Many an evening during the past few months, I have got up and gone down the road to look across at the windows of the flat, to see if there were a red light behind the curtains, and, if so, wonder if she were there, and how she was. My pride would never allow me to visit there again on my own initiative. K---- has managed to bring about a rapprochement but I go very seldom. Pride again.
I wanted to do so to-night. I thought I would just go down the road to look up at the windows. That seemed to be some comfort. Why do I wish to do this? I do not know. From a mere inspection one would say that I am in love. But remember I am also ill. Three times to-night I nearly put on my boots and went down to have a look up! What ridiculous weakness!
Yet this room can be a frightful prison. Shall I? I cannot decide. I see her figure constantly before me--gentle, graceful, calm, stretching forth both hands and to me....
Seized a pack of cards and played Patience and went on playing Patience because I was afraid to stop. Given a weak const.i.tution, a great ambition, an amorous nature, and at the same time a very fastidious one, I might have known I was in for trouble.
_October_ 14.
_Marie Bashkirtseff_
Some time ago I noticed a quotation from one, Marie Bashkirtseff in a book on Strindberg, and was struck with the likeness to a sentiment of my own. Who _are_ you? I wondered.
This evening went to the Library and read about her in Mathilde Blind"s introductory essay to her Journal. I am simply astounded. It would be difficult in all the world"s history to discover any two persons with temperaments so alike. She is the "very spit of me "! I devoured Mathilde Blind"s pages more and more astonished. We are identical! Oh, Marie Bashkirtseff! how we should have hated one another! She feels as I feel. We have the same self-absorption, the same vanity and corroding ambition. She is impressionable, volatile, pa.s.sionate--ill! So am I. Her journal is my journal. All mine is stale reading now. She has written down all my thoughts and forestalled me! Already I have found some heart-rending parallels. To think I am only a replica: how humiliating for a human being to find himself merely a duplicate of another. Is there anything in the transmigration of souls? She died in 1886. I was born in 1889.
_October_ 15.
A man is always looking at himself in the mirror if for no other reason than to tie his tie and brush his hair. What does he think of his face?
He must have private opinions. But it is usually considered a little out of taste to entertain opinions about one"s personal appearance.
As for myself, some mirrors do me down pretty well, others depress me!
I am bound to confess I am bia.s.sed in favour of the friendly mirror. I am not handsome, but I look interesting--I hope distinguished. My eyes are deep-set ... but my worst moments are when the barber combs my hair right down over my forehead, or when I see a really handsome man in Hyde Park. Such occasions direct my gaze reflexly, and doubt like a thief in the night forces the back door!
To-day, M---- sent me dancing mad by suggesting that I copied R---- in my manner of speech and opinions.
Now R---- has a d.a.m.ned pervasive way of conducting himself--for all the world as if he were a high official of the Foreign Office. I, on the contrary, am shy, self-conscious, easily overlooked, and this makes me writhe. As we are inseparable friends--everybody a.s.sumes that I am his tacky-lacky, a kind of appoggiatura to his big note. He, they suppose, is my guide, philosopher, and Great Maecenas--Oxford befriending the proletariat. The thought of it makes me sick--that any one should believe I imbibe his ideas, echo his conceits, and even ape his gestures and manner of voice.
"Lost yourself?" inquired a despicable creature the other morning as I came out of R----"s room after finding him out. I could have shot him dead! ... As for ---- more than one person thinks that he alone is the brilliant author until at last he himself has got into the way of thinking it.
"It makes me hate you like mad," I said to him to-day. "How can I confront these people with the naked truth?" R---- chuckled complacently.
"If I deny your alleged supremacy, as I did this morning, or if suddenly, in a fit of spleen, I"m induced to declare that I loathe you (as I sometimes do)"--(more chuckles) "that your breath stinks, your eyes bulge, that you have swollen jugulars and a platter face: they will think I am either jealous or insincere.... To be your Echo tho"!--my G.o.d!" I spat. We then grinned at one another, and I, being bored, went to the lavatory and read the newspaper secure from interruption.
_Resignation_
In the Tube, a young widow came in and sat in front of me--pale-faced, grief-stricken, demure--a sort of "Thy Will be Done" look. The adaptability of human beings has something in it that seems horrible. It is dreadful to think how we have all accommodated ourselves to this War.
Christian resignation is a feeble thing. Why won"t this demure widow with a loud voice blaspheme against this iniquitous world that permits this iniquitous war?
_October_ 21.
I myself (licking a stamp): "The taste of gum is really very nice."
R.: "I hate it."
I: "My dear fellow" (surprised and entreating), "envelope gum is simply delicious."
R.: "I never lick stamps--it"s dangerous--microbes."
I: "I always do: I shall buy a bookful and go away to the seaside with them."
R.: "Yes, you"ll need to."
(Laughter.)
Thus gaily and jauntily we went on to discuss wines, whiskies, and Worthington"s, and I rounded it up in a typical c.o.c.k-eyed manner,--
"Ah! yes, it"s only when the day is over that the day really begins--what?"
_October_ 23.
I expressed to R---- to-day my admiration for the exploit of the brave and successful Submarine Commander Max Kennedy Horton. (Name for you!) R---- was rather cold. "His exploits," said this b.l.o.o.d.y fool, "involve loss of life and scarcely make me deliriously eulogistic."
I cleared my throat and began,--
"Your precious sociology again--it will be the ruin of your career as an artist. It is so interwoven into the fibre of your brain that you never see anything except in relation to its State value. You are afraid to approve of a lying, thieving rogue, however delightful a rascal he may be, for fear of what Karl Marx might say.... You"ll soon be drawing landscapes with taxpayers in the foreground, or we shall get a picture of Ben Nevis with Keir Hardie on the summit." And so on to our own infinite mutual amus.e.m.e.nt.
The _English Review_ returns my Essay. I am getting simply furious with an ambition I am unable to satisfy, among beautiful London women I cannot get to know, and in ill-health that I cannot cure. Shall I ever find any one? Shall I ever be really well? My one solace is that I do not submit, it infuriates me, I resent it; I will never be resigned and milky. I will keep my claws sharp and fight to the end.
_October_ 24.
Went to Mark Lane by train, then walked over the Tower Bridge, and back along Lower Thames Street to London Bridge, up to Whitechapel, St.
Paul"s, Fleet Street, and Charing Cross, and so home.
Near Reilly"s Tavern, I saw a pavement artist who had drawn a loaf with the inscription in both French and English: "This is easy to draw but hard to earn." A baby"s funeral trotted briskly over the Tower Bridge among Pink"s jam waggons, carts carrying any goods from lead pencils and matches to bales of cotton and chests of tea.
In the St. Catherine"s Way there is one part like a deep railway cutting, the whole of one side for a long way, consisting of the brickwall of a very tall warehouse with no windows in it and beautifully curved and producing a wonderful effect. Walked past great blocks of warehouses and business establishments--a wonderful sight; and everywhere bacon factors, coffee roasters, merchants. On London Bridge, paused to feed the sea-gulls and looked down at the stevedores. Outside Billingsgate Market was a blackboard on an easel--for market prices--but instead some one had drawn an enormously enlarged chalk picture of a cat"s rear and tail with anatomical details.
In Aldgate, stopped to inspect a street stall containing popular literature--one brochure ent.i.tled _Suspended for Life_ to indicate the terrible punishment meted out to ----, a League footballer. The frontispiece enough to make a lump come in the juveniles" throats!
Another stall held domestic utensils with an intimation, "Anything on this stall _lent_ for id." A newsvendor I heard exclaim to a fellow-tradesman in the same line of business,--
"They come and look at your b.l.o.o.d.y plakaard and then pa.s.se on."
Loitered at a dirty little Fleet Street bookshop where Paul de Koch"s _The Lady with the Three Pairs of Stays_ was displayed prominently beside a picture of Oscar Wilde.
In Fleet Street, you exchange the Whitechapel sausage restaurants for Taverns with "snacks at the bar," and the chestnut roasters, with their buckets of red-hot coals, for Grub Street camp followers, selling _L"Independance Belge_ or pamphlets ent.i.tled, _Why We Went to War_.
In the Strand you may buy war maps, b.u.t.tonhole flags, etc., etc. I bought a penny stud. One shop was turned into a shooting gallery at three shots a penny where the Inner Temple Barristers in between the case for the defence and the case for the prosecution could come and keep their eye in against the time the Germans come.
Outside Charing Cross Station I saw a good-looking, well-dressed woman in mourning clothes, grinding a barrel organ....
Returned to the Library and read the _Dublin Review_ (article on Samuel Butler), _North American Review_(one on Henry James) and dined at seven.
After dinner, read: _Evening Standard, Sat.u.r.day Westminster_, and the _New Statesman_. Smoked six cigarettes and went to bed. To-morrow Fifth Symphony of Beethoven.
_October_ 25.
_Too Late_