makes me sick—that anyone should believe I imbibe his ideas, echo his conceits, and even ape his gestures and manner of voice.
“Lost yourself?” inquired a despicable creature the other morning as I came out of R⸺’s room after finding him out. I could have shot him dead! … As for ⸻ more than one person thinks that he alone is the brilliant author until at last he himself has got into the way of thinking it.
“It makes me hate you like mad,” I said to him today. “How can I confront these people with the naked truth?” R⸺ chuckled complacently.
“If I deny your alleged supremacy, as I did this morning, or if suddenly, in a fit of spleen, I’m induced to declare that I loathe you (as I sometimes do)”—(more chuckles) “that your breath stinks, your eyes bulge, that you have swollen jugulars and a platter face: they will think I am either jealous or insincere. … To be your Echo though!—my God!” I spat. We then grinned at one another, and I, being bored, went to the lavatory and read the newspaper secure from interruption.
Resignation
In the Tube, a young widow came in and sat in front of me—pale-faced, grief-stricken, demure—a sort of “Thy Will be Done” look. The adaptability of human beings has something in it that seems horrible. It is dreadful to think how we have all accommodated ourselves to this War. Christian resignation is a feeble thing. Why won’t this demure widow with a loud voice blaspheme against this iniquitous world that permits this iniquitous war?
I myself (licking a stamp): “The taste of gum is really very nice.”
R.: “I hate it.”
I: “My dear fellow” (surprised and entreating), “envelope gum is simply delicious.”
R.: “I never lick stamps—it’s dangerous—microbes.”
I: “I always do: I shall buy a bookful and go away to the seaside with them.”
R.: “Yes, you’ll need to.”
(Laughter.)
Thus gaily and jauntily we went on to discuss wines, whiskies, and Worthington’s, and I rounded it up in a typical cockeyed manner—
“Ah! yes, it’s only when the day is over that the day really begins—what?”
I expressed to R⸺ today my admiration for the exploit of the brave and successful Submarine Commander Max Kennedy Horton. (Name for you!) R⸺ was rather cold. “His exploits,” said this bloody fool, “involve loss of life and scarcely make me deliriously eulogistic.”
I cleared my throat and began—
“Your precious sociology again—it will be the ruin of your career as an artist. It is so interwoven into the fibre of your brain that you never see anything except in relation to its State value. You are afraid to approve of a lying, thieving rogue, however delightful a rascal he may be, for fear of what Karl Marx might say. … You’ll soon be drawing landscapes with taxpayers in the foreground, or we shall get a picture of Ben Nevis with Keir Hardie on the summit.” And so on to our own infinite mutual amusement.
The English Review returns my Essay. I am getting simply furious with an ambition I am unable to satisfy, among beautiful London women I cannot get to know, and in ill-health that I cannot cure. Shall I ever find anyone? Shall I ever be really well? My one solace is that I do not submit, it infuriates me, I resent it; I will never be resigned and milky. I will keep my claws sharp and fight to the end.
Went to Mark Lane by train, then walked over the Tower Bridge, and back along Lower Thames Street to London Bridge, up to Whitechapel, St. Paul’s, Fleet Street, and Charing Cross, and so home.
Near Reilly’s Tavern, I saw a pavement artist who had drawn a loaf with the inscription in both French and English: “This is easy to draw but hard to earn.” A baby’s funeral trotted briskly over the Tower Bridge among Pink’s jam wagons, carts carrying any goods from lead pencils and matches to bales of cotton and chests of tea.
In the St. Catherine’s Way there is one part like a deep railway cutting, the whole of one side for a long way, consisting of the brickwall of a very tall warehouse with no windows in it and beautifully curved and producing a wonderful effect. Walked past great blocks of warehouses and business establishments—a wonderful sight; and everywhere bacon factors, coffee roasters, merchants. On London Bridge, paused to feed the seagulls and looked down at the stevedores. Outside Billingsgate Market was a blackboard on an easel—for market prices—but instead someone had drawn an enormously enlarged chalk picture of a cat’s rear and tail with anatomical details.
In Aldgate, stopped to inspect a street stall containing popular literature—one brochure entitled “Suspended for Life” to indicate the terrible punishment meted out to ⸻, a League footballer. The frontispiece enough to make a lump come in the juveniles’ throats! Another stall held domestic utensils with an intimation, “Anything on this stall lent for 1d.” A news vendor I heard exclaim to a fellow-tradesman in the same line of business—
“They come and look at your bloody plakaard and then passe on.”
Loitered at a dirty little Fleet Street bookshop where Paul de Koch’s The Lady with the Three Pairs of Stays was displayed prominently beside a picture of Oscar Wilde.
In Fleet Street, you exchange the Whitechapel sausage restaurants for Taverns with “snacks at the bar,” and the chestnut roasters, with their buckets of red-hot coals, for Grub Street camp followers, selling L’Indépendance Belge or pamphlets entitled, “Why We Went to War.”
In the Strand you may buy war maps, buttonhole flags, etc., etc. I bought a penny stud. One shop was turned into a shooting gallery at three shots a penny where the Inner Temple Barristers in between the case for the defence and the case for the prosecution could come and keep their eye in against the time the Germans come.
Outside Charing Cross Station I saw a good-looking, well-dressed woman
