The nurse has been here now for over five weeks. One day has been pretty much the same as another. I get out of bed usually about tea-time and sit by the window and churn over past, present, and future. However, the Swallows have arrived at last, though they were very late, and there are also Cuckoos, Green Wood-peckers, Moorhens, calling from across the park. At night, when the moon is up, I get a great deal of fun out of an extremely self-inflated Brown Owl, who hoots up through the breadth and length of the valley, and then I am sure, listens with satisfaction to his echo. Still, I have much sympathy with that Brown Owl and his hooting.
What I do (goodness knows what E—— does), is to drug my mind with print. I am just a rag-bag of Smollett, H.G. Wells, Samuel Butler, the Daily News, the Bible, the Labour Leader, Joseph Vance, etc., etc. Except for an occasional geyser of malediction when some particularly acrid memory comes uppermost in my mind, I find myself submitting with a surprising calm and even cheerfulness. That agony of frustration which gnawed my vitals so much in 1913 has disappeared, and I, who expected to go down in the smoke and sulphur of my own fulminations, am quite as likely to fold my hands across my chest with a truly Christian resignation. Joubert said, "Patience and misfortune, courage and death, resignation and the inevitable, generally come together. Indifference to life generally arises with the impossibility of preserving it"—how cynical that sounds.
May 8.
This and another volume of my Journal are temporarily lodged in a drawer in my bedroom. It appears to me that as I become more static and moribund, they become more active and aggressive. All day they make a perfect uproar in their solitary confinement—although no one hears it. And at night they become phosphorescent, though nobody sees it. One of these days, with continued neglect they will blow up from spontaneous combustion like diseased gunpowder, the dismembered diarist being thus hoist upon his own petard.
June 1.
We discuss post mortem affairs quite genially and without restraint. It is the contempt bred of familiarity I suppose. E—— says widows' weeds have been so vulgarised by the war widows that she won't go into deep mourning. "But you'll wear just one weed or two for me?" I plead, and then we laugh. She has promised me that should a suitable chance arise, she will marry again. Personally, I wish I could place my hand on the young fellow at once, so as to put him thro' his paces—shew him where the water main runs and where the gas meter is, and so on.
You will observe what a relish I have for my own macabre, and how keenly I appreciate the present situation. Nobody can say I am not making the best of it. One might call it pulling the hangman's beard. Yet I ought, I fancy, to be bewailing my poor wife and fatherless child.
June 15.
I sit all day in my chair, moving 8 feet to my bed at night, and 8 feet from it to my chair in the morning—and wait. The assignation is certain. "Life is a coquetry with Death that wearies me, Too sure of the amour."
July 5.