The Journal of a Disappointed Man

December 10. He is a trifle better. It is fifteen years since he had the first paralytic stroke. Am taking over all his work and have written at once resigning the Plymouth appointment. December 23. It really did require an effort to go upstairs to-day to his bedroom and say cheerfully I was not going to P. after all, and that the matter was of no consequence to me. I laughed gaily and Dad was relieved. A thundering good joke. What annoys me is that other folk--the brainless, heartless mob, as Schopenhauer remarks, still continue to regard me as one of themselves.... I had nearly escaped into a seaside laboratory, and now suddenly to be flung back into the dirt and sweat of the newspaper world seems very hard, and it is very hard. December 26. Windy Ash With the dog for a walk around Windy Ash. It was a beautiful winter's morning--a low sun giving out a pale light but no warmth--a luminant, not a fire--the hedgerows bare and well trimmed, an Elm lopped close showing white stumps which glistened liquidly in the sun, a Curlew whistling overhead, a deeply cut lane washed hard and clean by the winter rains, a gunshot from a distant cover, a creeping Wren, silent and tame, in a bramble bush, and over the five-barred gate the granite roller with vacant shafts. I leaned on the gate and saw the great whisps of cloud in the sky like comets' tails. Everything cold, crystalline. [1] He had spoken about me to the Museum authorities, and it was his influence which got me the nomination to sit for the examination.