while ago, I read in the local newspaper which I get up from the country two columns concerning the accidental death of an old woman, while two lines were used to record the death of a townsman at the front from an aerial dart. Behold this poor rag! staggering along under the burden of the War in a passionate endeavour to preserve the old-time interest in an old woman’s decease. Yet more or less we are all in the same case: I still write my Journal and play Patience of an evening, and an old lady I know still reads as before the short items of gossip in the papers, neglecting articles and leaders. … We are like a nest of frightened ants when someone lifts the stone. That is the world just now.
… I was so ashamed of having to fall back upon such ignominious publications for my literary efforts that on presenting him with two copies, I told the following lie to save my face:
“They were two essays of mine left over at the beginning of the War, you know. My usual channel became blocked so I had to have recourse to these.”
“Where do you publish as a rule?” he innocently asked.
“Oh! several in the Manchester Guardian,” I told him out of vanity. “But of course every respectable journal now has closed down to extra-war topics.”
I lie out of vanity. And then I confess to lying—out of vanity too. So that one way or another I am determined to make kudos out of myself. Even this last reflection is written down with an excessive appreciation of its wit and the intention that it shall raise a smile.
Still nothing to report. The anxiety is telling on us all. The nurse has another case on the 22nd.
I looked at myself in the mirror this morning—nude, a most revolting picture. An emaciated human being is the most unlovely thing in creation. Some time ago a smart errand boy called out “Bovril” after me in the street.
On my way to the Station met two robust, brawny curates on the way to the daily weekday service—which is attended only by two decrepit old women in black, each with her prayerbook caught up to her breast as if she were afraid it might gallop off. That means a parson apiece—and in war time too.
My sympathy with myself is so unfailing that I don’t deserve anybody else’s. In many respects, however, this Journal I believe gives the impression that I behave myself in the public gaze much worse than I actually do. You must remember that herein I let myself go at a stretch gallop: in life I rein in, I am almost another person. Would you believe it, E⸺ says I am full of quick sympathy with others and extraordinarily cheerful, nay gay. Verily I lead a curious double existence: among most people, I pass for a complaisant, amiable, mealymouthed, furry if conceited creature. Here I stand revealed as a contemptuous, arrogant malcontent. My life has embittered me au fond, I have the crabbed temper of the disappointed man insufficiently developed yet to be very plainly visible beneath my innate affable, unassuming, humble, diffident, cheerful characteristics. With fools on every hand I am becoming insolent, aggressive, self-declamatory. Last evening came home and got down Robert Buchanan’s sonnet, “When He returns and finds the world so drear,” and felt constrained to read it out to E⸺. I poured out its acid sentiment with the base revenge of a vitriol thrower, and then became quiescent.
It is a helpless feeling, sitting still and watching circumstances pounding away at my malleable character and moulding it wrongly.
An American Neighbour
We have a delightful American neighbour here whose life revolves like the flywheel of an engine. Even when not in eruption his volcanic energy is always rumbling and can be heard. Seeing he is a globe trotter, I was surprised to observe his most elaborate precautions for catching the train and getting a seat when he takes his wife and family to town. He first of all plants himself and all his property down at a certain carefully selected point along the platform as if he were in the wild west lying in wait for a Buffalo. Then as the train comes in, his eye fixes on an empty compartment as it passes and he dashes off after it in furious pursuit up the platform, shouting to his family to follow him. Having lassoed the compartment, squaw and piccaninnies are hustled in as if there was not a moment to lose, what time the black-coated, suburban Englishmen look on in pain and silence, and then slowly with offensive deliberation enter their respective carriages.
The Stockbroker
Another neighbour who interests me is mainly notable for his extraordinary gait. He is a man with a large, round head, a large round, dissolute looking face and fairly broad shoulders, below which everything tapers away to a pair of tiny feet neatly booted. These two little feet are excessively sensitive to road surface—one would say he had special sense organs on his toes, to judge by the manner in which he picks out his path along the country road in short, quick, fussy steps: his feet seem to dissect out the road as if boning a herring. A big bunion is as good as a sense organ, but his feet are too small and elegant.
The second nurse arrived today. Great air raid last night of which we heard nothing, thank God!
My nerves are giving way under the strain. … One leg (the left) drags abominably. … We shall want a bath-chair as well as a perambulator.
Crawled up through the path-fields to the uplands and sat in a field in the sun with my back against a haystack. I was so immobile in my dejection that Flies and Grasshoppers came and
