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.
October 29.
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 realises 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.
Have 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 earthworks, 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 downrightfn2 – 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 début, 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.
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 16.
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.
The Journal of a Disappointed Man Page 11
