Cold better. So back at work—gauging ale at Dunfermline as R⸺ puts it.
he understand.
I shot up like a ball on a bagatelle board all steamy into zoology (my once beloved science) but at once rolled dead into the very low hole of Economic Entomology! Curse. … Why can’t I either have a first-rate disease or be a first-rate zoologist?
Now just think what a much better figure I should have cut, from the artistic view point, had I remained a newspaper reporter who had taught himself prodigious embryology out of F. M. Balfour’s Textbook, who had cut sections of fowls’ eggs and newt embryos with a hand microtome, who had passionately dissected out the hidden, internal anatomy of a great variety of animals, who could recite Wiedersheim’s Comparative Anatomy of Vertebrates and patter off the difference between a nephridium and a coelomic duct without turning a hair—or the phylogenetic history (how absorbing!) of the kidney—pronephros, mesonephros and metanephros and all the ducts! … All this, over now and wasted. My hardly-won knowledge wrenched away is never brought into use—it lies piled up in my brain rotting. I could have become a first-rate comparative anatomist.
In the evening found it quite impossible to stay in the house any longer: some vague fear drove me out. I was alarmed to be alone or to be still. It is my cough, I think.
Had two glasses of port at the Kensington Hotel, conversed with the barmaid, and then came home.
“Don’t be an old fossil,” she said to me tonight, irrelevantly.
“Apropos of what?” I inquired.
“Mother, here’s W⸺ proposing to E⸺! Do come,” cried ⸻, with intent to confuse. I laughed heartlessly.
Dear, dear, where will it all end? It’s a sad business when you fall in love with a girl you don’t like.
Spent a romping day at the Flat. Kissed her sister twice under the mistletoe, and in the evening went to a cinema. After supper made a mock heroic speech and left hilarious.
1914
… Finally and in conclusion I have fallen ill again, have again resumed my periodical visits to the Doctor, and am swallowing his rat-poison in a blind faith as aforetime. In fact, I am in London, leading the same solitary life, seeing no one, talking to no one, and daily struggling with this demon of ill-health. Can no one exorcise him? The sight of both my eyes is affected now. Blindness?
B⸺ continues whoring, drinking, sneering. R⸺ as usual, devoid of emotion, cold, passionless, Shavian, and self-absorbed, still titillates his mind with etching, sociology, music, etc., and I have at last ceased to bore him with what he probably calls the febrile utterances of an overwrought mind.
Such is my world! Oh! I forgot—on the floor below me is a corpse—that of an old gentleman who passed away suddenly in the night. In the small hours, the landlady went for the Doctor over the way, but he refused to come, saying the old man was too aged. So the poor gentleman died alone—in this rat hole of a place.
Intending to buy my usual 3d. packet of Goldflakes, entered a tobacconist’s in Piccadilly, but once inside surprised to find myself in a classy west-end establishment, which frightened my flabby nature into buying De Reszke’s instead. I hadn’t the courage to face the aristocrat behind the counter with a request for Goldflakes—probably not stocked. What would he think of me? Besides, I shrank from letting him see I was not perfectly well-to-do.
I wonder what this year has in store for me? The first twenty-four years of my life have hunted me up and down the keyboard—I have been right to the top and also to the bottom—very happy and very miserable. Yet I prefer the life that is a hunt and an adventure. I don’t really mind being chased like this. I almost thrive on the excitement. If I knew always where to look with any degree of certainty for my next day’s life I should yawn! “What if today be sweet,” I say, and never look ahead. To me, next week is next century.
The danger and uncertainty of my life make me cherish and hug closely to my heart various little projects that otherwise would seem unworthy. I work at them quickly, frantically, sometimes, afraid to whisper to a living soul what expectations I dare to harbour in my heart. What if now the end be near? Not a word! Let me go onward.
Today I have reviewed the situation carefully, exhaustively. I have peered into every aspect of my life and achievements and everything I have seen nauseates me. I can find no ray of comfort in anything I have done or in anything I might do. My life seems to have been a wilderness of futile endeavour. I started wrong from the very beginning. At the moment of my birth I was coming into the world in the wrong place and under wrong conditions. Why seek to overcome such colossal initial disadvantages? In this mood I found fault with my parentage, my inheritance, all my mental and physical disabilities. …
This must be a form of incipient insanity. Even as a boy, I can remember being preternaturally absorbed in myself and preternaturally discontented. I was accustomed to exhaust my mind by the most harassing cross-examinations—no Counsel at the Bar ever treated a witness more mercilessly. After a day of this sort of thing, when silently and morbidly in every spare moment, at meals, in school, or on a walk, I would incessantly ply the questions, “What is the ultimate value of your work, cui bono?” etc. I went to bed in the evening with a feeling of hopelessness and dissatisfaction—haggard with considerations and reconsiderations of my outlook, my talent, my character, my future. In bed, I tossed
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