I saw The Younger Generation while I was in London, which pleased me a good deal, but London without Elspeth is as hopeless as anywhere else. My pangs are just as acute. I'm working like the devil and playing games every day, but at night I'm so homesick or rather so sick with longing for Elspeth that I don't know what to do. If only I'd got some long-suffering friend in whom to confide, but even Tony can't fill her place!
March 2, 1913
I've applied for educational posts in Egypt, India, Bangkok, all over the world. I've been collecting testimonials from my colleagues. I suppose all testimonials are the same, but I'd no idea I was such a wonderfully gifted teacher as all my Dons and Senior Colleagues make me out to be. It's good of them to lie on my behalf like this when I've behaved so rottenly to them. I was getting on well with my continued bombardment at every door of employment and working like a nigger, when suddenly I got a really bad bout of "flu": it left me a complete wreck. I had to get up before I was really fit in order to go to interview the Colonial Office about a job in Nigeria. I felt properly seedy, but I kept the appointment, and then suddenly lost all control of myself. I couldn't face the prospect of going back to Radchester, so I just took a train for Bath, telegraphed to Elspeth and arrived. She was a good deal surprised and upset. I was put straight to bed for ten days and now I'm recovering from bronchitis. I never enjoyed a disease before, but it was sheer Heaven to have Elspeth nursing me. I felt serenely contented and didn't care what happened to me.
Of late I have been very carefully considering whether or not I ought to be ordained. Periodically I get what seems to me a clear call. Elspeth is against it. I don't quite know why.... She came to see me off at Bristol when I was convalescent. Again the agony of parting was almost unendurable. I clung to her like a small baby until the very last moment, utterly regardless of the other passengers. All the way up in the North Express I suffered horrors of nightmares. The hills and towns looked for the first time in my life cold and hostile. It was all I could do to keep myself from jumping out and taking the next train back. I know Elspeth does not suffer quite so acutely as I do. I'm glad. It's too terrible a strain on the nervous system.
April 3, 1913
It was all I could do to keep going to the end of this term, but I managed it somehow. I've thrown myself into my work as never before: when I am actually in form, teaching, or in the afternoons playing games I am more or less sane, but I am perilously near madness when the night draws on and the hours creep past and I am left alone with nothing to console me but her photographs, her letters and my letters to her. She is my whole aim and end of living: I've tried going to theatres in Scarborough, I've tried to coach all the boys for the sports, I've played "Rugger" and hockey with greater venom than ever before, with the rather humorous result that I now have spoilt my upper lip for ever. I got it cut all to pieces: it was very cleverly sewn up, but I guess it's going to be awry for the rest of my life. I have had a fearful, nightly fear of dying before I can taste the bliss of married life. I wish I could rid myself of this fear: it's the same sort of funk that makes me rush ahead with anything that I am writing, lest I should die before it is finished: it's a most unreasoning, foolish obsession, but one that I am totally unable to eradicate. I owe more than I can ever repay to Maurice Hewlett. I have found it increasingly hard to concentrate my attention on to any book or author since I became engaged: now I've found "The Forest Lovers," "Mrs. Launcelot," "Half-Way House," and others of his novels, and I have been really engrossed, and literally forgotten all about my gnawing agonies while reading him.
Poor old "Parsnips" Askew has been sacked after thirty years' service, for incompetence. I never in my life heard such a blackguardly action. Many mean things have been done since I came here, taking evidence against boys in confession before Confirmation, putting the blame for wrong judgments on to shoulders less well able to bear them, for example, but this beats all. Askew has devoted the best years of his life to Radchester and in spite of being persistently ragged by every boy in the place for two or three generations, he has certainly done a tremendous amount of good in his own honest, simple way.
April 8, 1913
As soon as ever the term was over I rushed back to Bath to stay with Elspeth. There was an Easter Dance the very first night. Elspeth and I had every one of them together. It was like returning to Heaven straight out of Hell. I had been holding myself in leash so severely for the past few weeks that I was perilously near to a severe breakdown.