accuracy, always refers to her as “that elegant virgin.”
While sketching under Hammersmith Bridge yesterday, R⸺ heard a whistle, and, looking up, saw a charming “young thing” leaning over the Bridge parapet smiling like the blessed Damozel out of Heaven.
“Come down,” he cried.
She did, and they discussed pictures while he painted. Later he walked with her to the Broadway, saw her into a bus and said “Goodbye,” without so much as an exchange of names.
“Even if she were a whore,” I said, “it’s a pity your curiosity was so sluggish. You should have seen her home, even if you did not go home with her. Young man, you preferred to let go of authentic life at Hammersmith Broadway, so as to return at once to your precious watercolour painting.”
“Perhaps,” replied he enigmatically.
“Whatever you do, if ever you meet her again,” I rejoined, “don’t introduce her to that abominable ⸻. He is abominably handsome, and I hate him for it. To all his other distinctions he is welcome—parentage, money, success, but I can never forgive him his good looks and the inevitable marriage to some beautiful fair-skinned woman.”
R. (reflectively): “Up to now, I was inclined to think that envy as a passion did not exist.”
“Have you none?”
“Not much,” he answered, and I believe it.
“Smug wretch, then. All I can say is, I may have instincts and passions but I am not a pale watercolour artist. … What’s the matter with you,” I foamed, “is that you like pictures. If I showed you a real woman, you would exclaim contemplatively, ‘How lovely;’ then putting out one hand to touch her, unsuspectingly, you’d scream aghast, ‘Oh! it’s alive, I hear it ticking.’ ‘Yes, my boy,’ I answer severely with a flourish, ‘That is a woman’s heart.’ ”
R⸺ exploded with laughter and then said, “A truce to your desire for more life, for actual men and women. … I know this that last night I would not have exchanged the quiet armchair reading the last chapter of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed for a Balaclava Charge.”
“A matter of temperament, I suppose,” I reflected, in cold detachment. “You see, I belong to the raw meat school. You prefer life cooked for you in a book. You prefer the confectioner’s shop to cutting down the wheat with your own scythe.”
The B.M. is a ghastly hole. They will give me none of the apparatus I require. If you ask the Trustees for a thousand pounds for the propagation of the Gospel in foreign parts they say, “Yes.” If you ask for twenty pounds for a new microscope they say, “No, but we’ll cut off your nose with a big pair of scissors.”
To a pedantic prosy little old maid who was working in my room this morning, I exclaimed—
“I’d sooner make a good dissection than go to a Lord Mayor’s Banquet. Turtle Soup ain’t in it.”
She was uninspired, and said, “Oom,” and went on pinning insects. Then more brightly, and with great punctilio in the pronunciation of her words, having cleared her throat and drawn herself up with great deliberation to deliver herself of a remark, she volunteered—
“I whish I had nevah taken up such a brittle grooop as the Stones (Stoneflies). One dare not loook at a Stone.”
Poor dear little old maid. This was my turn to say “Oom.”
“Pretty dismal work,” I added ambiguously. Then with malice aforethought I whistled a Harry Lauder tune, asked her if she had ever heard Willie Solar sing, “You made me love you,” and then absentmindedly and in succession inquired—
“What’s become of all the gold?”
“What’s become of Waring?”
“What shall I sing when all is sung?”
To which several categorical interrogations she ventured no reply, but presently in the usual voice—
“I have placed an Agrionine in this drawer for security and, now I want it, cannot find it.”
“Life is like that,” I said. “I never can find my Agrionines!”
All Europe is mobilising.
Will England join in?
We all await the result of a battle between two millions of men. The tension makes me feel physically sick.
—
In bed with a fever. I never visit the flat now, but her mother kindly came over to see me.
[Living now in rooms alone.]
I have—since my return from Cornwall—placed all my journals in a specially made cabinet. R⸺ came to dinner and after a glass or so of Beaune and a cigarette, I open my “coffin”12 (it is a long box with a brass handle at each end), and with some show of deliberation select a volume to read to him, drawing it from its division with lavish punctiliousness, and inquiring with an oily voice, “A little of 1912?” as if we were trying wines. R⸺ grins at the little farce and so encourages me.
Doctor’s Consulting Rooms—my life has been spent in them! Medical specialists—Harley Street men—I have seen four and all to no purpose. M⸺ wrote me the other day—
“Come along and see me on Tuesday; some day I dare say we shall find something we can patch.”
He regards me with the most obvious commiseration and always when I come away after a visit he shakes me warmly by the hand and says, “Goodbye, old man, and good luck.” More luck than the pharmacopoeia.
My life has always been a continuous struggle with ill-health and ambition, and I have mastered neither. I try to reassure myself that this accursed ill-health will not affect my career. I keep flogging my will in the hope of winning through in the end. Yet at the back of my mind there is the great improbability that I shall ever live long enough to realise myself. For a long time past my hope has simply been to last long enough to convince others of what I might have
