In the early days when I did my best to strangle my love—as one would a bastard child—I took courage in the fact that for a man like me the murder was necessary. There were books to write and to read, and name and fame perhaps. To these everything must be sacrificed. ... That is all gone now. No man could have withstood for ever that concentrated essence of womanhood that flowed from her....
Still the declaration has made amends. She is pleased about it—it is a scalp.
Yet how can I forgive her for saying she supposed it was a natural instinct for a girl not to feel drawn to an invalid like me. That was cruel tho' true.
November 19.
I might be Captain Scott writing his last words amid Antarctic cold and desolation. It is very cold. I am sitting hunched up by the fire in my lodgings after a meal of tough meat and cold apple-tart. I am full of self-commiseration—my only pleasure now. It is very cold and I cannot get warm—try as I will.
My various nervous derangements take different forms. This time my peripheral circulation is affected, and the hand, arm, and shoulder are permanently cold. My right hand is blue—tho' I've shut up the window and piled up a roaring fire. It's Antarctic cold and desolation. London in November from the inside of a dingy lodging-house can be very terrible indeed. This celestial isolation will send me out of my mind. I marvel how God can stick it—lonely, damp, and cold in the clouds. That is how I live too—but then I am not God.
I fall back on this Journal just as some other poor devil takes to drink. I, too, have toyed with the idea of drinking hard. I have frequented bars and billiards saloons and in fits of depression done my best to forget myself. But I am not sufficiently fond of alcohol (and it would take a lot to make me forget myself). So I plunge into these literary excesses and drown my sorrows in Stephens' Blue-black Ink. It gives me a sulky pleasure to think that some day somebody will know....
It is humiliating to feel ill as I do. If I had consumption, the disease would act as a stimulus—I could strike an attitude feverishly and be histrionic. But to be merely "below par"—to feel like a Bunny rabbit perennially "poorly," saps my character and mental vigour. I want to crawl away and die like a rat in a hole. A bronzed healthy man makes me wince. Healthy people regard a chronic sickly man as a leper. They suspect him, something fishy.
November 20.
Still at home ill.