The Journal of a Disappointed Man Part 34

_A Test of Happiness_

The true test of happiness is whether you know what day of the week it is. A miserable man is aware of this even in his sleep. To be as cheerful and rosy-cheeked on Monday as on Sat.u.r.day, and at breakfast as at dinner is to--well, make an ideal husband.

... It is a strange metempsychosis, this transformation of an enthusiast--tense, excitable, and active, into a sceptic, nerveless, ironical, and idle. That's what ill-health can do for a man. To be among enthusiasts--zoologists, geologists, entomologists--as I frequently am, makes me feel a very old man, regarding them as children, and provokes painful retrospection and sugary sentimentality over my past flame now burnt out.

I do wonder where I shall end up; what shall I be twenty years hence? It alarms me to find I am capable of such remarkable changes in character.

I am fluid and can be poured into any mould. I have moments when I see in myself the most staggering possibilities. I could become a wife beater, and a drug-taker (especially the last). My curiosity is often such a ridiculous weakness that I have found myself playing Peeping Tom and even spying into private doc.u.ments. In a railway carriage I will twist my neck and risk any rudeness to see the t.i.tle of the book my neighbour is reading or how the letter she is reading begins.

_April_ 10.

"Why," asks Samuel Butler, "should not chicken be born and clergymen be laid and hatched? Or why, at any rate, should not the clergyman be born full grown and in Holy Orders not to say already beneficed? The present arrangement is not convenient ... it is not only not perfect but so much the reverse that we could hardly find words to express our sense of its awkwardness if we could look upon it with new eyes...."

As soon as we are born, if we could but get up, bathe, dress, shave, breakfast once for all, if we could "cut" these monotonous cycles of routine. If once the sun rose it would stay up, or once we were alive we were immortal!--how much forrarder we should all get--always at the heart of things, working without let or hindrance in a straight line for the millennium! Now we waltz along instead. Even planets die off and new ones come in their place. How infinitely wearisome it seems. When an old man dies what a waste, and when a baby is born what a redundancy of labour in front!

_Two People I hate in particular_

The man walking along the pavement in front of me giving me no room to pa.s.s under the satisfactory impression that he is the only being on the pavement or in the street, city, country, world, universe: and it all belongs to him even the moon and sun and stars.

The woman on the 'bus the other night--pouring out an interminable flow of poisonous chatter into the ear of her man--poor, exhausted devil who kept answering dreamily "Oom" and"Yes" and "Oom"--how I hated her for his sake!

_April_ 11.

_Beethoven's Fifth Symphony_

If music moves me, it always generates images--a procession of apparently disconnected images in my mind. In the Fifth Symphony, for example, as soon as the first four notes are sounded and repeated, this magic population springs spontaneously into being. A nude, terror-stricken figure in headlong flight with hands pressed to the ears and arms bent at the elbows--a staring, bulgy-eyed mad-woman such as one sees in Raemakers' cartoons of the Belgian atrocities. A man in the first onset of mental agony on hearing sentence of death pa.s.sed upon him. A wounded bird, fluttering and flopping in the gra.s.s. It is the struggle of a man with a steam-hammer--Fate. As tho' thro' the walls of a closed room--some mysterious room, a fearful spot--I crouch and listen and am conscious that inside some brutal punishment is being meted out --there are short intervals, then unrelenting pursuit, then hammerlike blows--melodramatic thuds, terrible silences (I crouch and wonder what has happened), and the pursuit begins again. I see clasped hands and appealing eyes and feel very helpless and mystified outside. An epileptic vision or an opium dream--_Dostoievsky_ or De Quincey set to music.

In the Second Movement the man is broken, an unrecognisable vomit. I see a pale youth sitting with arms hanging limply between the knees, hands folded, and with sad, impenetrable eyes that have gazed on unspeakable horrors. I see the brave, tearful smile, the changed life after personal catastrophe, the Cross held before closing eyes, sudden absences of mind, reveries, poignant retrospects, the rustle of a dead leaf of thought at the bottom of the heart, the tortuous pursuit of past incidents down into the silence of yesterday, the droning of comfortable words, the painful collection of the wreckage of a life with intent to "carry on" for a while in duty bound, for the widow consolation in the child; a greyhound's cold wet nose nozzling into a listless hand, and outside a Thrush singing after the storm, etc., etc.

In the Third Movement comes the crash by which I know something final and dreadful has happened. Then the resurrection with commotion in Heaven: tempests and human faces, scurryings to and fro, brazen portcullises clanging to, never to open more, the distant roll of drums and the sound of horses' hoofs. From behind the inmost veil of Heaven I faintly catch the huzzas of a great mult.i.tude. Then comes a great healing wind, then a few ghost-like tappings on the window pane till gradually the Avenue of Arches into Heaven come into view with a solemn cortege advancing slowly along.

Above the great groundswell of woe, Hope is restored and the Unknown Hero enters with all pomp into his Kingdom, etc., etc.

I am not surprised to learn that Beethoven was once on the verge of suicide.

_April_ 15.

There is an absurd fellow ... who insists on taking my pirouettes seriously. I say irresponsibly, "All men are liars," and he replies with jejuneness and exact.i.tude of a p.r.o.nouncing dictionary, "A liar is one who makes a false statement with intent to deceive." What can I do with him? "Did I ever meet a lady," he asked, "who wasn't afraid of mice?" "I don't know," I told him, "I never experiment with ladies in that way."

He hates me.

_May_ 11.

This mysterious world makes me chilly. It is chilly to be alive among ghosts in a nightmare of calamity. This t.i.tanic war reduces me to the size and importance of a debilitated housefly. So what is a poor egotist to do? To be a common soldier is to become a p.a.w.n in the game between ambitious dynasts and their ambitious marshals. You lose all individuality, you become a "bayonet" or a "machine gun," or "cannon fodder," or "fighting material."

_May_ 22.

Generosity may be only weakness, philanthropy (beautiful word), self-advertis.e.m.e.nt, and praise of others sheer egotism. One can almost hear a eulogist winding himself up to strike his eulogy that comes out sententious, pompous, and full of self.

_May_ 23.

The following is a description of Lermontov by Maurice Baring:

"He had except for a few intimate friends an impossible temperament; he was proud, over-bearing, exasperated and exasperating, filled with a savage _amour-propre_ and he took a childish delight in annoying; he cultivated 'le plaisir aristocratique de deplaire.' ... He could not bear not to make himself felt and if he felt he was unsuccessful in this by fair means he resorted to unpleasant ones. Yet he was warm-hearted, thirsting for love and kindness and capable of giving himself up to love if he chose.... At the bottom of all this lay no doubt a deep-seated disgust with himself and with the world in general, and a complete indifference to life resulting from large aspirations which could not find an outlet and recoiled upon himself."

This is an accurate description of Me.

_May_ 26.

The time will come--it's a great way off--when a joke about s.e.x will be not so much objectionable as unintelligible. Thanks to Christian teaching, a nude body is now an obscenity, of the congress of the s.e.xes it is indecent to speak and our birth is a corruption. Hence come a legion of evils: reticence, therefore ignorance and therefore venereal disease; prurience especially in adolescence, poisonous literature, and dirty jokes. The mind is contaminated from early youth; even the healthiest-minded girl will blush at the mention of _the wonder of creation_. Yet to the perfectly enfranchised mind it should be as impossible to joke about s.e.x as about mind or digestion or physiology.

The perfectly enfranchised poet--and Walt Whitman in "The Song of Myself" came near being it--should be as ready to sing of the incredible raptures of the s.e.xual act between "twin souls" as of the clouds or sunshine. Every man or woman who has loved has a heart full of beautiful things to say but no man dare--for fear of the police, for fear of the coa.r.s.e jests of others and even of a breakdown in his own highmindedness. I wonder just how much wonderful lyric poetry has thus been lost to the world!

_May_ 27.

_The Pool: A Retrospect_

From above, the pool looked like any little innocent sheet of water. But down in the hollow itself it grew sinister. The villagers used to say and to believe that it had no bottom and certainly a very great depth in it could be _felt_ if not accurately gauged as one stood at the water's edge. A long time ago, it was a great limestone quarry, but to-day the large mounds of rubble on one side of it are covered with gra.s.s and planted with mazzard trees, grown to quite a large girth. On the other side one is confronted by a tall sheet of black, carboniferous rock, rising sheer out of the inky water--a bare sombre surface on which no mosses even--"tender creatures of pity," Ruskin calls them--have taken compa.s.sion by softening the jagged edges of the strata or nestling in the scars. It is an excellent example of "Contortion" as Geologists say, for the beds are bent into a quite regular geometrical pattern --syncline and anticline in waves--by deep-seated plutonic force that makes the mind quake in the effort to imagine it.

On the top of this rock and overhanging the water--a gaunt, haggard-looking Fir tree impends, as it seems in a perilous balance, while down below, the pool, sleek and shiny, quietly waits with a catlike patience.

In summer time, successive rows of Foxgloves one behind the other in barbaric splendour are ranged around the gra.s.sy rubble slopes like spectators in an amphitheatre awaiting the spectacle. Fire-bellied Efts slip here and there lazily thro' the water. Occasionally a Gra.s.s-snake would swim across the pool and once I caught one and on opening his stomach found a large fire-bellied Eft inside. The sun beats fiercely into this deep hollow and makes the water tepid. On the surface grows a glairy Alga, which was once all green but now festers in yellow patches and causes a horrible stench. Everything is absolutely still, air and water are stagnant. A large _Dytiscus_ beetle rises to the surface to breathe and every now and then large bubbles of marsh gas come sailing majestically up from the depth and explode quietly into the fetid air.

The _horrificness_ of this place impressed me even when I was intent only on fishing there for bugs and efts. Now, seen in retrospect, it haunts me.

_May_ 28.

It is only by accident that certain of our bodily functions are distasteful. Many birds eat the faeces of their young. The vomits of some Owls are formed into shapely pellets, often of beautiful appearance, when composed of the glittering multi-coloured elytra of Beetles, etc. The common Eland is known to micturate on the tuft of hair on the crown of its head, and it does this habitually, when lying down, by bending its head around and down--apparently because of the aroma, perhaps of s.e.xual importance during mating time, as it is a habit of the male alone.

At lunch time, had an unpleasant intermittency period in my heart's action and this rather eclipsed my anxiety over a probable Zeppelin Raid. Went home to my rooms by 'bus, and before setting off to catch my train for West Wycombe to stay for the week-end at a Farm with E---- swallowed two teaspoonfuls of neat brandy, filled my flask, and took a taxi to Paddington. At 3.50 started to walk to C---- H---- Farm from W. Wycombe Station, where E---- has been lodging for some weeks taking a rest cure after a serious nervous breakdown thro' overwork. As soon as I stepped out of the train, I sniffed the fresh air and soon made off down the road, happy to have left London and the winter and the war far behind. The first man of whom I inquired the way happened to have been working at the Farm only a few weeks ago, so I relied implicitly on his directions, and as it was but a mile and a half decided that my wobbly heart could stand the strain. I set out with a good deal of pleasurable antic.i.p.ation. I was genuinely looking forward to seeing E----, altho' in the past few weeks our relations had become a little strained, at least on my part, mainly because of her little sc.r.a.ppy notes to me scribbled in pencil, undated, and dull! Yet I could do with a volume of "Sonnets from the Portuguese." These letters chilled me. In reply, I wrote with cold steel short, lifeless formal notes, for I felt genuinely aggrieved that she should care so little how she wrote to me or how she expressed her love. I became ironical with myself over the prospect of marrying a girl who appeared so little to appreciate my education and mental habits. [What a popinjay!--1917.] My petty spirit grew disenchanted, out of love. I was false to her in a hundred inconsiderable little ways and even deliberately planned the breaking off of the engagement some months hence when she should be restored to normal health.

But once in the country and, as I thought, nearing my love at every step and at every bend in the road, even antic.i.p.ating her arms around me with real pleasure (for she promised to meet me half way), I on a sudden grew eager for her again and was a.s.sured of a happy week-end with her. Then the road grew puzzling and I became confused, uncertain of the way. I began to murmur she should have given me instructions. Every now and then I had to stop and rest as my heart was beating so furiously.

Espying a farm on the left I made sure I had arrived at my destination and walked across a field to it and entered the yard where I heard some one milking a cow in a shed. I shouted over the five-barred gate into empty s.p.a.ce, "Is this C---- H---- Farm?" A labourer came out of the shed and redirected me. It was now ten to five. I was tired and out of sorts, and carried a troublesome little handbag. I swore and cursed and found fault with E---- and the Universe.

I trudged on, asking people, as I went, the way, finally emerging from the cover of a beautiful wood thro' a wicket gate almost at the entrance to the Farm I sought. At the front door we embraced affectionately and we entered at once, I putting a quite good face upon my afternoon's exertions--when I consider my unbridled fury of a short time before.

E----, as brown as a berry, conducted me to my bedroom and I nearly forgot to take this obvious opportunity of kissing her again.

"How are you?" I asked.

"All right," she said, fencing.

"But really?"

"All right."

(A little nettled): "My dear, that isn't going to satisfy me. You will have to tell me exactly how you are."

After tea, I recovered myself and we went for a walk together. The beauty of the country warmed me up, and in the wood we kissed--I for my part happy and quite content with the present state of our relations, _i.e._, affectionate but not perfervid.

_May_ 29.