before my mind’s eye and observed myself as hero of the plot. I saw myself sitting in a dirty armchair in a dirty house in a dirty London street, with the landlady’s dirty daughter below-stairs singing, “Little Grey Home in the West,” my head obscured in a cloud of depression, and in my mind the thought that if life be a test of endurance I must hang on grimly to the arms of the chair and sit tight till bedtime.
This attitude proved a useful means of self-defence. When I had dramatised my misery, I enjoyed it, and acute mental pain turned into merely aesthetic malaise.
A lurid day. Suffering from the most horrible physical languor. Wrote the Doctor saying I was rapidly sliding down a steep place into the sea (like the swine I am). Could I see him?
Endured an hour’s torture of indecision tonight asking myself whether I should go over to ask her to be my wife or should I go to the Fabian Society and hear Bernard Shaw. Kept putting off the decision even till after dinner. If I went to the flat, I must shave; to shave required hot water—the landlady had already cleared the table and was rapidly retreating. Something must be done and at once. I called the old thing back impulsively and ordered shaving water, consoling myself with the reflection that it was still unnecessary to decide; the hot water could be at hand in case the worst happened. If I decided on matrimony I could shave forthwith. Should I? (After dark I always shave in the sitting-room because of the better gaslight.)
Drank some coffee and next found myself slowly, mournfully putting on hat and coat. You can’t shave in hat and coat so I concluded I had decided on Shaw. Slowly undid the front door latch and went off.
Shaw bored me. He is mid-Victorian. Sat beside a bulgy-eyed youth reading the Freethinker.
In the evening asked her to be my wife. She refused. Once perhaps … but now. …
I don’t think I have any moral right to propose to any woman seeing the state of my health and I did not actually intend or wish to. … It was just to get it off my mind—a plain statement. … If I don’t really and truly love her it was a perfectly heartless comedy. But I have good reason to believe I do. With me, moments of headstrong passion alternate with moods of perfectly immobile self-introspection. It is a relief to have spoken.
Very miserable. Asked R⸺ three times to come and have dinner with me. Each time he refused. My nerves are completely jangled. Tu l’as voulu, George Dandin—that’s the rub.
She observed me carefully—I’m looking a perfect wreck—tu l’as voulu, George Dandin—but it’s mainly ill-health and not on her account.
I said—
“Some things are too funny to laugh at.”
“Is that why you are so solemn?”
“No,” I answered, “I’m not solemn, I am laughing—some things are too solemn to be serious about.”
She saw me off at the door and smiled quietly—an amused faraway smile of feline satisfaction. …
Horrible nervous depression. Thinking of suicide with a pistol—a Browning. Or of 10 days’ mysterious disappearance, when I will go and live in a good Hotel, spend all my money, and live among human beings with eyes and noses and legs. This isolation. Am I going mad? If I disappeared, it would be interesting to see if anyone missed me.
Still thinking of suicide. It seems the only way out. This morning my Essay was returned by the Editor of ⸻. One by one I have been divested of all my most cherished illusions. Once my ambitions gave me the fuel with which to keep myself alive. One after another they have been foiled, and now I’ve nothing to burn. I am daily facing the fact that my ambitions have overtaxed my abilities and health. For years, my whole existence has rested on a false estimate of my own value, and my life been revolving around a foolish self-deception. But I know myself as I am at last—and am not at all enamoured. The future has nothing for me. I am wearied of my life already. What is there for any of us to do but die?
Before going over tonight bought London Opinion deliberately in order to find a joke or better still some cynicism about women to fire off at her. Rehearsed one joke, one witticism from Oscar Wilde, and one personal anecdote (the latter for the most part false), none of which came off, though I succeeded in carrying off a nonchalant or even jaunty bearing.
“Don’t you ever swear?” I asked. “It’s a good thing you know, swearing is like pimples, better to come out, cleanses the moral system. The person who controls himself must have lots of terrible oaths circulating in his blood.”
“Swearing is not the only remedy.”
“I suppose you prefer the gilded pill of a curate’s sermon: I prefer pimples to pills.”
Is it a wonder she does not love me?
I wonder why I paint myself in such horrid colours—why have I this morbid pleasure in pretending to those I love that I am a beast and a cynic? I suffer, I suppose, from a lacerated self-esteem, from a painful loneliness, from the consciousness of how ridiculous I have made myself, and that most people if they knew would regard me with loathing and disgust.
I am very unhappy. I am unhappy because she does not care for me, and I am chiefly unhappy because I do not care for her. Instead of a passion, only a dragging heavy chain of attraction … some inflexible law makes me gravitate to her, seizes me by the neck and suspends me over her, I cannot look away. …
