Am getting married at ⸻ Register Office on September 15th. It is impossible to set down here all the labyrinthine ambages of my will and feelings in regard to this event. Such incredible vacillations, doubts, fears. I have been living at a great rate below surface recently. “If you enjoy only twelve months’ happiness,” the Doctor said to me, “it is worth while.” But he makes a recommendation. … At his suggestion E⸺ went to see him and from his own mouth learnt all the truth about the state of my health, to prevent possible mutual recriminations in the future.18 To marry an introspective dyspeptic—what a prospect for her! … I exercise my microscopic analysis on her now as well as on myself. … This power in me is growing daily more automatic and more repugnant. It is a nasty morbid unhealthy growth that I want to hide if I cannot destroy. It amounts to being able at will to switch myself in and out of all my most cherished emotions; it is like the case in Sir Michael Foster’s Physiology of a man who, by pressing a tumour in his neck could stop or at any rate control the action of his heart.
His principal concern of course is to arouse and maintain a reputation for profundity and wit. This is done by the simple mechanical formula of antithesis: if you like winkles he proves that cockles are inveterately better; if you admire Ruskin he tears him to ribbons. If you want to learn to swim—as it is safer, he shows it is more dangerous to know how to swim and so on. I know his whole box of tricks. I myself am now playing the clever young man by writing out this analysis just as if I were not one myself.
You doubt my cleverness? Well, some years ago in R⸺’s presence I called ⸻ “the Rev. Fastidious Brisk”—the nickname be it recalled which Henley gave to Stevenson (without the addition of “Rev.”). At the time I had no intention of appropriating the witticism as I quite imagined R⸺ was acquainted with it. His unexpected explosion of mirth, however, made me uncomfortably uncertain of this, yet for the life of me I couldn’t muster the honesty to assure him that my feather was a borrowed one. A few weeks later he referred to it again as “certainly one of my better ones”—but still I remained dumb and the time for explanations went for once and all. Now see what a pretty pickle I am in: the name “Brisk” or “F.B.” is in constant use by us for this particular person—he goes by no other name, meanwhile I sit and wonder how long it will be before R⸺ finds me out. There are all sorts of ways in which he might find out: he might read about it for himself, someone might tell him or—worst of all—one day when we are dining out somewhere he will announce to the whole company my brilliant appellation as a little after-dinner diversion: I shall at once observe that the person opposite me knows and is about to air his knowledge; then I shall look sternly at him and try to hold him: he will hesitate and I shall land him with a left and right: “I suppose you’ve read Henley’s verses on Stevenson?” I remark easily and in a moment or so later the conversation has moved on.
House pride in newlywed folk, for example, H. and D. today at Golder’s Green or the Teignmouth folk, is very trying to the bachelor visitor. They will carry a chair across the room as tenderly as though it were a child and until its safe transit is assured, all conversation goes by the board. Or the wife suddenly makes a remark to the husband sotto voce, both thereupon start up simultaneously (leaving the fate of Warsaw undecided) while you, silenced by this unexpected manoeuvre, wilt away in your chair, the pregnant phrase stillborn on your lips. Presently they reenter the room with the kitten that was heard in the scullery or with a big stick used to flourish at a little Tomtit on the rose tree. She apologises and both settle down again, recompose their countenances into a listening aspect and with a devastating politeness, pick up the poor, little, frayed-out thread of the conversation where it left off with: “Europe? you were saying. …” I mobilise my scattered units of ideas but it is all a little chilly for the lady of the house if she listens with her face and speaks with her lips—her heart is far from me: she fixes a glassy eye on the tip of my cigarette, waiting to see if the ash will fall on her carpet.
The most intimate and extensive journal can only give each day a relatively small sifting of the almost infinite number of things that flow through the consciousness. However vigilant and artful a diarist may be, plenty of things escape him and in any event recollection is not
