The Journal of a Disappointed Man Part 52

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 gra.s.s--getting brown now in the sun. Great numbers of White b.u.t.terflies 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 thro' 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.

_August_ 1.

_A Jeremiad_

When I resigned my appointment last month, no one knows what I had to give up. But I know. Tho' 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 p.r.o.ne 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 m.u.f.fled 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 inst.i.tution--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 Clenterates 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 Inst.i.tution so grandly styled the British Museum (N.H.). On my first arrival I was presented with a pen, ink, paper, ruler, and an enormous instrument of steel which on enquiry I found to be a paper cutter. I asked for my microscope and microtome. I ought to have asked what Form I was in.

So I had to continue my struggle against odds, and only within the last year or so began to squeeze the authorities with any success. In time I should have revolutionised the study of Systematic Zoology, and the anonymous paper I wrote in conjunction with R---- in the _American Naturalist_ was a rare _jeu d'esprit_, and my most important scientific work.

In the literary world I have fared no better. My first published article appeared at the age of 15 over my father's name, my motive being not so much modesty as cunning--if the literary world (!) ragged it unmercifully, there was still a chance left for me to make good.

My next achievement of any magnitude was the unexpected printing of a story in the _Academy_ after I had unsuccessfully badgered almost every other newspaper. This was when I was 19. No proof had been sent me and no intimation of its acceptance. Moreover, there were two ugly printer's errors. I at once wrote off to correct them in the next issue. My letter was neither published nor acknowledged. I submitted, but presently wrote again, politely hinting that my cheque was overdue. But--screams of silence, and I thought it wise not to complain in view of future printing favours. I soon discovered that the journal had changed hands and was probably on its last legs at the time of my success. As soon as it grew financially sound again no more of my stories were accepted.

A more recent affair I had with the American _Forum,_ which delighted me by publis.h.i.+ng my article, but did not pay--tho' the Editor went out of his way to write that "payment was on publication." I did not venture to remonstrate as I had another article on the stocks which they also printed without paying me. In spite of uniform failure, my literary ambition has never flagged.[2] I have for years past received my rejected MSS. back from every conceivable kind of periodical, from _Punch_ to the _Hibbert Journal_. At one time I used to file their rejection forms and meditated writing a facetious essay on them. But I decided they were too monotonously similar. My custom was when the ordinary avenues to literary fame had failed me--the half-crown Reviews and the sixpenny Weeklies--to seek out at a library some obscure publication--a Parish Magazine or the local paper--anything was grabbed as a last chance. On one of these occasions I discovered the _Westminster Review_ and immediately plied them with a ma.n.u.script and the usual polite note. After six weeks, having no reply, I wrote again and waited for another six weeks. My second remonstrance met with a similar fate, so I went into the city to interview the publishers, and to demand my ma.n.u.script back. The manager was out, and I was asked to call again. After waiting about for some time, I left my card, took my departure and decided I would write. The same evening I told the publishers that the anonymous editor would neither print my article nor return it. Would they kindly give me his name and address so that I could write personally. After some delay they replied that although it was not the custom to disclose the editor's name, the following address would find her. She was a lady living in Richmond Row, Shepherd's Bush.

I wrote to her at once and received no answer. Meanwhile, I had observed that no further issues of the review had appeared on the bookstalls, and the book-sellers were unable to give me any information. I wrote again to the address--this time a playful and facetious letter in which I said I did not propose to take the matter into court, but if it would save her any trouble I would call for the MS. as I lived only a few minutes'

walk distant. I received no answer. I was busy at the time and kept putting off executing my firm purpose of visiting the good lady until one evening as I was casually reading the _Star_ coming home in the 'bus, I read an account of how some charitably disposed woman had recently visited the Hammersmith Workhouse and removed to her own home a poor soul who was once the friend of George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, and other well-known literary persons of the sixties and had, until it ceased publication a few months before, edited the once notable _Westminster Review_.

Recently, however, there has been evidence of a more benevolent att.i.tude towards me on the part of London editors. A certain magnificent quarterly has published one or two of my essays, and one of these called forth two pages of quotation and flattering comment in _Public Opinion_, which thrill me to the marrow. I fear, however, the flood-tide has come too late.

If this achievement impressed me it did not seem to impress anyone else.

A---- regarded it as a joke and laughed incredulously when someone told him of "P.O.'s" eulogy. You see I am still his foolish little brother. I am secretly very nettled too because E---- treated the whole matter very indifferently. She did not even take the trouble to read the paper's critique, and tho' she volunteered to buy several copies to send to friends, she never remembered to do so, and the whole affair has pa.s.sed out of her mind.

Now a pleasant paragraph that appeared in the press noticing some drawings of a friend of her friend, she read twice and marched off to Francesca with it in great glee. Another successful young person got his photo into the picture papers--a man we know only by hearsay, and yet it impressed her until 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.]

_August_ 6.

E---- and I were very modern in our courts.h.i.+p. 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.

_Voila_!... I hate all reticence and concealment.... There is a good deal of that a.s.s, Gregers Werle, in my nature.

_August_ 7.

_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.

_August_ 17.

My beloved wife comes home this evening after a short, much needed holiday.

_August_ 27.

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.

_August_ 31.

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.

_September_ 1.

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 G.o.d who is love. When as a boy I was bending the knee to Haeckel, the saying, "G.o.d 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 instances[3] been baulked by my own idealising yet also a.n.a.lytical 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.

_September_ 2.

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 Abelard and Helose, our love may be just gla.s.sy 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.

_September_ 3.

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 pa.s.sage and thro' 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 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sed at that time all right.

Next morning my darling asked me why I went upstairs. I did not answer, and I think she knows.

_September_ 4.

I am getting ill again, and can scarcely hold the pen. So good-bye 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.

_September_ 5.

_Leap-frog_

Some girls up the road spent a very wet Sunday morning playing leap-frog 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!