Preparing a Snake’s Skull
Prepared the skull of grass snake. I fancy I scooped out the eyes with patent delight—I suppose symbolically, as though, on behalf of the rest of suffering humanity, I were wiping off the old score against the beast for its behaviour in the Garden of Eden.
At 2:30 Dad had three separate “strokes” of paralysis in as many minutes, the third leaving him helpless. They sent for me in the Library, where I was reading, and I hurried home. Just as I entered the bedroom where he and Mother were another attack came on, and it was with the utmost difficulty that with her help I managed to get him from the chair to the bed. He struggled with his left arm and leg and made inarticulate noises which sounded as if they might be groans. I don’t know if he was in pain. Dear Mother.
Dad cannot live long. Mother bears up wonderfully well. Tried to do some examination work but failed utterly. A⸺ is watching in the sickroom with Mother who will not leave.
8:30. The nurse says he will not live through the night.
8:45. Telegraphed for A⸺ to come.
11:00. A⸺ came downstairs and had a little supper.
12:00. Went to bed. H⸺ and the others lit a fire and we have all sat around it silent, listening to its murmur. Everyone felt cold. Dad has been unconscious for over an hour.
1:45 a.m. Heard a noise, then heard Mother coming downstairs past my bedroom door with someone—sobbing. I knew it must be all over. H⸺ was helping her down. Waited in my bedroom in the dark for three parts of an hour, when H⸺ came up, opened the door slowly and said, “He’s gone, old man.” It was a tremendous relief to know that since he had to die his sufferings and cruel plight were over. Fell asleep from sheer exhaustion and slept soundly.
The funeral. It is not death but the dreadful possibilities of life which are so depressing.6
A Day in Autumn
A cool, breezy autumn day. The beach was covered with patches of soapy foam that shook tremulously in the wind—all the rocks and everything were drenched with water, and the spray came off the breaking waves like steam. A red sun went lower and lower and the shadows cast by the rocks grew very long and grotesque. Underneath the breaking waves, the hollows were green and dark like sea caverns. Herring gulls played about in the air balancing themselves as they faced the breeze, then sweeping suddenly around and downwards with the wind behind them. We all sat down on the rocks and were very quiet, almost monosyllabic. We pointed out a passing vessel to one another or chucked a bit of shingle into the sea. You would have said we were bored. Yet deep down in ourselves we were astir and all around us we could hear the rumours of divine passage, soft and mysterious as the flight of birds migrating in the dark.
The wind rose and tapped the line against the flagstaff at the Coastguard Station. It roared through my hair and past my ears for an hour on end till I felt quite windswept and bleak. On the way home we saw the wind darting hither and thither over the long grass like a lunatic snake. The wind! Oh! the wind—I have an enormous faith in the curative properties of the wind. I feel better already.
Staying in Surrey. Exam over and I feel fairly confident—after an agony for a few days before on account of the development of a cold which threatened to snatch the last chance out of my hands.
Justifiable Mendacity
Sitting on a gate on the N. Downs I saw a long way below me in the valley a man standing in a chalk pit and wielding a stick vigorously. For some reason or another the idea came to me that it would be interesting if he were in the act of killing a Snake—he so far away below and I above and unnoticed quietly watching him. At dinner tonight, this revised version of the story came out quite pat and natural and obviously interested the assembly. I added graphically that the man was too far away from me to be able to say what species of Snake it was he was killing. I possess the qualifications of an artistic liar. Yet I can’t regard such a story as a lie—it was rather a justifiable emendation of an otherwise uninteresting incident.
Une Caractère
… She is a tiny little old lady, very frail and very delicate, with a tiny voice like the noise of a fretsaw. She talks incessantly about things which do not interest you, until your face gets stiff with forcing a polite smile, and your voice cracked and your throat dry with saying, “Yes,” and “Really.”
Tonight I attend the Zoological Society to read my first paper, so I am really in a fluster and want to be quiet. Therefore to prevent her from talking I write two letters which I represent as urgent. At 6:15 desperate, so went out for a walk in the dark London streets. Returned to supper and to Her. After the wife, the husband is intellectual pyrotechnics. Referring to the Museum—
“Would you have there, I suppose, any insects, in a case like, what you might say to study to yourself when no one is by?” he inquired.
6:40. It is now one hour before I need leave for the meeting, and whether I sigh, cough, smoke, or read the paper, she goes on. She even refuses to allow me to scan
