The Journal of a Disappointed Man

The man I dare not look at: I sat beside him and merely imagined.

At – , I got a decent seat and arrived at T – jaded, but still alive, with no one to meet me. Decent rooms on the sea-front.

Next morning J – went away for the week end and I could not possibly explain how ill I was: she might have stayed at home.

To preserve my sanity, Saturday afternoon, took a desperate remedy by hiring a motor-car and travelling to Torquay and back via Babbacombe…

On the Sunday, feeling suddenly ill, I sent for the local medico whom I received in the drab little room by lamplight after dinner. "I've a tingling in my right hand," I said, "that drives me nearly silly."

"And on the soles of your feet?" he asked at once.

I assented, and he ran thro' at once all the symptoms in series.

"I see you know what my trouble is," I said shyly. And we chatted a little about the War, about disease, and I told him of the recent memoir on the histology of the disease – in the Trans. Roy. Soc, Edin. which interested him. Then he went away again – very amiable, very polite – an obvious non possumus…

On Monday at 4 went up to – to tea as previously arranged, but found the house shut up so returned to my rooms in a rage.

After tea, having read the newspapers inside out, sat by the open window looking out on to the Marine Parade. It was dusk, a fine rain was falling, and the parade and sea-front were deserted save for an occasional figure hurrying past with mackintosh and umbrella. Suddenly as I sat looking out on this doleful scene, a dirge from nowhere in particular sounded on my ears which I soon recognised as "Robin Adair," sung very lento and very maestoso by a woman, with a flute obligato played by some second person. The tide was right up, and the little waves murmured listlessly at long intervals: never before I think have I been plunged into such an abyss of acute misery.

Next day the wire came. But it was too late. The day after that, I was worse, a single ray of sunshine being the rediscovery of the second-hand-clothes family from Whitechapel taking the air together on the front. This dreary party was traipsing along, the parents in their furs giving an occasional glance at the sea uncomfortably, as if they only noticed it was wet, and the children still in black and still wearing their scuted boots, obviously a little uncomfortable in a place so clean and windswept. I think they all came to the seaside out of decorum and for the satisfaction of feeling that they could afford it like other folk, and that old-clothes was as profitable a business as another.

On Thursday, returned home as I was afraid of being taken ill and having to go into the public hospital. Arrived home and went to bed and here we are till Jan. 1st on 3 months' sick leave. However, the swingeing urtication in my hands and feet has now almost entirely abated and to-day I went out with E – and the perambulator, which I pushed.

December 13.

A Baby-Girl

Walked down the bottom of the road and hung over some wooden railings. A little village baby-girl aged not more than 3 was hovering about near me while I gazed abstractedly across the Park at the trees. Presently, she crawled through the railings into the field and picked up a few dead leaves – a baby picking up dead leaves! Then she threw them down, and kicked them. Then moved on again – rustling about intermittently like a winter Thrush in the shrubbery. At last, she had stumbled around to where I was leaning over the railings. She stood immediately in front of me and silently looked up with a steady reproachful gaze: "Ain't you 'shamed, you lazy-bones?" till I could bear her inquisitorial gaze no longer, and so went and hung over some more railings further on.

Service

He asked for a Tennyson. She immediately went upstairs in the dark, lit a match and got it for him.

He asked for a Shakespeare. And without a moment's hesitation, she went upstairs again, lit another match and got that for him.

And I believe if he had said "Rats," she would have shot out silently into the dark and tried to catch one for him. Only a woman is capable of such service.

Hardy's Poetry"You did not come,And marching time drew on and wore me numb —Yet less for loss of your dear presence thereThan that I thus found lacking in your makeThat high compassion which can overbearReluctance for pure loving-kindness' sakeGrieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,You did not come."

I thoroughly enjoy Hardy's poetry for its masterfulness, for his sheer muscular compulsion over the words and sentences. In his rough-hewn lines he yokes the recalcitrant words together and drives them along mercilessly with something that looks like simple brute strength. Witness the triumphant last line in the above where the words are absolute bondslaves to his exact meaning, his indomitable will. All this pleases me the more for I know to my cost what stubborn, sullen, hephæstian beasts words and clauses can sometimes be. It is nice to see them punished. Hardy's poetry is Michael Angelo rather than Greek, Browning not Tennyson.

December 14.

What a day! After a night of fog signals, I awoke this morning to find it still foggy and the ground covered with a grey rime. All day the fog has remained: I look out now thro' the yellowish atmosphere across a field which is frosted over, the grass and brambles stiff and glassy. My back is aching and the cold is so intense that unless I crouch over the fire hands and feet become immediately stone-cold. All day I have crouched over the fire, reading newspapers, listening to fog signals and the screaming of the baby… I have been in a torpor, like a Bat in a cavern – really dead yet automatically hanging on to life by my hind legs.

December 15.

"To stand upon one's guard against Death exasperates her malice and protracts our sufferings." W.S. Landor.

December 19.

The Parson called, over the christening of the baby. I told him I was an agnostic. "There are several interesting lines of thought down here," he said wearily, passing his hand over his eyes. I know several men more enthusiastic over Fleas and Worms than this phlegmatic priest, over Jesus Christ.

December 20.

The reason why I do not spend my days in despair and my nights in hopeless weeping simply is that I am in love with my own ruin. I therefore deserve no sympathy, and probably shan't get it: my own profound self-compassion is enough. I am so abominably self-conscious that no smallest detail in this tragedy eludes me. Day after day I sit in the theatre of my own life and watch the drama of my own history proceeding to its close. Pray God the curtain falls at the right moment lest the play drag on into some long and tedious anticlimax.

We all like to dramatise ourselves. Byron was dramatising himself when, in a fit of rhetorical self-compassion, he wrote:

"Oh! could I feel as I have felt or be what I have been, Or weep as I could once have wept o'er many a vanished scene."

Shelley, too, being an artist could not stand insensible to his own tragedy and Francis Thompson suggests that he even anticipated his own end from a passage in Julian and Maddalo, "… if you can't swim, Beware of Providence." "Did no earthly dixisti," Thompson asks, "sound in his ears as he wrote it?"

In any event, it was an admirable ending from the dramatic point of view; Destiny is often a superb dramatist. What more perfect than the death of Rupert Brooke at Scyros in the Ægean?23 The lives of some men are works of art, perfect in form, in development and in climax. Yet how frequently a life eminently successful or even eminently ruinous is also an unlovely, sordid, ridiculous or vulgar affair! Every one will concede that it must be a hard thing to be commonplace and vulgar even in misfortune, to discover that the tragedy of your own precious life has been dramatically bad, that your life even in its ruins is but a poor thing, and your own miseries pathetic from their very insignificance; that you are only Jones with chronic indigestion rather than Guy de Maupassant mad, or Coleridge with a great intellect being slowly dismantled by opium.

If only I could order my life by line and level, if I could control or create my own destiny and mould it into some marble perfection! In short, if life were an art and not a lottery! In the lives of all of us, how many wasted efforts, how many wasted opportunities, false starts, blind – how many lost days – and man's life is but a paltry three score years and ten: pitiful short commons indeed.

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 Staël, 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 amusement of a game of cards." How Jane Austen would have laughed at him! The passage 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 slumA simple swear word is to some —To Masefield something more."MAX BEERBOHM.

Still, to call Gallipoli "bloody Hell" 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 théâtre– 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 ambassadors 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 illustrating 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 damned 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 passion 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 Saturday, 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 grass, 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, Butterflies, 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 illustrated 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 association 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 cums along." Starlings on the washhouse roof, regularly fed with scraps, 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.

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.

I am over 6 feet high and as thin as a skeleton; every bone in my body, even the neck vertebrae, creak at odd intervals when I move. So that I am not only a skeleton but a badly articulated one to boot. If to this is coupled the fact of the creeping paralysis, you have the complete horror. Even as I sit and write, millions of bacteria are gnawing away my precious spinal cord, and if you put your ear to my back the sound of the gnawing I dare say could be heard. The other day a man came and set up a post in the garden for the clothes' line. As soon as I saw the post I said "gibbet" – it looks exactly like one, and I, for sure, must be the malefactor. Last night while E – was nursing the baby I most delightfully remarked: "What a little parasite – why you are Cleopatra affixing the aspic – 'Tarry, good lady, the bright day is done, and we are for the dark.'"

The fact that such images arise spontaneously in my mind, show how rotten to the core I am.

… The advent of the Baby was my coup de grâce. The little creature seems to focus under one head all my personal disasters and more than once a senseless rage has clutched me at the thought of a baby in exchange for my ambition, a nursery for the study. Yet, on the whole, I find it a good and satisfying thing to see her, healthy, new, intact on the threshold: I grow tired of my own dismal life just as one does of a suit of dirty clothes. My life and person are patched and greasy; hers is new and without a single blemish or misfortune… Moreover, she makes her mother happy and consoles her grandmother too.

January 21.

Death

What a delightful thing the state of Death would be if the dead passed their time haunting the places they loved in life and living over again the dear delightful past – if death were one long indulgence in the pleasures of memory! if the disembodied spirit forgot all the pains of its previous existence and remembered only the happiness! Think of me flitting about the orchards and farm-yards in – birdsnesting, walking along the coast among the seabirds, climbing Exmoor, bathing in streams and in the sea, haunting all my old loves and passions, cutting open with devouring curiosity Rabbits, Pigeons, Frogs, Dogfish, Amphioxus; think of me, too, at length unwillingly deflected from these cherished pursuits in the raptures of first love, cutting her initials on trees and fences instead of watching birds, day-dreaming over Parker and Haswell and then bitterly reproaching myself later for much loss of precious time. How happy I shall be if Death is like this: to be living over again and again all my ecstasies, over first times – the first time I found a Bottle Tit's nest, the first time I succeeded in penetrating into the fastnesses of my El Dorado – Exmoor, the first time I gazed upon the internal anatomy of a Snail, the first time I read Berkeley's Principles of Human Understanding (what a soul-shaking epoch that was!), and the first time I kissed her! My hope is that I may haunt these times again, that I may haunt the places, the books, the bathes, the walks, the desires, the hopes, the first (and last) loves of my life all transfigured and beatified by sovereign Memory.