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 £100 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.
May 9.—I have got no further in my study of these two enigmatical people, who seem to have not one thought, not one feeling, in common, and yet who seem to live so calmly side by side, in this vast house where they need never meet except at meals, or when the presence of strangers isolates them. I am wholly unable to talk with the Baron, who ignores me with the most punctilious deference. He never enters the library, and, in the drawing-room, is never without a newspaper, of which he rarely turns the pages. With the Baroness I can always talk; I can even, what is rare with me, listen. For a woman, her ideas are surprisingly well informed: quotations, of course, but arranged with a personal sense of decoration. She can discuss general questions broadly, with a rare frankness, a kind of eager sincerity. What does the Baron think, I wonder, behind that screen of the newspaper, if, as he sits motionless, he is listening, as I cannot but believe, to every word that is said? I often look at the newspaper, hoping to see it at least quiver, if not drop to the floor, and the man leap out of his ambush. The Baroness interests me a little more every day, and this interest is oddly balanced by my equal difficulty in looking or in not looking at her. When she is talking with me she invariably arranges herself so as to be on my left; often she leans her head on her left hand, as if to shield even what remains unseen. How horribly she must suffer from this living mask, under which she is condemned to exist! How long, I wonder, has she worn it, and shall I ever know the cause? Is she always conscious of its presence, of the eyes that seek to avoid it, and return, despite themselves, stealthily? I can conceive no more exquisite torture. Or yes, there is one. Suppose this woman, in whom I can distinguish a quite unusual force and energy of emotion, were to fall in love again: she is at the age of lasting passions, and what could be more natural in her? That would be a tragedy which I hardly like to think of; the more so, as I can easily conceive how powerful must have been her attraction before the time of this accident. There is something almost magnetic in her nature, and I can see that the Kahns, for instance, are attracted by her to the point of hardly seeing her as she is, of forgetting to look at her with their own eyes.