The Journal of a Disappointed Man Part 17

Pottering about all day on the Pier and Front, listening to other people's talk, catching snippets of conversation--not edifying. If there were seven wise men in the town, I would not save it. d.a.m.n the place!

_May_ 31.

... I espied her first in the distance and turned my head away quickly and looked out to sea. A moment after, I began to turn my head round again slowly with the cautiousness and air of suspicion of a Tortoise poking its head out from underneath his sh.e.l.l. I was terrified to discover that in the meantime she had come and sat down on the seat immediately behind me with her back to mine. We sat like this back to back for some time and I enjoyed the novel experience and the tension. A few years ago, the bare sight of her gave me palpitation of the heart, and, on the first occasion that I had the courage to stop to speak, I felt livid and the skin on my face twitched uncontrollably.

Presently I got up and walked past--in the knowledge that she must now be conscious of my presence after a disappearance of three years. Later we met face to face and I broke the ice. She's a pretty girl.... So too is her sister.

Few people, except my barber, know how amorous I am. He has to shave my sinuous lips.

_June_ 3.

Spent many dreadful hours cogitating whether to accept their invitation to dinner.... I wanted to go for several reasons. I wanted to see her in a home-setting for the first time, and I wanted to spend the evening with three pretty girls. I also had the idea of displaying myself to the scrutinising gaze of the family as the hero of the old romance: and of showing Her how much I had progressed since last we met and what a treasure she had lost.

On the other hand, I was afraid that the invitation was only a casual one, I feared a snuffy reception, a frosty smile and a rigid hand. Could I go up and partake of meat at their board, among brothers and sisters taking me for an ogre of a jilt, and she herself perhaps opposite me making me blush perpetually to recall our one-time pa.s.sionate kisses, our love letters and our execrable verses to each other! There seemed dreadful possibilities in such an adventure. Yet I badly wanted to experience the piquant situation.

At 7 p.m., half an hour before I was due, decided on strong measures. I entered a pub and took a stiff whisky and soda, and then set off with a stout heart to take the icy family by storm--and if need be live down my evil reputation by my amiability and urbanity!

I went--and of course everything pa.s.sed off in the most normal manner.

She is a very pretty girl--like velvet. Before dinner, we walked in the garden--and talked only of flowers.

_June_ 4.

On the Hill, this morning, felt the thrill of the news of my own Death: I mean I imagined I heard the words,--

"You've heard the news about B----?"

Second Voice: "No, what?"

"He's dead."

Silence.

Won't all this seem piffle if I don't die after all! As an artist in life I _ought_ to die; it is the only artistic ending --and I ought to die now or the Third Act will fizzle out in a long doctor's bill.

_June_ 5.

_A New Pile in the Pier_

Watched some men put a new pile in the pier. There was all the usual paraphernalia of chains, pulleys, cranes, and ropes, with a ma.s.sive wooden pile swinging over the water at the end of a long wire hawser.

Everything was in the ma.s.sive style--even the men--very powerful men, slow, ruminative, silent men.

Nothing very relevant could be gathered from casual remarks. The conversation was without exception monosyllabic: "Let go," or "Stand fast." But by close attention to certain obscure movements of the man on the ladder near the water's edge, it gradually came thro' to my consciousness that all these powerful, silent men were up against some bitter difficulty. I cannot say what it was. The burly monsters were silent about the matter.... In fact they appeared almost indifferent--and tired, oh! so very tired of the whole business. The att.i.tude of the man nearest me was that for all he cared the pile could go on swinging in mid-air to the crack of Doom.

They continued slow, laborious efforts to overcome the secret difficulty. But these gradually slackened and finally ceased. One ma.s.sive man after another abandoned his post in order to lean over the rails and gaze like a mystic into the depths of the sea. No one spoke.

No one saw anything not even in the depths of the sea. One spat, and with round, sad eyes contemplated the trajectory of his brown bolus (he had been chewing) in its descent into the water.

The foreman, an original thinker, lit a cigarette, which relieved the tension. Then, slowly and with majesty, he turned on his heel, and walked away. With the sudden eclipse of the foreman's interest, the incident closed. I should have been scarcely surprised to find him behind the Harbour-master's Office playing "Shove-ha'penny" or skittles with the pile still swinging in mid-air.... After all it was only a b.l.o.o.d.y pile.

_June_ 11.

_Depression_

Suffering from depression.... The melancholy fit fell very suddenly. All the colour went out of my life, the world was dirty gray. On the way back to my hotel caught sight of H----, jumping into a cab, after a visit to S---- Sands. But the sight of him aroused no desire in me to shout or wave. I merely wondered how on earth he could have spent a happy day at such a Sandy place.

On arriving at ----, sank deeper into my mora.s.s. It suffocated me to find the old familiar landmarks coming into view ... the holiday-makers along the streets how I hated them--the Peg Top Hill how desolate--all as before--how dull. The very fact that they were all there as before in the morning nauseated me. The sea-coast here is magnificent, the town is pretty--I know that, of course. But all looked dreary and cheerless--just the sort of feeling one gets on entering an empty house with no fire on a winter's day and nowhere to sit down.... I felt as lonely and desolate as a man suddenly fallen from the clouds into an unknown town on the Antarctic Continent built of ice and inhabited by Penguins. Who are these people? I asked myself irritably. There perhaps on the other side of the street was my own brother. But I was not even faintly interested and told the cabman to drive on. The spray from the sea fogged my spectacles and made me weary.

_June_ 14.

_The Restlessness o,' the Sea_

The restlessness of the sea acts as a soporific on jangled nerves. You gaze at its incessant activities, unwillingly at first because they distract your attention from your own cherished worries and griefs,--but later you watch with complete self-abandon--it wrenches you out of yourself--and eventually with a kind of stupid hypnotic stare.

_Dr. Spurgeon_

The day has been overcast, but to-night a soft breeze sprang up and swept the sky clear as softly as a mop. The sun coming out shone upon a white sail far out in the channel, scarcely another vessel hove in sight. The white sail glittered like a piece of silver paper whenever the mainsail swung round as the vessel tacked. Its solitariness and whiteness in a desert of marine blue attracted the attention and held it till at last I could look at nothing else. The sight of it--so clean and white and fair--set me yearning for all the rarest and most exquisite things my imagination could conjure up--a beautiful girl, with fair and sunburnt skin, brown eyes, dark eyebrows, and small pretty feet; a dewdrop in a violet's face; an orange-tip b.u.t.terfly swinging on an umbel of a flower.

The sail went on twinkling and began to exert an almost moral influence over me. It drew out all the good in me. I longed to follow it on white wings--an angel I suppose--to quit this husk of a body "as raiment put away," and pursue Truth and Beauty across the sea to the horizon, and beyond the horizon up the sky itself to its last tenuous confines, no doubt with a still small voice summoning me and the rest of the elect to an Agapemone, with Dr. Spurgeon at the door distributing tracts.

I can scoff like this now. But at the time my exaltation was very real.

My soul strained in the leash. I was full of a desire for unattainable spiritual beauty. I wanted something. But I don't know what I want.

_June_ 16.

_My Sense of Touch_

My sense of touch has always been morbidly acute. I like to feel a cigarette locked in the extreme corner of my mouth. When I remove it from my mouth then I hold it probably up in the fork between two fingers. If I am waiting for a meal I finger the cool knives and forks.

If I am in the country I plunge my hands with outspread fingers into a ma.s.s of large-topped gra.s.ses, then close my fingers, crush and decapitate the lot.

_June_ 27.

_Camping Out at S---- Sands_

A brilliant summer day. Up early, breakfasted, and, clad in sweater and trousers, walked up the sands to the boathouse with bare feet.

Everything was wonderful! I strode along over the level sands infatuated with the sheer ability to put one leg in front of the other and walk. I loved to feel the muscles of my thighs working, and to swing my arms in rhythm with the stride. The stiff breeze had blown the sky clear, and was rushing through my long hair, and bellowing into each ear. I strode as Alexander must have done!

Then I stretched my whole length out along a flat plank on the sands, which was as dry as a bone and warm. There was not a soul on the sands.

Everything was bare, clean, windswept. My plank had been washed clean and white. The sands--3 miles of it--were hard and purified, level. My eye raced along in every direction--there was nothing--not a bird or a man--to stop it. In that immense windswept s.p.a.ce nothing was present save me and the wind and the sea--a flattering moment for the egotist.

At the foot of the cliffs on the return journey met an old man gathering sticks. As he ambled along dropping sticks into a long sack he called out casually, "Do you believe in Jesus Christ?" in the tone of voice in which one would say, "I think we shall have some rain before night."

"Aye, aye," came the answer without hesitation from a boy lying on his back in the sands a few yards distant, "and that He died to save me."

Life is full of surprises like this. The only other sounds I have heard to-day were the Herring Gull's cackle. Your own gardener will one day look over his rake and give you the correct chemical formula for carbonic acid gas. I met a postman once reading Sh.e.l.ley as he walked his rounds.