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
What a delightful thing the state of Death would be if the dead passed their time haunting the places they loved in life and living over again the dear delightful past—if death were one long indulgence in the pleasures of memory! if the disembodied spirit forgot all the pains of its previous existence and remembered only the happiness! Think of me flitting about the orchards and farmyards in ⸻ birdsnesting, walking along the coast among the seabirds, climbing Exmoor, bathing in streams and in the sea, haunting all my old loves and passions, cutting open with devouring curiosity Rabbits, Pigeons, Frogs, Dogfish, Amphioxus; think of me, too, at length unwillingly deflected from these cherished pursuits in the raptures of first love, cutting her initials on trees and fences instead of watching birds, daydreaming 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 today it’s like the roaring forties! Every tree I passed in the lane was a great wind instrument, bellowing out a passionate song, and the sky was torn to ribbons. It is cold enough to freeze the nose off a brass Monkey, but very exhilarating. I stood on the hill and squared my fists to the wind and bade everything come on. I sit writing this by the fire and am thoroughly scourged and purified by this great castigating wind. … I think I will stick it out—I will sit quite still in my chair and defy this skulking footpad—let the paralysis creep into every bone, I will hang on to the last and watch it skulking with my most hideous grimace.
January 27
Still freezing and blowing. Coming back from the village, though 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 today. 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 through 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 semicircular 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’oeil, and I showed it to E⸺.
January 31
Showers of snow at intervals, the little flakes rocking about lazily or spiralling down, while the few that eventually reached the ground would in a moment or so be caught up in a sudden furious puff of wind, and sent driving along the road with the dust.
My usual little jaunt up the lane past the mossy farmhouse. Home to toasted teacakes 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 today, Death has been an impossibility. I have felt that anyhow today 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 through 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
After four months’ sick leave, returned to work and London.
An illness like mine rejuvenates one—for the time being! A pony and jingle from the old Fox and Hounds Inn took me to the Station, and I enjoyed the feel of the wheels rolling beneath me over the hard road. In the train, I looked out of the window as interested as any schoolboy. On the Underground I was delighted with the smooth, quiet way with which the Metro trains glide into the Station. I had quite forgotten this. Then, when my hand began to get better, I rediscovered the pleasures of penmanship and kept on writing, with my tongue out. And I re-enjoyed the child’s satisfaction in coaxing a button to slip into its hole: all grown-up people have forgotten how difficult and complex such operations are.
This morning how desirable everything seemed to me! The world intoxicated me. Moving again among so many human beings gave me the crowd-fever, and started again all the pangs of the old familiar hunger for a fuller life, that centrifugal élan in which I feared for the disruption and scattering of my parts in all directions. Temporarily I lost the hegemony of my own soul. Every man and woman I met was my enemy, threatening me with the secession of some inward part. I was alarmed to discover how many women I could passionately love and with how many men I could form a lasting friendship. Within, all was anarchy and commotion, a cold fright seized me lest some extraordinary event was about to happen: some general histolysis of my body, some sudden disintegration of my personality, some madness, some strange death. … I wanted to crush out the life of all these men and women in a great Bear’s hug, my God! this sea of human faces whom I can never recognise, all of us alive together beneath this yellow catafalque of fog on the morning of the announcement of world famine and world war! …
Tonight, 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, everyone. 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 rewriting, 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
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
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 greenroom 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.
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.”
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.
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.
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!
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.
And now the invalid’s gratitude is almost cringing, his admiration boundless and his love for always. It is the perfect rapprochement between two souls, one that was honeycombed with self-love and lost in the labyrinthine ways of his own motives and the other straight, direct, almost imperious in love and altogether adorable.
Finis
March 5
At home ill again. Yesterday was a day of utter dreariness. All my nerves were frozen, my heart congealed. I had no love for anyone … no emotion of any sort. It was a catalepsy of the spirit harder to bear than fever or pain. … Today, 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
Have been reading Sir Oliver Lodge’s Raymond. I do not deny that I am curious about the next world, or about the condition of death. I am and always have been. In my early youth, I reflected continually on death and hated it bitterly. But now that my end is near and certain, I consider it less and am content to wait and see. As, for all practical purposes, I have done with life, and my own existence is often a burden to me and is like to become a burden also to others, I wish I possessed the wherewithal to end it at my will. With two or three tabloids in my waistcoat pocket, and my secret locked in my heart, how serenely I would move about among my friends and fellows, conscious that at some specially selected moment—at midnight or high noon—just when the spirit moved me, I could quietly slip out to sea on this Great Adventure. It would be well to be able to control this: the time, the place, and the manner of one’s exit. For what disturbs me in particular is how I shall conduct myself; I am afraid lest I become afraid, it is a fear of fear. By means of my tabloids, I could arrange my death in an artistic setting, say underneath a big tree on a summer’s day, with an open Homer in my hand, or more appropriately, a magnifying glass and Miall and Denny’s Cockroach. It would be stage-managing my own demise and surely the last thing in self-conscious elegance!
I think it was De Quincey who said Death to him seemed most awful in the summer. On the contrary the earth is warm then, and would welcome my old bones. It is on a cold night by the winter fire that the churchyard seems to me the least inviting: especially horrible it is the first evening after the funeral.
March 10
Have had a relapse. My hand I fear is going. Food prices are leaping up. Woe to the unfit and the old and the poor in these coming days! We shall soon have nothing left in our pantries, and a piece of Wrigley’s chewing gum will be our only comfort.
When I come to quit this world I scarcely know which will be the greater regret: the people I have never met, or the places I have never seen. In the world of books, I rest fairly content: I have read my fair share.
Today I read down the column of tomorrow’s preachers with the most ludicrous avidity, ticking off the Churches I have visited: St. Paul’s and the Abbey, the Ethical Church in Bayswater and Westminster Cathedral. But the Unitarians, the Christadelphians, the Theosophists, the Church of Christ Scientist, the Buddhist Society, the Brompton Oratory, the Church of Humanity, the New Life Centre; all these adventures I intended one day to make. … It is not much fun ticking off things you have done from a list if you have done very little. I get more satisfaction out of a list of books. But Iona and the Hebrides, Edinburgh, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Spitzbergen (when the flowers are out), the Niagara Falls (by moonlight), the Grindelwald, Cairo—these names make me growl and occasionally yelp like a hurt puppy, although to outward view I am sitting in an armchair blowing smoke-rings.
March 11
In this Journal, my pen is a delicate needle point, tracing out a graph of temperament so as to show its daily fluctuations: grave and gay, up and down, lamentation and revelry, self-love and self-disgust. You get here all my thoughts and opinions, always irresponsible and often contradictory or mutually exclusive, all my moods and vapours, all the varying reactions to environment of this jelly which is I. I snap at any idea that comes floating down, particularly if it is gaudy or quixotic, no matter if it is wholly incompatible with what I said the day before. People unpleasantly refer me back, and to escape I have to invent some sophistry. I unconsciously imitate the mannerisms of folk I am particularly taken with. Other people never fail to tell me of my simulations. If I read a book and like it very much, by a process of peaceful penetration, the author takes possession of my whole personality just as if I were a medium giving a sitting, and for some time subsequently his ideas come spurting up like a fountain making a pretty display which I take to be my own. Other people say of me, “Oh! I expect he read it in a book.”
I am something between a Monkey, a Chameleon, and a Jellyfish. To any bully with an intellect like a blunderbuss, I have always timidly held up my hands and afterwards gnashed my teeth for my cowardice. In conversation with men of alien sentiment I am self-effacing to my intense chagrin, often from mere shyness. I say, “Yes … yes … yes,” to nausea, when it ought to be “No … no … no.” I become my own renegade, an amiable dissembler, an ass in short. It is a torture to have a sprightly mind blanketed by personal timidity and a feeble presence. The humiliating thing is that almost any strong character hypnotises me into complacency, especially if he is a stranger; I find myself for the time being in really sincere agreement with him, and only later, discover to myself his abominable doctrines. Then I lie in bed and have imaginary conversations in which I get my own back.
But, by Jove, I wreak vengeance on my familiars, and on those brethren even weaker than myself. They get my concentrated gall, my sulphurous fulminations, and would wonder to read this confession.
For an unusually long time after I grew up, I maintained a beautiful confidence in the goodness of mankind. Rumours did reach me, but I brushed them aside as slanders. I was an ingénu, unsuspecting, credulous. I thoroughly believed that men and women and I were much better than we actually are. I have not come to the end of my disillusions even now. I still rub my eyes on occasion. I simply can’t believe that we are such humbugs, hypocrites, self-deceivers. And strange to say it is the “good” people above all who most bitterly disappoint me. Give me a healthy liar, or a thief, or a vagabond, and he arouses no expectations, and so I get no heartburning. It is the good, the honest, the true, who cheat me of my boyhood’s beliefs. … I am a cynic then, but not a reckless cynic—a careworn unhappy cynic without the cynic’s pride. “It is easy to be cynical,” someone admonished me. “Unfortunately it is,” I said.
We are so cold, so aloof, so self-centred even the warmest friends. Men of piety love God, but their love for each other is so commonly but a poor thing. My own affections are always frosted over with the Englishman’s reserve. I hesitate as if I were not sure of them. I am afraid of self-deception, I hate to find out either myself or others. And yet I am always doing so. Mine is a restlessly analytical brain. I dissect everyone, even those I love, and my discoveries frequently sting me to the quick. “To the pure all things are pure,” whence I should conclude I suppose that it is the beam in my own eye. But I would not tolerate being deceived concerning either my own beam or other people’s motes.
March 12
Yesterday I collected two distinct and several twinges and hereby save them up. They were more than that—they were pangs, and pangs that twanged.
(Why do I make fun of my suffering?)
One was when I saw the well-known figure of the Archaeopteryx remains in the slab of Lithographic sandstone of Bavaria: a reproduction in an illustrated encyclopaedia. The other was when someone mentioned mud, and I thought of the wide estuary of the T⸺, its stretches of mudflats and its wildfowl. We were turning over some pages and she said:
“What’s that?”
“Archaeopteryx,” said I.
“Whatever is Archaeopteryx?”
“An extinct bird,” I answered mournfully.
Like an old amour, my love of paleontology and anatomy, and all the high hopes I entertained of them, came smarting to life again, so I turned over the page quickly.
But why need I explain to you, O my Journal? To others, I could not explain. I was tongue-tied.
“I used to get very muddy,” I remarked lamentably, “in the old days when stalking birds on the mudflats.”
And they rather jeered at such an occupation in such a place, just as those beautiful sights and sounds of Zostera-covered mud-banks, twinkling runnels, swiftly running thin-legged waders, their whistles and cries began to steal over my memory like a delicate pain.
To my infinite regret, I have no description, no photograph or sketch, no token of any sort to remember them by. And their doom is certain. Heavens! how I wasted my impressions and experiences then! Swinburne has some lines about saltings which console me a little, but I know of no other descriptions by either pen or brush.
March 15
How revolting it is to see some barren old woman lovesick over a baby, bestowing voluptuous kisses on its nose, eyes, hands, feet, utterly intoxicated and chattering incessantly in the “little language,” and hopping about like an infatuated cock grouse.
May 5
The nurse has been here now for over five weeks. One day has been pretty much the same as another. I get out of bed usually about teatime and sit by the window and churn over past, present, and future. However, the Swallows have arrived at last, though they were very late, and there are also Cuckoos, Green Woodpeckers, Moorhens, calling from across the park. At night, when the moon is up, I get a great deal of fun out of an extremely self-inflated Brown Owl, who hoots up through the breadth and length of the valley, and then I am sure, listens with satisfaction to his echo. Still, I have much sympathy with that Brown Owl and his hooting.
What I do (goodness knows what E⸺ does), is to drug my mind with print. I am just a ragbag of Smollett, H. G. Wells, Samuel Butler, the Daily News, the Bible, the Labour Leader, Joseph Vance, etc., etc. Except for an occasional geyser of malediction when some particularly acrid memory comes uppermost in my mind, I find myself submitting with a surprising calm and even cheerfulness. That agony of frustration which gnawed my vitals so much in 1913 has disappeared, and I, who expected to go down in the smoke and sulphur of my own fulminations, am quite as likely to fold my hands across my chest with a truly Christian resignation. Joubert said, “Patience and misfortune, courage and death, resignation and the inevitable, generally come together. Indifference to life generally arises with the impossibility of preserving it”—how cynical that sounds.
May 8
This and another volume of my Journal are temporarily lodged in a drawer in my bedroom. It appears to me that as I become more static and moribund, they become more active and aggressive. All day they make a perfect uproar in their solitary confinement—although no one hears it. And at night they become phosphorescent, though nobody sees it. One of these days, with continued neglect they will blow up from spontaneous combustion like diseased gunpowder, the dismembered diarist being thus hoist upon his own petard.
June 1
We discuss post mortem affairs quite genially and without restraint. It is the contempt bred of familiarity I suppose. E⸺ says widows’ weeds have been so vulgarised by the war widows that she won’t go into deep mourning. “But you’ll wear just one weed or two for me?” I plead, and then we laugh. She has promised me that should a suitable chance arise, she will marry again. Personally, I wish I could place my hand on the young fellow at once, so as to put him through his paces—show him where the water main runs and where the gas meter is, and so on.
You will observe what a relish I have for my own macabre, and how keenly I appreciate the present situation. Nobody can say I am not making the best of it. One might call it pulling the hangman’s beard. Yet I ought, I fancy, to be bewailing my poor wife and fatherless child.
June 15
I sit all day in my chair, moving 8 feet to my bed at night, and 8 feet from it to my chair in the morning—and wait. The assignation is certain. “Life is a coquetry with Death that wearies me / Too sure of the amour.”
July 5
It is odd that at this time of the breaking of nations, Destiny, with her hands so full, should spare the time to pursue a noncombatant atom like me down such a labyrinthine sidetrack. It is odd to find her determined to destroy me with such tremendous thoroughness—one would have thought it sufficient merely to brush the dust off my wings. Why this deliberate, slow-moving malignity? Perhaps it is a punishment for the impudence of my desires. I wanted everything so I get nothing. I gave nothing so I receive nothing. I am not offering up my life willingly—it is being taken from me piece by piece, while I watch the pilfering with lamentable eyes.
I have tendered my resignation and retire on a small gratuity.
July 7
My hand gets a little better. But it’s a cat and mouse game, and so humiliating to be the mouse.
… Parental affection comes to me only in spasms, and if they hurt, they do not last long. Curiously enough, as in the case of very old people, my consciousness reverts more easily to conditions long past. I seem unable to apprehend all the significance of having a nine-months old daughter, but some Bullfinches or Swallows seen through the window rouse me more. No one can deny I have loved Birds to intoxication. In my youth, birds’ eggs, and little nestlings and chickens sent me into such raptures I could never tell it to you adequately. … I am too tired to write more.
July 23
Reading Pascal again. If Shelley was “gold dusty from tumbling among the stars,” Pascal was bruised and shaken. The one was delighted, and the other frightened. I like Pascal’s prostration before the infinities of Time, Space and the Unknown. Somehow, he conveys this more vividly than the uplift afforded him by religion.
July 25
I don’t believe in the twin-soul theory of marriage. There are plenty of men any one of whom she might have married and lived with happily, and simpler men than I am. Methinks there are large tracts could be sliced off my character and she would scarcely feel the want of them. To think that she of all women, with a past such as hers, should be swept into my vicious orbit! Yet she seems to bear Destiny no resentment, so I bear it for her and enough for two. At our engagement I gave her my own ring to wear as a pledge—we thought it nicer than buying a new one. It was a signet ring with a dark smooth stone. Strange to say it never once occurred to me till now that it was a mourning ring in memory of a great-uncle of mine, actually with an inscription on the inside.
July 26
As long as I can hold a pen, I shall, I suppose, go on trickling ink into this diary!
I am amusing myself by reading the Harmsworth Encyclopaedia in 15 volumes, i.e., I turn over the pages and read everything of interest that catches my eye.
I get out of bed about ten, wash and sit by the window in my blue striped pyjama suit. It is so hot I need no additional clothing. E⸺ comes in, brushes my hair, sprinkles me with lavender water, lights my cigarette, and gives me my book-rest and books. She forgets nothing.
From my window I look out on a field with Beech hedge down one side and beyond, tall trees—one showing in outline exactly like the profile of a Beefeater’s head, more especially at sunset each evening when the tree next behind is in shadow. The field is full of blue Scabious plants, Wild Parsley and tall grass—getting brown now in the sun. Great numbers of White Butterflies are continually rocking themselves across—they go over in coveys of four or five at a time—I counted 50 in five minutes, which bodes ill for the cabbages. Not even the heaviest thunder showers seem to debilitate their kinetic ardour. They rock on like white aeroplanes in a hail of machine-gun bullets.
Then there are the Swallows and Martins cutting such beautiful figures through the air that one wishes they carried a pencil in their bills as they fly and traced the lines of flight on a Bristol board. How I hanker after the Swallows! so free and gay and vigorous. This autumn, as they prepare to start, I shall hang on every twitter they make, and on every wing-beat; and when they have gone, begin sadly to set my house in order, as when some much loved visitors have taken their departure. I am appreciating things a little more the last few days.
August 1
When I resigned my appointment last month, no one knows what I had to give up. But I know. Though if I say what I know no one is compelled to believe me excepting out of charity. It will never be discovered whether what I am going to state is not simply despairing bombast. My few intimate friends and relatives are entirely innocent of science, not to say zoology, and all they realise is the significant fact that I am prone to go extravagant lengths in conversation. But you may take it or leave it: I was the ablest junior on the staff and one of the ablest zoologists in the place—but my ability was always muffled by the inferior work they gave me to do. My last memoir published last December was the best of its kind in treatment, method and technique that ever issued from the institution—I do not say the most important. It was trivial—my work always was trivial because they put me in a mouldy department where all the work was trivial and the methods used as primitive, slipshod and easy as those of Fabricius, the idea being that as I had enjoyed no academic career I was unsuited to fill other posts then vacant—one, work on the Coelenterates and another on Vermes, both rarely favoured by amateurs and requiring laboratory training. Later, I had the mortification of seeing these posts filled by men whose powers I by no means felt inclined to estimate as greater than my own. Meanwhile, I who had been dissecting for dear life up and down the whole Animal Kingdom in a poorly equipped attic laboratory at home, with no adequate instruments, was bitterly disappointed to find still less provision made even in a so-called Scientific Institution so grandly styled the British Museum (N.H.). On my first arrival I was presented with a pen, ink, paper, ruler, and an enormous instrument of steel which on enquiry I found to be a paper cutter. I asked for my microscope and microtome. I ought to have asked what Form I was in.
So I had to continue my struggle against odds, and only within the last year or so began to squeeze the authorities with any success. In time I should have revolutionised the study of Systematic Zoology, and the anonymous paper I wrote in conjunction with R⸺ in the American Naturalist was a rare jeu d’esprit, and my most important scientific work.
In the literary world I have fared no better. My first published article appeared at the age of 15 over my father’s name, my motive being not so much modesty as cunning—if the literary world (!) ragged it unmercifully, there was still a chance left for me to make good.
My next achievement of any magnitude was the unexpected printing of a story in the Academy after I had unsuccessfully badgered almost every other newspaper. This was when I was 19. No proof had been sent me and no intimation of its acceptance. Moreover, there were two ugly printer’s errors. I at once wrote off to correct them in the next issue. My letter was neither published nor acknowledged. I submitted, but presently wrote again, politely hinting that my cheque was overdue. But—screams of silence, and I thought it wise not to complain in view of future printing favours. I soon discovered that the journal had changed hands and was probably on its last legs at the time of my success. As soon as it grew financially sound again no more of my stories were accepted.
A more recent affair I had with the American Forum, which delighted me by publishing my article, but did not pay—though the Editor went out of his way to write that “payment was on publication.” I did not venture to remonstrate as I had another article on the stocks which they also printed without paying me. In spite of uniform failure, my literary ambition has never flagged. I have for years past received my rejected MSS. back from every conceivable kind of periodical, from Punch to the Hibbert Journal. At one time I used to file their rejection forms and meditated writing a facetious essay on them. But I decided they were too monotonously similar. My custom was when the ordinary avenues to literary fame had failed me—the half-crown Reviews and the sixpenny Weeklies—to seek out at a library some obscure publication—a Parish Magazine or the local paper—anything was grabbed as a last chance. On one of these occasions I discovered the Westminster Review and immediately plied them with a manuscript and the usual polite note. After six weeks, having no reply, I wrote again and waited for another six weeks. My second remonstrance met with a similar fate, so I went into the city to interview the publishers, and to demand my manuscript back. The manager was out, and I was asked to call again. After waiting about for some time, I left my card, took my departure and decided I would write. The same evening I told the publishers that the anonymous editor would neither print my article nor return it. Would they kindly give me his name and address so that I could write personally. After some delay they replied that although it was not the custom to disclose the editor’s name, the following address would find her. She was a lady living in Richmond Row, Shepherd’s Bush. I wrote to her at once and received no answer. Meanwhile, I had observed that no further issues of the review had appeared on the bookstalls, and the booksellers were unable to give me any information. I wrote again to the address—this time a playful and facetious letter in which I said I did not propose to take the matter into court, but if it would save her any trouble I would call for the MS. as I lived only a few minutes’ walk distant. I received no answer. I was busy at the time and kept putting off executing my firm purpose of visiting the good lady until one evening as I was casually reading the Star coming home in the bus, I read an account of how some charitably disposed woman had recently visited the Hammersmith Workhouse and removed to her own home a poor soul who was once the friend of George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, and other well-known literary persons of the sixties and had, until it ceased publication a few months before, edited the once notable Westminster Review.
Recently, however, there has been evidence of a more benevolent attitude towards me on the part of London editors. A certain magnificent quarterly has published one or two of my essays, and one of these called forth two pages of quotation and flattering comment in Public Opinion, which thrill me to the marrow. I fear, however, the flood-tide has come too late.
If this achievement impressed me it did not seem to impress anyone else. A⸺ regarded it as a joke and laughed incredulously when someone told him of “P.O.’s” eulogy. You see I am still his foolish little brother. I am secretly very nettled too because E⸺ treated the whole matter very indifferently. She did not even take the trouble to read the paper’s critique, and though she volunteered to buy several copies to send to friends, she never remembered to do so, and the whole affair has passed out of her mind.
Now a pleasant paragraph that appeared in the press noticing some drawings of a friend of her friend, she read twice and marched off to Francesca with it in great glee. Another successful young person got his photo into the picture papers—a man we know only by hearsay, and yet it impressed her until I recalled, what strange to say she had quite forgotten, how the photographers wished to publish her own photograph in the picture papers at the time of our marriage. But she scornfully refused. (And so did I.)
But what a queer woman! … [And I, too, a queer man, drunken with wormwood and gall.]
August 6
E⸺ and I were very modern in our courtship. Our candour was mutual and complete—parents and relatives would be shocked and staggered if they knew. … You see I am a biologist and we are both freethinkers. Voilà! … I hate all reticence and concealment. … There is a good deal of that ass, Gregers Werle, in my nature.
August 7
I become dreadfully emaciated. This morning, before getting off the bed I lifted my leg and gazed wistfully along all its length. My flabby gastrocnemius swung suspended from the tibia like a gondola from a zeppelin. I touched it gently with the tip of my index finger and it oscillated.
August 17
My beloved wife comes home this evening after a short, much needed holiday.
August 27
My gratuity has turned out to be unexpectedly small. I hoped at least for one year’s salary. And the horrible thing is I might live for several years longer! No one was ever more enthusiastic for death than I am at this moment. I hate this world with its war, and I bitterly regret I never managed to buy laudanum in time. There are only E⸺ and dear R⸺ and one or two others—the rest of the people I know I hate en bloc. If only I could get at them. I hate to have to leave them to themselves without getting my own back.
August 31
My darling sweetheart, you ask me why I love you. I do not know. All I know is that I do love you, and beyond measure. Why do you love me—surely a more inscrutable problem. You do not know. No one ever knows. “The heart has its reasons which the reason knows not of.” We love in obedience to a powerful gravitation of our beings, and then try to explain it by recapitulating one another’s characters just as a man forms his opinions first and then thinks out reasons in support.
What delights me is to recall that our love has evolved. It did not suddenly spring into existence like some beautiful sprite. It developed slowly to perfection—it was forged in the white heat of our experiences. That is why it will always remain.
September 1
Your love, darling, impregnates my heart, touches it into calm, strongly beating life so that when I am with you, I forget I am a dying man. It is too difficult to believe that when we die true love like ours disappears with our bodies. My own experience makes me feel that human love is the earnest after death of a great reunion of souls in God who is love. When as a boy I was bending the knee to Haeckel, the saying, “God is Love,” scarcely interested me. I am wiser now. You must not think I am still anything but an infidel (as the churchmen say)—I should hate not to be taken for an infidel—and you must not be surprised that an embittered, angry, hateful person like myself should believe in a Gospel of Love. I am embittered because an intense desire to love has in many instances been baulked by my own idealising yet also analytical mind. I have wanted to love men blindly, yet I am always finding them out, and the disappointment chills the heart. Hence my malice and venom: which, dear, do not misconstrue. I am as greedy as an Octopus, ready out of love to take the whole world into my inside—that seat of the affections!—but I am also as sensitive as an Octopus, and quickly retract my arms into the rocky, impregnable recess where I live.
September 2
But am I dying? I have no presentiments—no conviction—like the people you read of in books. Am I, after all, in love? “I dote yet doubt; suspect yet strongly love.” It is all a matter of degree. Beside Abélard and Héloïse, our love may be just glassy affection. It is a great and difficult question to decide. I love no one else but E⸺, that, at least, is a certainty, and I have never loved anyone more.
September 3
My bedroom is on the ground floor as I cannot mount the stairs. But the other day when they were all out, I determined to clamber upstairs if possible, and search in the bedrooms for a half bottle of laudanum, which Mrs. ⸻ told me she found the other day in a box—a relic of the time when ⸻ had to take it to relieve pain.
I got off the bed on to the floor and crawled around on hands and knees to the door, where I knelt up straight, reached the handle and turned it. Then I crawled across the hall to the foot of the stairs, where I sat down on the bottom step and rested. It is a short flight of only 12 steps and I soon reached the top by sitting down on each and raising myself up to the next one with my hands.
Arrived at the top, I quickly decided on the most likely room to search first, and painfully crawled along the passage and through the bathroom by the easiest route to the small door—there are two. The handles of all the doors in the house are fixed some way up above the middle, so that only by kneeling with a straight back could I reach them from the floor. This door in addition was at the top of a high but narrow step, and I had to climb on to this, balance myself carefully, and then carefully pull myself up towards the handle by means of a towel hung on the handle. After three attempts I reached the handle and found the door locked on the inside.
I collapsed on the floor and could have cried. I lay on the floor of the bathroom resting with head on my arm, then set my teeth and crawled around the passage along two sides of a square, up three more steps to the other door which I opened and then entered. I had only examined two drawers containing only clothes, when a key turned in the front door lock and E⸺ entered with ⸻ and gave her usual whistle.
I closed the drawers and crawled out of the room in time to hear E⸺ say in a startled voice to her mother: “Who’s that upstairs?” I whistled, and said that being bored I had come up to see the cot: which passed at that time all right.
Next morning my darling asked me why I went upstairs. I did not answer, and I think she knows.
September 4
I am getting ill again, and can scarcely hold the pen. So goodbye Journal—only for a time perhaps.
Have read this blessed old Journal out to E⸺. It required some courage, and I boggled at one or two bits and left them out.
September 5
Some girls up the road spent a very wet Sunday morning playing leapfrog in their pyjamas around the tennis lawn. It makes me envious. To think I never thought of doing that! and now it is too late. They wore purple pyjamas too. I once hugged myself with pride for undressing in a cave by the sea and bathing in the pouring rain, but that seems tame in comparison.
A perfect autumn morning—cool, fine and still. What sweet music a horse and cart make trundling slowly along a country road on a quiet morning! I listened to it in a happy mood of abstraction as it rolled on further and further away. I put my head out of the window so as to hear it up to the very last, until a Robin’s notes relieved the nervous tension and helped me to resign myself to my loss. The incident reminded me of the “Liebestod” in Tristan, with the Robin taking the part of the harp.
For days past my emotions have been undergoing kaleidoscopic changes, not only from day to day but from hour to hour. For ten minutes at a time I am happy or miserable, or revengeful, venomous, loving, generous, noble, angry, or murderous—you could measure them with a stopwatch. Hell’s phantoms course across my chest. If I could lie on this bed as quiet and stony as an effigy on a tomb! But a moment ago I had a sharp spasm at the sudden thought that never, never, never again should I walk through the path-fields to the uplands.
September 7
My 28th birthday.
Dear old R⸺ (the man I love above all others) has been in a military hospital for months. It is a great hardship to have our intercourse almost completely cut off.
Dear old Journal, I love you! Goodbye.
September 29
I could never have believed so great misery compatible with sanity. Yet I am quite sane. How long I or any man can remain sane in this condition God knows. … It is a consummate vengeance this inability to write. I cannot help but smile grimly at the astuteness of the thrust. To be sure, how cunning to deprive me of my one secret consolation! How amusing that in this agony of isolation such an aggressive egotist as I should have his last means of self-expression cut off. I am being slowly stifled.
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
Pushkin (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 today 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 teatime. 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 pothook 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 threepenny 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—October 20
Miserable.
October 21
Self-disgust.
[Barbellion died on December 31.]