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.