I am getting ill again, and can scarcely hold the pen. So goodbye Journal—only for a time perhaps.
Have read this blessed old Journal out to E⸺. It required some courage, and I boggled at one or two bits and left them out.
pull myself up towards the handle by means of a towel hung on the handle. After three attempts I reached the handle and found the door locked on the inside.
I collapsed on the floor and could have cried. I lay on the floor of the bathroom resting with head on my arm, then set my teeth and crawled around the passage along two sides of a square, up three more steps to the other door which I opened and then entered. I had only examined two drawers containing only clothes, when a key turned in the front door lock and E⸺ entered with ⸻ and gave her usual whistle.
I closed the drawers and crawled out of the room in time to hear E⸺ say in a startled voice to her mother: “Who’s that upstairs?” I whistled, and said that being bored I had come up to see the cot: which passed at that time all right.
Next morning my darling asked me why I went upstairs. I did not answer, and I think she knows.
Leapfrog
Some girls up the road spent a very wet Sunday morning playing leapfrog in their pyjamas around the tennis lawn. It makes me envious. To think I never thought of doing that! and now it is too late. They wore purple pyjamas too. I once hugged myself with pride for undressing in a cave by the sea and bathing in the pouring rain, but that seems tame in comparison.
“Liebestod”
A perfect autumn morning—cool, fine and still. What sweet music a horse and cart make trundling slowly along a country road on a quiet morning! I listened to it in a happy mood of abstraction as it rolled on further and further away. I put my head out of the window so as to hear it up to the very last, until a Robin’s notes relieved the nervous tension and helped me to resign myself to my loss. The incident reminded me of the “Liebestod” in Tristan, with the Robin taking the part of the harp.
For days past my emotions have been undergoing kaleidoscopic changes, not only from day to day but from hour to hour. For ten minutes at a time I am happy or miserable, or revengeful, venomous, loving, generous, noble, angry, or murderous—you could measure them with a stopwatch. Hell’s phantoms course across my chest. If I could lie on this bed as quiet and stony as an effigy on a tomb! But a moment ago I had a sharp spasm at the sudden thought that never, never, never again should I walk through the path-fields to the uplands.
My 28th birthday.
Dear old R⸺ (the man I love above all others) has been in a military hospital for months. It is a great hardship to have our intercourse almost completely cut off.
Dear old Journal, I love you! Goodbye.
I could never have believed so great misery compatible with sanity. Yet I am quite sane. How long I or any man can remain sane in this condition God knows. … It is a consummate vengeance this inability to write.35 I cannot help but smile grimly at the astuteness of the thrust. To be sure, how cunning to deprive me of my one secret consolation! How amusing that in this agony of isolation such an aggressive egotist as I should have his last means of self-expression cut off. I am being slowly stifled.
Later. (In E.’s handwriting.)
Yesterday we shifted into a tiny cottage at half the rental of the other one, and situated about two miles further out from the village. … A wholly ideal and beautiful little cottage you may say. But a “camouflaged” cottage. For in spite of the happiness of its exterior it contains just now two of the most dejected mortals even in this present sorrow-laden world.
Last night, E⸺ sitting on the bed by me, burst into tears. It was my fault. “I can stand a good deal but there must come a breaking point.” Poor, poor girl, my heart aches for you.
I wept too, and it relieved us to cry. We blew our noses. “People who cry in novels,” E⸺ observed with detachment, “never blow their noses. They just weep.” … But the thunder clouds soon come up again.
The immediate future horrifies me.
Pushkin (as we have named the cat) is coiled up on my bed, purring and quite happy. It does me good to see him.
But consider: A paralytic, a screaming infant, two women, a cat and a canary, shut up in a tiny cottage with no money, the war still on, and food always scarcer day by day. “Give us this day, our daily bread.”
I want to be loved—above all, I want to love. My great danger is lest I grow maudlin and say petulantly, “Nobody loves me, nobody cares.” I must have more courage and more confidence in other people’s good-nature. Then I can love more freely.
I am grateful today for some happy hours plucked triumphantly from under the very nose of Fate, and spent in the warm sun in the garden. They carried me out at 12, and I stayed till after teatime. A Lark sang, but the Swallows—dear things—have gone. E⸺ picked two Primroses. I sat by some Michaelmas Daisies and watched the Bees, Flies, and Butterflies.
In fits of maudlin self-compassion I try to visualise Belgium, Armenia, Serbia, etc., and usually cure myself thereby.
It is winter—no autumn this year. Of an
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