personal advertisement to the newspaper to try to find my little Irish girl who lives at Notting Hill Gate. Today they return me the money and advert, no doubt mistaking me for a White Slave trafficker. And by this time, I’m thinking, my little Irish girl can go to blazes. Shall spend the P.O. on sweets or monkey nuts.
Lupus
It is raining heavily. I have just finished dinner. In the street an itinerant musician is singing dolefully, “O Rest in the Lord.” In my dirty little sitting room I begin to feel very restless, so put on my hat and cloak and walk down towards the Station for a paper to read. It is all very dark and dismal, and I gaze with hungry eyes in through some of the windows disclosing happy comfortable interiors. At intervals thunder growls and lightning brightens up the deserted dirtiness of the Station Waiting Room. A few bits of desolate paper lie about on the floor, and up in one corner on a form a crossing-sweeper, motionless and abject, driven in from his pitch by the rain. His hands are deep in his trousers’ pockets, and the poor devil lies with legs sprawling out and eyes closed: over the lower part of his face he wears a black mask to hide the ravages of lupus. … He seemed the last man on earth—after everyone else had died of the plague. Not a soul in the station. Not a train. And this is June!
Measuring Lice
Spent the day measuring the legs and antennae of lice to two places of decimals!
To the lay mind how fantastic this must seem! Indeed, I hope it is fantastic. I do not mind being thought odd. It seems almost fitting that an incurable dilettante like myself should earn his livelihood by measuring the legs of lice. I like to believe that such a bizarre manner of life suits my incurable frivolousness.
I am a Magpie in a Baghdad bazaar, hopping about, useless, inquisitive, fascinated by a lot of astonishing things: e.g., a book on the quadrature of the circle, the gabbertushed fustilugs passage in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, names like Mr. Portwine or Mr. Hogsflesh, Tweezer’s Alley or Pickle Herring Street, the excellent, conceitful sonnets of Henry Constable or Petticoat Lane on a Sunday morning.
Colossal things such as Art, Science, etc., frighten me. I am afraid I should develop a thirst that would make me wish to drink the sea dry. My mind is a disordered miscellany. The world is too distracting. I cannot apply myself for long. London bewilders me. At times it is a phantasmagoria, an opium dream out of De Quincey.
Prof. Geo. Saintsbury’s book on Elizabethan literature amuses me. George, there can be no doubt, is a very refined, cultivated fellow. I bet he don’t eat periwinkles with a pin or bite his nails—and you should hear him refer to folk who can’t read Homer in the original or who haven’t been to Oxford—to Merton above all. He also says non so che for je ne sais quoi.
… I placed the volume on the mantelpiece as if it were a bottle of physic straight from my Dispensary, and I began to expostulate and expound, as if she were a sick person and I the doctor. … She seemed a little nettled at my proselytising demeanour and gave herself out to be very preoccupied—or at any rate quite uninterested in my physic. I read the book last night at one sitting and was boiling over with it.
“I fear I have come at an inconvenient time,” I said, with a sardonic smile and strummed on the piano. … “I must really be off. Please read it (which sounded like ‘three times a day after meals’) and tell me how you like it. (Facetiously.) Of course don’t give up your present manual for it, that would be foolish and unnecessary.” … I rambled on—disposed to be very playful.
At last calmly and horribly, in a thoughtful voice she answered—
“I think you are very rude; you play the piano after I asked you to stop and walk about just as if it were your own home.”
I remained outwardly calm but inwardly was very surprised and full of tremors. I said after a pause—
“Very well, if you think so. … Goodbye.”
No answer; and I was too proud to apologise.
“Goodbye,” I repeated.
She went on reading her novel in silence while I got as far as the door—very upset.
“Au revoir.”
No answer.
“Oh,” said I, and went out of the room leaving my lady for good and all and I’m not sorry.
In the passage met Miss ⸻. “What?” she said, “going already?”
“Farewell,” I said sepulchrally. “A very tragic farewell,” which left her wondering.
At the Albert Hall
Went with R⸺ to the Albert Hall to the Empress of Ireland Memorial Concert with massed bands. We heard the Symphonie Pathétique, Chopin’s Funeral March, “Trauermarsch” from Götterdammerung, the “Ride of the Valkyries” and a solemn melody from Bach.
This afternoon I regard as a mountain peak in my existence. For two solid hours I sat like an Eagle on a rock gazing into infinity—a very fine sensation for a London Sparrow. …
I have an idea that if it were possible to assemble the sick and suffering day by day in the Albert Hall and keep the Orchestra going all the time, then the constant exposure of sick parts to such heavenly air vibrations would ultimately restore to them the lost rhythm of health. Surely, even a single exposure to—say Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—must result in some permanent reconstitution of ourselves body and soul. No one can be quite the same after a Beethoven Symphony has streamed through him.
If one could develop a human soul like a negative the effect I should say could be seen. …
