my wanting her back again. That would be singularly inconvenient, if, as
I can but suppose, she is perfectly happy with that ordinary person whom
she had the curious taste to prefer to me. One must guard against being
ridiculous, even when one is alone with oneself, and I am content to
seem no hero to this serviceable valet, my journal; but it is partly
the incapacity of good taste in them that makes women so intolerable.
There are men of whom I have said to myself: Now, if Clare fell in love
with this man, or that man, it would seem to me so natural, so
legitimate; I could almost despise her for not submitting to a
fascination which is insensitive not to feel. But a poseur, a fop, a
cad; one of those men whom every man sees through at the first
hand-shake; a sleek flatterer, whose compliments are vulgarities; the
shopman air of 'inquire within upon everything'; yes, that is the man
who takes his choice of women. Is vulgarity a curable thing? and will
the vulgarity of women ever be cultured out of them?
I once tried to believe that there are women and women; but I have never
found that the 'and' meant anything essential.
* * * * *
April 7.--I dined out at night, with my Jew friends, the Kahns, whom I
have not cared to see for so long; and the distraction has done me good.
They were charming, sympathetic, not obtrusively anxious about me; they
welcomed me as if I were really a friend; and there were some pleasant
people at the dinner-table. Only, I do not understand how they could ask
to dinner a certain Baroness von Eckenstein who was there. One should
preserve a certain decency in intercourse; there are things one should
be spared! I sat opposite to her, and she talked to me a good deal
across the table; she seemed intelligent; she might be all that is
admirable. Her figure was firm, ample, almost majestic, and the face had
once been not less finely designed, but over the whole left side, from
the forehead to the neck, there was a great white scar, shapeless,
horribly white, and scored as with deep cuts, which had formed
cicatrices of a yet more ghastly white. The bloodless and livid skin,
ploughed and wrinkled with these raised cicatrices, was drawn tightly
over the cheek-bone. The eyelid, strangely misshapen, was alone the
natural colour of flesh, but this eyelid looked as if it were
artificially attached to the underpart of the eyebrow, and on the
forehead above the eye there was a white scar, as if the flesh had been
cut away to form the eyelid. I dared not look at her, and yet, in spite
of myself, my eyes kept seeking her face. A death's head would be a more
agreeable companion at table. They tell me she is newly come to London,
very rich, very hospitable; Mrs. Kahn, with her intolerable indulgence,
means to make a friend of her; if I go there again I am sure to meet
her, and only the thought of that disgrace of nature makes me shiver.
Must I cut myself off again from just what had promised to be a real
distraction? I will stay at home, work, not think, bury myself in my
books.
* * * * *
April 8.--I realise, on thinking it over in a perfectly calm mood,
without any sort of nervous excitement, that I have always been afraid
of women; and that is one reason, the chief perhaps, why I have always
been so lonely, both when Clare was with me, and before and after it.
Just as I cannot get out of my head that there is some concealed
conspiracy against me, in earthly things, so there seems to be, in the
other sex, a kind of hidden anger or treachery, which makes me uneasy. I
was never really happy when a woman sat on the other side of the table,
at the other corner of the fireplace. Vigny was right:
'Toujours ce compagnon dont le coeur n'est pas sur.'
I will quote no more: the verse becomes Biblical; and indeed it is of
Samson and Delilah. Just what attracts me in a woman revolts me: the
'love strong as death,' which is no more than 'la candeur de l'antique
animal,' raised to the power of self-expression. It bewilders, distracts
yes, terrifies me. That women are better and worse than we think them, I
am certain; and no doubt nature was wise in setting us on our knees
before the enigma. To be so mysterious and so contemptible! Merely for
us to think that, shuts us away from them, our possible friends, as by a
great wall, outside which there can be only enemies. We capitulate,
perhaps, but it is the enemy who has conquered.
* * * * *
April 9.--I have been working hard, going nowhere, and I suppose staying
indoors too much. I begin to be restless again. The Kahns have written
asking me to dine with them on Sunday: will that woman be there? Hans
Greger is coming with his old music, and I should like to hear the viols
and harpsichord again. I think I must go.
Meanwhile some rumours of war which I read on the newspaper placards
have set me puzzling over one of my favourite enigmas. Is it not
incredible that there should be people in the world who will kill one
another, and even themselves, for any one of a multitude of foolish
reasons? As if life was not short enough at the longest, and one's
bodily pains troublesome enough without even the added risk of
accidents; and yet we must do our best to aid the enemy of us all; we
must make ourselves lieutenants of death; and for what? The thing begins
in our fantasies of honour, precedence, patriotism, or by whatever name,
big or small, we choose to christen the tiny germ of unreason. War
reduces to an absurdity, with its pompous mortal emphasis, the whole
argument. I have been thinking out a theory of this disease of humanity,
to which scientific people should have given a name. It might be
studied, in cellars, as they study bacilli.
* * * * *
April 10.--To-day has been one of those days in which London becomes
intolerable. The dust-carts in the street, the reek of chop-houses, the
unwashed bodies in frowsy clothes, stink on the air, and the air is too
heavy to drain off this odious foulness, and one breathes it, and seems
to sicken. I am sure some loathsome gas is rising up out of the canal
under my windows; my head turns if I lean out and look over; and now it
is between two lights, almost too dark to see by daylight and not dark
enough to draw the curtains and turn on the electric light. It is the
time of day that I hate most; it is the only time of the day when I
actively want to be doing something, and when I am acutely miserable
because I have nothing to do.
The last half-hour, since I wrote these words, has been as miserable a
half-hour as I remember spending in my life. And yet there is nothing to
account for it, except this absurd sensitiveness which is growing upon
me. Why is it that one clings to life when it bores one in this manner?
I am not sure that I have ever felt what people call the joy of living:
life has always seemed to me a more or less ridiculous compromise; and
yet there is nothing I dread so much as any sort of truth, the truth
which might put an end, once and for all, to this compromise. Was there
ever any one so illogical? I hate life, and yet I want to go on living
for ever. Sometimes, coming back at night, after a concert in which some
great music has struck one into a profound seriousness, a strange and
terrifying sensation takes hold of me as the cab turns suddenly, out of
a tangle of streets, into a broad road between trees and houses: one
enters into it as into a long dimly lighted alley, and at the end of the
road is the sky, with one star hung like a lantern upon the darkness;
and it seems as if the sky is at the end of the road, that if one drove
right on one would plunge over the edge of the world. All that is solid
on the earth seems to melt about one; it is as if one's eyes had been
suddenly opened, and one saw for the first time. And the great dread
comes over me: the dread of what may be on the other side of reality.
And it seems as if all the years of the longest life, measured out into
days and hours, would not be long enough to hold me back from the horror
of that plunge.
* * * * *
April 11.--She deceived me: all women deceive. I have no right to
condemn her any more than I condemn my doctor for deceiving me when I am
ill. He tells me: You will be better to-morrow; knowing that the only
way to make me better is to make me think I am going to be so. It would
be worse for us if women did not deceive us.
She was vain, selfish, sensual: should I have cared for her if she had
not been all three? To almost everybody she seemed gentle and modest:
was it really that I knew her better, or did everybody else know
something about her which I had never discovered? That is the odd thing
which I am beginning to wonder. She lived with me for three years, and
then left me. Whose fault was it that she left me after three years? In
this wholly unusual state of humility in which I find myself at
present, I cannot say that the fault was not partly mine, and partly
that she was a woman. What a thing it is to be a woman, and how
perplexing are even their virtues! They are not made, as we are, all of
a piece; they are not made to be consistent; they think so little of
what we think so much of; even sex is a light, simple, and natural thing
to them, to which they attach none of our morbid valuations. It is for
all this that, when I am not in this particular mood, I hate and fear
them; but to-day it all seems so natural, and women themselves seem so
pardonable. Think of the daily habits of their life: how many times a
day they dress and undress themselves, and all it means. With each new
gown a woman puts on a new self, made to match it. All day long they are
playing the comedian, while we do but sit in the stalls, listen, watch
and applaud. At least the play is for our entertainment; we pay them to
act it: let us be indulgent if the acting is not always to our taste.
* * * * *
April 13.--I have just come from the Kahns'. Certainly there is no music
like this old, tinkling, unwearied music of Greger's for giving one a
sort of phantom or ghostly peace, as if the present faded into the
distance, and life became a memory, half sad and half happy, and above
all not too poignant. I can no longer allow myself to hear Wagner, much
less Tschaikowsky: music made to make people suffer.
Of course the Baroness was there. She sat by me at dinner, but on my
left, and I could only see the unspoilt half of her face. Every now and
then I thought of the other half, and a kind of sickness came over me.
Once I turned to my other neighbour, in the middle of a sentence. But,
for the most part, I forgot, and then it seemed to me that I was talking
with the most accomplished woman I had ever met. She has travelled,
knows many languages, many people; she has the feeling, and, I think,
some of the knowledge of an artist; we spoke of music, painting, the art
of living; and, oddly enough, she has a passion for just my own
subject; history is her favourite reading, and when I spoke of one of
my own hobbies, of Attila, she quoted Jornandes, and a passage, I
remembered, that Thierry has not translated: she must have read it in
Latin. How has she found time to do all this? To me she does not seem
very young, but I suppose she is very little over forty. She spoke of
everything with great frankness; only, never of herself. I have hardly
spoken to the husband, to whom I have never seen her speak. He is very
tall, very dark, very thin, with an air of politeness so excessive that
it seems a kind of irony. She has asked me to come and see her; she
promises me the use of her library. Can I, I wonder, ever get the better
of that repugnance which rises in me when I see the ragged mask, the
mended eyelid?
* * * * *
April 14.--I have been filling these pages with rumours and
apprehensions, and now, just when I least expected it, something
definite has happened, which seems to make them all very trivial and
secondary. The Argonaut Building Society, into which I had put nearly
all the little money I had, has failed; there has been swindling; I am
ruined. What am I to do? I shall have to earn my living, heaven knows
how; I shall have to give up my work, sell my books, find some cheaper
rooms. This is the one thing I never thought would happen. I have been
afraid of most things but poverty, and now it is poverty which has come
upon me. Perhaps something will be saved out of the wreck of this false
Argonaut. I must wait until I know for certain that there is nothing.
* * * * *
April 15.--I called on the Baroness von Eckenstein. I did not expect to
see such a library. It was made by three generations of savants, and
continued by herself. There are folios not in the British Museum; one
that I had come to think had never existed. If she will really let me
sometimes use her library, I can sell my books cheerfully. She has a
remarkable intelligence. But for that scar she would have been
singularly handsome. What can have caused it, I wonder? It is like the
scar which I once saw on the face of a woman over whom her rival had
thrown vitriol. I am far from supposing any such vulgar tragedy in the
household of the Eckensteins!
* * * * *
April 16.--No further news yet from the Argonaut. I can only anticipate
the worst. Nothing but rain without, and this intolerable suspense in
one's mind. I can neither work nor think.
* * * * *
April 17.--To-day the weather has changed, and see how this barometer of
my nerves registers the change! I have been walking in Regent's Park,
the nearest country, and I feel singularly good, wise, and happy. That
uninteresting park, uninteresting in itself, has a gift of refreshment,
as one turns into it out of the streets. I find myself leaning against
the railing to watch a little dark creature with red legs and a red
bill, that swims between the swans, and clambers up on the grass, and
runs about there stealthily with a shy grace. There is an island, to
which all the water-birds go, and it is grown over with trees and
bushes and green weeds, down to the edge of the water, and they go there
when they want to be alone, as one goes into a deep wood, out of the
streets in which people stare. To-day I was perfectly happy, merely
walking about the park. I sat under a tree for half an hour, and it was
only when I realised that a queer sound which had come to me at
intervals, a mournful and deep cry, which I had heard in a kind of
dream, was the crying of the wild beasts, over yonder, inside their
bars, that I got up and came away.
I have gone back to my journal at three o'clock in the morning, because
I cannot sleep, and one of my old horrors has taken hold of me again. I
am writing in order to give myself almost a sense of companionship: this
talking to oneself on paper is so different from the loud emptiness of
the night, when one is awake, and one's thoughts cry out. I woke up
suddenly, and felt the darkness about me, like a horrible oppression. I
felt as I have sometimes felt when the train has been carrying me
through a long tunnel. All the blood went to my head, as if I were
stifling, and I had a need of daylight. I turned on the electric light,
but it made no difference; it was no more than the light in the
railway-carriage while the darkness is thundering about one's ears, I
had the sensation of a world in which the daylight had been blotted out,
and men stumbled in a perpetual night, which the lamps did but make
visible. I felt that I should not be able to go on breathing unless I
thrust the thought out of my mind, and I got up and turned on all the
lights and walked to and fro in the rooms, and then came in here to
quiet myself in the way I have found so good, by writing down all these
fears and scruples of mine, as coldly as I can, as if they belonged to
somebody else, in whose psychology I am interested. Already the
uneasiness has almost left me. And yet who knows if I am only wrapping
the blanket round my head once more, in order that I may run through
fire and not see it?
* * * * *
April 18.--I have had one of my old headaches to-day, partly because I
slept so little last night and partly because there has been thunder,
at intervals, all day long; and now at night, when it is quite cool
again, after the rain which washed off the suffocating heat of the day,
the sky still gives a nervous twitch now and again, like a face which
has lost control of its muscles. Yesterday it seemed as if Spring had
come, but to-day a premature Summer leapt out on the world, in one of
those distressing paroxysms of the elements in which I get more than my
share of the general discomfort. It is only for the last few hours that
I have recognised myself, and already I find it difficult to remember
that other self, which lay on the sofa with half-shut eyes and a
forehead eaten away by the little sharp teeth of the nerves. How we
measure ourselves by time, and time by ourselves! Then, it seemed
incredible that I should ever be my usual self again; my focus had been
suddenly altered, and nothing was the same. I think we ought to be more
grateful for such occasions than we are; for this sort of readjustment
is certainly useful. All habits, and not only what we call bad habits,
are hurtful; and life is one long habit, which it is good to vary
sometimes.
I suppose that my headache is not quite gone yet, and that it is this
which makes me write down these obvious reflections. I must stop writing
for to-night.
* * * * *
April 20.--I have had a strange, generous, almost incredible letter from
the Baroness. She has heard from the Kahns that I have lost all my
money, and she offers me the post of librarian; I can live in the house,
and I am to have a salary which is much more than I had before the
Argonaut went to pieces. I have only to say yes, and I am saved.
Can I accept this charity? It is nothing less. What can I give in
return? Nothing. What can have induced her to offer me this immediate
kindness? That she is generous I do not doubt; but to this point? I must
revise my opinions about women.
There is charity, certainly, and I shall soon be penniless, and not well
able to refuse it. She prizes her library; she wishes it to be put in
order, catalogued, kept in order, added to; she saw my interest, she
knew that I am perfectly capable to do what she wants to have done. Is
there anything unnatural after all in what must after all remain her
immense kindness?
One thing remains. Can I accustom myself to see her every day, to sit at
table with her, to be constantly at her call? At first it will not be
easy, and then afterwards, who knows? but that would be the worst of
all, I may come to find a sort of perverse pleasure in looking at her,
the pleasure which is part horror, and which comes from affronting and
half encouraging disgust.
* * * * *
April 28.--I have written nothing in my journal for the last week; too
many things have happened, and I have seemed to go through them almost
mechanically. I am already in my new quarters; I have my rooms, near the
library in which I work, in the vast house at Queen's Gate; and I am
already more than half regretting my old flat over Regent's Canal, where
I could be alone from morning to night.
There was no serious question of refusing this most fortunate
opportunity; I had no choice: it was this or nothing, for if I recover
L100 out of the Argonaut, it will be the utmost I have to hope for. The
Baroness is a woman of action; she insisted, she arranged everything,
and I found myself here without having done more than consent to let
things be done for me. Certainly that is a form of arrangement which
suits me, and life here seems to go not less smoothly; I have but to
accept it, not without a certain satisfaction. The Baron must be
enormously rich; there is something almost ostentatious in the display
of gold, silver, and silk. Nothing is simple; the cost of these
expensive things seems as if ticketed upon them; and there are coronets
everywhere. But I, who never seriously thought about money until the
little I had melted away, have never realised what an efficacious oil
can be distilled out of gold for making all the wheels of life go
smoothly. I am treated as one of the family; I profit hardly less than
they from all that I care for in the possession of riches.
And yet, there is something here which weighs upon me; a sort of moral
atmosphere which renders me uneasy. I see clearly, what I had guessed
before, that there is no affection, that there is even a certain degree
of alienation, between the Baron and Baroness. Nothing can be more
polite, but with a sort of enigmatical politeness, which hides I know
not what, than the Baron's manner towards his wife. He is scrupulously,
exaggeratedly, polite towards every one; and his excessive ceremony with
me puts a certain restraint upon me. I imagine that he detests me,
merely from the extreme care with which he tries to convince me of his
amiability. The whole man seems to me false; or, it may be, he has acted
a part so long that the part has fastened itself upon him. His eyes and
his mouth seem never to say the same thing; both guard, as at two
doorways, the thoughts which are at work in his brain.
The attitude of the Baroness towards her husband has a different
inflexion of meaning; it is frigidly polite, but with a more evident
shade of aversion. If he puts forward an opinion, she contradicts it;
while he assents, outwardly, to all her opinions, but with an ironical
air which seems itself a negation. He is a great sportsman, and I have
never seen him with a book in his hands; she cares passionately for
reading, and hates every form of sport. But it is not merely a
difference of temperament; there is, I am convinced, something very
definite which sets a barrier between them. What is it? Here is a
problem, for once outside the eternal, wearing, for the most part
inevitable, problem of myself, which I shall do well to study. How
gladly I welcome anything which can distract me from my own sensations,
in which I have so long lived isolated, alone with myself!
* * * * *
May 5.--The library is even finer than I thought. The labour of
cataloguing it will be an amusement. For the present I do none of my own
work; I am absorbed in this new occupation. How strange, how fortunate,
to be at the same time taken outside myself in my thoughts, and away
from what becomes monotonous in my studies! I have found, it would
seem, precisely the distraction which the doctor ordered me. Only, the
old solitary life seems a thing to regret, now I have left it behind me;
and ought I not to regret the self which I left with it?
It is certain that I shall never accustom myself to look at the Baroness
without repugnance. From my childhood I have never been able to endure
the sight of any human disfigurement. I used to faint at the sight of
blood, and I have always looked away when I have seen people crowding
about a man or a horse fallen in the street. It is not pity, it is a
very sensitive egoism: before an accident I imagine the thing happening
to me, or I imagine myself obliged to touch the wound or the broken
limb. I never look at the Baroness without a mental shiver at the
thought of what that dead, furrowed, and discoloured skin must be like
to the touch.
* * * * *