For days past have been living in a state of mental ebullition. All kinds of pictures of Love, Life, and Death have been pa.s.sing through my mind. Now I am too indolent and nerveless to set them down. Physically I am such a wreck that to carry out the least intention, such as putting on my boots, I have to flog my will like an Arab with a slave "in a sand of Ayaman." Three months ago when I got up before breakfast to dissect rabbits, dogfish, frogs, newts, etc., this would have seemed impossible.
_February_ 6.
Still visit Dr. ----"s surgery each week. I have two dull spots at the bottom of each lung. What a fine expressive word is _gloom_. Let me write it: GLOOM....
One evening coming home in the train from L---- County Sessions I noticed a horrible, wheezy sound whenever I breathed deep. I was scared out of my life, and at once thought of consumption. Went to the Doctor"s next day, and he sounded me and rea.s.sured me. I was afraid to tell him of the little wheezy sound at the apex of each lung, and I believed he overlooked it. So next day, very hara.s.sed, I went back to him again and told him. He _hadn"t_ noticed it and looked glum. Have to keep out of doors as much as possible.
The intense internal life I lead, worrying about my health, reading (eternally reading), reflecting, observing, feeling, loving and hating--with no outlet for superfluous steam, cramped and confined on every side, without any friends or influence of any sort, without even any acquaintances excepting my colleagues in journalism (whom I contemn)--all this will turn me into the most self-conscious, conceited, mawkish, gauche creature in existence.
_March_ 6.
The facts are undeniable: Life is pain. No sophistry can win me over to any other view. And yet years ago I set out so hopefully and healthfully--what are birds" eggs to me _now_? My ambition is enormous but vague. I am too distributed in my abilities ever to achieve distinction.
_March_ 22.
Had a letter from the Keeper of Zoology at the British Museum, advising me of three vacancies in his Dept., and asking me if I would like to try, etc.... So that Dr. ----"s visit to me bore some fruit.[1] Spent the morning day-dreaming.... Perhaps this is the flood tide at last! I shall work like a drayhorse to pull through if I am nominated.... I await developments in a frightfully turbulent state of mind. I have a frantic desire to control the factors which are going to affect my future so permanently. And this ferocious desire, of course, collides with a crash all day long with the fact that however much I desire there will still remain the unalterable logic of events.
_April_ 7.
... How delicious all this seemed! To be alive--thinking, seeing, enjoying, walking, eating--all quite apart from the amount of money in your purse or the prospects of a career. I revelled in the sensuous enjoyment of my animal existence.
_June_ 2.
Up to now my life has been one of great internal strife and struggle--the struggle with a great ambition and a weak will--unequal to the task of coping with it. I have planned on too big a scale, perhaps.
I have put too great a strain on my talents, I have whipped a flagging will, I have been for ever cogitating, worrying, devising means of escape. Meanwhile, the moments have gone by unheeded and unenjoyed.
_June_ 10.
Legginess is bad enough in a woman, but bandy legginess is impossible.
Solitude is good for the soul. After an hour of it, I feel as lofty and imperial as Marcus Aurelius.
The best girl in the best dress immediately looks disreputable if her stockings be downgyved.
Some old people on reaching a certain age go on living out of habit--a bad habit too.
How much I can learn of a stranger by his laugh.
Bees, Poppies, and Swallows!--and all they mean to him who really knows them! Or a White Gull on a piece of floating timber, or a troop of shiny Rooks close on the heels of a ploughman on a sunny autumn day.
_June_ 30.
My egoism appals me. Likewise the extreme intensification of the consciousness of myself. Whenever I walk down the High Street on a market day, my self-consciousness magnifies my proportions to the size of a Gulliver--so that it is grievous to reflect that in spite of that the townsfolk see me only as an insignificant bourgeois youth who reports meetings in shorthand.
_July_ 17.
We sang to-night in Church, "But when I know Thee as Thou art, I"ll praise Thee as I ought." Exactly! Till then, farewell. We are a great little people, we humans. If there be no next world, still the Spirit of Man will have lived and uttered its protest.
_July_ 22.
_Our Simian Ancestry_
How I hate the man who talks about the "brute creation," with an ugly emphasis on _brute_. Only Christians are capable of it. As for me, I am proud of my close kinship with other animals. I take a jealous pride in my Simian ancestry. I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees and that my frame has come down through geological time _via_ sea jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden?
_August_ 9.
I do not ever like going to bed. For me each day ends in a little sorrow. I hate the time when it comes to put my books away, to knock out my pipe and say "Good-night," exchanging the vivid pleasures of the day for the darkness of sleep and oblivion.
_August_ 23.
Spent the afternoon and evening till ten in the woods with Mary ----.
Had tea in the Haunted House, and after sat in the Green Arbor until dark, when I kissed her. "Achilles was not the worse warrior for his probation in petticoats."
_September_ 1.
I hope to goodness she doesn"t think I want to marry her. In the Park in the dark, kissing her. I was testing and experimenting with a new experience.
_September_ 4.
Last evening, after much mellifluous cajolery, induced her to _kiss me_.
My private opinion about this whole affair is that all the time I have been at least twenty degrees below real love heat. In any case I am const.i.tutionally and emotionally unfaithful. I said things which I did not believe just because it was dark and she was charming.
_September_ 5.
Read Thomas a Kempis in the train. It made me so angry I nearly flung it out of the window. "Meddle not with things that be too deep for thee,"
he says, "but read such things as yield compunction to the heart rather than elevation to the head." Forsooth! Can"t you see me?
_September_ 15.
A puzzling afternoon: weather perfect, the earth green and humming like a top, yet a web of dream overlaid the great hill, and at certain moments, which recurred in a kind of pulsation, accompanied by subjective feelings of vague strife and effort, I easily succeeded in letting all I saw--the field and the blackberry bush, the whole valley and the apple orchards--change into something unreal, flimsy, gauzelike, immaterial, and totally unexperienced. Suddenly when the impression was most vivid, the whole of this mysterious tapestry would vanish away and I was back where 2 and 2 make 4. Oh! Earth! how jealously you guard your secrets!
_October_ 4.
Sat at the Civil Service Commission in Burlington House for the exam, for the vacancy in the B.M. No luck at all with the papers. The whole of my nine months" a.s.siduous preparation helped me in only two questions.
In fine, I have not succeeded, I shall not obtain the appointment, and in a few weeks I shall be back in the wilds of
N---- again under the old regime, reporting plat.i.tudes from greasy guardians of the poor, and receiving condolences from people not altogether displeased at some one else"s misfortune.
_October_ 14.
Returned home from London. Felt horribly defeated in crossing the threshold. It was so obviously _returning_ after an unsuccessful flight.
_October_ 22.
Dissected a _Squilla_ for which I paid 2s. 6d. to the Plymouth Marine Laboratory.
_October_ 23.
_Ambition_