The Journal of a Disappointed Man Part 33

What a boon is Sunday! I can get out of bed just when the spirit moves me, dress and bath leisurely, even with punctilio. How nice to dawdle in the bath with a cigarette, to hear the holiday sound of Church bells!

Then comes that supreme moment when, shaven, clean, warm and hungry for breakfast and coffee, I stand a moment before the looking-gla.s.s and comb out my towzled hair with a parting as straight as a line in Euclid. That gives the finishing touch of self-satisfaction, and I go down to breakfast ready for the day's pleasure. I hate this weekday strain of having to be always each day at a set time in a certain place.

_March_ 3.

I often sit in my room at the B.M. and look out at the traffic with a gla.s.sy, mesmerised face--a faineant. How different from that extremely busy youth who came to London in 1912. Say--could that lad be I? How many hours do I waste day-dreaming. This morning I dreamed and dreamed and could not stop dreaming--I had not the will to shake myself down to my task.... My memories simply trooped the colour.

It surprised me to find how many of them had gone out of my present consciousness and with what poignancy of feeling I recognised them again! How selfishly for the most part we all live in our present selves or in the selves that are to be.

Then I raced thro' all sorts of future possibilities--oh! when and how is it all going to end? How do you expect me to settle down to scientific research with all this internal unrest! The scientific man above all should possess the "quiet mind in all changes of fortune"--Sir Henry Wotton's _How happy is he born and taught_.

The truth is I am a hybrid: a mixture of two very distinct temperaments and they are often at war. To keep two different natures and two different mental habits simultaneously at work is next to impossible.

Consequently plenty of waste and fever and--as I might have discovered earlier for myself--success almost out of the question. If only I were pure-bred science or pure-bred art!

_March_ 4.

Life is a dream and we are all somnambuloes. We know that for a fact at all times when we are most intensely alive--at crises of unprecedented change, in sorrow or catastrophe, or in any unusual incident brought swiftly to a close like a vision!

I sit here writing this--a mirage! Who am I? No one can say. What am I?

"A soap-bubble hanging from a reed."

Every man is an inexhaustible treasury of human personality. He can go on burrowing in it for an eternity if he have the desire--and a taste for introspection. I like to keep myself well within the field of the microscope, and, with as much detachment as I can muster, to watch myself live, to report my observations of what I say, feel, think. In default of others, I am myself my own spectator and self-appreciator--critical, discerning, vigilant, fond!--my own stupid Boswell, shrewd if silly. This spectator of mine, it seems to me, must be a very moral gentleman and eminently superior. His incessant attentions, while I go on my way misconducting myself, goad me at times into a surly, ill-tempered outbreak, like Dr. Johnson. I hate being shadowed and reported like this. Yet on the whole--like old Samuel again--I am rather pleased to be Boswelled. It flatters me to know that at least one person takes an unremitting interest in all my ways.

And, mind you, there are people who have seen most things but have never seen themselves walking across the stage of life. If someone shows them glimpses of themselves they will not recognise the likeness. How do you walk? Do you know your own idiosyncrasies of gait, manner of speech, etc.?

I never cease to interest myself in the Gothic architecture of my own fantastic soul.[1]

_March_ 6.

_The Punch and Judy Show_

Spent a most delightful half-an-hour to-day reading an account in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ (one of my favourite books--it's so "gey disconnekkit") the history of the Punch and Judy Show. It's a delightful bit of antiquarian lore and delighted me the more because it had never occurred to me before that it had an ancient history. I am thoroughly proud of this recent acquisition of knowledge and as if it were a valuable freehold I have been showing it off saying, "Rejoice with me--see what I have got here." I fired it off first in detail at ----; and H---- and D---- will probably be my victims to-morrow. After all, it is a charming little cameo of history: compact, with plenty of scope for conjecture, theory, research, and just that combination of all three which would suit my taste and capacity if I had time for a Monograph.

_March_ 22

I waste much time gaping and wondering. During a walk or in a book or in the middle of an embrace, suddenly I awake to a stark amazement at everything. The bare fact of existence paralyses me--holds my mind in mort-main. To be alive is so incredible that all I do is to lie still and merely breathe--like an infant on its back in a cot. It is impossible to be interested in anything in particular while overhead the sun shines or underneath my feet grows a single blade of gra.s.s. "The things immediate to be done," says Th.o.r.eau, "I could give them all up to hear this locust sing." All my energies become immobilised, even my self-expression frustrated. I could not exactly master and describe how I feel during such moments.

_March_ 23.

_Johnson_ v. _Yves Delage_

I expect we have all of us at one time or another heard ourselves addressing to annoying, objectionable acquaintances some such stinging castigation as Hazlitt's letter to Gifford, or Burke's letter to a n.o.ble Lord, or Johnson's letter to Lord Chesterfield, or Rousseau's letter to the Archbishop of Paris. If only I could indulge myself! At this moment I could glut my rancours on six different persons at least!

What a raging discontent I have suffered to-day! What cynicism, what bitterness of spirit, what envy, hate, exasperation, childish petulance, what pusillanimous feelings and desires, what crude efforts to flout simple, ingenuous folk with my own thwarted, repressed self-a.s.sertiveness!

A solemn fellow told me he had heard from Johnson who said he had already had much success from collecting in moss.[2] With an icy politeness I asked who Johnson was. Who the h.e.l.l is Johnson? As a _quid pro quo_ I began to talk of Yves Delage, which left him as much in the dark as he left me. Our G.o.ds differ, we have a different hierarchy.

"Well, how's your soul?" said R----, bursting in with a sardonic smile.

I gave him a despairing look and said:

"Oh! a pink one with blue spots," and he left me to my fate.

Had tea with the ---- and was amazed to find on the music tray in the drawing-room of these inoffensive artists a copy of ----'s Memoir on _Synapta_. Within his hearing, I said, "Did you and Mrs. ---- find this exciting reading?" And I held it up with a sneer. I felt I had laid bare a nerve and forthwith proceeded to make it twinge. ----, of course, was glib with an explanation, yet the question remains incalculable--just how pleased that young man is with himself.

After tea went out into the Studio and watched these two enthusiasts paint. I must have glowered at them. I--the energetic, ambitious, pushing youth--of necessity sitting down doing nought, as unconsidered as a child playing on the floor. I recollected my early days in my attic laboratory and sighed. Where is my energy now?

Mrs. ---- plays Chopin divinely well. How I envied this man--to have a wife play you Chopin!

_March_ 24.

It is fortunate I am ill in one way for I need not make my mind up about this War. I am not interested in it--this filth and lunacy. I have not yet made up my mind about myself. I am so steeped in myself--in my moods, vapours, idiosyncrasies, so self-sodden, that I am unable to stand clear of the data, to marshal and cla.s.sify the mult.i.tude of facts and thence draw the deduction what manner of man I am. I should like to know--if only as a matter of curiosity. So what in G.o.d's name am I? A fool, of course, to start with--but the rest of the diagnosis?

One feature is my incredible levity about serious matters. Nothing matters, provided the tongue is not furred. I have coquetted with death for so long now, and endured such prodigious ill-health that my main idea when in a fair state of repair is to seize the pa.s.sing moment and squeeze it dry. The thing that counts is to be drunken; as Baudelaire says, "One must be for ever drunken; that is the sole question of importance. If you would not feel the horrible burden of time that bruises your shoulders and bends you to the earth, you must be drunken without cease."

Another feature is my insatiable curiosity. My purpose is to move about in this ramshackle, old curiosity shop of a world sampling existence. I would try everything, meddle lightly with everything. Religions and philosophies I devour with a relish, Pragmatism and Bishop Berkeley and Bergson have been my favourite bagatelles in turn. My consciousness is a ragbag of things: all quips, quirks, and quillets, all excellent pa.s.ses of pate, all the "obsolete curiosities of an antiquated cabinet" take my eye for a moment ere I pa.s.s on. In Sir Thomas Browne's _Pseudodoxia_, I am interested to find "why Jews do not stink, what is the superst.i.tion of sneezing after saluting, wherefore negroes are black," and so forth.

There is a poetic appropriateness that in A.D. 1915 I should be occupied mainly in the study of Lice. I like the insolence of it.

They tell me that if the Germans won it would put back the clock of civilisation for a century. But what is a meagre 100 years? Consider the date of the first Egyptian dynasty! We are now only in A.D. 1915--surely we could afford to chuck away a century or two? Why not evacuate the whole globe and give the ball to the Boches to play with--just as an experiment to see what they can make of it. After all there is no desperate hurry. Have we a train to catch? Before I could be serious enough to fight, I should want G.o.d first to dictate to me his programme of the future of mankind.

_March_ 25.

Often in the middle of a quite vivid ten seconds of life, I find I have switched myself off from myself to make room for the person of a disinterested and usually vulgar spectator. Even in the thrill of a devotional kiss I have overheard myself saying, "Hot stuff, this witch."

Or in a room full of agreeable and pleasant people, while I am being as agreeable as I know how, comes the whisper in a cynical tone, "These d.a.m.ned women." I am apparently a triple personality:

(1) The respectable youth.

(2) The foul-mouthed commentator and critic.

(3) The real but unknown I.

Curious that these three should live together amiably in the same tenement!

_In a Crowd_

A crowd makes egotists of us all. Most men find it repugnant to them to submerge themselves in a sea of their fellows. A silent, listening crowd is potentially full of commotion. Some poor devils suffocating and unable any longer to bear the strain will shout, "Bravo," or "Hear, hear," at every opportunity. At the feeblest joke we all laugh loudly, welcoming this means of self-survival. Hence the success of the Salvation Army. To be preached at and prayed for in the ma.s.s for long on end is what human nature can't endure in silence and a good deal of self can be smuggled by an experienced Salvationist into "Alleluia" or "The Lord be praised."

_Naming c.o.c.kroaches_

I had to determine the names of some exotic c.o.c.kroaches to-day and finding it very difficult and dull raised a weak smile in two enthusiasts who know them as "Blattids" by rechristening them with great frivolity, "Fat 'eds."

"These b.l.o.o.d.y insects," I said to an Australian entomologist of rare quality.

"A good round oath," he answered quietly.

"If it was a square one it wouldn't roll properly," I said. It is nice to find an entomologist with whom I can swear and talk bawdy.

_March_ 26.