The Journal of a Disappointed Man Part 16

_April_ 30.

Went with M---- to see a well-known nerve specialist--Dr. H----. He could find no symptoms of a definite disease, tho' he asked me suspiciously if I had ever been with women.

Ordered two months' complete rest in the country. H---- chased me round his consulting room with a drum-stick, tapping my nerves and cunningly working my reflexes. Then he tickled the soles of my feet and p.r.i.c.ked me with a pin--all of which I stood like a man. He wears a soft black hat, looks like a Quaker, and reads the _Verhandlungen d. Gesellschaft d.

Nervenarzten_.

M---- is religious and after I had disclosed my physique to him yesterday (for the 99th time) he remained on his knees by the couch in his consulting room (after working my reflexes) for a moment or two in the att.i.tude of prayer. When the Doctor prays for you--better call in the undertaker. My epitaph "He played Ludo well." The game anyhow requires moral stamina--ask H----.

_May_ 5.

At R----. Mugged about all day. Put on a gramophone record--then crawled up into a corner of the large, empty drawing room and ate my heart out.

Heart has a bitter taste--if it's your own.

_May_ 6.

Sat in the "morning room" feeling ill. In the chair opposite sat Aunt f.a.n.n.y, aged 86, knitting. I listened to the click of her needles, while out in the garden a thrush sang, and there was a red sunset.

_May_ 8.

Before I left R----, A---- [My brother] had written to Uncle enclosing my doctor's letter. I don't know the details except that Dr. M---- emphasised the seriousness and yet held out hope that two months' rest would allay the symptoms.

_May_ 11.

_At Home_

I made some offensive remark to H---- whom I met in the street. This set him off.

"You blighter, I hope you marry a loose woman. May your children be all bandy-legged and squint-eyed, may your teeth drop out, and your toes have bunions," and so on in his usual lengthy commination.

I turned to the third man.

"Bob--this!--after all I've done for that young man! I have even gone out of my Way to cultivate in him a taste for poetry--until he is now, in fact, quite wrapped up in it--indeed, so much so, that for a time he was nothing but a brown paper parcel labelled Poetry."

H. (doggedly): "When are you going to die?"

"That Master H----," I answered menacingly, "is on the knees of the G.o.ds."

H.: "I shan't believe you're dead till I see your tombstone. I shall then say to the s.e.xton, 'Is he really dead, then?' and the s.e.xton will say, 'Well, 'ee's buried onny way.'"

Bob was not quite in sympathy with our boisterous spirits.

_May_ 15.

_Gardening_

Sought out H---- as he was watering his petunias in the garden. He informed me he was going to London on Monday.

H.: "Mother is coming too."

B.: "Why?"

H.: "Oh! I'm buying my kit--s.h.i.+rts and things. I sail at the beginning of July."

B.: "I suppose s.h.i.+rts are difficult to buy. You wouldn't know what to do with one if you had one. Your mother will lead you by the hand into a shop and say, 'H----, dear, this is a s.h.i.+rt,' and you'll reply with pathos, 'Mother what are the wild s.h.i.+rts saying?'"

H.: "You're a B.F." (goes on watering).

"I wonder what you'd do if you were let loose in a big garden," I began.

H.: "I should be as happy as a bird. I should hop about, chirrup and lay eggs. You should have seen my tomato plants last year--one was as tall as father."

B.: "Now tell me of the Gooseberry as big as Mother."

Mutual execrations. Then we grinned and cackled at each other, emitting weird and ferocious cachinnations. Several times a day in confidential, serious tones--after one of these explosions--we say, "I really believe we're mad." You never heard such extraordinary caterwaulings. Our snappy conversations are interrupted with them every minute or so!

_Stagnancy_

A stagnant day. Lay still in the Park all day with just sufficient energy to observe. The Park was almost empty. Every one but me at work.

Nothing is more dreary than a pleasure ground on workdays. There was one man a little way off throwing a ball to a clever dog. Behind me on the path, some one came along wheeling a pram. I listened in a kind of coma to the scrunching of the gravel in the distance a long time after the pram was out of sight. Far away--the tinkle of Church bells in a village across the river, and, in front, the man still throwing the ball to his clever dog.

_May_ 25.

_Death_

... I suppose the truth is I am at last broken to the idea of Death. Once it terrified me and once I hated it. But now it only annoys me. Having lived with the Bogey for so long, and broken bread with him so often, I am used to his ugliness, tho' his persistent attentions bore me. Why doesn't he do it and have done with me? Why this deference, why does he pa.s.s me everything but the poison? Why am I such an unconscionably long time dying?

What embitters me is the humiliation of having to die, to have to be pouring out the precious juices of my life into the dull Earth, to be no longer conscious of what goes on, no longer moving abroad upon the Earth creating attraction and repulsions, pouring out one's ego in a stream.

To think that the women I have loved will be marrying and forget, and that the men I have hated will continue on their way and forget I ever hated them--the ignominy of being dead! What voluble talker likes his mouth to be stopped with earth, who relishes the idea of the carrion worm mining in the seat of the intellect?

_May_ 29.

_Renunciation_

Staying at the King's Hotel, ----. Giddiness very bad. Death seems unavoidable. A tumour on the brain?

Coming down here in the train, sat in corner of the compartment, twined one leg around the other, rested my elbow on the window ledge, and gazed out helplessly at the exuberant green fields, green woods, and green hedgerows. The weather was perfect, the sun blazed down.

Certainly, I was rather sorry for myself at the thought of leaving it all. But I girded up my loins and wrapped around me for a while the mantle of a n.o.bler sentiment; _i.e._ I felt sorry for the others as well--for the two brown carters in the road ambling along with a timber waggon, for the two old maids in the same compartment with me knitting bedsocks, for the beautiful Swallows darting over the stream, for the rabbit that lopped into the fern just as we pa.s.sed--they too were all leaving it.

The extent of my benign compa.s.sion startled me--it was so unexpected.

Perhaps for the first time in my life I forgot all about my own miserable ambitions--I forgave the successful, the time-servers, the self-satisfied, the overweening, the gracious and condescending--all, in fact, who hitherto have been thorns in my flesh and innocently enough have goaded me to still fiercer efforts to win thro'. "Poor people," I said. "Leave them alone. Let them be happy if they can." With a submissive heart, I was ready to sit down in the rows of this world's failures and never have thought one bitter word about success. To all those persons who in one way or another had foiled my purposes I extended a pardon with Olympian gravity, and, strangest of all, I could have melted such frosty moral rect.i.tudes with a genuine interest in the careers of my struggling contemporaries. With perfect self-abnegation, I held out my hand to them and wished them all "G.o.d Speed."

It was a strange metempsychosis. Yet of a truth it is no use being n.i.g.g.ardly over our lives. We are all of us "sh.e.l.ling out." And we can afford to be generous, for we shall all--some early, some late--be bankrupt in the end. For my part, I've had a short and boisterous voyage and shan't be sorry to get into port. I give up all my plans, all my hopes, all my loves and enthusiasms without remonstrance. I renounce all--I myself am already really dead.

_May_ 30.

Last night the sea was as flat as a pavement, a pretty barque with all her sails out to catch the smallest puff of wind--the tiniest inspiration--was nevertheless without motion--a painted s.h.i.+p on a tapestry of violet. H---- Hill was an immense angular ma.s.s of indigo blue. Even rowing boats made little progress and the water came off the languid paddles in syrupy clots. Everything was utterly still, the air thick--like cottonwool to the touch and very stifling; vitality in living things leaked away under a sensuous lotus influence.

Intermittently after the darkness had come, Bullpoint Lighthouse shone like the wink of a lascivious eye.