Perhaps I was pretty near having a breakdown when I came abroad, and the enforced idleness of this life may have been Providential (all my hair was falling out, and my eyes were very bad, and the war was wearing me down rather); but to sit in an hotel bedroom or to potter over trifles in sitting-rooms seems a poor sort of way of passing one's time. To rest has always seemed to me very hard work. I can't even go to bed without a pile of papers beside me to work at during the night or in the early morning!
When the power of writing leaves me, as it does fitfully and without warning, I have a feeling of loneliness, which helps to convince me of what I have always felt, that this power comes from outside, and can only be explained psychically. I asked a great writer once if he ever experienced the feeling I had of being "left," and he told me that sometimes during the time of desolation he had seriously contemplated suicide.
30 January.—I got a telephone message from Mr. Bevan last night. He says Baku is too horrible, and there is no news of the cars. People are telling me now that if instead of cars we had given money, we should have been fêted and decorated and extolled to the skies; but then, where would the money have gone? Last week the two richest Armenian merchants in this town were arrested for cheating the soldiers out of thousands of yards of stuff for their coats. A Government official could easily be found to say that the cloth had been received, and meanwhile what has the soldier to cover him in the trenches?
Armenians are certainly an odious set of people, and their ingratitude is equalled by their meanness and greed. Mr. Hills, who is doing the Armenian relief work here, pays all his own expenses, and he can't get a truck to take his things to the refugees without paying for it, while he is often asked the question, "Why can't you leave these things alone?" Now that Mrs. Wynne has left I am asked the same question about her. Russia can "break" one very successfully.
The weather has turned cold, and there is tearing wind and snow.
1 February.—"No," says I to myself, in a supremely virtuous manner, "I shall not be beaten by this enervating existence here. I'll do something—if it's only sewing a seam."
So out came needles and cotton and mending and hemming, but, would it be believed, I am afflicted with two "doigts blancs" (festered fingers), and have to wear bandages, which prevent my doing even the mildest seam. Oddly enough, this "maladie" is a sort of epidemic here. The fact is, the dust is full of microbes, and no one is too well nourished.
SOME "MALADES IMAGINAIRES"
I am rather amused by those brave strong people who "don't make a fuss about their health." One hears from them almost daily that their temperature has gone up to 103°; "but it's nothing," they say heroically, "or if it is, it's only typhoid, and who cares for a little typhoid?" Does a head ache, there is "something very queer about it, but"—pushing back hair from hot brow—"no one is to worry about it. It will be better to-morrow; or if it really is going to be fever, we must just try to make the best of it." A sty in the eye is cataract, "but lots of blind people are very happy;" and a bilious attack is generally that mysterious, oft-recurring and interesting complaint "camp fever." Cheer up, no one is to be discouraged if the worst happens! A thermometer is produced and shaken and applied. The temperature is too low now; it is probably only typhus, and we mean to be brave and get up.
3 February.—Last night we played bridge. All the princes and princesses moistened their thumbs before dealing, and no one is above using a "crachoir" on the staircase! Oh for one hour of England! In all my travels I have only found one foreign race which seemed to me to be well-bred (as I understand it), and that is the native of India. The very best French people come next; and the Spaniard knows how to bow, but he clears his throat in an objectionable manner. None of them have been licked! That is the trouble. An Eton boy of fifteen could give them all points, and beat them with his hands in his pockets.