Strange feelings

Monday, March 1st., Winter Palace Hotel, Menton.

I wrote 700 words this morning, and 700 this afternoon, of my new novel which I think I shall call "The Vanguard". Dorothy worked on her scenario of my short story "Death, Fire and Life", and so was not ready to go out until 12.22.  We sat in the garden of the hotel for a bit, and began to lunch fairly early. After a snooze we went out at 3 and walked down to the level ground, about six minutes, and then Dorothy did not want to walk any more, and we took a victoria and went about town shopping. I think that pregnancy is starting to make her lazy, and warned her that she will get fat if not careful. She laughed.

I have been reading more of Yeats's "Celtic Twilight". It is an engaging little book. Simple but elegantly written. I particularly like the way Yeats tells the reader, without frills or comment, what he has himself been told about supernatural experiences. Their matter-of-fact delivery makes them more credible. Yeats describes a couple of weird experiences of his own but shrinks from saying that he believes in 'faeries'; intimates that he may have fallen under some sort of enchanting influence. But I think he does believe. A part I was reading today about the feeling one can get in isolated places, especially woods, rang a bell with me. I have sometimes felt that sense of heightened awareness, a sort of anticipation that something strange is going to happen, even on one occasion in Bradwell Woods when I was a boy. I can remember that just in the act of taking one step I felt as if I had crossed some sort of line, things were quieter, I became wary, and wanted to look round as if I was being watched. Not scared exactly, but conscious that there was more around me than I had been aware of previously. This must have been forty odd years ago, and yet I can resurrect the feeling now, and the hair on my neck rises.

We have had an invitation to visit the Wells's for one of their 'weekends' but won't be back in England in time. Our intention is to leave here next Sunday and travel by easy stages to Paris, then on to Calais and home.

Dripping wet

Saturday, February 13th., London.
Yesterday afternoon, a sandwich man in Coventry Street, stooping with difficulty owing to his encumbrances, picked up a cigarette out of the gutter. "My first of the day," he exclaimed to his mate who was in front of him. 

This struck a chord with me. I have been told by my mother that when I was young I used to be taken out for walks by my Uncle Len, by the canal or to Bradwell Woods near Tunstall. He was more or less an itinerant, never working to my knowledge. My mother said it was because he had been on a ship that was sunk by a submarine during the war. Apparently I got into the habit of picking up cigarette ends for him to smoke later, because he could never afford to buy them. I saw nothing unusual in this behaviour at the time. It all came out when I was out shopping with my mother one day and automatically picked up a cigarette end I saw on the floor. She was horrified when I explained that it was to save for Lennie.


In either 1893 or 1894 I heard a Wagner opera for the fist time with understanding. It was at Drury Lane and we sat in the balcony. There was no crush on entering, not more than a dozen people had collected when the doors opened. At most 40 people occupied the balcony, and the other parts of the immense building were similarly forlorn. Nevertheless it was an excellent performance with Alvarez and (I think) Klapsky as chief stars. Contrast: Tonight with Frank I went to a Wagner orchestral concert (promenade) at Queen's Hall, under Henry J. Wood. We got there a quarter of an hour before the commencement and already the entrance hall was packed with an eager tumultuous mass (excited by expectation) struggling to get at the ticket offices. At eight o'clock the vast floor (promenade) and the upper circle were crowded in every part, and in the balcony only a few reserved seats were left, which in turn were taken before the second piece on the programme had been played. The audience was enthusiastic, keenly anticipatory; and the orchestra under the magnetic influence of the occasion played in a fashion which steadily increased the exquisite nervous tension of its hearers. At the opening bars of "The Flying Dutchman" overture I felt those strange tickling sensations in the back which are the physical signs of aesthetic emotion. The mysterious effects of orchestral colour contrast dazed and dazzled Frank's willing ears till he existed simply as a "receiver" - receiver of a microphone or other phonetic instrument ... The waves of sound swallowed him up, and at the end he emerged, like a courageous child from the surf of a summer sea, dripping wet, breathless, and enraptured.