Consider the War: and the current adventures of millions of men on land, sea and air; and the incessant labours of millions of men in factory and workshop and in the field; think of the hospitals and all they hold, of everyone hoping, fearing, suffering, waiting--of the concentration of all humanity on the one subject--the War. And then think of me, poor little me, deserted and forgotten, a tiny fragment sunk so deep and helplessly between the sheer granite walls of my environment that scarce an echo reaches me of the thunder among the mountains above. I read about the War in a ha"penny paper, and see it in the pictures of the _Daily Mirror_. For the rest, I live by counting the joints on insects"
legs and even that much effort is almost beyond my strength.
That is strange enough. But my life is stranger still by comparison. And this is the marvel: that every day I spend by the waters of Babylon, weeping and neglected among enthusiasts, enthusiastically counting joints, while every evening I return to Zion to my books, to Hardy"s poems, to Maurice de Guerin"s Journals, to my own memoirs. Mine is a life of consummate isolation, and I frequently marvel at it.
The men I meet accept me as an entomologist and _ipso facto_, an enthusiast in the science. That is all they know of me, and all they want to know of me, or of any man. Surely no man"s existence was ever quite such a duplicity as mine. I smile bitterly to myself ten times a day, as I engage in all the dreary technical jargon of professional talk with them. How they would gossip over the facts of my life if they knew!
How scandalised they would be over my inner life"s activities, how resentful of enthusiasm other than entomological!
I find it very irksome to keep up this farce of concealment. I would love to declare myself. I loathe, hate and detest the secrecy of my real self: the continuous restraint enforced on me ulcerates my heart and makes harmonious social existence impossible with those who do not know me thoroughly. "On dit qu"au jugement dernier le secret des consciences sera revele a tout l"univers; je voudrais qu"il en fut ainsi de moi des aujourd"hui et que la vue de mon ame fut ouvert a tous venants." Maurice de Guerin.
_March_ 1.
It is curious for me to look at my tubes and microscope and realise that I shall never require them again for serious use. Life is a dreadful burden to me at the Museum. I am too ill for any scientific work so I write labels and put things away. I am simply marking time on the edge of a precipice awaiting the order, "Forward."
It is excoriating to be thus wasting the last few precious days of my life in such mummery merely to get bread to eat. They might at least let me die in peace, and with fitting decorum. It is so ign.o.ble to be tinkering about in a Museum among Scarabees and insects when I ought to be reflecting on life and death.
I ask myself what ought to be my most appropriate reaction in such circ.u.mstances as the present? Why, of course, to carry on as if all were normal, and the future unknown: why, so I do, to outward view, for the sake of the others. Yet that is no reason why in my own inward parts I should not at times indulge in a little relaxation. It is a relief to put off the mailed coat, to sit awhile by the green-room fire and have life as it really is, all to myself. But the necessity of living will not let me alone. I must be always mumming.
My life has been all isolation and restriction. And it now appears even my death is to be hedged around with prohibitions. Drugs for example--how beneficent a little laudanum at times in a case like mine!
and how happy I could be if I knew that in my waistcoat pocket I carried a kindly, easy means of shuffling off this coil when the time comes as come it must. It horrifies me to consider how I might break the life of E---- clean in two, and sap her courage by a lingering, dawdling dying.
But there is the Defence of the Realm Act. It is a case of a Scorpion in a ring of fire but without any sting in its tail.
_March_ 2.
I ask myself: what are my views on death, the next world, G.o.d? I look into my mind and discover I am too much of a mannikin to have any. As for death, I am a little bit of trembling jelly of antic.i.p.ation. I am prepared for anything, but I am the complete agnostic; I simply don"t know. To have views, faith, beliefs, one needs a backbone. This great bully of a universe overwhelms me. The stars make me cower. I am intimidated by the immensity surrounding my own littleness. It is futile and presumptuous for me to opine anything about the next world. But I _hope_ for something much freer and more satisfying after death, for emanc.i.p.ation of the spirit and above all for the obliteration of this puny self, this little, skulking, sharp-witted ferret.
_A Potted Novel_
(1)
He was an imaginative youth, and she a tragedy queen. So he fell in love with her because she was melancholy and her past tragic. "She is _capable_ of tragedy, too," he said, which was a high encomium.
But he was also an ambitious youth and all for dalliance in love.
"Marriage," said he sententiously, "is an economic trap." And then, a little wistfully: "If she were a bit more melancholy and a bit more beautiful she would be quite irresistible."
(2)
But he was a miserable youth, too, and in the anguish of loneliness and lovelessness a home tempted him sorely. Still, he dallied. _She_ waited.
Ill-health after all made marriage impossible.
(3)
Yet love and misery drove him towards it. So one day he closed his eyes and offered himself up with sacrificial hands.... "Too late," she said.
"Once perhaps ... but now...." His eyes opened again, and in a second Love entered his Temple once more and finally ejected the money changers.
(4)
So they married after all, and he was under the impression she had made a good match. He had ill-health perhaps, yet who could doubt his ultimate fame?
Then the War came, and he had the hardihood to open a sealed letter from his Doctor to the M.O. examining recruits.... Stars and staggers!! So it was she who was the victim in marriage! That hara.s.sing question: Did she know? What an a.s.s he had been all through, what superlative egoism and superlative conceit!
(5)
Then a baby came. He broke under the strain and daily the symptoms grew more obvious. Did she know?... The question dazed him.
Well, she _did_ know, and had married him for love, nevertheless, against every friendly counsel, the Doctor"s included.
(6)
And now the invalid"s grat.i.tude is almost cringeing, his admiration boundless and his love for always. It is the perfect _rapprochement_ between two souls, one that was honeycombed with self-love and lost in the labyrinthine ways of his own motives and the other straight, direct, almost imperious in love and altogether adorable.
_Finis_
_March_ 5.
At home ill again. Yesterday was a day of utter dreariness. All my nerves were frozen, my heart congealed. I had no love for anyone ... no emotion of any sort. It was a catalepsy of the spirit harder to bear than fever or pain.... To-day, life is once more stirring in me, I am slowly awaking to the consciousness of acute but almost welcome misery.
_March_ 6.
An affectionate letter from H---- that warmed the c.o.c.kles of my heart--poor frozen molluscs. A---- has written only once since August.
_March_ 7.
I am, I suppose, a whey-faced, lily-livered creature ... yet even an infantry subaltern has a chance....
My dear friend ---- has died and a _Memorial_ Exhibition of his pictures is being held at the Goupil Gallery. The most fascinating man I ever met. I was attracted by him almost as one is attracted by a charming woman: by little ways, by laughing eyes, by the manner of speech. And now he is dead, of a lingering and painful disease.
_March_ 8.
_Death_
Have been reading Sir Oliver Lodge"s _Raymond_. I do not deny that I am curious about the next world, or about the condition of death. I am and always have been. In my early youth, I reflected continually on death and hated it bitterly. But now that my end is near and certain, I consider it less and am content to wait and see. As, for all practical purposes, I have done with life, and my own existence is often a burden to me and is like to become a burden also to others, I wish I possessed the wherewithal to end it at my will. With two or three tabloids in my waistcoat pocket, and my secret locked in my heart, how serenely I would move about among my friends and fellows, conscious that at some specially selected moment--at midnight or high noon--just when the spirit moved me, I could quietly slip out to sea on this Great Adventure. It would be well to be able to control this: the time, the place, and the manner of one"s exit. For what disturbs me in particular is how I shall conduct myself; I am afraid lest I become afraid, it is a fear of fear. By means of my tabloids, I could arrange my death in an artistic setting, say underneath a big tree on a summer"s day, with an open Homer in my hand, or more appropriately, a magnifying gla.s.s and Miall and Denny"s _c.o.c.kroach._ It would be stage-managing my own demise and surely the last thing in self-conscious elegance!
I think it was De Ouincey who said Death to him seemed most awful in the summer. On the contrary the earth is warm then, and would welcome my old bones. It is on a cold night by the winter fire that the churchyard seems to me the least inviting: especially horrible it is the first evening after the funeral.
_March_ 10.
Have had a relapse. My hand I fear is going. Food prices are leaping up.
Woe to the unfit and the old and the poor in these coming days! We shall soon have nothing left in our pantries, and a piece of Wrigley"s chewing gum will be our only comfort.
When I come to quit this world I scarcely know which will be the greater regret: the people I have never met, or the places I have never seen. In the world of books, I rest fairly content: I have read my fair share.
To-day I read down the column of to-morrow"s preachers with the most ludicrous avidity, ticking off the Churches I have visited: St. Paul"s and the Abbey, the Ethical Church in Bayswater and Westminster Cathedral. But the Unitarians, the Christadelphians, the Theosophists, the Church of Christ Scientist, the Buddhist Society, the Brompton Oratory, the Church of Humanity, the New Life Centre; all these adventures I intended one day to make.... It is not much fun ticking off things you have done from a list if you have done very little. I get more satisfaction out of a list of books. But Iona and the Hebrides, Edinburgh, Brussels, Buenos Ayres, Spitzbergen (when the flowers are out), the Niagara Falls (by moonlight), the Grindelwald, Cairo--these names make me growl and occasionally yelp like a hurt puppy, although to outward view I am sitting in an armchair blowing smoke-rings.
_March_ 11.
_The Graph of Temperament_