Got up early and walked around the Farm before breakfast. Everything promises to be delightful--young calves, broods of ducklings, and turkeys, fowls, cats and dogs. In the yard are two large Cathedral barns, with enormous pent roofs sloping down to within about two feet of the ground and entered by way of great double doors that open with the slowness and solemnity of a Castle"s portal studded with iron k.n.o.bs. It thrilled me to the marrow on first putting my head outside to be greeted with the grunt of an invisible pig that I found sc.r.a.ping his back on the other side of the garden wall.
In the afternoon, E---- and I sat together in the Beech Wood: E---- on a deck chair and I on a rug on the ground. In spite of our beautiful surroundings we did not progress very well, but I attributed her slight aloofness to the state of her nerves. She is still far from recovered.
These wonderful Beech Woods are quite new to me. The forest beech is a very different plant from the solitary tree. In the struggle to reach the light the Forest Beech grows lean and tall and gives an extraordinary suggestion of wiry powerful strength. On the margins of the wood, Bluebells were mobilised in serried ranks. Great t.i.ts whistled--in the language of our allies--"Bijou, Bijou" and I agreed with every one of them.
Some folk don"t like to walk over Bluebells or b.u.t.tercups or other flowers growing on the ground. But it is foolish to try to pamper Nature as if she were a sickly child. She is strong and can stand it. You can stamp on and crush a thousand flowers--they will all come up again next year.
By some labyrinthine way which I cannot now recall, the conversation worked round to a leading question by E.--if in times like these we ought not to cease being in love? She was quite calm and serious. I said "No, of course not, silly." My immediate apprehension was that she had perceived the coldness in my letters and I was quite satisfied that she was so well able to read the signs in the sky. "But you don"t wish to go on?" she persisted. I persisted that I did, that I had no misgivings, no second thoughts, that I was not merely taking pity on her, etc. The wild temptation to seize this opportunity for a break I smothered in reflecting how ill she was and how necessary to wait first till she was well again. These thoughts pa.s.sed swiftly, vaguely like wraiths thro" my mind: I was barely conscious of them. Then I recalled the sonnet about coming in the rearward of a conquered woe and mused thereon. But I took no action. [Fortunately--for me. 1916.]
Presently with cunning I said that there was no cloud on my horizon whatever--only her "letters disappointed me a little--they were so cold," but "as soon as I saw you again, darling, those feelings disappeared."
As soon as they were spoken I knew they were not as they might seem, the words of a liar and hypocrite. They _became_ true. E---- looked very sweet and helpless and I loved her again as much as ever.
"It"s funny," she said, "but I thought your letters were cold. Letters are so horrid."
The incident shews how impossible is intellectual honesty between lovers. Truth is at times a hound which must to kennel.
"Write as you would speak," said I. "You know I"m not one to carp about a spelling mistake!"
The latter remark astonished me. Was it indeed I who was speaking? All the week I had been fuming over this. Yet I was honest: the Sun and E."s presence were dispelling my ill-humours and crochets. We sealed our conversation with a kiss and swore never to doubt each other again. E."s spell was beginning to act. It is always the same. I cannot resist the actual presence of this woman. Out of her sight, I can in cold blood plan a brutal rupture. I can pay her a visit when the first kiss is a duty and the embrace a formality. But after 5 minutes I am as pa.s.sionate and devoted as before. It is always thus. After leaving her, I am angry to think that once more I have succ.u.mbed.
In the evening we went out into a field and sat together in the gra.s.s.
It is beautiful. We lay flat on our backs and gazed up at the sky.
S.H. has died of enteric at Malta. In writing to Mrs. H., instead of dwelling on what a splendid fellow he was I belaboured the fact that I still remembered our boyish friendship in every detail and still kept his photo on my mantelpiece and altho" "in later years" I didn"t suppose we "had a great deal in common I discovered that a friendship even between two small boys cannot wholly disappear into the void."
Discussing myself when I ought to have been praising him! Ugh! She will think what a conceited, puff-breasted Jackanapes. These phrases have rankled in my mind ever since I dropped the letter into the letter-box.
"Your Stanley, Mrs. H., was of course a very inferior sort of person and naturally, you could hardly expect me to remain friendly with him but rest a.s.sured I hadn"t forgotten him," etc.
_The Luxury of Lunacy_
Yesterday, I read a paper at the Zoological Society about lice. There was a goodly baldness of sconce and some considerable length of beard present that listened or appeared to listen to my innocent remarks with great solemnity and sapience.... I badly wanted to tell them some horrid stories about human lice but I had not the courage. I wanted to jolt these middle-aged gentlemen by performing a few tricks but I am too timid for such adventures. But before going to sleep I imagined a pandemonium in which with a perfectly glacial manner I produced lice alive from my pockets, conjured them down from the roof in a rain, with the skilful sleight of hand drew them out of the chairman"s beard, made the ladies scream as I approached, dared to say they were all lousy and unclean and finished up with an eloquent apostrophe after the manner of Thomas de Quincey (and of Sir Walter Raleigh before him) beginning:
"O just, subtle and eloquent avenger, pierce the hides of these abominable old fogies, speckle their polished calvaria with the scarlet blood drops...."
But I hadn"t the courage. Sh.e.l.ley in a crowded omnibus suddenly burst out: "O let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of Kings, etc." I"ve always wanted to do something like that and when I have 5 to spare I hope to pull the communication cord of an express train--my hands tingle as often as I look at it. Dr. Johnson"s courage in tapping the lamp-posts is really everyone"s envy tho" we laugh at him for it and say, green-eyed, that he was mad. In walking along the pavement, I sometimes indulge myself in the unutterable, deeply rooted satisfaction of stepping on a separate flagstone where this is possible with every stride. And if this is impossible or not easy, there arises in me a vague mental uneasiness, some subconscious suspicion that the world is not properly geometrical and that the whole universe perhaps is working out of truth. I am also rather proud of my courageous self-surrender to the daemon of laughter, especially in those early days when H. and I used to sit opposite one another and howl like hyenas.
After the most cacophonous cachinnations as soon as we had recovered ourselves he or I would regularly remark in serious and confidential tones, "I say--we _really_ are going mad." But what a delightful luxury to be thus mad amid the great, s.p.a.cious, architectural solemnity with gargoyles and effigies of a scientific meeting! Some people never do more than chuckle or smile--and they are often very humorous happy people, ignorant nevertheless of the joy of riding themselves on the snaffle and losing all control.
While boating on ---- last summer, we saw two persons, a man and a girl sitting together on the beach reading a book with heads almost touching.
"I wonder what they"re reading?" I said, and I was dying to know. We made a few facetious guesses.
"Shall I ask?"
"Yes, do," said Mrs. ----.
The truth is we all wanted to know. We were suddenly mad with curiosity as we watched the happy pair turning over leaf after leaf.
While R---- leaned on his oars, I stood up in the boat and threatened to shout out a polite enquiry--just to prove that the will is free. But seeing my intention the boat-load grew nervous and said seriously, "No,"
which unnerved me at the last moment so I sat down again. Why was I so afraid of being thought a lunatic by two persons in the distance whom I had never seen and probably would never see again? Besides I _was_ a lunatic--we all were.
In our post-prandial perambulations about S. Kensington G---- and I often pa.s.s the window of a photographer"s shop containing always a profusion of bare arms, chests, necks, bosoms belonging to actresses, aristocrats and harlots--some very beautiful indeed. Yet on the whole the window annoys us, especially one picture of a young thing with an arum lily (ghastly plant!) laid exquisitely across her breast.
"Why do we suffer this?" I asked G----, tapping the window ledge as we stood.
"I don"t know," he answered lamely--morose. (Pause while the two embittered young men continue to look in and the beautiful young women continue to look out.)
Thoroughly disgruntled I said at last: "If only we had the courage of our innate madness, the courage of children, lunatics and men of genius, we should get some stamp paper, and stick a square beneath each photograph with our comments."
Baudelaire describes how he dismissed a gla.s.s vendor because he had no coloured gla.s.ses--"gla.s.ses of rose and crimson, magical gla.s.ses, gla.s.ses of Paradise"--and, stepping out on to his balcony, threw a flowerpot down on the tray of gla.s.ses as soon as the man issued into the street below, shouting down furiously, "The Life Beautiful! The Life Beautiful."
Bergson"s theory is that laughter is a "social gesture" so that when a man in a top hat treads on a banana skin and slips down we laugh at him for his lack "of living pliableness." At this rate we ought to be profoundly solemn at Baudelaire"s action and moreover a "social gesture"
is more likely to be an expression of society"s will to conformity in all its members rather than any dangerous "living pliableness." Society hates living pliableness and prefers drill, routine, orthodoxy, conformity. It hated the living pliableness of Turner, of Keats, of Samuel Butler and a hundred others.
But to return to lunacy: the truth is we are all mad fundamentally and are merely schooled into sanity by education. Pascal wrote: "Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness." And, in fact, the man who has succeeded in extirpating this intoxication of life is usually said to be "temporarily insane." In those melancholy interludes of sanity when the mind becomes rationalised we all know how much we have been deceived and gulled, what an extraordinary spectacle humanity presents rushing on in noise and tumult no one knows why or whither. Look at that tailor in his shop--why does he do it? Some day in the future he thinks he will.... But the day never, comes and he is nevertheless content.
_May_ 30.
A brilliantly sunny day. This funny old farm-house where we are staying quite delights me. It is pleasant, too, to dawdle over dressing, to put away shaving tackle for a day or so, to jump out of bed in the morning and thrust my head out of the window into the fresh and stock-scented air of the garden, listen to the bird chorus or watch a "sc.r.a.p" in the poultry-run. Then all unashamed, I dress myself before a dear old lady in a flowery print gown concealing 4 thin legs and over the top of the mirror a piece of lace just like a bonnet, caught up in front by a piece of pink ribbon. On the walls Pear"s Soap Annuals, on a side table _Swiss Family Robinson_ and _Children of the New Forest_. Then there are rats under the floors, two wooden staircases which wind up out of sight, two white dairies, iron hapses on all the doors and a privy at the top of the orchard. (Tell me--how do you explain the psychosis of a being who on a day must have seized hammer and nail and an almanac picture of a woman in the snow with a basket of goodies--"An Errand of Mercy"--carried all three to the top of the orchard and nailed the picture up on the dirty wall in the semi-darkness of an earth-closet?)
Got up quite early before breakfast and went birds"-nesting.... It would take too long and be too sentimental for me to record my feelings on looking into the first nest I found--a Chaffinch"s, the first wild bird"s eggs I have seen for many years. As I stood with an egg between thumb and forefinger, my memories flocked down like white birds and surrounded me. I remained still, fed them with my thoughts and let them perch upon my person--a second St. Francis of a.s.sisi. Then I shoo"ed them all away and prepared for the more palpitating enjoyment of to-day.
After breakfast we sat in the b.u.t.tercup field--my love and I--and "plucked up kisses by the roots that grew upon our lips." The sun was streaming down and the field thickly peopled with b.u.t.tercups. From where we sat we could see the whole of the valley below and Farmer Whaley--a speck in the distance--working a machine in a field. We watched him idly. The gamekeeper"s gun went off in one of the covers. It was jolly to put our heads together right down deep in the b.u.t.tercups and luxuriously follow the pelting activities of the tiny insects crawling here and there in the forest of gra.s.s, clambering over a broken blade athwart another like a wrecked tree or busily enquiring into some low scrub at the roots. A chicken came our way and he seemed an enormous bird from the gra.s.s-blade"s point of view. How nice to be a chicken in a field of b.u.t.tercups and see them as big as Sunflowers! or to be a Gulliver in the Beech Woods! to be so small as to be able to climb a b.u.t.tercup, tumble into the corolla and be dusted yellow or to be so big as to be able to pull up a Beech-tree with finger and thumb! If only a man were a magician, could play fast and loose with rigid Nature? what a mult.i.tude of rich experiences he could discover for himself!
I looked long and steadily this morning at the magnificent torso of a high forest Beech and tried to project myself into its lithe tiger-like form, to feel its electric sap vitalising all my frame out to the tip of every tingling leaf, to possess its splendid erectness in my own bones.
I could have flung my arms around its fascinating body but the austerity of the great creature forbad it. Then a Hawk fired my ambition!--to be a Hawk, or a Falcon, to have a Falcon"s soul, a Falcon"s heart--that splendid muscle in the cage of the thorax--and the Falcon"s pride and sagacious eye![3]
When the sun grew too hot we went into the wood where waves of Bluebells dashed up around the foot of the Oak in front of us.... I never knew before, the delight of offering oneself up--an oblation of one"s whole being; I even longed for some self-sacrifice, to have to give up something for her sake. It intoxicated me to think I was making another happy....
After a lunch of scrambled eggs and rhubarb and cream went up into the Beech Wood again and sat on a rug at the foot of a tree. The sun filtered in thro" the greenery casting a "dim, religious light."
"It"s like a cathedral," I chattered away, "stained gla.s.s windows, pillars, aisles--all complete."
"It would be nice to be married in a Cathedral like this," she said.
"At C---- Hall Cathedral, by the Rev. Canon _Beech_...."
"Sir Henry Wood was the organist."
"Yes," she said, "and the Rev. Blackbird the precentor."
We laughed over our silliness!
Shrew-mice pattered over the dead leaves and one came boldly into view under a bramble bush--she had never seen one before. Overhead, a ribald fellow of a Blackbird whistled a jaunty tune. E---- laughed. "I am sure that Blackbird is laughing at us," she said. "It makes me feel quite hot."
This evening we sat on the slope of a big field where by lowering our eyes we could see the sun setting behind the gra.s.s blades--a very pretty sight which I do not remember, ever to have noted before. A large blue _Carabus_ beetle was stumbling about, Culvers cooed in the woods near by. It was delightful to be up 600 feet on a gra.s.sy field under the shadow of a large wood at sunset with my darling.
_May_ 31.
Sitting at tea in the farm house to-day E---- cried suddenly, pointing to a sandy cat in the garden: