The Journal of a Disappointed Man

example⁠—how beneficent a little laudanum at times in a case like mine! and how happy I could be if I knew that in my waistcoat pocket I carried a kindly, easy means of shuffling off this coil when the time comes as come it must. It horrifies me to consider how I might break the life of E⁠⸺ clean in two, and sap her courage by a lingering, dawdling dying. But there is the Defence of the Realm Act. It is a case of a Scorpion in a ring of fire but without any sting in its tail.

March 2

I ask myself: what are my views on death, the next world, God? I look into my mind and discover I am too much of a mannikin to have any. As for death, I am a little bit of trembling jelly of anticipation. I am prepared for anything, but I am the complete agnostic; I simply don’t know. To have views, faith, beliefs, one needs a backbone. This great bully of a universe overwhelms me. The stars make me cower. I am intimidated by the immensity surrounding my own littleness. It is futile and presumptuous for me to opine anything about the next world. But I hope for something much freer and more satisfying after death, for emancipation of the spirit and above all for the obliteration of this puny self, this little, skulking, sharp-witted ferret.

A Potted Novel

(1)

He was an imaginative youth, and she a tragedy queen. So he fell in love with her because she was melancholy and her past tragic. “She is capable of tragedy, too,” he said, which was a high encomium.

But he was also an ambitious youth and all for dalliance in love. “Marriage,” said he sententiously, “is an economic trap.” And then, a little wistfully: “If she were a bit more melancholy and a bit more beautiful she would be quite irresistible.”

(2)

But he was a miserable youth, too, and in the anguish of loneliness and lovelessness a home tempted him sorely. Still, he dallied. She waited. Ill-health after all made marriage impossible.

(3)

Yet love and misery drove him towards it. So one day he closed his eyes and offered himself up with sacrificial hands.⁠ ⁠… “Too late,” she said. “Once perhaps⁠ ⁠… but now.⁠ ⁠…” His eyes opened again, and in a second Love entered his Temple once more and finally ejected the money changers.

(4)

So they married after all, and he was under the impression she had made a good match. He had ill-health perhaps, yet who could doubt his ultimate fame?

Then the War came, and he had the hardihood to open a sealed letter from his Doctor to the M.O. examining recruits.⁠ ⁠… Stars and staggers!! So it was she who was the victim in marriage! That harassing question: Did she know? What an ass he had been all through, what superlative egoism and superlative conceit!

(5)

Then a baby came. He broke under the strain and daily the symptoms grew more obvious. Did she know?⁠ ⁠… The question dazed him.

Well, she did know, and had married him for love, nevertheless, against every friendly counsel, the Doctor’s included.

(6)

And now the invalid’s gratitude is almost cringing, his admiration boundless and his love for always. It is the perfect rapprochement between two souls, one that was honeycombed with self-love and lost in the labyrinthine ways of his own motives and the other straight, direct, almost imperious in love and altogether adorable.

Finis

March 5

At home ill again. Yesterday was a day of utter dreariness. All my nerves were frozen, my heart congealed. I had no love for anyone⁠ ⁠… no emotion of any sort. It was a catalepsy of the spirit harder to bear than fever or pain.⁠ ⁠… Today, life is once more stirring in me, I am slowly awaking to the consciousness of acute but almost welcome misery.

March 6

An affectionate letter from H⁠⸺ that warmed the cockles of my heart⁠—poor frozen molluscs. A⁠⸺ has written only once since August.

March 7

I am, I suppose, a whey-faced, lily-livered creature⁠ ⁠… yet even an infantry subaltern has a chance.⁠ ⁠…

My dear friend ⸻ has died and a Memorial Exhibition of his pictures is being held at the Goupil Gallery. The most fascinating man I ever met. I was attracted by him almost as one is attracted by a charming woman: by little ways, by laughing eyes, by the manner of speech. And now he is dead, of a lingering and painful disease.

March 8

Death

Have been reading Sir Oliver Lodge’s Raymond. I do not deny that I am curious about the next world, or about the condition of death. I am and always have been. In my early youth, I reflected continually on death and hated it bitterly. But now that my end is near and certain, I consider it less and am content to wait and see. As, for all practical purposes, I have done with life, and my own existence is often a burden to me and is like to become a burden also to others, I wish I possessed the wherewithal to end it at my will. With two or three tabloids in my waistcoat pocket, and my secret locked in my heart, how serenely I would move about among my friends and fellows, conscious that at some specially selected moment⁠—at midnight or high noon⁠—just when the spirit moved me, I could quietly slip out to sea on this Great Adventure. It would be well to be able to control this: the time, the place, and the manner of one’s exit. For what disturbs me in particular is how I shall conduct myself; I am afraid lest I become afraid, it is a fear of fear. By means of my tabloids, I could arrange my death in an artistic setting, say underneath a big tree on a summer’s day, with an open Homer in my hand, or more appropriately, a magnifying glass