, what superlative egoism and superlative conceit!
(5)
Then a baby came. He broke under the strain and daily the symptoms grew more obvious. Did she know? … The question dazed him.
Well, she did know, and had married him for love, nevertheless, against every friendly counsel, the Doctor’s included.
(6)
And now the invalid’s gratitude is almost cringing, his admiration boundless and his love for always. It is the perfect rapprochement between two souls, one that was honeycombed with self-love and lost in the labyrinthine ways of his own motives and the other straight, direct, almost imperious in love and altogether adorable.
Finis
March 5.
At home ill again. Yesterday was a day of utter dreariness. All my nerves were frozen, my heart congealed. I had no love for anyone … no emotion of any sort. It was a catalepsy of the spirit harder to bear than fever or pain … To-day, life is once more stirring in me, I am slowly awaking to the consciousness of acute but almost welcome misery.
March 6.
An affectionate letter from H— that warmed the cockles of my heart – poor frozen molluscs. A— has written only once since August.
March 7.
I am, I suppose, a whey-faced, lily-livered creature … yet even an infantry subaltern has a chance …
My dear friend — — has died and a Memorial Exhibition of his pictures is being held at the Goupil Gallery. The most fascinating man I ever met. I was attracted by him almost as one is attracted by a charming woman: by little ways, by laughing eyes, by the manner of speech. And now he is dead, of a lingering and painful disease.
March 8.
Death
Have been reading Sir Oliver Lodge’s Raymond. I do not deny that I am curious about the next world, or about the condition of death. I am and always have been. In my early youth, I reflected continually on death and hated it bitterly. But now that my end is near and certain, I consider it less and am content to wait and see. As, for all practical purposes, I have done with life, and my own existence is often a burden to me and is like to become a burden also to others, I wish I possessed the wherewithal to end it at my will. With two or three tabloids in my waistcoat pocket, and my secret locked in my heart, how serenely I would move about among my friends and fellows, conscious that at some specially selected moment – at midnight or high noon – just when the spirit moved me, I could quietly slip out to sea on this Great Adventure. It would be well to be able to control this: the time, the place, and the manner of one’s exit. For what disturbs me in particular is how I shall conduct myself; I am afraid lest I become afraid, it is a fear of fear. By means of my tabloids, I could arrange my death in an artistic setting, say underneath a big tree on a summer’s day, with an open Homer in my hand, or more appropriately, a magnifying glass and Miall and Denny’s Cockroach. It would be stage-managing my own demise and surely the last thing in self-conscious elegance!
I think it was De Quincey who said Death to him seemed most awful in the summer. On the contrary the earth is warm then, and would welcome my old bones. It is on a cold night by the winter fire that the churchyard seems to me the least inviting: especially horrible it is the first evening after the funeral.
March 10.
Have had a relapse. My hand I fear is going. Food prices are leaping up. Woe to the unfit and the old and the poor in these coming days! We shall soon have nothing left in our pantries, and a piece of Wrigley’s chewing gum will be our only comfort.
When I come to quit this world I scarcely know which will be the greater regret: the people I have never met, or the places I have never seen. In the world of books, I rest fairly content: I have read my fair share.
To-day I read down the column of to-morrow’s preachers with the most ludicrous avidity, ticking off the Churches I have visited: St Paul’s and the Abbey, the Ethical Church in Bayswater and Westminster Cathedral. But the Unitarians, the Christadelphians, the Theosophists, the Church of Christ Scientist, the Buddhist Society, the Brompton Oratory, the Church of Humanity, the New Life Centre; all these adventures I intended one day to make … It is not much fun ticking off things you have done from a list if you have done very little. I get more satisfaction out of a list of books. But Iona and the Hebrides, Edinburgh, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Spitzbergen (when the flowers are out), the Niagara Falls (by moonlight), the Grindelwald, Cairo – these names make me growl and occasionally yelp like a hurt puppy, although to outward view I am sitting in an armchair blowing smoke-rings.
March 11.
The Graph of Temperament
In this Journal, my pen is a delicate needle point, tracing out a graph of temperament so as to show its daily fluctuations: grave and gay, up and down, lamentation and revelry, self-love and self-disgust. You get here all my thoughts and opinions, always irresponsible and often contradictory or mutually exclusive, all my moods and vapours, all the varying reactions to environment of this jelly which is I.
I snap at any idea that comes floating down, particularly if it
is gaudy or quixotic, no matter if it is wholly incompatible with what I said the day before. People unpleasantly refer me back, and to escape I have to invent some sophistry. I unconsciously imitate the mannerisms of folk I am particularly taken with. Other people never fail to tell me of my simulations. If I read a book and like it very much, by a process of peaceful penetration the author takes possession of my whole personality just as if I were a medium giving a sitting, and for some time subsequently his ideas come spurting up like a fountain making a pretty display which I take to be my own. Other people say of me, ‘Oh! I expect he read it in a book.’
I am something between a Monkey, a Chameleon, and a Jellyfish. To any bully with an intellect like a blunderbuss, I have always timidly held up my hands and afterwards gnashed my teeth for my cowardice. In conversation with men of alien sentiment I am self-effacing to my intense chagrin, often from mere shyness. I say, ‘Yes … yes … yes’, to nausea, when it ought to be ‘No … no … no.’ I become my own renegade, an amiable dissembler, an ass in short. It is a torture to have a sprightly mind blanketed by personal timidity and a feeble presence. The humiliating thing is that almost any strong character hypnotises me into complacency, especially if he is a stranger; I find myself for the time being in really sincere agreement with him, and only later, discover to myself his abominable doctrines. Then I lie in bed and have imaginary conversations in which I get my own back.
The Journal of a Disappointed Man Page 29