All My Road Before Me

by C. S. Lewis

  After seeing her into Bernagh I came back here, finding my father already in, changed, and had dinner. I worked well afterwards and finished the Beowulf section in Sweet. Before going to bed I read a chapter or two in Strachey’s Adventure of Living which seems a curious and delightful book. I was much excited by his account of what he (from Berlioz) calls isolement. I found great difficulty in deciding whether it is like my ‘sense of the is-ness of things’ or my ‘Joy’, but concluded that it was really different. Had a good letter from Arthur today, but containing nothing new. To bed and slept well.

  Thursday 11 January: After letter and diary writing I turned to Anglo-Saxon and read till lunch time, a good part of the Fall of the Angels, which is very fine indeed: in Satan’s feeling about his own powers of creation (if that is what the author means) it gets a point which even Milton missed.

  Noticing just before lunch that the post had come, I went over to Bernagh, but was surprised and rather worried to find nothing for me. After lunch I walked out to the post, and, coming back went to the little end room where I fully intended to continue the Anglo-Saxon.

  As I came into the room, however, I was suddenly flooded with the conviction that now at last I should be able to write some more ‘Dymer’. I sat down at once and went at it with a run, securing eight stanzas with which I was well pleased.

  After this I read Macdonald’s Phantastes over my tea, which I have read many times and which I really believe fills for me the place of a devotional book. It tuned me up to a higher pitch and delighted me.

  I then went out and walked to Holywood: descended through the town to the low road and rejoined the high road by the lane which skirts the barracks. By going out a little before five and returning at 6.15 I managed during this comparatively short walk to get a great variety of light and colours. It was a clear, quiet evening: as I came back there were very brilliant stars. I was quite unusually happy.

  My father was already here when I came back. In the evening I finished the Fall of the Angels and read some of the Gnomic Verses which seem great rubbish. Then, after finishing Phantastes, to bed at half past eleven.

  Friday 12 January: Immediately after breakfast I went over to Bernagh and found again that there was no letter. Mrs Greeves told me that she was setting out for town at 2 o’clock and if anything came by the second post she would then give it to me. I then came back and went up to the little end room where I made up my diary and wrote to D—a postcard.

  After this I trammed into town, got a new Homberg hat at Laird’s, or rather the shop that used to be Laird’s, and came back, getting off the tram at Mopsi Todd’s. Here I got a sponge and some shaving soap and walked to Leeborough. As soon as I had finished lunch I went out and paced up and down the front path until I saw Mrs Greeves passing. She gave me a letter and I said good bye to her, thanking her warmly for her services.

  I was not best pleased to read in this letter that D was giving a party for Maureen tonight—but I suppose it is necessary. I next made all preparations for packing and then wrote three more stanzas of ‘Dymer’, which seemed fairly satisfactory. The vein however soon ran dry and I came down to the study and read Bernard Shaw’s Candida (an amusing trifle) till tea and finished it. After tea I went for a short stroll round by the fenced tree: a cold misty evening.

  Coming back I went upstairs and had hardly started packing when the cook, ‘The Witch of Endor’ as my father calls her, came to my door and announced in her breathless manner that she had made me a cake and it wasn’t very big and could I fit it in my case.7 As I have had nothing but cake for three weeks at tea time this kindness was a little disconcerting. I thanked her profusely: but when she produced a cake of some five pounds burthen, which almost completely filled my suitcase, I had to ask her to send it after by post.

  I then went down to greet my father who had just come in, and returned to finish packing. For some reason I had a horror of this last tail end of my long penance, and, I am afraid, spun out packing as long as I could. After dinner I changed.

  The taxi came at 8.15 and my father accompanied me into town. Up to the moment of leaving Little Lea I was still feeling that I was not yet out of the wood and half expecting something to turn up.

  Once alone and on the boat I experienced a great sense of relief and security, tempered by sympathy for my father. I had Mrs McNaughton’s Lame Dog’s Diary with me, which has some charm: but I fear it is a toy book. After reading this in the smoking room till ten o’clock and drinking a bottle of stout I retired to my single berth room where I was very comfortable and above all, at last, easy in my mind. Slept excellently.

  Saturday 13 January: I was called by my steward at 7.30 and shaved and dressed while the boat was moving from the landing stage to the dock. After a very good breakfast on board, which I ate with extraordinary appetite, I crossed by ferry and arrived at Woodside Station shortly after nine o’clock. It was a typical Liverpool morning, grey and foggy, but with a certain cheerfulness on the river.

  I came down by the 9.35, an excellent through train with a luncheon car, reaching Oxford at 2.18. I travelled with an interesting man, a civil servant of some sort. He was not a man of breeding but had travelled a good deal in Germany and Italy. He contrasted the civility and refinement of continental life—the music, the gardens, the bowing managers of hotels etc.—with our English barbarism. During the morning I finished the Lame Dog’s Diary. A good deal of the country was flooded, with ice here and there. I had lunch at 12.30.

  I arrived home about [3] and was glad to find that D, tho’ tired, was much better—the tooth being painless for the time. After I had changed and had a bath we spent most of the rest of the day talking. D described to me the curious affair with the Askins. The Doc had been, according to Mary, ‘much hurt’ by some chaff of Maureen’s. If this is true it shows only how ill the poor man must be. The party last night seems to have been a great success. Maureen went out shortly after my arrival.

  I was so delighted at being home again that even the news that we must all support Maureen tomorrow morning at her first experience of the uncomfortable sacrament did not damp me. After supper it was delightful to write up my diary—describing a Leeborough day while sitting here. D, rather extravagantly, has presented me with a desk, which will be a great comfort. We were in bed by 11.30.

  Sunday 14 January: All of us were up by 7.30 and, after tea and biscuits, up to Headington on our bicycles. On the outward journey it seemed a mild morning. Mr Clarke and a curate who came in late, officiated.8

  On the return journey we found it had turned much colder. After breakfast I spent most of the morning putting my things into my new desk and destroying a lot of old MS books. D was slightly threatened with the tooth off and on today, but was otherwise in excellent form. After lunch I made a new start on the Vth Canto of ‘Dymer’. What between my stanzas written at Leeborough and selections from those written before I went to Ireland and some new ones today, I have now a continuous opening of sixteen stanzas with which I am fairly pleased.

  After tea I read through my Magdalen dissertation preparatory to sending my father a copy and chatted with D: then, at about six, I walked up to Headington, down the Green Lane and home by the old London Rd. where there was a fine display of stars through the bare trees.

  We had supper at 7.30 and after it I assisted D in the composition of a letter to Moppie. Moppie had written to D saying that she had saved 30/- a week and given it to Miss Quinlan to keep: and proposing, so far as we could gather, to spend this on further lessons for which she would go three times a week to London while living here for the six months which she is out of work. It had been understood that she was to try and find temporary work for this period: or, at the worst, that the saving would go to help the common stock while she was with us. We felt her letter rather cool: she seems to have no compunction about being a deadweight and we cannot entirely trust what she tells us.

  In the end we produced a letter which laid the facts before her, I hope w
ithout being unkind. We explained that she had run away to a poor family and that we could not afford the arrangements she suggested. The business is a worry to us and D has quite lost confidence in Moppie: I still try to hope for the best.

  After posting this letter I came back to a belated wash up and then sat in the drawing room where D and I talked of a lot of things—death, second marriages, and whether one would feel horror at the ghost of a friend. In bed about twelve o’clock.

  Monday 15 January: . . . After lunch I went over my notes on the Elizabethan plays, which I find that I remember very well. I finished them after tea and began Lodge’s Rosalynde which is almost quite worthless. I continued it till supper time and afterwards went on for a page or two with my fair copy of ‘Forster’, making a few corrections.

  Later I had a long and interesting conversation with D in which she answered several questions greatly to my enlightenment. To bed about 12. I forgot to say that I met the Doc as I was returning through Iffley. We had some talk, but nothing of interest.

  Tuesday 16 January: . . . After lunch I did some work on Anglo-Saxon grammar and later on began to write my paper on Spenser for Gordon’s discussion class. Just before tea the Doc appeared and I joined him and D in the dining room. D and I both remarked afterwards that he was very much worse: we also heard him swearing to himself in a very odd way in the bathroom, which is a bad sign in a man of his sort. He seems less interested in life than he used to be and can hardly be got to talk outside theosophical philosophy.

  After tea he and I had our usual kind of talk. I told him what Fasnacht had said—that as, by perspective, you could represent a three dimensional object in two dimensions, so you must be able to make in three a model of a four dimensional object. He agreed with my objection that one would have no means of recognising it when made . . .

  Thursday 18 January: . . . After breakfast I worked all morning on my paper on Spenser. D had a letter from Moppie in which she says she has been advised by Miss Quinlan to take more lessons during the summer and apparently intends to do so and believes that she can on her savings. It was a beautiful bright day and I tried to persuade D to come out for a ride: as she had been busy all morning she wisely refused . . .

  I . . . hastened to get tea, intending to go into town afterwards and have a look into College—today being the beginning of term. During tea however a card came from Wilson telling me to call on him at 9.45 tomorrow and I decided that I would make one journey do. After tea I went on with Donne and read the Second Anniversary which is ‘a new planet’: I never imagined or hoped for anything like it: also the Soul’s Progress which is mostly bosh and won’t scan.

  Just as we were getting supper Smudge arrived unexpectedly, looking much thinner than when I last saw her, but in very good form and greatly improved in appearance. She has been making good progress with her exercise. Maureen has a curious instrument, a cylinder of cardboard which turns on a handle and when made to revolve executes an arpeggio: it sounds like a cross between a violin and a concertina. We had arranged to try this on Smudge and during supper I twirled it outside the dining room door. To our surprise, the first strain of the music, which has rather a weird way of swelling up from nowhere, reduced her to abject terror. And even afterwards she refused to look at it or have it brought near her, saying it was a device of the devil. She has a bad term before her, working for Smalls. After supper we had a lot of talk and chaff in the drawing room. She left about ten.

  Friday 19 January: . . . I . . . rode to Manor Road: on the way I met Robson-Scott and one unknown who were also going to Wilson. There were others with him already and we three sat in his dining room downstairs to wait. When I went up he dictated a collections paper to me and advised me to see Miss Wardale at once.

  As soon as I left him I rode to Margaret Rd. and caught her just before she went out. She also promised to send me a paper (which arrived this afternoon), said, in answer to my enquiries, that I owed her five pounds, and hoped I had had a pleasant vacation. I said that I had and hoped that she had had the same: whereupon she dropped her lower lip, shot out her eyes, looked as if I had insulted her, ‘roseate and pained as any ravished nymph’ and said nothing.

  I picked up my gloves and stole away to the Union where I read Santayana’s Reason in Art for an hour: very pugnacious and bracing and mostly true. I then came home and read a little Homer—Iliad 16—before lunch. D and I were alone, Maureen being at lunch in Headington . . .

  Saturday 20 January: I spent the first part of the morning doing the O.E. translation paper with moderate success: and then, till lunch time, looked up O.E. grammar . . . After tea I began my O.E. grammar paper. I realised as soon as I had opened it that it contained a lot of unexpected questions and almost thought of putting it away and reading up some more. I decided however that this would be unfair and proceeded to do a shockingly bad paper. When I had finished it I put it in an envelope, enclosing £5 as a peace offering, and posted it.

  In the evening Smudge came to supper, bringing her sister: she had threatened to do so because we had been condemning the sister for going to London in the Vac and compelling Smudge to look after her mother: and in general for her selfishness towards Smudge. Smudge thought she would cure this by showing how nice her sister really was. She turned out to be very plain, with an old maid’s manner, as self confident as Smudge is shy.

  I was left alone with her for a few minutes before supper. She said she always made her pupils promise never to touch the piano during the holidays. She said that children should be sent to boarding school as early as possible—say at the age of two: because no mother could have ‘the sympathy and wisdom’ that the ideal school marm would have.

  During supper she explained that she had given up meat for vegetables and then vegetables for fruit: she hoped to give up milk and eggs soon and finally to live without food at all: tho’ she admitted that she hardly expected that in this life. She said (under examination) that animal food was gross. Asked why a pig was grosser than an apple—the pig being more highly organised matter—she said you should eat the lower kingdom rather than the higher. Asked why again, she said something which I do not remember. The legitimacy of pork eating, I gathered, depended on the age of one’s soul: a young soul might eat it, but not an advanced one. During this dialogue she executed a great many curious gestures with her arms above her head. After supper I did Tacitus with Smudge. D and I both thought S’s sister a perfect fool . . .

  Monday 22 January: . . . At twelve o’clock again I went to Schools and heard Gordon give a capital lecture by way of introduction to Shakespeare’s tragedy.9 As I was getting my bike from College afterwards, I met Stevenson, who tells me that Wyllie has still got no permanent job—anxious news for me. Forgot to say that I had a card from Jenkin yesterday, from some place South of Naples: he is not coming back till February, so I have now no friend in the University at all . . .

  After a little opposition from D I succeeded in being allowed to wash up: after which I came to the drawing room and had hardly sat down to my desk when I saw Cranny opening the gate. Much against my will, I ushered him into the room. He was in great form, enormously improved since his last visit. D turned up presently and we listened to him till tea time . . . At tea we talked of music. He said that the Americans had used a gun for the accompaniment of Handel’s ‘Wonderful conqueror’ passage in the Messiah. I said it was a cheap passage: he said it was the finest in all music. He asked whether Christ, apart from the question of his divinity, was a great teacher or a fanatic? He also doubted whether Christian ethics were practicable.

  After tea I escaped to the drawing room and attacked my essay on the influence of Donne on 17th century lyric. I decided an essay (for tomorrow) was out of the question and did notes instead.

  At supper the subject of personality arose—I said that it made one giddy to think that oneself might not have been. Maureen said ‘Yes—I was wishing the other day that you had married someone else (to D) and then I thought, Oh i
t wouldn’t make any difference to me, I shouldn’t have been there.’ This shows she thinks more than I hoped for.

  After supper went on with my notes and read a little O.E. Poor D very miserable and depressed today . . .

  Tuesday 23 January: A busy day. Cycled into town after breakfast and worked in the Union at my notes on the Metaphysicals: I read Johnson’s passage in the life of Cowley, and found that I had been rather off the track. Worked hard to pull it straight and went to Wilson at 12, where I had a good hour.

  So home. D insisted on doing the washing up after lunch. For the rest of the day I did Middle English, reading the reign of Stephen from the Chronicle10 and a passage from Havelock, which is great stuff. Then I started a paper on the Chronicle passage for Miss Wardale and continued very busy till 11 o’clock.

  Thursday 25 January: . . . Biked to College where I got a note from Carritt inviting me to dine in Hall some day next week. I answered at once, accepting for Tuesday . . .

  I went to Schools at 10 o’c. to hear Onions on Middle English. Here I met Robson-Scott who told me there would be a meeting of the Martlets on Wednesday next, though there were no cards printed yet. Onions gave a delightful lecture: the best part being the quotations, which he does inimitably. Once he repeated nearly a whole poem with much relish and then observed ‘That wasn’t what I meant to say.’ A man after my own heart.

  Friday 26 January: . . . After lunch and washing up I changed and went in to Schools to ‘assist at’ the first meeting of Gordon’s Discussion Class.11 It was held in an upper room, on the High, to the right of the entrance hall: a bare, over-heated room with a round table. I was there early and watched it gradually fill up with a crowd of people who were certainly not there when the show was arranged and the papers alloted. Robson-Scott was there, but with a friend, and I did not speak to him. Darlow (see Dec. 7. 22.) who was to read, came and sat close to me and talked to another man, tho’ eyeing me from time to time with what seemed a glazed insolence but may have been unintentional. Gordon arrived rather late.