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