That was a couple of hours ago. Since then I have been reading some of the diaries of recent years. It has brought back some of the pleasure and hope I have gathered from these people. Some of them have gone before now, without being helped. But others are free people, a nucleus of friends, thinking and acting and living as no other group I am likely to know again.
That is my achievement, and nothing can take it from me. Jack and Olive, for all their faults and defections: Lewis Eliot, away in London — Phyllis and — and — and —: they’re all different for having known me and from my being able to spend my devotion. Well, that must go on — whatever distracts me by the way. Are there many men who have twenty better lives to their credit?
So let us not be sad. Personal misery is grotesque: and who am I to complain of losing one when there are so many to occupy my life? Really, I do not often worry about myself at all.
But the passion lasted — different from any in his life, and nearer to others’ experience. The same pattern of unhappiness, desire for freedom and return to K, ran through the diary for months.
13 DECEMBER
I take too little notice of people about me. By this wretched affair, I have hurt Rachel. Apart from business I scarcely ever see Olive. I am vexed with ever-absent money, tension about K, no fame. But K seems to have hinted to Jack that she would like to be reconciled: which news filled me with wild joy, though I was intensely annoyed by Jack’s remark — ‘She may think you too mad and dangerous.’
I am a little afraid of Jack at times.
This afternoon Freda said of K and me: ‘When you take a dislike to a person, imagination does the rest.’
5 JANUARY 1930
I wish I could feel for Freda instead of K. Sometimes I think I could: at least I could get comfort from her. But there again I should have other problems to face. I cannot control myself all these years, resist being laughed at by Jack, only to crash all my aspirations by my own deliberate action.
Anyway the question does not arise. With K it is an ache, a slow corroding pain.
I went off to see Pat, sick at heart. I had quite a pleasant time with her.
14 JANUARY
Tonight K broke her silence. I saw her quite by chance in Rachel’s flat — who, good soul, made a sarcastic remark and then went out. K began to talk. She did not apologise. After making myself incredibly late for everything else that evening, I went. But not before I had seen her smile, and felt a happiness that seemed unsensuous and perfect.
At times, by the way, she was wearisome and showed signs of being shallow — but I could hardly think of that.
The after effect has been to make me dream of Freda.
MY HAPPIEST DAY
15 JANUARY
Realising it It is very difficult to think of her as tangible.
The reconciliation and their ‘ethereal’ relations continued all that spring. It occupied much of the diary; for the rest he wrote far less of the constructive side of the group — with occasional reiterations that it was still ‘my major interest’.
Instead, he became more explicit about his ‘sensations’ — to begin with, the nights in Nottingham and London were minutely described. Then: ‘Jack and I are narrowing our attention to the libido. It is a long time since we talked of our friends in any other way. For myself, I still cannot limit my interest as he does in his frank fashion. Yet no man has lived more freely than Jack. I know they have often thought him a superficial person by the side of some of us. Perhaps that is not just.’
24 MARCH
Tonight Jack told me some of the stories of his conquests. Some I knew, of course; Mona, in the old days, and —. But Olive! I was astonished at that — though now it makes her Morcom adventure (which is probably ending) more explicable. And he made other hints — I was angry, I told him he had betrayed any decent code of friendship. But I cannot only be jealous. Haven’t I inveighed, time after time, against irrational conventions? I must think of his behaviour in the light of reason.
4 APRIL
Last night at the farm I arranged that Freda and I be left alone. And, of course, I made love to her. I felt an altogether marvellous delight — more of the mind than the flesh perhaps, but that was to be expected.
Today I am still in a state of joy — but sometimes now quite easy. I must reassure myself once for all. No one is a penny the worse. It will not interfere with my influence with them, for none of them will know. I am prepared to believe that I could not bring them on as in the past, if this were common property. For many of them, the news would be altogether bad. But for Freda, by herself, it can have done nothing but good. She was longing for the substance of freedom, not only the words. She is older than twenty, in everything that matters: she wanted to begin a life that will be different from all that I have tried to rescue her out of. I am now a completer means of escape. That is all.
Yet tonight I am not altogether tranquil. The years of the group, the continual presence of K — it all seems strange and not entirely real. I used to think I should not stay in this town for long. Now I am past thirty. I have been at Eden’s nearly nine years. Sometimes it seems too long a time.
1 JUNE
It has proved unnecessary to keep my change of attitude secret from the group. I must readjust some of my old values — founded probably on the family and my early upbringing. I am now convinced that it is easy to combine the greatest mental activity with a general view more like Jack’s than mine. We are all the better for real freedom. No unnecessary internal restraints — and one has more appetite for constructive good. Of course there are times when I cannot always live up to what seems intellectually established: then I have hankerings after the old days.
4 JUNE
Daphne was at a Whitsun party at the farm, which was remarkable for the afterglow it left.
30 JUNE
Money is desperately short again. The trickle from the agency is lessening. I shall have to borrow. What does that matter in this fin-de-siècle time?
15 JULY
The high meridian of freedom is on us now. In our nucleus of free people, anyway — and sometimes I think on the world.
7 AUGUST
I tried uselessly to explain to the family some indication of my changed views. With no result, except great fatigue and bitter distress — though they could not understand all my statements. I am more worn than I have been for years. Old habits are the strongest: and still, at my age, nothing tires me to the heart so much as a family quarrel.
2 SEPTEMBER
K came unexpected to the farm this Saturday. After tea — Daphne, Iris R (Mona’s half-sister, who used to be a ‘regular’ and has now come back) and several others were there — K began to talk to me, then stopped. Suddenly I saw tears running down her face. It upset me a little, though not as much as a possible absence of Daphne or Freda.