The Journal of a Disappointed Man Part 51

In this Journal, my pen is a delicate needle point, tracing out a graph of temperament so as to show its daily fluctuations: grave and gay, up and down, lamentation and revelry, self-love and self-disgust. You get here all my thoughts and opinions, always irresponsible and often contradictory or mutually exclusive, all my moods and vapours, all the varying reactions to environment of this jelly which is I. I snap at any idea that comes floating down, particularly if it is gaudy or quixotic, no matter if it is wholly incompatible with what I said the day before. People unpleasantly refer me back, and to escape I have to invent some sophistry. I unconsciously imitate the mannerisms of folk I am particularly taken with. Other people never fail to tell me of my simulations. If I read a book and like it very much, by a process of peaceful penetration, the author takes possession of my whole personality just as if I were a medium giving a sitting, and for some time subsequently his ideas come spurting up like a fountain making a pretty display which I take to be my own. Other people say of me, "Oh! I expect he read it in a book."

I am something between a Monkey, a Chameleon, and a Jellyfish. To any bully with an intellect like a blunderbuss, I have always timidly held up my hands and afterwards gnashed my teeth for my cowardice. In conversation with men of alien sentiment I am self-effacing to my intense chagrin, often from mere shyness. I say, "Yes ... yes ... yes,"

to nausea, when it ought to be "No ... no ... no." I become my own renegade, an amiable dissembler, an a.s.s in short. It is a torture to have a sprightly mind blanketed by personal timidity and a feeble presence. The humiliating thing is that almost any strong character hynotises me into complacency, especially if he is a stranger; I find myself for the time being in really sincere agreement with him, and only later, discover to myself his abominable doctrines. Then I lie in bed and have imaginary conversations in which I get my own back.

But, by Jove, I wreak vengeance on my familiars, and on those brethren even weaker than myself. They get my concentrated gall, my sulphurous fulminations, and would wonder to read this confession.

_Cynicism_

For an unusually long time after I grew up, I maintained a beautiful confidence in the goodness of mankind. Rumours did reach me, but I brushed them aside as slanders. I was an ingenu, unsuspecting, credulous. I thoroughly believed that men and women and I were much better than we actually are. I have not come to the end of my disillusions even now. I still rub my eyes on occasion. I simply can't believe that we are such humbugs, hypocrites, self-deceivers. And strange to say it is the "good" people above all who most bitterly disappoint me. Give me a healthy liar, or a thief, or a vagabond, and he arouses no expectations, and so I get no heart-burning. It is the good, the honest, the true, who cheat me of my boyhood's beliefs.... I am a cynic then, but not a reckless cynic--a careworn unhappy cynic without the cynic's pride. "It is easy to be cynical," someone admonished me.

"Unfortunately it is," I said.

We are so cold, so aloof, so self-centred even the warmest friends. Men of piety love G.o.d, but their love for each other is so commonly but a poor thing. My own affections are always frosted over with the Englishman's reserve. I hesitate as if I were not sure of them. I am afraid of self-deception, I hate to find out either myself or others.

And yet I am always doing so. Mine is a restlessly a.n.a.lytical brain. I dissect everyone, even those I love, and my discoveries frequently sting me to the quick. "To the pure all things are pure," whence I should conclude I suppose that it is the beam in my own eye. But I would not tolerate being deceived concerning either my own beam or other people's motes.

_March_ 12.

_Archaeopteryx and Mudflats_

Yesterday I collected two distinct and several twinges and hereby save them up. They were more than that--they were pangs, and pangs that tw.a.n.ged.

(Why do I make fun of my suffering?)

One was when I saw the well-known figure of the _Archaeopteryx_ remains in the slab of Lithographic sandstone of Bavaria: a reproduction in an ill.u.s.trated encyclopaedia. The other was when someone mentioned mud, and I thought of the wide estuary of the T----, its stretches of mudflats and its wild-fowl. We were turning over some pages and she said:

"What's that?"

"_Archaeopteryx_," said I.

"Whatever is _Archaeopteryx_?"

"An extinct bird," I answered mournfully.

Like an old amour, my love of palaeontology and anatomy, and all the high hopes I entertained of them, came smarting to life again, so I turned over the page quickly.

But why need I explain to you, O my Journal? To others, I could not explain. I was tongue-tied.

"I used to get very muddy," I remarked lamentably, "in the old days when stalking birds on the mudflats."

And they rather jeered at such an occupation in such a place, just as those beautiful sights and sounds of zostera-covered mud-banks, twinkling runnels, swiftly running thin-legged waders, their whistles and cries began to steal over my memory like a delicate pain.

To my infinite regret, I have no description, no photograph or sketch, no token of any sort to remember them by. And their doom is certain.

Heavens! how I wasted my impressions and experiences then! Swinburne has some lines about saltings which console me a little, but I know of no other descriptions by either pen or brush.

_March_ 15.

How revolting it is to see some barren old woman love-sick over a baby, bestowing voluptuous kisses on its nose, eyes, hands, feet, utterly intoxicated and chattering incessantly in the "little language," and hopping about like an infatuated c.o.c.k grouse.

_May_ 5.

The nurse has been here now for over five weeks. One day has been pretty much the same as another. I get out of bed usually about tea-time and sit by the window and churn over past, present, and future. However, the Swallows have arrived at last, though they were very late, and there are also Cuckoos, Green Wood-p.e.c.k.e.rs, Moorhens, calling from across the park. At night, when the moon is up, I get a great deal of fun out of an extremely self-inflated Brown Owl, who hoots up through the breadth and length of the valley, and then I am sure, listens with satisfaction to his echo. Still, I have much sympathy with that Brown Owl and his hooting.

What I do (goodness knows what E---- does), is to drug my mind with print. I am just a rag-bag of Smollett, H.G. Wells, Samuel Butler, the _Daily News_, the Bible, the _Labour Leader, Joseph Vance_, etc., etc.

Except for an occasional geyser of malediction when some particularly acrid memory comes uppermost in my mind, I find myself submitting with a surprising calm and even cheerfulness. That agony of frustration which gnawed my vitals so much in 1913 has disappeared, and I, who expected to go down in the smoke and sulphur of my own fulminations, am quite as likely to fold my hands across my chest with a truly Christian resignation. Joubert said, "Patience and misfortune, courage and death, resignation and the inevitable, generally come together. Indifference to life generally arises with the impossibility of preserving it"--how cynical that sounds.

_May_ 8.

This and another volume of my Journal are temporarily lodged in a drawer in my bedroom. It appears to me that as I become more static and moribund, they become more active and aggressive. All day they make a perfect uproar in their solitary confinement--although no one hears it.

And at night they become phosph.o.r.escent, though n.o.body sees it. One of these days, with continued neglect they will blow up from spontaneous combustion like diseased gunpowder, the dismembered diarist being thus hoist upon his own petard.

_June_ 1.

We discuss post mortem affairs quite genially and without restraint. It is the contempt bred of familiarity I suppose. E---- says widows' weeds have been so vulgarised by the war widows that she won't go into deep mourning. "But you'll wear just one weed or two for me?" I plead, and then we laugh. She has promised me that should a suitable chance arise, she will marry again. Personally, I wish I could place my hand on the young fellow at once, so as to put him thro' his paces--shew him where the water main runs and where the gas meter is, and so on.

You will observe what a relish I have for my own _macabre_, and how keenly I appreciate the present situation. n.o.body can say I am not making the best of it. One might call it pulling the hangman's beard.

Yet I ought, I fancy, to be bewailing my poor wife and fatherless child.

_June_ 15.

I sit all day in my chair, moving 8 feet to my bed at night, and 8 feet from it to my chair in the morning--and wait. The a.s.signation is certain. "Life is a coquetry with Death that wearies me, Too sure of the amour."

_July_ 5.

It is odd that at this time of the breaking of nations, Destiny, with her hands so full, should spare the time to pursue a non-combatant atom like me down such a labyrinthine side-track. It is odd to find her determined to destroy me with such tremendous thoroughness--one would have thought it sufficient merely to brush the dust off my wings. Why this deliberate, slow-moving malignity? Perhaps it is a punishment for the impudence of my desires. I wanted everything so I get nothing. I gave nothing so I receive nothing. I am not offering up my life willingly--it is being taken from me piece by piece, while I watch the pilfering with lamentable eyes.

I have tendered my resignation and retire on a small gratuity.

_July_ 7.

My hand gets a little better. But it's a cat and mouse game, and so humiliating to be the mouse.

... Parental affection comes to me only in spasms, and if they hurt, they do not last long. Curiously enough, as in the case of very old people, my consciousness reverts more easily to conditions long past. I seem unable to apprehend all the significance of having a nine-months old daughter, but some Bullfinches or Swallows seen thro' the window rouse me more. No one can deny I have loved Birds to intoxication. In my youth, birds' eggs, and little nestlings and chickens sent me into such raptures I could never tell it to you adequately.... I am too tired to write more.

_July_ 23.

Reading Pascal again. If Sh.e.l.ley was "gold dusty from tumbling among the stars," Pascal was bruised and shaken. The one was delighted, and the other frightened. I like Pascal's prostration before the infinities of Time, s.p.a.ce and the Unknown. Somehow, he conveys this more vividly than the uplift afforded him by religion.

_July_ 25.

I don't believe in the twin-soul theory of marriage. There are plenty of men any one of whom she might have married and lived with happily, and simpler men than I am. Methinks there are large tracts could be sliced off my character and she would scarcely feel the want of them. To think that she of all women, with a past such as hers, should be swept into my vicious...o...b..t! Yet she seems to bear Destiny no resentment, so I bear it for her and enough for two. At our engagement I gave her my own ring to wear as a pledge--we thought it nicer than buying a new one. It was a signet ring with a dark smooth stone. Strange to say it never once occurred to me till now that it was a mourning ring in memory of a great-uncle of mine, actually with an inscription on the inside.

_July_ 26.

As long as I can hold a pen, I shall, I suppose, go on trickling ink into this diary!

I am amusing myself by reading the _Harmsworth Encyclopaedia_ in 15 volumes, _i.e._, I turn over the pages and read everything of interest that catches my eye.

I get out of bed about ten, wash and sit by the window in my blue striped pyjama suit. It is so hot I need no additional clothing.

E---- comes in, brushes my hair, sprinkles me with lavender water, lights my cigarette, and gives me my book-rest and books. She forgets nothing.