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 embarra.s.sing."
She: "Oh! my dear, I"m not serious, you know--you"re such a vain young man."
He: "Well, it"s equally embarra.s.sing 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 succ.u.mb 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 pa.s.sionately 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 clomic duct without turning a hair--or the phylogenetic history (how absorbing!) of the kidney--p.r.o.nephros, 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 gla.s.ses 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 Eugenie de Guerin_.
[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?