The Journal of a Disappointed Man Part 8

_May_ 14.

Returned home. I hate living in this little town. If some one dies, he is sure to be some one you had a joke with the night before. A suicide--ten to one--implicates your bosom friend, or else the little man at the bookshop cut him down. There have been three deaths since I came home--I knew them all. It depresses me. The town seems a mortuary with all these dead bodies lying in it. Lucky for you, if you're a fat, rubicund, unimaginative physician.

_May_ 16.

Two more people dead--one a school friend. Sat on a seat on the river bank and read the _Journal of Animal Behaviour_. It made me long to be at work. I foamed at the mouth to be sitting there perforce in an overcoat on a seat doing nothing like a pet dove. A weak heart makes crossing a road an adventure and turns each day into a dangerous expedition.

_May_ 18.

A dirty ragam.u.f.fin on the river's bank held up a tin can to me with the softly persuasive words,--

"'Ere, Mister, BAIT."

"What are you going to do with it?"

"Fish."

"What for?"

"Salmon."

We have all tried to catch salmon with a bent pin. No matter though if no salmon be caught. Richard Jefferies said, "If there be no immortality still we shall have had the glory of that thought."

_May_ 19.

_Old Diaries_

Spent some happy time reading over old diaries. I was grieved and surprised to find how much I had forgotten. To forget the past so easily seems scarcely loyal to oneself. I am so selfishly absorbed in my present self that I have grown not to care a d.a.m.n about that ever increasing collection of past selves--those dear, dead gentlemen who one after the other have tenanted the temple of this flesh and handed on the torch of my life and personal ident.i.ty before creeping away silently and modestly to rest.

_June_ 6.

Brilliantly fine and warm. Unable to resist the sun, so I caught the ten train to S---- and walked across the meadow (b.u.t.tercups, forget-me-nots, ragged robins) to the Dipper stream and the ivy bridge.

Read ardently in Geology till twelve. Then took off my boots and socks, and waded underneath the right arch of the bridge in deep water, and eventually sat on a dry stone at the top of the masonry just where the water drops into the green salmon pool in a solid bar. Next I waded upstream to a big slab of rock tilted at a comfortable angle. I lay flat on this with my nether extremities in water up to my knees. The sun bathed my face and dragon flies chased up and down intent on murder. But I cared not a tinker's Demetrius about Nature red in tooth and claw. I was quite satisfied with Nature under a June sun in the cool atmosphere of a Dipper stream. I lay on the slab completely relaxed, and the cool water ran strongly between my toes. Surely I was never again going to be miserable. The voices of children playing in the wood made me extra happy. As a rule I loathe children. I am too much of a youth still. But not this morning. For these were fairy voices ringing through enchanted woods.

_June_ 8.

Brilliantly fine and warm. Went by train to C---- Woods. Took first-cla.s.s return on account of the heat. Crossed the meadow and up the hill to the mill leat, where we bathed our feet and read. Ate a powerful lunch and made several unsuccessful grabs at Caddie flies. I want one to examine the mouth parts. After lunch we sat on the foot-bridge over the stream, and I rested on it flat in the face of the sun. The sun seemed to burn into my very bones, purging away everything that may be dark or threatening there. The physical sensation of the blood flow beneath the skin was good to feel, and the heat made every tissue glow with a radiant well-being. When I got up and opened my eyes all the colours of the landscape vanished under the silvery whiteness of the intense sunlight.

We put on our boots and socks (our feet seemed to have swollen to a very large size) and wandered downstream to a little white house, a gamekeeper's cottage, where the old woman gave us cream and milk and home-made bread in her beautiful old kitchen with open hearth. China dogs, of course, and on the wall an old painting representing the person of a page boy (so she said) who was once employed up at the squire's. An unwholesome atmosphere of pigs pervaded the garden, but as this is not pretty I ought to leave it out....

_June_ 14.

Brilliantly fine. Went by the early train to S----. Walked to the ivy bridge and then waded upstream to the great slab of rock where I spread myself in the sun as before. The experiment was so delightful it is worth repeating a hundred times. In this position I read of the decline and fall of Trilobites, of the Stratigraphy of the Lias and so on.

Geology is a very crus.h.i.+ng science, yet I enjoyed my existence this morning with the other flies about that stream.

_June_ 20.

Sat at Liverpool University for the practical exam. Zoology, Board of Education.

At the close the other students left but I went on working. Prof.

Herdman asked me if I had finished. I said "No," so he gave me a little more time. Later he came up again, and again I said "No," but he replied that he was afraid I must stop. "What could you do further?" he asked, picking up a dish of plankton. I pointed out a _Sagitta_, an _Oikopleura_, and a _Noctiluca_, and he replied, "Of course I put in more than you were expected to identify in the time, so as to make a choice possible." Then he complimented me on my written papers which were sent in some weeks ago, and looking at my practical work he added, "And this, too, seems to be quite excellent."

I thanked him from the bottom of a greedy and grateful heart, and he went on, "I see you describe yourself in your papers as a journalist, but can you tell me exactly what has been your career in Zoology?" I answered of course rather proudly that I had had _no_ career in Zoology.

"But what school or college have you worked at?" he persisted.

"None," I said a little doggedly. "What I know I have taught myself."

"So you've had no training in Zoology at all?"

"No, sir."

"Well, if you've taught yourself all you know, you've done remarkably well."

He still seemed a little incredulous, and when I explained how I got a great many of my marine animals for dissection and study at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, he immediately asked me suspiciously if I had ever worked there. We shook hands, and he wished me all success in the future, to which I to myself devoutly said Amen.

Came home very elated at having impressed some one at last.

Now for Dublin.

_June_30.

Oeconomic biology may be very useful but I am not interested in it. Give me the pure science. I don't want to be worrying my head over remedies for potato disease nor cures for fleas in fowls. Heaven preserve me from ever becoming a County Council lecturer or a Government Entomologist![1]... Give me the recluse life of a scholar or investigator, full of leisure, culture, and delicate skill. I would rather know Bergson than be able to stay at the Ritz Hotel. I would rather be able to dissect a star-fish's water-vascular system than know the price of Consols. I should make a most industrious country gentleman with 5,000 a year and a deer park.... My idea is to withdraw from the _mobile vulgus_ and spend laborious days in the library or laboratory.

The world is too much with us. I long for the monotony of monastic life!

Father Wasmann and the Abbe Spallanzani are the type. Let me set my face towards them. Such lives afford poor material for novelists or dramatists, but so much the better. Hamlet makes fine reading, but I don't want to be Hamlet myself.

_July_ 6.

In the afternoon went out dredging in fifteen fathoms off the pier at I----, but without much success.... Got a large number of interesting things, however, in the tow net, including some advanced eggs of _Loligo_ and a _Tomopteris_....

_July_ 7.

Went to the trout stream again. After stretching a muslin net crosswise on the water for insects floating down, sat on the footbridge and read Geology for the Dublin Examination. Later, waded downstream to a hazel bush on the right bank beneath a shady oak. Squatted right down on the bush, which supported me like an arm-chair--and, with legs dangling in the cool water, opened a Meredith and enjoyed myself.

_July_ 28.

Had to write backing out of the Dublin Examination for which I am nominated to sit. I am simply not fit for the racket of such a journey in my present state of health. My chances of success, too, are not such as to warrant my drawing on Dad for the money. He is still ill, and secretly agitated, I fear, because I am so bent on giving up his work.

It looks, however, as if newspaper journalism is to be my fate. It was the refinement of torture having to write.

_July_ 31.

Had a letter from Dr. S---- enough to wring tears from a monument.

Sat like a valetudinarian in the Park all day getting fresh air--among the imbeciles, invalids, and children. Who cares? "But, gentlemen, you _shall_ hear."

_August_ 4.

Still another chance--quite unexpectedly received a second nomination this morning to sit for another exam, for two vacancies in the British Museum. Good luck this.