It has now become a victory.
in the Daily News that the British Navy had been defeated, and thought it was the end of all things. The news took away our appetites. At the railway station, the Morning Post was more cheerful, even reassuring, and now at 6:30 p.m. the Battle has turned into a merely regrettable indecisive action. We breathe once more.
Old systems of Classification: Rafinesc’s Theory of Fives, Swainson’s Theory of Sevens, Edward Newman’s book called Sphinx Vespiformis tracing fives throughout the animal world, Sir Thomas Browne’s Quincunx, chasing fives throughout the whole of nature—in the words of Coleridge, “quincunxes in Heaven above, quincunxes in the Earth below, quincunxes in the mind of man, in optic nerves, in roots of trees, in leaves, in everything!”
Old false trails:
The Philosopher’s Stone (Balthazar Claes).26
A universal catholicon (Bishop Berkeley’s tar-water). Mystical numbers (as per above).
My father was Sir Thomas Browne and my mother Marie Bashkirtseff. See what a curious hybrid I am!
I toss these pages in the faces of timid, furtive, respectable people and say: “There! that’s me! You may like it or lump it, but it’s true. And I challenge you to follow suit, to flash the searchlight of your self-consciousness into every remotest corner of your life and invite everybody’s inspection. Be candid, be honest, break down the partitions of your cubicle, come out of your burrow, little worm.” As we are all such worms we should at least be honest worms.
My gratitude to E⸺ for plucking me out of the hideous miseries of my life in London is greater than I can express. If I were the cheap hero of a ladies’ novel I should immolate my journals as a token, and you would have a pretty picture of a pale young man watching his days go up in smoke by the drawing-room fire. But I have more confidence in her sterling good sense, and if I cannot be loved for what I am, I do not wish to be loved for what I am not.
Since the fateful Nov. 27th, my life has become entirely posthumous. I live now in the grave and am busy furnishing it with posthumous joys. I accept my fate with great content, my onetime restless ambition lies asleep now, my onetime, furious self-assertiveness is anaesthetised by this great War; the War and the discovery about my health together have plucked out of me that canker of self-obsession. I sit at home here in this country cottage in perfect isolation—flattened out by a steam hammer (though it took Armageddon to do it!), yet as cheerful and busy as a Dormouse laying up store for the winter. For I am almost resigned to the issue in the knowledge that some day, someone will know, perhaps somebody will understand and—immortal powers!—even sympathise, “the quick heart quickening from the heart that’s still.”
Omniscience
An omniscient Caledonian asked me today:
“Where are the Celebes? Are they E. or N.E. of the Sandwich Group?”
I marked him down at once as my legitimate prey. Sitting back in my chair, I replied slowly in my most offensive manner:
“The Island of Celebes is of enormous size and curious shape situated in the Malay Archipelago.”
The Caledonian made no sign. Instead of grinning at his error and confessing to a “floater,” he endeavoured to carry on by remarking, “That of course would be N. of Papua,” just for all the world as if his error was a minor one of latitude and longitude.
Ignoring his comment, I continued:
“From the Zoogeographical point of view, Celebes is unequalled in importance, having the strangest fauna almost of any island on the face of the globe. Then there’s ‘Wallace’s Line,’ ” I said, being purposely obscure.
The Caledonian said nought but looked hurt. It was so obvious that he didn’t know, and it was so obvious that I knew that he didn’t know, that after my farcical truculence I expected the tension to dissolve in laughter. Yet it is hard for a Caledonian to say “God be merciful to me, ignorant devil that I am.” So I pursued him with more information about “Wallace’s Line,” with an insouciant air, as much as to say, “Wallace’s Line of course you heard discussed before you were breached.”
“Some do say, you know, that the Line is ‘all my eye and Betty Martin,’ e.g., R⸺.”
This gave him his first opportunity of finding his feet in this perilously deep water. So he said promptly, eager to seem knowledgeable with an intelligent rejoinder:
“As! yes, R⸺ is an authority on Fishes.”
I assented. “At the last meeting of the British Ass. he tore the idea to shreds.”
The drowning Caledonian seized at any straw:
“Fishes, however, are not of paramount importance in cases of geographical distribution, are they?”
I knew he was thinking of marine fishes, but I did not illumine him, and merely said:
“Oh! yes, of very great importance,” at which he looked still more hurt, decamped in silence and left me conqueror of the field but without the spoils of victory: it was impossible to bring him to say “I do not know”—four monosyllables was all I wanted from the man who for months past has been lecturing me on all things from Music and the Drama to Philosophy, Painting and—Insects.
The cradle came a few days ago but I had not seen it until this morning when I unlocked the cupboard door, looked in and shuddered.
“That’s the skeleton in our cupboard,” I said on coming down to breakfast. She laughed, but I really meant it.
E⸺ keeps a blue bowl replenished with flaming Poppies in our room. The cottage is plagued with Earwigs which fly in at night and get among the clothes and bedlinen. This morning, dressing, she held up her chemise to the light saying: “I always do this—you can see their little heathen bodies then against the light. …” Isn’t she charming?
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