29 January 1917 – 4 February 1917

Last night, I pulled aside the window curtain of our front door and peeped out. Just below the densely black projecting gable of the house I saw the crescent moon lying on her back in a bed of purple sky, and I saw our little white frosted garden path curving up towards the garden gate. It was a delicious coup d'œil, and I shewed it to E----.

Showers of snow at intervals, the little flakes rocking about lazily or spiralling down, while the few that eventually reached the ground would in a moment or so be caught up in a sudden furious puff of wind, and sent driving along the road with the dust. My usual little jaunt up the lane past the mossy farm-house. Home to toasted tea-cakes and a pinewood fire, with my wife chattering prettily to the baby. After tea, enchanted by the reading of a new book--Le Journal de Maurice de Guérin--or rather the introduction to it by Sainte-Beuve. I devoured it! I have spent a devouring day; under a calm exterior I have burnt up the hours; all of me has been athrob; every little cell in my brain has danced to its own little tune. For to-day, Death has been an impossibility. I have felt that anyhow to-day I could not die--I have laughed at the mere thought of it. If only this mood would last! If I could feel thus always, then I could fend off Death for an immortality of life. But suddenly, as now, the real horror of my life and future comes on me in a flash. For a second I am terrified by the menace of the future, but fortunately only for a second. For I've learnt a trick which I fear to reveal; it is so valuable and necessary to me that if I talked of it or vulgarised it my secret might be stolen away. Not a word then! Later. I have just heard on the gramophone, some Grieg, and it has charged my happiness with disrupting voltage of desire. Oh! if only I had health, I could make the welkin ring! I shall leave so little behind me, such a few paltry pages beside what I have it in me to do. It shatters me.

Looking back, I must say I like the splendid gusto with which I lived thro' yesterday: that mettlesome fashion in which I took the lane, and at the top, how I swung around to sweep my gaze across to the uplands opposite with snow falling all the time. Then in the evening, the almost complete absorption in the new book when I forgot everything pro tem. It was quite like the old days.

Crowd Fever After four months' sick leave, returned to work and London. An illness like mine rejuvenates one--for the time being! A pony and jingle from the old "Fox and Hounds Inn" took me to the Station, and I enjoyed the feel of the wheels rolling beneath me over the hard road. In the train, I looked out of the window as interested as any schoolboy. On the Underground I was delighted with the smooth, quiet way with which the "Metro" trains glide into the Station. I had quite forgotten this. Then, when my hand began to get better, I rediscovered the pleasures of penmanship and kept on writing, with my tongue out. And I re-enjoyed the child's satisfaction in coaxing a button to slip into its hole: all grown-up people have forgotten how difficult and complex such operations are. This morning how desirable everything seemed to me! The world intoxicated me. Moving again among so many human beings gave me the crowd-fever, and started again all the pangs of the old familiar hunger for a fuller life, that centrifugal elan in which I feared for the disruption and scattering of my parts in all directions. Temporarily I lost the hegemony of my own soul. Every man and woman I met was my enemy, threatening me with the secession of some inward part. I was alarmed to discover how many women I could passionately love and with how many men I could form a lasting friendship. Within, all was anarchy and commotion, a cold fright seized me lest some extraordinary event was about to happen: some general histolysis of my body, some sudden disintegration of my personality, some madness, some strange death.... I wanted to crush out the life of all these men and women in a great Bear's hug, my God! this sea of human faces whom I can never recognise, all of us alive together beneath this yellow catafalque of fog on the morning of the announcement of world famine and world war!... To-night, I have lost this paroxysm. For I am home again by the fireside. All the multitude have disappeared from my view. I have lost them, every one. I have lost another day of my life and so have they, and we have lost each other. Meanwhile the great world spins on unrelentingly, frittering away lightly my precious hours (surely a small stock now?) while I sit discomfited by the evening fire and nurse my scraped hands that tingle because the spinning world has wrenched itself out of my feeble grasp.

This morning on arriving at S. Kensington, went straight to a Chemist's shop, but finding someone inside, I drew back, and went on to another. "Have you any morphia tabloids?" I asked a curly-haired, nice-looking, smiling youth, who leaned with both hands on the counter and looked at me knowingly, as if he had had unlimited experience of would-be morphi nomaniacs. "Yes, plenty of them," he said, fencing. And then waited. "Can you supply me?" I asked, feeling very conscious of myself. He smiled once more, shook his head and said it was contrary to the Defence of the Realm Act. I made a sorry effort to appear ingenuous, and he said: "Of course, it is only a palliative." With a solemn countenance intended to indicate pain I answered: "Yes, but palliatives are very necessary sometimes," and I walked out of the hateful shop discomfited.