The Journal of a Disappointed Man Part 48

Sometimes, as I lean over a five-barred gate or gaze stupidly into the fire, I garner a bitter-sweet contentment in making ideal reconstructions of my life, selecting my parents, the date and place of my birth, my gifts, my education, my mentors and what portions out of the infinity of knowledge shall gain a place within my mind--that sacred glebe-land to be zealously preserved and enthusiastically cultivated.

Whereas, my mind is now a wilderness in which all kinds of useless growths have found an ineradicable foothold. I am exasperated to find I have by heart the long addresses of a lot of dismal business correspondents and yet can't remember the last chapters of Ecclesiastes: what a waste of mind-stuff there! It irks me to be acquainted even to nausea with the spot in which I live, I whose feet have never traversed even so much as this little island much less carried me in triumph to Timbuctoo, Honolulu, Rio, Rome.

_December_ 21.

This continuous preoccupation with self sickens me--as I look back over these entries. It is inconceivable that I should be here steadily writing up my ego day by day in the middle of this disastrous war....

Yesterday I had a move on. To-day life wearies me. I am sick of myself and life. This beastly world with its beastly war and hate makes me restless, dissatisfied, and full of a longing to be quit of it. I am as full of unrest as an autumn Swallow. "My soul," I said to them at breakfast with a sardonic grin, "is like a greyhound in the slips. I shall have to wear heavy boots to prevent myself from soaring. I have such an uplift on me that I could carry a horse, a dog, a cat, if you tied them on to my homing spirit and so transformed my Ascension into an adventure out of Baron Munchausen." With a gasconnade of contempt, I should like to turn on my heel and march straight out of this wretched world at once.

_December_ 22.

_Gibbon's Autobiography_

This book makes me of all people (and especially just now) groan inwardly. "I am at a loss," he says, referring to the _Decline and Fall_, "how to describe the success of the work without betraying the vanity of the writer.... My book was on every table and almost on every toilette." It makes me bite my lips. Rousseau and his criticism of "I sighed as a lover; I obeyed as a son," and Gibbon on his dignity in reply make one of the most ludicrous incidents in literary history. "...

that extraordinary man whom I admire and pity, should have been less precipitate in condemning the moral character and conduct of a stranger!" Oh my giddy Aunt! Isn't this _rich_? Still, I am glad you did not marry her: we could ill spare Madam de Stael, Madam Necker's daughter, that wonderful, vivacious and warmhearted woman.

"After the morning has been occupied with the labours of the library, I wish to unbend rather than exercise my mind; and in the interval between tea and supper, I am far from disdaining the innocent amus.e.m.e.nt of a game of cards." How Jane Austen would have laughed at him! The pa.s.sage reminds me of the Rev. Mr. Collins saying:

"Had I been able I should have been only too pleased to give you a song, for I regard music as a harmless diversion and perfectly compatible with the profession of a clergyman."

"When I contemplate the common lot of mortality," Gibbon writes, "I must acknowledge I have drawn a high prize in the lottery of life," and he goes on to count up all his blessings with the most offensive delight--his wealth, the good fortune of his birth, his ripe years, a cheerful temper, a moderate sensibility, health, sound and peaceful slumbers from infancy, his valuable friendship with Lord Sheffield, his rank, fame, etc., etc., _ad nauseam_. He rakes over his whole life for things to be grateful for. He intones his happiness in a long recitative of thanksgiving that his lot was not that of a savage, of a slave, or a peasant; he washes his hands with imaginary soap on reflecting on the bounty of Nature which cast his birth in a free and civilised country, in an age of science and philosophy, in a family of honourable rank and decently endowed with the gifts of fortune--sleek, complacent, oleaginous and salacious old gentleman, how I would love to have bombed you out of your self-satisfaction!

_Masefield's "Gallipoli"_

It amused me to discover the evident relish with which the author of _In the Daffodil Fields_ emphasises the blood and the flowers in the attack on Achi Baba. It's all blood and beautiful flowers mixed up together to Masefield's great excitement.

"A swear word in a city slum A simple swear word is to some-- To Masefield something more."

MAX BEERBOHM.

Still, to call Gallipoli "b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l" is, after all, only a pedantically exact description. You understand, tho', a very remarkable book--a work of genius.

_December_ 23.

To be cheerful this Xmas would require a _coup de theatre_--some sort of psychological sleight of hand.

I get downstairs at 10 and spend the day reading and writing, without a soul to converse with. Everything comes to me second-hand--thro' the newspapers, the world of life thro' the halfpenny _Daily News_, and the world of books thro' the _Times Literary Supplement_. For the rest I listen to the kettle singing and make symphonies out of it, or I look into the fire to see the pictures there....

_December_ 24.

Everyone I suppose engaged in this irony of Xmas. What a solemn lunatic the world is.

Walked awhile in a beautiful lane close by, washed hard and clean and deeply channelled by the recent rain. On the hill-top, I could look right across the valley to the uplands, where on the sky line a few Firs stood in stately sequestration from common English Oaks, like a group of amba.s.sadors in full dress. In the distance a hen clucked, I saw a few Peewits wheeling and watched the smoke rising from our cottage perpendicularly into the motionless air. There was a clement quiet and a clement warmth, and in my heart a burst of real happiness that made me rich even beside less unfortunate beings and beyond what I had ever expected to be again.

_December_ 26.

"In thus describing and ill.u.s.trating my intellectual torpor, I use terms that apply more or less to every part of the years during which I was under the Circean spells of opium. But for misery--"

(Why do I waste my energy with this d.a.m.ned Journal? I stop. I hate it. I am going out for a walk in the fog.)

_December_ 31.

_Reminiscences_

For the past few days I have been living in a quiet hermitage of retrospect. My memories have gone back to the times--remote, inaccessible, prehistoric--before ever this Journal was begun, when I myself was but a jelly without form and void--that is, before I had developed any characteristic qualities and above all the dominant one, a pa.s.sion for Natural History.

One day a school friend, being covetous of certain stamps in my collection, induced me to "swop" them for his collection of birds' eggs which he showed me nestling in the bran at the bottom of a box. He was a cunning boy and thought he had the better of the bargain. He little realised--nor did I--the priceless gift he bestowed when his little fat dirty hands decorated, I remember, with innumerable warts, picked out the eggs and gave them to me. In fact, a smile momentarily crossed his face, he turned his head aside, he spat in happy contemplation of the deal.

I continued eagerly to add to the little collection of Birds' eggs, but for a long time it never occurred to me to go out into the country myself and collect them,--I just _swopped,_ until one day our errand boy, who stuttered, had bandy legs, and walked on the outside of his feet with the gait of an Anthropoid, said to me, "I will sh-how you how to find Birds' n-nests if you like to come out to the w-woods." So one Sat.u.r.day, when the backyard was cleaned down and the coal boxes filled, he and I started off together to a wood some way down the river bank, where he--my good and beneficent angel--presently showed me a Thrush's nest in the fork of a young Oak tree. Never-to-be-forgotten moment! The sight of those blue speckled eggs lying so unexpectedly, as I climbed up the tree, on the other side of an untidy tangle of dried moss and gra.s.s, in a neat little earthenware cup, caused probably the first tremor of real emotion at a beautiful object. The emotion did not last long! In a moment I had stolen the eggs and soon after smashed them--in trying to blow them, schoolboy fashion.

Then, I rapidly became an ardent field naturalist. My delight in Birds and Birds' eggs spread in a benignant infection to every branch of Natural History. I collected Beetles, b.u.t.terflies, plants, Birds' wings, Birds' claws, etc. Dr. Gordon Staples in the _Boy's Own Paper_, taught me how to make a skin, and I got hold of a Mole and then a Squirrel (the latter falling to my prowess with a catapult), stuffed them and set them up in cases which I glazed myself. I even painted in suitable backgrounds, in the one case a mole-hill, looking, I fear, more like a mountain, and in the other, a Fir tree standing at an impossible angle of 45. Then I read a book on trapping, and tried to catch Hares. Then I read Sir John Lubbock's _Ants, Bees and Wasps_, and constructed an observation Ants' nest (though the Ants escaped).

In looking back to these days, I am chiefly struck by my extraordinary ignorance of the common objects of the countryside, for although we lived in the far west country, the house, without a garden, was in the middle of the town, and all my seniors were as ignorant as I. Nature Study in the schools did not then exist, I had no benevolent paterfamilias to take me by the hand and point out the common British Birds; for my father's only interest was in politics. I can remember coming home once all agog with a wonderful Bird I had seen--like a tiny Magpie, I said. No one could tell me that it was, of course, only a little Pied Wagtail.

The absence of sympathy or of congenial companionship, however, had absolutely no effect in damping my ardour. As I grew older my egg-collecting companions fell away, some took up the law, or tailoring, or clerking, some entered the Church, while I became yearly more engrossed. In my childhood my enthusiasm lay like a watch-spring, coiled up and hidden inside me, until that Thrush's nest and eggs seized hold of it by the end and pulled it out by degrees in a long silver ribbon. I kept live Bats in our upstairs little-used drawing-room, and Newts and Frogs in pans in the backyard. My mother tolerated these things because I had sufficiently impressed her with the importance to science of the observations which I was making and about to publish. Those on Bats indeed were thought fit to be included in a standard work --Barrett-Hamilton's _Mammals of Great Britain and Ireland_. The published articles served to bring me into correspondence with other naturalists, and I shall never forget my excitement on receiving for the first time a letter of appreciation. It was from the author of several natural history books, to

"W.N.P. BARBELLION, ESQ., Naturalist, Downstable,"

and ill.u.s.trated with a delightful sketch of Ring Plovers feeding on the saltings. This letter was carefully pasted into my diary, where it still remains.

After all, it is perhaps unfair to say that I had no kindred spirit with me in my investigations. Martha, the servant girl who had been with us for 30 years, loved animals of all sorts and--what was strange in a country girl--she had no fear of handling even such things as Newts and Frogs. My Batrachia often used to escape from their pans in the yard into Martha's kitchen, and, not a bit scandalised, she would sometimes catch one marching across the rug or squeezing underneath a cupboard.

"Lor'!" would be her comment as she picked the vagrant up and took it back to its aquarium, "can't 'em travel?" Martha had an eye for character in animals. In the long dynasty of cats we possessed one at length who by a.s.sociation of opposite ideas we called Marmaduke because he ought to have been called Jan Stewer. "A chuff old feller, 'idden 'ee?" Martha used to ask me with pride and love in her eyes. "He purrs in broad Devon," I used to answer. Marmaduke need only wave the tip of his tail to indicate to her his imperative desire to promenade. Martha knew if no one else did that every spring "Pore 'Duke," underneath his fur, used to come out in spots. "'Tiz jus' like a cheel 'e gets a bit spotty as the warm weather c.u.ms along." Starlings on the washhouse roof, regularly fed with sc.r.a.ps, were ever her wonder and delight. "Don' 'em let it down, I zay?" In later years, when I was occupied in the top attic, making dissections of various animals that I collected, she would sometimes leave her scrubbing and cleaning in the room below to thrust her head up the attic stairs and enquire, "'Ow be 'ee gettin' on then?"

Her unfeigned interest in my anatomical researches gave me real pleasure, and I took delight in arousing her wonder by pointing out and explaining the brain of a Pigeon or the nervous system of a Dog-fish, or a Frog's heart taken out and still beating in the dissecting dish. She, in reply, would add reflections upon her own experiences in preparing meat for dinner--anecdotes about the "maw" of an old Fowl, or the great "pipe" of a Goose. Then, suddenly scurrying downstairs, she would say, "I must be off or I shall be all be'ind like the cow's tail." Now the dignified interest of the average educated man would have chilled me.

By the way, years later, when he was a miner in S. Wales, that historic errand-boy displayed his consciousness of the important role he once played by sending me on a postcard congratulations on my success in the B.M. appointment. It touched me to think he had not forgotten after years of separation.

[1] So it proved. See September 26 _et seq._

[2] In "La Recherche de l'Absolu" (Balzac).

[3] See September 3 (next entry), "_A Jolt_," and September 24 (_infra_).

[4] The handwriting is painfully laboured, very large across a page and so crooked as to be almost undecipherable in places.

[5] This is from a letter written by the dying Keats in Naples to his friend Brown.

[6] Contrast with it Wordsworth rotting at Rydal Mount or Swinburne at Putney.

1917

_January_ 1.

The New Year came in like a thief in the night--noiselessly; no bells, no syrens, no songs by order of the Government. Nothing could have been more appropriate than a burglarious entry like this--seeing what the year has come to filch from us all in the next 12 months.

_January_ 20.