B.: ‘Four.’
N.: ‘Yes. Now Charlie used to show me partridges’ nests with as many as twenty-four.’
B.: ‘Yes, but laid probably by more than one hen.’
N.: ‘Charlie said it was all one bird. The prettiest nest he ever showed me was a greenfinch’s.’
B.: ‘What was that like?’
N.: ‘It was swung underneath the bough of a fir-tree right at the end.’
B.: ‘That was not a greenfinch’s.’
N.: ‘Well, Charlie said it was, and he showed it to all of us; we all saw it.’
B.: ‘It was the nest of a goldcrest.’
N.: ‘Yes? Charlie had a wonderful collection of eggs. He could name them all, and labelled the names on them. They would cover the table when all set out.’
B.: ‘Yes?’
N.: ‘Oh, I forgot, another nest he showed me – a kingfisher’s.’
B.: ‘What was that like?’
N.: ‘It was right down among some reeds of a stream.’
B.: ‘What were the eggs like?’
N.: ‘There were no eggs in it when I saw it. Another pretty—’
B.: ‘That was not a kingfisher’s nest. A kingfisher nests at the end of a hole in the bank of the stream.’
N.: ‘Charlie said it was. Another pretty nest was the robin’s.’
B.: ‘The prettiest nest of all, I think, is the long-tailed tit’s.’
N.: ‘Oh, yes, I know that.’
B.: ‘What’s it like?’
N.: ‘I can’t recollect.’
B.: ‘All arched over with sticks and lined with green leaves?’
N.: ‘Oh, yes.’
I suspect ‘Charlie’ (whoever he was) could not tell a hawk from a handsaw, even when the wind was southerly. Now what a stupid old woman not to make better use of me!
January 23.
Have been sustaining a hell of tedium by reading a sloppy novel – sentimental mucilage – called Conrad in Quest of His Youth, which sent me in quest of mine. I see now that my youth was over before I came to London. For never after did I experience such electric tremors of joy and fear as, e.g., over —. As a small boy I knew her, and always lifted my hat. But one day at the age of sixteen, with a heart like nascent oxygen (though I did not know it), I lifted my hat and, in response to her smile, fell violently in love. During country rambles I liked to pause and carve her initials on the bark of a tree. It pleased me to confide my burning secret to the birds and wild things. I knew it was safe in their keeping. And I always hoped she might come along one day and see the letters there, and feel curiosity, yet she couldn’t find out … I daresay they are still legible in places, some of them of exquisite rural beauty; though the letters themselves probably now look obscured and distorted by the evergrowing bark, the trees and locality doubtless are still as beautiful:
‘Upon a poet’s page I wrote
Of old two letters of her name;
Part seemed she of the effulgent thought
Whence that high singer’s rapture came.
When now I turn the leaf the same
Immortal light illumes the lay,
But from the letters of her name
The radiance has waned away.’
For a whole year I was in agony, meeting her constantly in the town, but never daring to stop and speak. I used to return home after a short cap-lifting encounter with an intolerable ache that I did not understand. Even in subsequent miseries I do not believe I suffered mental pain equal to this in acuteness. I used to lift my cap to her in the High Street, then dart down a side-street and around, so as to meet her again, and every time I met her came a raging stormy conflict between fear and desire. I wanted to stop – my heart always failed me. How I cursed myself for a poltroon the very next moment!
I always haunted all the localities – park, concerts, skating-rink – where I thought to see her. In church on Sundays I became electrified if she was there. One afternoon at a concert in company with my sister, I determined on a bold measure: I left before it was over – saw my sister home, and at once darted back to the hall and met my paragon coming out. She was with her friend (how I hated her!) and her friend’s mother (how I feared her!). I was seventeen, she was seventeen, and of ravishing, virginal beauty. I spoke. I said (obviously): ‘How did you enjoy the concert?’
While the other two walked on, she replied ‘Very much.’ That was all. I could think of nothing more, so I left her, and she rejoined her friends. It had been a terrible nervous strain to me. At the crucial second my nose twitched and I felt my face contorted. But I walked home on air and my soul sang like a bird. It was the beautiful rhapsody of a boy. There was nothing carnal in it. Indeed, the poor girl was idealised aloft into something scarcely human. But that at the moment of speaking to her I was in the power of an unprecedented emotion is obvious if I write that neither before nor after has anything ever caused facial twitching. It is evidence of my ardour and youth.
Our acquaintance remained tenuous for long. I was shy and inexperienced. I was too shy to write. I heard rumours that she was staying by the sea, so I went down and wandered about to try to see her. In vain. I went down another day, and it began to pour with rain. So I spent all my time sheltering under doorways and shop awnings, cursing my luck, and groaning at the waste of my precious time. ‘There was a large halibut on a fishmonger’s stall,’ I posted in my diary, ‘but not caught, I think, off this coast.’ Then follows abruptly:
‘A daughter of the gods she walked,
Divinely tall, and most divinely fair.’
I bought a local paper in the High Street, and, examining the ‘Visitors’ List’, I went through hundreds of names, and at the end saw ‘The most recent arrivals will be found here.’ I turned to here and found nothing there. I complained to the manager. ‘Ah, yes, I know, an unfortunate oversight, sir. If you will leave your name and address, I will see it appears in next week’s issue.’ I felt silly, and slunk off, saying: ‘Oh, never mind. I don’t care much about it.’
‘It is the more worrying to me because I know –
(1) It is wasting good time.
(2) A common occurrence to others, and they all get over it.
(3) There is no comfort in study or reading. Knowledge is dull and dry. Poetry seems to me to be more attractive.’
Then immediately follows a description of a ring snake with notes on its anatomy. Then a few days later: ‘Have not seen my beloved all the week. Where on earth has she been hiding herself?’ And again: ‘I cannot hope ever to see more wonderful eyes – of the richest, sweetest brown-amber, soft, yet bright.’ At length we became friends, wrote letters to one another (her first one was an event), and went for walks.
Of course, the next stage was kissing her. It took me over another twelve months to kiss her. I must have been close on nineteen. We had been walking in the woods all the afternoon, then had tea in the garden tea-rooms. We sat in the green arbour till after dark. I was in a terrible state. Restlessness and fever were exhausting me. Desire struggled with pride. What if she smacked my face? Then I lit a cigarette for her (I used to buy her little heliotrope boxes of cigarettes labelled in gold ‘My Darling’). Greatly daring, I put my left arm round her neck, and holding the matchbox, struck a light and kissed her at the same moment. She said, ‘I ought not to let you really’, quite calm. I was in too much of a turmoil to answer, but kissed her again.
I kissed her many times after that. One wet afternoon we had spent kissing in a linhay by a country lane. Coming home, we met her sister’s baby, and she stopped to lean over the pram, and crow. This irritated me, and I strolled on. ‘Do you like babies?’ I asked when she came up. ‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘do you?’ ‘Not much,’ said I with dryness, and changed what I felt to be almost an indelicate subject. After all, a baby is only a kiss carried to a rational conclusion, in natural sequence, sometimes arithmetical, sometimes geometrical. It depends on the length of the engagement.
But it was curious how this ki
ssing destroyed my ideal. I soon knew I was not in love. With callous self-possession I was investigating a new sensation, and found it very enjoyable. ‘I kiss you,’ I said to her one night in the park, ‘but you never kiss me.’ She at once gave me a passionate token on my lips, and having exacted thus much tribute, I sank into complacency, self-adulation, and, ultimately, indifference. I had been surcharged. The relief was too complete. After exchanging impassioned verses (oh, such tosh!), each other’s photographs, and plenty of letters, my romance died a natural death. My agony and sweat became a trifle, and one I wished to blot from my memory out of boyish sense of shame.
Doubtless I broke her heart. She had left the town, when one morning I received a last pathetic appeal. I remember now the nausea that love-letter caused me. I put it on the fire, and thought, ‘Heavens what a fool the girl is!’ In 1913 I met her again, and had the effrontery to go to her home and have dinner with her people. (See May 31st and June 3rd, 1913.)
Now, in my old age, I like to gaze back on this flashing gem of youth. It still reflects the light, and she is a princess again. ‘Love in the Valley’ becomes a personal memory instead of someone else’s poem.
Ah! what a heart I had in those days! a nascent oxygen with an affinity for every pretty girl who smiled at me. I fell in love with a post-office girl, a silversmith’s daughter, a grocer’s daughter, the daughter of a judge. For months I worshipped —, and bought every kind of photograph of her. But I’ve never seen her in my life, and now she’s Dead Sea fruit. I had never set eyes on any beautiful women until I came to London. Then I was dazzled by them all – in every rank or station, in the street or on the street, in the Café de l’Europe or the Café Royal – pretty, laughing girls, handsome women, or beautiful pieces of mere flesh only … I was doomed to destruction from the first. If I had not developed disease, if I had come up from the country a healthy, lusty youth, I must soon have got on the rocks. Now that the blood is slow, it is difficult to recall the anguish. That I only succumbed twice is a marvel to me and a joy. My situation at one time was fraught with dire possibilities. My secret life was a tumult. I never went skylarking with jaunty pals in the West End. I crept along the streets alone … all this time I was alone, in dirty diggings, by myself. I am consumed with self-pity at the thought.
I cannot understand how saints like Augustine and Tolstoi confess how they went with women in their youth, but recall no sense of nausea. They just deplore their moral lapse. When St Augustine’s mother enjoined him never to lie with his neighbour’s wife, he laughed at the advice as womanish!
For myself, I never received any parental instruction. I first learned of the wonder of generation through the dirty filter of a barmaid’s nasty mind.
I remember — telling me in sardonic vein that the only advice his father ever gave him on leaving home was to keep his bowels open. The present generation has altered all that.
Birds’ eggs were another electrifying factor in my youth. I can remember tramping to and fro all one warm June afternoon over a bracken-covered sandy waste, searching for a nightjar’s eggs. H— and I quartered out the ground systematically, till presently, after two hours’ search, the hen goat-sucker flipped up at my feet and fluttered away like a big moth across the silvery bracken out of sight. Lying before me on the ground were two long, grey eggs, marbled like pebbles. I turned away from this intoxicating vision, flicking my fingers as if I had been bitten. Then I turned, approached slowly, and gloated.
It was just such an effect on me as a girl’s beautiful face used to make – equally tantalising and out of reach. I stared, fingered them, put one to my lips. Then it was over. I had to leave them, and an equal thrill at goat-suckers’ eggs could never return again.
January 24.
The Cottage on the Shore
It was as mysterious as Stevenson’s Pavilion on the Links. For a long time I never noticed any indication of its being inhabited, save a few chickens at the back which no one seemed to feed. I could see it from miles around, as it was situated in a desolate, treeless waste, thousands of acres of marshes and duckponds (known as the Mires) on the one side, and on the other a wilderness of sandy links and sandhills swarming with rabbits (known as the Burrows). Immediately in front, the waters of a broad tidal estuary came up almost to the door during spring tides. The nearest human habitation was the lighthouse, a mile away round the corner on the sands near the harbour bar. In my rambles in search of bird or beast, I used occasionally, while eating sandwiches at midday on a sandhill top, to turn my field-glasses on the cottage idly. For long I saw no one. Then one spring, while thousands of lapwings circled above my head, calling indignantly at me ‘Little boo-oy’, and larks dotted the blue sky everywhere in little white-hot needle-points of song, I saw a tiny man – a manikin – come out of this tiny cottage – a doll’s house – and throw some corn to the chickens. He was three miles away, and by the time that I arrived at the cottage, the little man had disappeared. It was a little four-roomed cottage, with no path leading up to it, no garden, no enclosure, only a few hardy shrubs to keep the sandy soil from drifting. For a long time I never saw him again, and began to think he had been an hallucination. But the desolate cottage was still there and the chickens were still alive, so they must have been fed. Then one day I ran up against him on the Mires, and we exchanged greetings. He was a round, tubby, short man with a stubble of beard. Devon folk would have called him bungy, stuggy. His face bore a ludicrous resemblance to the monkey in the ‘Monkey Brand’ advertisement, only fatter and rounder. We discussed birds (he was the gamekeeper) and became fast friends. He would take me the round of his duckponds, and sometimes he sent me a postcard when there were wild swans or geese ‘in over’, or when he had discovered a ‘stranger’ on his water.
But this did not dispel the mystery of the cottage. For he had a woman inside whose presence was never suspected until I had occasion to knock at the door. There was no answer and no sound. All the windows were shut. I knocked again, and heard a distant noise. Then there were long, preparatory noises, as if someone were climbing up from an underground cellar or cave, or wandering down a long, dark passage. Bolts were drawn (and powerful enough they sounded to make fast a portcullis), and I watched the door opening with curiosity; a tall, fat, middle-aged woman stood there blinking at me like an owl unaccustomed to daylight. Her eyes were weak blue, and her face puffy and red.
‘Oh! is Fedder about?’ I enquired.
Without changing a muscle of her face, she replied mechanically:
‘No, but Fedder said if the young gentleman called, I was to say that the shovellers brought off their brood all right.’
I thanked her and departed, as she was obviously embarrassed. In her moping countenance I detected a startled look – Robinson Crusoe, as it were, discovering Friday all at once without any advertising Friday. I heard her bolting the door again, as I strolled off down by the waterside to examine the tide-wrack. It was almost eerie to hear the cackle of herring gulls overhead. They seemed to be laughing at the stupidity of human nature.
There are some things the imagination boggles at. For example, what did that woman in that desolate cottage do? What did she think about? What were her wants, her grievances? Where were her relatives? Did she ever love, or want little babies? Did murder stories interest her at all? Drugs? That is an easy explanation – to jump at some horrible vice. Theatrical. In reality I should have found, I expect, the answer would be just nothing at all. She did nothing, thought nothing, perhaps only feared a little, so she always bolted the door and hid herself away. I suppose if one saw nothing bigger than a kingplover or a seagull during the twelve months, and heard no noises other than the trumpet of wild swans and the cries of Fedder’s wild fowl, a tall man six feet high, with a voice like a human being’s, must seem a little disconcerting.
January 26.
Here is some arithmetic which ought to please me. But it doesn’t. I wrote:
12 papers in the Zoologist in the years 1905–
1910; 6 in the P.Z.S. (1912–1916); 7 in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History (1912–1916); 3 in Bulletin of Entomological Research; 2 B.M. pamphlets, in addition to 18 literary efforts (some in newspapers and some not published), and other old scientific papers in different periodicals such as British Birds, the Journal of Animal Behaviour, etc. In all 65 publications.
Further, in my locker lie:
6 unpublished literary MSS.
17 volumes of Journal post quarto, pre-war 1s. thickness.
12 smaller volumes written in boyhood.
6 volumes (post quarto 1s.) of abstracted entries from the Journal.
2½ post quarto volumes of abstract, abstracted from the volumes of abstract for publication purposes.
In vulgar parlance, cacoëthes scribendi.
January 27.
Have you ever considered what a fever of anticipation must be raging in me as I sit by the fire, day after day, awaiting the constantly delayed publication of this my Journal; how I strain to hold it, to smell the fresh ink, to hear the binding crackle as I open it out, and above all to read what one of the foremost literary men thinks about me and my book.
I wait with head on the block for my child to be brought to receive my farewell blessings.
Will it come in time? I nearly died last month of ’flu, and get worse almost daily. I am running a neck-and-neck race up the straight with my evil genius on the black horse. It is touch and go who wins; and if I do, I expect some horrible forfeit will be exacted of me, a penalty will have to be paid – lèse-majesté – for my audacity in challenging the stars in their courses and defeating them.
My life has certainly been an astonishing episode in human story. To me, it appears as a titanic struggle between consuming ambition and adverse fortune. Behold a penniless youth thirsting for knowledge introduced into the world out of sheer devilment, hundreds of miles from a university, with a towering ambition, but cursed with ill-health and a twofold nature – pleasure-loving as well as labour-loving. The continuous, almost cunning frustration of my endeavours long ago gave me a sense of struggle with some evil genius. Think of the elaborate precautions I took of my MSS. during the air-raids! I saw each bomb labelled ‘Barbellion’s contemptible ambition’. Consider the duplication of abstracts – I saw an army of housemaids prowling round to throw them on the fire after Carlyle’s French Revolution. I have been consciously contesting with an incendiary, a bomber from Hunland, a wicked housemaid, a whole world of wicked folk, in league with a hostile spirit decided on killing and obliterating me and my ambition – a grotesque couple, a monkey astride a hippogriff, an ass with a Jabberwock! True, he has ruined me; yet the struggle is not over. With demoniac determination, I am getting on still, crawling on all fours, with the dagger between my teeth. I am mauled, battered, scorched, but not slain. The dagger I hope to see published by Messrs. Chatto and Windus next month.
The Journal of a Disappointed Man Page 34