A Last Diary | Page 6

to do if it has to be done in a bath-chair."
His will-power was enormous, unconquerable. Again and again he spurred himself on to work with an appalling expenditure of nervous energy, when an ordinary man might have flung up his hands and resigned himself to passive despair.
Let me quote from one of many letters written to me from South Kensington, all charged with a strangely arresting amalgam of hope, despair, defiance, cravings for imaginative sympathy, lofty ideals, and throbbing with a prodigious passion of life. Each and every one was a challenge and a protest. Surely there never was a halfdead man more alive. It was shortly after war broke out that he wrote this letter:
"The reason why the article The Joy of Life ' has not been sent you is because it is not finished. . . . My mood just now is scarcely fitted for the completion of an essay with such a title. I am like to ask sullenly, "What the devil's the good?" I have already drawn out of my inside big ropy entrails, all hot and steaming, and you say 'Very nice,' or ' effectively expressed,' and Austin Harrison says he is too full up.' Damn his eyes! Damn everything! Hall Caine, poor man, said once that a most terrible thing had happened to him. He sat in a railway carriage opposite a young woman reading a book written * in his life's blood,' and she kept looking up listlessly to see the names of the stations. ' The Joy of Life/ my friend, in the completed state will make people sit up perhaps. So I think as I write it. But perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. It has been like the birth of a child to me. I've been walking about ' in the family way.' The other essay was a relief to be able to bring forth. Both are self-revelations. . . . My journal is full of them, and one day when, as is probable, I have predeceased you, you will find much of B. F. C. in it almost as he appears to His Maker. It is a study in the nude, with no appeal to the highly pennnicanised intellect of such a being as , but there is meaty stuff in it, raw, red, or underdone.
"It is curious to me how satisfied we all are with wholly inadequate opinions and ideas as to the character and nature of our friends. For example, I have a rough-and-ready estimate of yourself which has casually grown up over a series of years. But I don't really feel very satisfied that I know you, and most folk wouldn't care if they didn't. They want neither to understand nor to be understood. They walk about life as at a mask ball, content to remain unknown and unrealised by the consciousness of any single human being. A man can live with his wife all his days and never be known to her particularly if they are in love. And the extraordinary thing to me is that they don't wish to understand each other. They accept each other's current coin without question. That seems to me to be uncanny to be lolling about in the arms of someone who is virtually a stranger to you.
"Not only ourselves, but everything is bound about with innumerable concentric walls of impenetrable armour. I long to pull them down, to tear down all the curtains, screens, and dividing partitions, to walk about with my clothes off, to make a large ventral incision and expose my heart. I am sick of being tied up in flesh and clothes, hemmed in by walls, by prosies, deceits. I want to pull people by the nose and be brutally candid. I want everyone to know, to be told everything. It annoys me to find someone who doesn't realise some horrible actuality like cancer or murder, or who has not heard of R. L. S., or like an infamous man I met the other day who was not sufficiently alive to know that it was Amundsen not Scott (as he nonchalantly assumed) who got to the Pole first. . . .
"You ask for my dyspepsia in a way which, my dear, good lad, I cannot resist. Well, it has been bad, damned bad. There you are! I have been in hell without the energy to lift up mine eyes. The first twenty-five years of my life have chased me up and down the keyboard. I have been to the top and to the bottom, very happy and very miserable. But don't think I am whining I prefer a life which is a hunt, and an adventure rather than a study in still life. If you suffer, Balzac said proudly, at least you live. If I were suddenly assured