The Journal of a Disappointed Man Part 41

_February_ 16.

We took possession of our country cottage to-day: very charming and overlooking a beautiful Park.

Have just discovered the Journal of the De Goncourts and been reading it greedily. Life has really been a commodity. I am boiling over with vitality, chattering amiably to everyone about nothing--argumentative, sanguine, serious, ridiculous. I called old R---- a Rapscallion, a Curmudgeon, and a Scaramouche, and E---- a trull, a drab, a trollop, a callet. "You certainly are a unique husband," said that sweet little lady, and I....

With me, one of the symptoms of delirium is always a melodramatic truculence! I shake my fist in R----'s face and make him explode with laughing.... The sun to-day, and the great, whopping white clouds all bellied out, made me feel inside quite a bright young dog wriggling its body in ecstatic delight let loose upon the green sward.

"You must come down for a week end," I said to R---- at lunch. "Come down as soon as you can. You will find every comfort. It is an enormous house--I have not succeeded in finding my way about it and--it's dangerous to lose yourself--makes you late for dinner. When you arrive our gilded janitor will say: 'I believe Mr. Barbellion is in the library.'"

"Black eunuchs wait on you at dinner, I suppose," R---- rejoined.

"Oh! yes and golden chandeliers and a marble stair-case--all in barbaric splendour."

"Yes, I shall certainly be glad to come down," said R----, phlegmatically.

And so on and so on. Words, idle words all day in a continuous rush. And I am sure that the match which fired the gun-powder was the discovery of the De Goncourts' Journal! It's extraordinary how I have been going on from week to week quite calmly for all the world as if I had read all the books and seen all the places and done everything according to the heart's desire. This book has really jolted me out of my complacency: to think that all this time, I have been dead to so much! Why I might have died unconscious that the De Goncourts had ever lived and written their colossal book and now I am aware of it, I am all in a fever to read it and take it up into my brain: I might die now before I have finished it--a thought that makes me wild with desire just as I once endured most awful pangs when I felt my health going, and believed that I might die before having ever been in love--to die and never to have been in love!

--for an instant at a time this possibility used to make me writhe.

_March_ 22.

R---- has an unpleasant habit of making some scarifying announcement drawing forth an explosive query from me and then lapsing at once into an eleusinian silence: he appears to take a sensuous pleasure in the pause that keeps you expectant. I could forgive a man who keeps you on tenterhooks for two puffs in order to keep his pipe alight, but R---- shuts up out of sheer self-indulgence and goes on gazing at the horizon with the eyes of a seer (he thinks) trying to cod me he sees a portent there only revealed to G.o.d's elect.

I told him this in the middle of one of his luxurious silences. "I will tell you," he said deliberately, "when we reach the Oratory." (We were in Brompton Road.)

"Which side of it?" I enquired anxiously. "This or that?"

"That," said he, "will depend on how you behave in the meantime."

_April_ 3.

We met a remarkable Bulldog to-day in the street, humbly following behind a tiny boy to whom it was attached by a piece of string. At the time we were following in the wake of three magnificent Serbian Officers, and I was particularly interesting myself in the curious cut of their top boots. But the Bulldog was the Red Herring in our path.

"Is that a Dog?" I asked the little boy.

He a.s.sured me that it was, and so it turned out to be, tho' Bull-frog would have been a better name for it, the forelegs being more bandied, the back broader and the mouth wider than in any Bulldog I have ever seen. It was a super-Bulldog.

We turned and walked on. "There," said R----, "now we have lost our Serbian Officers."

_April_ 4.

"May I use your microscope?" he asked.

"By all means," I said with a gesture of elaborate politeness.

He sat down at my table, in my chair, and used my instrument--becoming at once absorbed and oblivious to my banter as per below:

"As Scotchmen," I said, "are monuments rather than men, this latest raid on Edinboro's worthy inhabitants must be called vandalsim rather than murder."

No answer. I continued to stand by my chair.

"How pleased Swift, Johnson, Lamb, and other anti-Caledonians would be...."

"Hope you don't mind my occupying your chair a little longer," the Scotchman said, "but this is a larva, has curious maxillae...." and his voice faded away in abstraction.

"Oh! no--go on," I said, "I fear it is a grievous absence of hospitality on my part in not providing you with a gla.s.s of whiskey. Can I offer you water, Sir?"

No answer.

Another enthusiast ushered himself in, was greeted with delight by the first and invited to sit down. I pulled out a chair for him and said:

"Shave, sir, or hair cut?"

"If you follow along to the top of the galea," No. I droned on imperturbably, "you will...." etc.

I got tired of standing and talking to an empty house but at last they got up, apologising and making for the door.

I entreated them not to mention the matter--my fee should be nominal--I did it out of sheer love, etc.

They thanked me again and would have said more but I added blandly:

"You know your way out?" They a.s.sured me they did (having worked in the place for 30 years and more)--I thanked G.o.d--and sat down to my table once more.

(These reports of conversations are rather fatuous: yet they give an idea of the sort of person I have to deal with, and also the sort of person I am among this sort of person.)

_April_ 6.

_The Housefly Problem_--1916

For weeks past we have all been in a terrible flutter scarcely paralleled by the outbreak of Armageddon in August, 1914. The spark which fired almost the whole building was a letter to the _Times_ written by Dr. ----, making public an ignominious confession of ignorance on the part of Entomologists as to how the Housefly pa.s.sed the winter. In reply, many correspondents wrote to say they hibernated, and one man was even so temerarious as to quote to us Entomologists the exact Latin name of the Housefly: viz., _Musca domestica_. We asked for specimens and enormous numbers of flies at once began to arrive at the Museum, alive and dead--and not a Housefly among them! So there was a terrible howdedo.

One of the correspondents was named "Masefield." "Not Masefield the poet?" an excited dipterist asked. I rea.s.sured him.

"I've a good mind," said Dr. ----, "to reply to this chap who's so emphatic and give him a whigging--only he's climbing down a bit in this second letter in to-day's issue." I strongly advocated clemency.

But still the affair goes on. Every morning sees more letters and more flies sent by all sorts of persons--we seem to have set the whole world searching for Houseflies--d.u.c.h.esses, signalmen, farmers, footmen. Every morning each fresh batch of flies is mounted on pins by experts in the Setting Room, and an a.s.sistant's whole time is devoted to identifying, arranging, listing and reporting upon the new arrivals. At the last meeting of the Trustees a sample collection was displayed to show indubitably that the insects which hibernate in houses are not _Musca domestica_ but _Pollenia rudis_. I understand the Trustees were appreciative.

An observant eye can now discover state visits to our dipterists from interested persons carrying their flies with them, animated discussions in the corridor, knots of excited enthusiasts in the Lavatory, in the Library, everywhere--and everywhere the subject discussed is the same: How does the Housefly pa.s.s the winter? As one pa.s.ses one catches: "In Bakehouses certainly they are to be found but...." or a wistful voice, "I wish I had caught that one in my bathroom three winters ago--I am certain it was a Housefly." The Doctor himself--a gallant Captain--wanders from room to room stimulating his lieutenants to make suggestions, and examining every answer to the great interrogative on its merits, no matter how humble or insignificant the person who makes it. Then of an afternoon he will entirely disappear, and word goes round that he has set forth to examine a rubbish heap in Soho or Pimlico. As the afternoon draws to its close someone enquires if he has come back yet; next morning a second asks if I had seen him, then a third announces mournfully that he has just been holding conversation with him, but that nothing at all was found in the rubbish heap.

The great sensation of all occurred last week when somebody ran along the corridor crying that Mr. ---- had just found a Housefly in his room.

We were all soon agog with the news, and the excited Captain was presently espied setting out for the scene of operations with a killing bottle and net. The insect was promptly impounded and identified as a veritable _Musca domestica_. A consultation being held to sit on the body, a lady finally laid information that two "forced Houseflies"

hatched the day before had escaped from her possession. She suggested Mr. ----'s specimen was one of them.

"How would it get from your room to Mr. ----'s?" she

was immediately asked. And breathless, we all heard her answer deliberately and quite audibly that the fugitive may have gone out of her window, up the garden and in by Mr. ----'s window, _or_ it may have gone out of her door, up the corridor and in by his door. I wanted to know why it should have entered Mr. ----'s room as he is not a dipterist but a microlepidopterist. They looked at me sternly and we slowly dispersed.

This morning, the Dr. came to me with a newspaper cutting in his hand, saying, "_The Times_ is behindhand." He handed me the slip. It was a clipping from to-day's _Times_ about a sackful of flies which had been taken from Wandsworth Clock Tower in a state of hibernation.