E⸺ and I were very modern in our courtship. Our candour was mutual and complete—parents and relatives would be shocked and staggered if they knew. … You see I am a biologist and we are both freethinkers. Voilà! … I hate all reticence and concealment. … There is a good deal of that ass, Gregers Werle, in my nature.
I recalled, what strange to say she had quite forgotten, how the photographers wished to publish her own photograph in the picture papers at the time of our marriage. But she scornfully refused. (And so did I.)
But what a queer woman! … [And I, too, a queer man, drunken with wormwood and gall.]
My Gastrocnemius
I become dreadfully emaciated. This morning, before getting off the bed I lifted my leg and gazed wistfully along all its length. My flabby gastrocnemius swung suspended from the tibia like a gondola from a zeppelin. I touched it gently with the tip of my index finger and it oscillated.
My beloved wife comes home this evening after a short, much needed holiday.
My gratuity has turned out to be unexpectedly small. I hoped at least for one year’s salary. And the horrible thing is I might live for several years longer! No one was ever more enthusiastic for death than I am at this moment. I hate this world with its war, and I bitterly regret I never managed to buy laudanum in time. There are only E⸺ and dear R⸺ and one or two others—the rest of the people I know I hate en bloc. If only I could get at them. I hate to have to leave them to themselves without getting my own back.
My darling sweetheart, you ask me why I love you. I do not know. All I know is that I do love you, and beyond measure. Why do you love me—surely a more inscrutable problem. You do not know. No one ever knows. “The heart has its reasons which the reason knows not of.” We love in obedience to a powerful gravitation of our beings, and then try to explain it by recapitulating one another’s characters just as a man forms his opinions first and then thinks out reasons in support.
What delights me is to recall that our love has evolved. It did not suddenly spring into existence like some beautiful sprite. It developed slowly to perfection—it was forged in the white heat of our experiences. That is why it will always remain.
Your love, darling, impregnates my heart, touches it into calm, strongly beating life so that when I am with you, I forget I am a dying man. It is too difficult to believe that when we die true love like ours disappears with our bodies. My own experience makes me feel that human love is the earnest after death of a great reunion of souls in God who is love. When as a boy I was bending the knee to Haeckel, the saying, “God is Love,” scarcely interested me. I am wiser now. You must not think I am still anything but an infidel (as the churchmen say)—I should hate not to be taken for an infidel—and you must not be surprised that an embittered, angry, hateful person like myself should believe in a Gospel of Love. I am embittered because an intense desire to love has in many instances34 been baulked by my own idealising yet also analytical mind. I have wanted to love men blindly, yet I am always finding them out, and the disappointment chills the heart. Hence my malice and venom: which, dear, do not misconstrue. I am as greedy as an Octopus, ready out of love to take the whole world into my inside—that seat of the affections!—but I am also as sensitive as an Octopus, and quickly retract my arms into the rocky, impregnable recess where I live.
But am I dying? I have no presentiments—no conviction—like the people you read of in books. Am I, after all, in love? “I dote yet doubt; suspect yet strongly love.” It is all a matter of degree. Beside Abélard and Héloïse, our love may be just glassy affection. It is a great and difficult question to decide. I love no one else but E⸺, that, at least, is a certainty, and I have never loved anyone more.
My bedroom is on the ground floor as I cannot mount the stairs. But the other day when they were all out, I determined to clamber upstairs if possible, and search in the bedrooms for a half bottle of laudanum, which Mrs. ⸻ told me she found the other day in a box—a relic of the time when ⸻ had to take it to relieve pain.
I got off the bed on to the floor and crawled around on hands and knees to the door, where I knelt up straight, reached the handle and turned it. Then I crawled across the hall to the foot of the stairs, where I sat down on the bottom step and rested. It is a short flight of only 12 steps and I soon reached the top by sitting down on each and raising myself up to the next one with my hands.
Arrived at the top, I quickly decided on the most likely room to search first, and painfully crawled along the passage and through the bathroom by the easiest route to the small door—there are two. The handles of all the doors in the house are fixed some way up above the middle, so that only by kneeling with a straight back could I reach them from the floor. This door in addition was at the top of a high but narrow step, and I had to climb on to this, balance myself carefully, and then carefully
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