The Journal of a Disappointed Man Part 37

_June_ 25.

If sometimes you saw me in my room by myself, you would say I was a ridiculous c.o.xcomb. For I walk about, look out of the window then at the mirror--turning my head sideways perhaps so as to see it in profile. Or I gaze down into my eyes--my eyes always impress me--and wonder what effect I produce on others. This, I believe, is not so much vanity as curiosity. I know I am not prepossessing in appearance--my nose is crooked and my skin is blotched. Yet my physique--because it is mine--interests me. I like to see myself walking and talking. I should like to hold myself in my hand in front of me like a Punchinello and carefully examine myself at my leisure.

_June_ 28.

Saw my brother A---- off at Waterloo en route for Armageddon. Darling fellow. He shook hands with P---- and H----, and P---- wished him "Goodbye, and good luck." Then he held my hand a moment, said "Goodbye, old man," and for a second gave me a queer little nervous look. I could only say "Goodbye," but we understand each other perfectly.... It is horrible. I love him tenderly.

_June_ 29.

_Sleep_

Sleep means unconsciousness: unconsciousness is a solemn state--you get it for example from a blow on the head with a mallet. It always weightily impresses me to see someone asleep--especially someone I love as to-day, stretched out as still as a log--who perhaps a few minutes ago was alive, even animated. And there is nothing so welcome, unless it be the sunrise, as the first faint gleam of recognition in the half-opened eye when consciousness like a mighty river begins to flow in and restore our love to us again.

When I go to bed myself, I sometimes jealously guard my faculties from being filched away by sleep. I almost fear sleep: it makes me apprehensive--this wonderful and unknowable Thing which is going to happen to me for which I must lay myself out on a bed and wait, with an elaborate preparedness. Unlike Sir Thomas Browne, I am not always so content to take my leave of the sun and sleep, if need be, into the resurrection. And I sometimes lie awake and wonder when the mysterious Visitor will come to me and call me away from this thrilling world, and how He does it, to which end I try to remain conscious of the gradual process and to understand it: an impossibility of course involving a contradiction in terms. So I shall never know, nor will anybody else.

_July_ 2.

I've had such a successful evening--you've no idea! The pen simply flew along, automatically easy, page after page in perfect sequence. My style trilled and bickered and rolled and ululated in an infinite variety; you will find in it all the subtlest modulations, inflections and suavities.

My afflatus came down from Heaven in a bar of light like the Shekinah--straight from G.o.d, very G.o.d of very G.o.d. I worked in a golden halo of light and electric sparks came off my pen nib as I scratched the paper.

_July_ 3.

_The Clever Young Man_

Argued with R---- this morning. He is a type specimen of the clever young man. We both are. Our flowers of speech are often forced hot-house plants, paradoxes and cynicisms fly as thick as driving rain and Shaw is our great exemplar. I could write out an exhaustive a.n.a.lysis of the clever young man, and being one myself can speak from "inspired sources"

as the newspapers say.

A common habit is to underline and memorise short, sharp, witty remarks he sees in books and then on future occasions dish them up for his own self-glorification. If the author be famous he begins, "As ---- says, etc." If unknown the quotation is quietly purloined. He is always very self-conscious and at the same time very self-possessed and very conceited. You tell me with tonic candour that I am insufferably conceited. In return, I smile, making a sardonic avowal of my good opinion of myself, my theory being that as conceit is, as a rule, implicit and, as a rule, blus.h.i.+ngly denied, you will mistake my impudent confession for bluff and conclude there is really something far more substantial and honest beneath my apparent conceit. If, on the other hand, I am conceited, why I have admitted it--I agree with you--but tho'

there is no virtue in the confession being quite detached and unashamed--still you haven't caught me by the tail. It is very difficult to circ.u.mvent a clever young man. He is as agile as a monkey.

His princ.i.p.al concern of course is to arouse and maintain a reputation for profundity and wit. This is done by the simple mechanical formula of ant.i.thesis: if you like winkles he proves that c.o.c.kles are inveterately better; if you admire Ruskin he tears him to ribbons. If you want to learn to swim--as it is safer, he shows it is more dangerous to know how to swim and so on. I know his whole box of tricks. I myself am now playing the clever young man by writing out this a.n.a.lysis just as if I were not one myself.

You doubt my cleverness? Well, some years ago in R----'s presence I called ----"the Rev. Fastidious Brisk,"--the nickname be it recalled which Henley gave to Stevenson (without the addition of "Rev."). At the time I had no intention of appropriating the witticism as I quite imagined R---- was acquainted with it. His unexpected explosion of mirth, however, made me uncomfortably uncertain of this, yet for the life of me I couldn't muster the honesty to a.s.sure him that my feather was a borrowed one. A few weeks later he referred to it again as "certainly one of my better ones"--but still I remained dumb and the time for explanations went for once and all. Now see what a pretty pickle I am in: the name "Brisk" or "F.B." is in constant use by us for this particular person--he goes by no other name, meanwhile I sit and wonder how long it will be before R---- finds me out. There are all sorts of ways in which he might find out: he might read about it for himself, someone might tell him or--worst of all--one day when we are dining out somewhere he will announce to the whole company my brilliant appellation as a little after-dinner diversion: I shall at once observe that the person opposite me _knows_ and is about to air his knowledge; then I shall look sternly at him and try to hold him: he will hesitate and I shall land him with a left and right: "I suppose you've read Henley's verses on Stevenson?" I remark easily and in a moment or so later the conversation has moved on.

_August_ 1.

Am getting married at ---- Register Office on September 15th. It is impossible to set down here all the labyrinthine ambages of my will and feelings in regard to this event. Such incredible vacillations, doubts, fears. I have been living at a great rate below surface recently. "If you enjoy only twelve months' happiness," the Doctor said to me, "it is worth while." But he makes a recommendation.... At his suggestion E---- went to see him and from his own mouth learnt all the truth about the state of my health, to prevent possible mutual recriminations in the future.[4] To marry an introspective dyspeptic--what a prospect for her!... I exercise my microscopic a.n.a.lysis on her now as well as on myself.... This power in me is growing daily more automatic and more repugnant. It is a nasty morbid unhealthy growth that I want to hide if I cannot destroy. It amounts to being able at will to switch myself in and out of all my most cherished emotions; it is like the case in Sir Michael Foster's _Physiology_ of a man who, by pressing a tumour in his neck could stop or at any rate control the action of his heart.

_August_ 2.

House pride in newly-wed folk, for example, H. and D. to-day at Golder's Green or the Teignmouth folk, is very trying to the bachelor visitor.

They will carry a chair across the room as tenderly as tho' it were a child and until its safe transit is a.s.sured, all conversation goes by the board. Or the wife suddenly makes a remark to the husband _sotto voce_, both thereupon start up simultaneously (leaving the fate of Warsaw undecided) while you, silenced by this unexpected manuvre, wilt away in your chair, the pregnant phrase still-born on your lips.

Presently they re-enter the room with the kitten that was heard in the scullery or with a big stick used to flourish at a little Tomt.i.t on the rose tree. _She_ apologises and both settle down again, recompose their countenances into a listening aspect and with a devastating politeness, pick up the poor, little, frayed-out thread of the conversation where it left off with: "Europe? you were saying...." I mobilise my scattered units of ideas but it is all a little chilly for the lady of the house if she listens with her face and speaks with her lips--her heart is far from me: she fixes a gla.s.sy eye on the tip of my cigarette, waiting to see if the ash will fall on her carpet.

_August_ 6.

The most intimate and extensive journal can only give each day a relatively small sifting of the almost infinite number of things that flow thro' the consciousness. However vigilant and artful a diarist may be, plenty of things escape him and in any event re-collection is not re-creation....

To keep a journal is to have a secret liaison of a very sentimental kind. A _journal intime_ is a super-confidante to whom everything is told and confessed. For an engaged or married man to have a secret super-confidante who knows things which are concealed from his lady seems to me to be deliberate infidelity. I am as it were engaged to two women and one of them is being deceived. The word "Deceit" comes up against me in this double life I lead, and insists I shall name a plain thing bluntly. There is something very like sheer moral obliquity in these entries behind her back.... Is this journal habit slowly corrupting my character? Can an engaged or married man conscientiously continue to write his _journal intime_?

This question of giving up my faithful friend after September I must consider.

Of course most men have something to conceal from someone. Most married men are furtive creatures, and married women too. But I have a Gregers Werle-like pa.s.sion for life to be lived on a foundation of truth in every intercourse. I would have my wife know all about me and if I cannot be loved for what I surely am, I do not want to be loved for what I am not. If I continue to write therefore she shall read what I have written....

My Journal keeps open house to every kind of happening in my soul.

Provided it is a veritable autochthon--I don't care how much of a tatterdemalion or how ugly or repulsive--I take him in and--I fear sponge him down with excuses to make him more creditable in other's eyes. You may say why trouble whether you do or whether you don't tell us all the beastly little subterranean atrocities that go on in your mind. Any eminently "right-minded" _Times_ or _Spectator_ reader will ask: "Who in Faith's name is interested in your introspective muck-rakings--in fact, who the Devil are you?" To myself, a person of vast importance and vast interest, I reply,--as are other men if I could but understand them as well. And in the firm belief that whatever is inexorably true however unpleasant and discreditable (in fact true things can never lack a certain dignity), I would have you know Mr.

_Times_- and Mr. _Spectator-reader_ that actual crimes have many a time been enacted in the secrecy of my own heart and the only difference between me and an habitual criminal is that the habitual criminal has the courage and the nerve and I have not. What, then, may these crimes be? Nothing much--only murders, theft, rape, etc. None of them, thank G.o.d; fructify in action--or at all events only the lesser ones. My outward and visible life if I examine it is merely a series of commonplace, colourless and thoroughly average events. But if I a.n.a.lyse myself, my inner life, I find I am both incredibly worse and incredibly better than I appear. I am Christ and the Devil at the same time--or as my sister once called me--a child, a wise man, and the Devil all in one.

Just as no one knows my crimes so no one knows of my good actions. A generous impulse seizes me round the heart and I am suddenly moved to give a poor devil a 5 note. But no one knows this because by the time I come to the point I find myself handing him a sixpenny-bit and am quite powerless to intervene. Similarly my murders end merely in a little phlegm.

_August_ 7.

_Two Adventures_

On a 'bus the other day a woman with a baby sat opposite, the baby bawled, and the woman at once began to unlace herself, exposing a large, red udder, which she swung into the baby's face. The infant, however, continued to cry and the woman said,--

"Come on, there's a good boy--if you don't, I shall give it to the gentleman opposite."

Do I look ill-nourished?

"'Arma virumque cano,'" a beggar said to me this morning in the High Street, "or as the boy said, 'Arms and the man with a dog,' mistaking the verb for the noun. Oh! yes, sir, I remember my Latin. Of course, I feel it's rather invidious my coming to you like this, but everything is absolutely 'non est' with me," and so on.

"My dear sir," I answered expansively, "I am as poor as you are. You at least have seen better days you say--but I never have."

He changed in a minute his cringeing manner and rejoined:

"No, I shouldn't think you had," eyeing me critically and slinking off.

Am I _so_ shabby?

_August_ 8.

By Jove! I hope I live! ... Why does an old crock like myself go on living? It causes me genuine amazement. I feel almost ashamed of myself because I am not yet dead seeing that so many of my full-blooded contemporaries have perished in this War. I am so grateful for being allowed to live so long that nothing that happens to me except death could upset me much. I should be happy in a coal mine.

_August_12.

Suffering from indigestion. The symptoms include:

Excessive pandiculation,

Excessive oscitation,

Excessive eructation,

Dyspna,

Sphygmic flutters,

Abnormal porrigo,