To a pedantic prosy little old maid who was working in my room this morning, I exclaimed,--
"I"d sooner make a good dissection than go to a Lord Mayor"s Banquet.
Turtle Soup ain"t in it."
She was uninspired, and said, "Oom," and went on pinning insects. Then more brightly, and with great punctilio in the p.r.o.nunciation of her words, having cleared her throat and drawn herself up with great deliberation to deliver herself of a remark, she volunteered,--
"I whish I had nevah taken up such a brittle grooop as the Stones (Stoneflies). One dare not loook at a Stone."
Poor dear little old maid. This was my turn to say "Oom."
"Pretty dismal work," I added ambiguously. Then with malice aforethought I whistled a Harry Lauder tune, asked her if she had ever heard Willie Solar sing, "You made me love you," and then absent-mindedly and in succession inquired,--
"What"s become of all the gold?"
"What"s become of Waring?"
"What shall I sing when all is sung?"
To which several categorical interrogations she ventured no reply, but presently in the usual voice,--
"I have placed an Agrionine in this drawer for security and, now I want it, cannot find it."
"Life is like that," I said. "I never can find my Agrionines!"
_August_ 1.
All Europe is mobilising.
_August_ 2.
Will England join in?
_August_ 12.
We all await the result of a battle between two millions of men. The tension makes me feel physically sick.
_August_ 21--_August_ 24.
In bed with a fever. I never visit the flat now, but her mother kindly came over to see me.
_September_ 25.
[Living now in rooms alone.]
I have--since my return from Cornwall--placed all my journals in a specially made cabinet. R---- came to dinner and after a gla.s.s or so of Beaune and a cigarette, I open my "coffin"[2] (it is a long box with a bra.s.s handle at each end), and with some show of deliberation select a volume to read to him, drawing it from its division with lavish punctiliousness, and inquiring with an oily voice, "A little of 1912?"
as if we were trying wines. R---- grins at the little farce and so encourages me.
_September_ 26.
Doctor"s Consulting Rooms--my life has been spent in them! Medical specialists--Harley Street men--I have seen four and all to no purpose.
M---- wrote me the other day,--
"Come along and see me on Tuesday; some day I dare say we shall find something we can patch."
He regards me with the most obvious commiseration and always when I come away after a visit he shakes me warmly by the hand and says, "Good-bye, old man, and good luck." More luck than the pharmacopia.
My life has always been a continuous struggle with ill-health and ambition, and I have mastered neither. I try to rea.s.sure myself that this accursed ill-health will not affect my career. I keep flogging my will in the hope of winning thro" in the end. Yet at the back of my mind there is the great improbability that I shall ever live long enough to realise myself. For a long time past my hope has simply been to last long enough to convince others of what I might have done--had I lived.
That will be something. But even to do that I will not allow that I have overmuch time. I have never at any time lived with any sense of security. I have never felt permanently settled in this life--nothing more than a shadowy _loc.u.m tenens_, a wraith, a festoon of mist likely to disappear any moment.
At times, when I am vividly conscious of the insecurity of my tenure here, my desires enter on a mad race to obtain fulfilment before it is too late ... and as fulfilment recedes ambition obsesses me the more. I am daily occupied in calculating with my ill-health: trying to circ.u.mvent it, to carry on in spite of all. I conquer each day. Every week is a victory. I am always surprised that my health or will has not collapsed, that, by Jove! I am still working and still living.
One day it looks like appendicitis, another stoppage, another threatened blindness, or I develop a cough and am menaced with consumption. So I go on in a hurricane of bad dreams. I struggle like Laoc.o.o.n with the serpents--the serpents of nervous depression that press around the heart tighter than I care to admit. I must use every kind of blandishment to convince myself that my life and my work are worth while. Frequently I must smother and kill (and it calls for prompt action) the shrill voice that cries from the tiniest corner of my heart, "Are you quite sure you are such an important fellow as you imagine?" Or I fret over the condition of my brain, finding that I forget what I read, I lose in acuteness of my perceptions. My brain is a tumefaction. But I won"t give in. I go on trying to recollect what I have forgotten, I harry my brain all day to recall a word or name, I attack other folk importunately. I write things down so as to look them up in reference books--I am always looking up the things I remember I have forgotten....
There is another struggle, too, that often engrosses all my energies....
It is a horrible thing that with so large an ambition, so great a love of life, I should nevertheless court disaster like this. Truly Sir Thomas Browne you say, "Every man is his own Atropos."
In short, I lead an unfathomably miserable existence in this dark, gray street, in these drab, dirty rooms--miserable in its emptiness of home, love, human society. Now that I never visit the flat, I visit about two houses in London--the Doctor"s and R----"s Hotel. I walk along the streets and stare in the windows of private houses, hungry for a little society. It creates in me a gnawing, rancorous discontent to be seeing people everywhere in London--millions of them--and then to realise my own ridiculously circ.u.mscribed knowledge of them. I am pa.s.sionately eager to have acquaintances, to possess at least a few friends. If I die to-morrow, how many persons shall I have talked to? or how many men and women shall I have known? A few maiden aunts and one or two old fossils.
I am burning to meet real live men, I have ma.s.ses of mental stuff I am anxious to unload. But I am ignorant of people as of countries and live in celestial isolation.
This, I fear, reads like a wail of self-commiseration. But I am trying to give myself the pleasure of describing myself at this period truthfully, to make a bid at least for some posthumous sympathy.
Therefore it shall be told that I who am capable of pa.s.sionate love am s.e.xually starved, and endure the pangs of a fiendish solitude in rooms, with an ugly landlady"s face when ... I despair of ever finding a woman to _love_. I never meet women of my own cla.s.s, and am unprepossessing in appearance and yet I fancy that once my reserve is melted I am not without attractions. "He grows on you," a girl said of me once. But I am hypercritical and hyperfastidious. I want too much.... I search daily in the streets with a starved and hungry look. What a horrible and powerful and hateful thing this love instinct is! I hate it, hate it, hate it. It will not let me rest. I wish I were a eunuch.
"There"s a beautiful young thing," R---- and I say to one another sardonically, hoping thereby to conceal the canker within.
I could gnash my teeth and weep in anger--baulked, frustrated as I am at almost every turn of life--in my profession, in my literary efforts, and in my love of man and woman kind. I would utter a whole commination service in my present state of mind.
_October_ 7.
To me woman is _the_ wonderful fact of existence. If there be any next world and it be as I hope it is, a jolly gossiping place, with people standing around the mantelpiece and discussing their earthly experiences, I shall thump my fist on the table as my friends turn to me on entering and exclaim in a loud voice, "WOMAN."
_October_ 11.
Since I grew up I have wept three times. The first time they were tears of exasperation. Dad and I were sitting down side by side after a wordy combat in which he had remained adamant and I was forced both by conscience and argument to give in, to relinquish my dissections, and go off to some inquest on a drowning fatality. The second time was when Mother died, and the third was _to-day._ But I am calm now. To-day they were tears of remorse....
On occasion bald confession in this Journal is sweet for the soul and strengthens it. It gives me a kind of false backbone to communicate my secrets: for I am determined that some day some one shall know. If G.o.d really intervenes in our affairs, here is an opportunity. Let Him save me. I challenge Him to save me from perishing in this ditch.... It is not often I am cornered into praying but I did this morning, for I feel defeated this day, and almost inarticulate in my misery.
Nietzsche in a newspaper I read to-day: "For myself I have felt exceptionally blest having h.e.l.l"s phantoms inside me to thrust at in the dark, internal enemies to dominate till I felt myself an ecstatic victor, wrenching at last good triumphant joys thro" the bars of my own sickness and weakness--joys with which your notions of happiness, poor sleek smug creatures, cannot compare! You must carry a chaos inside you to give birth to a dancing star."
But Nietzsche is no consolation to a man who has once been weak enough to be brought to his knees. There I am and there I think I have prayed a little somehow to-day. But it"s all in desperation, not in faith.
Internal chaos I have, but no dancing star. Dancing stars are the consolation of genius.
_October_ 12.
Am better to-day. My better self is convinced that it is silly and small-minded to think so much about my own puny destiny--especially at times like these when--G.o.d love us all--there is a column of casualties each day. The great thing to be thankful for is that I am _alive_ and alive _now_, that I was alive _yesterday_, and even may be to-morrow.
Surely that is thrilling enough. What, then, have I to complain of? I"m a lucky dog to be alive at all. My plight is bad, but there are others in a worse one. I"m going to be brave and fight on the side of Nietzsche. Who knows but that one day the dancing star may yet be born!
_October_ 13.
Spent the evening in my lodgings struggling with my will. Too flabby to work, disinclined to read, a dreadful vague unrest possessing me. I couldn"t sit still in my chair, so walked around the table continuously like a squirrel in a cage. I wanted to be going out somewhere, talking to some one, to be among human beings.