What a boon is Sunday! I can get out of bed just when the spirit moves me, dress and bath leisurely, even with punctilio. How nice to dawdle in the bath with a cigarette, to hear the holiday sound of Church bells! Then comes that supreme moment when, shaven, clean, warm and hungry for breakfast and coffee, I stand a moment before the looking-glass and comb out my tousled hair with a parting as straight as a line in Euclid. That gives the finishing touch of self-satisfaction, and I go down to breakfast ready for the day’s pleasure. I hate this weekday strain of having to be always each day at a set time in a certain place.
up a bit. They are just like little old women bundling along.
The Penguins, of course, were the most amusing, and, after operating fruitlessly for some time on a troublesome Adèle, I was amused to find, on turning around, all the other Adèles clustered close around my feet in an attitude of mute supplication.
The Armadillo required all the strength of two keepers to hold still while I went over his carcass with lens and forceps. I was also allowed to handle and examine the Society’s two specimens of that amazing creature the Echidna.
Baloeniceps rex like other royalty had to be approached decorously. He was a big, ill-tempered fellow, and quite unmanageable except by one keeper for whom he showed a preference. While we other conspirators hid ourselves outside, this man entered the house quietly and approached the bird with a gentle cooing sound. Then suddenly he grabbed the bill and held on. We entered at the same moment and secured the wings, and I began the search—without any luck. We must have made an amusing picture—three men holding on for dear life to a tall, grotesque bird with an imperial eye, while a fourth searched the feathers for parasites!
I often sit in my room at the B.M. and look out at the traffic with a glassy, mesmerised face—a fainéant. How different from that extremely busy youth who came to London in 1912. Say—could that lad be I? How many hours do I waste daydreaming. This morning I dreamed and dreamed and could not stop dreaming—I had not the will to shake myself down to my task. … My memories simply trooped the colour.
It surprised me to find how many of them had gone out of my present consciousness and with what poignancy of feeling I recognised them again! How selfishly for the most part we all live in our present selves or in the selves that are to be.
Then I raced through all sorts of future possibilities—oh! when and how is it all going to end? How do you expect me to settle down to scientific research with all this internal unrest! The scientific man above all should possess the “quiet mind in all changes of fortune” —Sir Henry Wotton’s “How Happy Is He Born and Taught.”
The truth is I am a hybrid: a mixture of two very distinct temperaments and they are often at war. To keep two different natures and two different mental habits simultaneously at work is next to impossible. Consequently plenty of waste and fever and—as I might have discovered earlier for myself—success almost out of the question. If only I were purebred science or purebred art!
Life is a dream and we are all somnambules. We know that for a fact at all times when we are most intensely alive—at crises of unprecedented change, in sorrow or catastrophe, or in any unusual incident brought swiftly to a close like a vision!
I sit here writing this—a mirage! Who am I? No one can say. What am I? “A soap-bubble hanging from a reed.”
Every man is an inexhaustible treasury of human personality. He can go on burrowing in it for an eternity if he have the desire—and a taste for introspection. I like to keep myself well within the field of the microscope, and, with as much detachment as I can muster, to watch myself live, to report my observations of what I say, feel, think. In default of others, I am myself my own spectator and self-appreciator—critical, discerning, vigilant, fond!—my own stupid Boswell, shrewd if silly. This spectator of mine, it seems to me, must be a very moral gentleman and eminently superior. His incessant attentions, while I go on my way misconducting myself, goad me at times into a surly, ill-tempered outbreak, like Dr. Johnson. I hate being shadowed and reported like this. Yet on the whole—like old Samuel again—I am rather pleased to be Boswelled. It flatters me to know that at least one person takes an unremitting interest in all my ways.
And, mind you, there are people who have seen most things but have never seen themselves walking across the stage of life. If someone shows them glimpses of themselves they will not recognise the likeness. How do you walk? Do you know your own idiosyncrasies of gait, manner of speech, etc.?
I never cease to interest myself in the Gothic architecture of my own fantastic soul.13
The Punch and Judy Show
Spent a most delightful half-an-hour today reading an account in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (one of my favourite books—it’s so “gey disconnekkit”) the history of the Punch and Judy Show. It’s a delightful bit of antiquarian lore and delighted me the more because it had never occurred to me before that it had an ancient history. I am thoroughly proud of this recent acquisition of knowledge and as if it were a valuable freehold I have been showing it off saying, “Rejoice with me—see what I have got here.” I fired it off first in detail at ⸻; and H⸺ and D⸺ will probably be my victims tomorrow. After all, it is a charming little cameo of history: compact, with plenty of scope
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