my life willingly—it is being taken from me piece by piece, while I watch the pilfering with lamentable eyes.
I have tendered my resignation and retire on a small gratuity.
My hand gets a little better. But it’s a cat and mouse game, and so humiliating to be the mouse.
… Parental affection comes to me only in spasms, and if they hurt, they do not last long. Curiously enough, as in the case of very old people, my consciousness reverts more easily to conditions long past. I seem unable to apprehend all the significance of having a nine-months old daughter, but some Bullfinches or Swallows seen through the window rouse me more. No one can deny I have loved Birds to intoxication. In my youth, birds’ eggs, and little nestlings and chickens sent me into such raptures I could never tell it to you adequately. … I am too tired to write more.
Reading Pascal again. If Shelley was “gold dusty from tumbling among the stars,” Pascal was bruised and shaken. The one was delighted, and the other frightened. I like Pascal’s prostration before the infinities of Time, Space and the Unknown. Somehow, he conveys this more vividly than the uplift afforded him by religion.
I don’t believe in the twin-soul theory of marriage. There are plenty of men any one of whom she might have married and lived with happily, and simpler men than I am. Methinks there are large tracts could be sliced off my character and she would scarcely feel the want of them. To think that she of all women, with a past such as hers, should be swept into my vicious orbit! Yet she seems to bear Destiny no resentment, so I bear it for her and enough for two. At our engagement I gave her my own ring to wear as a pledge—we thought it nicer than buying a new one. It was a signet ring with a dark smooth stone. Strange to say it never once occurred to me till now that it was a mourning ring in memory of a great-uncle of mine, actually with an inscription on the inside.
As long as I can hold a pen, I shall, I suppose, go on trickling ink into this diary!
I am amusing myself by reading the Harmsworth Encyclopaedia in 15 volumes, i.e., I turn over the pages and read everything of interest that catches my eye.
I get out of bed about ten, wash and sit by the window in my blue striped pyjama suit. It is so hot I need no additional clothing. E⸺ comes in, brushes my hair, sprinkles me with lavender water, lights my cigarette, and gives me my book-rest and books. She forgets nothing.
From my window I look out on a field with Beech hedge down one side and beyond, tall trees—one showing in outline exactly like the profile of a Beefeater’s head, more especially at sunset each evening when the tree next behind is in shadow. The field is full of blue Scabious plants, Wild Parsley and tall grass—getting brown now in the sun. Great numbers of White Butterflies are continually rocking themselves across—they go over in coveys of four or five at a time—I counted 50 in five minutes, which bodes ill for the cabbages. Not even the heaviest thunder showers seem to debilitate their kinetic ardour. They rock on like white aeroplanes in a hail of machine-gun bullets.
Then there are the Swallows and Martins cutting such beautiful figures through the air that one wishes they carried a pencil in their bills as they fly and traced the lines of flight on a Bristol board. How I hanker after the Swallows! so free and gay and vigorous. This autumn, as they prepare to start, I shall hang on every twitter they make, and on every wing-beat; and when they have gone, begin sadly to set my house in order, as when some much loved visitors have taken their departure. I am appreciating things a little more the last few days.
A Jeremiad
When I resigned my appointment last month, no one knows what I had to give up. But I know. Though if I say what I know no one is compelled to believe me excepting out of charity. It will never be discovered whether what I am going to state is not simply despairing bombast. My few intimate friends and relatives are entirely innocent of science, not to say zoology, and all they realise is the significant fact that I am prone to go extravagant lengths in conversation. But you may take it or leave it: I was the ablest junior on the staff and one of the ablest zoologists in the place—but my ability was always muffled by the inferior work they gave me to do. My last memoir published last December was the best of its kind in treatment, method and technique that ever issued from the institution—I do not say the most important. It was trivial—my work always was trivial because they put me in a mouldy department where all the work was trivial and the methods used as primitive, slipshod and easy as those of Fabricius, the idea being that as I had enjoyed no academic career I was unsuited to fill other posts then vacant—one, work on the Coelenterates and another on Vermes, both rarely favoured by amateurs and requiring laboratory training. Later, I had the mortification of seeing these posts filled by men whose powers I by no means felt inclined to estimate as greater than my own. Meanwhile, I who had been dissecting for dear life up and down the whole Animal Kingdom in a poorly equipped attic laboratory at home, with no adequate instruments, was bitterly disappointed to find still less provision made even in a so-called Scientific Institution so grandly styled the British Museum (N.H.). On my
