I would not tolerate being deceived concerning either my own beam or other people’s motes.
Archaeopteryx and Mudflats
Yesterday I collected two distinct and several twinges and hereby save them up. They were more than that—they were pangs, and pangs that twanged.
(Why do I make fun of my suffering?)
One was when I saw the well-known figure of the Archaeopteryx remains in the slab of Lithographic sandstone of Bavaria: a reproduction in an illustrated encyclopaedia. The other was when someone mentioned mud, and I thought of the wide estuary of the T⸺, its stretches of mudflats and its wildfowl. We were turning over some pages and she said:
“What’s that?”
“Archaeopteryx,” said I.
“Whatever is Archaeopteryx?”
“An extinct bird,” I answered mournfully.
Like an old amour, my love of paleontology and anatomy, and all the high hopes I entertained of them, came smarting to life again, so I turned over the page quickly.
But why need I explain to you, O my Journal? To others, I could not explain. I was tongue-tied.
“I used to get very muddy,” I remarked lamentably, “in the old days when stalking birds on the mudflats.”
And they rather jeered at such an occupation in such a place, just as those beautiful sights and sounds of Zostera-covered mud-banks, twinkling runnels, swiftly running thin-legged waders, their whistles and cries began to steal over my memory like a delicate pain.
To my infinite regret, I have no description, no photograph or sketch, no token of any sort to remember them by. And their doom is certain. Heavens! how I wasted my impressions and experiences then! Swinburne has some lines about saltings which console me a little, but I know of no other descriptions by either pen or brush.
How revolting it is to see some barren old woman lovesick over a baby, bestowing voluptuous kisses on its nose, eyes, hands, feet, utterly intoxicated and chattering incessantly in the “little language,” and hopping about like an infatuated cock grouse.
The nurse has been here now for over five weeks. One day has been pretty much the same as another. I get out of bed usually about teatime and sit by the window and churn over past, present, and future. However, the Swallows have arrived at last, though they were very late, and there are also Cuckoos, Green Woodpeckers, Moorhens, calling from across the park. At night, when the moon is up, I get a great deal of fun out of an extremely self-inflated Brown Owl, who hoots up through the breadth and length of the valley, and then I am sure, listens with satisfaction to his echo. Still, I have much sympathy with that Brown Owl and his hooting.
What I do (goodness knows what E⸺ does), is to drug my mind with print. I am just a ragbag of Smollett, H. G. Wells, Samuel Butler, the Daily News, the Bible, the Labour Leader, Joseph Vance, etc., etc. Except for an occasional geyser of malediction when some particularly acrid memory comes uppermost in my mind, I find myself submitting with a surprising calm and even cheerfulness. That agony of frustration which gnawed my vitals so much in 1913 has disappeared, and I, who expected to go down in the smoke and sulphur of my own fulminations, am quite as likely to fold my hands across my chest with a truly Christian resignation. Joubert said, “Patience and misfortune, courage and death, resignation and the inevitable, generally come together. Indifference to life generally arises with the impossibility of preserving it”—how cynical that sounds.
This and another volume of my Journal are temporarily lodged in a drawer in my bedroom. It appears to me that as I become more static and moribund, they become more active and aggressive. All day they make a perfect uproar in their solitary confinement—although no one hears it. And at night they become phosphorescent, though nobody sees it. One of these days, with continued neglect they will blow up from spontaneous combustion like diseased gunpowder, the dismembered diarist being thus hoist upon his own petard.
We discuss post mortem affairs quite genially and without restraint. It is the contempt bred of familiarity I suppose. E⸺ says widows’ weeds have been so vulgarised by the war widows that she won’t go into deep mourning. “But you’ll wear just one weed or two for me?” I plead, and then we laugh. She has promised me that should a suitable chance arise, she will marry again. Personally, I wish I could place my hand on the young fellow at once, so as to put him through his paces—show him where the water main runs and where the gas meter is, and so on.
You will observe what a relish I have for my own macabre, and how keenly I appreciate the present situation. Nobody can say I am not making the best of it. One might call it pulling the hangman’s beard. Yet I ought, I fancy, to be bewailing my poor wife and fatherless child.
I sit all day in my chair, moving 8 feet to my bed at night, and 8 feet from it to my chair in the morning—and wait. The assignation is certain. “Life is a coquetry with Death that wearies me / Too sure of the amour.”
It is odd that at this time of the breaking of nations, Destiny, with her hands so full, should spare the time to pursue a noncombatant atom like me down such a labyrinthine sidetrack. It is odd to find her determined to destroy me with such tremendous thoroughness—one would have thought it sufficient merely to brush the dust off my wings. Why this deliberate, slow-moving malignity? Perhaps it is a punishment for the impudence of my desires. I wanted everything so I get nothing. I gave nothing so I receive nothing. I am not offering up
