Tonight it was still on me. I took the familiar train to Nottingham. I found a pair of old friends in the first pub and spent a half-hour of pleasure looking at Pauline’s face; but they were booked, and I was not in a mood to award free sherry for ever, so I moved on. I have hazy recollections of hordes of women that I kissed. I finished up drunk in the train three or four hours ago. And as we came to the scattered lights outside the town, I thought that everything worthwhile in my life I had invested in this place.
It was in the following autumn that they bought the agency. George’s references to the group in the next two years became far more varied: at times impatient, moved by Jack, ‘urging me on to his own freedom. Wanting me to destroy the only thing I have ever made. Yet he is a lover of life, he has given me his warm companionship for years, he looks into the odd corners of living’ (17 November 1928).
During that autumn, also, a girl called Katherine Faulkner entered the society — usually referred to in the diary as K. For some time she was only mentioned casually.
A NEW VENTURE
16 OCTOBER 1928
CONTRACT SIGNED
Today Jack, Olive and I took over the agency, that curious stage in Martineau’s mad progress. It is to be hoped it does well. Money is a perpetual nuisance: why should I, who care so little for it, have it always dragging round my neck? I have hopes that Jack will win us new comforts. Of course, I am not as optimistic as they all think. I remember his bad luck and bad management with that absurd first attempt of his. But he is still capable of success: it is time we had the luck on our side.
2 DECEMBER 1928
JACK AGAIN
Jack is busy and active and full of ideas. A little money has come in already. Today it struck me as strange that Jack, of all my friends, should have been close at my side for the longest time. He was indulging in one of his new attacks on the group. ‘Why don’t you see what people really want?’
He does not trouble to conceal that he includes me among them. He does not pretend to share my hopes nowadays: he would like me to follow him with his suburban girls. Yet all this sadistic nonsense of his does not seem to interrupt our alliance.
4 DECEMBER 1928
ARGUMENT
Jack brought in a friend tonight who made a fierce emotional case for immortality. Lewis, in the old days, would have shrugged his shoulders, but I enjoyed the talk. On the train afterwards, going to this petty little case — I’m tired of being foisted off with Eden’s drudgery — I remember that it was the first argument with a stranger for many months.
The group is taking up all my energy — more even than it did in the first flush of youthful zeal, religious years that are not quite repeated now. If Jack were not obsessed with his own pleasures, he would see how that answers his attacks.
6 DECEMBER 1928
A FEW HOURS SNATCHED FOR MYSELF
I thought it was perhaps a mistake not to keep a tiny fraction of my interests away from the ‘little world’. I sometimes wish that Lewis were here for a day of two. So on the train I read some calculus with immense excitement. Why wasn’t I told about these things at school? Also ‘Clissold’; Wells is childish in politics, but there are moments when he feels for the whole common soul of man.
Yet I have found little time for anything outside the group now.
During the next few weeks, he wrote those entries about the circulation which Daphne had showed me at first. I put them aside to think over again.
22 FEBRUARY 1929
COLLAPSE
I appeared before the School Committee, asking for money for the brightest man since Lewis’ day. It was a horrible fiasco. Cameron was unnecessarily offensive. The cleric Martineau scored at my expense. I am not so effective as I used to be. I can still hear that grotesque display, and I feel like blinding all the damned night through.
1 MARCH 1929
I COME TO GRIPS AGAIN
TOO EASILY DOWNCAST
Things have not been perfect. I have not quite the usual satisfaction of work well done. The débâcle of my appearance before the committee, another storm of lust, Jack’s contempt for the ‘hole-and-corner’ way in which I indulge my passions, have all played their part. Jack hints also that Olive has begun an affair with Morcom of all people, to whom I have scarcely spoken a private word for months. It may take her away from our little business venture, and it’s a piece of wanton irritation. However, I ought to be able to ignore it.
The sight of K, smiling at the farm, a different person from what she was three months ago, is enough to remove any memories of Olive as anything more than a friendly, competent person, who is some help to Jack and myself.
After a walk in the beautiful rain-sodden evening, I have felt again the essential urge to live among these people. My course is set and my mind made up. Jack’s friendship is valuable, but his influence must be despised. I see it clearly now.
2 MARCH 1929
K and the others made this the most perfect weekend I have ever known. They were alive, we were all on terms of absolute confidence. I was overwhelmed with happiness, unqualified happiness, such happiness as comes unawares and only in rare moments. I was bathed in the warmth of joyous living, so that any trouble seemed incredible.
18 APRIL 1929
Next weekend, so I have just heard, some clod has rented the farm and we cannot be accommodated. Why in heaven should I be denied what is my food and life by the sheer inconsequent whim of some unknown fool?
Although he did not admit it for some months, it was probably about this time that he became engrossed in Katherine — in love with her, perhaps. Never before, at any rate, had any girl in the group meant as much: Mona, now married to an acquaintance of Jack’s, had only been one of many ‘fancies’. In the diary about this date he dismissed her: ‘She was a bright little thing. I could have slept with her if my theory had permitted it — I suppose Jack did not feel any scruples’. There had been another girl, Phyllis, who had by this time finished her training as an elementary schoolmistress, and taken a job in the county; George had toyed half-heartedly with the idea of marrying her, a couple of years back.
But Katherine moved him far more deeply: she came upon him when he was trying to maintain all his ideals over the ‘little world’.
I never met her, or knew much of her, except that she was very poor and possessed the delicate and virginal beauty which most excited George. He struggled against recognising the passion. After that outburst over the farm, he tried to miss the group’s meetings there. He found himself in one of his whirls of womanising, unusually long drawn out.
RELAPSES
7 MAY
FACES IN LONDON
Somehow I have not got the School and the group in my bones as I used to have. This is strange after the promise of a month ago. I am in a tangle of desires, scattering money more frantically in than ever did. I met Winnie in Oxford Street: she is one of the nicest girls I have managed to know. Curious — her face comes and goes. Why? (Peggy’s went long since. Dorothy’s went, also the Cambridge girl, and the Bear Street one. It needs some effort to recall Hilda.)