his kindness during this terrible week. … Can the Fates have the audacity? … Who can say?
I believe there can be no doubt that I have had a slight partial paralysis of my right side (like Dad). I stutter a little in my speech when excited, I cannot write properly (look at this handwriting), and my right leg is rocky at the knee. My head swims.
It is too inconceivably horrible to be buried in the Earth in such splendid spring weather. Who can tell me what is in store for me? … Life opens to me, I catch a glimpse of a vision, and the doors clang to again noiselessly. It is dark. That will be my history. Am developing a passionate belief in my book and a fever of haste to complete it before the congé définitif.
Saw M⸺ again, who said my symptoms were alarming certainly, but he was sure no definite diagnosis could be made.
Went with M⸺ to see a well-known nerve specialist—Dr. H⸺. He could find no symptoms of a definite disease, though 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 drumstick, tapping my nerves and cunningly working my reflexes. Then he tickled the soles of my feet and pricked 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 attitude 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⸺.
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.
Sat in the “morning room” feeling ill. In the chair opposite sat Aunt Fanny, 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.
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.
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 Gods.”
H.: “I shan’t believe you’re dead till I see your tombstone. I shall then say to the Sexton, ‘Is he really dead, then?’ and the Sexton will say, ‘Well, ’ee’s buried onny way.’ ”
Bob was not quite in sympathy with our boisterous spirits.
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—shirts and things. I sail at the beginning of July.”
B.: “I suppose shirts 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 shirt,’ and you’ll reply with pathos, ‘Mother what are the wild shirts 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. Everyone 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, someone 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.
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
