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The Journal of a Disappointed Man

by W. N. P. Barbellion · English · Gutenberg #39585 · 582,034 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Journal of a Disappointed Man

Author: W. N. P. Barbellion

Author of introduction, etc.: H. G. Wells


        
Release date: April 30, 2012 [eBook #39585]
                Most recently updated: April 28, 2022

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39585

Credits: Marc D’Hooghe


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE JOURNAL OF A DISAPPOINTED MAN ***




THE JOURNAL OF A DISAPPOINTED MAN

BY

W.N.P. BARBELLION



WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY H.G. WELLS



NEW YORK

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

1919


"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift,
nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet
riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time
and chance happeneth to them all.

"For man also knoweth not his time; as the fishes that are taken in an
evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons
of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them."




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 tree 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 observations[1] 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.


[1] Up to 1911, the Journal is mainly devoted to records of observations
in general Natural History and latterly in Zoology alone.




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.[1]

_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.

_December_ 4.

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.


[1] There are numerous drawings of dissections scattered through the
Journal about this period.




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.[1] 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.[2] 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.


[1] He had spoken about me to the Museum authorities, and it was his
influence which got me the nomination to sit for the examination.

[2] In Byron's poem.

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.

_April_ 22.

Who will rid me of the body of this death? My body is chained to me--a
dead weight. It is my warder. I can do nothing without first consulting
it and seeking its permission. I jeer at its grotesqueness. I chafe at
the thongs it binds on me. On this bully I am dependent for everything
the world can give me. How can I preserve my _amour propre_ when I must
needs be for ever wheedling and cajoling a despot with delicate meats
and soft couches?--I who am proud, ambitious, and full of energy! In the
end, too, I know it intends to carry me off.... I should like though to
have the last kick and, copying De Quincey, arrange to hand it over for
dissection to the medical men--out of revenge.

"Hope thou not much; fear thou not at all"--my motto of late.

_April_ 30.

I can well imagine looking back on these entries later on and blushing
at the pettiness of my soul herein revealed.... Only be charitable, kind
reader. There are three Johns, and I am much mistaken if in these pages
there will not be found something of the John known to himself, and an
inkling, perhaps, of the man as he is known to his Creator. As a timid
showman afraid that unless he emphasises the feature of his exhibit,
they will be overlooked, let me, hat in hand, point out that I know I am
an ass, that I am still hoping (in spite of ill health) that I am an
enthusiast.

_May_ 2.

Maeterlinck's _Wisdom and Destiny_ is distilled Marcus Aurelius. I am
rather tired of these comfortable philosophers. If a man be harassed by
Fate with a red rag and a picador let him turn and rend him--or try to,
anyway.

_May_ 8.

_Staying by the Sea_

I have been living out of doors a lot lately and am getting sunburnt. It
gives me infinite pleasure to be sunburnt--to appear the man of the open
air, the open road, and the wild life. The sun intoxicates me to-day.
The sea is not big enough to hold me nor the sky for me to breathe in. I
feel I should like to be swaying with all the passions, throbbing with
life and a vast activity of heart and sinew--to live magnificently--with
an unquenchable thirst to drink to the lees, to plumb the depth of every
joy and every sorrow, to see my life flash in the heat. Ah! Youth!
Youth! Youth!!! In these moments of ecstasy my happiness is torrential.
I have the soul of the poppy flaming in me then. I am rather like the
poppy in many ways.... It is peculiarly appropriate. It must be my
flower! I am the poppy!!

_May_ 9.

L---- was digging up the ground in his garden to-day and one shovelful
came up thick and shapely. He laid the sod on its back gently without
breaking it and said simply, "Doesn't it come up nice?" His face was
radiant!--Real happiness lies in the little things, in a bit of garden
work, in the rattle of the teacups in the next room, in the last chapter
of a book.

_May_ 14.

Returned home. I hate living in this little town. If some one dies, he
is sure to be some one you had a joke with the night before. A
suicide--ten to one--implicates your bosom friend, or else the little
man at the bookshop cut him down. There have been three deaths since I
came home--I knew them all. It depresses me. The town seems a mortuary
with all these dead bodies lying in it. Lucky for you, if you're a fat,
rubicund, unimaginative physician.

_May_ 16.

Two more people dead--one a school friend. Sat on a seat on the river
bank and read the _Journal of Animal Behaviour_. It made me long to be
at work. I foamed at the mouth to be sitting there perforce in an
overcoat on a seat doing nothing like a pet dove. A weak heart makes
crossing a road an adventure and turns each day into a dangerous
expedition.

_May_ 18.

A dirty ragamuffin on the river's bank held up a tin can to me with the
softly persuasive words,--

"'Ere, Mister, BAIT."

"What are you going to do with it?"

"Fish."

"What for?"

"Salmon."

We have all tried to catch salmon with a bent pin. No matter though if
no salmon be caught. Richard Jefferies said, "If there be no immortality
still we shall have had the glory of that thought."

_May_ 19.

_Old Diaries_

Spent some happy time reading over old diaries. I was grieved and
surprised to find how much I had forgotten. To forget the past so easily
seems scarcely loyal to oneself. I am so selfishly absorbed in my
present self that I have grown not to care a damn about that ever
increasing collection of past selves--those dear, dead gentlemen who one
after the other have tenanted the temple of this flesh and handed on the
torch of my life and personal identity before creeping away silently and
modestly to rest.

_June_ 6.

Brilliantly fine and warm. Unable to resist the sun, so I caught the ten
train to S---- and walked across the meadow (buttercups,
forget-me-nots, ragged robins) to the Dipper stream and the ivy bridge.
Read ardently in Geology till twelve. Then took off my boots and socks,
and waded underneath the right arch of the bridge in deep water, and
eventually sat on a dry stone at the top of the masonry just where the
water drops into the green salmon pool in a solid bar. Next I waded
upstream to a big slab of rock tilted at a comfortable angle. I lay flat
on this with my nether extremities in water up to my knees. The sun
bathed my face and dragon flies chased up and down intent on murder. But
I cared not a tinker's Demetrius about Nature red in tooth and claw. I
was quite satisfied with Nature under a June sun in the cool atmosphere
of a Dipper stream. I lay on the slab completely relaxed, and the cool
water ran strongly between my toes. Surely I was never again going to be
miserable. The voices of children playing in the wood made me extra
happy. As a rule I loathe children. I am too much of a youth still. But
not this morning. For these were fairy voices ringing through enchanted
woods.

_June_ 8.

Brilliantly fine and warm. Went by train to C---- Woods. Took
first-class return on account of the heat. Crossed the meadow and up the
hill to the mill leat, where we bathed our feet and read. Ate a powerful
lunch and made several unsuccessful grabs at Caddie flies. I want one to
examine the mouth parts. After lunch we sat on the foot-bridge over the
stream, and I rested on it flat in the face of the sun. The sun seemed
to burn into my very bones, purging away everything that may be dark or
threatening there. The physical sensation of the blood flow beneath the
skin was good to feel, and the heat made every tissue glow with a
radiant well-being. When I got up and opened my eyes all the colours of
the landscape vanished under the silvery whiteness of the intense
sunlight.

We put on our boots and socks (our feet seemed to have swollen to a very
large size) and wandered downstream to a little white house, a
gamekeeper's cottage, where the old woman gave us cream and milk and
home-made bread in her beautiful old kitchen with open hearth. China
dogs, of course, and on the wall an old painting representing the person
of a page boy (so she said) who was once employed up at the squire's. An
unwholesome atmosphere of pigs pervaded the garden, but as this is not
pretty I ought to leave it out....

_June_ 14.

Brilliantly fine. Went by the early train to S----. Walked to the ivy
bridge and then waded upstream to the great slab of rock where I spread
myself in the sun as before. The experiment was so delightful it is
worth repeating a hundred times. In this position I read of the decline
and fall of Trilobites, of the Stratigraphy of the Lias and so on.
Geology is a very crushing science, yet I enjoyed my existence this
morning with the other flies about that stream.

_June_ 20.

Sat at Liverpool University for the practical exam. Zoology, Board of
Education.

At the close the other students left but I went on working. Prof.
Herdman asked me if I had finished. I said "No," so he gave me a little
more time. Later he came up again, and again I said "No," but he replied
that he was afraid I must stop. "What could you do further?" he asked,
picking up a dish of plankton. I pointed out a _Sagitta_, an
_Oikopleura_, and a _Noctiluca_, and he replied, "Of course I put in
more than you were expected to identify in the time, so as to make a
choice possible." Then he complimented me on my written papers which
were sent in some weeks ago, and looking at my practical work he added,
"And this, too, seems to be quite excellent."

I thanked him from the bottom of a greedy and grateful heart, and he
went on, "I see you describe yourself in your papers as a journalist,
but can you tell me exactly what has been your career in Zoology?" I
answered of course rather proudly that I had had _no_ career in Zoology.

"But what school or college have you worked at?" he persisted.

"None," I said a little doggedly. "What I know I have taught myself."

"So you've had no training in Zoology at all?"

"No, sir."

"Well, if you've taught yourself all you know, you've done remarkably
well."

He still seemed a little incredulous, and when I explained how I got a
great many of my marine animals for dissection and study at the Plymouth
Marine Laboratory, he immediately asked me suspiciously if I had ever
worked there. We shook hands, and he wished me all success in the
future, to which I to myself devoutly said Amen.

Came home very elated at having impressed some one at last.

Now for Dublin.

_June_ 30.

Oeconomic biology may be very useful but I am not interested in it. Give
me the pure science. I don't want to be worrying my head over remedies
for potato disease nor cures for fleas in fowls. Heaven preserve me from
ever becoming a County Council lecturer or a Government
Entomologist![1]... Give me the recluse life of a scholar or
investigator, full of leisure, culture, and delicate skill. I would
rather know Bergson than be able to stay at the Ritz Hotel. I would
rather be able to dissect a star-fish's water-vascular system than know
the price of Consols. I should make a most industrious country gentleman
with £5,000 a year and a deer park.... My idea is to withdraw from the
_mobile vulgus_ and spend laborious days in the library or laboratory.
The world is too much with us. I long for the monotony of monastic life!
Father Wasmann and the Abbé Spallanzani are the type. Let me set my
face towards them. Such lives afford poor material for novelists or
dramatists, but so much the better. Hamlet makes fine reading, but I
don't want to be Hamlet myself.

_July_ 6.

In the afternoon went out dredging in fifteen fathoms off the pier at
I----, but without much success.... Got a large number of interesting
things, however, in the tow net, including some advanced eggs of
_Loligo_ and a _Tomopteris_....

_July_ 7.

Went to the trout stream again. After stretching a muslin net crosswise
on the water for insects floating down, sat on the footbridge and read
Geology for the Dublin Examination. Later, waded downstream to a hazel
bush on the right bank beneath a shady oak. Squatted right down on the
bush, which supported me like an arm-chair--and, with legs dangling in
the cool water, opened a Meredith and enjoyed myself.

_July_ 28.

Had to write backing out of the Dublin Examination for which I am
nominated to sit. I am simply not fit for the racket of such a journey
in my present state of health. My chances of success, too, are not such
as to warrant my drawing on Dad for the money. He is still ill, and
secretly agitated, I fear, because I am so bent on giving up his work.
It looks, however, as if newspaper journalism is to be my fate. It was
the refinement of torture having to write.

_July_ 31.

Had a letter from Dr. S---- enough to wring tears from a monument.

Sat like a valetudinarian in the Park all day getting fresh air--among
the imbeciles, invalids, and children. Who cares? "But, gentlemen, you
_shall_ hear."

_August_ 4.

Still another chance--quite unexpectedly received a second nomination
this morning to sit for another exam, for two vacancies in the British
Museum. Good luck this.

_August_ 11.

Very hot, so went to S----, and bathed in the salmon pool. Stretched
myself out in the water, delighted to find that I had at last got to the
very heart of the countryside. I was not just watching from the
outside--on the bank. I was in it, and plunging in it, too, up to my
armpits. What did I care about the British Museum or Zoology then? All
but the last enemy and object of conquest I had overcome--for the moment
perhaps even Death himself was under heel--I was immortal--in that
minute I was always prostrate in the stream--sunk deep in the bosom of
old Mother Earth who cannot die!

_August_ 14.

At 4 p.m. to the Salmon Pool for a bathe. 87.3 in the shade. The meadow
was delicious in the sunshine. It made me want to hop, flirt my tail,
sing. I felt ever such a bright-eyed wily bird!

_August_ 17.

Caught the afternoon train to C----, but unfortunately forgot to take
with me either watch or tubes (for insects). So I applied to the
station-master, a youth of about eighteen, who is also signalman,
porter, ticket-collector, and indeed very factotal--even to the extent
of providing me with empty match boxes. I agreed with him to be called
by three halloos from the viaduct just before the evening train came in.
Then I went up to the leat, set up my muslin net in it for insects
floating down, and then went across to the stream and bathed.
Afterwards, went back and boxed the insects caught, and returned to the
little station, with its creepers on the walls and over the roof, all
as delightfully quiet as ever, and the station youth as delightfully
silly. Then the little train came around the bend of the line--green
puffing engine and red coaches, like a crawling caterpillar of gay
colour.

_August_ 20.

A trapper killed a specimen of _Tropidonotus natrix_ and brought it to
me. I gave him sixpence for it and am just going to dissect it.

_August_ 21.

There are folk who notice nothing. (Witness Capt. McWhirr in Conrad's
_Typhoon_.) They live side by side with genius or tragedy as innocent as
babies; there are heaps of people who live on a mountain, a volcano,
even, without knowing it. If the stars of Heaven fell and the Moon were
turned into blood some one would have to direct their attention to
it.... Perhaps after all, the most obvious things are the most difficult
to see. We all recognise Keats now, but suppose he was only "the boy
next door"--why should I read his verses?

_August_ 27.

_Preparing a Snake's Skull_

Prepared the skull of grass snake. I fancy I scooped out the eyes with
patent delight--I suppose symbolically, as though, on behalf of the rest
of suffering humanity, I were wiping off the old score against the beast
for its behaviour in the Garden of Eden.

_September_ 5.

At 2.30 Dad had three separate "strokes" of paralysis in as many
minutes, the third leaving him helpless. They sent for me in the
Library, where I was reading, and I hurried home. Just as I entered the
bedroom where he and Mother were another attack came on, and it was with
the utmost difficulty that with her help I managed to get him from the
chair to the bed. He struggled with his left arm and leg and made
inarticulate noises which sounded as if they might be groans. I don't
know if he was in pain. Dear Mother.

_September_ 14.

Dad cannot live long. Mother bears up wonderfully well. Tried to do some
examination work but failed utterly. A---- is watching in the sick-room
with Mother who will not leave.

8.30. The nurse says he will not live through the night.

8.45. Telegraphed for A---- to come.

11.00. A---- came downstairs and had a little supper.

12.00. Went to bed. H---- and the others lit a fire and we have all sat
around it silent, listening to its murmur. Every one felt cold. Dad has
been unconscious for over an hour.

1.45 a.m. Heard a noise, then heard Mother coming downstairs past my
bedroom door with some one--sobbing. I knew it must be all over.
H----was helping her down. Waited in my bedroom in the dark for three
parts of an hour, when H---- came up, opened the door slowly and said,
"He's gone, old man." It was a tremendous relief to know that since he
had to die his sufferings and cruel plight were over. Fell asleep from
sheer exhaustion and slept soundly.

_September_ 18.

The funeral. _It is not death but the dreadful possibilities of life
which are so depressing_.[2]

_September_ 21.

_A Day in Autumn_

A cool, breezy autumn day. The beach was covered with patches of soapy
foam that shook tremulously in the wind--all the rocks and everything
were drenched with water, and the spray came off the breaking waves like
steam. A red sun went lower and lower and the shadows cast by the rocks
grew very long and grotesque. Underneath the breaking waves, the hollows
were green and dark like sea caverns. Herring gulls played about in the
air balancing themselves as they faced the breeze, then sweeping
suddenly around and downwards with the wind behind them. We all sat down
on the rocks and were very quiet, almost monosyllabic. We pointed out a
passing vessel to one another or chucked a bit of shingle into the sea.
You would have said we were bored. Yet deep down in ourselves we were
astir and all around us we could hear the rumours of divine passage,
soft and mysterious as the flight of birds migrating in the dark.

The wind rose and tapped the line against the flag-staff at the
Coastguard Station. It roared through my hair and past my ears for an
hour on end till I felt quite windswept and bleak. On the way home we
saw the wind darting hither and thither over the long grass like a
lunatic snake. The wind! Oh! the wind--I have an enormous faith in the
curative properties of the wind. I feel better already.

_October_ 17.

Staying in Surrey. Exam. over and I feel fairly confident--after an
agony for a few days before on account of the development of a cold
which threatened to snatch the last chance out of my hands.

_Justifiable Mendacity_

Sitting on a gate on the N. Downs I saw a long way below me in the
valley a man standing in a chalk pit and wielding a stick vigorously.
For some reason or another the idea came to me that it would be
interesting if he were in the act of killing a Snake--he so far away
below and I above and unnoticed quietly watching him. At dinner
to-night, this revised version of the story came out quite pat and
natural and obviously interested the assembly. I added graphically that
the man was too far away from me to be able to say what _species_ of
Snake it was he was killing. I possess the qualifications of an
artistic liar. Yet I can't regard such a story as a lie--it was rather a
justifiable emendation of an otherwise uninteresting incident.

_October_ 24.

_Une Caractère_

... She is a tiny little old lady, very frail and very delicate, with a
tiny voice like the noise of a fretsaw. She talks incessantly about
things which do not interest you, until your face gets stiff with
forcing a polite smile, and your voice cracked and your throat dry with
saying, "Yes," and "Really."

To-night I attend the Zoological Society to read my first paper, so I am
really in a fluster and want to be quiet. Therefore to prevent her from
talking I write two letters which I represent as urgent. At 6.15
desperate, so went out for a walk in the dark London streets. Returned
to supper and to Her. After the wife, the husband is intellectual
pyrotechnics. Referring to the Museum,--

"Would you have there, I suppose, any insects, in a case like, what you
might say to study to yourself when no one is by?" he inquired.

6.40. It is now one hour before I need leave for the meeting, and
whether I sigh, cough, smoke, or read the paper, she goes on. She even
refuses to allow me to scan the lines below photos in the _Illustrated
London News._ I write this as the last sole resource to escape her
devastating prattle and the ceaseless hum of her tiny gnat-like mind.
She thinks (because I told her so) that I am preparing notes for the
evening meeting.

_Later_: Spent an absolutely damnable day. Am sick, tired, bored,
frantic with her voice which I have been able to share with no one
except the intellectual giant, her husband, at tea time. In order to
break the flow of chatter, I would rudely interrupt and go on talking,
by this means keeping my end up for as long as I could, and enjoying a
short respite from the fret-sawing voice. But I tired of this and it was
of no permanent value. When I broke in, she still went on for a few
sentences unable to stop, and lo! here was the spectacle of two persons
alone together in a room both talking at the same time and neither
listening. I persisted though--and she had to stop. Once started, I was
afraid to stop--scared at the certain fact of the voice beginning to saw
again. After a while the fountain of my artificial garrulity dried up,
and the Voice at once leaped into the breach, resuming--amazing and
incredible as it seems--at the precise point where it had left off. At 7
I am quite exhausted and sit on the opposite side of the hearth, staring
with glassy eyes, arms drooping at my sides and mouth druling. At 7.05
her cough increases, and she has to stop to attend to it. With a
fiendish smile I push back my chair, and quietly watch her cough.... She
coughs continuously now and can talk no longer. Thank God! 8 p.m., left
for the meeting, where I read my paper in a state of awful
nervousness.... I read out all I had to say and kept them amused for
about ten minutes. I was very excited when Dr. ---- got up and praised
the paper,[3] saying it was interesting, and hoping I should continue
the experiments. The chairman, Sir John Rose Bradford, asked a question,
I answered it and then sat down. After the meeting we went upstairs to
the library, had tea and chatted with some of the big people.... Zoology
is certainly delightful, yet it seems to me the Zoologists are much as
other people. I like Zoology. I wish I could do without Zoologists....

_October_ 30.

Home once more. The Natural History Museum impressed me enormously. It
is a magnificent building--too magnificent to work there--to follow
one's profession in a building like that seems an altogether too
grandiose manner of life. A pious zoologist might go up to pray in
it--but not to earn his daily bread there.

_October_ 31.

I'm in, in, in!!!!!!!!! being first with 141 marks to spare. Old
M----[the servant] rushes up to my sister's bedroom with the news just
after 7 a.m., and she says, "Fine, fine," and comes down in her
nightgown to my bedroom, where we drink our morning cup of tea
together--and talk! I'm delighted. What a magnificent obstacle race it
has been! Still one ditch--the medical exam! Wired to friends.

_November_ 1.

This is the sort of letter which is balm to me:--"My darling W----,--I
need hardly tell you how absolutely delighted we were at the grand news
of this morning. You must be feeling a huge glow of satisfaction with
the knowledge of your object attained through untold difficulties. I
don't wish to butter you up, or to gush, but I must honestly say that I
feel tip-top proud of my old Beano. I admire your brains more than ever,
and also your indomitable pluck and grit, and your quiet bravery in
disappointment and difficulty...."

_November_ 14.

The three most fascinating books in Science that I have so far read are
(easily):--1. Darwin's _Expression of the Emotions_. 2. Gaskell's
_Origin of Vertebrates_. 3. Bergson's _Le Rire_.

Went to the dentist in the afternoon. Evening chiefly occupied in
reading _Le Rire_. By my halidom, it is an extraordinarily interesting
book!

_November_ 29.

... I am always looking out for new friends--assaying for friendship....
There is no more delightful adventure than an expedition into a rich,
many-sided personality. Gradually over a long probation--for deep minds
are naturally reticent--piece after piece is added to the geography of
your friend's mind, and each piece pleases or entertains, while in
return you let him steal away piece after piece of your own territory,
perhaps saving a bit up here and there--such as an enthusiasm for
Francis Thompson's poetry--and then letting it go unexpectedly. It's a
delightful reciprocity.

I dream of "the honeyed ease of the Civil Servant's working day"
(Peacock). Yet the French say _Songes sont mensonges_.

_December_ 13.

In the Park it was very dark and she said,--

"If I lose you I shan't be able to find my way home."

"Oh! I'll look after you," I said.

Both being of the same mind at the same time we sat down on a seat
together when a fortunate thing happened. It began to rain. So I offered
her part of my overcoat. She nestled in under my arm and I kissed her
out of hand. _Voilà_! A very pretty little girl, 'pon my word.

_December_ 20.

The thing is obsessing me. After an early supper called and found my
lady ready to receive me. No one else at home. So walked into the
oak-panelled room with the red-curtained windows, took off my coat and
scarf. She followed and switched off the light. There was a roaring fire
in the grate. She is very amorous and I am not Hippolytus, so we were
soon closely engaged in the large chair before the fire. As we sailed
thus, close hauled to the wind, with double entendres and she trembled
in the storm (and I was at the helm) the garden gate slammed and both of
us got up quickly. I next heard a key turn in the lock and a foot in the
passage: "Mr. ----" she said....

She switched on the light, went out swiftly into the passage, and
meeting him conducted him to her office, while I as swiftly put on
overcoat and scarf, and slipped out through the open door, stumbling
over his bicycle, but of course not stopping to pick it up. Later she
telephoned to say it was all right. Very relieved!... She recalls
Richepin's _La Glu_.

_December_ 21.

She is a fine sedative. Her movements are a pleasant adagio, her voice
piano to pianissimo, her conversation breaks off in thrilling
aposiopoeses.

An awful comedy this morning--for as soon as I was securely "gagged" the
dentist went out of the room. She approached, leered at me helpless, and
said provokingly, "Oh! you do look funny." Minx. On returning he said to
her, "Would you like to hold his hand?"

She: "Oh! not just now."

And they grinned at one another and at me waiting to be tortured.

_December_ 23.

... On the Station waited for an hour for the train. Gave her a box of
sweets and the _Bystander_. We walked up the platform to extreme end in
the dark and kissed! But it was very windy and cold. (I noticed that!)
So we entered an empty luggage guard's van on rail beside platform left
there by shunters. Here we were out of the wind and far better off. But
a shunter came along and turned us out. She gave me a silver match-box.
But I believe for various reasons that it is one of her own and not a
new one. Said "Good-bye."

_December_ 28.

At R----. Played the negligent _flaneur_, reclining on the Chesterfield,
leaning against the grand piano, or measuring my length on the mat
before the fire.

_December_ 31.

To-morrow I begin duties at the British Museum of Natural History. I
cannot quite imagine myself a Museum assistant. Before I get there I
know I shall be the strangest assistant on the staff. It will be
singing my song in a Strange land and weeping--I hope not too
bitterly--down by the waters of a very queer Babylon.

Still, I have burnt my bridges like Cæsar--or burnt my ships like
Cortez. So forward!


[1] See entry for October 8, 1913.

[2] Italics added 1917.

[3] The paper was "Distant Orientation in Batrachia"--detailing
experiments on the homing faculty in newts.




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
disorientated, 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 of regrets is as terrible as a dead body full of
worms? There, I talk literature, my boy, if you were only Boswell
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 of 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!

Then I stretched my whole length out along a flat plank on the sands,
which was as dry as a bone and warm. There was not a soul on the sands.
Everything was bare, clean, windswept. My plank had been washed clean
and white. The sands--3 miles of it--were hard and purified, level. My
eye raced along in every direction--there was nothing--not a bird or a
man--to stop it. In that immense windswept space nothing was present
save me and the wind and the sea--a flattering moment for the egotist.

       *       *       *       *       *

At the foot of the cliffs on the return journey met an old man gathering
sticks. As he ambled along dropping sticks into a long sack he called
out casually, "Do you believe in Jesus Christ?" in the tone of voice in
which one would say, "I think we shall have some rain before night."
"Aye, aye," came the answer without hesitation from a boy lying on his
back in the sands a few yards distant, "and that He died to save me."

Life is full of surprises like this. The only other sounds I have heard
to-day were the Herring Gull's cackle. Your own gardener will one day
look over his rake and give you the correct chemical formula for
carbonic acid gas. I met a postman once reading Shelley as he walked his
rounds.

_June_ 28.

I am writing this by the lamp in the cabin among the sandhills waiting
for H---- to arrive from town with provisions. I wear a pair of bags, a
dirty sweater, and go without hat or shoes and stockings. There is a
"Deadwood Dick" atmosphere here. I'm a sort of bronco-breaker or rancher
off duty writing home. In a minute I haven't the slightest doubt, H----
will gallop into the compound, tether his colt and come in "raising
Cain" for a belly-full of red meat.... If I am going to live after all
(touch wood) I shall go abroad and be in the open.

I eat greedily, am getting very sunburnt, am growing hairy (that means
strength!), and utter portentous oaths. If I stayed here much longer I
should grow a tail and climb trees.

After a supper of fried eggs and fried bread done to a nicety, turned in
at ten, and both of us lay warm and comfortable in bed, smoking
cigarettes and listening to Hoffmann's Barcarolle on the gramophone. We
put the lamp out, and it pleased us to watch the glow of each other's
cigarettes in the dark.... Neither of us spoke.... Went to sleep at
midnight. Awoke at sunrise to hear an Owl still hooting, a Lark singing,
and several Jackdaws clattering on our tin roof with their claws as they
walked.

_July_ 1.

_In London Again_

Returned to London very depressed. Am not so well as I was three weeks
ago. The sight of one eye is affected, and I am haunted by the
possibility of blindness. Then I have a numb feeling on one side of my
face, and my right arm is less mobile.

Left darling Mother in a very weak state in bed, with neuritis and a
weak heart. She cried when I said "Goodbye," and asked me to go to
Church as often as I could, and to read a portion of Scripture every
day. I promised. Then she added, "For Dad's sake;" just as if I would
not do it for her. Poor dear, she suffers a deal of pain. She does not
know how ill I am. I have not told her.

_July_ 3.

Back at work. A terrible day. Thoughts of suicide--a pistol.

_July_ 8.

I get thro' each day with the utmost difficulty. I have to wrestle with
every minute. Each hour is a conquest. The three quarters of an hour at
lunch comes as a Godsend. I look forward to it all the morning, I enter
into it with joyful relief with no thought of the dreadful moment
impending when I must return and re-enter my room. By being wise like
this, I manage to husband my spirits and am relatively cheerful for one
hour in the middle of each difficult day.

_July_ 9.

Several times I have gone to bed and hoped I should never wake up. Life
grows daily more impossible. To-day I put a slide underneath the
microscope and looked at it. It was like looking at something thro' the
wrong end of a telescope. I sat with eye glued to the ocular, so as to
keep up a pretence of work in case some one came in. My mind was
occupied with quite different affairs. If one is pondering on Life and
Death, it is a terrible task to have to study Mites.

_July_ 10.

Am doing no work at all.... I sit motionless in my chair and beat the
devil's tattoo with my thumbs and think, think, think in the same
horrible circle hour after hour. I am unable to work. I haven't the
courage to. I've lost my nerve.

At five I return "home" to the Boarding-house and get more desperate.

Two old maids sat down to dinner to-night, one German youth (a
lascivious, ranting, brainless creature), a lady typist (who takes drugs
they say), a dipsomaniac (who has monthly bouts--H---- carried him
upstairs and put him to bed the other night), two invertebrate
violinists who play in the Covent Garden Orchestra, a colonial lady
engaged in a bedroom intrigue with a man who sits at my table. What are
these people to me? I hate them all. They know it and are offended.

After dinner, put on my cap and rushed out anywhere to escape. Walked to
the end of the street, not knowing where I was going or what doing.
Stopped and stared with fixed eyes at the traffic in Kensington Road,
undetermined what to do with myself and unable to make up my mind
(volitional paralysis). Turned round, walked home, and went straight to
bed 9 p.m., anxiously looking forward to to-morrow evening when I go to
see her again, but at the same time wondering how on earth I am to get
through to-morrow's round before the evening comes.... This is a
hand-to-mouth existence. My own inner life is scorching up all outside
interests. Zoology appears as a curious thing in a Bagdad bazaar. I sit
in my room at the B.M. and play with it; I let it trickle thro' my
fingers and roll away like a child playing with quicksilver.

_July_ 11.

Over to the flat. She was looking beautiful in a black dress, with a
white silk blouse, and a Byron collar, negligently open in front as if
a button had come out. She said I varied: sometimes I went up in her
estimation, sometimes down; once I went down very low. I understood her
to say I was now UP! Alleluia!

_July_ 14.

... It would take too long and I am too tired to write out all the
varying phases of this day's life--all its impressions and petty
miseries chasing one another across my consciousness or leap-frogging
over my chest like gleeful fiends.[1]

_July_ 21.

Thoroughly enjoyed the journey up to town this morning. I secretly
gloated over the fact that the train was dashing along over the rails to
London bearing me and all the rest of the train's company upon their
pursuits--wealth, fame, learning. I was inebriated with the speed,
ferocity, and dash of living.... If the train had charged into the
buffers I should have hung my head out of the window and cheered. If a
man had got in my way, I'd have knocked him down. The wheels of the
carriage were singing a lusty song in which I joined.

_July_ 30.

... We talked of men and women, and she said she thought men were
neither angels nor devils but just men. I said I thought women were
either angels or devils.

"I am afraid to ask you which you think me."

"You needn't," I said shortly.

_August_ 9.

Horribly upset with news from home. Mother is really ill. The Doctor
fears serious nerve trouble and says she will always be an invalid. This
is awful, poor dear! It's dreadful, and yet I have a tiny wish buried at
the bottom of my heart that she may be removed early from us rather
than linger in pain of body and mind. Especially do I hope she may not
live to hear any grievous news of me.... What irony that she should lose
the use of her right arm only two years after Dad's death from
paralysis. It is cruel for it reminds her of Dad's illness.... What,
too, would she think if she could have heard M----'s first words to me
yesterday on one of my periodical visits to his consulting room, "Well,
how's the _paralysis_?"

       *       *       *       *       *

In the evening went over to see her. She was wearing a black silk gown
and looked handsome.... She is always the same sombre, fascinating,
lissom, soft-voiced She! She herself never changes.... What am I to do?
I cannot give her up and yet I do not altogether wish to take her to my
heart. It distresses me to know how to proceed. I am a wily fish.

_August_ 10.

Sat in the gardens with her. We sat facing the sun for a while until she
was afraid of developing freckles and turned around, deliberately
turning her back on good King Sol.... I said it was disrespectful.

"Oh! he doesn't mind," she said. "He's a dear. He kissed me and said,
'Turn round my dear if you like.'"

Isn't she tantalising?

I wanted to say sarcastically, "I wonder you let him kiss you," but
there was a danger of the remark reviving the dead.

_August_ 14.

I tried my best, I've sought every loophole of escape, but I am quite
unable to avoid the melancholy fact that her thumbs are--lamentable. I
am genuinely upset about it for I like her. No one more than I would be
more delighted if they were otherwise.... Poor dear! how I love her!
That's why I'm so concerned about her thumbs.

_August_ 21.

A wire from A---- came at 11.50 saying "Darling Mother passed peacefully
away yesterday afternoon." ... Yesterday afternoon I was writing Zoology
and all last night I slept soundly.... It was quite sudden. Caught the
first train home.

_August_ 23.

The funeral.

_August_ 31.

Staying at the Hotel du Guesclin at Cancale near St. Malo with my dear
A----.

This flood of new experiences has knocked my diary habit out of gear. To
be candid, I've forgotten all about myself. I've been too engrossed in
living to stand the strain of setting down and in cold blood writing out
all the things seen and heard. If I once began I should blow thro' these
pages like a whirlwind.... But what a waste of time with M. le batelier
waiting outside with his bisque to take us mackerel fishing!...

_September_ 8.

Returned to Southampton yesterday. Have spent the night at Okehampton in
Devonshire _en route_ for T---- Rectory. This morning we hatched the
ridiculous idea of hiring two little Dartmoor ponies and riding out from
the town. A---- rides fairly well tho' he has not been astride a beast
for years. As for me, I cannot ride at all! Yet I had the idea that I
could easily manage a pretty little pony with brown eyes and a long
tail. On going out into the Inn yard, was horrified--two horses
saddled--one a large traction beast.... I climbed on to the smaller one,
walked him out of the yard and down the road in good style without
accident. Once in the country, however, my animal, the fresher of the
two, insisted on a smart trot which shook me up a good deal so that I
hardly kept my seat. This eventually so annoyed the animal that it
began to fidget and zigzag across the road--no doubt preparing to break
away at a stretch gallop when once it had rid itself of the
incomprehensible pair of legs across its back.

I got off quickly and swopped horses with A----.

Walked him most of the way, while A---- cantered forward and back to
cheer me on. Ultimately however this beast, too, got sick of walking and
began to trot. For a time I stood this well and began to rise in my
saddle quite nicely. After two miles, horrible soreness supervened, and
I had to get off--very carefully, with a funny feeling in my legs--even
looked down at them to assure myself they were not bandy! In doing so,
the horse--this traction monster--stepped on my toe and I swore.

On nearing the village, L---- arrived, riding A----'s animal and holding
his sides for laughing at me as I crawled along holding the carthorse by
the bridle. Got on again and rode into the Rectory grounds in fine style
like a dashing cavalier, every one jeering at me from the lawn.

_September_ 28.

Having lived on this planet now for the space of 24 years, I can claim
with some cogency that I am qualified to express some sort of opinion
about it. I therefore hereby record that I find myself in an absorbingly
interesting place where I live, move and have my being, dominated by one
monstrous feature above all others--the mystery of it all! Everything is
so astonishing, my own existence so incredible!

Nothing explains itself. Every one is dumb. It is like walking about at
a masqued Ball.... Even I myself am a mystery to me. How wonderful and
frightening that is--to feel yourself--your innermost and most
substantial possession to be a mystery, incomprehensible. I look at
myself in the mirror and mock at myself. On some days I am to myself as
strange and unfamiliar as a Pterodactyl. There is a certain grim humour
in finding myself here possessed of a perfectly arbitrary arrangement
of lineaments when I never asked to be here and never selected my own
attributes. To the dignity of a human being it seems like a coarse
practical joke.... My own freakish physique is certainly a joke.

_October_ 4.

_In London Again_

K---- comes in from her dancing class, nods to me, hugs her sister
around the neck and says,--

"Oh! you dear thing, you've got a cold."

"I shouldn't do that," I remark, green-eyed, "she's in an awful wax
to-night."

She: "Oh! I don't mind K----!"

(Laughter!)

_October_ 8.

Heard a knock at the door last night, and, thinking it was R----, I
unbolted it and let in a tramp who at once asked God to bless me and
crown all my sorrow with joy. An amiable fellow to be sure--so I gave
him some coppers and he at once repeated with wonderful fervour, "God
bless you, sir."

"I wish He would," I answered, "I have a horrible cold."

"Ah, I know, I gets it myself and the hinfluenza--have you had that,
sir?"

In ten minutes I should have told him all my personal history. But he
was thirsting for a drink and went off quickly and left me with my heart
unburthened. London is a lonely place.

To-day journeyed to ---- where I gave evidence as an _expert_ in Economic
Entomology at the County Court in a case concerning damage to furniture
by mites for which I am paid £8 8s. fee and expenses and travelled first
class. What irony! (See June 30, 1911.)

_October_ 11.

I may be a weak, maundering, vacillating fool but I cannot help loving
her on one day, being indifferent the next and on some occasions even
disliking her.... To-day she was charming, with a certain warm glossy
perfection on her face and hair.... And she loves me--I could swear it.
"And when a woman woos ..." etc. How difficult for a vain and lonely man
to resist her. She tells me many times in many dainty ways that she
loves me without so much as stopping her work to talk.

I wish I were permanently and irresistibly enamoured. I want a
_bouleversement_....

_October_ 13.

Went to see a Harley Street oculist about the sight of one eye, which
has caused a lot of trouble and worry of late and continuously haunted
me with the possibility of blindness. At times, I see men as trees
walking and print becomes hopelessly blurred.

The Specialist however is reassuring. The eye is healthy --no
neuritis--but the adjustment muscles have been thrown out of gear by the
nervous troubles of last spring.

       *       *       *       *       *

Was ever man more sorely tempted? Here am I lonely and uncomfortable in
diggings with a heart like nascent oxygen.... Shall I? Yes, but.... And
I have neither health nor wealth.

_October_ 22.

_The British Museum Reading Room_

I saw it for the first time to-day! Gadzooks!! This is the only fit
ejaculation to express my amazement! It's a pagan temple with the Gods
in the middle and all around, various obscure dark figures prostrating
themselves in worship.

For any one who is not simply a Sheep or Cow or whose nervous
organisation is a degree more sensitive than the village blacksmith's,
it is a besetting peril to his peace of mind to be constantly moving
about an independent being, with loves and hates, and a separate
identity among other separate identities, who prowl and prowl around
like the hosts of Midian--ready to snarl, fight, seize you, bore you,
exasperate you, to arouse all your passions, call up all the worst from
the depths where they have lain hidden.... A day spent among my fellows
goads me to a frenzy by the evening. I am no longer fit for human
companionship. People string me up to concert pitch. I develop
suspicions of one that he is prying, of another that he patronises.
Others make me horribly anxious to stand well in their eyes and horribly
curious to know what they think of me. Others I hate and loathe--for no
particular reason. There is a man I am acquainted with concerning whom I
know nothing at all. He may be Jew, Gentile, Socinian, Pre-adamite,
Anabaptist, Rosicrucian--I don't know, and I don't care, for I hate him.
I should like to smash his face in. I don't know why.... In the whole
course of our tenuous acquaintance we have spoken scarce a dozen words
to each other. Yet I should like to blow up his face with dynamite. If I
had £200 a year private income I should be in wait for him to-morrow
round a corner and land him one--just to indicate my economic
independence. He would call for the police and the policeman--discerning
creature--on arrival, would surely say, "With a face like that, I'm not
surprised."

       *       *       *       *       *

R---- said to me this morning, "Well, have you heard?" with an
exuberance of curiosity that made my blood boil--he was referring to my
Essay still at the bar of the opinion of the Editor of the _English
Review_. "You beast," I snapped and walked off.

R---- shouted with laughter for he realizes my anger with him is only
semi-serious: it is meant and not meant: meant, for it is justified by
the facts; not meant, for I can't be too serious over anything _au
fond_.

       *       *       *       *       *

Of all the grim and ridiculous odds and ends of chance that Fortune has
rolled up to my feet, my friendship with a man like B---- is the
grimmest and most ridiculous. He is a bachelor of sixty, rather
good-looking, of powerful physique and a faultless constitution.... His
ignorance is colossal and he once asked whether Australia, for example,
tho' surrounded by water, is not connected up with other land underneath
the sea. Being himself a child in intelligence (tho' commercially
cunning), he has a great respect for my brains. Being himself a strong
man, he views my ill-health with much contempt. His private opinion is
that I am in consumption. When asked once by a lady if I were not going
to be "a great man" one day, he replied, "Yes--if he lives." I ought to
walk six miles a day, drink a bottle of stout with my dinner, and eat
plenty of _onions_. His belief in the curative properties of onions is
strong as death....

His system of prophylaxis may be quickly summarised,--

(1) Hot whisky _ad lib_. and off to bed.

(2) A woman.

These two sterling preventives he has often urged upon me at the same
time tipping out a quantity of anathemas on doctors and physic....

He is a cynic. He scoffs at the medical profession, the Law, the Church,
the Press. Every man is guilty until he is proved innocent. The Premier
is an unscrupulous character, the Bishop a salacious humbug. No doctor
will cure, for it pays him to keep you ill. Every clergyman puts the
Sunday-school teacher in the family way. His mouth is permanently
distorted by cynicism.

He is vain and believes all women are in love with him. When playing the
Gallant, he turns on a special voice, wears white spats, and looks like
a Newmarket "Crook."

"I lost my 'bus," a girl says to him. "Lost your bust," he answers, in
broad Scotch. "I can't see that you've done that." ... His sexual career
has been a remarkable one, he claiming to have brought many women to
bed, and actually to have lain with women of almost all European
nationalities, for he has been a great traveller....

This man is my devoted friend!... And truth to tell I get on with him
better than I do with most people. I like his gamey flavour, his utter
absence of self-consciousness, and his doggy loyalty to myself--his
weaker brother. He may be depraved in his habits, coarse in his
language, boorish in his manners, ludicrous in the wrongness of all his
views. But I like him just because he is so hopeless. I get on with him
because it is so impossible to reclaim him--my missionary spirit is not
intrigued. If he only dabbled in vice (for an experiment), if he had
pale, watery ideas about current literature--if--to use his own
favourite epithet--he were _genteel_, I should quarrel.

_October_ 30.

Having developed a passion for a piece of sculpture by R. Boeltzig
called the Reifenwerferin--the most beautiful figure of a woman. I am
already devoted to Rodin's "Kiss" and have a photo of it framed in my
bedroom. Have written to Bruciani's.

I suspect that my growing appreciation of the plastic art is with me
only distilled sensuality. I enjoy my morning bath for the same reason.
My bath is a daily baptism. I revel in the pleasure of the pain of the
cold water. I whistle gleefully because I am clean and cool and nude
early in the morning with the sun still low, before the day has been
stained by clothes, dirt, pain, exasperation, death.... How I love
myself as I rub myself down!--the cool, pink skin--I could eat it! I
want to be all day in a cold bath to enjoy the pain of mortifying the
flesh--it is so beautiful, so soft, so inscrutable--if I cut out chunks
of it, it would only bleed.

_November_ 8.

The other morning R---- said hyperbolically that he hadn't slept all
night for fear that, before he had time to put an arresting hand on my
shoulder and say "Don't," I might have gone and become "Entangled." ...

... No, I'm as firm as a rock, my dear. But in imagination the affair
was continued as follows,--

She: "I am fond of you, you know."

He: "I wish you wouldn't say these things to me--they're quite
embarrassing."

She: "Oh! my dear, I'm not serious, you know--you're such a vain young
man."

He: "Well, it's equally embarrassing any way."

She: "Then I _am_ serious."

Tears.

I say: "I wish you would take me only for what I am--a blackguard with
no good intentions, yet no very evil ones--but still a blackguard, whom
you seem to find has engaging manners."

I breathe freely hoping to have escaped this terrible temptation and
turn to go. But she, looking up smiling thro' a curtain of wet
eyelashes, asks,--

"Won't the blackguard stop a little longer?" In a moment my earth works,
redoubts, and bastions fall down, I rush forward impetuously into her
arms shouting, "I _will_, I _will_, I will as long as for eternity."

(Curtain.)

I dramatised this little picture and much more last night before going
to sleep when I was in a fever. I should succumb at once to the first
really skilful coquette.

_November_ 9.

_Ludo_

We played Ludo together this evening and she won 2s. 6d. Handsomely
gowned in black and wearing black ornaments, she sat with me in the
lamplight on the sofa in the Morris Room, with the Ludo board between us
placed on a large green cushion. Her face was white as parchment and
her hair seemed an ebony black. I lolled in the opposite corner, a thin,
elongated youth, with fair hair all stivvered up, dressed in a
light-brown lounge suit with a good trouser crease, a soft linen collar
and--a red tie! Between us, on its green cushion the Ludo board with its
brilliantly coloured squares:--all of it set before a background formed
by the straight-backed, rectangular, settle-like sofa, with a charming
covering which went with the rest of the scheme.

"Rather decorative,"---- remarked in an audible voice, turning her head
on one side and quizzing. I can well believe it was. _She_ looked wholly
admirable.

_November_ 21.

_My Nightmare_

Can't get rid of my cough. I have so many things to do--I am living in a
fever of haste to get them done. Yet this cough hinders me. There is
always something which drags me back from the achievement of my desires.
It's like a nightmare; I see myself struggling violently to escape from
a monster which draws continuously nearer, until his shadow falls across
my path, when I begin to run and find my legs tied, etc. The only
difference is that mine is a nightmare from which I never wake up. The
haven of successful accomplishment remains as far off as ever. Oh! make
haste.

_November_ 29.

The _English Review_ has returned my Essay!--This is a keen
disappointment to me. "I wish I could use this, but I am really too
full," the Editor writes. To be faintly encouraged and delicately
rejected--why I prefer the printed form.

_December_ 1.

_More Irony_

Renewed my cold--I do nothing all day but blow my nose, cough, and curse
Austin Harrison.

M---- thinks the lungs are all right. "There is nothing there, I think,"
said he, this morning. Alleluia! I've had visions of consumption for
weeks past and M---- himself has been expecting it. I always just escape:
I always almost get something, do something, go somewhere, I have
dabbled in a variety of diseases, but never got one downright[2]--but
only enough to make me feel horribly unfit and very miserable without
the consolation of being able to regard myself as the heroic victim of
some incurable disorder. Instead of being Stevenson with tuberculosis,
I've only been Jones with dyspepsia. So, too, in other directions, big
events have always just missed me: by Herculean efforts I succeeded in
giving up newspaper journalism and breaking thro' that steel
environment--but only to become an Entomologist! I once achieved success
in an Essay in the _Academy_, which attracted attention--a debut,
however, that never developed. I had not quite arrived. It is always
_not quite_.

Yesterday, I received a state visit from the Editor of the _Furniture
Record_ seeking advice on how to eradicate mites from upholstering! I
received him ironically--but little did he understand.

I shot up like a ball on a bagatelle board all steamy into zoology (my
once beloved science) but at once rolled dead into the very low hole of
Economic Entomology! Curse.... Why can't I either have a first-rate
disease or be a first-rate zoologist?

Now just think what a much better figure I should have cut, from the
artistic view point, had I remained a newspaper reporter who had taught
himself prodigious embryology out of F.M. Balfour's Textbook, who had
cut sections of fowls' eggs and newt embryos with a hand microtome, who
had passionately dissected out the hidden, internal anatomy of a great
variety of animals, who could recite Wiedersheim's _Comparative Anatomy
of Vertebrates_ and patter off the difference between a nephridium and a
cœlomic duct without turning a hair--or the phylogenetic history (how
absorbing!) of the kidney--pronephros, mesonephros and metanephros and
all the ducts!... All this, over now and wasted. My hardly-won
knowledge wrenched away is never brought into use--it lies piled up in
my brain rotting. I could have become a first-rate comparative
anatomist.

_December_ 3.

Cold better. So back at work--gauging ale at Dunfermline as R---- puts
it.

_December_ 9.

In the evening found it quite impossible to stay in the house any
longer: some vague fear drove me out. I was alarmed to be alone or to be
still. It is my cough, I think.

Had two glasses of port at the Kensington Hotel, conversed with the
barmaid, and then came home.

_December_ 10.

"Don't be an old fossil," she said to me to-night, irrelevantly.

"_A propos_ of what?" I inquired.

"Mother, here's W---- proposing to E----! Do come," cried ----, with
intent to confuse. I laughed heartlessly.

Dear, dear, where will it all end? It's a sad business when you fall in
love with a girl you don't like.

_December_ 26.

Spent a romping day at the Flat. Kissed her sister twice under the
mistletoe, and in the evening went to a cinema. After supper made a mock
heroic speech and left hilarious.


[1] "The life of the Soul is different; there is nothing more changing,
more varied, more restless ... to describe the incidents of one hour
would require an eternity."--_Journal of Eugénie de Guérin_.

[2] See entry for November 27, 1915.




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 shar

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