_Two Young Men Talking_

With H---- in his garden. He is a great enthusiast.

"I disapprove entirely of your taste in gardening," I said. "You object to the 'ragged wilderness' style, I like it. You like lawns laid out for croquet and your privet hedges pruned into 'G.o.d Save the King' or 'Dieu et mon droit.' My dear boy, if you saw Mr. ----'s wilderness at ----you'd be so shocked you'd cut and run, and I imagine there'd be an affecting reunion between you and your beloved geraniums. For my part, I don't like geraniums: they're suburban, and all of a piece with antimaca.s.sars and stuffed birds under gla.s.s bells. The colour of your specimens, moreover," I rapped out, "is vulgar--like the muddied petticoats of old market women."

H----, quite unmoved, replied slowly, "Well, here are some like the beautiful white cambric of a lady of fashion. You've got no taste in flowers--you're just six feet of grief and patience." We roared with laughing.

"Do stop watering those d.a.m.ned plants," I exclaimed at last. But he went on. I exclaimed again and out of sheer ridiculousness, in reply he proceeded to water the cabbages, the gravel path, the oak tree--and me!

While I writhed with laughing.

_May_ 27.

_By the Sea_

Sat upon a comfortable jetty of rock and watched the waves without a glimmer of an idea in my mind about anything--though to outward view I might have been a philosopher in cerebral parturition with thoughts as big as babies. Instead, little rustling dead leaves of thoughts stirred and fluttered in the brain--the pimple _e.g._ I recollected on my Aunt's nose, or the boyishness of Dr. ----'s handwriting, or Swinburne's lines: "If the golden-crested wren Were a nightingale--why, then Something seen and heard of men Might be half as sweet as when Laughs a child of seven."

I continued in this pleasurable coma all the afternoon and went home refreshed.

_May_ 29.

Have returned to London and the B.M. My first day at the M. Sat at my table in a state of awful apathy.

At least temporarily, I am quite disenchanted of Zoology. I work--G.o.d save the mark--in the Insect Room!

On the way home, purchased:--

Peroxide of hydrogen (pyorrha threatened). One bottle of physic (for my appalling dyspepsia).

One flask of brandy for emergencies (as my heart is intermittent again).

Prussic acid next.

Must have been near pneumonia at R----. Auntie was nervous, and came in during the night to see how I was.

_June_ 20.

It caused me anguish to see my article returned from the _Fortnightly_ and lying in a big envelope on the table when I returned home this evening. I can't do any work because of it, and in desperation rushed off to the stately pleasure domes of the White City, and systematically went through all the thrills--from the Mountain Railway to the Wiggle Woggle and the 'Witching Waves.

_June_ 21.

To-day I am easier. The cut worm forgives the plough. But how restless this disappointment has made me.... I have no plans for recuperation and cannot settle down to work.

_July_ 6.

On my doctor's advice, went to see Dr. P----, a lung specialist.

M----found a dull spot on one of my lungs, and, not feeling very sure, and without telling me the nature of his suspicion, he arranged for Dr.

P---- to see me, allowing me to suppose he was a stomach authority as my dyspepsia is bad.

Well: it is _not_ consumption, but my lungs and physique are such that consumption might easily supervene. As soon as Dr. P---- had gone, M----appended the following lugubrious yarn:--

Whenever I catch cold, I must go and be treated at once, all my leisure must be spent out of doors, I must take cream and milk in prodigious quant.i.ties and get fat at all costs. There is even a question of my giving up work.

_July_ 10.

A young but fat woman sitting in the sun and oozing moisture is as nasty as anything in Baudelaire.

_July_ 14.

_A "Brilliant Career"_

My old head master once prophesied for me "a brilliant career." That was when I was in the Third Form. Now I have more than a suspicion that I am one of those who, as he once pointed out, grow sometimes out of a brilliant boyhood into very commonplace men. This continuous ill health is having a very obvious effect on my work and activities. With what courage I possess I have to face the fact that to-day I am unable to think or express myself as well as when I was a boy in my teens--witness this Journal!

I intend to go on however. I have decided that my death shall be disputed all the way.

Oh! it is so humiliating to die! I writhe to think of being overcome by so unfair an enemy before I have demonstrated myself to maiden aunts who mistrust me, to colleagues who scorn me, and even to brothers and sisters who believe in me.

As an Egotist I hate death because I should cease to be I.

Most folk, when sick unto death, gain a little consolation over the notoriety gained by the fact of their decease. Criminals enjoy the pomp and circ.u.mstance of their execution. Voltaire said of Rousseau that he wouldn't mind being hanged if they'd stick his name on the gibbet. But my own death would be so mean and insignificant. Guy de Maupa.s.sant died in a grand manner--a man of intellect and splendid physique who became insane. Tusitala's death in the South Seas reads like a romance. Heine, after a life of sorrow, died with a sparkling witticism on his lips; Vespasian with a jest.

But I cannot for the life of me rake up any excitement over my own immediate decease--an un.o.btrusive pa.s.sing away of a rancorous, disappointed, morbid, and self-a.s.sertive entomologist in a West Kensington Boarding House--what a mean little tragedy! It is hard not to be somebody even in death.

A sing-song to-night in the drawing-room; all the boarding-house present in full muster. There was a German, Schulz, who sat and leered at his inamorata--a sensual-looking, pasty-faced girl--while she gave us daggers-and-moonlight recitations with the most unwarranted self-a.s.surance (she boasts of a walking-on part at one of the theatres); there was Miss M---- listening to her fiance, Capt. O---- (home from India), singing Indian Love Songs at her; there was Miss T----, a sour old maid, who knitted and snorted, not fully conscious of this young blood coursing around her; Mrs. Barclay Woods pursued her usual avocation of imposing on us all the great weight of her immense social superiority, clucking, in between, to her one chick--a fluffy girl of 18 or 19, who was sitting now in the draught, now too close to a "common"

musician of the Covent Garden Opera; finally our hostess, a divorcee, who hated all males, even Tom-cats. We were a pathetic little company--so motley, ill-a.s.sorted--who had come together not from love or regard but because man is a gregarious animal. In fact, we sat secretly criticising and contemning one another ... yet outside there were so many millions of people unknown, and overhead the mult.i.tude of the stars was equally comfortless.

_Later_: ... Zoology on occasion still fires my ambition! Surely I cannot be dying yet.

Whatever misfortune befalls me I do hope I shall be able to meet it unflinchingly. I do not fear ill-health in itself, but I do fear its possible effect on my mind and character.... Already I am slowly altering, as the Lord liveth. Already for example my sympathy with myself is maudlin.

Whenever the blow shall fall, some sort of a reaction _must_ be given.

Heine flamed into song. Beethoven wrote the 5th Symphony. So what shall I do when my time comes? I don't think I have any lyrics or symphonies to write, so I shall just have to grin and bear it--like a dumb animal.... As long as I have spirit and buoyancy I don't care what happens--for I know that or so long I cannot be accounted a failure. The only _real_ failure is one in which the victim is left spiritless, dazed, dejected with blackness all around, and within, a knife slowly and unrelentingly cutting the strings of his heart.

My head whirls with conflicting emotions, struggling, desperate ideas, and a flood of impressions of all sorts of things that are never sufficiently sifted and arranged to be caught down on paper. I am brought into this world, hustled along it and then hustled out of it, with no time for anything. I want to be on a great hill and square up affairs.

_August_ 28.

... After tea, we all three walked in Kensington Gardens and sat on a seat by the Round Pond. My umbrella fell to the ground, and I left it there with its nose poking up in a cynical manner, as She remarked.

"It's not cynical," I said, "only a little knowing. Won't you let yours fall down to keep it company? Yours is a lady umbrella and a good-looking one--they might flirt together."

"Mine doesn't want to flirt," she answered stiffly.

_September_ 13.

_At C----, a tiny little village by the sea in N----._

Looking up from a rockpool, where I had been watching Gobies, I saw three children racing across the sands to bathe, I saw a man dive from a boat, and I saw a horse-man gallop his mare down to the beach and plunge about in the line of breakers. The waters thundered, the mare whinnied, the children shouted to one another, and I turned my head down again to the rockpool with a great thumping heart of happiness: it was so lovely to be conscious of the fact that out there this beautiful picture was awaiting me whenever and as often as I chose to lift my head. I purposely kept my head down, for the picture was so beautiful I did not want to hurt it by breathing on it, and I kept my head down out of a playful self-cheating delight; I decided not to indulge myself.