Who dare forecast even his nearest future?
These last four weeks have been so charged with anxiety--not only, or
even chiefly, war anxieties--that I have not made so much as a single
entry in this diary. In fact there has been nothing to record. The poor
little garden; its flowers; its weeds; the copse surrounding it; the
entire _mise-en-scène_, with all the quips and jests which in sunnier
hours it gives rise to, seems to have vanished bodily. It is as though
the whole thing, erstwhile not without its own little importance, had
dwindled to the size of one of those infinitesimal specks, which one
sometimes sees in feverish dreams; specks so dim and small, so well-nigh
invisible, that one wonders how in the first place one ever discovered
them, and why, having done so, one should take the trouble of trying to
keep them in sight. That being the case it is as well that I am leaving
home to-morrow for several weeks, and, since I shall be chiefly in
London, have a good excuse for leaving the garden diary, like the
garden itself, behind me. Possibly, by the time I return to them, the
old, now submerged, landmarks may have risen once more to the surface,
or I may have grown a little better used to this changed landscape;
seeing that we all have to get used to every variety of landscape; every
admixture of weather; every cruel, blinding storm; every rain-washed
shore, or bitter, wreck-strewn sea, which meets us in this very odd
journey that we call our lives.