Kitabı oku: «The Journal of a Disappointed Man»

INTRODUCTION

By H.G. WELLS

Your egoist, like the solitary beasts, lives only for himself; your altruist declares that he lives only for others; for either there may be success or failure but for neither can there be tragedy. For even if the altruist meets nothing but ingratitude, what has he to complain of? His premises abolish his grounds of complaint. But both egoist and altruist are philosophical abstractions. The human being by nature and necessity is neither egoist nor altruist; he trims a difficult course between the two; for the most part we are, within the limits of our powers of expression, egotists, and our desire is to think and if possible talk and write about this marvellous experiment of ourselves, with all the world – or as much as we can conveniently assemble – for audience. There is variety in our styles. Some drape the central figure; some let it rather appear than call attention to it; some affect a needless frankness: "I am an egotist, mind you, and I pretend nothing else"; some by adopting a pose with accessories do at least develop so great and passionate an interest in the accessories as to generalise and escape more or less completely from self. An egotism like an eggshell is a thing from which to escape; the art of life is that escape. The fundamental art of life is to recover the sense of that great self-forgetful continuous life from which we have individually budded off. Many people have done this through religion, which begins with a tremendous clamour to some saviour god or other to recognise us and ends in our recognition of him; or through science, when your egotist begins with: "Behold me! I, I your humble servant, am a scientific man, devoted to the clear statement of truth," and ends with so passionate a statement of truth that self is forgotten altogether.

In this diary of an intensely egotistical young naturalist, tragically caught by the creeping approach of death, we have one of the most moving records of the youthful aspects of our universal struggle. We begin with one of those bright schoolboys that most of us like to fancy we once were, that many of us have come to love as sons or nephews or younger brothers, and this youngster is attracted by natural science, by the employments of the naturalist and by the thought of being himself some day a naturalist. From the very beginning we find in this diary the three qualities, from the narrowest to broadest. "Observe me," he says to himself, "I am observing nature." There is the self-conscious, self-centred boy. But he also says "I am observing nature!" And at moments comes the clear light. He forgets himself in the twilight cave with the bats or watching the starlings in the evening sky, he becomes just you and I and the mind of mankind gathering knowledge. And the diary, as the keen edge of untimely fate cuts down into the sensitive tissue, shows us presently, after outcries and sorrow and darkness of spirit, the habits of the observer rising to the occasion. Not for him, he realises, are the long life, the honours of science, the Croonian lecture, the listening Royal Society, one's memory embalmed in specific or generic names, the sure place in the temple of fame, that once filled his boyish dreams. But here is something close at hand to go on observing manfully to the end, in which self may be forgotten, and that is his own tormented self, with desire still great and power and hope receding. "I will go on with this diary," I read between the lines. "You shall have at least one specimen, carefully displayed and labelled. Here is a recorded unhappiness. When you talk about life and the rewards of life and the justice of life and its penalties, what you say must square with this."

Such is what we have here. It will be going beyond the necessities of this preface to expatiate upon a certain thread of unpremeditated and exquisite beauty that runs through the story this diary tells. To all sensitive readers it will be plain enough, and those who cannot see it plain do not deserve to have it underlined for them, that, still unseeing, they may pretend to see. Nor need we dilate upon the development of the quality of this diary from the rather fussy egotism of the earlier half. But it may be well to add a few explanatory facts that the opening chapters rather take for granted. Barbellion began life at a material as well as a physical disadvantage; neither of his parents were sturdy people, his mother died at last of constitutional heart weakness, and his father belonged to that most unfortunate class, the poor educated, who live lives of worry in straitened circumstances. Barbellion's father was a newspaper reporter in a west country town, his income rarely exceeded a couple of hundred pounds a year; the educational facilities of the place were poor, and young Barbellion had to get such learning as he could as a day boy at a small private school, his father supplementing this meagre training and presently taking him on as an apprentice reporter. How the passion for natural science arose does not appear in this diary; we already find the naturalist formed in the first schoolboy entries. An uncle, a chemist, seems to have encouraged the tendency, and to have given him textbooks and other help. Somehow at any rate he acquired a considerable amount of knowledge; by the time he was eighteen he was already publishing quite excellent observations of his own in such periodicals as the Zoologist, and by the time he was twenty he could secure an appointment as assistant naturalist to the director of a well-known marine biological station. It was a success, as the reader will learn, gained only to be renounced. His father was ill and he had to stand by his family; our economical country cannot afford to make biologists out of men who can earn a living as hack reporters. Poverty and science are sisters wherever the flag of Britain waves; for how could the rich live if we wasted money on that sort of thing? But the dream was not altogether abandoned, and in 1911 Barbellion got a post, one of the dozen or so of rare and coveted opportunities to toil in a scientific atmosphere that our Empire affords; he secured an assistantship at the Natural History Museum, South Kensington, to which a living wage was attached, a fair equivalent to a reporter's earnings. The rest of the story needs no helping out. Let me only add that since 1911 Barbellion, in spite of his steadily diminishing strength, has published articles in both British and American periodicals, that entirely justify the statement that in him biological science loses one of the most promising of its recent recruits. His scientific work is not only full and exact but it has those literary qualities, the grace, the power of handling, the breadth of reference, which have always distinguished the best English biological work, and which mark off at once the true scientific man from the mere collector and recorder of items. With this much introduction Barbellion may be left to tell the tragedy of his hopes and of the dark, unforeseen, unforeseeable, and inexplicable fate that has overtaken him.

PART I – THE JOURNAL BEGINS WHEN ITS AUTHOR IS A LITTLE OVER 13 YEARS OLD

[The Following are Selected Entries.]

1903

January 3.

Am writing an essay on the life-history of insects and have abandoned the idea of writing on "How Cats Spend their Time."

January 17.

Went with L – out catapult shooting. While walking down the main road saw a Goldfinch, but very indistinctly – it might not have been one. Had some wonderful shots at a tree creeper in the hedge about a foot away from me. While near a stream, L – spotted what he thought to be some Wild Duck and brought one down, hitting it right in the head. He is a splendid shot. We discovered on examining it that it was not Wild Duck at all but an ordinary tame Wild Duck – a hen. We ran away, and to-night L – tells me he saw the Farmer enter the poulterer's shop with the bird in his hand.

January 19.

Went to A – Wood with S – and L – . Saw a Barn Owl (Strix flammea) flying in broad daylight. At A – Woods, be it known, there is a steep cliff where we were all out climbing to inspect and find all the likely places for birds to build in, next spring. S-and I got along all right, but L – , being a bit too careless, let go his hold on a tree and fell headlong down. He turned over and over and seemed to us to pitch on the back of his neck. However, he got up as cheerfully as ever, saying, "I don't like that – a bit of a nasty knock."

February 8.

Joe became the mother of one kitten to-day. It was born at 1.20. It is a tiny little thing. One would almost call it deformed. It is gray.

March 18.

Our Goldfinch roosts at 5.30. Joe's kitten is a very small one. "Magpie" is its name.

March 28.

Went our usual ramble. But we were unfortunate from the very beginning. First, when we reached the "Nightjar Field," we found there were two men at the bottom of it cutting the hedge, so we decided not to venture on, as Gimbo and Bounce were with us, and it would look like poaching. Later on, we came to a splendid wood, but had to withdraw hastily from it, an old farmer giving us a severe chase. There were innumerable rabbits in the wood, so, of course, the dogs barked hard. I gave them a sound beating when we got back out of danger, The old farmer is known as "Bale the Bell-hanger."

April 2.

I was glad yesterday to see the egg season so well in. I shall have to get blow-pipes and egg drills. Spring has really arrived and even the grasshoppers are beginning to stridulate, yet Burke describes these little creatures as being "loud and troublesome" and the chirp unpleasant. Like Samuel Johnson, he must have preferred brick walls to green hedges. Many people go for a walk and yet are unable to admire Nature simply because their power of observation is untrained. Of course some are not suited to the study at all and do not trouble themselves about it. In that case they should not talk of what they do not understand… I might have noticed that I have used the term "Study of Nature." But it cannot be called a study. It is a pastime of sheer delight, with naught but beautiful dreams and lovely thoughts, where we are urged forward by the fact that we are in God's world which He made for us to be our comfort in time of trouble… Language cannot express the joy and happy forgetfulness during a ramble in the country. I do not mean that all the ins and outs and exact knowledge of a naturalist are necessary to produce such delight, but merely the common objects – Sun, Thrush, Grasshopper, Primrose, and Dew.

April 21.

S – and I have made a little hut in the woods out of a large natural hole in the ground by a big tree. We have pulled down branches all around it and stuck in upright sticks as a paling. We are training ivy to grow over the sticks. We smoke "Pioneer" cigarettes here and hide the packets in a hole under the roots of the tree. It's like a sort of cupboard.

August 6.

In the evening, S – and I cycled to S – , and when it was dark we went down on the rocks and lit a fire which crackled and burnt in the dusk of the evening… Intend to do a bit to Beetles these hols. Rev. J. Wood in the B.O.P. has incited me to take them up, and it is really time, for at present I am as ignorant as I can hang together of the Coleoptera.

December 24.

Went out with L – to try to see the squirrels again. We could not find one and were just wondering if we should draw blank when L – noticed one clinging to the bark of a tree with a nut in its mouth. We gave it a good chase, but it escaped into the thickest part of the fir tree, still carrying the nut, and we gave up firing at it. Later on, L – got foolishly mischievous – owing, I suppose, to our lack of sport – and unhinged a gate which he carried two yards into a copse, and threw it on the ground. Just then, he saw the Squirrel again and jumped over the hedge into the copse, chasing it from tree to tree with his catty. Having lost it, he climbed a fir tree into a Squirrel's drey at the top and sat there on the three top, and I, below, was just going to lift the gate back when I looked up and saw a farmer watching me, menacing and silent. I promptly dropped the gate and fled. L – from his Squirrel's drey, not knowing what had happened, called out to me about the nest – that there was nothing in it. The man looked up and asked him who he was and who I was. L – would not say and would not come down. The farmer said he would come up. L – answered that if he did he would "gob" [i. e. spit] on him. Eventually L – climbed down and asked the farmer for a glass of cider. The latter gave him his boot and L – ran away.

1904

January 23.

Went to the meet of the Stag hounds. Saw a hind in the stream at L – with not a horse, hound, or man in sight. It looked quite unconcerned and did not seem to have been hunted. I tried to head it, but a confounded sheep-dog got there before me and drove it off in the wrong direction. I was mad, because if I had succeeded in heading it and had there been a kill, I should have got a slot. Got home at 6.30, after running and walking fifteen miles – tired out.

April 5.

Just read Stalky & Co. Of Stalky, Beetle, and McTurk. I like Beetle best.

April 14.

Won the School Gymnasium championship (under fifteen).

August 25.

Had quite an adventure to-day. D – and I cycled to the Lighthouse at – . On the way, in crossing the sands near the Hospital Ship we espied a lame Curlew which could hardly fly. I gave chase, but it managed to scramble over a gut full of water about two yards wide. D – took off his boots and stockings and carried me over on his back, and we both raced across the sands to where the Curlew lay in an exhausted state. I picked him up and carried him off under my arm, like the boy with the Goose that laid the golden eggs. All the time, the bird screamed loudly, opening its enormously long bill and struggling to escape. Arrived at the gut again, we found that the incoming tide had made the gut wider and deeper so that we were cut off from the mainland, and found it. necessary to wade across at once before it got deeper. As I had to carry a pair of field-glasses as well as my boots and stockings, I handed over the struggling bird to D – . While wading across, I suddenly sank to my waist in a sandpit. This frightened me, and I was glad to reach the other side in safety. But on arrival I found D – , but no Curlew. In wading across the current, he grew flurried and let it go. The tide swept it upstream, and the poor bird, I fear, perished by drowning… Knocked up my friend P – , who is skipper of the ship N– and asked him if he had a fire so that I could dry myself. He replied that they had no fire but that his "missus" would look out a pair of pants for me. Before falling in with this plan unconditionally, I thought it best to inspect the garment. However, it was quite clean – a pair of blue serge seaman's trousers, very baggy in the seat and far too long. But I turned up the bottoms and hid the baggy part underneath my overcoat. So, I got back home!

September 8.

Wet all day. Toothache.

September 9.

Toothache.

September 10.

Toothache.

September 11.

Toothache.

Xmas Day.

Mother and Dad wanted to give me one of G.A. Henty's, but, fearing lest I did not want it, they did not put my name in it, so that if I wished I could change it. Intend doing this. Am reading the Origin of Species. It requires careful study, but I understand it so far and shall go on.

December 26.

I have caught nothing in my traps yet. A little while ago I set a springe and two horse-hair nooses in the reed bed for water rails. I have bought a book on practical trapping.

1905

January 15.

I am thinking that on the whole I am a most discontented mortal. I get fits of what I call "What's the good of anything" mania. I keep asking myself incessantly till the question wears me out: "What's the good of going into the country naturalising? what's the good of studying so hard? where is it going to end? will it lead anywhere?"

February 17.

When I can get hold of any one interested in Natural History I talk away in the most garrulous manner and afterwards feel ashamed of myself for doing it.

May 15.

The Captain, in answer to my letter, advises me to join one of the ordinary professions and then follow up Nat. History as a recreation, or else join Science Classes at S. Kensington, or else by influence get a post in the Natural History Museum. But I shall see.

June 9.

During dinner hour, between morning and afternoon school, went out on the S – B – River Bank, and found another Sedge Warbler's nest. This is the fifth I have found this year. People who live opposite on the T – V – hear them sing at night and think they are Nightingales!

June 27.

On reviewing the past egg-season, I find in all I have discovered 232 nests belonging to forty-four species. I only hope I shall be as successful with the beetle-season.

August 15.

A hot, sultry afternoon, during most of which I was stretched out on the grass beside an upturned stone where a battle royal was fought between Yellow and Black Ants. The victory went to the hardy little Yellows… By the way, I held a Newt by the tail to-day and it emitted a squeak! So that the Newt has a voice after all.

August 26.

In bed with a feverish cold. I am afraid I have very few Nat. His. observations to make. It is hard to observe anything at all when lying in bed in a dull bedroom with one small window. Gulls and Starlings pass, steam engines whistle, horses' feet clatter down the street, and sometimes the voice of a passer-by reaches me, and often the loud laugh that speaks the vacant mind. I can also hear my own cough echoing through my head, and, by the evening, the few pages of Lubbock's Ants, Bees, and Wasps which I struggled to get through during the day rattle through my brain till I am disgusted to find I have them by heart. The clock strikes midnight and I wait for the morning. Oh! what a weary world.

October 13.

Down with another cold. Feeling pretty useless. It's a wonder I don't develop melancholia.

November 6.

By 7 a.m. H – and I were down on the mudflats of the River with field-glasses, watching Waders. Ringed Plover in great numbers.

1906

January 13.

I have always had one ambition to be a great naturalist. That is, I suppose, a child's fancy, and I can see my folly in hoping for such great things. Still, there is no reason why I should not become a learned naturalist if I study hard. I hope that whatever I do I shall do in the hope of increasing knowledge of truth and not for my own fame. This entry may suggest that I am horribly conceited. But really I am as humble as possible. I know I have advanced beyond many others, and I know I shall advance further, but why be conceited?.. What a short life we have, and what heaps of glorious work to be done! Supper bell – so I am off… This reads like Isaac Walton's funny mixtures of the sublime with the ridiculous. He discusses abstract happiness and the best salmon sauce all in one breath.

February 26.

Although it is a grand achievement to have added but one jot or tittle to the sum of human knowledge it is grander still to have added a thought. It is best for a man to try to be both poet and naturalist – not to be too much of a naturalist and so overlook the beauty of things, or too much of a poet and so fail to understand them or even perceive those hidden beauties only revealed by close observation.

March 17.

Woke up this morning covered with spots, chest inflamed, and bad cough. H – carted me down from the Attic to the Lower Bedroom, and when the Dr. came he confirmed the general opinion that I had measles. It is simply disgusting, I have somewhere near 10,000 spots on me.

April 27.

Went to A – Woods, where, strange to say, I again saw Mary. But she had a tribe of friends with her, so did not speak, but watched her from a distance through my field-glasses.

May 8.

On interviewing my old friend Dr. H – , found I had chickenpox. This instead of being a Diary of a Naturalist's observations¹ will be one of infectious diseases.

May 28.

[Letter from Editor of Countryside to my brother saying that if the Countryside grew he might be able to offer me a billet. "Meanwhile he will be able to get along with his pen … he will soon make a living and in time too a name."] This is a bit of all right. I shall always be on the look-out for a job on a N.H. Journal.

December 7.

Went to F – Duckponds. Flocks of Wigeon and Teal on the water. Taking advantage of a dip in the land managed to stalk them splendidly, and for quite a long time I lay among the long grass watching them through my field-glasses. But during the day Wild Duck are not particularly lively or interesting birds. They just rest serenely on the water like floating corks on a sheet of glass. Occasionally one will paddle around lazily. But for the most part they show a great ennui and seem so sleepy and tired that one would almost think to be able to approach and feed them out of the hand. But I moved one hand carelessly and the whole flock was up in a minute and whizzing across the river. Afterwards, at dusk, on returning to the ponds, they had come back; but now that the sun was down, those dozy, flapdoodle creatures of the afternoon were transformed into quacking, quarrelsome, blustering birds that squabbled and chivvied each other, every moment seizing the chance of a luxurious dip, flinging the ice-cold water off their backs with a shake of the tail that seemed to indicate the keenest-edged delight.

It was now quite dark. A Snipe rose at my feet and disappeared into the darkness. Coots and Moorhens clekked, and a Little Grebe grew bold and began to dive and fish quite close to me, methodically working its way upstream and so quartering out its feeding area.

A happy half-hour! Alas! I enjoy these moments the more as they recede. Not often do I realise the living present. That is always difficult. It is the mere shades – the ghosts of the dead days – that are dearest to me.

Spent my last day at school. De Quincey says (or was it Johnson?) that whenever we do anything for the last time, provided we have done it regularly for years before, we are a little melancholy, even though it has been distasteful to us… True.

December 14.

Signed my Death Warrant, i. e., my articles apprenticing me to journalism for five years. By Jove! I shall work frantically during the next five years so as to be ready at the end of them to take up a Natural History appointment.

1907

March 1.

As long as he has good health, a man need never despair. Without good health, I might keep a long while in the race, yet as the goal of my ambition grew more and more unattainable I should surely remember the words of Keats and give up: "There is no fiercer Hell than the failure of a great ambition."

March 14.

Have been reading through the Chemistry Course in the Harmsworth Self-Educator and learning all the latest facts and ideas about radium. I would rather have a clear comprehension of the atom as a solar system than a private income of £100 a year. If only I had eyes to go on reading without a stop!

May 1.

Met an old gentleman in E – , a naturalist with a great contempt for the Book of Genesis. He wanted to know how the Kangaroo leapt from Australia to Palestine and how Noah fed the animals in the Ark. He rejects the Old T. theogony and advised me to read "Darwin and J.G. Wood!" Silly old man!

May 22.

To Challacombe and then walked across Exmoor. This is the first time I have been on Exmoor. My first experience of the Moors came bursting in on me with a flood of ideas, impressions, and delights. I cannot write out the history of to-day. It would take too long and my mind is a palpitating tangle. I have so many things to record that I cannot record one of them. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to draw up an inventory of things seen and heard and trust to my memory to fill in the details when in the future I revert to this date. Too much joy, like too much pain, simply makes me prostrate. It wounds the organism. It is too much. I shall try to forget it all as quickly as possible so as to be able to return to egg-collecting and bird-watching the sooner as a calm and dispassionate observer. Yet these dear old hills. How I love them. I cannot leave them without one friendly word. I wish I were a shepherd!

At the "Ring of Bells" had a long yarn with the landlord, who, as he told us the story of his life, was constantly interrupted but never disconcerted by the exuberant loyalty and devotion of his wife – a stout, florid, creamy woman, who capped every story with: "Ees quite honest, sir; no 'arm at all in old Joshua."

June 5.

A half-an-hour of to-day I spent in a punt under a copper beech out of the pouring rain listening to Lady – 's gamekeeper at A – talk about beasts and local politics – just after a visit of inspection to the Heronry in the firs on the island in the middle of the Lake. It was delightful to hear him describing a Heron killing an Eel with "a dap on the niddick," helping out the figure with a pat on the nape of his thick bull neck.

July 22.

Am reading Huxley's Crayfish. H – brought me in that magnificent aculeate Chrysis ignita.

August 15.

Met her in the market with M – . I just lifted my hat and passed on. She has the most marvellous brown eyes I have ever seen. She is perfectly self-possessed. A bad sign this.

August 18.

When I feel ill, cinema pictures of the circumstances of my death flit across my mind's eye. I cannot prevent them. I consider the nature of the disease and all I said before I died – something heroic, of course!

August 31.

She is a ripping girl. Her eyes are magnificent. I have never seen any one better looking.

October 1.

In the afternoon dissected a Frog, following Milnes Marshall's Book. Am studying Chemistry and attending classes at the Evening School and reading Physiology (Foster's). Am also teaching myself German. I wish I had a microscope.

October 3.

What heaps of things to be done! How short the time to do them in! An appetite for knowledge is apt to rush one off one's feet, like any other appetite if not curbed. I often stand in the centre of the Library here and think despairingly how impossible it is ever to become possessed of all the wealth of facts and ideas contained in the books surrounding me on every hand. I pull out one volume from its place and feel as if I were no more than giving one dig with a pick in an enormous quarry. The Porter spends his days in the Library keeping strict vigil over this catacomb of books, passing along between the shelves and yet never paying heed to the almost audible susurrus of desire – the desire every book has to be taken down and read, to live, to come into being in somebody's mind. He even hands the volumes over the counter, seeks them out in their proper places or returns them there without once realising that a Book is a Person and not a Thing. It makes me shudder to think of Lamb's Essays being carted about as if they were fardels.

October 16.

Dissected an Eel. Cassell's Natural History says the Air-bladder is divided. This is not so in the one I opened. Found what I believe to be the lymphatic heart in the tail beneath the vent.

1908

March 10.

Am working frantically so as to keep up my own work with the daily business of reporting. Shorthand, type-writing, German, Chemistry classes, Electricity lectures, Zoology (including dissections) and field work. Am reading Mosenthal's Muscle and Nerve.

April 7.

Sectioned a leech. H – has lent me a hand microtome and I have borrowed an old razor. My table in the Attic is now fitted up quite like a Laboratory. I get up every morning at 6 a.m. to dissect. Have worked at the Anatomy of Dytiscus, Lumbricus, another Leech, and Petromyzon fluviatilis all collected by myself. The "branchial basket" of Petromyzon interested me vastly. But it's a brute to dissect.²

May 1.

Cycled to the Lighthouse at the mouth of the Estuary. Underneath some telegraph wires, picked up a Landrail in excellent condition. The colour of the wings is a beautiful warm chestnut. While sweeping the sandhills with my field-glasses in search of Ring Plover, which nest there in the shingle beaches, I espied a Shelduck (Tadorna) squatting on a piece of level ground. On walking up cautiously, found it was dead – a Drake in splendid plumage and quite fresh and uninjured. Put him in my poacher's pocket, alongside of the Landrail. My coat looked rather bulgy, for a Shelduck is nearly as big as a Goose. Heard a Grasshopper Warbler – a rare bird in North – . Later, after much patient watching, saw the bird in a bramble bush, creeping about like a mouse.

On the sea-shore picked up a number of Sea Mice (Aphrodite) and bottled them in my jar of 70 per cent., as they will come in useful for dissection. Also found the cranium of a Scyllium, which I will describe later on.

Near the Lighthouse watched some fishermen bring in a large Salmon in a seine net worked from the shore. It was most exciting. Cycled down three miles of hard sand with the wind behind me to the village where I had tea and – as if nothing could stay to-day's good luck – met Margaret – . I showed her one by one all my treasures – Rail, Duck, Skull, Sea Mice, etc., and felt like Thomas Edward, beloved of Samuel Smiles. To her I must have appeared a very ridiculous person.

"How do you know it's the skull of a dog-fish?" she asked, incredulous.

"How do I know anything?" I said, a little piqued.

On arriving home found T – awaiting me with the news that he had discovered a Woodpecker's nest. When will the luck cease? I have never had such a flawless ten hours in le grand air. These summer days eat into my being. The sea has been roaring into my ears and the sun blazing down so that even the backs of my hands are sunburnt. And then: those coal-black eyes. Ah! me, she is pretty.

May 2.

Dissected the Sheldrake. Very entertained to discover the extraordinary asymmetry of the syrinx…

May 3.

Dissected Corncrake, examining carefully the pessulus, bronchidesmus (incomplete), tympani-form and semi-lunar membranes of a very interesting syrinx…

May 6.

Dissected one of the Sea Mice. It has a remarkable series of hepatic ducts running into the alimentary canal as in Nudibranchs…

May 9.

Spring in the Woods

Among the Oak Saplings we seemed enveloped in a cloud of green. The tall green grasses threw up a green light against the young green of the Oaks, and the sun managed to trickle through only here and there. Bevies of swinging bluebells grew in patches among the grass. Overhead in the oaks I heard secret leaf whispers – those little noiseless noises. Birds and trees and flowers were secretive and mysterious like expectant motherhood. All the live things plotted together, having the same big business in hand. Out in the sunlit meadows, there was a different influence abroad. Here everything was gay, lively, irresponsible. The brook prattled like an inconsequential schoolgirl. The Marsh Marigolds in flamboyant yellow sunbonnets played ring-a-ring-a-roses.

An Oak Sapling should make an elderly man avuncular. There are so many tremendous possibilities about a well-behaved young oak that it is tempting to put a hand upon its shoulder and give some seasoned, timberly advice.

June 1.

A Small Red Viper

Went to L – Sessions. After the Court rose, I transcribed my notes quickly and walked out to the famous Valley of Rocks which Southey described as the ribs of the old Earth poking through. At the bottom of one of the hills saw a snake, a Red Viper. Put my boot on him quickly so that he couldn't get away and then recognised him as a specimen of what I consider to be the fourth species of British Serpent —Vipera rubra. The difficulty was to know how to secure him. This species is more ferocious than the ordinary V. bera, and I did not like the idea of putting my hand down to seize him by the neck. I stood for some time with my foot so firmly pressed down on its back that my leg ached and I began to wonder if I had been bitten. I held on and presently hailed a baker's cart coming along the road. The man got out and ran across the grass to where I stood. I showed him what I had beneath my boot and he produced a piece of string which I fastened around the snake's tail and so gently hauled the little brute up. It already appeared moribund, but I squashed its head on the grass with my heel to make certain. After parting with the baker, to whom all thanks be given, I remember that Adders are tenacious of life and so I continue to carry him at string's length and occasionally wallop him against a stone. As he was lifeless I wrapped him in paper and put him in my pocket – though to make assurance doubly sure I left the string on and let its end hang out over my pocket. So home by a two hours' railway journey with the adder in the pocket of my overcoat and the overcoat on the rack over my head. Settled down to the reading of a book on Spinoza's Ethics. At home it proved to be quite alive, and, on being pulled out by the string, coiled up on the drawing-room floor and hissed in a fury, to my infinite surprise. Finished him off with the poker and so spoilt the skin.

July 18.

Have had toothache for a week. Too much of a coward to have it out. Started for P – early in the morning to report Mr. Duke, K.C. After a week's pain, felt a little dicky. All the way in the train kept hardening myself to the task in front of me by recollecting the example of Zola, who killed pain with work. So all day to-day I have endeavoured to act as if I had no pain – the worst of all pains – toothache. By the time I got home I was rather done up, but the pain was actually less. This gave me a furious joy, and, after days of morose silence, to-night at supper I made them all laugh by bursting out violently with, "I don't know whether you know it but I've had a horrible day to-day." I explained at length and received the healing ointment of much sympathy. Went to bed happy with tooth still aching. I fear it was scarcely playing the strict Zolaesque game to divulge the story of my sufferings… No, I am not a martyr or a saint. Just an ordinary devil who's having a rough time.

August 17.

Prawning

Had a glorious time on the rocks at low tide prawning. Caught some Five-Bearded Rocklings and a large Cottus bubalis. The sun did not simply shine to-day – it came rushing down from the sky in a cataract and flooded the sands with light. Sitting on a rock, with prawning net over my knees I looked along three miles of flat hard and yellow sands. The sun poured down on them so heavily that it seemed to raise a luminous golden yellow dust for about three feet high.

On the rocks was a pretty flapper in a pink sunbonnet – also prawning in company of S – , the artist, who has sent her picture to the Royal Academy. They saw I was a naturalist, so my services were secured to pronounce my judgment on a "fish" she had caught. It was a Squid, "an odd little beast," in truth, as she said. "The same class of animal," I volunteered, "as the Cuttlefish and Octopus."

"Does it sting?"

"Oh, no!"

"Well, it ought to with a face like that." She laughed merrily, and the bearded but youthful artist laughed too.

"I don't know anything about these things," he said hopelessly.

"Nor I," said the naturalist modestly. "I study fish."

This was puzzling. "Fish?" What was a Squid then?

… The artist would stop now and then and raise his glasses at a passing ship, and Maud's face occasionally disappeared in the pink sunbonnet as she stooped over a pool to examine a seaweed or crab.

She's a dear – and she gave me the Squid. What a merry little cuss!

September 1.

Went with Uncle to see a Wesleyan minister whose fame as a microscopist, according to Uncle, made it worth my while to visit him. As I expected, he was just a silly old man, a diatomaniac fond of pretty-pretty slides and not a scientific man at all. He lectures Bands of Hope on the Butterfly's Life History and hates his next-door neighbour, who is also a microscopist and incidentally a scientific man, because he interests himself in "parasites and those beastly things."

I remarked that his friend next door had shown me an Amphioxus.

"Oh! I expect that's some beastly bacteria thing," he said petulantly. "I can't understand Wilkinson. He's a pervert."

I told him what Amphioxus was and laughed up my sleeve. He likes to think of Zoology as a series of pretty pictures illustrating beautiful moral truths. The old fellow's saving grace was enthusiasm… Having focused an object for us, he would stand by, breathless, while we squinted down his gas-tube, and gave vent to tremendous expletives of surprise such as "Heavens," or "Jupiter." His eyes would twinkle with delight and straightway another miracle is selected for us to view. "They are all miracles," he said.

"Those are the valves" – washing his hands with invisible soap – "no one has yet been able to solve the problem of the Diatom's valves. No one knows what they are – no, nor ever will know – why? – why can't we see behind the valves? – because God is behind the valves – that is why!" Amen.

October 1.

Telegraphed 1,000 words of Lord – 's speech at T – .

Spent the night at a comfortable country inn and read Moore's lyrics. "Row gently here, my Gondolier," ran through my head continuously. The Inn is an old one with a long narrow passage that leads straight from front door to back with wainscoted smoke room and parlours on each side. China dogs, bran on the floor, and the picture of Derby Day with horses galloping incredibly, the drone of an old crony in the bar, and a pleasant barmy smell. Slept in a remarkable bedroom full of massive furniture, draped with cloth and covered with trinkets. The bed had a tremendous hood over it like a catafalque, and lying in it made me think I was an effigy. Read Moore till the small hours and then found I had left my handbag downstairs. Lit a candle and went on a voyage of discovery. Made a considerable noise, but roused no one. Entered drawing-room, kitchen, pantries, parlour, bar – everywhere looking for my bag and dropping candle grease everywhere! Slept in my day shirt. Tired out and slept like a top.

November 3.

Aristotle's Lantern

Dissected the Sea Urchin (Echinus esculentus). Very excited over my first view of Aristotle's Lantern. These complicated pieces of animal mechanism never smell of musty age – after æons of evolution. When I open a Sea Urchin and see the Lantern, or dissect a Lamprey and cast eyes on the branchial basket, such structures strike me as being as finished and exquisite as if they had just a moment before been tossed me fresh from the hands of the Creator. They are fresh, young, they smell new.

December 3.

Hard at work dissecting a Dogfish. Ruridecanal Conference in the afternoon. I enjoy this double life I lead. It amazes me to be laying bare the brain of a dogfish in the morning and in the afternoon to be taking down in shorthand what the Bishop says on Mission Work.

December4.

Went to the Veterinary Surgeon and begged of him the skull of a horse. Carried the trophy home under my arm – bare to the public view. "Why, Lor', 'tis an ole 'orse's jib," M – said when I got back.

1909

March 7.

My programme of work is: (1) Continue German. (2) Sectioning embryo of (a) Fowl, (b) Newt. (3) Paper on Arterial System of Newts. (4) Psychology of Newts. (5) General Zoological Reading.

May 2.

To C – Hill. Too much taken with the beauty of the Woods to be able to do any nesting. Here are some of the things I saw: the bark on several of the trees in the mazzard orchards rubbed into a beautifully smooth, polished surface by the Red Devon Cows when scratching where it itched; I put my hand on the smooth almost cherry-red patch of bark and felt delighted and grateful that cows had fleas: the young shoots of the whortle-berry plants on the hill were red tipped with the gold of an almost horizontal sun. I caught a little lizard which slipped across my path… Afar off down in the valley I had come through, in a convenient break in a holly bush, I could just see a Cow sitting on her matronly haunches in a field. She flicked her ears and two starlings settled on her back. A Rabbit swept out of a sweet-brier bush, and a Magpie flew out of the hedge on my right.

In another direction I could see a field full of luscious, tall, green grass. Every stalk was so full of sap that had I cut one I am sure it would have bled great green drops. In the field some lambs were sleeping; one woke up and looked at me with the back of its head to the low sun, which shone through its two small ears and gave them a transparent pink appearance.

No sooner am I rebaptized in the sun than I have to be turning home again. No sooner do "the sudden lilies push between the loosening fibres of the heart" than I am whisked back into the old groove – the daily round. If only I had more time! – more time in which to think, to love, to observe, to frame my disposition, to direct as far as in me lies the development and unfolding of my character, if only I could direct all my energies to the great and difficult profession of life, of being man instead of trifling with one profession that bores me and dabbling in another.

June 5.

On Lundy Island

Frankie is blowing Seagulls' eggs in the scullery. His father, after a day's work at the farm, is at his supper very hungry, yet immensely interested, and calls out occasionally, —

"'Ow you're getting on, Foreman?"

"All right, Capt.," says Frankie affectionately, and the unpleasant asthmatic, wheezy noise of the egg-blowing goes on… There are three dogs asleep under the kitchen table; all three belong to different owners and neither one to A – .

June 6.

Our egg-collecting with the Lighthouse Keepers. They walk about the cliffs as surefooted as cats, and feed their dogs on birds' eggs collected in a little bag at the end of a long pole. One dog ate three right off in as many minutes, putting his teeth through and cracking the shell, then lapping up the contents. Crab for tea.

June 7.

After a glorious day at the N. end of the Island with the Puffins, was forced to-night to take another walk, as the smell of Albert's tobacco, together with that of his stockinged feet and his boots removed, was asphyxiating.

June 9.

The governess is an awfully pretty girl. We have been talking together to-day and she asked me if I were a naturalist. I said "Yes." She said, "Well, I found a funny little beetle yesterday and Mr. S – said I ought to have given it to you." Later, I felt she was looking at me, so I looked at her, across the beach. Yes! it was true. When our eyes met she gave me one of the most provokingly pretty smiles, then turned and went up the cliff path and so out of my life – to my everlasting regret.

Return to-night in a cattle steamer.

June 18.

Dr. – , M.A., F.R.S., D.C.L., LL.D., called in the office to-day, and seeing Dad typing, said, "Are you Mr. Barbellion?" Dad replied in the affirmative, whereupon the Doctor handed him his card, and Dad said he thought it was his son he wanted to see. He is an old gentleman aged eighty or thereabouts, with elastic-sided boots, an umbrella, and a guardian nephew – a youngster of about sixty. But I paid him due reverence as a celebrated zoologist and at his invitation [and to my infinite pride] accompanied him on an excursion to the coast, where he wanted to see Philoscia Couchii, which I readily turned up for him.

I chanced to remark that I thought torsion in gastropods one of the most fascinating and difficult problems in Zoology. Why should a snail be twisted round?

"Humph," said he, "why do we stand upright?" I was not such a fool as to argue with him, so pretended his reply was a knock-out. But it enabled me to size him up intellectually.

In the evening dined with him at his hotel… He knows Wallace and Haeckel personally, and I sat at his feet with my tongue out listening to personal reminiscences of these great men. However, he seemed never to have heard of Gaskell's Theory on the Origin of Vertebrates.

June 27.

Walked to V – . As usual, Nature with clockwork regularity had all her taps turned on – larks singing, cherries ripening, and bees humming. It all bored me a little. Why doesn't she vary it a little?

August 8.

A cold note from Dr. – saying that he cannot undertake the responsibility of advising me to give up journalism for zoology.

A hellish cold in the head. Also a swingeing inflammation of the eyes. Just heard them singing in the Chapel over the way: "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes." Hope so, I'm sure.

August 9.

A transformation. After a long series of drab experiences in Sheffield, etc., the last being the climax of yesterday, an anti-cyclone arrived this morning and I sailed like an Eagle into cloudless, windless weather! The Academy has published my article, my cold is suddenly better, and going down by the sea this afternoon met Mary – !

August 20.

Had an amusing letter from my maiden-aunt F – , who does not like "the agnostic atmosphere" in my Academy article. Poor dear! She is sorry if I really feel like that, and, if I do, what a pity to put it into print. Then a Bible reference to the Epistle to the Romans.

Xmas Day.

Feeling ill – like a sloppy Tadpole. My will is paralysed. I visit the Doctor regularly to be stethoscoped, ramble about the streets, idly scan magazines in the Library and occasionally rink – with palpitation of the heart as a consequence. In view of the shortness, bitterness, and uncertainty of life, all scientific labour for me seems futile.

1910

January 10.

Better, but still very dicky: a pallid animal: a weevil in a nut. I have a weak heart, an enervated nervous system; I suffer from lack of funds with which to carry on my studies; I hate newspaper-reporting – particularly some skinny-witted speaker like – ; and last, but not least, there are women; all these worries fight over my body like jackals over carrion. Yet Zoology is all I want. Why won't Life leave me alone?

January 15.

Reading Hardy's novels. He is altogether delightful in the subtlety with which he lets you perceive the first tiny love presentiments between his heroes and heroines – the casual touch of the hands, the peep of a foot or ankle underneath the skirt – all these in Hardy signify the cloud no bigger than a man's hand. They are the susurrus of the breeze before the storm, and you await what is to follow with palpitating heart.

February 3.

For days past have been living in a state of mental ebullition. All kinds of pictures of Love, Life, and Death have been passing through my mind. Now I am too indolent and nerveless to set them down. Physically I am such a wreck that to carry out the least intention, such as putting on my boots, I have to flog my will like an Arab with a slave "in a sand of Ayaman." Three months ago when I got up before breakfast to dissect rabbits, dogfish, frogs, newts, etc., this would have seemed impossible.

February 6.

Still visit Dr. – 's surgery each week. I have two dull spots at the bottom of each lung. What a fine expressive word is gloom. Let me write it: GLOOM…

One evening coming home in the train from L – County Sessions I noticed a horrible, wheezy sound whenever I breathed deep. I was scared out of my life, and at once thought of consumption. Went to the Doctor's next day, and he sounded me and reassured me. I was afraid to tell him of the little wheezy sound at the apex of each lung, and I believed he overlooked it. So next day, very harassed, I went back to him again and told him. He hadn't noticed it and looked glum. Have to keep out of doors as much as possible.

The intense internal life I lead, worrying about my health, reading (eternally reading), reflecting, observing, feeling, loving and hating – with no outlet for superfluous steam, cramped and confined on every side, without any friends or influence of any sort, without even any acquaintances excepting my colleagues in journalism (whom I contemn) – all this will turn me into the most self-conscious, conceited, mawkish, gauche creature in existence.

March 6.

The facts are undeniable: Life is pain. No sophistry can win me over to any other view. And yet years ago I set out so hopefully and healthfully – what are birds' eggs to me now? My ambition is enormous but vague. I am too distributed in my abilities ever to achieve distinction.

March 22.

Had a letter from the Keeper of Zoology at the British Museum, advising me of three vacancies in his Dept., and asking me if I would like to try, etc… So that Dr. – 's visit to me bore some fruit.³ Spent the morning day-dreaming… Perhaps this is the flood tide at last! I shall work like a drayhorse to pull through if I am nominated… I await developments in a frightfully turbulent state of mind. I have a frantic desire to control the factors which are going to affect my future so permanently. And this ferocious desire, of course, collides with a crash all day long with the fact that however much I desire there will still remain the unalterable logic of events.

April 7.

… How delicious all this seemed! To be alive – thinking, seeing, enjoying, walking, eating – all quite apart from the amount of money in your purse or the prospects of a career. I revelled in the sensuous enjoyment of my animal existence.

June 2.

Up to now my life has been one of great internal strife and struggle – the struggle with a great ambition and a weak will – unequal to the task of coping with it. I have planned on too big a scale, perhaps. I have put too great a strain on my talents, I have whipped a flagging will, I have been for ever cogitating, worrying, devising means of escape. Meanwhile, the moments have gone by unheeded and unenjoyed.

June 10.

Legginess is bad enough in a woman, but bandy legginess is impossible.

Solitude is good for the soul. After an hour of it, I feel as lofty and imperial as Marcus Aurelius.

The best girl in the best dress immediately looks disreputable if her stockings be downgyved.

Some old people on reaching a certain age go on living out of habit – a bad habit too.

How much I can learn of a stranger by his laugh.

Bees, Poppies, and Swallows! – and all they mean to him who really knows them! Or a White Gull on a piece of floating timber, or a troop of shiny Rooks close on the heels of a ploughman on a sunny autumn day.

June 30.

My egoism appals me. Likewise the extreme intensification of the consciousness of myself. Whenever I walk down the High Street on a market day, my self-consciousness magnifies my proportions to the size of a Gulliver – so that it is grievous to reflect that in spite of that the townsfolk see me only as an insignificant bourgeois youth who reports meetings in shorthand.

July 17.

We sang to-night in Church, "But when I know Thee as Thou art, I'll praise Thee as I ought." Exactly! Till then, farewell. We are a great little people, we humans. If there be no next world, still the Spirit of Man will have lived and uttered its protest.

July 22.

Our Simian Ancestry

How I hate the man who talks about the "brute creation," with an ugly emphasis on brute. Only Christians are capable of it. As for me, I am proud of my close kinship with other animals. I take a jealous pride in my Simian ancestry. I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees and that my frame has come down through geological time via sea jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden?

August 9.

I do not ever like going to bed. For me each day ends in a little sorrow. I hate the time when it comes to put my books away, to knock out my pipe and say "Good-night," exchanging the vivid pleasures of the day for the darkness of sleep and oblivion.

August 23.

Spent the afternoon and evening till ten in the woods with Mary – . Had tea in the Haunted House, and after sat in the Green Arbor until dark, when I kissed her. "Achilles was not the worse warrior for his probation in petticoats."

September 1.

I hope to goodness she doesn't think I want to marry her. In the Park in the dark, kissing her. I was testing and experimenting with a new experience.

September 4.

Last evening, after much mellifluous cajolery, induced her to kiss me. My private opinion about this whole affair is that all the time I have been at least twenty degrees below real love heat. In any case I am constitutionally and emotionally unfaithful. I said things which I did not believe just because it was dark and she was charming.

September 5.

Read Thomas à Kempis in the train. It made me so angry I nearly flung it out of the window. "Meddle not with things that be too deep for thee," he says, "but read such things as yield compunction to the heart rather than elevation to the head." Forsooth! Can't you see me?

September 15.

A puzzling afternoon: weather perfect, the earth green and humming like a top, yet a web of dream overlaid the great hill, and at certain moments, which recurred in a kind of pulsation, accompanied by subjective feelings of vague strife and effort, I easily succeeded in letting all I saw – the field and the blackberry bush, the whole valley and the apple orchards – change into something unreal, flimsy, gauzelike, immaterial, and totally unexperienced. Suddenly when the impression was most vivid, the whole of this mysterious tapestry would vanish away and I was back where 2 and 2 make 4. Oh! Earth! how jealously you guard your secrets!

October 4.

Sat at the Civil Service Commission in Burlington House for the exam, for the vacancy in the B.M. No luck at all with the papers. The whole of my nine months' assiduous preparation helped me in only two questions. In fine, I have not succeeded, I shall not obtain the appointment, and in a few weeks I shall be back in the wilds of

N – again under the old regime, reporting platitudes from greasy guardians of the poor, and receiving condolences from people not altogether displeased at some one else's misfortune.

October 14.

Returned home from London. Felt horribly defeated in crossing the threshold. It was so obviously returning after an unsuccessful flight.

October 22.

Dissected a Squilla for which I paid 2s. 6d. to the Plymouth Marine Laboratory.

October 23.

Ambition

Am attempting to feel after some practical philosophy of living – something that will enable me to accept disappointment with equanimity and Town Council meetings with a broad and tolerant smile. At present, ambition consumes me. I was ambitious before I was breeched. I can remember wondering as a child if I were a young Macaulay or Ruskin and secretly deciding that I was. My infant mind even was bitter with those who insisted on regarding me as a normal child and not as a prodigy. Since then I have struggled with this canker for many a day, and as success fails to arrive it becomes more gnawing.

October 24.

In the morning a Town Council and in the afternoon a Rural Council. With this abominable trash in my notebook waiting to be written up and turned into "copy," and with the dream pictures of a quiet studious life in Cromwell Road not yet faded from my mind, where can I turn for consolation? That I have done my best? That's only a mother's saying to her child.

Perhaps after all it is a narrow life – this diving and delving among charming little secrets, plying diligently scalpel and microscope and then weaving the facts obtained into theoretic finespun. It is all vastly entertaining to the naturalist but it leaves the world unmoved. I sometimes envy the zealot with a definite mission in life. Life without one seems void. The monotonous pursuit of our daily vocations – the soldier, sailor, candlestick-maker – so they go on, never living but only working, never thinking but only hypnotising themselves by the routine and punctuality of their lives into just so many mechanical toys warranted to go for so long and then stop when Death takes them… It amazes me that men must spend their precious days of existence for the most part in slaving for food and clothing and the bare necessaries of existence.

To sum up my despondency, what's the good of such a life? Where does it lead? Where am I going? Why should I work? What means this procession of nights and days wherein we are all seen moving along intent and stern as if we had some purpose or a goal?.. Of course to the man who believes in the next world and a personal God, it is quite another matter. The Christian is the Egoist par excellence. He does not mind annihilation by arduous labour in this world if in the next he shall have won eternal life… He is reckless of to-day, extravagant in the expenditure of his life. This intolerable fellow will be cheerful in a dungeon. For he flatters himself that God Almighty up in Heaven is all the time watching through the keyhole and marking him down for eternal life.

October 26.

The nose-snuffling, cynical man who studies La Rochefoucauld, and prides himself on a knowledge of human motives, is pleased to point out that every action and every motive is selfish, from the philanthropist who advertises himself by his charities to the fanatic who lays down his life for a cause. Even secret charities, for they give pleasure to the doer. So your cynic thinks he has thus, with one stroke of his psychological scalpel, laid human nature bare in all its depravities. All he has done really is to reclassify motives – instead of grouping them as selfish and unselfish (which is more convenient) he lumps them together as selfish, a method by which even he is forced to recognise different grades of selfishness. For example, the selfishness of a wife-beater is lower than the selfishness of a man who gives up his life for another.

October 28.

The result arrived. As I thought, I have failed, being fourth with only three vacancies.

November 7.

It is useless to bewail the course of fortune. It cannot be much credit to possess – though we may covet – those precious things, to possess which depends on circumstances outside our control.

November 9.

Dined at the Devonshire Club in St. James's Street, W., with Dr. H – and Mr. – , the latter showing the grave symptomatic phenomena of a monocle and spats. A dinner of eight courses. Only made one mistake – put my salad on my dish instead of on the side dish. Horribly nervous and reticent. I was apparently expected to give an account of myself and my abilities – and with that end in view, they gave me a few pokes in my cranial ribs. But I am a peculiar animal, and, before unbosoming myself, I would require a happier mise-en-scène than a West End Club, and a more tactful method of approach than ogling by two professors, who seemed to think I was a simple penny-in-the-slot machine. I froze from sheer nervousness and nothing resulted.

November 11.

Returned home and found a letter awaiting me from Dr. A – offering me £60 a year for a temporary job as assistant at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory.

Left London horribly depressed. They evidently intend to shuffle me off.

Read Geo. Gissing's novel, Born in Exile. Godwin Peak, with his intense pride of individuality, self-torturing capacities, and sentimental languishment, reminds me of myself.

November 20.

A purulent cold in the nose. My heart is weak. Palpitation after the least exertion. But I shall soon be swinging my cudgels in the battle of life, so it won't do to be hypochondriacal… Let all the powers of the world and the Devil attack me, yet I will win in the end – though the conquest may very well be one which no one but myself will view.

Have accepted the Plymouth appointment.

November 30.

Struggling in the depths again within the past few days with heart attacks. Am slowly getting better of them and trying to forget as soon as may be visions of sudden death, coffins, and obituary notices.

December 2.

Death

At first, when we are very young, Death arouses our curiosity, as it did Cain in the beginning.⁴ It is a strange and very rare phenomenon which we cannot comprehend, and every time we hear of some one's death, we try to recall that person's appearance in life and are disappointed if we can't. The endeavour is to discover what it is, this Death, to compare two things, the idea of the person alive and the idea of him dead. At last some one we know well dies – and that is the first shock… I shall never forget when our Matron died at the D – School… As the years roll on, we get used to the man with the scythe and an acquaintance's death is only a bit of gossip.

Suppose the Hellfire of the orthodox really existed! We have no assurance that it does not! It seems incredible, but many incredible things are true. We do not know that God is not as cruel as a Spanish inquisitor. Suppose, then, He is! If, after Death, we wicked ones were shovelled into a furnace of fire – we should have to burn. There would be no redress. It would simply be the Divine Order of things. It is outrageous that we should be so helpless and so dependent on any one – even God.

December 9.

Sometimes I think I am going mad. I live for days in the mystery and tears of things so that the commonest object, the most familiar face – even my own – become ghostly, unreal, enigmatic. I get into an attitude of almost total scepticism, nescience, solipsism even, in a world of dumb, sphinx-like things that cannot explain themselves. The discovery of how I am situated – a sentient being on a globe in space overshadows me. I wish I were just nothing.

Later: While at a public meeting, the office-boy approached me and immediately whispered without hesitation, —

"Just had a telephone message to say that your father is at the T – Railway Station, lying senseless. He has evidently had an apoplectic fit."

(How those brutal words, "lying senseless," banged and bullied and knocked me down. Mother was waiting for me at the door in a dreadful state and expecting the worst.)

Met the train with the Doctor, and took him home in the cab – still alive, thank God, but helpless. He was brave enough to smile and shake me by the hand – with his left, though he was speechless and the right side of his body helpless. A porter discovered him at the railway terminus lying on the floor of a second-class carriage.

December 10.

He is a trifle better. It is fifteen years since he had the first paralytic stroke.

Am taking over all his work and have written at once resigning the Plymouth appointment.

December 23.

It really did require an effort to go upstairs to-day to his bedroom and say cheerfully I was not going to P. after all, and that the matter was of no consequence to me. I laughed gaily and Dad was relieved. A thundering good joke. What annoys me is that other folk – the brainless, heartless mob, as Schopenhauer remarks, still continue to regard me as one of themselves… I had nearly escaped into a seaside laboratory, and now suddenly to be flung back into the dirt and sweat of the newspaper world seems very hard, and it is very hard.

December 26.

Windy Ash

With the dog for a walk around Windy Ash. It was a beautiful winter's morning – a low sun giving out a pale light but no warmth – a luminant, not a fire – the hedgerows bare and well trimmed, an Elm lopped close showing white stumps which glistened liquidly in the sun, a Curlew whistling overhead, a deeply cut lane washed hard and clean by the winter rains, a gunshot from a distant cover, a creeping Wren, silent and tame, in a bramble bush, and over the five-barred gate the granite roller with vacant shafts. I leaned on the gate and saw the great whisps of cloud in the sky like comets' tails. Everything cold, crystalline.

1911

January 2.

As a young man – a very young man – my purpose was to plough up all obstacles, brook no delays, and without let or hindrance win through to an almost immediate success! But witness 1910! "My career" so far has been like the White Knight's, who fell off behind when the horse started, in front when it stopped, and sideways occasionally to vary the monotony.

January 30.

Feeling ill and suffering from attacks of faintness. My ill health has produced a change in my attitude towards work. As soon as I begin to feel the least bit down, I am bound to stop at once as the idea of bending over a desk or a dissecting dish, of reading or studying, nauseates me when I think that perhaps to-morrow or next day or next week, next month, next year I may be dead. What a waste of life it seems to work! Zoology is repugnant and philosophy superfluous beside the bliss of sheer living – out in the cold polar air or indoors in a chair before a roaring fire with hands clasped, watching the bustling, soothing activity of the flames.

Then, as soon as I am well again, I forget all this, grow discontented with doing nothing and work like a Tiger.

February 11.

Walked in the country. Coming home, terrified by a really violent attack of palpitation. Almost every one I met I thought would be the unfortunate person who would have to pick me up. As each one in the street approached me, I weighed him in the balance and considered if he had presence of mind and how he would render first aid. After my friend, P.C. – , had passed, I felt sorry that the tragedy had not already happened, for he knows me and where I live. At length, after sundry leanings over the river wall, arrived at the Library, which I entered, and sat down, when the full force of the palpitation was immediately felt. My face burned with the hot blood, my hand holding the paper shook with the angry pulse, and my heart went bang! bang! bang! and I could feel its beat in the carotids of the neck and up along the Torcular herophili and big vessels in the occipital region of the head. Drew in each breath very gently for fear of aggravating the fiend. Got home (don't know how) and had some sal volatile. Am better now but very demoralised.

February 13.

Feel like a piece of drawn threadwork, or an undeveloped negative, or a jelly fish on stilts, or a sloppy tadpole, or a weevil in a nut, or a spitchcocked eel. In other words and in short – ill.

February 16.

After some days with the vision of sudden death constantly before me, have come to the conclusion that it's a long way to go to die. Am coming back anyhow. Yet these are a few terrible pages in my history.

March 4.

… The Doctor's orders "Cease Work" have brought on in an aggravated form my infatuation for zoological research. I lie in bed and manufacture rolling periods in praise of it, I get dithyrambic over the zoologists themselves – Huxley, Wallace, Brooks, Lankester. I chortle to reflect that in zoology there are no stock exchange ambitions, there is no mention of slum life, Tariff Reform is not included. In the repose of the spacious laboratory by the seaside or in the halls of some great Museum, life with its vulgar struggles, its hustle and obscenity, scarcely penetrates. Behind those doors, life flows slowly, deeply. I am ascetic and long for the monastic seclusion of a student's life.

March 5.

From One Maiden Lady to Another. (Authentic)

"My dear Sister, – You have been expecting to hear from me I know, I have had inflammation to my eyes twice in 3 weeks so I thought I had better let the Doctor see and he says it is catarrh of the eyes and windpipe. I am inhaling and taking lozenges and medicine. You will be sorry to learn Leonora Mims has been taken to a Sanatorium with Diptheria, we heard yesterday, she is better, poor Mrs. Mims herself quite an invalid, she has to walk with a stick, I believe you know she has had to have her breast cut off, they keep a servant as she can't do anything, old Mrs. Point is 87 I think it is so they too have a lot of trouble, Fred Mims has just got married…

"Poor old Mrs. Seemsoe is just the same, she doesn't know anybody but she talks, the nurse put a grape in her mouth but she didn't know what to do with it, I think it is very sad. She was taken about a fortnight before Easter. Will you tell me dear if this is right receipt for clothes 1/2 oz. carbolic in 1/2 pint of rose water. Harry Gammon's 2 little children have measles, poor Maisie has gone with her Aunt Susan, poor old Joe Gammon they say had very little to leave, we don't know where Robert gets his money from. I dare say you saw that Tom Sagg has married another of Ned Smith's daughters and we hear these Smith girls are rare housekeepers and this girl that has married Tom Sagg has made all her own linen. Mrs. Wilkins, the butcher's wife is going to have a little one after 15 years, our Vicar has been laid up with an abscess, he told us about his brother the other day, he says as brothers they love each other very much. We have 3 very sad cases of men ill in the village. We had 4 but one man died of cancer.

"Yr loving Sister Amy."

Voilà!

March 7.

If I die I should like to be buried in the cherry orchards at V – .

How the beastly mob loves a tragedy! The sudden death of the Bank Manager is simply thrilling the town, and the newspapers sell like hot cakes. Scarcely before the body is cold the coincidence of his death on the anniversary of his birth is discussed in every household; every one tells everybody else where they saw him last "he looked all right then." The policeman and the housemaid, the Mayor and the Town Clerk, the cabman and the billposter, stand and discuss the deceased gentleman's last words or what the widow's left with. "Ah! well, it is very sad," they remark to one another with no emotion and continue on their way.

March 10.

On coming downstairs in the evening played Ludo with H – . At one stage I laughed so much in conjunction with that harlequin H – that I got cramp in the abdominal muscles and the tears trickled down my face.

March 13.

H – and I play Ludo incessantly. We've developed the gambling fever, and our pent-up excitement every now and then explodes in fiendish cackles, and Mother looks up over her spectacles and says, "William, William, they'll hear in the street presently."

A Character

For this world's unfortunates, his is the ripe sympathy of a well-developed nature, standing in strong contrast with the rest of his personality, which is wholly self-centred, a little ungenerous, and what strong men of impeccable character call "weak." If you are ill he is delightful, if you are robust or successful he can be very objectionable. To an influenza victim he goes out of his way to carry a book, but if you tell him with gusto you have passed your exam, he says, "Oh, but there's not much behind it, is there?" "Oh! no," I answer, comforting him, "it is really a misfortune to be a success." And so only the bankrupts, dipsos (as he calls them), ne'er-do-weels, and sudden deaths ever touch his heart or tap his sympathy. He is a short, queery, dressy little fellow, always spruce and clean. His joy consists in a glass of beer, a full stomach, a good cigar, or a pretty girl to flirt with. He frequents drinking saloons and billiard rooms, goes to dances and likes to be thought a lady's man. "Urn," he will say, with the air of a connoisseur, "a little too broad in the beam," as some attractive damsel walks down the street. Any day about twelve you can see both of us, "the long and the short of it" (he is only half my height and I call him .5), walking together in the Park, and engaged in the most heated discussion over some entirely trivial matter, such as whether he would marry a woman with sore eyes, etc., etc. More than once we have caught cabmen idle on the cab-rank or policemen on point duty jerking their thumbs backward at us and expressing some facetious remarks which we longed to overhear. I usually walk in the gutter to bring my height down a bit.

A good raconteur himself, he does not willingly suffer a story from another. The varmint on occasion finishes your joke off for you, which is his delicate way of intimating that he has heard it before. He is a first-class mimic, and sends every one into a thousand fits while he gives you in succession the Mayor and all the Corporation He also delights me at times by mimicking me. His mind is receptive rather than creative: it picks up all sorts of gaudy ideas by the wayside like a magpie, and I sometimes enjoy the exquisite sensation of hearing some of these petty pilferings (which he has filched from me) laid at my feet as if they were his own. The ideas which are his own are always unmistakable.

His favourite poems are Omar and the Ballad of Reading Jail, his favourite drinks Medoc or a Cherry Mixture. Me he describes as serpentilous with Gibbon-like arms, pinheaded, and so on. He amuses me. In fact I love him.

March 16.

No one will ever understand without personal experience that an exceedingly self-conscious creature like myself driven in on himself to consume himself is the unhappiest of men. I have come to loathe myself: my finicking, hypersensitive, morbid nature, always thinking, talking, writing about myself for all the world as if the world beyond did not exist! I am rings within rings, circles concentric and intersecting, a maze, a tangle: watching myself behave or misbehave, always reflecting on what impression I am making on others or what they think of me. Introduce me to a stranger and I swell out as big as Alice. Self-consciousness makes me pneumatic, and consequently so awkward and clumsy and swollen that I don't know how to converse – and God help the other fellow.

Later: Youth is an intoxication without wine, some one says. Life is an intoxication. The only sober man is the melancholiac, who, disenchanted, looks at life, sees it as it really is, and cuts his throat. If this be so, I want to be very drunk. The great thing is to live, to clutch at our existence and race away with it in some great and enthralling pursuit. Above all, I must beware of all ultimate questions – they are too maddeningly unanswerable – let me eschew philosophy and burn Omar.

In this week's T.P.'s Weekly a youth advertises: – "Young thinkers interested in philosophy, religion, social reform, the future of humanity, and all freethought, please communicate with 'Evolution,' aged 21!" All right for 21.

Later: I have in mind some work on the vascular system of larval newts. In the autumn I see a large piece of work to be done in animal psychology – namely, frequency of stimulus and its relation to habit formation. Yet the doctor advises long rest and the office work remains to be done. I must hack my way through somehow. I sit trying to disentangle these knots; then some one plays a dreamy waltz and all my fine edifices of the will vanish in mist. Is it worth while? Why not float with the tide? But I soon throw off these temptations. If I live, I shall play a fine game! I am determined. A lame-dog life is of no use.

April 17.

Railway Travel

A journey in a railway train makes me sentimental. If I enter the compartment a robust-minded, cheerful youth, fresh and whistling from a walk by the sea, yet, as soon as I am settled down in one corner and the train is rattling along past fields, woods, towns, and painted stations, I find myself indulging in a saccharine sadness – very toothsome and jolly. I pull a long face and gaze out of the window wistfully and look sad. But I am really happy – and incredibly sentimental.

The effect is produced, I suppose, by the quickly changing panoramic view of the country, and as I see everything sliding swiftly by, and feel myself being hurtled forward willy-nilly, I am sub-conscious of the flight of Time, of the eternal flux, of the trajectory of my own life… Timid folk, of course, want some Rock of Ages, something static. They want life a mill pond rather than the torrent which it is, a homely affair of teacups and tabby cats rather than a dangerous expedition.

PART II – IN LONDON

1912

January 21.

Am at last beginning to get more content with the work at the Museum, so that I muse on Bernard Shaw's saying, "Get what you like or you'll grow to like what you get." I have a terrible suspicion that the security of tenure here is like the lion's den in the fable —Nulla vestiga retrorsum. Of course I am wonderfully proud of being at the Museum, although I am disappointed and write as if I were quite blasé.

January 25.

I should be disappointed if at the end of my career (if I live to see it through) I do not win the F.R.S. I should very much like it… My nature is very mixed – ambitious above all things and yet soon giddy with the audacity of my aspirations. The B.M. and my colleagues make me feel most inferior in fact, but in theory – in the secrecy of my own bedchamber – I feel that there are few men there my equal.

April 26.

Down with influenza. A boarding-house with the 'flue!

May 8.

Went home to recuperate, a beef jelly in one pocket and sal volatile in the other. On arrival, my blanched appearance frightened Mother and the others, so went to bed at once. "Fate's a fiddler, life's a dance."

May 12.

Weak enough to sit down before dressing-table while I shave and brush my hair. Dyspepsia appalling. The Doctor in Kensington seemed to think me an awful wreck and asked if I were concealing —

Reading Baudelaire and Verlaine.

May 24.

Bathing

Sat on a seat overlooking the sand-hills with stick between my legs like an old man, and watched a buxom wench aet. 25 run down the path pursued by "Rough" and two little girls in blue. Later they emerged from a striped bathing tent in the glory of blue bathing dresses. It made me feel quite an old man to see the girl galloping out over the hard level sands to the breakers, a child clinging to each hand. Legs and arms twinkled in the sun which shone with brilliance. If life were as level as those sands and as beautiful as that trio of girls!

May 26.

Two Young Men Talking

With H – in his garden. He is a great enthusiast.

"I disapprove entirely of your taste in gardening," I said. "You object to the 'ragged wilderness' style, I like it. You like lawns laid out for croquet and your privet hedges pruned into 'God Save the King' or 'Dieu et mon droit.' My dear boy, if you saw Mr. – 's wilderness at – you'd be so shocked you'd cut and run, and I imagine there'd be an affecting reunion between you and your beloved geraniums. For my part, I don't like geraniums: they're suburban, and all of a piece with antimacassars and stuffed birds under glass bells. The colour of your specimens, moreover," I rapped out, "is vulgar – like the muddied petticoats of old market women."

H – , quite unmoved, replied slowly, "Well, here are some like the beautiful white cambric of a lady of fashion. You've got no taste in flowers – you're just six feet of grief and patience." We roared with laughing.

"Do stop watering those damned plants," I exclaimed at last. But he went on. I exclaimed again and out of sheer ridiculousness, in reply he proceeded to water the cabbages, the gravel path, the oak tree – and me! While I writhed with laughing.

May 27.

By the Sea

Sat upon a comfortable jetty of rock and watched the waves without a glimmer of an idea in my mind about anything – though to outward view I might have been a philosopher in cerebral parturition with thoughts as big as babies. Instead, little rustling dead leaves of thoughts stirred and fluttered in the brain – the pimple e. g. I recollected on my Aunt's nose, or the boyishness of Dr. – 's handwriting, or Swinburne's lines: "If the golden-crested wren Were a nightingale – why, then Something seen and heard of men Might be half as sweet as when Laughs a child of seven."

I continued in this pleasurable coma all the afternoon and went home refreshed.

May 29.

Have returned to London and the B.M. My first day at the M. Sat at my table in a state of awful apathy.

At least temporarily, I am quite disenchanted of Zoology. I work – God save the mark – in the Insect Room!

On the way home, purchased: —

Peroxide of hydrogen (pyorrhœa threatened). One bottle of physic (for my appalling dyspepsia).

One flask of brandy for emergencies (as my heart is intermittent again).

Prussic acid next.

Must have been near pneumonia at R – . Auntie was nervous, and came in during the night to see how I was.

June 20.

It caused me anguish to see my article returned from the Fortnightly and lying in a big envelope on the table when I returned home this evening. I can't do any work because of it, and in desperation rushed off to the stately pleasure domes of the White City, and systematically went through all the thrills – from the Mountain Railway to the Wiggle Woggle and the 'Witching Waves.

June 21.

To-day I am easier. The cut worm forgives the plough. But how restless this disappointment has made me… I have no plans for recuperation and cannot settle down to work.

July 6.

On my doctor's advice, went to see Dr. P – , a lung specialist. M – found a dull spot on one of my lungs, and, not feeling very sure, and without telling me the nature of his suspicion, he arranged for Dr. P – to see me, allowing me to suppose he was a stomach authority as my dyspepsia is bad.

Well: it is not consumption, but my lungs and physique are such that consumption might easily supervene. As soon as Dr. P – had gone, M – appended the following lugubrious yarn: —

Whenever I catch cold, I must go and be treated at once, all my leisure must be spent out of doors, I must take cream and milk in prodigious quantities and get fat at all costs. There is even a question of my giving up work.

July 10.

A young but fat woman sitting in the sun and oozing moisture is as nasty as anything in Baudelaire.

July 14.

A "Brilliant Career"

My old head master once prophesied for me "a brilliant career." That was when I was in the Third Form. Now I have more than a suspicion that I am one of those who, as he once pointed out, grow sometimes out of a brilliant boyhood into very commonplace men. This continuous ill health is having a very obvious effect on my work and activities. With what courage I possess I have to face the fact that to-day I am unable to think or express myself as well as when I was a boy in my teens – witness this Journal!

I intend to go on however. I have decided that my death shall be disputed all the way.

Oh! it is so humiliating to die! I writhe to think of being overcome by so unfair an enemy before I have demonstrated myself to maiden aunts who mistrust me, to colleagues who scorn me, and even to brothers and sisters who believe in me.

As an Egotist I hate death because I should cease to be I.

Most folk, when sick unto death, gain a little consolation over the notoriety gained by the fact of their decease. Criminals enjoy the pomp and circumstance of their execution. Voltaire said of Rousseau that he wouldn't mind being hanged if they'd stick his name on the gibbet. But my own death would be so mean and insignificant. Guy de Maupassant died in a grand manner – a man of intellect and splendid physique who became insane. Tusitala's death in the South Seas reads like a romance. Heine, after a life of sorrow, died with a sparkling witticism on his lips; Vespasian with a jest.

But I cannot for the life of me rake up any excitement over my own immediate decease – an unobtrusive passing away of a rancorous, disappointed, morbid, and self-assertive entomologist in a West Kensington Boarding House – what a mean little tragedy! It is hard not to be somebody even in death.

A sing-song to-night in the drawing-room; all the boarding-house present in full muster. There was a German, Schulz, who sat and leered at his inamorata – a sensual-looking, pasty-faced girl – while she gave us daggers-and-moonlight recitations with the most unwarranted self-assurance (she boasts of a walking-on part at one of the theatres); there was Miss M – listening to her fiancé, Capt. O – (home from India), singing Indian Love Songs at her; there was Miss T – , a sour old maid, who knitted and snorted, not fully conscious of this young blood coursing around her; Mrs. Barclay Woods pursued her usual avocation of imposing on us all the great weight of her immense social superiority, clucking, in between, to her one chick – a fluffy girl of 18 or 19, who was sitting now in the draught, now too close to a "common" musician of the Covent Garden Opera; finally our hostess, a divorcee, who hated all males, even Tom-cats. We were a pathetic little company – so motley, ill-assorted – who had come together not from love or regard but because man is a gregarious animal. In fact, we sat secretly criticising and contemning one another … yet outside there were so many millions of people unknown, and overhead the multitude of the stars was equally comfortless.

Later: … Zoology on occasion still fires my ambition! Surely I cannot be dying yet.

Whatever misfortune befalls me I do hope I shall be able to meet it unflinchingly. I do not fear ill-health in itself, but I do fear its possible effect on my mind and character… Already I am slowly altering, as the Lord liveth. Already for example my sympathy with myself is maudlin.

Whenever the blow shall fall, some sort of a reaction must be given. Heine flamed into song. Beethoven wrote the 5th Symphony. So what shall I do when my time comes? I don't think I have any lyrics or symphonies to write, so I shall just have to grin and bear it – like a dumb animal… As long as I have spirit and buoyancy I don't care what happens – for I know that or so long I cannot be accounted a failure. The only real failure is one in which the victim is left spiritless, dazed, dejected with blackness all around, and within, a knife slowly and unrelentingly cutting the strings of his heart.

My head whirls with conflicting emotions, struggling, desperate ideas, and a flood of impressions of all sorts of things that are never sufficiently sifted and arranged to be caught down on paper. I am brought into this world, hustled along it and then hustled out of it, with no time for anything. I want to be on a great hill and square up affairs.

August 28.

… After tea, we all three walked in Kensington Gardens and sat on a seat by the Round Pond. My umbrella fell to the ground, and I left it there with its nose poking up in a cynical manner, as She remarked.

"It's not cynical," I said, "only a little knowing. Won't you let yours fall down to keep it company? Yours is a lady umbrella and a good-looking one – they might flirt together."

"Mine doesn't want to flirt," she answered stiffly.

September 13.

At C – , a tiny little village by the sea in N – .

Looking up from a rockpool, where I had been watching Gobies, I saw three children racing across the sands to bathe, I saw a man dive from a boat, and I saw a horse-man gallop his mare down to the beach and plunge about in the line of breakers. The waters thundered, the mare whinnied, the children shouted to one another, and I turned my head down again to the rockpool with a great thumping heart of happiness: it was so lovely to be conscious of the fact that out there this beautiful picture was awaiting me whenever and as often as I chose to lift my head. I purposely kept my head down, for the picture was so beautiful I did not want to hurt it by breathing on it, and I kept my head down out of a playful self-cheating delight; I decided not to indulge myself.

September 16.

Out in the Bay dredging for Echinoderms with "Carrots." Brilliantly fine. The haul was a failure, but, being out in a boat on a waveless sea under a cloudless sky, I was scarcely depressed at this! We cruised along from one little bay to another, past smugglers' caves and white pebble beaches, the dredge all the while growling along the sea bottom, and "Carrots" and I lying listless in the bows. I was immensely happy. My mercury was positively ringing the bell.

Who, then, is "Carrots"? He is a fine brawny boat-man who jumps over the rocks like a Chamois, swims like a Fish, pulls like an Ox, snorts like a Grampus – a sort of compound zoological perfection, built eclectically.

September 18.

Early Boughies

Up the village, Mrs. Beavan keeps a tiny little shop and runs a very large garden. She showed us all about the garden, and introduced us to her husband, whom we discovered in an apple tree – an old man, aged 76, very hard of hearing, and with an impediment in his speech. He at once began to move his mouth, and I caught odd jingles of sound that sounded like nothing at all – at first, but which gradually resolved themselves on close attention to such familiar landmarks as "Early Boughies," "Stubbits," "Ribstone Pippins" into a discourse on Apples.

The following curious conversation took place between me and the deaf gaffer, aged 76, standing in the apple tree, —

"These be all appulls from Kent – I got 'em all from Kent."

"How long have you lived in C – ?"

"Bunyard & Son – that's the firm – they live just outside the town of Maidstone."

"Do you keep Bees here?"

"One of these yer appulls is called Bunyard after the firm – a fine fruit too."

"Your good wife must be of great assistance to you in your work."

"Little stalks maybe, but a large juishy appull for all that."

Just then I heard Mrs. B – saying to E – , —

"Aw yes, he's very active for 76. A little deaf, but he manages the garden all 'eesulf, I bolsters 'un up wi' meat and drink – little and often as they zay for children… Now there's a bootifull tree, me dear, that 'as almost beared itself to death, as you may say."

She picked an apple off it shouting to poor Tom still aloft, —

"Tom what's the name of this one?"

"You should come a bit earlier, zir," replied T. "'Tis late a bit now doan't 'ee zee?"

"No – what's its name I want," shouted his spouse.

"Yes, yes, give the lady one to take home – there's plenty for all," he said.

"What is the NAME? THE NAME OF THIS YER APPULL," screamed Mrs. B., and old Tom moving his bones slowly down from the tree answered quite unmoved, —

"Aw the name? Why, 'tis a common kind of appull – there's a nice tree of 'em up there."

"Oh! never mind, 'tis a Gladstone," said Mrs. B., turning to us.

"A very fine Appull," droned the old boy.

September 28.

Back in town again. Wandered about in a somnambulistic way all the afternoon till I found myself taking tea in Kew Gardens. I enjoyed the wind in my face and hair. Otherwise there is nothing to be said – a colourless day.

October 10.

Came across the following arresting sentence: "Pale, anæmic, cadaverous, bad teeth and disordered digestion and a morbid egotism." Yes, but my teeth are not bad.

October 20.

On the N. Downs

Under the oak where I sat the ground was covered with dead leaves. I kicked them, and I beat them with my stick, because I was angry that they were dead. In the coppice, leaves were quietly and majestically floating earthwards in the pomp of death. It was very thrilling to observe them.

It was a curious sensation to realise that since the last time I sat under the old oak I had been right up to the N. of England, then right down to the S.W., and back once more to London town. I bragged about my kinetic activity to the stationary oak and I scoffed at the old hill for having to remain always in the same place.

It gave me a pleasing sense of infinite superiority to come back and see everything the same as before, to sit on the same old seat under the same old oak. Even that same old hurdle was lying in the same position among the bracken. How sorry I was for it! Poor wretch – unable to move – to go to Whitby, to go to C – , to be totally ignorant of the great country of London…

Day dreamed. My own life as it unrolls day by day is a source of constant amazement, delight, and pain. I can think of no more interesting volume than a detailed, intimate, psychological history of my own life. I want a perfect comprehension at least of myself…

We are all such egotists that a sorrow or hardship – provided it is great enough – flatters our self-importance. We feel that a calamity by overtaking us has distinguished us above our fellows. A man likes not to be ignored even by a railway accident. A man with a grievance is always happy.

October 23.

Over to see E – . Came away disillusioned.

October 25.

Met her in Smith's book shop looking quite bewitching. Hang it all, I thought I had finished. Went home with her, watched her make a pudding in the kitchen, then we sat by the firelight in the drawing-room and had supper. Scrumptious (not the supper).

October 27.

Quarrelled with D – ! The atmosphere is changed at the flat – my character is ruined. D – has told them I'm a loose fellow. I've always contrived to give him that impression – I liked to be cutting my throat – and now it's cut!

November 1.

D – came and carried me off to the flat, where they asked why I hadn't been over – which, of course, pleased me immensely.

November 6.

Doctor M – is very gloomy about my health and talks of S. Africa, Labrador, and so on. I'm not responding to his treatment as I should.

November 11.

Met her this evening in Kensington Road. "I timed this well," said she, "I thought I should meet you." Good Heavens, I am getting embroiled. Returned to the flat with her and after supper called her "The Lady of Shalott."

"I don't think you know what you're talking about" – this stiffly.

"Perhaps not," I answered. "I leave it to you."

"Oh! but it rests with you," she said.

Am I in love? God knows – but I don't suppose God cares.

November 15.

On M – 's advice went to see a stomach specialist – Dr. Hawkins. As I got there a little too early walked up the street – Portland Place – on the opposite side (from shyness) past an interminable and nauseating series of night bells and brass plates, then down again on the right side till I got to No. 66 which made me flutter – for ten doors ahead I mused is the house I must call at. It made me shiver a little.

The specialist took copious notes of my evidence and after examining me retired to consult with M – . What a parade of ceremony! On coming back, the jury returned a verdict of "Not proven." I was told I ought to go out and live on the prairies – and in two years I should be a giant! But where are the prairies? What 'bus? If I get worse, I must take several months' leave. I think it will come to this.

November 16.

Arthur came down for the week end. He likes the Lady of Shalott. She is "not handsome, but arresting, striking" and "capable of tragedy." That I believe she has achieved already… If she were a bit more gloomy and a bit more beautiful, she'd be irresistible.

November 22.

He: "Have a cigarette? I enjoy lighting your cigarettes."

She: "I don't know how to smoke properly."

He: "You smoke only as you could."

She: "How's that?"

H.: "Gracefully, of course."

S.: "Do you think I like pretty things being said to me?"

H.: "Why not, if they are true. Flattery is when you tell an ugly woman she is beautiful. Have you so poor an opinion of yourself to think all I say of you is flattery?"

S.: "Yes. I am only four bare walls, – with nothing inside."

H.: "What a deliciously empty feeling that must be. … But I don't think you're so simple as all that. You bewilder me sometimes."

S.: "Why?"

H.: "I feel like Sindbad the Sailor."

S.: "Why?"

H.: "Because I'm not George Meredith." The title of "husband" frightens me.

December 9.

It's a fearful strain to go on endeavouring to live up to time with a carefully laid-out time-table of future achievements. I am hurrying on with my study of Italian in order to read the Life of Spallanzani in order to include him in my book – to be finished by the end of next year; I am also subsidising Jenkinson's embryological lectures at University College with the more detailed account of practical and experimental work in his text-book; I have also started a lengthy research upon the Trichoptera – all with a horrible sense of time fleeing swiftly and opportunities for work too few ever to be squandered, and, in the background, behind all this feverish activity, the black shadow that I might die suddenly with nothing done – next year, next month, next week, to-morrow, now!

Then sometimes, as to-night, I have misgivings. Shall I do these things so well now as I might once have done them? Has not my ill-health seriously affected my mental powers? Surely the boy of 1908-10 was almost a genius or – seen at this distance – a very remarkable youth in the fanatical zeal with which he sought to pursue, and succeeded in gaining, his own end of a zoological education for himself.

It is a terrible suspicion to cross the mind of an ambitious youth that perhaps, after all, he is a very commonplace mortal – that his life, whether comedy or tragedy, or both, or neither, is any way insignificant, of no account.

It is still more devastating for him to have to consider whether the laurel wreath was not once within his grasp, and whether he must not ascribe his own incalculable loss to his stomach simply.

December 15.

A very bad heart attack. As I write it intermits every three or four beats. Who knows if I shall live thro' to-night?

December 16.

Here I am once more. A passable night. After breakfast the intermittency recommenced – it is better now, with a dropped beat only about once per half-hour, so that I am almost happy after yesterday, which was Hell. The world is too good to give up without remonstrance at the beck of a weak heart.

Before I went to sleep last night, my watch stopped – I at once observed the cessation of its tick and wondered if it were an omen. I was genuinely surprised to find myself still ticking when I awoke this morning. A moment ago a hearse passed down the street… Yes, but I'm damned if I haven't a right to be morbid after yesterday. To be ill like this in a boarding-house! I'd marry to-morrow if I had the chance.

December 22.

Sollas's "Ancient Hunters"

Read Sollas's book Ancient Hunters– very thrilling – mind full of the Aurignacians, Mousterians, Magdalenians! I have been peering down such tremendous vistas of time and change that my own troubles have been eclipsed into ridiculous insignificance. It has been really a Pillar of Strength to me – a splendid tonic. Palæontology has its comfortable words too. I have revelled in my littleness and irresponsibility. It has relieved me of the harassing desire to live, I feel content to live dangerously, indifferent to my fate; I have discovered I am a fly, that we are all flies, that nothing matters. It's a great load off my life, for I don't mind being such a micro-organism – to me the honour is sufficient of belonging to the universe – such a great universe, so grand a scheme of things. Not even Death can rob me of that honour. For nothing can alter the fact that I have lived; I have been I, if for ever so short a time. And when I am dead, the matter which composes my body is indestructible – and eternal, so that come what may to my "Soul," my dust will always be going on, each separate atom of me playing its separate part – I shall still have some sort of a finger in the Pie. When I am dead, you can boil me, burn me, drown me, scatter me – but you cannot destroy me: my little atoms would merely deride such heavy vengeance. Death can do no more than kill you.

December 27.

"It is a pleasure to note the success attending the career of Mr. W.N.P. Barbellion now engaged in scientific work on the staff of the Natural History Museum …" etc., etc.

This is a cutting from the local paper – one of many that from time to time I once delightedly pasted in the pages of the Journal. Not so now.

… At 23, I am a different being. Surrounded by all the stimulating environment of scientific research, I am cold and disdainful. I keep up the old appearances but underneath it is quite different. I am a hypocrite. I have to wear the mask and cothornoi, finding the part daily more difficult to bear. I am living on my immense initial momentum – while the machinery gradually slows up. My career! Gadzooks.

1913

January 3.

From the drawing-room window I see pass almost daily an old gentleman with white hair, a firm step, broad shoulders, healthy pink skin, a sunny smile – always singing to himself as he goes – a happy, rosy-cheeked old fellow, with a rosy-cheeked mind… I should like to throw mud at him. By Jove, how I hate him. He makes me wince with my own pain. It is heartless, indecently so, for an old man to be so blithe. Life has, I suppose, never lain in wait for him. The Great Anarchist has spared him a bomb.

January 19.

My Aunt, aged 75, who has apparently concluded from my constant absences from Church that my spiritual life is in a parlous way, to-day read me her portion from a large book with a broad purple-tasseled bookmark. I looked up from "I Promessi Sposi" and said "Very nice." It was about someone whose soul was not saved and who Would not answer the door when it was knocked. It is jolly to be regarded as a wicked, libidinous youth by an aged maiden Aunt.

January 22.

This Diary reads for all the world as if I were not living in mighty London. The truth is I live in a bigger, dirtier city – ill-health. Ill-health, when chronic, is like a permanent ligature around one's life. What a fine fellow I'd be if I were perfectly well. My energy for one thing would lift the roof off…

We conversed around the text: "To travel hopefully is better than to arrive and true success is to labour." She is – well, so graceful. My God! I love her, I love her, I love her!!!

February 3.

A Confession

H – B – invited me to tea to meet his fiancée.

Rather pleased with the invitation – I don't know why, for my idea of myself is greater than my idea of him and probably greater than his idea of himself.

Yet I went and got shaved, and even thought of buying a new pair of gloves, but poverty proved greater than vanity, so I went with naked hands. On arriving at Turnham Green, I removed my spectacles (well knowing how much they damage my personal appearance). However, the beauty of the thing was that, tho' I waited as agreed, he never turned up, and so I returned home again, crestfallen – and, with my spectacles on again.

February 9.

… "Now, W – , talk to me prettily," she said as soon as the door was closed on them.

"Oh! make him read a book," whined her sister, but we talked of marriage instead – in all its aspects. Bless their hearts, I found these two dear young things simply sodden with the idea of it.

In the middle I did a knee-jerk which made them scream with laughing – the patellar reflex was new to them, so I seized a brush from the grate, crossed to Her and gently tapped: out shot her foot, and – cried: "Oh, do do it to me as well." It was rare fun.

 
"Oh! pretty knee, what do I see?
And he stooped and he tied up my garter for me."
 

February 10.

News of Scott's great adventure! Scott dead a year ago!! The news, when I saw it to-night in the Pall Mall Gazette gave me cold thrills. I could have wept… What splendid people we humans are! If there be no loving God to watch us, it's a pity for His sake as much as for our own.

February 15.

Tried to kiss her in a taxi-cab on the way home from the Savoy – the taxi-cab danger is very present with us – but she rejected me quietly, sombrely. I apologised on the steps of the Flats and said I feared I had greatly annoyed her. "I'm not annoyed," she said, "only surprised" – in a thoughtful, chilly voice.

We had had supper in Soho, and I took some wine, and she looked so bewitching it sent me in a fever, thrumming my fingers on the seat of the cab while she sat beside me impassive. Her shoulders are exquisitely modelled and a beautiful head is carried poised on a tiny neck.

February 16.

Walking up the steps to her flat to-night made me pose to H – (who was with me) as Sydney Carton in the picture in A Tale of Two Cities on the steps of the scaffold. He laughed boisterously, as he is delighted to know of my last evening's misadventure.

At supper, a story was told of a man who knocked at the door of his lady's heart four times and at last was admitted. I remarked that the last part of the romance was weak. She disagreed. H – exclaimed, "Oh! but this man has no sentiment at all!"

"So much the worse for him," chimed in the others.

"He was 66 years of age," added Mrs. – .

"Too old," said P. "What do you think the best age for a man to marry?"

H.: "Thirty for a man, twenty-five for a woman."

She: "That's right: it still gives me a little time."

P.: "What do you think?" (to me).

I replied sardonically, —

"A young man may not yet and an old man not at all."

"That's right, old wet blanket," chirruped P – .

"You know," I continued, delighted to seize the opportunity to assume the role of youthful cynic, "Cupid and Death once met at an Inn and exchanged arrows, since when young men have died and old men have doted."

H – was charming enough to opine that it was impossible to fix a time for love. Love simply came.

We warned him to be careful on the boat going out.

"Yes, I know," said H – (who is in love with P – ).

"My brother had a dose of moonlight on board a boat when he sailed and he's been happy ever since."

P.: "How romantic!"

H.: "A great passion!"

"The only difference," I interjected in a sombre monotone, "between a passion and a caprice is that the caprice lasts a little longer."

"Sounds like a book," She said in contempt.

It was – Oscar Wilde!

P – insisted on my taking a biscuit. "Don't mind me," she said. "Just think I'm a waitress and take no notice at all."

H.: "Humph! I never see him taking no notice of a waitress."

(Sneers and Curtain.)

February 24.

H – came home last night and told me that she said as he came away, "Tell W – I hate him." So it's all right. I shall go over to-morrow again – Hurrah! My absence has been felt then.

March 7.

Came home, lay on my bed, still dressed, and ruminated…

First a suspicion then a conviction came to me that I was a cad – a callous, selfish, sensation-hunting cad… For the time being the bottom was knocked out of my smug self-satisfaction. For several long half-hours I found myself drifting without compass or stars. I was quite di orientated, temporarily thrown off the balance of my amour propre. Then I got up, lit the gas and looking at myself in the mirror, found it was really true, – I was a mean creature, wholly absorbed in self.

As an act of contrition, I ought to have gone out into the garden and eaten worms. But the mirror brought back my self-consciousness and I began to crawl back into my recently discarded skin – I began to be less loathesome to myself. For as soon as I felt interested or amused or curious over the fact that I had been really loathesome to myself I began to regain my equilibrium. Now, I and myself are on comparatively easy terms with one another. I am settled on the old swivel… I take a lot of knocking off it and if shot off soon return.

To-day, she was silent and melancholy but wonderfully fascinating. One day I am desperate and the next cold and apathetic. Am I in love? God knows! She came to the door to say "Good night," and I deliberately strangled my desire to say something.

March 9.

In bed till 12.30 reading Bergson and the O.T.

Over to the flat to supper. E – was cold and silent. She spurned me. No wonder. I talked volubly and quite brilliantly with the definite purpose of showing up J – 's somnolence. I also pulled his leg. He hates me. No wonder. After supper, he went in to her studio and remained there alone with her while she worked. At 11 p.m. he was still there when I came away in a whirlwind of jealousy, regrets, and rage. G – said he was going to stay on until he saw "the blighter off the premises." Neither of us would go in to turn him out.

I love her deeply and once my heart jumped when I thought I heard her coming into the room. But it was only P – . Did not see her again – even to say "Good-night."

March 10.

Work in the evening in our bedroom – two poor miserable bachelors – H – reading Equity Law, a rug around his legs before an empty grate, while I am sitting at the table in top-coat, with collar up, and writing my magnum opus, which is to bring me fame, fortune and – E – !

H – says that this morning I was putting on my shoes when he pointed out a large hole in the heel of my sock.

"Damn! I shall have to wear boots," I said – at least he says I said it, and I am quite ready to believe him. Such unconsciousness of self is rare with me.

March 15.

[At a public dinner at the Holborn Restaurant] J – replied to the toast of the Ladies. Feeble! H – and I stood and had a silent toast to E – and N – by just winking one eye at each other. He sat opposite me.

If I had been asked to reply to this toast I should have said with the greatest gusto, something as follows, —

[Here follows the imaginary speech in full, composed the same night before going to sleep.]

Yet I am taken for a soft fool! My manner is soft, self-conscious, shy. What a lot of self-glorification I lose thereby! What a lot of self-torture I gain in its stead!

March 17.

To-day went to the B.M. but did very little work. Thought over the matter carefully and decided to ask E – to marry me. Relief to be able to decide. I was happy too.

Yesterday P – came in to us from E – 's studio and said, —

"E – sends her love."

"To whom?" H – inquired.

"I don't know," P – replied, smiling at me.

March 18.

Had a long conversation with H – last night. He says all E – intended to convey was that the quarrel was over… I felt relieved, because I have no money, but – a large ambition. Then I am selfish, and have not forgotten that I want to spend my holidays in the Jura, and next year three weeks at the Plymouth Laboratory.

March 19.

Went over to see E – . We had an awkward half-an-hour alone together. She was looking bewitching! I am plunging more and more into love. Had it on the tip of my tongue once. I am dreadfully fond of her.

"I have a most profound gloom over me," I said.

"Why don't you try and get rid of it?" she asked.

"I can't until Zeus has pity and rolls away the clouds."

April 21.

We are sitting up in our beds which are side by side in a room on the top story of a boarding house in – Road.

It is 11.30 p.m. and I am leaning over one one side lighting the oil lamp so as to boil the kettle to make Ovaltine before going to sleep.

"Whom have I seduced?" I screamed. "You rotter, don't you know that a dead passion full or regrets is as terrible as a dead body full of worms? There, I talk literature, my boy, if you were only Bos well enough to take it down… As for K – , I shall never invite him to dinner again. He comes to me and whines that nobody loves him, and so I say, 'Oh! poor lad, never mind, if you're bored, why, come to my rooms of an evening and hear me talk – you'll have the time of your life.' And now he's cheeky."

H. (sipping his drink and very much preoccupied with it) replied abstractedly, "When you die you'll go to Hell." (I liked his Homeric simplicity.) "You ought to be buried in a fireproof safe."

Silence.

H. (returning to the attack), "I hope she turns you down."

"Thank you," I said.

"As for P – ," he resumed, "she's double-Dutch to me."

"Go to the Berlitz School," I suggested, "and learn the language."

"You bally fool… All you do is to sit there and smile like a sanguinary cat. Nothing I say ever rouses you. I believe if I came to you and said, 'Here, Professor, is a Beetle with 99 legs that has lived on granite in the middle of the Sahara for 40 days and 40 nights,' you'd simply answer, 'Yes, and that reminds me I've forgotten to blow my nose.'"

The two pyjamaed figures shake with laughing, the light goes out and the sanguinary conversation continues on similar lines until we fall asleep.

April 26.

Two Months' Sick Leave

In a horrible panic – the last few days – I believe I am developing locomotor ataxy. One leg, one arm, and my speech are affected, i. e. the right side and my speech centre. M – is serious… I hope the disease, whatever it is, will be sufficiently lingering to enable me to complete my book.

R – is a dear man. I shall not easily forget his kindness during this terrible week… Can the Fates have the audacity?.. Who can say?

April 27.

I believe there can be no doubt that I have had a slight partial paralysis of my right side (like Dad). I stutter a little in my speech when excited, I cannot write properly (look at this handwriting), and my right leg is rocky at the knee. My head swims.

It is too inconceivably horrible to be buried in the Earth in such splendid spring weather. Who can tell me what is in store for me?.. Life opens to me, I catch a glimpse of a vision, and the doors clang to again noiselessly. It is dark. That will be my history. Am developing a passionate belief in my book and a fever of haste to complete it before the congé définitif.

April 29.

Saw M – again, who said my symptoms were alarming certainly, but he was sure no definite diagnosis could be made.

April 30.

Went with M – to see a well-known nerve specialist – Dr. H – . He could find no symptoms of a definite disease, tho' he asked me suspiciously if I had ever been with women.

Ordered two months' complete rest in the country. H – chased me round his consulting room with a drum-stick, tapping my nerves and cunningly working my reflexes. Then he tickled the soles of my feet and pricked me with a pin – all of which I stood like a man. He wears a soft black hat, looks like a Quaker, and reads the Verhandlungen d. Gesellschaft d. Nervenarzten.

M – is religious and after I had disclosed my physique to him yesterday (for the 99th time) he remained on his knees by the couch in his consulting room (after working my reflexes) for a moment or two in the attitude of prayer. When the Doctor prays for you – better call in the undertaker. My epitaph "He played Ludo well." The game anyhow requires moral stamina – ask H – .

May 5.

At R – . Mugged about all day. Put on a gramophone record – then crawled up into a corner of the large, empty drawing room and ate my heart out. Heart has a bitter taste – if it's your own.

May 6.

Sat in the "morning room" feeling ill. In the chair opposite sat Aunt Fanny, aged 86, knitting. I listened to the click of her needles, while out in the garden a thrush sang, and there was a red sunset.

May 8.

Before I left R – , A – [My brother] had written to Uncle enclosing my doctor's letter. I don't know the details except that Dr. M – emphasised the seriousness and yet held out hope that two months' rest would allay the symptoms.

May 11.

At Home

I made some offensive remark to H – whom I met in the street. This set him off.

"You blighter, I hope you marry a loose woman. May your children be all bandy-legged and squint-eyed, may your teeth drop out, and your toes have bunions," and so on in his usual lengthy commination.

I turned to the third man.

"Bob – this! – after all I've done for that young man! I have even gone out of my Way to cultivate in him a taste for poetry – until he is now, in fact, quite wrapped up in it – indeed, so much so, that for a time he was nothing but a brown paper parcel labelled Poetry."

H. (doggedly): "When are you going to die?"

"That Master H – ," I answered menacingly, "is on the knees of the Gods."

H.: "I shan't believe you're dead till I see your tombstone. I shall then say to the Sexton, 'Is he really dead, then?' and the Sexton will say, 'Well, 'ee's buried onny way.'"

Bob was not quite in sympathy with our boisterous spirits.

May 15.

Gardening

Sought out H – as he was watering his petunias in the garden. He informed me he was going to London on Monday.

H.: "Mother is coming too."

B.: "Why?"

H.: "Oh! I'm buying my kit – shirts and things. I sail at the beginning of July."

B.: "I suppose shirts are difficult to buy. You wouldn't know what to do with one if you had one. Your mother will lead you by the hand into a shop and say, 'H – , dear, this is a shirt,' and you'll reply with pathos, 'Mother what are the wild shirts saying?'"

H.: "You're a B.F." (goes on watering).

"I wonder what you'd do if you were let loose in a big garden," I began.

H.: "I should be as happy as a bird. I should hop about, chirrup and lay eggs. You should have seen my tomato plants last year – one was as tall as father."

B.: "Now tell me of the Gooseberry as big as Mother."

Mutual execrations. Then we grinned and cackled at each other, emitting weird and ferocious cachinnations. Several times a day in confidential, serious tones – after one of these explosions – we say, "I really believe we're mad." You never heard such extraordinary caterwaulings. Our snappy conversations are interrupted with them every minute or so!

Stagnancy

A stagnant day. Lay still in the Park all day with just sufficient energy to observe. The Park was almost empty. Every one but me at work. Nothing is more dreary than a pleasure ground on workdays. There was one man a little way off throwing a ball to a clever dog. Behind me on the path, some one came along wheeling a pram. I listened in a kind of coma to the scrunching of the gravel in the distance a long time after the pram was out of sight. Far away – the tinkle of Church bells in a village across the river, and, in front, the man still throwing the ball to his clever dog.

May 25.

Death

… I suppose the truth is I am at last broken to the idea of Death. Once it terrified me and once I hated it. But now it only annoys me. Having lived with the Bogey for so long, and broken bread with him so often, I am used to his ugliness, tho' his persistent attentions bore me. Why doesn't he do it and have done with me? Why this deference, why does he pass me everything but the poison? Why am I such an unconscionably long time dying?

What embitters me is the humiliation of having to die, to have to be pouring out the precious juices of my life into the dull Earth, to be no longer conscious of what goes on, no longer moving abroad upon the Earth creating attraction and repulsions, pouring out one's ego in a stream. To think that the women I have loved will be marrying and forget, and that the men I have hated will continue on their way and forget I ever hated them – the ignominy of being dead! What voluble talker likes his mouth to be stopped with earth, who relishes the idea of the carrion worm mining in the seat of the intellect?

May 29.

Renunciation

Staying at the King's Hotel, – . Giddiness very bad. Death seems unavoidable. A tumour on the brain?

Coming down here in the train, sat in corner of the compartment, twined one leg around the other, rested my elbow on the window ledge, and gazed out helplessly at the exuberant green fields, green woods, and green hedgerows. The weather was perfect, the sun blazed down.

Certainly, I was rather sorry for myself at the thought of leaving it all. But I girded up my loins and wrapped around me for a while the mantle of a nobler sentiment; i. e. I felt sorry for the others as well – for the two brown carters in the road ambling along with a timber waggon, for the two old maids in the same compartment with me knitting bedsocks, for the beautiful Swallows darting over the stream, for the rabbit that lopped into the fern just as we passed – they too were all leaving it.

The extent of my benign compassion startled me – it was so unexpected. Perhaps for the first time in my life I forgot all about my own miserable ambitions – I forgave the successful, the time-servers, the self-satisfied, the overweening, the gracious and condescending – all, in fact, who hitherto have been thorns in my flesh and innocently enough have goaded me to still fiercer efforts to win thro'. "Poor people," I said. "Leave them alone. Let them be happy if they can." With a submissive heart, I was ready to sit down in the rows of this world's failures and never have thought one bitter word about success. To all those persons who in one way or another had foiled my purposes I extended a pardon with Olympian gravity, and, strangest of all, I could have melted such frosty moral rectitudes with a genuine interest in the careers of my struggling contemporaries. With perfect self-abnegation, I held out my hand to them and wished them all "God Speed."

It was a strange metempsychosis. Yet of a truth it is no use being niggardly over our lives. We are all of us "shelling out." And we can afford to be generous, for we shall all – some early, some late – be bankrupt in the end. For my part, I've had a short and boisterous voyage and shan't be sorry to get into port. I give up all my plans, all my hopes, all my loves and enthusiasms without remonstrance. I renounce all – I myself am already really dead.

May 30.

Last night the sea was as flat as a pavement, a pretty barque with all her sails out to catch the smallest puff of wind – the tiniest inspiration – was nevertheless without motion – a painted ship on a tapestry of violet. H – Hill was an immense angular mass of indigo blue. Even rowing boats made little progress and the water came off the languid paddles in syrupy clots. Everything was utterly still, the air thick – like cottonwool to the touch and very stifling; vitality in living things leaked away under a sensuous lotus influence. Intermittently after the darkness had come, Bullpoint Lighthouse shone like the wink of a lascivious eye.

Pottering about all day on the Pier and Front, listening to other people's talk, catching snippets of conversation – not edifying. If there were seven wise men in the town, I would not save it. Damn the place!

May 31.

… I espied her first in the distance and turned my head away quickly and looked out to sea. A moment after, I began to turn my head round again slowly with the cautiousness and air of suspicion of a Tortoise poking its head out from underneath his shell. I was terrified to discover that in the meantime she had come and sat down on the seat immediately behind me with her back to mine. We sat like this back to back for some time and I enjoyed the novel experience and the tension. A few years ago, the bare sight of her gave me palpitation of the heart, and, on the first occasion that I had the courage to stop to speak, I felt livid and the skin on my face twitched uncontrollably.

Presently I got up and walked past – in the knowledge that she must now be conscious of my presence after a disappearance of three years. Later we met face to face and I broke the ice. She's a pretty girl… So too is her sister.

Few people, except my barber, know how amorous I am. He has to shave my sinuous lips.

June 3.

Spent many dreadful hours cogitating whether to accept their invitation to dinner… I wanted to go for several reasons. I wanted to see her in a home-setting for the first time, and I wanted to spend the evening with three pretty girls. I also had the idea of displaying myself to the scrutinising gaze of the family as the hero of the old romance: and of showing Her how much I had progressed since last we met and what a treasure she had lost.

On the other hand, I was afraid that the invitation was only a casual one, I feared a snuffy reception, a frosty smile and a rigid hand. Could I go up and partake of meat at their board, among brothers and sisters taking me for an ogre of a jilt, and she herself perhaps opposite me making me blush perpetually to recall our one-time passionate kisses, our love letters and our execrable verses to each other! There seemed dreadful possibilities in such an adventure. Yet I badly wanted to experience the piquant situation.

At 7 p.m., half an hour before I was due, decided on strong measures. I entered a pub and took a stiff whisky and soda, and then set off with a stout heart to take the icy family by storm – and if need be live down my evil reputation by my amiability and urbanity!

I went – and of course everything passed off in the most normal manner. She is a very pretty girl – like velvet. Before dinner, we walked in the garden – and talked only of flowers.

June 4.

On the Hill, this morning, felt the thrill of the news of my own Death: I mean I imagined I heard the words, —

"You've heard the news about B – ?"

Second Voice: "No, what?"

"He's dead."

Silence.

Won't all this seem piffle if I don't die after all! As an artist in life I ought to die; it is the only artistic ending – and I ought to die now or the Third Act will fizzle out in a long doctor's bill.

June 5.

A New Pile in the Pier

Watched some men put a new pile in the pier. There was all the usual paraphernalia of chains, pulleys, cranes, and ropes, with a massive wooden pile swinging over the water at the end of a long wire hawser. Everything was in the massive style – even the men – very powerful men, slow, ruminative, silent men.

Nothing very relevant could be gathered from casual remarks. The conversation was without exception monosyllabic: "Let go," or "Stand fast." But by close attention to certain obscure movements of the man on the ladder near the water's edge, it gradually came thro' to my consciousness that all these powerful, silent men were up against some bitter difficulty. I cannot say what it was. The burly monsters were silent about the matter… In fact they appeared almost indifferent – and tired, oh! so very tired of the whole business. The attitude of the man nearest me was that for all he cared the pile could go on swinging in mid-air to the crack of Doom.

They continued slow, laborious efforts to overcome the secret difficulty. But these gradually slackened and finally ceased. One massive man after another abandoned his post in order to lean over the rails and gaze like a mystic into the depths of the sea. No one spoke. No one saw anything not even in the depths of the sea. One spat, and with round, sad eyes contemplated the trajectory of his brown bolus (he had been chewing) in its descent into the water.

The foreman, an original thinker, lit a cigarette, which relieved the tension. Then, slowly and with majesty, he turned on his heel, and walked away. With the sudden eclipse of the foreman's interest, the incident closed. I should have been scarcely surprised to find him behind the Harbour-master's Office playing "Shove-ha'penny" or skittles with the pile still swinging in mid-air… After all it was only a bloody pile.

June 11.

Depression

Suffering from depression… The melancholy fit fell very suddenly. All the colour went out of my life, the world was dirty gray. On the way back to my hotel caught sight of H – , jumping into a cab, after a visit to S – Sands. But the sight of him aroused no desire in me to shout or wave. I merely wondered how on earth he could have spent a happy day at such a Sandy place.

On arriving at – , sank deeper into my morass. It suffocated me to find the old familiar landmarks coming into view … the holiday-makers along the streets how I hated them – the Peg Top Hill how desolate – all as before – how dull. The very fact that they were all there as before in the morning nauseated me. The sea-coast here is magnificent, the town is pretty – I know that, of course. But all looked dreary and cheerless – just the sort of feeling one gets on entering an empty house with no fire on a winter's day and nowhere to sit down… I felt as lonely and desolate as a man suddenly fallen from the clouds into an unknown town on the Antarctic Continent built of ice and inhabited by Penguins. Who are these people? I asked myself irritably. There perhaps on the other side of the street was my own brother. But I was not even faintly interested and told the cabman to drive on. The spray from the sea fogged my spectacles and made me weary.

June 14.

The Restlessness o,' the Sea

The restlessness of the sea acts as a soporific on jangled nerves. You gaze at its incessant activities, unwillingly at first because they distract your attention from your own cherished worries and griefs, – but later you watch with complete self-abandon – it wrenches you out of yourself – and eventually with a kind of stupid hypnotic stare.

Dr. Spurgeon

The day has been overcast, but to-night a soft breeze sprang up and swept the sky clear as softly as a mop. The sun coming out shone upon a white sail far out in the channel, scarcely another vessel hove in sight. The white sail glittered like a piece of silver paper whenever the mainsail swung round as the vessel tacked. Its solitariness and whiteness in a desert of marine blue attracted the attention and held it till at last I could look at nothing else. The sight of it – so clean and white and fair – set me yearning for all the rarest and most exquisite things my imagination could conjure up – a beautiful girl, with fair and sunburnt skin, brown eyes, dark eyebrows, and small pretty feet; a dewdrop in a violet's face; an orange-tip butterfly swinging on an umbel of a flower.

The sail went on twinkling and began to exert an almost moral influence over me. It drew out all the good in me. I longed to follow it on white wings – an angel I suppose – to quit this husk of a body "as raiment put away," and pursue Truth and Beauty across the sea to the horizon, and beyond the horizon up the sky itself to its last tenuous confines, no doubt with a still small voice summoning me and the rest of the elect to an Agapemone, with Dr. Spurgeon at the door distributing tracts.

I can scoff like this now. But at the time my exaltation was very real. My soul strained in the leash. I was full of a desire for unattainable spiritual beauty. I wanted something. But I don't know what I want.

June 16.

My Sense of Touch

My sense of touch has always been morbidly acute. I like to feel a cigarette locked in the extreme corner of my mouth. When I remove it from my mouth then I hold it probably up in the fork between two fingers. If I am waiting for a meal I finger the cool knives and forks. If I am in the country I plunge my hands with outspread fingers into a mass of large-topped grasses, then close my fingers, crush and decapitate the lot.

June 27.

Camping Out at S – Sands

A brilliant summer day. Up early, breakfasted, and, clad in sweater and trousers, walked up the sands to the boathouse with bare feet.

Everything was wonderful! I strode along over the level sands infatuated with the sheer ability to put one leg in front of the other and walk. I loved to feel the muscles of my thighs working, and to swing my arms in rhythm with the stride. The stiff breeze had blown the sky clear, and was rushing through my long hair, and bellowing into each ear. I strode as Alexander must have done!

1914

February 4.

… Finally and in conclusion I have fallen ill again, have again resumed my periodical visits to the Doctor, and am swallowing his rat-poison in a blind faith as aforetime. In fact, I am in London, leading the same solitary life, seeing no one, talking to no one, and daily struggling with this demon of ill-health. Can no one exorcise him? The sight of both my eyes is affected now. Blindness?

B – continues whoring, drinking, sneering. R – as usual, devoid of emotion, cold, passionless, Shavian, and self-absorbed, still titillates his mind with etching, sociology, music, etc., and I have at last ceased to bore him with what he probably calls the febrile utterances of an overwrought mind.

Such is my world! Oh! I forgot – on the floor below me is a corpse – that of an old gentleman who passed away suddenly in the night. In the small hours, the landlady went for the Doctor over the way, but he refused to come, saying the old man was too aged. So the poor gentleman died alone – in this rat hole of a place.

February 7.

Intending to buy my usual 3d. packet of Goldflakes, entered a tobacconist's in Piccadilly, but once inside surprised to find myself in a classy west-end establishment, which frightened my flabby nature into buying De Reszke's instead. I hadn't the courage to face the aristocrat behind the counter with a request for Goldflakes – probably not stocked. What would he think of me? Besides, I shrank from letting him see I was not perfectly well-to-do.

February 14.

I wonder what this year has in store for me? The first twenty-four years of my life have hunted me up and down the keyboard – I have been right to the top and also to the bottom – very happy and very miserable. Yet I prefer the life that is a hunt and an adventure. I don't really mind being chased like this. I almost thrive on the excitement. If I knew always where to look with any degree of certainty for my next day's life I should yawn! "What if to-day be sweet," I say, and never look ahead. To me, next week is next century.

The danger and uncertainty of my life make me cherish and hug closely to my heart various little projects that otherwise would seem unworthy. I work at them quickly, frantically, sometimes, afraid to whisper to a living soul what expectations I dare to harbour in my heart. What if now the end be near? Not a word! Let me go onward.

February 15.

To-day I have reviewed the situation carefully, exhaustively. I have peered into every aspect of my life and achievements and everything I have seen nauseates me. I can find no ray of comfort in anything I have done or in anything I might do. My life seems to have been a wilderness of futile endeavour. I started wrong from the very beginning. At the moment of my birth I was coming into the world in the wrong place and under wrong conditions. Why seek to overcome such colossal initial disadvantages? In this mood I found fault with my parentage, my inheritance, all my mental and physical disabilities…

This must be a form of incipient insanity. Even as a boy, I can remember being preternaturally absorbed in myself and preternaturally discontented. I was accustomed to exhaust my mind by the most harassing cross-examinations – no Counsel at the Bar ever treated a witness more mercilessly. After a day of this sort of thing, when silently and morbidly in every spare moment, at meals, in school, or on a walk, I would incessantly ply the questions, "What is the ultimate value of your work, cui bono?" etc. I went to bed in the evening with a feeling of hopelessness and dissatisfaction – haggard with considerations and reconsiderations of my outlook, my talent, my character, my future. In bed, I tossed from side to side, mentally exhausted with my efforts to obtain some satisfying conclusion – always hopeful, determined to the last to be able to square up my little affairs before going to sleep. But out of this mazy, vertiginous mass of thinking no satisfaction ever came. Now, I thought – or the next moment– or as soon as I review and revise myself in this or in that aspect, I shall be content. And so I went on, tearing down and reforming, revising and reviewing, till finally from sheer exhaustion and very unhappy I fell asleep.

Next morning I was all right.

February 20.

Am feeling very unwell. My ill-health, my isolation, baulked ambitions, and daily breadwinning all conspire to bring me down. The idea of a pistol and the end of it grows on me day by day.

February 21.

After four days of the most profound depression of spirits, bitterness, self-distrust, despair, I emerged from the cloud to-day quite suddenly (probably the arsenic and strychnine begins to take effect) and walked up Exhibition Road with the intention of visiting the Science Museum Library so as to refer to Schafer's Essentials of Histology (I have to watch myself carefully so that I may act at once as soon as the balance of mind is restored). In the lobby was a woman screaming as if in pain, with a passer-by at her side saying sternly, "What is the matter with you?" as if she were making herself ridiculous by suffering pain in public.

I passed by quickly, pretending not to notice lest – after all – I should be done out of my Essentials of Histology. Even in the Library I very nearly let the opportunity slide by picking up a book on squaring the circle, the preface and introduction of which I was forced to read.

March 4.

The Entomological Society

There were a great many Scarabees present who exhibited to one another poor little pinned insects in collecting-boxes … It was really a one-man show, Prof. Poulton, a man of very considerable scientific attainments, being present, and shouting with a raucous voice in a way that must have scared some of the timid, unassuming collectors of our country's butterflies and moths. Like a great powerful sheep-dog, he got up and barked, "Mendelian characters," or "Germ plasm," what time the obedient flock ran together and bleated a pitiful applause. I suppose, having frequently heard these and similar phrases fall from the lips of the great man at these reunions, they have come to regard them as symbols of a ritual which they think it pious to accept without any question. So every time the Professor says, "Allelomorph," or some such phrase, they cross themselves and never venture to ask him what the hell it is all about.

March 7.

A Scots Fir

Have been feeling very "down" of late, but yesterday I saw a fine Scots Fir by the roadside – tall, erect, as straight as a Parthenon pillar. The sight of it restored my courage. It had a tonic effect. Quite unconsciously I pulled my shoulders back and walked ahead with renewed vows never to flinch again. It is a noble tree. It has strength as a giant, and a giant's height, and yet kindly withal, the branches drooping down graciously towards you – like a kind giant extending its hands to a child.

March 22.

A Stagnant Day

Went to bed late last night so I slept on soundly till 9 a.m. Went down to the bath-room, but found the door was shut, so went back to my bedroom again, lay down and dosed a while, thinking of nothing in particular. Went down again – door still locked – swore – returned once more to my room and reclined on the bed, with door open, so that I could hear as soon as the bath-room door opened… Rang the bell, and Miss – brought up a jug of hot water to shave with, and a tumbler of hot water to drink (for my dyspepsia). She, on being interrogated, said there was some one in the bath-room. I said I wanted a bath too, so as she passed on her way down she shouted, "Hurry up, Mr. Barbellion wants a bath as well." Her footsteps then died away as she descended lower into the basement, where the family lives, sleeps, and cooks our food.

At length, hearing the door open, I ejaculated, "the Lord be praised," rushed down, entered the bath-room and secured it from further intruders. I observed that Miss – senior had been bathing her members, and that the bath, tho' empty, was covered inside with patches of soap – unutterably black! Oh! Miss – !

Dressed leisurely and breakfasted. When the table was cleared wrote a portion of my essay on Spallanzani…

Then, being giddy and tired, rang for dinner. Miss – laid the table. She looked very clean. I said, "Good-morning," and she suitably replied, and I went on reading, the Winning Post. Felt too slack to be amiable. Next time she came in, I said as pleasantly as I could, "Is it all ready?" and being informed proceeded to eat forthwith.

In the afternoon, took a 'bus to Richmond. No room outside, so had to go inside – curse – and sit opposite a row – curse again – of fat, ugly, elderly women, all off to visit their married daughters, the usual Sunday jaunt. At Hammersmith got on the outside, and at Turnham Green was caught in a hail storm. Very cold all of a sudden, so got off and took shelter in the doorway of a shop, which was of course closed, the day being Sunday. Rain, wind, and hail continued for some while, as I gazed at the wet, almost empty street, thinking, re-thinking and thinking over again the same thought, viz., that the 'bus ride along this route was exceptionally cheap – probably because of competition with the trams.

The next 'bus took me to Richmond. Two young girls sat in front, and kept looking back to know if I was "game." I looked through them. Walked in the Park just conscious of the singing of Larks and the chatter of Jays, but harassed mentally by the question, "To whom shall I send my essay, when finished?" To shelter from the rain sat under an oak where four youths joined me and said, "Worse luck," and "Not half," and smoked cigarettes. They gossipped and giggled like girls, put their arms around each other's necks. At the dinner last night, they said, they had Duck and Tomato Soup and Beeswax ("Beesley, you know, the chap that goes about with Smith a lot") wore a fancy waistcoat with a dinner jacket. When I got up to move on, they became convulsed with laughter. I scowled.

Had tea in the Pagoda tea-rooms, dry toast and brown bread and butter. Two young men opposite me were quietly playing the fool.

"Hold my hand," one said audibly enough for two lovers to hear, comfortably settled up in a corner. Even at a side view I could see them kissing each other in between mouthfuls of bread and butter and jam.

On rising to go, one of the two hilarious youths removed my cap and playfully placed it on top of the bowler which his friend was wearing.

"My cap, I think," I said sharply, and the young man apologised with a splutter. I glared like a kill-joy of sixty.

On the 'bus, coming home, thro' streets full of motor traffic and all available space plastered with advertisements that screamed at you, I espied in front three pretty girls, who gave me the "Glad Eye." One had a deep, musical voice, and kept on using it, one of the others a pretty ankle and kept on showing it.

At Kew, two Italians came aboard, one of whom went out of his way to sit among the girls. He sat level with them, and kept turning his head around, giving them a sweeping glance as he did so, to shout remarks in Italian to his friend behind. He thought the girls were prostitutes, I think, and he may have been right. I was on the seat behind this man and for want of anything better to do, studied his face minutely. In short, it was fat, round, and greasy. He wore black moustachios with curly ends, his eyes were dark shining, bulgy, and around his neck was wrapped a scarf inside a dirty linen collar, as if he had a sore throat. I sat behind him and hated him steadily, perseveringly.

At Hammersmith the three girls got off, and the bulgy-eyed Italian watched them go with lascivious eyes, looking over the rail and down at them on the pavement – still interested. I looked down too. They crossed the road in front of us and disappeared.

Came home and here I am writing this. This is the content of to-day's consciousness. This is about all I have thought, said, or done, or felt. A stagnant day!

March 26.

Home with a bad influenza cold. In a deplorable condition. The best I could do was to sit by the fire and read newspapers one by one from the first page to the last till the reading became mechanical. I found myself reading an account of the Lincoln Handicap and a column article on Kleptomania, while advertisements of new books were devoured with relish as delicacies. My mind became a morass of current Divorce Court News, Society Gossip – "if Sir A. goes Romeward, if Miss B. sings true" – and advertisements. I went on reading because I was afraid to be alone with myself.

B – arrived at tea and after saying he felt very "pin-eyed" swallowed a glass of Bols gin – the Gin of Antony Bols – and recovered sufficiently to inform me delightedly that he had just won £50. He told me all the story; meanwhile, I, tired of wiping and blowing my nose, sat in the dirty armchair hunched up with elbows on knees and let it drip on to the dirty carpet. B – , of course, noticed nothing, which was fortunate.

Some kinds of damned fool would have been kindly and sympathetic. I must say I like old B – . I like him for his simpleness and utter absence of self-consciousness, which make him as charming as a child. Moreover, he often makes me a present of invaluable turf tips. Of course, he is a liar, but his lies are harmless and on his mouth like milk on an infant's. My own lies are much more dangerous. And when you are ill, to be treated as tho' you were well is good for hypochondriacs.

April 15.

H – 's wedding. Five minutes before time, I am told I made a dramatic entry into the church clad in an audaciously light pair of Cashmere trousers, lemon-coloured gloves, with top hat and cane. The latter upset the respectability frightfully – it is not comme il faut.

April 16.

… If I am to admit the facts they are that I eagerly anticipate love, look everywhere for it, long for it, am unhappy without it. She fascinates me – admitted. I could, if I would, surrender myself. Her affection makes me long to do it. I am sick of living by myself. I am frightened of myself. My life is miserable alone, and sometimes desperately miserable when I long for a little sympathy to be close at hand.

I have often tried to persuade R – to share a flat with me, because I don't really wish to marry. I struggle against the idea, I am egotist enough to wish to shirk the responsibilities.

But then I am a ridiculously romantic creature With a wonderful ideal of a woman I shall never meet or if I do she won't want me – "that (wholly) impossible She." R – in a flat with me would partly solve my difficulties. I don't love her enough for marriage. Mine must be a grand passion, a bouleversement– for I am capable of it.

April 17.

A Humble Confession

The Hon. – , son and heir of Lord – , to-day invited me to lunch with him in – Square. He's a handsome youth of twenty-five, with fair hair and blue eyes… and O! such an aristocrat. Good Lord.

But to continue: the receipt of so unexpected an invitation from so glorious a young gentleman at first gave me palpitation of the heart. I was so surprised that I scarcely had enough presence of mind to listen to the rest of his remarks and later, it was only with the greatest difficulty that I could recall the place where we arranged to meet. His remarks, too, are not easy to follow, as he talks in a stenographic, Alfred-Jingle-like manner, jerking out disjected members of sentences, and leaving you to make the best of them or else to Hell with you – by the Lord, I speak English, don't I? If I said, "I beg your pardon," he jerked again, and left me often equally unenlightened.

On arriving at his home, the first thing he did was to shout down the stairs to the basement: "Elsie, Elsie," while I gazed with awe at a parcel on the hall table addressed to "Lord – ." Before lunch we sat in his little room and talked about – , but I was still quite unable to regain my self-composure. I couldn't for the life of me forget that here was I lunching with Lord – 's son, on equal terms, with mutual interests, that his sisters perhaps would come in directly or even the noble Lord himself. I felt like a scared hare. How should I address a peer of the realm? I kept trying to remember and every now and then for some unaccountable reason my mind travelled into – shire and I saw Auntie C – serving out tea and sugar over the counter of the baker's shop in the little village. I luxuriated in the contrast, tho' I am not at all inclined to be a snob.

He next offered me a cigarette, which I took and lit. It was a Turkish cigarette with one end plugged up with cotton-wool – to absorb the nicotine – a, thing I've never seen before. I was so flurried at the time that I did not notice this and lit the wrong end. With perfect ease and self-possession, the Honourable One pointed out my error to me and told me to throw the cigarette away and have another.

By this time I had completely lost my nerve. My pride, chagrin, excessive self-consciousness were entangling all my movements in the meshes of a net. Failing to tumble to the situation, I inquired, "Why the wrong end? Is there a right and a wrong end?" Lord – 's son and heir pointed out the cotton-wool end, now blackened by my match.

"That didn't burn very well, did it?"

I was bound to confess that it did not, and threw the smoke away under the impression that these wonderful cigarettes with right and wrong ends must be some special brand sold only to aristocrats, and at a great price, and possessing some secret virtue. Once again, handsome Mr. – drew out his silver cigarette-case, selected a second cigarette for me, and held it towards me between his long delicate fingers, at the same time pointing out the plug at one end and making a few staccato remarks which I could not catch.

I was still too scared to be in full possession of my faculties, and he apparently was too tired to be explicit to a member of the bourgeoisie, stumbling about his drawing-room. The cotton-wool plug only suggested to me some sort of a plot on the part of a dissolute scion of a noble house to lure me into one of his bad habits, such as smoking opium or taking veronal. I again prepared to light the cigarette at the wrong end.

"Try the other end," repeated the young man, smiling blandly. I blushed, and immediately recovered my balance, and even related my knowledge of pipes fitted to carry similar plugs…

During lunch (at which we sat alone) after sundry visits to the top of the stairs to shout down to the kitchen, he announced that he thought it wasn't last night's affair after all which was annoying the Cook (he got home late without a latch-key) – it was because he called her "Cook" instead of Mrs. Austin. He smiled serenely and decided to indulge Mrs. A., his indulgent attitude betraying an objectionable satisfaction with the security of his own unassailable social status. There was a trace of gratification at the little compliment secreted in the Cook's annoyance. She wanted Mr. Charles to call her Mrs. Austin, forsooth. Very well! and he smiled down on the little weakness de haute en bas.

I enjoyed this little experience. Turning it over in my mind (as the housemaid says when she decides to stay on) I have come to the conclusion that the social parvenu is not such a vulgar fellow after all. He may be a bore – particularly if he sits with his finger tips apposed over a spherical paunch, festooned with a gold chain, and keeps on relating in extenso how once he gummed labels on blacking bottles. Often enough he is a smug fellow, yet, truth to tell, we all feel a little interested in him. He is a traveller from an antique land, and we sometimes like to listen to his tales of adventure and all he has come through. He has traversed large territories of human experience, he has met strange folk and lodged in strange caravanserai. Similarly with the man who has come down in the world – the fool, the drunkard, the embezzler – he may bore us with his maudlin sympathy with himself yet his stories hold us. It must be a fine experience within the limits of a single life to traverse the whole keyboard of our social status, whether up or down. I should like to be a peer who grinds a barrel organ or (better still) a one-time organ-grinder who now lives in Park Lane. It must be very dull to remain stationary – once a peer always a peer.

April 20.

Miss – heard me sigh to-day and asked what it might mean. "Only the sparks flying upward," I answered lugubriously.

A blackguard is often unconscious of a good deal of his wickedness. Charge him with wickedness and he will deny it quite honestly – honest then, perhaps, for the first time in his life.

An Entomologist is a large hairy man with eyebrows like antennæ.

Chronic constipation has gained for me an unrivalled knowledge of all laxatives, aperients, purgatives and cathartic compounds. At present I arrange two gunpowder plots a week. It's abominable. Best literature for the latrine: picture puzzles.

April 23.

A Foolish Bird

With a menacing politeness, B – to-day inquired of a fat curate who was occupying more than his fair share of a seat on top of a 'bus, —

"Are you going to get up or stay where ye are, sir?"

The foolish bird was sitting nearly on top of B – , mistaking a bomb for an egg.

"I beg your pardon," replied the fat curate.

B – repeated his inquiry with more emphasis in the hideous Scotch brogue.

"I suppose I shall stay here till I get down presently."

"I don't think you will," said B – .

"What do you mean?" asked the fat one in falsetto indignation.

"This," B – grunted, and shunted sideways so that the poor fellow almost slid on to the floor.

A posse of police walking along in single file always makes me laugh. A single constable is a Policeman, but several in single file are "Coppers." I imagine every one laughs at them and I have a shrewd suspicion it is one of W.S. Gilbert's legacies – the Pirates of Penzance having become part of the national Consciousness.

On Lighting Chloe's Cigarette

R – remarked to-day that he intended writing a lyric on lighting Chloe's cigarette.

"Ah!" I said at once appreciative, "now tell me, do you balance your hand – by gently (ever so gently) resting the extreme tip of your little finger upon her chin, and" (I was warming up) "do you hold the match vertically or horizontally, and do you light it in the dark or in the light? If you have finesse, you won't need to be told that the thing is to get a steady flame and the maximum of illumination upon her face to last over a period for as long as possible."

"Chloe," replied R – , "is wearing now a charming blouse with a charming V-shaped opening in front. Her Aunt asked my Mother last night tentatively, 'How do you like Chloe's blouse? Is it too low?' My Mother scrutinised the dear little furry, lop-eared thing and answered doubtfully, 'No, Maria, I don't think so.'"

"How ridiculous! Why the V is a positive signpost. My dear fellow," I said to R – , "I should refuse to be bluffed by those old women. Tell them you know."

Carlyle called Lamb a despicable abortion. What a crime!

May 2.

Developed a savage fit. Up to a certain point, perhaps, but beyond that anxiety changes into recklessness – you simply don't care. The aperients are causing dyspepsia and intermittent action of the heart, which frightens me. After a terrifying week, during which at crises I have felt like dropping suddenly in the street, in the gardens, anywhere, from syncope, I rebelled against this humiliating fear. I pulled my shoulders back and walked briskly ahead along the street with a dropped beat every two or three steps. I laughed bitterly at it and felt it could stop or go on – I was at last indifferent. In a photographer's shop was the picture of a very beautiful woman and I stopped to look at her. I glowered in thro' the glass angrily and reflected how she was gazing out with that same expression even at the butcher's boy or the lamp-lighter. It embittered me to think of having to leave her to some other man. To me she represented all the joy of life which at any moment I might have had to quit for ever. Such impotence enraged me and I walked off up the street with a whirling heart and the thought, "I shall drop, I suppose, when I get up as far as that." Yet don't think I was alarmed. Oh! no. The iron had entered me, and I went on with cynical indifference waiting to be struck down.

… She is a very great deal to me. Perhaps I love her very much after all.

May 3.

Bad heart attack all day. Intermittency is very refined torture to one who wants to live very badly. Your pump goes a "dot and carry one," or say "misses a stitch," what time you breathe deep, begin to shake your friend's hand and, make a farewell speech. Then it goes on again and you order another pint of beer.

It is a fractious animal within the cage of my thorax, and I never know when it is going to escape and make off with my precious life between its teeth. I humour and coax and soothe it, but, God wot, I haven't much confidence in the little beast. My thorax it appears is an intolerable kennel.

May 10.

In a very cheerful mood. Pleased with myself and everybody till a seagull soared overhead in Kensington Gardens and aroused my vast capacities for envy – I wish I could fly.

May 24.

In L – with my brother, A – . The great man is in great form and very happy in his love for N – . He is a most delightful creature and I love him more than any one else in the wide world. There is an almost feminine tenderness in my love.

We spent a delightful day, talking and arguing and insulting one another… At these seances we take delight in anaesthetising our hearts for the purposes of argument, and a third person would be bound to suppose we were in the throes of a bitter quarrel. We pile up one vindictive remark on another, ingeniously seeking out – and with malice – weak points in each other's armour, which previous exchange of confidences makes it easy to find. Neither of us hesitates to make use of such private confessions, yet our love is so strong that we can afford to take any liberty. There is, in fact, a fearful joy in testing the strength of our affection by searching for cutting rejoinders – to see the effect. We rig up one another's cherished ideals like Aunt Sallies and then knock them down, we wax sarcastic, satirical, contemptuous in turn, we wave our hands animatedly (hand-waving is a great trick with both of us), get flushed, point with our fingers, and thump the table to clinch some bit of repartee. Yet it's all smoke. Our love is unassailable – it's like the law of gravitation, you cannot dispute it, it underlies our existence, it is the air we breathe.

N – is charming, and thought we were quarrelling, and therefore intervened on his side!

May 31.

R – outlined an impression he had in Naples one day during a sirocco of the imminence of his own death. It was evidently an isolated experience and bored me a little as I could have said a lot myself about that. When he finished I drew from my pocket an envelope with my name and three addresses scribbled on it to help the police in case of syncope as I explained. I have carried this with me for several years and at one time a flask of brandy.

June 3.

Went to see the Irish Players in The Playboy. Sitting in front of me was a charming little Irish girl accompanied by a male clod with red-rimmed eyes like a Bull-terrier's, a sandy, bristly moustache like a housemaid's broom, and a face like a gluteal mass, and a horrid voice that crepitated rather than spoke.

She was dark, with shining blue eyes, and a delightful little nose of the utmost import to every male who should gaze upon her. Between the acts, the clod hearkened to her vivacious conversation – like an enchanted bullock. Her vivacity was such that the tip of her nose moved up and down for emphasis and by the end of the Third Act I was captured entirely. Lucky dog, that clod!

After the play this little Irish maiden caught my eye and it became a physical impossibility for me to check a smile – and oh! Heavens! – she gave me a smile in return. Precisely five seconds later, she looked again to see if I was still smiling – I was – and we then smiled broadly and openly on one another – her smile being the timorous ingénue's not the glad eye of a femme de joie. Later, on the railway platform whither I followed her, I caught her eye again (was ever so lucky a fellow?), and we got into the same carriage. But so did the clod – ah! dear, was ever so unlucky a fellow? Forced to occupy a seat some way off, but she caught me trying to see her thro' a midnight forest of opera hats, lace ruffles, projecting ears and fat noses.

Curse! Left her at High Street Station and probably will never see her again. This is a second great opportunity. The first was the girl on Lundy Island. These two women I shall always regret. There must be so many delightful and interesting persons in London if only I could get at them.

June 4.

Rushed off to tell R – about my little Irish girl. Her face has been "shadowing" me all day.

June 6.

A violent argument with R – re marriage. He says Love means appropriation, and is taking the most elaborate precautions to forfend passion – just as if it were a militant suffragette. Every woman he meets he first puts into a long quarantine, lest perchance she carries the germ of the infectious disease. He quotes Hippolytus and talks like a mediæval ascetic. Himself, I imagine, he regards as a valuable but brittle piece of Dresden china which must be saved from rough handling and left unmolested to pursue its high and dusty destiny – an old crock as I warned him. By refusing to plunge into life he will live long and be a well preserved man, but scarcely a living man – a mummy rather. I told him so amid much laughter.

"You're a reactionary," says he.

"Yes, but why should a reactionary be a naughty boy?"

June 7.

My ironical fate lured me this evening into another discussion on marriage in which I had to take up a position exactly opposite to the one I defended yesterday against R – . In fact, I actually subverted to my own pressing requirements some of R – 's own arguments! The argument, of course, was with Her.

The "Fallen Angel" I loved most. The legs of the woman droop lifelessly backwards in an intoxicating curve. The eye caresses it – down the thighs and over the calves to the tips of the toes – like the hind limbs of some beautiful dead gazelle. He has brought off exactly the same effect in the woman in the group called "Eternal Spring," which I have only seen in a photograph.

This morning at 9 a.m. lay in bed on my back, warm and comfortable, and, for the first time for many weeks, with no pain or discomfort of any kind. The mattress curved up around my body and legs and held me in a soft warm embrace… I shut my eyes and whistled the saccharine melody for solo violin in Chopin's Funeral March. I wanted the moment prolonged for hours. Ill-health chases the soul out of a man. He becomes a body, purely physical.

November 29.

This evening she promised to be my wife after a long silent ramble together thro' dark London squares and streets! I am beside myself!

December 6.

I know now – I love her with passion. Health and ambition and sanity are returning. Projects in view: —

(1) To make her happy and myself worthy.

(2) To get married.

(3) To prepare and publish a volume of this Journal.

(4) To write two essays for Corn hill which shall surely induce the Editor to publish and not write me merely long complimentary and encouraging letters as heretofore.

Wired to A – , "The brave little pennon has been hauled down."

December 7.

Have so many projects in view and so little time in which to get them done! Moreover I am always haunted by the fear that I may never finish them thro' physical or temperamental disabilities – a breakdown in health or in purpose. I am one of those who are apt to die unexpectedly and no one would be surprised. An inquest would probably be unnecessary. I badly want to live say another twelve months. Hey! nonny-no! a man's a fool that wants to die.

December 9.

… I shook her angrily by the shoulders to-night and said, "Why do I love you? – Tell me," but she only smiled gently and said, "I cannot tell…" I ought not to love her, I know – every omen is against it… Then I am full of self-love: an intellectual Malvolio proud of his brains and air of distinction…

Then I am fickle, passionate, polygamous … I am haunted by the memory of how I have sloughed off one enthusiasm after another. I used to dissect snails in a pie-dish in the kitchen while Mother baked the cakes – the unravelling of the internal economy of a Helix caused as great an emotional storm as to-day the Unfinished Symphony does! I look for the first parasol in Kensington Gardens with the same interest as once I sought out the first snowdrop or listened for the first Cuckoo. I am as anxious to identify an instrument in Sir Henry's Orchestra as once to identify the song of a new bird in the woods. Nothing is further from my intention or desire to continue my old habit of nature study. I never read nature books – my old favourites – Waterton's Wanderings, Gilbert White, The Zoologist, etc. – have no interest for me – in fact they give me slight mental nausea even to glance at. Wiedersheim (good old Wiedersheim) is now deposed by a text book on Harmony. My main desire just now is to hear the best music. In the country I wore blinkers and saw only zoology. Now in London, I've taken the bit in my mouth – and it's a mouth of iron – wanting a run for all my troubles before Death strikes me down.

All this evidence of my temperamental instability alarms and distresses me on reflection and makes the soul weary. I wish I loved more steadily. I am always sidetracking myself. The title of "husband" scares me.

December 12.

Sir Henry Wood conducting

Went to the Queen's Hall, sat in the Orchestra and watched Sir Henry's statuesque figure conducting thro' a forest of bows, "which pleased me mightily." He would be worth watching if you were stone deaf. If you could not hear a sound, the animation and excitement of an orchestra in full swing, with the conductor cutting and slashing at invisible foes, make a magnificent spectacle.

The face of Sir Henry Wood strikes me as very much like the traditional pictures of Jesus Christ, tho' Sir Henry is dark – the melanic Messiah I call him (very much to my own delight). Rodin ought to do him in stone – Chesterfield's ideal of a man – a Corinthian edifice on Tuscan foundations. In Sir Henry's case there can be no disputing the Tuscan foundations. However swift and elegant the movements of his arms, his splendid lower extremities remain as firm as stone columns. While the music is calm and serene his right hand and baton execute in concert with the left, perfect geometric curves around his head. Then as it gathers in force and volume, when the bows begin to dart swiftly across the fiddles and the trumpets and trombones blaze away in a conflagration, we are all expectant – and even a little fearful, to observe his sabre-like cuts. The tension grows … I hold my breath… Sir Henry snatches a second to throw back a lock of his hair that has fallen limply across his forehead, then goes on in unrelenting pursuit, cutting and slashing at hordes of invisible fiends that leap howling out towards him. There is a great turmoil of combat, but the Conductor struggles on till the great explosion happens. But in spite of that, you see him still standing thro' a cloud of great chords, quite undaunted. His sword zigzags up and down the scale – suddenly the closed fist of his left hand shoots up straight and points to the zenith – like the arm of a heathen priest appealing to Baal to bring down fire from Heaven… But the appeal avails nought and it looks as tho' it were all up for poor Sir Henry. The music is just as infuriated – his body writhes with it – the melanic Messiah crucified by the inappeasable desire to express by visible gestures all that he feels in his heart. He surrenders – so you think – he opens out both arms wide and baring his breast, dares them all to do their worst – like the picture of Moffat the missionary among the savages of the Dark Continent!

And yet he wins after all. At the very last moment he seems to summon all his remaining strength and in one final and devastating sweep mows down the orchestra rank by rank… You awake from the nightmare to discover the victor acknowledging the applause in a series of his inimitable bows.

One ought to pack one's ears up with cotton wool at a concert where Sir Henry conducts. Otherwise, the music is apt to distract one's attention. R.L.S. wanted to be at the head of a cavalry charge – sword over head – but I'd rather fight an orchestra with a baton.

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony

This symphony always works me up into an ecstasy; in ecstatic sympathy with its dread fulness I could stand up in the balcony and fling myself down passionately into the arena below. Yet there were women sitting alongside me to-day – knitting! It so annoyed and irritated me that at the end of the first movement I got up and sat elsewhere. They would have sat knitting at the foot of the Cross, I suppose.

At the end of the second movement, two or three other women got up and went home to tea! It would have surprised me no more to have seen a cork extract itself from its bottle and promenade.

Tschaikovsky

Just lately I've heard a lot of music including Tschaikovsky's Pathétique and Fifth Symphonies, some Debussy, and odd pieces by Dukas, Glinka, Smetana, Mozart. I am chock-full of impressions of all this precious stuff and scarcely know what to write. As usual, the third movement of the Pathétique produced a frenzy of exhilaration; I seemed to put on several inches around my chest and wished to shout in a voice of thunder. The conventions of a public concert hall are dreadfully oppressive at such times. I could have eaten "all the elephants of Hindustan and picked my teeth with the spire of Strassburg Cathedral."

In the last movement of the Fifth Symphony of that splendid fellow Tschaikovsky, the orchestra seemed to gallop away leaving poor Landon Ronald to wave his whip in a ridiculously ineffective way. They went on crashing down chords, and just before the end I had the awful presentiment that the orchestra simply could not stop. I sat still straining every nerve in the expectancy that this chord or the next or the next was the end. But it went on pounding down – each one seemed the last but every time another followed as passionate and emphatic as the one before, until finally, whatever this inhuman orchestra was attempting to crush and destroy must have been reduced to shapeless pulp. I wanted to board the platform and plead with them, elderly gentlemen turned their heads nervously, everyone was breathless, we all wanted to call "For God's sake, stop" – to do anything to still this awful lust for annihilation… The end came quickly in four drum beats in quick succession. I have never seen such hate, such passionate intensity of the will to destroy… And Tschaikovsky was a Russian!

Debussy was a welcome change. "L'Après-midi d'un Faun" is a musical setting to an oscitatory exercise. It is an orchestral yawn. Oh! so tired!

Came away thoroughly delighted. Wanted to say to every one "Bally good, ain't it?" and then we would all shake hands and go home whistling.

December 14.

My rooms are littered with old concert programmes and the Doctor's prescriptions (in the yellow envelopes of the dispenser) for my various ailments and diseases, and books, books, books.

Among the latter those lying on my table at this moment are —

Plays of M. Brieux.

Joseph Vance.

The Sequel to Pragmatism: The Meaning of Truth, by Willam James.

Beyond Good and Evil.

Dostoievsky's The Possessed.

Marie Bashkirtseff's Journal.

I have found time to read only the first chapter of this last and am almost afraid to go on. It would be so humiliating to find I was only her duplicate.

On my mantelpiece stands a photograph of Huxley – the hero of my youth – which old B – has always taken to be that of my grandpapa! A plaster-cast mask of Voltaire when first hung up made him chuckle with indecent laughter. "A regular all-nighter. Who is it?" he said.

December 15.

Petticoat Lane

This morning, being Sunday, went to Petticoat Lane and enjoyed myself.

On turning the corner to go into Middlesex Street, as it it now called, the first thing I saw was a little girl – a Jewess – being tackled for selling Belgian button-hole flags by two policemen who ultimately marched her off to the police station.

In the Lane, first of all, was a "Royal Ascot Jockey Scales" made of brass and upholstered in gaudy red velvet – a penny a time. A very fat man was being weighed and looked a little distressed on being given his ticket.

"Another stone," he told the crowd mournfully.

"You'll have to eat less pork," some one volunteered and we all laughed.

Next door to the Scales was a man selling gyroscopes. "Something scientific, amusing as well as instructive, illustrating the principles of gravity and stability. What I show you is what I sell – price one shilling. Who?"

I stopped next at a stall containing nothing but caps, – "any size, any colour, any pattern, a shilling apiece – now then!" This show was being run by two men – a Jew in a fur cap on one side of the stall and a very powerful-looking sort of Captain Cuttle on the other – a seafaring man, almost as broad as he was long, with a game leg and the voice of a skipper in a hurricane. Both these men were selling caps at a prodigious pace, and with the insouciance of tradesmen sure of their custom. The skipper would seize a cap, chuck it across to a timid prospective purchaser, and, if he dropped it, chuck him over another, crying, with a "yo-heave-ho" boisterousness, "Oh! what a game, what a bees' nest."

Upon the small head of another customer, he would squash down his largest sized cap saying at once, —

"There, you look the finest gentleman – oh! ah! a little too large."

At which we all laughed, the customer looked silly, but took no offence.

"Try this," yells the skipper above the storm, and takes off his own cap. "Oh! ye needn't be afraid – I washed my hair last – year." (Laughter.)

Then to his partner, the Jew on the other side of the stall, "Oh! what a face you've got. Here! 6d. for any one who can tell me what it is. Why not take it to the trenches and get it smashed in?"

The Jew wore spectacles and had a soft ingratiating voice and brown doe-like eyes – a Jew in every respect. "Oh!" says he, in the oleaginous Semitic way, and accurately taking up his cue (for all this was rehearsed patter), "my wife says 'my face is my fortune.'"

"No wonder you're so hard up and 'ave got to take in lodgers. What's yer name?"

"John Jones," in a demure wheedling voice.

"Hoo – that's not your name in your own bloody country – I expect it's Hullabullinsky."

"Do you know what my name really is?"

"No."

"It's Assenheimopoplocatdwizlinsky Kovorod." (Loud laughter.)

"I shall call you 'ass' for short."

I was laughing loudly at these two clowns and the skipper observing as much, shouted out to me, —

"Parlez-vous Francois, M'sieur?"

"Oui, oui," said I.

"Ah! lah, you're one of us – oh! what a game! what a bees' nest," and all the time he went on selling caps and chucking them at the purchasers.

Perhaps one of the most extraordinary things I saw was a stream of young men who, one after another, came up to a stall, paid a penny and swallowed a glass of "nerve tonic" – a green liquid syphoned out of a large jar – warranted a safe cure for

"Inward weakness, slightest flurry or body oppressed."

Another man was pulling teeth and selling tooth powder. Some of the little urchins' teeth, after he had cleaned them as a demonstration, were much whiter than their faces or his. This was "the original Chas. Assenheim."

Mrs. Meyers, "not connected with any one else of the same name in the Lane" was selling eels at 2d., 3d. and 6d. and doing a brisk trade too.

But I should go on for hours if I were to tell everything seen in this remarkable lane during an hour an a half on a Sunday morning. Each stall-holder sells only one kind of article – caps or clocks or songs, braces, shawls, indecent literature, concertinas, gramophones, coats, pants, reach-me-downs, epergnes. The thoroughfare was crowded with people (I saw two Lascars in red fez caps) inspecting the goods displayed and attentively observed by numerous policemen. The alarm clocks were all going off, each gramophone was working a record (a different one!) and every tradesman shouting his wares – a perfect pandemonium.

December 31.

A Conversation

"There is that easily calculable element in your nature, dear boy," I said, "by which you forego the dignity of a free-willed human being and come under an inflexible natural law. I can anticipate your movements, intentions, and opinions long beforehand. For example, I know quite well that every Saturday morning will see you with The New Statesman under your arm; I know that the words 'Wagner' or 'Shaw' uttered slowly and deliberately in your ear will produce a perfectly definite reaction."

"I bet you can't predict what I am going to buy now,"

R – replied gaily, advancing to the newspaper stall.

He bought the Pink 'Un and I laughed…

"And so you read Pragmatism," he mused, "while the fate of the Empire stands in the balance."

"Yes," said I, "and the Paris Academy of Sciences were discussing the functions of θ [Greek: Thèta] and the Polymorphism of Antarctic diatoms last September when the Germans stood almost at the gates of Paris."

This was a lucky stroke for me, for he knew he was rubbing me on the raw. We are, of course, great friends, but sometimes we get on one another's nerves.

"I am polychromatic," I declaimed, "rhetorical, bass. You – besides being a bally fool – are of a pretty gray colour, a baritone and you paint in water-colours."

"Whereas you, of course, would paint in blood?" he answered facetiously.

His Oxford education has a firm hold on him. He says for example, "e converso" instead of "on the other hand" and "entre nous" for "between ourselves." He labels his paragraphs α, β, γ, instead of a, b, c, and quotes Juvenal, knows Paris and Naples, visits the Alps for the winter sports, all in the approved manner of dons.

Not infrequently he visits the East End to Study "how the poor live," he lectures at Toynbee Hall, and calls the proletariat "the prolly." In fact, he does everything according to the regulations, being a socialist and an agnostic, a follower of Shaw and a devotee of Bunyan. "Erotic" he is careful to pronounce eròtic to show he knows Greek, and the "Duma," the Dumà, tho' he doesn't know Russian. Like any don, he is always ready to discuss and give an opinion on any sub- supra- or circum-lunary subject from bimetallism to the Symphony as an art-form.

"That's a dominant fifth," I said to him the other day; no answer.

"You ignorant devil," I said, "you don't know what a dominant fifth is!"

We made grimaces at one another.

"Who's the Master of the Mint?" I asked him. "That is an easy one."

"The Chancellor of the Exchequer," was the prompt reply.

"Oh! that's right," I said sarcastic and crestfallen. "Now tell me the shortest verse in the Bible and the date of Rameses II."

We laughed. R – is a very clever man and the most extroardinarily versatile man I know. He is bound to make his mark. His danger is – too many irons in the fire. Here are some of his occupations and acquirements: Art (etching, drypoint, water-colours), music (a charming voice), classics, French, German, Italian (both speaking and reading knowledge), biology, etc., etc. He is for ever titillating his mind with some new thing. "For God's sake, do leave it alone – you simply rag your mind to death. Put it out to grass – go thro' an annual season of complete abstinence from knowledge – an intellectual Lent."

No one more than he enjoys my ragging him like this – and I do it rather well.

1915

January 1.

I have grown so ridiculously hypercritical and fastidious that I will refuse a man's invitation to dinner because he has watery blue eyes, or hate him for a mannerism or an impediment or affectation in his speech. Some poor devil who has not heard of Turner or Debussy or Dostoieffsky I gird at with the arrogance of a knowledgeable youth of 17. Some oddity who should afford a sane mind endless amusement, I write off as a Insus naturæ and dismiss with a flourish of contempt. My intellectual arrogance – excepting at such times as I become conscious of it and pull myself up – is incredible. It is incredible because I have no personal courage and all this pride boils up behind a timid exterior. I quail often before stupid but over-bearing persons who consequently never realise my contempt of them. Then afterwards, I writhe to think I never stood up to this fool; never uttered an appropriate word to interfere with another's nauseating self-love. It exasperates me to be unable to give a Roland for an Oliver – even servants and underlings "tick me off" – to fail always in sufficient presence of mind to make the satisfying rejoinder or riposte. I suffer from such a savage amour propre that I fear to enter the lists with a man I dislike on account of the mental anguish I should suffer if he worsted me. I am therefore bottled up tight – both my hates and loves. For a coward is not only afraid to tell a man he hates him, but is nervous too of letting go of his feeling of affection or regard lest it be rejected or not returned. I shudder to think of such remarks as (referring to me), "He's one of my admirers, you know" (sardonically), or, "I simply can't get rid of him."

If however my cork does come out, there is an explosion, and placid people occasionally marvel to hear violent language streaming from my lips and nasty acid and facetious remarks.

Of course, to intimate friends (only about three persons in the wide, wide world), I can always give free vent to my feelings, and I do so in privacy with that violence in which a weak character usually finds some compensation for his intolerable self-imposed reserve and restraint in public. I can never marvel enough at the ineradicable turpitude of my existence, at my double-facedness, and the remarkable contrast between the face I turn to the outside world and the face my friends know. It's like leading a double existence or artificially constructing a puppet to dangle before the crowd while I fulminate behind the scenes. If only I had the moral courage to play my part in life – to take the stage and be myself, to enjoy the delightful sensation of making my presence felt, instead of this vapourish mumming – then this Journal would be quite unnecessary. For to me self-expression is a necessity of life, and what cannot be expressed one way must be expressed in another. When colossal egotism is driven underground, whether by a steely surface environment or an unworkable temperament or as in my case by both, you get a truly remarkable result, and the victim a truly remarkable pain – the pain one might say of continuously unsuccessful attempts at parturition.

It is perhaps not the whole explanation to say that my milky affability before, say bores or clods is sheer personal cowardice… It is partly real affability. I am so glad to have opposite me some one who is making himself pleasant and affable and sympathetic that I forget for the moment that he is an unconscionable time-server, a sycophant, lick-spittle, toady, etc. My first impulse is always to credit folk with being nicer, cleverer, more honest and amiable than they are. Then, on reflection, I discover unpleasing characteristics, I detect their little motives, and hate myself for not speaking. The fellow is intolerable, why did I not tell him so? Bitter recriminations from my critical self upon my flabby amiable half.

On the whole, then, I lead a pretty disgraceful inner life – excepting when I pull myself together and smile benignly on all things with a philosophical smugness, such as is by no means my mood at this present moment. I am so envious that a reprint of one of Romney's Ramus girls sends me into a dry tearless anger – for the moment till I turn over the next page… Inwardly I was exacerbated this morning when R – recited, "Come and have a tiddle at the old Brown Bear," and explained how a charming "young person" sang this at breakfast the other morning. It was simply too charming for him to hear.

To-night as I brushed my hair, I decided I was quite good-looking, and I believe I mused that E – was really a lucky girl… All that is the matter with me is a colossal conceit and a colossal discontent, qualities exaggerated where a man finds himself in an environment which …

You observant people will notice that this explanation is something of a self-defence whereby the virtue goes out of my confession. I plead guilty, but great and unprecedented provocation as well. Intense pride of individuality forbids that I should ever be other than, shall I say, amiably disposed towards myself au fond, however displeased I may be with my environment. It is indeed impossible without sending him to a lunatic asylum ever to knock a man off the balance of his self-esteem… A man's loyalty to himself is the most pig-headed thing imaginable.

January 2.

The Fire Bogey

"This Box contains Manuscripts. One guinea will be paid to any one who in case of danger from fire saves it from damage or loss."

Signed: W.N.P. BARBELLION.

I have had this printed in large black characters on a card, framed and nailed to my "coffin" of Journals. I told the printer first to say Two Guineas, but he suggested that One Guinea was quite enough. I agreed but wondered how the devil he knew what the Journals were worth – nobody knows.

Next month, I expect I shall have a "hand" painted on the wall and pointing towards the box. And the month after that I shall hire a fireman to be on duty night and day standing outside No. 101 in a brass helmet and his hatchet up at the salute.

These precious Journals! Supposing I lost them! I cannot imagine the anguish it would cause me. It would be the death of my real self and as I should take no pleasure in the perpetuation of my flabby, flaccid, anæmic, amiable puppet-self, I should probably commit suicide.

August 7.

Harvey who discovered the circulation of the blood also conducted a great many investigations into the Anatomy and development of insects. But all his MSS. and drawings disappeared in the fortunes of war, and one half of his life work thus disappeared. This makes me feverish, living as I do in Armageddon!

Again, all Malpighi's pictures, furniture, books and MSS. were destroyed in a lamentable fire at his house in Bononia, occasioned it is said by the negligence of his old wife.

About 1618, Ben Jonson suffered a similar calamity thro' a fire breaking out in his study. Many unpublished MSS. perished.

A more modern and more tragic example I found recently in the person of an Australian naturalist, Dr. Walter Stimpson, who lost all his MSS., drawings, and collections in the great fire of Chicago, and was so excoriated by this irreparable misfortune that he never recovered from the shock, and died the following year a broken man and unknown.

Of course the housemaid who lit the fire with the French Revolution is known to all, as well as Newton's "Fido, Fido, you little know what you have done."

There are many dangers in preserving the labours of years in MS. form. Samuel Butler (of Erewhon) advised writing in copying ink and then pressing off a second copy to be kept in another and separate locality. My own precautions for these Journals are more elaborate. Those who know about it think I am mad. I wonder… But I dare say I am a pathetic fool – an incredible self-deceiver!

Anyhow – the "coffin" of raw material I sent down to T – while I retain the two current volumes. This is to avoid Zeppelins. E – took the "coffin" down for me on her way home from school, and at Taunton, inquisitive porters mistaking it, I suppose, for an infant's coffin carried it reverently outside the station and laid it down. She caught them looking at it just in time before her train left. Under her instructions they seized it by the brass handles and carried it back again. I sit now and with a good deal of curiosity fondle the idea of porters carrying about my Journals of confession. It's like being tickled in the palm of the hand… Two volumes of abstracted entries I keep here, and, as soon as I am married, I intend to make a second copy of these… Then all in God's good time I intend getting a volume ready for publication.

January 30.

Hearing Beethoven

To the Queen's Hall and heard Beethoven's Fifth and Seventh Symphonies.

Before the concert began I was in a fever. I kept on saying to myself, "I am going to hear the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies." I regarded myself with the most ridiculous self-adulation – I smoothed and purred over myself – a great contented Tabby cat – and all because I was so splendidly fortunate as to be about to hear Beethoven's Fifth and Seventh Symphonies.

It certainly upset me a little to find there were so many other people who were singularly fortunate as well, and it upset me still more to find some of them knitting and some reading newspapers as if they waited for sausage and mashed.

How I gloried in the Seventh! I can't believe there was any one present who gloried in it as I did! To be processing majestically up the steps of a great, an unimaginable palace (in the "Staircase" introduction), led by Sir Henry, is to have had at least a crowded ten minutes of glorious life – a suspicion crossed the mind at one time "Good Heavens, they're going to knight me." I cannot say if that were their intentions. But I escaped however…

I love the way in which a beautiful melody flits around the Orchestra and its various components like a beautiful bird.

January 19.

An Average Day

After a morning of very mixed emotions and more than one annoyance … at last sat down to lunch and a little peace and quiet with R – . We began by quoting verse at one another in open competition. Of course neither of us listened to the other's verses. We merely enjoyed the pleasure of recollecting and repeating our own. I began with Tom Moore's "Row gently here, my Gondolier." R – guessed the author rightly at once and fidgeted until he burst out with, "The Breaths of kissing night and day" – to me an easy one. I gave, "The Moon more indolently sleeps to-night" (Baudelaire), and in reply he did a great stroke by reciting some of the old French of Frangois Villon which entirely flummuxed me.

I don't believe we really love each other, but we cling to each other out of ennui and discover in each other a certain cold intellectual sympathy.

At the pay desk (Lyons' is our rendezvous) we joked with the cashier – a cheerful, fat little girl, who said to R – (indicating me), —

"He's a funny boy, isn't he?"

"Dangerous," chirped R – , and we laughed. In the street we met an aged, decrepit newsvendor – very dirty and ragged – but his voice was unexpectedly fruity.

"British Success," he called, and we stopped for the sake of the voice.

"I'm not interested," I said – as an appetiser.

"What! Not… Just one sir: I haven't sold a single copy yet, and I've a wife and four children."

"That's nothing to me – I've three wives and forty children," I remarked.

"What!" in affected surprise, turning to R – , "he's Brigham Young from Salt Lake City. Yes I know it – I've been there myself and been dry ever since. Give us a drink, sir – just one."

In consideration of his voice we gave him 2d. and passed on…

After giving a light to a Belgian soldier whose cigarette had gone out, farther along we entered a queer old music shop where they sell flageolets, serpents, clavichords, and harps. We had previously made an appointment with the man to have Schubert's Unfinished Symphony played to us, so as to recall one or two of the melodies which we can't recall and it drives us crazy. "What is that one in the second movement which goes like this?" and R – whistled a fragment. "I don't know," I said, "but let's go in here and ask." In the shop, a youth was kind enough to say that if we cared to call next day, Madame A – , the harp player would be home and would be ready to play us the symphony.

PART III – MARRIAGE

September 12.

This evening we walked thro' the Churchyard reading tombstone inscriptions. What a lot of men have had wives!

I can't make out what has come over folk recently: the wit, wisdom and irony on the old tombstones have given place to maudlin sentiment and pious Bible references. Then on the anniversary of the death the custom among poorer classes is to publish such pathetic doggerel as the following – cuttings I have taken from time to time from the local newspaper in-:

"Her wish:

 
"'Farewell dear brother, Mother, sisters,
My life was passed in love for thee.
Mourn not for me nor sorrow take
But love my husband for my sake
Until the call comes home to thee,
Live thou in peace and harmony.'"
 

Again:

 
"A day of remembrance sad to recall
But still in my heart he is loved best of all
No matter how I think of him – his name I oft recall;
There is nothing left to answer me but his photo on the wall."
 

Or:

 
"One year has passed since that sad day,
When one we loved was called away.
God took her home; it was His will,
Forget her? – No, we never will."
 

These piteous screeds fill me with loving-kindness and with contempt alternately in a pendulum-like rhythm. What is the truth about them? Is the grief of these people as mean and ridiculous as their rhymes? Or is it a pitiful inarticulateness? Or is it merely vulgar advertisement of their sorrow? Or does it signify a passionate intention never to forget? – or a fear of forgetting, the rhymes being used as a fillip to the memory? Or – most miserable of all – is it just a custom, and one follow'ed in order to appear respectable in others' eyes? Are they poor souls? or contemptible fools?

September 14.

There is a ridiculous Cocker spaniel at the house where we are staying. He must have had a love affair and been jilted, or else he's a sort of village idiot. The landlady says he's not so silly as he looks – but he looks very silly: he languishes sentimentally, and when we laugh at him he looks "hurt." To-day we took him up on the Down and it seemed to brighten him up. Really, he is sane enough, with plenty of commonsense and good manners. But he is kept at home in the garden so much, lolling about all day, that as E – said, having nothing to do, he falls in love.

The Saturday Review writes: The effect of the "Brides and the Bath" Case on people with any trace of nice feeling is perhaps not particularly mischievous, tho' the thing is repulsive and hateful to them… To gloat over the details of repulsive horrors, simply from motives of curiosity– this is bad and degrading.

What a lot of repulsive things the nice refined people who read the Saturday Review must find in the world just now. For example the War. "Simply from motives of curiosity." Why certainly, no other than these, concerning one of the most remarkable murders in the annals of crime. And murders anyhow are damned interesting – which the Saturday Review isn't.

Chipples

I was surprised to discover the other day that when I talked of Chipples no one understood what I meant! It proves to be a dialect word familiar to all residents in Devonshire and designating spring onions. Anyway you won't find it in Murray's Dictionary; yet etymologically it is an extremely interesting word and a thoroughly good word with a splendid pedigree. To wit:

Italian: Cipollo.

Spanish: Cebolla.

French: Ciboule.

Latin: Cæpulla, dim. of cæpa (cf. cive, civot).

Now how did this pretty little alien manage to settle down among simple Devon folk? What has been the relation between Italy and – say Appledore, or Plymouth?¹⁷

October 6.

In London once more, living at her flat and using her furniture.

The Chalcidoidea

The Chalcidoidea are minute winged insects that parasitise other insects, and in the Memoirs of the Queensland Museum (Vol. I., 1912) you shall find an enormous catalogue of them by a person named Girault who writes the following dedication:

"I respectfully dedicate this little portion of work to science, common sense or true knowledge. I am convinced that human welfare is so dependent upon science that civilisation would not endure without it, and that what is meant by progress would be impossible. Also I am convinced that the great majority of mankind are too ignorant, that education is too archaic and impractical as looked at from the standpoint of intrinsic knowledge. There is too little known of the essential unity of the Universe and of things included, for instance, man himself. Opinions and prejudices rule in the place of what is true…"

Part II. is dedicated to:

"The genius of mankind, especially to that form of it expressed in monistic philosophy, whose conceived perception is the highest attainment reached by man."

I can only echo Whistler's remark one day as he stood before an execrably bad drawing "God bless my soul" – uttered slowly and thoughtfully and then repeated.

The beauty of it is that the Editor adds a serious footnote, dissociating himself, and a Scarabee to whom I shewed the Work, read it with a clouded brow and then said: "I think it rather out of place in a paper of this sort." (Tableau.)

October 12.

Down with influenza.

October 13.

A Zeppelin raid last night. I am down with a temperature, but our little household remained quite calm, thank God. We heard guns going off, and I had a fit of trembling as I lay in bed. Many dead of heart failure owing to the excitement.

October 14.

Still in bed. No raid last night. There were two raids on Wednesday, one at 9.30, and another at midnight. The first time the caretaker of the flats came up very alarmed to say "Zeppelins about," so we put out the lights. Then at midnight when everyone else was asleep I heard a big voice shout up from the street: "Lights out there. They're about again." Lay still in bed and waited. Distant gunfire.

October 17.

Bad heart attack.

October 18.

Heart intermits. Every three or four minutes. M – said that I ought to be getting used to it by now! Phew!! Very nervy and pusillanimous. Taking strychnine in strong doses. I hope dear E – does not catch the 'flu. She swallows quinine with large hopes.

October 19.

Staying at R – . Had a ghastly journey down, changing trains twice at Clapham Junction and at Croydon, heart intermitting all the time in every position. Poor E – with me. To-day surprised to find myself still alive.

October 20.

Better to-day. After much persuasion, I have got E – to let the flat so that we can get away into the country outside the Zeppelin zone.

October 24.

Back in London again. Am better, bolstered up with arsenic and strychnine. Too nervously excited to do any work.

October 25.

The letting of our flat is now in the hands of an agent, and E – , poor dear, is quite resigned to abandoning all her precious wallpapers, etc.

November 7.

The flat is let and we are now living in rooms at – , 20 miles out of London, to the Westward.

November 8.

It is a great relief to be down in the country. Zeppelins terrify me. Have just had a delightful experience in reading Conrad's new book, Victory– a welcome relief from all the tension of the past two months. To outward view, I have been merely a youth getting married, catching the 'flu and giving up a London flat.

Inwardly, I have been whizzing around like a Catherine Wheel. Consider the items:

Concussion of the spine.

Resulting paralysis of left leg ten days before marriage.

Zeppelin raid (heard a cannon go off for the first time).

Severe cold in the head day before marriage (and therefore wild anxiety).

Successful marriage with abatement of cold.

Return to our home.

Ten days later, down with influenza.

A second Zeppelin raid.

Bad heart attack.

Then flat sub-let and London evacuated.

The record nauseates me. I am nauseated with myself and my self-centredness… Suppose I have been "whizzing" as I call it – what then? They are but subjective trifles – meanwhile other men are seeing great adventures in Gallipoli and elsewhere. "The Triumph is gone," exclaimed the Admiral who in a little group of naval officers on board the flagship had been watching H.M.S. Triumph sink in the Ægean. He shuts his telescope with a click and returns in great dudgeon to his own quarters. How I envy all these men who are participating in this War – soldiers, sailors, war correspondents – all who live and throb and are not afraid. I am a timid youth, ansemic, wear spectacles, and am frightened by a Zep raid! How humiliating. I hate myself for a white-livered craven: I am suffocated for want of more life and courage. My damnable body is slowly killing off all my spirit and buoyancy. Even my mind is becoming blurred. My memory is like an old man's exactly. (Ask – .)

Yet thro' all my nausea, here I remain happy to discuss myself and my little mishaps. I'm damned sick of myself and all my neurotic whimperings, and so I hereby and now intend to lead a new life and throw this Journal to the Devil. I want to mangle it, tear it to shreds. You smug, hypocritical readers! you'll get no more of me. All you say I know is true before you say it and I know now all the criticism you are going to launch. So please spare yourself the trouble. You cannot enlighten me upon myself. I know. I disgust myself – and you, and as for you, you can go to the Devil with this Journal.

Finis

November 27.

To-day, armed with a certificate from my Doctor in a sealed envelope and addressed "to the Medical Officer examining Mr. W.N.P. Barbellion," I got leave to attend the recruiting office and offer my services to my King and Country. At the time, the fact that the envelope was sealed caused no suspicion and I had been comfortably carrying the document about in my pocket for days past.

Of course I attended merely as a matter of form under pressure of the authorities, as I knew I was totally unfit – but not quite how unfit. After receiving this precious certificate, I learnt that K – was recruiting Doctor at W – , and he offered to "put me thro' in five minutes," as he knows the state of my health. So at a time agreed upon, I went to-day and was immediately rejected as soon as he had stethoscoped my heart. The certificate therefore was not needed, and coming home in the train I opened it out of curiosity…

I was quite casual and thought it would be merely interesting to see what M – said.

It was.

"Some 18 months ago," it ran, "Mr. Barbellion shewed the just visible symptoms of – " and altho' this fact was at once communicated to my relatives it was withheld from me and M – therefore asked the M.O. to respect this confidence and to reject me without stating on what grounds. He went on to refer to my patellar and plantar reflexes, by which time I had had enough, tore the paper up and flung it out of the railway carriage window.

I then returned to the Museum intending to find out what – was in Clifford Allbutt's System of Medicine. I wondered whether it was brain or heart; and the very thought gave me palpitation. I hope it is heartsomething short and sharp rather than lingering. But I believe it must be – of the brain, the opposite process of softening occurring in old age. I recall M-'s words to me before geting married: that I had this "nerve weakness," but I was more likely to succumb to pneumonia than to any nervous trouble, and that only 12 months' happiness would be worth while.

On the whole I am amazed at the calm way in which I take this news. I was a fool never to have suspected serious nerve trouble before. Does dear E – know? What did M – tell her when he saw her before our marriage?

November 28.

As soon as I woke up in this clear, country air this morning, I thought: – . I have decided never to find out what it is. I shall find out in good time by the course of events.

A few years ago, the news would have scared me. But not so now. It only interests me. I have been happy, merry, and quite high-spirited to-day.

December 5.

I believe it's creeping paralysis. My left leg goes lame after a short walk. Fortunately E – does not take alarm.

December 17.

Spent the last two days, both of us, in a state of unrelieved gloom. The clouds never lifted for a moment – it's awful. I scarcely have spoken a word… And eugenically, what kind of an infant would even a Mark Tapley expect of a father with a medical history like mine, and a mother with a nervous system like hers?.. Could anything be more unfortunate? And the War? What may not have happened by this time next year? My health is grotesque.

December 20.

I wonder if she knows. I believe she does but I am afraid to broach the matter in case she doesn't. I think she must know something otherwise she would show more alarm over my leg, and when I went to the Recruiting Office she seemed to show no fear whatever lest they took me. Several times a day in the middle of a talk, or a meal, or a kiss, this problem flashes thro' my mind. I look at her but find no solution. However – for the present – the matter is not urgent.

1916

February 1.

Since I last wrote – a month ago – I have recovered my buoyancy after a blow which kept me under water so long I thought I should never come up and be happy again… I was reciting my woes to R – , and gaining much relief thereby, when we espied another crony on the other side of the street, crossed over at once, bandied words with him and then walked on, picking up the thread of my lugubrious story just where I had left off – secretly staggered at my emotional agility. I've got to this now, – I simply don't care.

February 2.

"And she draiglet all her petticoatie, Coming thro' the rye." These words have a ridiculous fascination for me; I cannot resist their saccharine, affectionate, nay amorous jingle and keep repeating them aloud all over the house – as Lamb once kept reciting "Rose Aylmer."

February 16.

We took possession of our country cottage to-day: very charming and overlooking a beautiful Park.

Have just discovered the Journal of the De Goncourts and been reading it greedily. Life has really been a commodity. I am boiling over with vitality, chattering amiably to everyone about nothing – argumentative, sanguine, serious, ridiculous. I called old R – a Rapscallion, a Curmudgeon, and a Scaramouche, and E – a trull, a drab, a trollop, a callet. "You certainly are a unique husband," said that sweet little lady, and I…

With me, one of the symptoms of delirium is always a melodramatic truculence! I shake my fist in R – 's face and make him explode with laughing… The sun to-day, and the great, whopping white clouds all bellied out, made me feel inside quite a bright young dog wriggling its body in ecstatic delight let loose upon the green sward.

"You must come down for a week end," I said to R – at lunch. "Come down as soon as you can. You will find every comfort. It is an enormous house – I have not succeeded in finding my way about it and – it's dangerous to lose yourself – makes you late for dinner. When you arrive our gilded janitor will say: 'I believe Mr. Barbellion is in the library.'"

"Black eunuchs wait on you at dinner, I suppose," R – rejoined.

"Oh! yes and golden chandeliers and a marble stair-case – all in barbaric splendour."

"Yes, I shall certainly be glad to come down," said R – , phlegmatically.

And so on and so on. Words, idle words all day in a continuous rush. And I am sure that the match which fired the gun-powder was the discovery of the De Goncourts' Journal! It's extraordinary how I have been going on from week to week quite calmly for all the world as if I had read all the books and seen all the places and done everything according to the heart's desire. This book has really jolted me out of my complacency: to think that all this time, I have been dead to so much! Why I might have died unconscious that the De Goncourts had ever lived and written their colossal book and now I am aware of it, I am all in a fever to read it and take it up into my brain: I might die now before I have finished it – a thought that makes me wild with desire just as I once endured most awful pangs when I felt my health going, and believed that I might die before having ever been in love – to die and never to have been in love! – for an instant at a time this possibility used to make me writhe.

March 22.

R – has an unpleasant habit of making some scarifying announcement drawing forth an explosive query from me and then lapsing at once into an eleusinian silence: he appears to take a sensuous pleasure in the pause that keeps you expectant. I could forgive a man who keeps you on tenterhooks for two puffs in order to keep his pipe alight, but R – shuts up out of sheer self-indulgence and goes on gazing at the horizon with the eyes of a seer (he thinks) trying to cod me he sees a portent there only revealed to God's elect.

I told him this in the middle of one of his luxurious silences. "I will tell you," he said deliberately, "when we reach the Oratory." (We were in Brompton Road.)

"Which side of it?" I enquired anxiously. "This or that?"

"That," said he, "will depend on how you behave in the meantime."

April 3.

We met a remarkable Bulldog to-day in the street, humbly following behind a tiny boy to whom it was attached by a piece of string. At the time we were following in the wake of three magnificent Serbian Officers, and I was particularly interesting myself in the curious cut of their top boots. But the Bulldog was the Red Herring in our path.

"Is that a Dog?" I asked the little boy.

He assured me that it was, and so it turned out to be, tho' Bull-frog would have been a better name for it, the forelegs being more bandied, the back broader and the mouth wider than in any Bulldog I have ever seen. It was a super-Bulldog.

We turned and walked on. "There," said R – , "now we have lost our Serbian Officers."

April 4.

"May I use your microscope?" he asked.

"By all means," I said with a gesture of elaborate politeness.

He sat down at my table, in my chair, and used my instrument – becoming at once absorbed and oblivious to my banter as per below:

"As Scotchmen," I said, "are monuments rather than men, this latest raid on Edinboro's worthy inhabitants must be called vandalsim rather than murder."

No answer. I continued to stand by my chair.

"How pleased Swift, Johnson, Lamb, and other anti-Caledonians would be…"

"Hope you don't mind my occupying your chair a little longer," the Scotchman said, "but this is a larva, has curious maxillæ…" and his voice faded away in abstraction.

"Oh! no – go on," I said, "I fear it is a grievous absence of hospitality on my part in not providing you with a glass of whiskey. Can I offer you water, Sir?"

No answer.

Another enthusiast ushered himself in, was greeted with delight by the first and invited to sit down. I pulled out a chair for him and said:

"Shave, sir, or hair cut?"

"If you follow along to the top of the galea," No. I droned on imperturbably, "you will…" etc.

I got tired of standing and talking to an empty house but at last they got up, apologising and making for the door.

I entreated them not to mention the matter – my fee should be nominal – I did it out of sheer love, etc.

They thanked me again and would have said more but I added blandly:

"You know your way out?" They assured me they did (having worked in the place for 30 years and more) – I thanked God – and sat down to my table once more.

(These reports of conversations are rather fatuous: yet they give an idea of the sort of person I have to deal with, and also the sort of person I am among this sort of person.)

April 6.

The Housefly Problem– 1916

For weeks past we have all been in a terrible flutter scarcely paralleled by the outbreak of Armageddon in August, 1914. The spark which fired almost the whole building was a letter to the Times written by Dr. – , making public an ignominious confession of ignorance on the part of Entomologists as to how the Housefly passed the winter. In reply, many correspondents wrote to say they hibernated, and one man was even so temerarious as to quote to us Entomologists the exact Latin name of the Housefly: viz., Musca domestica. We asked for specimens and enormous numbers of flies at once began to arrive at the Museum, alive and dead – and not a Housefly among them! So there was a terrible howdedo.

One of the correspondents was named "Masefield." "Not Masefield the poet?" an excited dipterist asked. I reassured him.

"I've a good mind," said Dr. – , "to reply to this chap who's so emphatic and give him a whigging – only he's climbing down a bit in this second letter in to-day's issue." I strongly advocated clemency.

But still the affair goes on. Every morning sees more letters and more flies sent by all sorts of persons – we seem to have set the whole world searching for Houseflies – Duchesses, signalmen, farmers, footmen. Every morning each fresh batch of flies is mounted on pins by experts in the Setting Room, and an Assistant's whole time is devoted to identifying, arranging, listing and reporting upon the new arrivals. At the last meeting of the Trustees a sample collection was displayed to show indubitably that the insects which hibernate in houses are not Musca domestica but Pollenia rudis. I understand the Trustees were appreciative.

An observant eye can now discover state visits to our dipterists from interested persons carrying their flies with them, animated discussions in the corridor, knots of excited enthusiasts in the Lavatory, in the Library, everywhere – and everywhere the subject discussed is the same: How does the Housefly pass the winter? As one passes one catches: "In Bakehouses certainly they are to be found but…" or a wistful voice, "I wish I had caught that one in my bathroom three winters ago – I am certain it was a Housefly." The Doctor himself – a gallant Captain – wanders from room to room stimulating his lieutenants to make suggestions, and examining every answer to the great interrogative on its merits, no matter how humble or insignificant the person who makes it. Then of an afternoon he will entirely disappear, and word goes round that he has set forth to examine a rubbish heap in Soho or Pimlico. As the afternoon draws to its close someone enquires if he has come back yet; next morning a second asks if I had seen him, then a third announces mournfully that he has just been holding conversation with him, but that nothing at all was found in the rubbish heap.

The great sensation of all occurred last week when somebody ran along the corridor crying that Mr. – had just found a Housefly in his room. We were all soon agog with the news, and the excited Captain was presently espied setting out for the scene of operations with a killing bottle and net. The insect was promptly impounded and identified as a veritable Musca domestica. A consultation being held to sit on the body, a lady finally laid information that two "forced Houseflies" hatched the day before had escaped from her possession. She suggested Mr. – 's specimen was one of them.

"How would it get from your room to Mr. – 's?" she was immediately asked. And breathless, we all heard her answer deliberately and quite audibly that the fugitive may have gone out of her window, up the garden and in by Mr. – 's window, or it may have gone out of her door, up the corridor and in by his door. I wanted to know why it should have entered Mr. – 's room as he is not a dipterist but a microlepidopterist. They looked at me sternly and we slowly dispersed.

This morning, the Dr. came to me with a newspaper cutting in his hand, saying, "The Times is behindhand." He handed me the slip. It was a clipping from to-day's Times about a sackful of flies which had been taken from Wandsworth Clock Tower in a state of hibernation.

"Behindhand?" I asked timidly, for I felt that all the story was not in front of me.

"Why, yes. Don't you know?"

I knew nothing, but was prepared for anything.

"The Star, two days ago," he informed me, "had a paragraph about this – headed 'Tempus fugit' " – this last in a resentful tone as tho' the frivolous reporter were attempting to discredit our mystery.

There was a long pause. Neither of us spoke. Then he slowly said:

"I wonder why The Times is so behindhand. This is two days late."

May 5.

Hulloa, old friend: how are you? I mean my Diary. I haven't written to you for ever so long, and my silence as usual indicates happiness. I have been passing thro' an unbroken succession of calm happy days, walking in the woods with my darling, or doing a little gentle gardening on coming home in the evening – and the War has been centuries away. Later on towards bedtime, E – reads Richard Jefferies, I play Patience and Mrs. – makes garments for Priscilla.

The only troubles have been a chimney which smokes and a neighbour's dog which barks at night. So to be sure, I have made port after storm at last – and none too soon. To-day my cheerfulness has been rising in a crescendo till to-night it broke in such a handsome crest of pure delight that I cannot think of going to bed without recording it.

Pachmann

After sitting on the wall around the fountain in the middle of Trafalgar Square, eating my sandwiches and feeding the Pigeons with the crumbs, I listened for a moment to the roar of the traffic around three sides of the Square as I stood in the centre quite alone, what time one fat old pigeon, all unconcerned, was treading another. It was an extraordinary experience: motor horns tooted incessantly and it seemed purposelessly, so that one had the fancy that all London was out for a joy-ride – it was a great British Victory perhaps, or Peace Day.

Then walked down Whitehall to Westminster Bridge in time to see the 2 o'clock boat start upstream for Kew. I loitered by the old fellow with the telescope who keeps his pitch by Boadicea: I saw a piper of the Scots Guards standing near gazing across the river but at nothing in particular – just idling as I was. I saw another man sitting on the stone steps and reading a dirty fragment of newspaper. I saw the genial, red-faced sea-faring man in charge of the landing stage strolling up and down his small domain, – chatting, jesting, spitting, and making fast a rope or so. Everything was alive to the finger tips, vividly shining, pulsating.

Arrived at Queen's Hall in time for Pachmann's Recital at 3.15… As usual he kept us waiting for 10 minutes. Then a short, fat, middle-aged man strolled casually on to the platform and everyone clapped violently – so it was Pachmann: a dirty greasy looking fellow with long hair of dirty grey colour, reaching down to his shoulders and an ugly face. He beamed on us and then shrugged his shoulders and went on shrugging them until his eye caught the music stool, which seemed to fill him with amazement. He stalked it carefully, held out one hand to it caressingly, and finding all was well, went two steps backwards, clasping his hands before him and always gazing at the little stool in mute admiration, his eyes sparkling with pleasure, like Mr. Pickwick's on the discovery of the archeological treasure. He approached once more, bent down and ever so gently moved it about 7/8ths of an inch nearer the piano. He then gave it a final pat with his right hand and sat down.

He played Nocturne No. 2, Prelude No. 20, a Mazurka and two Etudes of Chopin and Schubert's Impromptu No. 4.

At the close we all crowded around the platform and gave the queer, old-world gentleman an ovation, one man thrusting up his hand which Pachmann generously shook as desired.

As an encore he gave us a Valse – "Valse, Valse," he exclaimed ecstatically, jumping up and down in his seat in time to the music. It was a truly remarkable sight: on his right the clamorous crowd around the platform; on his left the seat holders of the Orchestra Stalls, while at the piano bobbed this grubby little fat man playing divine Chopin divinely well, at the same time rising and falling in his seat, turning a beaming countenance first to the right and then to the left, crying, "Valse, Valse." He is as entertaining as a tumbler at a variety hall.

As soon as he had finished, we clapped and rattled for more, Pachmann meanwhile standing surrounded by his idolaters in affected despair at ever being able to satisfy us. Presently he walked off and a scuffle was half visible behind the scenes between him and his agent who sent him in once more.

The applause was wonderful. As soon as he began again it ceased on the instant, and as soon as he left off it started again immediately – nothing boisterous or rapturous but a steady, determined thunder of applause that came regularly and evenly like the roar from some machine.

May 20.

Spent a quiet day. Sat at my escritoire in the Studio this morning writing an Essay, with a large 4-fold window on my left, looking on to woods and fields, with Linnets, Greenfinches, Cuckoos calling. This afternoon while E – rested awhile I sat on the veranda in the sun and read Antony and Cleopatra… Yes, I'm in harbour at last. I'd be the last to deny it but I cannot believe it will last. It's too good to last and it's all too good to be even true. E – is too good to be true, the home is too good to be true, and this quiet restful existence is too wonderful to last in the middle of a great war. It's just a little deceitful April sunshine, that's all…¹⁸

Had tea at the – . A brilliant summer's evening. Afterwards, we wandered into the garden and shrubbery and sat about on the turf of the lawn, chatting and smoking. Mr. – played with a rogue of a white Tomcat called Chatham, and E – talked about our neighbour, "Shamble legs," about garden topics, etc. Then I strolled into the drawing-room where Cynthia was playing Chopin on a grand piano. Is it not all perfectly lovely?

How delicious to be silent, lolling on the Chesterfield, gazing abstractedly thro' the lattice window and listening to the lulling charities of Nocturne No. 2, Op. 37! The melody in the latter part of this nocturne took me back at once to a cloudless day in an open boat in the Bay of Combemartin, with oars up and the water quietly and regularly lapping the gunwales as we rose and fell. A state of the most profound calm and happiness took possession of me.

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-how 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 Staples 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 role 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 syrens, 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 vertebrae, 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 farm-yards 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 sculking 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 farm-house. 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 impossibility. 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.

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 elan 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 have 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 morphi nomaniacs.

"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,²⁴ 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 fut ainsi de moi dès aujourd'hui et que la vue de mon âme fut 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 cringeing, 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 Ouincey 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.

Later. (In E.'s handwriting.)

Yesterday we shifted into a tiny cottage at half the rental of the other one, and situated about two miles further out from the village… A wholly ideal and beautiful little cottage you may say. But a "camouflaged" cottage. For in spite of the happiness of its exterior it contains just now two of the most dejected mortals even in this present sorrow-laden world.

September 30.

Last night, E – sitting on the bed by me, burst into tears. It was my fault. "I can stand a good deal but there must come a breaking point." Poor, poor girl, my heart aches for you.

I wept too, and it relieved us to cry. We blew our noses. "People who cry in novels," E – observed with detachment, "never blow their noses. They just weep." … But the thunder clouds soon come up again.

October 1.

The immediate future horrifies me.

October 2.

Poushkin (as we have named the cat) is coiled up on my bed, purring and quite happy. It does me good to see him.

But consider: A paralytic, a screaming infant, two women, a cat and a canary, shut up in a tiny cottage with no money, the war still on, and food always scarcer day by day. "Give us this day, our daily bread."

I want to be loved – above all, I want to love. My great danger is lest I grow maudlin and say petulantly, "Nobody loves me, nobody cares." I must have more courage and more confidence in other people's good-nature. Then I can love more freely.

October 3.

I am grateful to-day for some happy hours plucked triumphantly from under the very nose of Fate, and spent in the warm sun in the garden. They carried me out at 12, and I stayed till after tea-time. A Lark sang, but the Swallows – dear things – have gone. E – picked two Primroses. I sat by some Michaelmas Daisies and watched the Bees, Flies, and Butterflies.

October 6.

In fits of maudlin self-compassion I try to visualise Belgium, Armenia, Serbia, etc., and usually cure myself thereby.

October 12.

It is winter – no autumn this year. Of an evening we sit by the fire and enjoy the beautiful sweet-smelling wood-smoke, and the open hearth with its big iron bar carrying pot-hook and hanger. E – knits warm garments for the Baby, and I play Chopin, César-Franck hymns, Three Blind Mice (with variations) on a mouth-organ, called "The Angels' Choir," and made in Germany… You would pity me would you? I am lonely, penniless, paralysed, and just turned twenty-eight. But I snap my fingers in your face and with equal arrogance I pity you. I pity you your smooth-running good luck and the stagnant serenity of your mind. I prefer my own torment. I am dying, but you are already a corpse. You have never really lived. Your body has never been flayed into tingling life by hopeless desire to love, to know, to act, to achieve. I do not envy you your absorption in the petty cares of a commonplace existence.

Do you think I would exchange the communion with my own heart for the toy balloons of your silly conversation? Or my curiosity for your flickering interests? Or my despair for your comfortable Hope? Or my present tawdry life for yours as polished and neat as a new three-penny bit? I would not. I gather my mantle around me and I solemnly thank God that I am not as some other men are.

I am only twenty-eight, but I have telescoped into those few years a tolerably long life: I have loved and married, and have a family; I have wept and enjoyed; struggled and overcome, and when the hour comes I shall be content to die.

October 14 to 20.

Miserable.

October 21.

Self-disgust.

FINIS

[Barbellion died on December 31.]

SYNOPSIS

PART I: AT HOME

Rambles and bathes, 2, 3, 4, 9, 11, 20, 37, 45, 46, 48, 49

Natural History and Zoology, 9, 12, 13, 20, 29

Leaves school, 10

Newspaper reporting, 17, 19

Ambition, 8, 10, 13, 26, 29

Calf-love, 8, 12, 23, 28

The Wesleyan Minister Microscopist, 18

Conversation with Prof. Herdman, 46

Ill-health, 10, 24, 25, 35, 42, 48 (Jul. 31)

Heart attacks, 33, 36

On Death, 33, 38, 43, 44

Sits for British Museum exam., 29

Failure, 30, 31, 32

Appointment to Laboratory at Plymouth, 32

Everything "ghostly, unreal, enigmatic," 29, 33

Self-consciousness, 27, 40

The Poppy, 43

Appointment resigned and his father's illness, 34

His father's death, 50, 51

Success and appointment to B.M., 55

A youthful Passion, 56, 57

PART II: IN LONDON

Disillusionment, 59, 61, 93, 94, 132, 178, 185

Life in a boarding-house, 63, 78, 79, 94, 99, 107

Ambition, 71, 73, 109

An affair in a taxicab, 75

Self-disgust, 77

In love, 78, 96, 107

Conversations: (a) with E., 65, 69, 70, 75, 76, 79, 95, 96, 99, 104, 151, 152

(b) with H., 82, 83

(c) with R., 131, 140, 141, 142, 154, 155, 165,

Ill-health, 59, 62, 69, 72, 74, 100, 107, 110, 114, 134-5, 153, 156

On Death, 62, 63, 84, 88

Heart attacks, 71, 72, 120, 122

Nervous breakdown, 80, 81, 82

Meets an old love, 86, 87

Holidays: (a) at C – , by the sea in North – , 65, 66, 67

(b) at home, 82

(c) in Brittany and on Dartmoor (riding a pony), 97

Life in rooms, 102, 107, 108, 114, 138, 148, 149, 153

His brother, 121, 206

Discussions on marriage, 123, 124

In his sitting-room, 162

The fascination of London, 74, 142-145

(a) Petticoat Lane, 163

(b) Rotten Row, 176

Goes to concerts, 127, 161, 172

A lovers' quarrel, 126

He struggles with himself, 135, 137, 138

Engaged, 150, 158

Fears his inconstancy, 159, 185

Self-analysis, 167 et seq., 182, 183

Day-dreams: Life a dream, 178, 179, 188

The War, 182

Holidays: (a) on a Buckinghamshire farm, 191-205

(b) at the Lakes, 215-217

Should a husband keep a private journal? 210

Marriage, 205, 209, 215

PART III: MARRIAGE

Zeppelin raid and influenza, 222

Living in the country, 223, 227, 228

Reads his doctor's certificate after visit to recruiting-office, 225, 238

Self-disgust, 223, 224, 225, 247, 250 (nude), 267

Mental agony, 226, 227

Conversations: with R., 229

with Scarabees, 230, 239, 243

Halcyon days, 233, 235, 238

A natural idiot climbs a stile on uplands, 240

Tension, 250, 252

The War, 237 (Jutland), 242, 247, 248, 249

Another nervous breakdown, 253

How E. knew all the time, 255, 256

Self-compassion, 251, 304

Home ill, 257 ("in the doldrums"), 259, 265

Returns to work, 278

Ill again, 285

From an invalid's view-point, 292, 293 (by his bedroom window)

Post-mortem affairs, 291

Resigns appointment, 294, 299

Self-consciousness and self-dramatization, 255, 265, 267

A badly articulated skeleton, 274

Cold weather in January, 276, 277, 278

On Death, 275, 283, 286, 291

His phosphorescent Journals, 291

Morphia and laudanum, 280, 300

Great misery, 303, 305