The Journal of a Disappointed Man Part 27

Yesterday's ramble has left me very sore in spirit. London was spread out before me, a vast campagne. But I felt too physically tired to explore. I could just amble along--a spectator merely--and automatically register impressions. Think of the misery of that! I want to see the Docks and Dockland, to enter East End public-houses and opium-dens, to speak to Chinamen and Lascars: I want a first-rate, first-hand knowledge of London, of London men, London women. I was tingling with antic.i.p.ation yesterday and then I grew tired and fretful and morose, crawled back like a weevil into my nut. By 6.30 I was in a Library reading the _Dublin Review_!

What a young fool I was to neglect those priceless opportunities of studying and tasting life and character in North ----, at Borough Council meetings, Boards of Guardians, and electioneering campaigns--not to mention inquests, police courts, and country fairs. Instead of appraising all these precious and genuine pieces of experience at their true value, my diary and my mind were occupied only with--Zoology, if you please. I ignored my exquisite chances, I ramped around, fuming and fretting, full of contempt for my circ.u.mscribed existence, and impatient as only a youth can be. What I shall never forgive myself is my present inability to recall that life, so that instead of being able now to push my chair back and entertain myself and others with descriptions of some of those antique and incredible happenings, my memory is rigid and formal: I remember only a few names and one or two isolated events. All that time is just as if it had never been. My recollections form only an indefinite smudge--odd Town Clerks, Town Criers (at least five of them in wonderful garb), policemen (I poached with one), ploughing match dinners (platters of roast beef and boiled potatoes and I, bespectacled student of Zoology, sitting uncomfortably among valiant trenchermen after their day's ploughing), election meetings in remote Exmoor villages (and those wonderful Inns where I had to spend the night!)--all are gone--too remote to bear recital--yet just sufficiently clear to hara.s.s the mind in my constant endeavours to raise them all again from the dead in my consciousness. I hate to think it is lost; that my youth is buried--a cemetery without even headstones. To an inquest on a drowned sailor--disclosing some thrilling story of the wild seas off the coast--with a pitiful myopia--I preferred Wiedersheim's _Comparative Anatomy of Vertebrates_. I used to carry Dr. Smith Woodward's _Paleontology_ with me to a Board of Guardians meeting, mingling _Pariasaurus_ and Holoptychians with tenders for repairs and reports from the Master. Now I take Keats or Tschekov to the Museum!

London certainly lies before me. Certainly I am alive at last. Yet now my energy is gone. It is too late. I am ill and tired. It costs me infinite discomfort to write this entry, all the skin of my right hand is permanently "pins and needles" and in the finger tips I have lost all sense of touch. The sight of my right eye is also very bad and sometimes I can scarcely read print with it, etc., etc. But why should I go on?

A trance-like condition supervenes in a semi-invalid forced to live in almost complete social isolation in a great whirling city like London.

Days of routine follow each other as swiftly as the weaver's shuttle and numb the spirit and turn palpitating life into a silent picture show.

Everywhere always in the street people--millions of them --whom I do not know, moving swiftly along. I look and look and yawn and then one day as to-day I wake up and race about beside myself--a swollen bag ready to burst with hope, love, misery, joy, desperation.

_Apologia pro vita mea_

How may I excuse myself for continuing to talk about my affairs and for continuing to write zoological memoirs during the greatest War of all time?

Well, here are some precedents:--

Goethe sat down to study the geography of China, while his fatherland agonised at Leipsig.

Hegel wrote the last lines of the _Phenomenology of Spirit_ within sound of the guns of Jena.

While England was being rent in twain by civil war, Sir Thomas Browne, ensconced in old Norwich, reflected on Cambyses and Pharaoh and on the song the Sirens sang.

Lacepede composed his _Histoire des Poissons_ during the French Revolution.

Then there were Diogenes and Archimedes.

This defence of course implicates me in an unbounded opinion of the importance of my own work. "He is quite the little poet," some one said of Keats. "It is just as if a man remarked of Buonaparte," said Keats, in a pet, "that he's quite the little general."

_A Woman and a Child_

On the way to the Albert Hall came upon the most beautiful picture of young maternity that ever I saw in my life. She was a delightfully girlish young creature--a perfect phnix of health and beauty. As she stood with her little son at the kerb waiting for a 'bus, smiling and chatting to him, a luminous radiance of happy, satisfied maternal love, maternal pride, womanliness streamed from her and enveloped me.

We got on the same 'bus. The little boy, with his long hair and dressed in velvet like little Lord Fauntleroy, said something to her--she smiled delightedly, caught him up on her knees and kissed him. Two such pretty people never touched lips before--I'm certain of it. It was impossible to believe that this virginal creature was a mother--childbirth left no trace. She must have just budded off the baby boy like a plant. Once, in her glance, she took me in her purview, and I knew she knew I was watching her. In travelling backwards from Kensington Gardens to the boy again, her gaze rested on me a moment and I, of course, rendered the homage that was due. As a matter of fact there was no direct evidence that she was the mother at all.

_The Albert Hall Hag_

While waiting outside the Albert Hall, an extraordinarily weird contrast thrust itself before me--she was the most pathetic piece of human jetsam that ever I saw drifting about in this sea of London faces. Tall, gaunt, cadaverous, the skin of her face drawn tightly over her cheekbones and over a thin, pointed, hook-shaped nose, on her feet brown sandshoes, dressed in a long draggle-tailed skirt, a broken-brimmed straw hat, beneath which some scanty hair was sc.r.a.ped back and tied behind in a knot--this wretched soul of some thirty summers (and what summers!) stood in the road beside the waiting queue and weakly pa.s.sed the bow across her violin which emitted a slight sc.r.a.ping sound. She could not play a tune and the fingers of her left hand never touched the strings--they merely held the handle.

A policeman pa.s.sed and, with an eye on the queue, muttered audibly, "Not 'arf," but no one laughed. Then she began to rummage in her skirt, holding the violin by the neck in her right hand just as she must hold her brat by the arm when at home. Simultaneously sounds issued from her mouth in a high falsetto key; they were unearthly sounds, the tiny voice of an articulating corpse underneath the coffin lid. For a moment no one realised that she was reciting. For she continued to rummage in her skirt as she squeaked, "Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O sea," etc. The words were scarcely audible tho' she stood but two yards off. But she repeated the verse and I then made out what it was. She seemed ashamed of herself and of her plight, almost without the courage to foist this mockery of violin-playing on us--one would say she was frightened by her own ugliness and her own pathos.

After conscientiously carrying out her programme but with the distracted, uncomfortable air of some one scurrying over a painful task--like a tired child gabbling its prayers before getting into bed--she at length produced from her skirt pocket a small canvas money bag which she started to hand around. This was the climax to this harrowing incident--for each time she held out the bag, she smiled, which stretched the skin still more tightly down over her malar prominence and said something--an inarticulate noise in a very high pitch. "A woman," I whispered to R----, "She claims to be a woman." If any one hesitated a moment or struggled with a purse she would wait patiently with bag outstretched and head turned away, the smile vanis.h.i.+ng at once as if the pinched face were but too glad of the opportunity of a rest from smiling. She stood there, gazing absently--two lifeless eyes at the bottom of deep socket holes in a head which was almost a bare skull. She was perfunctorily carrying out an objectionable task because she could not kill the will to live.

As she looked away and waited for you to produce the copper, she thought, "Why trouble? Why should I wait for this man's aid?" The clink of the penny recalled her to herself, and she pa.s.sed on, renewing her terrible grimacing smile.

Why didn't I do something? Why? Because I was bent on hearing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, if you please.... And she may have been a well-to-do vagrant--well got up for the occasion--a clever simulator?...

_October_ 28.

_Rigor Bordis_

Rigor bordis!--I write like this as if it were a light matter. But to-night I was _in extremis_.... First I read the paper; then I finished the book I was reading--"_Thus Spake Zarathustra_." Not knowing quite what next to do, I took my boots off and poured out another cup of coffee. But these manuvres were only the feeble attempts of a cowardly wretch to evade the main issue which was:--

How to occupy myself and keep myself sane during the hour and a half before bedtime.

Before now I have tried going off to bed. But that does not work--I don't sleep. Moreover, I have been in the grip of a horrible mental unrest. To sit still in my chair, much less to lie in bed doing nothing seemed ghastly. I experienced all the cravings of a dissolute neurotic for a stimulus, but what stimulus I wanted I did not know. Had I known I should have gone and got it. The dipsomaniac was a man to be envied.

Some mechanical means were necessary for sustaining life till bedtime. I sat down and played a game of Patience--no one knows how I loathe playing Patience and how much I despise the people who play it. Tiring of that, sat back in my chair, yawned, and thought of a word I wanted to look up in the Dictionary. This quest, forgotten until then, came like a beam of bright light into a dark room. So looked the word up leisurely, took out my watch, noted the time, and then stood up with elbows on the mantelpiece and stared at myself in the gla.s.s.... I was at bay at last.

There was simply nothing I could do. I would have given worlds to have some one to talk to. Pride kept me from ringing for the landlady. I must stand motionless, back to the wall, and wait for the hour of my release.

I had but one idea, viz., that I was surely beaten in this game of life.

I was very miserable indeed. But being so miserable that I couldn't feel more so, I began to recover after a while. I began to visualise my lamentable situation, and rose above it as I did so. I staged it before my mind's eye and observed myself as hero of the plot. I saw myself sitting in a dirty armchair in a dirty house in a dirty London street, with the landlady's dirty daughter below-stairs singing, "Little Grey Home in the West," my head obscured in a cloud of depression, and in my mind the thought that if life be a test of endurance I must hang on grimly to the arms of the chair and sit tight till bedtime.

This att.i.tude proved a useful means of self-defence. When I had dramatised my misery, I enjoyed it, and acute mental pain turned into merely aesthetic malaise.

_November_ 4.

A lurid day. Suffering from the most horrible physical languor. Wrote the Doctor saying I was rapidly sliding down a steep place into the sea (like the swine I am). Could I see him?

Endured an hour's torture of indecision to-night asking myself whether I should go over to ask her to be my wife or should I go to the Fabian Society and hear Bernard Shaw. Kept putting off the decision even till after dinner. If I went to the flat, I must shave; to shave required hot water--the landlady had already cleared the table and was rapidly retreating. Something must be done and at once. I called the old thing back impulsively and ordered shaving water, consoling myself with the reflection that it was still unnecessary to decide; the hot water could be at hand in case the worst happened. If I decided on matrimony I could shave forthwith. Should I? (After dark I always shave in the sitting-room because of the better gaslight.)

Drank some coffee and next found myself slowly, mournfully putting on hat and coat. You can't shave in hat and coat so I concluded I had decided on Shaw. Slowly undid the front door latch and went off.

Shaw bored me. He is mid-Victorian. Sat beside a bulgy-eyed youth reading the _Freethinker_.

_November_ 9.

In the evening asked her to be my wife. She refused. Once perhaps ...

but now....

I don't think I have any moral right to propose to any woman seeing the state of my health and I did not actually intend or wish to.... It was just to get it off my mind--a plain statement.... If I don't really and truly love her it was a perfectly heartless comedy. But I have good reason to believe I do. With me, moments of headstrong pa.s.sion alternate with moods of perfectly immobile self-introspection. It is a relief to have spoken.

_November_ 10.

Very miserable. Asked R---- three times to come and have dinner with me.

Each time he refused. My nerves are completely jangled. _Tu l'as voulu, George Dandin_--that's the rub.

_November_ 11.

She observed me carefully--I'm looking a perfect wreck _--tu l'as voulu, George Dandin_--but it's mainly ill-health and not on her account.

I said,--

"Some things are too funny to laugh at."

"Is that why you are so solemn?"

"No," I answered, "I'm not solemn, I am laughing--some things are too solemn to be serious about."

She saw me off at the door and smiled quietly--an amused faraway smile of feline satisfaction....