On the other hand, I was afraid that the invitation was only a casual one, I feared a snuffy reception, a frosty smile and a rigid hand. Could I go up and partake of meat at their board, among brothers and sisters taking me for an ogre of a jilt, and she herself perhaps opposite me making me blush perpetually to recall our onetime passionate kisses, our love letters and our execrable verses to each other! There seemed dreadful possibilities in such an adventure. Yet I badly wanted to experience the piquant situation.
At 7 p.m., half an hour before I was due, decided on strong measures. I entered a pub and took a stiff whisky and soda, and then set off with a stout heart to take the icy family by storm—and if need be live down my evil reputation by my amiability and urbanity!
I went—and of course everything passed off in the most normal manner. She is a very pretty girl—like velvet. Before dinner, we walked in the garden—and talked only of flowers.
On the Hill, this morning, felt the thrill of the news of my own Death: I mean I imagined I heard the words—
“You’ve heard the news about B⸺?”
Second Voice: “No, what?”
“He’s dead.”
Silence.
Won’t all this seem piffle if I don’t die after all! As an artist in life I ought to die; it is the only artistic ending—and I ought to die now or the Third Act will fizzle out in a long doctor’s bill.
A New Pile in the Pier
Watched some men put a new pile in the pier. There was all the usual paraphernalia of chains, pulleys, cranes, and ropes, with a massive wooden pile swinging over the water at the end of a long wire hawser. Everything was in the massive style—even the men—very powerful men, slow, ruminative, silent men.
Nothing very relevant could be gathered from casual remarks. The conversation was without exception monosyllabic: “Let go,” or “Stand fast.” But by close attention to certain obscure movements of the man on the ladder near the water’s edge, it gradually came through to my consciousness that all these powerful, silent men were up against some bitter difficulty. I cannot say what it was. The burly monsters were silent about the matter. … In fact they appeared almost indifferent—and tired, oh! so very tired of the whole business. The attitude of the man nearest me was that for all he cared the pile could go on swinging in midair to the crack of Doom.
They continued slow, laborious efforts to overcome the secret difficulty. But these gradually slackened and finally ceased. One massive man after another abandoned his post in order to lean over the rails and gaze like a mystic into the depths of the sea. No one spoke. No one saw anything not even in the depths of the sea. One spat, and with round, sad eyes contemplated the trajectory of his brown bolus (he had been chewing) in its descent into the water.
The foreman, an original thinker, lit a cigarette, which relieved the tension. Then, slowly and with majesty, he turned on his heel, and walked away. With the sudden eclipse of the foreman’s interest, the incident closed. I should have been scarcely surprised to find him behind the Harbour-master’s Office playing “Shove-ha’penny” or skittles with the pile still swinging in midair. … After all it was only a bloody pile.
Depression
Suffering from depression. … The melancholy fit fell very suddenly. All the colour went out of my life, the world was dirty gray. On the way back to my hotel caught sight of H⸺, jumping into a cab, after a visit to S⸺ Sands. But the sight of him aroused no desire in me to shout or wave. I merely wondered how on earth he could have spent a happy day at such a Sandy place.
On arriving at ⸻, sank deeper into my morass. It suffocated me to find the old familiar landmarks coming into view … the holidaymakers along the streets how I hated them—the Peg Top Hill how desolate—all as before—how dull. The very fact that they were all there as before in the morning nauseated me. The seacoast here is magnificent, the town is pretty—I know that, of course. But all looked dreary and cheerless—just the sort of feeling one gets on entering an empty house with no fire on a winter’s day and nowhere to sit down. … I felt as lonely and desolate as a man suddenly fallen from the clouds into an unknown town on the Antarctic Continent built of ice and inhabited by Penguins. Who are these people? I asked myself irritably. There perhaps on the other side of the street was my own brother. But I was not even faintly interested and told the cabman to drive on. The spray from the sea fogged my spectacles and made me weary.
The Restlessness of the Sea
The restlessness of the sea acts as a soporific on jangled nerves. You gaze at its incessant activities, unwillingly at first because they distract your attention from your own cherished worries and griefs—but later you watch with complete self-abandon—it wrenches you out of yourself—and eventually with a kind of stupid hypnotic stare.
Dr. Spurgeon
The day has been overcast, but tonight a soft breeze sprang up and swept the sky clear as softly as a mop. The sun coming out shone upon a white sail far out in the channel, scarcely another vessel hove in sight. The white sail glittered like a piece of silver paper whenever the mainsail swung round as the vessel tacked. Its solitariness and whiteness in a desert of marine blue attracted the attention and held it till at last I could look at nothing else. The sight of it—so clean and white and fair—set me yearning for all the rarest and most exquisite things my imagination could conjure up—a beautiful girl,
