Bogey for so long, and broken bread with him so often, I am used to his ugliness, though his persistent attentions bore me. Why doesn’t he do it and have done with me? Why this deference, why does he pass 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?
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 nobler sentiment; i.e. I felt sorry for the others as well—for the two brown carters in the road ambling along with a timber wagon, 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 passed—they too were all leaving it.
The extent of my benign compassion 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 timeservers, 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 through. “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 rectitudes 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 “God Speed.”
It was a strange metempsychosis. Yet of a truth it is no use being niggardly over our lives. We are all of us “shelling 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.
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 ship on a tapestry of violet. H⸺ Hill was an immense angular mass 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 cotton wool 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.
Pottering about all day on the Pier and Front, listening to other people’s talk, catching snippets of conversation—not edifying. If there were seven wise men in the town, I would not save it. Damn the place!
… I espied her first in the distance and turned my head away quickly and looked out to sea. A moment after, I began to turn my head round again slowly with the cautiousness and air of suspicion of a Tortoise poking its head out from underneath his shell. I was terrified to discover that in the meantime she had come and sat down on the seat immediately behind me with her back to mine. We sat like this back to back for some time and I enjoyed the novel experience and the tension. A few years ago, the bare sight of her gave me palpitation of the heart, and, on the first occasion that I had the courage to stop to speak, I felt livid and the skin on my face twitched uncontrollably.
Presently I got up and walked past—in the knowledge that she must now be conscious of my presence after a disappearance of three years. Later we met face to face and I broke the ice. She’s a pretty girl. … So too is her sister.
Few people, except my barber, know how amorous I am. He has to shave my sinuous lips.
Spent many dreadful hours cogitating whether to accept their invitation to dinner. … I wanted to go for several reasons. I wanted to see her in a home-setting for the first time, and I wanted to spend the evening with three pretty girls. I also had the idea of displaying myself to the scrutinising gaze of the family as the hero of the old romance: and of showing Her how much I had progressed since last we met and what a
