Author: Robertson Davies
Date: 2016-05-24 15:39:29+00:00
Keywords: General; Canada; Epistolary; Literary; 20th Century; Fiction; Humorous
Description: The earliest of the Samuel Marchbanks volumes, originally published in 1947, is available in e-book form for the first time. In 1942, two years after returning to Canada from Britain, Robertson Davies took up the role of editor of the Peterborough Examiner. During his tenure as editor at the Examiner, a post he held until 1955, and later as publisher of the newspaper (1955–65), Davies published witty, curmudgeonly, mischievous, and fiercely individualistic editorials under the name of his alter ego, Samuel Marchbanks, “one of the choice and master spirits of his age.” The Diary of Samuel March
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Rights: Copyright © 1947 by Robertson Davies

The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks

ROBERTSON DAVIES (1913–1995) was born and raised in Ontario, and was educated at a variety of schools, including Upper Canada College, Queen’s University, and Balliol College, Oxford. He had three successive careers: as an actor with the Old Vic Company in England; as publisher of the Peterborough Examiner; and as university professor and first Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto, from which he retired in 1981 with the title of Master Emeritus.

He was one of Canada’s most distinguished men of letters, with several volumes of plays and collections of essays, speeches, and belles lettres to his credit. As a novelist, he gained worldwide fame for his three trilogies: The Salterton Trilogy, The Deptford Trilogy, and The Cornish Trilogy, and for later novels Murther & Walking Spirits and The Cunning Man.

His career was marked by many honours: He was the first Canadian to be made an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he was a Companion of the Order of Canada, and he received honorary degrees from twenty-six American, Canadian, and British universities.

By Robertson Davies

NOVELS

THE SALTERTON TRILOGY

Tempest-Tost

Leaven of Malice

A Mixture of Frailties

THE DEPTFORD TRILOGY

Fifth Business

The Manticore

World of Wonders

THE CORNISH TRILOGY

The Rebel Angels

What’s Bred in the Bone

The Lyre of Orpheus

Murther and Walking Spirits

The Cunning Man

SHORT FICTION

High Spirits

FICTIONAL ESSAYS

THE SAMUEL MARCHBANKS COLLECTION

The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks

The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks

Samuel Marchbanks’ Almanack

The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks

ESSAYS

One Half of Robertson Davies

The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies

The Merry Heart

Happy Alchemy

Selected Works on the Art of Writing

Selected Works on the Pleasure of Reading

CRITICISM

A Voice from the Attic

PLAYS

Selected Plays

The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks
New Canadian Library electronic edition, 2016

Copyright © 1947 by Robertson Davies

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

First published in Canada by Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited in 1947 All rights reserved.

e-ISBN: 978-0-7710-2792-5

Electronic edition published in Canada by New Canadian Library, an imprint of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company, Toronto, in 2016

McClelland & Stewart with colophon is a registered trademark

Library of Congress Control Number is available upon request
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

v3.1

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

I Winter
II Spring
III Summer
IV Autumn

A WARNING TO THE READER

This is not a work of fiction, but of history — a record of the daily life of a Canadian during one of the early years of the Atomic Age. All the people mentioned in it are real; all the incidents described are actual happenings. All saints and festal days mentioned are from the Celtic Calendar. Any suggestion to the contrary will be keenly resented.

S. M.

-I-

• SUNDAY & NEW YEAR’S DAY •

Laus Deo was the pious ejaculation with which the diarists of old began their year’s entries, and I can do no less. Woke early this morning, and thanks to my discretion last night, my tongue was as red and shiny as a piece of Christmas ribbon, and my breath was like a zephyr from a May meadow.… Wasted no time on New Year resolutions, for I outgrew such folly long ago. Any betterment in my character will be the outcome of prolonged meditation, and slow metabolic and metaphysical reform—a psychosomatic process, in other words. My only resolve is to keep this Diary faithfully for a year, without cant and—so far as in me lies (which may not be very far)—without exaggeration. There have been too few Canadian diarists: however unfittingly, I have determined to fill the gap.

• MONDAY •

A holiday, because yesterday was Sunday. Sat by my fireplace most of the day, with the drawers of my various bureaux and desks gathered about me, and I went through their contents, throwing away old letters and odds and ends, in one of my periodic strainings toward order and efficiency. Though the wrench is painful I can throw away old letters which were not interesting even when hot from the postman’s hand, but there are some things which I can never bring myself to part with. I have old erasers, for instance, which have turned to stone and merely dirty and tear any paper upon which they are set to work, but they have associations for me which makes it impossible to throw them away. There are paper clips which have grown rusty with age, but I will not discard them for the excellent reason that I got them free and may some day get some use out of them. There are pipe-cleaners which are not very dirty, and although I have not smoked a pipe for some years, who can say when I shall begin again? There are the keys of a flat in which I once lived, and which I preserve out of sheer sentimentality. There are old Christmas cards which are too pretty to put on the fire. There are three cigarette holders which have become plugged with immovable substances, but which may some day become unplugged (if I ever get a free hand with a compressed-air machine) and will then be as good as new. There is a box which is empty, but which bears the name of a very famous jeweller; I am keeping it in order that I may lend a factitious air of grandeur to a modest wedding-gift, some day. Therefore I cannot really reduce my drawers to order; I can only throw away some of the accumulation of years of tousled living. But even a little tidying gives me a righteous glow, and the rubbish made the fire burn brightly all day.

• TUESDAY •

Was talking to a man today who was bemoaning the dullness of his life; he wanted adventure, and it never came his way. His job gives him no outlet for the daring and resource which he is sure he possesses. I am never much impressed by such complaints; it seems to me that most of us get all the adventure that we are capable of digesting. Personally, I have never had to fight a dozen pirates single-handed, and I have never jumped from a moving express-train onto the back of a horse, and I have never been discovered in the harem of the Grand Turk. I am glad of all these things. They are too rich for my digestion, and I do not long for them. I have all the close shaves and narrow squeaks in my life that my constitution will stand, and my daily struggles with bureaucrats, tax-gatherers and uplifters are more exhausting than any encounters with mere buccaneers on the Spanish Main.

• WEDNESDAY •

Faced the fact with dull submission that the holiday season is now over and that a long, hard winter is before me. A man told me that he had always despised me because I confessed that I had trouble with my furnace; he never had any with his. But last week his “iron fireman” broke down, and he had to stoke his own machine, for a day or two, and he had a new appreciation of my sufferings.… I am glad to hear it. What can a sybarite, a plutocrat with an automatic stoker know of the wretched tribulations of the proletariat? While I sweat and slave in my cellar, bursting my truss every time I heave a shovelful of coal, he lolls at ease in his arm-chair, listening to the soothing hum of his mechanical stoker.… I am glad that he has been humbled and brought low. Now he will have sympathy with the deserving poor.

• THURSDAY •

Read an article in a Western newspaper, in which the writer rejoiced that the war had caused the railway dining cars to discard finger-bowls. He says that he has never liked finger-bowls, looking upon them as a useless and irksome frippery.… I scorn him. He is probably a poor wretch who has eaten off a corner of a kitchen table all his life, and who drank out of his finger-bowl the first time he was given one. Throw out the finger-bowl, and what goes next? The napkin. After the napkin, the table-cloth, and after the cloth, the knife and fork. My poor Western brother, if you want to eat with your hands you cannot do it at my table. I have always liked finger-bowls, and if possible, I like a few flower petals floating in them. I take my ceremonial lustrations as seriously as the Hebrews of old.

• FRIDAY •

Looked over some late Christmas cards today, including one with the words of I Saw Three Ships on it, and an elaborate background of music. But the music was not the music of the song; in fact, it was no music at all, but merely an artist’s arrangement of notes, signifying nothing.… I like Christmas cards to have plenty of holly, and stage-coaches, and roaring fires, and stars, and babes in a manger and other such Christmassy pictures on them, I don’t care much for the ultra-modern ones which try to get as far as possible from the season.… Was caught under the mistletoe today—at my age, too! I had forgotten that the stuff was there. I am now in the time of life when only children lie in wait for me near the magic plant. There is something dispiriting about this.

• SATURDAY AND OLD CHRISTMAS •

Twelfth Night, and the official end of the Christmas celebrations, so I took down all the decorations and cards, and dutifully stuffed myself with mince pies and cheesecakes. There is a belief that one will have a happy month for every mince pie one eats today, and every year I gag myself trying to round out an entire year of bliss. I usually stick at June and have never passed August. Someday I must bake a particularly small batch of mince pies for this special purpose, so that I shall not need to short-circuit my epigastrium in pursuit of a fine old custom.… Those who do not eat 12 pies are supposed to be plagued by the Lubber Fiend—a goblin somewhat vaguely identified by folk-lore specialists. I know several people who might accurately be described as Lubber Fiends.

-II-

• SUNDAY •

An amateur astrologer told me last night that I am overly critical, and should try to develop more benevolence toward mankind. Today, therefore, I went about beaming benevolently on everyone I met, and was greeted with scowls and rebuffs by most of them. The plain fact is that most Canadians dislike and mistrust any great show of cheerfulness. If a man were to sing in the street he would probably end up in jail; if he sang at his work the efficiency expert would ask him to come to his office for a frank talk. The way to impress your boss is to look glum all the time. He may mistake this for intelligence and give you a raise. The same thing holds true in politics: he who laughs is lost.

• MONDAY •

Was chatting with a man who has been suffering from bad dreams, which he erroneously describes as nightmares. As I understand the matter the only genuine nightmare is the sort of dream in which you suffer from increasing dread and shortness of breath, accompanied by pressure on the chest, until it seems that you must either throw off the weight or be smothered; it is at this point that you find yourself sitting bolt upright, screaming blue murder. If you don’t you are probably found in your bed in the morning, quite cold and stiff. I have only had nightmares once or twice in my life, and many people never have them at all. Bad dreams, however, are common with me, and I rather welcome them, as they break the monotony of the long hours of sluggish slumber.… A psychologist once tried to attach great significance to my bad dreams, but I did not play quite fair with him, for I withheld from him one relevant fact i.e., that I never go to bed without having a bite to eat, and my digestion sometimes gives me bad dreams even when I am wide awake. Of course, my nightly snack may merely act as a porter who throws open the gates of my repulsive Unconscious, letting all the bugaboos and hobgoblins out for a frolic, but frankly I don’t care. Better a bad dream than no dream at all.

• TUESDAY •

A child asked me to mend her doll today; it has broken up into a trunk, a head and four limbs, like a country with too many parties. I gave her the usual speech about my inability to mend anything, and then set to work. It was a gruesome experience, reminiscent of the scene in Mrs. Shelley’s romance where Frankenstein puts together his monster out of bits of slaughter-house waste. But more by good luck than good management I outfitted the doll with new entrails made of strong string, and tightened these by winding one leg around for twenty-three revolutions. Now the doll is better than new, for it kicks, twists and squirms like a real infant.… This evening heard Carmen on the radio, and reflected how hard it was to vamp a man while singing at the top of one’s voice. That is the operatic problem; the singer must keep up a big head of steam while trying to appear secretive, or seductive, or consumptive. Some ingenious composer should write an opera about a group of people who were condemned by a cruel god to scream all the time; it would be an instantaneous success, and a triumph of verisimilitude.

• WEDNESDAY •

As I want to get the remainder of my winter’s coal in tomorrow, I had to shovel my drive today; it has not been touched since the first snowfall, and this was no task for a child; it was no task for a hypochondriacal diarist, either, but I tackled it with the valour of ignorance. In ten minutes I was sweating freely, in spite of a cutting wind. After twenty minutes I could think of nothing except a recent warning by a coroner that shovelling heavy snow was a good way to bring on a stroke. After half an hour I had what I am certain was a slight stroke, and went inside for a dose of a special stroke-medicine which I keep. It did me a lot of good, and after that I took stroke-medicine every half hour regularly. As a result I finished my drive magnificently and did not have even a touch of stiffness from the unusual exercise. I know plenty of people who would have been as stiff as frozen mackerel if they had done what I did, the way I did it.

• THURSDAY •

My coal came today, and went into the bin with the usual amount of banging and thumping. A fine black dust settled on everything in the house, and when I looked in a mirror inadvertently, I was startled to see that I had been metamorphosed into a blackamoor.… Then I went down into the cellar, and addressed my furnace in these words: “O Furnace (I always model my speeches to my furnace on Cicero’s orations).… O Furnace, three winter months having now gone by and the Yuletide and New Year seasons having been completed I, Marcus Tullius Marchbanks, have purchased all the coal, wood, coke, charcoal and kindred combustibles that I intend (to purchase, understood). Look to it, Furnace, for I shall feed you justly, but not wastefully, and if it should so hap that when all these good things are gone the gods still send us inclement weather, I shall cram your maw with broken chairs and cardboard boxes, but not another morsel of coal will I buy. Witness, O ye gods of the household, and you, O Furnace, that M. Tullius Marchbanks will throw himself upon his poker and perish before he will spend another denarius on coal.” … The furnace was impressed and roared politely, but there was a faint contemptuous smell of coal gas when I went to bed.

• FRIDAY •

Read too long and too much today, resulting in a severe attack of the Miseries. Reading is a form of indulgence, like eating and smoking. Some men smoke heavily and some drink heavily; I read heavily, and sometimes I have the most awful hangovers. Tobacco manufacturers, I understand, hire men to make continual tests of their product, and these poor wretches get shaky hands and tobacco hearts, and when they take a bath nicotine comes out of their skins into the water. It is the same with whisky-testers. Well, I am a book-tester and I have an occupational disease, which is called the Miseries.… To make matters worse, I ate an apple and got hiccups, and was convulsed three times a minute for almost an hour. Hiccups are very funny to everyone but the man who has them. To have the Miseries and hiccups together is to drain a bitter cup. Bup!

• SATURDAY •

This afternoon climbed out on the roof of my verandah and shovelled snow down into the garden; it had piled up to the point where I could hardly get my bedroom window open, and although I am no fanatic for fresh air it is convenient to be able to hurl slops into the road, or lean out and shout “Who’s there?” at late callers. I become dizzy when standing on a soapbox; the roof of a verandah is as high as the Eiffel Tower to me. Consequently I did my shovelling with the utmost caution and paused now and then to cling to the wall with my eyes shut, recovering my balance. Knocked down several icicles and was interested to find how sharp they were. If ever I decide to murder somebody, I shall stab him with an icicle, which will melt, destroying my fingerprints and all traces of the weapon. The melted ice will mingle with the victim’s blood, and I shall go to his funeral in that state of profound satisfaction which we all feel when we have done something dangerous and illegal without being caught.

-III-

• SUNDAY AND ST. FISTULA THE STALAGMITE •

Pursuing my policy of “See Your Home First” I investigated my heating system today, trying to find out why one room which I use a great deal never gets any heat. I took the face off the hot air register, lay on my stomach and groped; soon I fished up a large mass of shredded paper, pencil shavings, old bridge tallies, saw-dust and other breakfast food, which some former occupant had used to block off that room. This impressed me as a very subtle way of starting a fire, and I determined to search further, so I inserted as much of myself as I could into the bathroom register, and salvaged 32 used razor blades, a large piece of stick, and a thimble in good condition. I was now aroused; it was a forbear of mine, Gaston l’Immerdue Marchbanks, who mapped the sewers of Paris for Napoleon; therefore I investigated a cold-air pipe near the telephone, and recovered a great gross of pencil stubs. Next spring I must dismantle my whole heating system, to see what I can find.

• MONDAY •

Drug addiction is horrible, addiction to drink is pitiable, but to be a slave of the salted-nut habit is to be lost indeed. Years ago I realized my weakness in this respect, and vowed never to set tooth to salted nut again as long as I lived. But tonight I visited the home of my friend X (a prominent prohibitionist, by the way) and turned as white as a blanched almond when I saw the nut-dish at his elbow. It was obvious from the dry, salty tone of his voice that he had been hitting the cashews pretty hard, and as we talked he ate bowl after bowl of the insidious dainties. His wife (in rags, and barefoot, for their home and fortune had been ruined by his vice) patiently filled the bowl whenever it was empty. Once, however, when she attempted to take a fat filbert from his hand, he struck her brutally across the mouth. I walked home sadly, determined to urge the government to take over the salted nut industry—vile traffic!—not for profit, but for control.

• TUESDAY •

There are days when nothing seems to happen to me at all; I passed today in a coma.… But I did read the suggestion of a scientist that men over 45, with physical defects, should be made to fight the next war, in order that young men may be spared. This convinces me of something which I have suspected for a long time, namely that scientists are simpletons who happen to have a knack with test-tubes, but possess no real intelligence at all. The logical thing to do, when the next war comes, is to recruit an army from all those of whatever age or sex who are unable to pass certain basic intelligence tests. This would be a good way of getting rid of a lot of the stupid people who cumber the earth; probably there would be a high percentage of scientists, Civil Servants, uplifters and minor prophets in an armed force collected in such a way. But if every country adopted this method the country with the biggest population of boobs, yahoos and ninnies would win, and I am not entirely convinced that we have overall superiority in this respect, though we seem bound in that direction.

• WEDNESDAY •

Reflected today on the sinful luxury which is sapping the morale of our country. My brother Fairchild has just bought himself an “electronic janitor”, a costly device which, I understand, keeps his house at an even temperature of 70 degrees without any effort on his part whatever. I don’t know quite how it works, but it has something to do with molecules and the quantum theory.… Another man I know has a method of sprinkling his ashes with common household substances (salt and pepper, I think he said, and a dash of vinegar) and burning them again; in this way he never has any ashes to carry out, because last week’s ash is this week’s fuel.… The hardy pioneer virtues which made Canada what it is (a nation of ash-choked grouches) seem to have disappeared everywhere except in me. I still get up before dawn—which on these winter mornings means before 8:30 a.m.—and give myself an appetite for breakfast by wrestling with my Cellar Demon.

• THURSDAY •

Had to do some travelling today, so rose early and discovered that it was very cold; would gladly have stayed at home and hugged the fire, but duty called, and I obeyed. Made the first stage of my journey by car and was thoroughly chilled; as the conversation for several miles was about ghosts, I cannot blame it all on the weather. Sponged my lunch from some people I know who keep a very warm house, so I thawed out there, but I had to go at once to a meeting, the chairman of which was either a disciple of Bernarr McFadden or a wearer of long underwear, for he insisted on opening the window and letting merry little breezes creep up my trouser legs. I must remember to get some long underwear of my own. Then home again by train; my seat was by the door, and three news butchers kept bursting into the coach, letting the Arctic in with them. I got some valuable exercise jumping up to shut the door, but it was not enough to keep me warm. Made the final stage of my journey by bus, which really was well heated. Listened to a CWAC vamping a sailor in the seat behind. She had hair of a rusty mouse-colour, but she referred to herself as a “red-head” and hinted broadly that she was a specialist in the arts of love. I doubted if this were true, but I admired her self-confidence.

• FRIDAY •

Woke this morning to find that I had a chill, the result of yesterday’s junketing. Managed to do some work in the morning, but by noon it had settled in the small of my back, and I was doubled up like a jack-knife. There is only one place in which this position can be maintained without severe pain, and that is bed, so to bed I went and passed several miserable hours wishing I were not a prey to so many foolish and humiliating ailments. I have the less desirable characteristics of a number of great men—the digestion of Napoleon, the eyesight of Dr. Johnson, the breathing apparatus of Daniel Webster, the lumbago of Disraeli, the neuralgia of De Quincey and the deafness of Herbert Spencer—but none of their genius. I am a walking textbook of pathology, and I would sell myself to any university medical school which would make a decent bid. But they all refuse to do so, because they think that I will leave my cadaver to them, free, after my demise. But I shall cheat them: I shall be buried with all my invaluable diseases; no pinchpenny university is going to get me cheap.

• SATURDAY •

A slight improvement in my condition today. I was able to struggle downstairs and roast my back in front of an open fire.… Somebody told me a few days ago that they got the impression that I disliked children. Not at all: I love the little dears. But I have no patience with ill-mannered, noisy, destructive, rude, rampaging little yahoos and it is my misfortune, from time to time, to come in contact with herds of these, roaming wild in the streets; can anyone blame me if I drive them away with curses and blows? But I love to see children playing happily and quietly, while I watch from behind barbed wire, about 300 feet away.… Ah, the sweet innocence of childhood! What a delightful thing it is in the young; what a pain in the neck it is in those who are assumed to have reached maturity! No, Marchbanks unhesitatingly declares himself to be a Child-Lover, but that is no reason to expect him to dandle young baboons upon his knee, and he flatly refuses to do so.

-IV-

• SUNDAY •

Was out for a walk this afternoon, and was joined by a dog; it was unknown to me, and was obviously of mixed ancestry; it was not a Social Register dog. What there was about me which struck its fancy, I cannot say, but it romped under my feet, smelled me searchingly, licked my gloves and hindered my progress seriously. Its most irritating trick was to run just ahead of me, with its head turned back so that it could stare rudely into my face; naturally it fell down a lot because it did not look where it was going, and every time it fell down I had to dance an impromptu jig to keep from falling over it.… I like dogs, just as I like children. I like to think about them, and I like to read in the papers that dogs have been given medals for life-saving. But I do not particularly relish dogs in the flesh. When I meet a dog socially, with its owner, I am prepared to pat it once, and to allow it to smell me once, and then, so far as I am concerned, the matter is closed. Dogs which go beyond this limit are asking for a kick in the slats, and they usually get it.

• MONDAY •

Was looking through a catalogue of new recordings for player-pianos today and noticed a heading saying “Hymns and Religious Rolls”, which included such sanctified ditties as Come To The Church In The Wild Wood; elsewhere I found another roll listed called I Won’t Give Nobody None Of My Jelly Roll. The question which puzzles me is this: is the antithesis of a religious roll a jelly roll? … Why, by the way, is music written on religious or pseudo-religious themes called “sacred music”? And why, under that title, is it thought to be immune from the criticism which affects other music? Much of it is the most arrant tripe, but nobody ever says so. I once heard of a clergyman who said that he thought that “God must grow tired of this perpetual serenading”; I quite agree, particularly if God has a sensitive ear and a fine taste in lyric and panegyric verse.… This evening picked up an old volume of Hannah More’s Sacred Dramas and took a quick look at David and Goliath. All the s’s in the book were the 18th century kind which look like f’s, and the opening spasm, as sung by David, ran thus:

Great Lord of all thingf! Pow’r divine!

Breathe on thif erring heart of mine

Thy grace ferene and pure;

Defend my frail, my erring youth,

And teach me thif important truth

The humble are fecure.

This lisping bit about the humble being fecure interested me, for it is the earliest reference to focial fecurity for the Common Man that I have feen. And fertainly Goliath, who waf rather an Uncommon Man, got a frightful fock in the jaw.… The Sacred Dramas are more sacred than dramatic, just as sacred music is so often more sacred than musical. There appears to be something so overwhelming about Biblical themes that artists—musicians, painters and dramatists—who essay them are thrown into paroxysms of ineptitude.

• TUESDAY •

Prepared for a relaxed evening, and was sitting happily in my pyjamas and dressing gown (a pre-war creation of blue towelling) when some friends dropped in, but as they were pyjama friends, so to speak, this only added to my comfort. They told me that a passing reference to my truss in a recent conversation had encouraged them to wonder just what sort of truss I wear. As a matter of fact, that reference was mere pleasantry. Several years ago I read an advertisement which said “Throw Away Your Truss”, and I did so; to be precise, I sent it to the Grenfell Mission, for the relief of some ruptured Eskimo. A week or two later I saw an ad which said “Throw Away Your Surgical Boot”, so I did that, too, and got a wooden leg instead. It was only a few days until I saw another ad saying “Re-Shape Ugly Noses While You Sleep”, which I did, changing my warty proboscis to an elegant Grecian model. At the same time, I invested in a hearing aid (“fits in the ear but cannot be seen”) and gave my ear trumpet to a Boy Scout, who complained that he thrust it into his ear until it hurt, but was unable to produce the faintest toot. Now, when I go to bed, I pile all this salvage on the floor, with my false teeth and wig on top, and in the mornings it takes a female spot-welder half an hour to assemble me.

• WEDNESDAY AND EPICŒNIA •

My eye was caught this morning by a statement in the paper that “76 per cent of adults have bad breath.” I am always puzzled by such dogmatic observations. How are these conclusions reached? Do investigators scamper about the streets, sniffing? For many years I have maintained that the breath is an emanation of the soul, and that people who have disagreeable breaths are in poor spiritual health. Plenty of people with bad teeth and a dozen diseases have sweet breaths, because they are at peace with God and man. Conversely I have met many athletes, fresh-air fiends, uplifters, do-gooders and physical culture addicts whose breaths were a shocking revelation of their spiritual corruption and malnutrition. An unhealthy breath rises from an unhealthy soul, not from a disordered gizzard. For years I have fought shy of any business dealings with bad-breathed people, for experience has shown me that they are undependable, if not positive crooks. But I will trust any man, however unpleasing of aspect, if his breath whispers to me of April and May.

• THURSDAY •

A soft day, and I think it must be raining down the chimney, for I can’t get my furnace to go. I have shaken, and poked, and tinkered with the drafts, and removed the accumulation of overshoes from the cold air intake, but to no avail. I have even (I blush to write this) tried a propitiatory offering: I built a little altar before the furnace door, and offered up a bowl of delicious turkey-giblet soup on it, but the Fire-God remained sulky, so I ate the soup myself and resumed my hopeless poking.… But I know what will happen; if I go to bed, leaving the drafts full on, I shall waken in the night semi-cooked, for the furnace will rage and roar at 4 a.m.; but if I check it ever so lightly it will congeal and go out, and in the morning I shall be faced with an immense clinker, like a piece of peanut-brittle. Sometimes I wonder why I don’t jump into the furnace myself, and end it all.

• FRIDAY •

A man I know has been so broken by the restrictions on horse-racing that he has attempted to console himself by collecting calendars with pictures of horses on them: he has a very fine one with Man o’ War on it just in sight as he works. I have heard of pin-up girls before, but this is my first experience of a pin-up horse.… Nevertheless, I know one Senator whose Ottawa office is entirely hung with photographs and portraits of Holstein cattle. “Look at those flanks,” he will cry, as one enters the room, and as he goes on to even more startling intimacies, and as one looks eagerly for an art study of Lana Turner, the realization dawns that he is talking about Buttercup-Nestlerode-Springfilled III, queen of the dairy, whose butterfat production has never been equalled. Once a young divinity student visited this Senator, and as he knew nothing of his enthusiasm, and did not understand fully what was being said, he was convinced after twenty minutes of dairy-talk that he was in the presence either of an eminent woman’s doctor or a libertine of Neronian abandonment.

• SATURDAY •

Tried to listen to the opera broadcast of Rigoletto this afternoon, but as a man in the cellar was doing something cruel to the furnace, and a horde of visitors descended upon me, I did not make much headway with it.… Went to bed early and read about Dr. Johnson, a man after my own heart, for he loved tea, conversation and pretty women, and had not much patience with fools. Rose at 11:30, ate a big plate of breakfast food and an orange, put the snaffle on the furnace, and retired to sleep the sweet sleep of the deserving poor.

-V-

• SUNDAY •

Met a little girl today who was wearing a pair of high rubber boots, which she referred to as her Wellingtons, and of which she was very proud. Have not heard high boots called Wellingtons for a long time, and it reminded me of my Uncle Hengist, who was a clergyman and a great hand at organizing strawberry socials, bazaars, bean suppers, local talent concerts and similar pious breaches of the peace. At all such affairs he set up a curtained booth, with a sign outside which said “See the Grand Historical Tableau—The Meeting of Wellington and Blucher at Waterloo. Admission Ten Cents. Proceeds for Missions” (or the Organ Fund, or the Abandoned Women, or whatever the good cause might be). Inside the booth was a table, on which a Wellington boot faced a Blucher boot. Uncle Hengist thought this very funny, and his parishioners put up with it for years, although they were all privy to the fraudulent nature of the exhibit. It was not until he became Bishop of Baffinland that he gave up obtaining money by this shady ruse.

• MONDAY •

Was talking today to a man and his wife who were groaning that their three children were boys; a girl, they thought, would be much easier to bring up, and a refining influence upon their young gorillas. This is a mis-conception about the nature of daughters which should be exploded. I think immediately of the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould, that gentle man who had eight daughters, all beautiful and all possessed of the spirit of tigresses. The poor man would sit in his study at Lew Trenchard, trying to write Onward, Christian Soldiers, or some such ditty, when a servant would rush in, crying, “If you please, sir, Miss Angela has fallen off the roof, Miss Beatrice has fallen off her horse, Miss Cecilia has sprained her ankle (if you’ll pardon the expression, sir), Miss Dorothea has shot a gamekeeper, Miss Emily is riding the bull, Miss Frances has climbed the steeple, Miss Gertrude has fallen into the pond, and Miss Harriet is pumping water on the curate!” Such were the trials of that Devon vicarage—and all caused by daughters!

• TUESDAY •

Everyone I meet these days asks me how my furnace is getting on. As a matter of fact, it is behaving very well; cold weather seems to agree with it thoroughly. I have only to whisper my desire down one of the cold air pipes and it obliges at once.… But I am having unusual trouble with ashes. Twice a week I fill all the cans, hoppers, baskets, cartons and old derby hats in the house, and drag them out to the curb, and even at that I am accumulating a little hoard of ashes in a corner of my cellar.… There is fireplace ash too. My fireplace has a trapdoor in its hearth which allows all the ashes to tumble down into a cave in the cellar wall. When I remove the door of the cave all the ashes gush forth into my face, covering me so thickly with ash that I look like Boris Karloff in one of his mummy roles. Of course I hold a basket under the deluge, but never in the right place.… Some months ago I went away for a few days and left a furnace man in charge of things. When I came back the cellar was full of ashes; “I couldn’t find enough o’ vessels to put ’em out in,” said he, in the rich accents of Old Ireland. That has always been my trouble. Not enough o’ vessels.

• WEDNESDAY •

To the movies, to see a piece which exalted the virtues of country life; the chief incident was the burning of a barn which belonged to an elderly farmer, and the eagerness of his neighbours to give him livestock and produce with which to start farming again. But this is not a form of generosity exclusive to the country. I well recall when the Astor mansion in New York burned to the ground in 1896; all the rich city folk hastened to do what they could for the poor Astors, who had been burnt out. Old Mrs. Van Rensellaer threw a shawl over her head and ran over at once with a big tureen of real turtle soup. The Vanderbilts sent silk bed sheets and down pillows; the Van Courtlandts offered the Astors their ballroom to bed down in for the night; the Goulds insisted on sending them a full set of crested fish-knives, and a large salmon as well; the Rockefellers sent their butler with a big block of Standard Oil stock, and a dish of out-of-season fruit. It was a wonderful outburst of spontaneous kindness on the part of all the Astor’s neighbours. It is simply foolish to think that only the humble have kind and generous instincts; many a great heart beats beneath a ruby and sapphire stomacher.

• THURSDAY •

Rain today, and frost coming out of the ground. A black day at Marchbanks Towers, which is so situated that water pours into the cellar every spring and during the January thaw. There is something about the sound of water pouring into one’s cellar which cannot be ignored; I sat by the fire for a time, trying to distract my attention with a good book; this failed, so I tried a bad book, (the latest selection of the Bawdy Book Club, of which I am a member), but even that was useless, and at last my conscience drove me down into the depths to see what was happening. There was no doubt about it; the water was mounting. So I seized a broom and tried to sweep it toward the drain; I was alarmed that my furnace might get its feet wet, and develop one of its fits of sulks. My woodpile was soggy at the base; my window screens were beginning to shift in an uneasy way. For a mad moment I contemplated scooping up all the water I could in a bucket and rushing upstairs to empty it out into the garden, but Reason regained her throne almost at once, and I rejected the notion as unworthy. Fortunately the rain stopped soon afterward, and I was able to go to bed with a fairly calm mind.

• FRIDAY •

Was talking to a friend of mine, and noticed that he had a strange smell. When I commented on this he blushed becomingly, and said that it was some shaving lotion which he had been given for Christmas. It was manufactured especially for masculine use, and was called (I think he said) “Horse.” A number of scents for the male are now on the market and all of them guarantee to make the wearer smell of something wholesome and rugged like heather, or the harness-room in a livery stable. They have short, rugged masculine names, like “Gym,” “Running Shoes,” “Barn,” “Cheese,” “Glue,” and the like. I think that they have a definite place in modern society. A sedentary worker, like myself, has no characteristic smell; anybody who met me in the dark might think that I was a professional woman of some kind (not the oldest kind, of course). But if I sprinkle a few drops of “Corduroy Trousers” on my handkerchief, it is obvious for several yards around me that I am a man. Business women always use scents like “Riot,” “Delinquency,” “Turpitude,” and the ever-popular “Beast-Goad.”

• SATURDAY •

Listened to Tales of Hoffman broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera in New York, this afternoon; Hoffman was sung by Raoul Jobin, a Canadian, and Pierette Alarie, another Canadian, was the leading coloratura; the conductor was Wilfred Pelletier, also a Canadian. Reflected for the millionth time that it is a pity that Canadians with this sort of ability have so little chance or encouragement to use it for the advancement of their native land. Canada exports brains and talent with the utmost recklessness, as though we had a surfeit of them at home, instead of having one of the highest living standards, and one of the lowest artistic and æsthetic standards in the world.… Going to bed, discovered that my tube of toothpaste was suffering from severe hernia, and gushed in the most unexpected places when squeezed. Tried to weld the ruptured place over the electric stove, with desperate results, and the odour of frizzling dentifrice spread nauseatingly through the house. Abandoned myself to despair for a few minutes, and then burned some brown paper to dispel the stench of failure.

-VI-

• SUNDAY AND SS. FIACRE & HANSOM

Took a dish of tea this afternoon with some people who served the strongest mixture that I have ever swallowed under that name. It was the colour of a spaniel’s eyes, and when I supped it my tongue was immediately numbed. I ventured to ask for a little hot water, but it was powerless against such tea; I estimate that a cup of it, poured into a wash-tub full of boiling water, might have made an endurable drink for me, but I will not guarantee it.… I ventured to remark to my hosts that they liked their tea very strong. “Oh yes,” said they; “Tea is no good to us unless it will trot a mouse.” I asked a few questions about the latter expression, and learned that what they meant was that they liked their tea so strong that a mouse could trot over the surface of the cup without sinking.… It occurred to me, in a horrible revelation, that they probably kept a mouse in their kitchen for testing purposes, and I lost all my thirst at once.

• MONDAY •

Was roused before seven this morning by a telegraph boy with a message. It read, “Am sending crocheted pillow shams today stop Auntie.” I blenched, and the paper fell to the floor from my nerveless fingers, for of course this was code, and it meant, “All discovered stop prepare to fly at once stop” and it was from my spymaster, Serge Pantz. I immediately gathered all the incriminating papers in the house, and burnt them in the fireplace, and then ate the ashes; with a little milk and sugar they were not unpalatable.… Then I waited and waited and waited until another telegram came. “Send me your recipe for prune bumblepuppy at once stop delicious stop Auntie.” This, when decoded, meant: “Destroy no records stop guard them with your life if necessary stop.” I must confess that this depressed me, for I knew how testy Pantz would be when he discovered that I had eaten the ashes of the records. But Soviet Above Self has always been my motto, so I set about my day’s work. Disguising myself as an old apple-woman, I stood on a kerb until noon and sold my special cyanide apples to as many capitalists as I could persuade to buy them, and then went to a beverage room to poison the minds of the Workers. This is always hard, as they won’t keep their heads still while I am squirting the poison into their ears. Anyway, a lot of them have pretty poisonous minds already.… I am getting sick of this spy business. I think I’ll turn rat, and peach on Pantz to the R.C.M.P.

• TUESDAY •

The spy-scare is mounting, and I hear that some nosey garbage-man has reported to the City Council that I always put my garbage out wrapped in Pravda. To offset any suspicion this may have aroused I put on my Rotary button, my Kiwanis button, my Lion button, my Hi-Y button, my Teen-club button, my Soroptotimist button, my W.C.T.U. button, my B’nai B’rith and Hadassah buttons, and all my ritual jewels from Beta Sigma Phi and walked around town, thus heavily disguised as a Good Citizen. I patted several children, and gave bones to every dog I met, and upon the whole I think I made a favourable impression. I may get out of this mess with my skin whole if I play my cards properly.

• WEDNESDAY •

My mail this morning included some information about this season’s Valentines, though why I should be interested in them I do not know. But I was tickled to read in choice advertising agency English that “thoughtful creators of Valentine varieties have not overlooked the emotional needs of the bachelor girl who doesn’t ‘go steady’ but sports the odd gentleman friend.… If she’s still uncertain of her boy friend’s intentions and emotions, a Valentine could be found which might provide either an encouragement to the shy swain, or ‘no thoroughfare’ to the wolf, without in any way compromising the young lady’s dignity or affections.” … In my young days it was easy to short-circuit a wolf by sending him a one-cent comic Valentine entitled “The Masher,” the verse on the latter being:

You think you’re a Masher, and all hearts do please,

But you might as well know you’re a Big Hunk of Cheese.

It may be argued, of course, that this type of Valentine compromised the sender’s dignity, though not half as badly as it compromised that of the receiver.… I see no mention of a Valentine suitable for a dyspeptic diarist whose emotions have been cauterized by a rebellious and evilly-disposed furnace.

• THURSDAY •

Another note from the Income Tax people this morning. A while ago they presented me with a bill for the whole of my 1941 tax, insisting that I had not paid it. By great good luck and contrary to my usual unbusinesslike procedure, I had my receipts, which I brandished angrily in their faces. Gradually the whole sordid story leaked out: they had taxed me both as Samuel Marchbanks and as Fortunatus S. Marchbanks, in spite of the fact that nobody has called me Fortunatus since 1897; having billed Sam they were out to skin Fortunatus, but I am not quite such a dual personality as that. When their error was pointed out to them, they did not even apologize for their threat to take proceedings against me, but managed to dig up an item of a few dollars which they said I ought to pay, plus interest.… The churlishness of tax-gatherers is phenomenal. I wonder if there is a case on record in which a private citizen has extracted an apology from a tax-gatherer? I wonder if their work makes them curmudgeons, or if curmudgeonliness is a qualification for the job? I have received a stack of letters about this affair, all written from the standpoint of a government official addressing a hardened and evasive criminal. The insolence of these herdsmen of The Golden Calf is past all bearing.

• FRIDAY •

The papers tell me that the sports world has been shaken by a horrible basketball scandal, which surprises me more than I can express. I have for years been under the impression that basketball is a gentle game played by fat little girls who trundle up and down a gymnasium floor with jellying thighs and bobbing bosoms, trying to toss an old soccer ball into a hoop, squealing and giggling the while. But apparently the real basketball players are big hairy fellows who chew tobacco and occasionally accept bribes.… Not long ago I discovered that I was similarly out-of-date on the subject of lacrosse. My idea of lacrosse is genuine Indian baggataway, with 24 of the most murderous ruffians in town clashing and hacking at each other with hickory clubs and pieces of fish-net. An old lacrosse player once pulled up his trousers and showed me his shins, and they looked like raw hamburger even after 25 years. But now it seems that lacrosse really is a girl’s game, refereed by prim females who cry, “Ah, ah there, Lucy,” and “Tut, Tut Marjorie” and “Now girls, remember your Guide honour” when hair-pulling seems imminent.

• SATURDAY •

The spy-hunt has made me as jumpy as a hen on a hot griddle all week, and today was a climax. Telegram from Serge Pantz—“Sending you half-a-dozen tatted doilies stop love stop Auntie.” This, decoded, meant “You have failed, pig of a dog; prepare to die.” This was going too far, so I wired back (collect) “Expecting little stranger next week what do you mean to do about it? Gladys”; this, decoded by Pantz, means “Pish, dog of a pig, I flatly refuse to die”.—However, knowing Pantz, I put on my bullet-proof combinations at once, disguised myself as a woman, and went out and hid in the powder room of a Ladies’ Beverage Room (No Men Allowed). I am counting on the R.C.M.P. finding Pantz before he finds me; indeed, I sent them a little anonymous note about him last Monday.

-VII-

• SUNDAY •

Had a heated argument this afternoon with one of those well-meaning people whose democracy is a burning faith rather than a belief based on reason; a majority, he roared, while his eyes brimmed with sentimental tears, must always be right and must always have its way; he talked feelingly about the wisdom of the Common Man. “But,” I protested, “why should you assume that a group of people, all of mediocre ability and restricted information, possesses more wisdom than the same people as individuals? For instance, if I told a group of fifty average people that the cube root of 100 is 1,000,000 it is most unlikely that anyone would dispute my word, because they do not think; but in actual fact the cube root of 100 is 4.641.” He was nonplussed, and I saw that he had fallen for my bit of sophistry himself.… I am a democrat, but the idea that a gang of anybodies may override the opinion of one expert is preposterous nonsense. Only individuals think; gangs merely throb.

• MONDAY •

Quite a number of people, I notice, have taken to calling me by my first name: I was hailed as “Sam” this morning by a young fellow whose name I do not even know. This does not distress me; if he thinks that he makes the world a cheerier place by calling everyone by a first name or a nickname, I am content that he should do so. But I wonder if people do not attach too much importance to the first-name habit? Every man and woman is a mystery, built like those Chinese puzzles which consist of one box inside another, so that ten or twelve boxes have to be opened before the final solution is found. Not more than two or three people have ever penetrated beyond my outside box, and there are not many people whom I have explored further; if anyone imagines that being on first-name terms with somebody magically strips away all the boxes and reveals the inner treasure he still has a great deal to learn about human nature. There are people, of course, who consist only of one box, and that a cardboard carton, containing nothing at all.

• TUESDAY AND ST. VALENTINE’S DAY •

It was warmer today than it has been for many weeks. The snow sagged, and I sagged with it. My overcoat, which has seemed like a wisp of cheesecloth in bitter weather, felt like the coat of a shepherd dog.… Nobody sent me any Valentines today, which seems a little shabby, considering that I sent out more than a dozen, including a few anonymous insulting ones to the leaders of the principal political parties and high-ranking churchmen.… Rereading Dickens’ Dombey and Son. What an easy life children have nowadays! A century ago a child expected to be beaten, pinched, shaken, cuffed, locked in dark cupboards, bastinadoed and told it would go to Hell all day and every day, even in the happiest homes. And with what result? They grew up to be the Gladstones, Huxleys, Darwins, Tennysons, and other Great Victorians whom we all admire. Nowadays, with our weak-kneed kindness, we are raising a generation of nincompoops and clodhoppers. The revulsion against progressive education may be expected any time now. Eminent child psychologists are already beginning to advocate cruelty as a theory of training. Is your child disobedient, saucy and self-willed? Shove red-hot gramophone needles under its nails, and be a pioneer in the new movement!

• WEDNESDAY •

A fellow who is very much in the know at Ottawa tells me that there will be no relief of the stocking shortage until after the Opening of Parliament. All the best stockings are being held for the Prime Minister, the Supreme Court Justices, the Senate and Commons Speakers, and the Black Rod and Sergeant-at-Arms. The Prime Minister refuses to wear anything but the best of silk, though the Supreme Court is rather advanced in its views and favours nylons.… There is an ugly story of a Senate Speaker a few years ago who turned up at the Opening wearing an old pair of gun-metal lisles of his wife’s: he got what-for from the Governor-General’s aide, this man said.

• THURSDAY •

To Toronto on business. The Royal York was the scene of a Better Roads corroboree, and in the Gentleman’s Powder Room, I was accosted by a young rustic who had apparently been attending a committee-meeting in a beverage room. He was wandering about, trying to find the exit, but the multiplicity of doors confused him. When I met him, he had just finished an unsuccessful tour of a row of doors which, as they did not come to the floor, may have looked to him like the entrances to further saloons. He was hanging on to the soiled towel bin, lost in admiration of the wonders of the great city. Perhaps I reminded him of someone from home, for he hailed me. “Say, this here’s certainly one swell toilet,” he cried. I nodded. I did not want him to think that I was fully accustomed—indeed indifferent—to such splendours.… Toronto is a depressing place. Riding up Yonge Street in the trolley, past all those postage stamp stores, dress-suit renters, used car bazaars, pants-pressing ateliers, bathtub enterpreneurs and antique shops specializing in leering china dogs, my heart was heavy. This, I thought, is Canada’s answer to Regent St., to 5th Avenue, to the Rue de la Paix.

• FRIDAY •

Home tonight on a local train. Was interested in its electrical apparatus: when the train stopped the light was so poor that the filaments in the bulbs could be clearly seen, but when we worked up a good speed it was reasonably bright. How was it produced? By the friction of the wheels on the axles? Or more romantically, by the beautiful wife of the engineer, standing in the tender, brushing her thick auburn locks, the electricity so generated supplying our light? At each station she stopped brushing (to lean down and whisper some delicious secret into the hairy ear of the station agent, her teeth flashing the while like pearls imbedded in a pomegranate) and our light failed.… Whatever the cause, the light was too poor to read by, and I shall write and tell the president of the line that the axles must grind harder, or the engineer’s wife must brush more vigorously, or I shall see that ugly questions are asked at the next session of Parliament.

• SATURDAY •

Have received many letters relating to my recent fearless attack on the Salted Nut Traffic—that spawning-ground of juvenile delinquency and broken homes. A typical missive today from an apologist for the nut-growers: “Surely you are intolerant in your desire to take salted nuts from us all; the moderate nut-eaters far out-number the nut abusers.” This is merely specious. Another writes: “My father, as good a man as ever lived, always kept nuts on the sideboard, and we children saw him eat them, though I never saw him debauch. When I was 21, he took me into the dining room, and said, ‘Jasper, you’re a man now; there they are—cashews, brazils, filberts, everything; use nuts, but don’t abuse them; the nut is a good servant, but a bad master’. I consider your nut-prohibition plans fanatical.” But I am not to be deterred in my war on salted nuts by such letters as these, or the insidious propaganda of the nut-gorged press. I shall not sheathe my sword until we have a nut-free Canada.

-VIII-

• MOTHERING SUNDAY •

It is at this time of year that I begin to think seriously about suicide. My interest in the matter is not practical; I never reach for the bread-knife or the poison bottle. But I begin to understand what it is that people see in suicide, and why they do it. They have seen too many Februaries; they have lugged too many cans of ashes; they have shivered on too many bus stops. Rather than face the remaining two months of official winter, and the likelihood of a bitter May, they commit the Happy Despatch. The rest of us, the cowards, live on and see the summer come once more.… Snow and ice have backed up somewhere on my roof and water has begun to leak down an inside wall, to the serious detriment of the wallpaper. Shall I send a man up there, and pay his widow $50 a week for life if he falls and breaks his neck, shall I risk my own neck, or shall I pretend that it is not happening until the strain becomes too great and I go crazy? Canada’s high rate of insanity is caused by just such problems. Meanwhile water comes down my stairs like the rapids of the Saguenay, and I shall not be surprised to see a salmon leaping upward from step to step.

• SMOTHERING MONDAY •

Yesterday’s suicidal mood persists. Contemplated throwing myself from my office window, as so many despairing men did during the Great Depression. But it is only one storey above ground, and at worst I would break a leg, and look foolish. Anyway there are storm windows, and I can’t be bothered to remove one of them. What Canadians need in February is a painless, simple, and definitely retractable method of suicide.… At one time I used to see a man every day who had tried to cut his throat several years before; it had left him with a wry neck and a livid, weeping scar. After making such a mess of himself it was clearly his æsthetic duty to finish himself off, and get himself out of the way, for he was a public eyesore. Failure to succeed in suicide is the ultimate ignominy, but criminologists tell us that hundreds of people try to shoot themselves every year, and miss; inability to concentrate their energies, which brings them to the verge of death, inadvertently yanks them away from it.

• BOTHERING TUESDAY •

Was chatting with a man who knows a lot about the coal situation. He tells me that things are now so bad that people are asked to come and cart away their own supplies. This frightens me. I do not drive a car myself, and I am quite certain that nobody would lend me one if he thought that I was going to put half a ton of coal in the back seat. I doubt if I could get a taxi to help me with a few hundredweight of coal, even if I did it all up in brown paper packages and held it in my lap, pretending it was bananas.… I crept down into my cellar, and viewed my dwindling bin with new eyes; I looked at my furnace, which seemed to wear a malignant leer on its ugly iron face; I did futile sums in my head about cubic footage divided by square shovelage, multiplied by backward springage. I wildly contemplated pulling up the floor of my cellar, on the off-chance of discovering a private peat-bog. I tried to recall something I had heard about tightly wrapped newspapers, dipped in molasses, making excellent fuel. By this time my teeth were chattering, and I went to look at my indoor thermometer; it said 70, and I felt better at once.

• WEDNESDAY •

To the movies this evening, and saw yet another of those films in which a young married couple, for no reason which would impress anyone outside Hollywood, see fit to behave as though they were an unmarried couple. By this feeble device it is possible to slip scenes past the Censors’ Office—scenes in bedrooms, bathrooms and hotel rooms—which would otherwise be deemed salacious. Why the spectacle of a young unmarried woman brushing her teeth should be considered inflammatory and lewd, whereas the same scene is merely cosy and chummy when she is married, I cannot understand, but such is the power of the wedding ring to anæsthetize and insulate the passions according to the Censors.… The mess concerned a young couple who met, married and laid the foundation for a posterity in four days, after which the husband went to war and faced the foe for a year and a half. He returned to find his wife a stranger, with a baby which looked, and talked, like Charles Laughton. This dreary incident, which was unfolded at a turtle’s pace, failed to grip my attention, and my right knee got a cramp; my right knee is an infallible critic.

• THURSDAY •

Travelling again today, but not toward the fleshpots of Toronto this time. Instead I travelled upon a line which, if it does not already hold the title, I nominate for the worst in Ontario. Ancient and smelly rolling-stock, a roadbed laid out by a drunken manufacturer of roller-coasters, an engine with the disposition of a love-crossed billy-goat—it has all these and lesser iniquities which I shall not enumerate. Worse, there was a train-sick child aboard, for whom I was very sorry, for she was plainly in great distress. But her mother, like many other mothers, had got hold of a wrong idea and would not use her common sense, if she had any. “There’s only one thing to do,” she kept on saying, “and that’s to keep washing her stomach out.” So she poured the child full of water, orange juice, and soft drinks at five-minute intervals, and the child promptly threw it up again, noisily and agonizingly. I wondered how long it would be before I followed suit, but they got out somewhere in the wilderness, and the trainman threw a few old copies of the Globe and Mail over the shambles.

• FRIDAY •

Talked for a couple of hours to a group of young people today, and enjoyed myself very much. But I was amazed to find them so solemn; they approached every subject, however trifling, with knit brows and a high moral attitude; they obviously thought that seriousness and solemnity were the same thing. I made a few little jokes in an attempt to cajole them into happier mood, but they looked at me with pain, and pretended not to notice these excesses of ribald eld.… Met some of them tonight at a party, where jelly-doughnuts made up a part of the fare. It takes a high degree of social accomplishment to hold a cup of coffee in one hand, and eat a jelly-doughnut from the other, and this cannot be done by anyone who wants to indulge in deeply serious conversation at the same time. In consequence many of my heavy-minded young friends squirted doughnut-blood on themselves because they did not approach their food in a realistic frame of mind. A jelly-doughnut is deadlier than a grapefruit in the hands of an unwary eater.

• SATURDAY •

Was talking today to a man quite High in the Civil Service about the censorship of books and put my question to him: What do the censors know about literature and, specifically, how can they decide whether a book is fit for me to read or not? I expected him to confess that the censors knew nothing, but instead he told me that the censors have a long and special training: first of all they attend a series of lectures on Sin, delivered by unfrocked clergy of all denominations, then they pursue a course of reading which comprises most of what is to be found on the Reserved Shelves of university libraries (the books you can’t get unless you know the librarian or his secretary); then they travel widely, taking in the spicier entertainments of Naples, Port Said and Bombay; then they are brought back to Canada, and if they still wear bedsocks, and blush deeply whenever they pass a cabbage patch or a stork in mixed company, and are able to tame unicorns, they are decorated with the Order of the Driven Snow and given jobs in the censorship department.

-IX-

• SUNDAY •

I meant to get up early this morning and cleanse my soul with hard work and godly reflection but a profound torpor settled upon me and I did not waken until a crash outside put me in dread that the chimney had fallen off the house. But it was no such thing; several large chunks of ice had dislodged themselves from the roof and had fallen to the ground. Dare I take this as the first hint of Spring?

• MONDAY •

A day of dissolution and thaw, and very welcome to me, for if all this winter’s snow were to melt at once, my cellar would be flooded, and my furnace might get wet feet, and a cold in the head, and be even uglier than it is.… During lunch the phone rang, and I galloped to it, chewing vigorously; it was a wrong number.… Mentioned my passion for bathtub reading to a lady of my acquaintance, who told me of an ingenious scheme devised by an aunt of hers, who hung a framed chart of Kings of England, from Egbert, son of Ealhmund (827–839) down to Victoria (1837–1901) in the bathroom in full view of the obligatory seat, with the result that all her children and visitors, over a period of years, gained a fine knowledge of the skeleton of British history, and were even certain of where such obscure kings as Stephen and Henry II came in. The shortest reigns, she informed me, were those of Ethelbald, Hardicanute, Harold II and Edward V; the longest, of course, was that of Queen Victoria with George III hot on her trail.… Phone rang at 7:30 and at 9:25; wrong number both times.

• TUESDAY •

Was asked today to look over a large manuscript volume of poetry by a lady who suffers from a poetical seizure two or three times a week. In a life almost entirely devoted to embarrassing situations, I have found that nothing is more embarrassing and difficult than complying with such requests. The best of poets are touchy; the worst are basilisks and scorpions. As long as that book of verse stays in my possession I shall feel like the sailor who had an unexploded shell in his thigh; one false move and I am a goner.… Two more false alarms on the phone today. This is getting past a joke.…

• WEDNESDAY •

Decided to take a firm line with wrong numbers today; in the past I have feebly said, “I’m afraid you have the wrong number,” though in actual fact I am not in the least afraid; usually the boob at the other end of the line, who dialled the wrong number in the first place, grunts nastily as though it were my fault. So when my first call came today, it was, as I had expected, a wrong number, and a voice said, “Is Mrs. Blank at home?” “Not to the likes of you!” I roared in a feigned Irish accent. My next chance came in the afternoon; “Can you send me out a dozen fresh eggs?” asked a voice; “Sure thing; right away, lady,” I promised. At 7:30 the phone rang again; “Is Effie there?” inquired a mouse-like voice, “She is,” said I, assuming the tones of a schoolgirl, “but she’s too drunk to come to the phone; shall I ask her to call you when she can stand up?” … Altogether it was a most successful day, and I shall adopt this procedure in future with all wrong numbers.

• THURSDAY •

Observed a young lady of my acquaintance using a man’s handkerchief to stanch her cold. This seems to be the final and decisive piece of evidence that women have emancipated themselves from the superstitions which have surrounded them for centuries. A generation ago no woman, whatever her needs, ever carried a handkerchief larger than four inches square, with nose-abrading lace at the edges. This was tucked in her bosom, from which insecure rest it usually descended inside her clothes to the region of her stomach, so that she could not get at it without unseemly self-exploration. If she had a cold and really wanted to blow her nose, she had to retire to a private place and blow on a duster, or a torn-up piece of nightdress; sometimes, in moments of extreme stress, petticoats were thus violated.

• FRIDAY •

To the movies tonight and saw yet another picture about a girl who marries a soldier on short acquaintance. In this particular Hollywood nugacity the girl was a multimillionairess, who tested her suitor by pretending to be a secretary, to discover whether he loved her for herself alone; of course, he did so, and I think this was a fault in the plot, for money, especially in very large quantities, is so much more desirable than the average young woman that no man of real wisdom would hesitate for an instant between the two. Of course, money will not bring happiness to a man who has no capacity for happiness, but neither will the possession of a woman who has no more brains than himself. But money will greatly increase the happiness of a man who is already happy (like me). Wisdom is the greatest possession in the world; money comes next; the intimate caresses of Hollywood stars come a long way down the list.… The hero of this movie was noticeably fat; he was greasy, too. Is the fat, greasy man to be the Adonis of the future?

• SATURDAY AND SEPTICÆMIA •

Took advantage of the thaw this afternoon to dig a few drains; every spring I am seized by the idea that I would have made an excellent engineer, and I construct an elaborate system of drains to prove it. The effect is not always what I intend, but bona fide engineers have told me that my schemes are far ahead of the times; my attempts to make water run uphill have been particularly admired. The streets are so clear these days that when I go out in my overshoes, I frequently feel as though my feet were muffled in rags (which is partly the case, of course). To discard overshoes is to court influenza; to wear them is to cultivate the shuffling gait of a hobo. This is a pedestrian’s crossroads.

-X-

• SUNDAY •

Did some tidying in my cellar this morning; it has long been my custom to do some work of this kind on the seventh day, meditating meanwhile on the beauties of humility and simplicity. The occupational disease of people in my line of work is infallibility, complicated by loquacity and carbonic acid gas in the blood. The proper corrective for the mental ills of the man who deals primarily in words is a brief spell of dealing with things; the contrariness and obduracy of such things as dirt, boxes and old potato bags, which he cannot charm into subjection with his honeyed tongue, bring humility to the writer’s heart.… Contrariwise, of course, men who spend their lives dealing with things ought to try to clarify their thoughts on Sundays; the fault is as great on one side as on the other. The impotent man of thought: the bonehead man of action—what is there to choose between them? … Then wrote some letters. I am one of the few people who uses sealing wax on private correspondence; I like it, for it makes the letter gay and gives it a decidedly personal air. I have a couple of very pretty seals; the one I use most frequently is a goddess (or a nymph or a dryad or some such young woman) in puris naturalibus kneeling by a stream. Postmen love it; it feasts their eyes, they tell me. I have never thought highly of the modern custom of sealing letters with horse-hoof glue and spit.

• MONDAY •

A man I know happened to mention on the bus this morning that he was suffering from a trifling complaint—an ingrowing hair. Immediately he was bombarded with tales of horror about ingrowing hairs; one man had known of a case in which such a hair grew three feet into the flesh, and was removed only after major surgery; another knew of a case in which an ingrowing hair developed a hard ball of gristle on its root and left a crater when extirpated; a third had heard tell of an ingrowing hair which, when removed, proved to be a continuation of the patient’s spine, so that he was left with nothing to connect his vertebrae.… I was reminded of the stories women tell any other woman who is going to have a baby.… To a meeting tonight, and reflected upon the excessive hardness, smallness and shakiness of folding chairs which, combined with speechmaking, always reduce me to the lowest depths of melancholy. Why are all good causes inextricably bound up with folding chairs? Is there no virtue in springs and cushions?

• TUESDAY •

To the movies tonight to see a film dedicated to the exposition of one of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Hollywood Faith, to wit, that a fellow who chews gum, wears his hat in the house, and rapes the English language every time he opens his mouth is a better matrimonial choice for a nice young girl than a suave fellow who has lots of money and has been successfully exposed to education. The Apotheosis of the Yahoo is one of the primary objects of Hollywood.

• WEDNESDAY •

The movies last night—an organ recital tonight! It seems to me that I just stagger from one hotspot to another, wallowing in the pleasures of the senses.… To a party afterwards, where I met several ladies called Mrs. Mumbledemum; this Mumbledemum family must be very large, for I am introduced to members of it everywhere. The name is hard to hear, and not too easy to pronounce, and it seems to fit almost anyone, so there must be a lot of people who were born Mumbledemums, or who have become Mumbledemums by marriage. Nowadays when anyone smiles at me whose name I don’t know, I just smile in return, and say, “How do you do, Mrs. Mumbledemum?” in a low, indistinct voice, and they always reply. On occasion I have been addressed as Mr. Mumbledemum myself, and I always grin and pretend that I am a member of that fine old family.

• THURSDAY •

An Indian I know (a chief of the great Swivel Chair tribe) was pointing out sun-dogs in the sky to me tonight, and prophesying stormy weather from them. I had never heard of sun-dogs before, but it appears that they are the roots of a rainbow, of which the arch is invisible. It is an impressive sight to see a Swivel Chair Chief, sitting as straight as an arrow on the back of his Buick, gazing into the setting sun and forecasting the weather.… But this evening I happened to be with this same Indian (we had been sitting around the campfire with a friend, a medicine man of the Long Bill tribe, chewing the pemmican) and on our way back to our tepees we met a third Indian of the Bifocal tribe, who looked up at the sky and said, “By the look of the stars we should have fine weather,” and my Swivel Chair Chief agreed heartily! I never know what to make of these Indians when they start looking into the future. Stars, sun-dogs, stray dogs, dogcatchers—everything they see has a deep meaning for them, but I have to take the weather as it comes.

• FRIDAY •

Today I found myself in the peculiar position of having to restrain my furnace: it was in high spirits, chewing up the coal and spitting out the cinders, and outside the thermometer was pushing upward toward 60 degrees Fahrenheit, birds were twittering, drains were gurgling, and snow was yielding up the smell of rich brown earth, subtly mixed with cat and dog. When I opened the furnace door gusts of heat and flame belched forth, shrivelling my cheap celluloid waistcoat buttons. I toyed with the idea of raking out the fire and throwing pails of water on it, as I once saw a railroad fireman do, but I wanted the fire again, and I knew that it would never forgive such an insult.… As the snow melts, leaves which I should have raked last year come into view, looking discouraged and sad, like soggy breakfast cereals. My lawn, which I left reasonably tidy in the autumn, looks like a garbage dump, and I know why. The jolly dogs (man’s best friend) who live round about, have thrown their old bones and chocolate bar wrappings there all winter. A pox on man’s dumb chum! If I behaved like that, around their doghouses, they would bite me.

• SATURDAY •

This afternoon slept soundly through the first act of a broadcast of Beethoven’s Fidelio, but I heard enough of it to discover that all of the all-American cast spoke English with thick foreign accents, and in that too-rich, fruity speaking voice which opera singers don’t seem able to help.… Went out and chopped some ice off a walk, which was hot work, and was amazed to find that crocus, iris, thrombosis and early haemophilia are all coming up on my borders, thereby making work and ruining my Saturday afternoons for weeks to come.… To a meeting to choose artists for a concert series. How glorious it must be to rise from the miserable status of a $500 artist to the altitude of a $2500 one! But how bitter, as old age advanced and one’s fingers stiffened, or corns appeared on one’s vocal cords, to slip from the $2500 eminence back to $500 a night, and from that to entertaining at political rallies and lodge benefits for a measly $5 and all one could eat in doughnuts and coffee! Congratulated myself that I am a writer, a job in which advancing senility is rarely detectable.

-XI-

• SUNDAY •

Confined to my bed with a desperate and unspecified internal malady, which my friends interpret in the light of their own experience. Those who have had gallstones say that I have all the symptoms of a rock-bound gall; appendix martyrs assure me that I shall know no peace until I have my appendix snipped out; the man who came on an emergency call to look at the plumbing tells me that I must have what he calls “an ulster.” I reply that it can’t be an ulster as I haven’t even a coated tongue, and the joke is so bad that it makes me feel much worse. However, any sort of joke is praiseworthy from a man in my condition. I hug a hotwater bottle to my breast (or a little lower down) and groan.

• MONDAY •

I feel no better today. Reflect that Mind is the lord of Matter, and that if I were a Yogi I should dispel my ailment with a few breathing exercises and repetitions of the mystic syllable “Om.” But I am not a Yogi and the only syllable I feel like uttering with any regularity is “Ow.” The boredom of this ailment is becoming intense.

• TUESDAY •

The doctor tells me that I must have a test tomorrow to discover what is going on inside me. This throws me into a frenzy of apprehension. Respectful and even reverential as I am toward the medical fraternity, I wish upon occasions like this that I could escape to some desert island where no doctor had ever set foot. Such dreadful things happen when doctors begin their tests. I think about the Blue Baby which has been so much in the press of late. Could it possibly be that I am a Blue Adult, and that all the tests will be for nothing? I roll and toss in my bed (which has become as hot as a blast furnace) and wish that I had lived a better life, and given more to the poor. I resolve that if I survive the test I shall become a holy hermit and live in a cave, giving good advice to all who visit me. The only thing which deters me is the reflection that the standard of cooking in hermitages is notoriously low, and most hermits have ulsters.

• WEDNESDAY •

The Test: I am forced to swallow about a pint of liquid cement, flavoured with chocolate; this stuff is apparently impervious to X-rays, and a giant X-ray lamp is placed behind me; a doctor who looks like a scientist in a Boris Karloff film puts on a large pair of red goggles and stares right through me; I have even less concealment than a movie star in one of those new bare-bosom evening dresses. He watches the cement on its odyssey through my gizzard; every once in a while he murmurs with pleasure as my digestive system does something particularly clever; I wish that I, too, could have a peek, but it is impracticable.… This process goes on for some time, and I begin to wonder if it is a deep plot to turn me into a living statue by stuffing me with cement, so that I may be stood outside the clinic with a lamp in my hand, as a sort of advertisement. I begin to wriggle slightly just to make sure that I retain the power of movement.… At last it is over, and I can go home. The Test is finished. But what did it reveal? Shall I ever know?

• THURSDAY •

Spent the day recovering from The Test. Forunately quite a number of people dropped in to see me, and I was able to describe it to them in juicy detail. But all my friends are amateur doctors, and insisted on diagnosing me themselves. Those who had gallstones were morally convinced that I was also a mass of limestone, and should be quarried immediately. The appendix veterans, on the contrary, maintained that I showed every symptom of appendicitis in the last and most horrifying stages, and urged me to be separated from my appendix within twenty-four hours or never to speak to them again. The ulster man came to put a washer on a tap and looked through the door to ask after my ulster. I denied that I was harbouring an ulster. He said that his brother-in-law had taken the same pigheaded attitude, and had eventually been seized with something resembling spontaneous combustion, and had been taken to the hospital, screaming for a drink out of a fire extinguisher. Upon the whole it was a lively day.

• FRIDAY •

A woman whom I know slightly, and who knows me, sent me the following clipping from a Toronto daily: “Bristol, England, March 14. Five pints of beer, leeks, figs and liquid paraffin have been given recently to Alfred, the Bristol zoo’s 15-year-old gorilla, who has been suffering from stomach trouble. Keepers said what finally cured him, however, was a pint of cider.” I suppose this is meant to be a jocose reference to my indisposition. Humph! I reflect cynically upon Cornelius Whurr’s deathless couplet:

What lasting joys that man attend

Who has a polished female friend!

She does not realize what I have been going through; she has not heard about The Test; probably if I told her about ulsters she would interrupt with some irrelevancy about the time she had a baby. The idea that women are sympathetic is grossly overdone. Fifteen-year-old gorilla indeed!

• SATURDAY •

Received a letter today, which promised me good luck in four days if I would only copy it and send it to four other people. Gracie Fields is alleged to have won $40,000 after receiving it, and David Van Brooks (whoever he may be) is said to have lost $20,000 after breaking the chain.… I am joining David Van Brooks’ party, although I have no $20,000 to lose. I am capable of many varieties of idiocy, but sending chain-letters is not one of them.… Was talking to a man today who had a long and beautiful chain running from under his waistcoat into his trousers pocket. I was agog to know what it was for, and at last I found out. On the end of it was an ingenious little machine for piercing the ends of cigars. It reminded me of another golden gadget which I once saw a man carry on a similar chain; it was a little thing like an umbrella (without any top) for stirring champagne to make it bubble. I suppose it could be used in beer, or pop, for that matter, but I have always thought of that champagne-stirrer as a symbol of luxury and abandonment.

-XII-

• SUNDAY •

Was delighted this morning to receive a tribute from the other inhabitants of my tenement on the able manner in which I have coped with the furnace this winter; it had never been cold, they said, the fire had never gone out, the ashes had not penetrated too searchingly into the living rooms, and the cries of anguish and the profanity and execrations from the furnace room had not too far transgressed the bounds of reverence and decency. I mumbled my thanks with a full heart, and dived into the cellar, to look at my old enemy. The thermometer outside registered 62, and he looked sick and beaten; I gave him a malignant kick in the lower draught and left him.

• MONDAY •

Had an opportunity this afternoon to examine the finest two-headed calf I have ever seen; it was no monstrosity, but a calf with two perfect Durham heads on one pair of shoulders; it lived for a week in this interesting condition, and when I saw it was well preserved in ice and was on its way to the taxidermist’s. It is destined to become a macabre little ornament on somebody’s dining-room wall, and probably a nasty shock to anyone who has been too free with the dandelion wine.… I am sure that I would not make a good taxidermist; the temptation to improve upon nature would certainly be too strong for me. Think how easy it would be, when stuffing somebody’s pet terrier, to slip a couple of human glass eyes into the sockets, instead of the usual buttons. Then the owner would really be justified in saying that his pet looked almost human. If I were stuffing this two-headed calf, for instance, I could not resist making one head smile and the other one frown, so that they looked like masks of Comedy and Tragedy. But such irreverent antics would ruin a taxidermy business, in which self-restraint is the first requirement.

• TUESDAY •

Was passing some time in a barbershop, turning over the pages of that sterling periodical The Police Gazette, when I came upon a page of pictures of lightly-clad girls who were described in the letterpress as “beauties.” To prove that they were beautiful, their measurements of ankle, calf, thigh, hip, waist, bosom and neck were given. But I maintain that this mechanical, mathematical symmetry has nothing whatever to do with beauty. Beauty in a woman is largely made up of mystery, charm, and aloofness; these girls were about as mysterious, charming and aloof as those paper cups which are supplied with water-coolers.… Musing thus I laid aside The Police Gazette and took up The Gospel Witness and permitted my mind to heave and roll upon the troubled seas of its passionate prose.

• WEDNESDAY •

If I were a burglar, I should choose the houses I would rob by a careful inspection of their garbage cans. High livers, whose houses are sure to be stuffed with valuables, have large garbage cans from which chicken carcasses and the rinds of costly fruits protrude. Less favoured mortals have small cans, smelling of old tripe and onions. As it is the quaint custom in Eastern Ontario to expose the garbage cans to the public several times a week, this handy credit index is always available, and peeking under the lids is quicker than wiring Dun and Bradstreet. I offer this suggestion, gratis, to book agents, magazine salesmen, and such needy riff-raff.

• THURSDAY •

Every day I learn something new. Today I read of a movement among artists of the Left Wing to destroy art altogether. The leader of this jihad is a fellow called Julian Symons, who writes: “The arts are disintegrating; the objective of art today is to divert attention from the class struggle. The intelligentsia who try to nurture the coy bloom of art as we know it are tending a dying flower.… The transition from the bourgeois art of the last three hundred years to any possible Socialist art of the future will not be made without … sacrifices.” Ha, Ha, Symons old boy! You should come to Canada, where the great mass of the public hasn’t even found out about the bourgeois art of the last three hundred years, let alone this new Socialist art of which you speak in such trenchant terms. Get wise to yourself, Julian, you old red carnation, you!

• FRIDAY •

How I abhor candid people! Today a candid friend told me that this Diary was drivel. What is the diary of any man likely to be but drivel? How many of us are able to record a deed of daring every day, or a ponderous reflection on the nature of the universe? How many of us are able to record that we have been reasonably honest, that we have kept our hands from picking and stealing, and that Lust and Covetousness have been strangers to our hearts? In my time I have read many diaries, published and in manuscript, and the noble and uplifting ones were invariably the work of men whom I knew to be engine-turned, copper-bottomed self-lubricating liars and hypocrites.… One of the most irritating diaries I ever read was written by a fellow I know who used to pinch all the best remarks I made and attribute them to himself. Hell gapes for such villainy.

• SATURDAY •

Raked and rolled my lawn this afternoon; some of my neighbours are gardeners born and bred, and thoroughly enjoy an afternoon of back-breaking labour in the great outdoors; but to me it is nothing but toil and a concession to popular opinion. I am afraid that people will look down on me if my lawn is a hayfield, and I would rather work myself into a decline than have them think that I am lazy (which is the real truth of the matter).… As a result of this unwonted activity my spine shrank a couple of inches and I was forced to walk in an uneasy posture, and when I sat down invisible daggers assailed me in the small of the back. Some of us are built for physical toil, and some for mental toil; every time I lift a rake I get a pain, but I have not had a headache in twenty years. But alas, most of us have to spend many hours a week at work for which we are unsuited.

-XIII-

• SUNDAY •

Had lunch out-of-doors for the first time this year, and further welcomed the fine weather by getting a touch of sunburn. Went for a stroll in the afternoon and admired babies; I find that the most successful approach to the subject of babies is to discuss them as though they were hams; the firmness of the flesh, the pinkness of the flesh, the even distribution of fat, the sweetness and tenderness of the whole, and the placing of bone are the things to praise. Carrying on the ham approach, you may safely say that the baby makes your mouth water, and you may pinch it appraisingly, but if your enthusiasm gets the better of you, and you stick a fork in it, you had better prepare to sell your life dearly.

• MONDAY •

Magnificent spring day, recalling to my mind those lovely lines of Keats:

Oh, how sweet the morning air,

Oh, how sweet the morning air,

When the zephyrs,

And the heifers,

Odoriferous breaths compare!

Met a man who must have been deeply affected by spring, for he wanted to talk about love, a subject on which he had no particularly novel or interesting views. But he gave me a description of how he proposed to his wife, and of his nervousness upon that occasion. He asked me if I thought most men were nervous when proposing? I replied that I thought that formal proposals were rather uncommon, and that couples usually arrived at an understanding without ceremonious palaver, kneeling on the drawing-room carpet, blushing, fainting, bursting a corset-string, and the like; I have never heard of a formal proposal between people of reasonably equal age, and I have given more advice to the lovelorn than Dorothy Dix, in my time.

• TUESDAY •

Some people I know were telling me of a curious experience which they had recently; they put a collection of old and rejected household articles in their car and drove to a dump to dispose of them. While busy at the dump, they were accosted by a strange figure, a woman of tall and stately presence, wearing a paper crown and carrying a staff in her hand, who strode majestically through the avenues of ashes, tin cans, dishonoured wash-boilers and superannuated bathtubs, attended by a rabble of admiring children. This apparition hailed my friends in a strange, incoherent, but musical language, and her breath was richly perfumed with bay-rum, or it may have been lilac lotion; she was in fact as high as a kite and as mimsy as a borogrove. Having said her say, she strode off in queenly style, and she and her raffish crew were soon lost in the mazes of the dump.… My theory is that this was Titania, the fairy queen, fallen upon evil days, but magnificent in ruin; or it may simply have been some rumdumb old bag with a sense of humour. In either case the matter is worth investigating.

• WEDNESDAY •

Received news today that a friend of mine, a scientist of highly complex mentality, is about to marry a lady who is also a scientist of equally daedal intellect. This impresses me as an excellent scheme; then when they are tired of love they can always talk about science, and if love grows cold, science will keep them together, until it warms up again. I have long held the opinion that community of interest is more important to a marriage than scalding passion. People who mean to marry should make sure that there is something more than love between them. In the words of the old song:

Will the love that you’re so rich in

Light the fire in the kitchen

And the little god of Love turn the spit, spit, spit?

Love, like ice-cream, is a beautiful thing, but nobody should regard it as adequate provision for a long and adventurous journey.

• THURSDAY •

Had to do some motoring today. I have two characters, my Pedestrian Character, in which I am all for the Common Man, the freedom of the roads, and the dignity of Shank’s Mare; and also my Motorist Character, in which I am contemptuous of the rights of walkers, violent in my passion for speed, and arrogant in my desire to kill anybody who gets in my way. As I have never ridden a bicycle, I am the enemy of cyclists in both characters. If I am walking, they sneak up behind me, and slice the calves off my legs with their wheels; if I am driving, they wobble all over the road, never signal, and seem to be deaf, blind and utterly idiotic. In spite of their stupidity, cyclists rarely get themselves killed; the roads are slippery with defunct cats, squashed skunks and groundhogs, and hens who have been gathered to Abraham’s bosom, but I have never seen a mass of steel, leather windbreaker and hamburger which was identifiable as the cadaver of a cyclist.

• FRIDAY •

Went today to view the X-rays which were taken of my inside some weeks ago. They were hung up on a rack and lighted from behind. I saw what was wrong at once; a long, thin, jagged monster was gnawing at my vitals; it was at least two feet in length, and on every joint there was a cruel hook. The doctor was very kind. He showed me my pylorus, and commented pleasantly on the nice appearance my spine made in the picture. But I could not take my eyes off the monster. Was it a tapeworm? Or was it something infinitely worse—something hitherto unknown to science? How long could I last with a thing like that in my vitals? As the doctor drew attention to the wonders of my inner world I grew more and more apprehensive, for I knew that he was saving the worst for the last. But the time came when he seemed to have finished. Summoning up all my courage, I asked the fatal question. “And that, doctor,” I said; “what is that?” He lowered his voice, in case one of the nurses might overhear. “That is your zipper, Mr. Marchbanks,” said he.

• SATURDAY •

Was in a bookshop today, reading a magazine on the sly, when a man and a woman came in and bought a school-book for their child. Neither one had the look of a reader (this is understatement) and as they left the man said, “Jeez if they were onto their job they’d put all this school stuff in one book, and then I wouldn’t be all the time wastin’ money.” This seemed to me to sum up much of the popular attitude toward books and education. There was a time when reformers thought that if education were available to the masses, the masses would love it, and every humble cottage would be bursting at the seams with cheap reprints of the world’s classics. In this supposition, as in many another, the reformers were somewhat optimistic. A real dictatorship of the proletariat—if such a thing existed—would quickly result in a bookless world.

-XIV-

• GAMMOCKING SUNDAY •

One of those fine bright days upon which communion with Nature is all but obligatory, so I obediently made my way into the country and tried it. But fine as the phrase “communion with Nature” sounds, it is anything but easy in practice. Observed that the pussywillows were well advanced, but what of it? I never cared much for pussywillows. The roads were muddy, and the air smelled pleasantly of spring, except when I passed a swamp, where it smelled powerfully of drains. Investigated an old churchyard and read some old tombstones, and admired the carving on them, which was really very skilful, though not particularly tasteful. Nature seemed to have no special message for me, so I went home and resumed the combat with my furnace, which is trying to roast me alive.

• MONDAY •

A cold, wet, foggy day—a sort of Indian winter; people who have gone about during the fine weather gloating that we should pay for it later are in the seventh heaven of delight because of the fulfilment of their prophecy. Business took me to Toronto, the Ontario Babylon, and in an odd moment, I tried to buy a copy of Edmund Wilson’s latest book, but was told that it had been banned from sale in Canada. Why? And by whom? Why is it that my government, which takes anything up to 18 months to check and return my Income Tax form, can tell me what I may not read within a fortnight of the book’s publication? I should like to know whether the official who banned this book read it through? I should like to know whether he knows anything about Edmund Wilson and his work? I should like to know what, specifically, he objected to in the book which he banned? Is this official a critic? What education has he had? I imagine him as a little man with thin lips and rimless spectacles who does not read himself (his real job is checking invoices for the Customs) but who acts on suggestions from professional sin-sniffers—a class abounding in our fair land.

• TUESDAY •

Train-travel tonight, and I sat up in a day-coach, reading. Everyone else, however, was disposed to sleep, and curled up in astonishing contortions on the seats; they looked as though they had all eaten toadstools, and died in agony. A young airman across the aisle from me took off his tunic, his tie and his boots, scratched himself as thoroughly as decency allowed, and laid himself down with his feet under my nose; I tapped the feet with my book; and he moved them a little nearer to himself, but they were still plainly visible out of the corner of my eye. A soldier nearby stuck his clenched fist into his mouth, which gave his snores a hollow bassoon-like quality. The women, for the most part, tucked their heads out of sight and elevated their hind-quarters, like Mohammedans praying. The air was heavy with the frowsy, dead stench of sleeping humanity. I sat bolt upright, feeling like the only reveller at a wake, and read the night through, starting nervously whenever the owner of the socks kicked in his sleep, or when the fist-sucker seemed in danger of strangulation, or when one of the women groaned. Toward morning they all looked greenish-gray, which added nothing to the charm of the scene.

• WEDNESDAY •

As I was slicing some bread this morning there was a ring at my door, and I opened it to find an ugly-faced ruffian with a heavy paunch standing on the mat. “D’yuh own this house or rent it?” he demanded. “Who wants to know?” I asked. “I do,” said Pauncho; “this house had oughta be insulated, and if yuh don’t own it there’s no good my wastin’ time talkin’ to yuh.” I disembowelled him neatly with the breadknife, and called the Sanitation Department to come and clear away the mess.… I am often amazed that reputable firms, anxious to sell their products, will permit underbred, impudent, discreditable, rascally slubberdegullions to go from house to house, losing friends and alienating people from them. Nowadays, when there are so many government snoops and stool-pigeons asking questions everywhere, mere hawkers of potato-peelers, loose-leaf encyclopaedias, and patent jamjar rings think that they may adopt the same insulting tone. Consumption, cancer and the pox are all said to be on the increase in this country, but in my opinion the disease of bad manners is outstripping them all.

• THURSDAY •

Visited the dentist today, and as I was a few minutes early I had a chance to look around his waiting-room and make a few Holmes-like deductions from what I saw. Like all dentists, he is apparently a slow reader, for magazines which other people discarded in the 1942 salvage drive are just beginning to find their way to his table. Examined his diplomas carefully. Why do all the boss-dentists who sign these things write so illegibly? A man who cannot control a pen any better than that is surely a dangerous fellow to be poking about in one’s mouth with the nut-picks and tiny power-driven grindstones which dentists use. Lying on the table was a parcel which obviously contained a pound box of a popular brand of candy, left there by the patient who was at that moment in the monster’s clutch. “Aha,” I thought; “a woman, obviously, and a self-indulgent woman at that; probably fat.” But when the door opened the candy was claimed by a big bruiser in a leathern jerkin, who had been getting his snappers put in condition for a delicious feast of nougat, chocolate creams, fudge, and caramels. There are times when I think that Sherlock Holmes was a fraud.

• FRIDAY •

My furnace passed peacefully away in its sleep last night; I could have prolonged its life with a transfusion of coke, but I thought it better not to do so; its temperature had risen to 82°, and I was sweltering, so I let nature take its course. The obsequies will be celebrated very quietly by the ash-man.… Thus ends another winter’s epic struggle, and as I watched my old enemy grow colder and colder this morning, I was able to think of him with the magnanimity of a victor. He did all he could to outwit me, but science, skill, experience, and superior brain-power were on my side. When I hung up my long poker and my clinkerhook, my scraper and my shaker, and put the shovel in the corner, there was triumph in my heart, but a little sadness too.… My furnace now being extinct, and invalid as a source of grief and irritation to me, I masochistically turn my attention to my garden. I am learning about gardening in the only practical way—by experience. Last year I planted $3.45 worth of flower seeds, all in 5 cent packages, and not one single bloom rewarded my efforts. Maybe my method was wrong. My desire was to have a garden which might be described as “a riot of bloom”, and so I mixed all my 69 packets of seeds in a big bowl and sowed them broadcast through the flower beds; all I got was the usual riot of weeds. But once again I am filled with hope for my garden. Upon the pleasures of the past the sun never sets, and over its horrors the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy.

• SATURDAY •

The coming of spring may mean blossoms and picnics for some people, but I am faced with enough repairs and painting to keep me busy till the dogdays. Did some staining today, with a particularly volatile stain, most of which I absorbed into my system through my nose; probably my breathing apparatus is a rich mahogany colour, in consequence.… The fumes of the stain, combined with some chocolates which I unwisely ate, produced a mystical lethargy, in which I saw strange visions; the lethargy was succeeded by a headache, which I cured with tablets.… Was trying to explain about Hitler to some children today; he was, I said, a very bad man. “Was he the kind that wanted his custard before he’d eaten up all his meat and vegetables?” one of them asked. I said that his sins had been even more scarlet than that, but was unable to abridge the iniquities of the Third Reich to nursery terms, for fear of putting ideas into their heads.… It turned cold tonight, and as my fireplace was inadequate for my wants, I had to relight my furnace. I make no bones about it; this was an humiliation which I found hard to swallow. The furnace giggled and sniggered and made thumping noises all evening, just to let me know that it was there, and had not finished with me yet.

-XV-

• SUNDAY •

The press of the times forced me to work today, just as though it were any Monday or Tuesday, which afflicted me abominably. I hate work, regarding it as the curse of Adam, and am fully in sympathy with the medieval view that work is an ignoble way of passing the time, beneath the dignity of anyone of fine feelings or intelligence. However, as there was no escape, I pushed my pen and punched my typewriter all day, and all evening till bedtime, taking time off only for a short walk. When I returned, my furnace had gone out. Tired of being checked, it yielded up the ghost, leaving only a mass of clinkers in the firepot. Addressed myself to the task of re-lighting it, and at last, when I was worn to a nubbin and hysterical with exasperation, the new fire was ready, and in time a gentle warmth stole through the house.

• MONDAY •

Tonight to the movies to see a Noel Coward film of which I had heard and read a variety of conflicting criticisms. I enjoyed it very much, but I can understand that many Canadians would not care for it because it dealt with a kind of English life which is unfamiliar to most people here. So far as acting, directing and humour were concerned, I thought it far beyond all but the best Hollywood products.… Right behind me was a fellow who had brought his deaf and blind fiancée to the films, and he explained every piece of action to her in detail, and repeated all the dialogue as well. I thought the girl was dumb, too, but whenever anything particularly moving came on the screen, she said “Jeeznitawful,” which I interpreted as an expresson of emotion.… When this picture was shown in Ottawa, there was a newspaper controversy about the accent in which the characters spoke, which refined Bytowners thought common. It is interesting that most Ontario people suffer from the delusion that they speak without an accent of any kind, and that corruption of the King’s English exists only outside the confines of this blessed spot, this earth, this realm, this Ontario.

• TUESDAY •

Looked out of an upstairs window this morning and saw a squirrel apparently fast asleep on the roof of my woodshed; when I returned five minutes later, it was still dozing peacefully in the sun. I did not know that squirrels ever rested in this lazy way; I thought that only the more highly developed mammals, like man, had enough sense to keep still for long periods when the weather was fine.… A friend who wants to save my soul has sent me three tracts, which I have added to my collection of works of edification. One of them tells of a “devoted Christian businessman” who was knocked down by a truck, and called his family about him for a deathbed orgy; to all of them he said “Good-night” except Charlie, the Black Sheep; to Charlie he said “Good-bye” in such a significant manner that Charlie was soon brought to his knees, “crying out in agony of soul” and repenting. “Charlie is now a preacher of the Gospel,” says the tract, triumphantly.… Another is about a wicked sea-captain who repented on his deathbed in time to be saved; a cabin-boy with a Bible completed the job just in the nick of time. The eventual profession of this boy is not mentioned.

• WEDNESDAY •

Woke early this morning, looked out of my window, and saw snow descending in large wet flakes; later, when I had summoned up the energy to get out of bed, the sun was shining brightly; as I sat down to breakfast, the skies clouded and it began to rain. This reminded me of Sir William Watson’s painful lines:

April, April,

Laugh thy girlish laughter;

Then, the moment after,

Weep thy girlish tears.

I have long thought that these displays of meteorological hysterics might better be described thus:

Idiot April,

You dribble and grin;

Calm yourself, April,

Wipe off your chin.

This in turn reminded me of the girl in Schubert’s song who laughed and wept by turns, and didn’t know why, but coyly suspected that she must be in love. I have known plenty of girls who were in love, in my time, and I never saw one yet who behaved in this uncertain manner; they all looked like the cat who had just swallowed the canary.

• THURSDAY •

Attacks on my peace of mind are unpleasantly common this week. Today a man presented me with a volume called Seven Years Street Preaching in San Francisco, California, Embracing Triumphant Death Scenes. He said that he thought I needed it more than anybody.… It has its lively side; I am particularly impressed with the author’s observations on an auctioneer whom he saw in San Francisco: “If we could get ministers to cry aloud as earnestly over living immortal souls as this man does over spoiled cheese at two cents a pound, what a waking up they would produce among the sleeping thousands of this land!” … The triumphant death scenes are very choice, particularly those of Orlando Gale and Romeo Darwin, both of Ohio, and I am amazed that dying women and men should be able to find breath to make such long and involved speeches. I notice that the author has little hope for those who died outside the Methodist faith, and is particularly scathing about the Church of Rome. Upon the whole I judged that the writer of this book has never been exceeded in zeal, even by auctioneers selling spoiled cheese.

• FRIDAY •

Paid a visit today to the liquor store, that mighty democratic institution, where I hobnobbed with high and low, rich and poor, clergy and laity for twenty minutes or so, while waiting my turn. Was not pleased to see a little girl there with her mother; the child could not have been more than four years old. Now was it her mother’s fault, that desire for a bottle of Ontario wine caused her to bring her child into that crowd, or the fault of our fatherly government, which makes the purchase of liquor so complex an undertaking? How long will it be before we learn to treat liquor sensibly in this country? … On another journey today I had to wait while an official filled up a form for me. I noticed that he spent a few seconds flourishing his pen in the air, before setting it to paper, every time he had to write, and this flourishing cost me several minutes extra before the job was done. I wanted to ask him about it, but did not want to embarrass him. I have seen business men, also, waggle their pens furiously above the page before making their mark (which is what most business signatures amount to).

• SATURDAY •

Meant to do some gardening this afternoon, but as a heavy snowfall made it impossible, I enjoyed a pleasant swoon on a sofa for a couple of hours, and arose much refreshed.… Then to a party, where I showed my prowess at those games where you have to fill out forms saying who Cain’s wife was, and whether it was Lincoln or Petrillo who said “We must save the Union at all costs.” I like games of that sort; the games I hate are those where somebody comes into the room and says that his first is in coffee but not in tea, and his second is in India but not in Canada, and so forth, until he has told you everything except what you want to know, namely, when the refreshments are going to appear.

-XVI-

• SUNDAY AND METABOLISM OF ST. PANCREAS •

To the zoo this afternoon, and watched some boys who were busy trying to goad the bear into a display of temper. Reflected that their bravery depended entirely upon the strength of the wire around the bear-pen, and wished that the prophet Elisha would suddenly appear and repeat his vindictive trick as described in 2 Kings ii; of all created creatures, there is surely none capable of such bone-headed, thoughtless cruelty as a healthy growing boy.… Looked at some owls which sat blinking and solemn in the daylight; a friend who was with me turned to me and said, “If you put that big one in an expensive suit and sat him behind a desk he could do as well as the manager of any business in the country.”

• MONDAY •

Saw seeds for sale in a shop today, and was sorely tempted. Every spring I have to fight the desire to go on a seed-buying spree; it has been my lifelong habit to plant three seeds where one would do, and I usually buy several packages of everything, including watermelon and century plant. I love the gay pictures on the little envelopes, and the brave, boastful directions on the back of each package. “Sow in open soil when all danger of frost is past”; “plant in a cold frame and set out in June”; “separate until plants are one-sixteenth of an inch apart”—I know all the directions, and could write a gardening-book myself. The only trouble is that I am rarely able to grow any flowers, because I always forget what I have planted, and when the time comes to thin the flowers, I never can tell them from the weeds.… And fertilizer! My garden is all fertilizer; it is really too rich for anything but jungle growths. I might be able to raise bamboo or sugar cane, but not a sprig of miserable Baby’s Breath or Old Maid’s Buttonhole, or whatever that stuff is called.

• TUESDAY •

Sent a telegram today containing the word “critic.” Had a hard time convincing the girl who took my message that such a word existed, and that I did not mean “cricket.” Later on I went into a bookshop and asked for Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of A Little Town. And—so help me, Jimmy Johnson—the girl in the shop had never heard of it! One of the finest, if not the finest, book ever written about Canadian life, read all over the world and translated into several foreign languages, and she had never heard of it! What do these people learn at school? What occupies the chamber in their minds where miscellaneous information should be stored? How do they manage to get through life without finding out anything? And how do these intellectual shut-ins ever get jobs?

• WEDNESDAY •

I may not be able to grow flowers, but my garden produces just as many dead leaves, old overshoes, pieces of rope and bushels of dead grass as anybody’s and today I bought a wheelbarrow to help in clearing it up. I have always loved and respected the wheelbarrow; it is one wheeled vehicle of which I am perfect master. I cannot drive a car, I fall off bicycles, and the only time I tried to get into a wheelchair it tipped forward and threw me out. But with a wheelbarrow I am any man’s equal: I have not only a practical, but also a theoretical mastery of it; I once won a debate on the subject “Resolved: That a wheelbarrow is of more use on a farm than an Old Maid.” I took the affirmative side, and stunned the judges with my eloquence. But until today I have never had a wheelbarrow of my own. I must have a name painted on its side: Shall I call it “Falcon” or “Zephyr”?

• THURSDAY •

Several of my friends who are zealous in the temperance cause are back from Toronto today with sore throats—the result of their impromptu serenade of the Premier at Queen’s Park yesterday. They tell me that they sang the four verses of Fight the Good Fight at least seventeen times, while the depraved, rum-loving M.P.P.’s sat in their velvet chairs roaring, “Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest”, and “They took the ice right off the corpse and put it in the beer”, and other gems of pot-house psalmody.… A dog-breeder tells me that the Mexican Chihuahua is given gin in puppyhood to stunt its growth. I knew that Hollywood child actors were given gin for this purpose, but I never before heard of a dog being shrunk with gin. Perhaps that accounts for the permanently sozzled expression of the Chihuahua, and its peculiar bark, which sounds so much like a hiccup.

• FRIDAY •

A conference which is going on now has caused the papers to be filled with cartoonists’ ideas of what personified Peace looks like; she is either an iron-jawed, gimlet-eyed female with a bust like the prow of a destroyer, or she is a droopy, big-eyed miss with no bosom at all, who looks as though she lived entirely on marshmallows; in both cases she wears a garment equally suggestive of a modest girl’s nightie, and the glory that was Greece. Why should Peace be such a pill? … Saw a couple of handsome stuffed owls in a window today and was sorely tempted to add them to my collection. But fond as I am of owls, stuffed or on the claw, there is no disputing that they create a somewhat close atmosphere, and people are complaining about my office already. Asthmatical visitors, and those who are allergic to feathers, begin to wheeze as they cross the threshold. Some day, when I have completed my collection of native owls I am going to import one of these pretty little owls from Greece; they are about a foot high, and extremely fetching in appearance. They are the true owls of Minerva, and very intelligent; they say “Whoo!” in Greek.… I get a good deal of mail, but little of it is personal, and none of it is interesting. The strangest people and institutions choose to send me letters; for some weeks past I have been getting communications from the American Institute of Laundering, who want to tell me why it takes them so long to do the washing. Frankly, I don’t care; I would never dream of sending my laundry to the States to be done up; I have it done in the Marchbanks Institute of Laundering, an excellent institution with a 100 per cent Irish staff, and it takes no time at all; if I want anything in a hurry, I can always fish it out of the ironing-basket and wear it rough-dried.… The railways keep sending me messages, too, boasting about how much money they have made, which I think dreadfully bad taste. What would they think of me if I sent them letters saying, “Last year, after paying all bills and charges, Marchbanks had $7.68 to spend as he liked.” They would be disgusted; so am I.

• SATURDAY •

Discerned symptoms of a cold deep in my inner being today, and immediately set to work to circumvent it. For twenty-four hours before a cold breaks out in its unmistakable symptoms of salt rheum, cough and tædium vitæ I suffer from tremblings of the spirit and a sense of impending doom; during this period I consume glass after glass of sodium bicarbonate in hot water; sometimes it does the trick and sometimes it does not. I got the idea that it would stave off a cold from a man who subsequently died of pneumonia, so I may be on the wrong track. But the results, whether healthful or not, are certainly violent. My frail form is racked by horrendous belchings, like the roars of a lion. The Chinese are said to frighten away evil spirits by beating gongs; I have my own not wholly dissimilar method.

-XVII-

• SUNDAY •

A cold, the like of which has never before confronted medical science, has me in its grip, and my head feels as though it had been roughly scooped out with a tin spoon, and stuffed with soiled laundry. My sense of taste has completely gone; I cleaned my teeth with a widely-advertised drain-opener tonight and did not even notice until it ate the bristles off my toothbrush. Went to bed, propped up on many pillows, so that I should not strangle in the night. Had a chest-rub, a hot drink, and crunched up a mouthful of aspirin before going to sleep. Woke, some hours later, having dreamed that I was in the grip of a big dog, which was tossing me from side to side and barking furiously. Was alarmed to find that in truth I was being thrown all over the bed by some mysterious agency, and the sound of deep, angry barking was deafening. As consciousness returned, I realized that I was having a Coughing Fit. As the old song has it:

I attempt from love’s sickness

To fly, in vain;

For I am myself

My own fever and pain.

I was myself my own dog, bark and all; each paroxysm raised me at least two feet above the bed, and then as I emitted a frightful roar it flung me down again. This went on for some time—long after I had begun to ask of Death where was its sting? But everything passes in this world, and at last I fell asleep, and dreamed that I was being suffocated.

• MONDAY •

Today I live in the gray, muffled, smelless, puffy, tasteless half-world of those who have colds.

• TUESDAY •

Made the acquaintance of a rum-drinking budgerigar this evening. Was chatting with some people who offered me a glass of rum, and after I had been convinced that they were not joking and not crazy, I settled down in the cosy beatitude which comes over a man who has unexpectedly been given a drink. At this moment their budgerigar broke out of his cage, whizzed across the room and settled on my shoulder. I thought it was my simple and child-like nature which had fascinated him, but I was wrong. He cake-walked along my sleeve, suddenly dipped his beak into my glass and took a hefty swig; luckily Nature has not equipped budgerigars with much in the way of a gullet, so he didn’t get more than his share. He had a few more gulps, and then flew off to a mirror, in which he kissed his own reflection several times, with evident satisfaction. It has been years since I had enough rum to provoke any such ecstasy; there are advantages in a limited capacity.

• WEDNESDAY •

A man who had been poking his nose into the MS. of this Diary told me he didn’t think it was very funny. This is the sort of comment which makes me secrete adrenalin by the bucketful. First of all, how did the ridiculous assumption spring up that my Diary was meant to be funny? What record of man’s life, shot through and through with toil and anguish, disappointment and shame, frustration and denial is ever funny? When Tolstoy gave up wealth and rank and, in an agony of pity and idealism, tilled the land with his peasants, was it funny? When Gauguin left a secure life in Paris and went to paint the beauties of Tahiti, casting his lot with savages, lepers and degenerates, was it funny? And when Marchbanks, furnace-fried and garden-torn, commits his reflections to his Diary, is that funny? No, baboon! No, donkey! Tragic, mystic, sublime, perhaps. But only a coarse and warty soul could find food for laughter here.

• THURSDAY •

My coal bin is empty at last. For weeks I have been feeding my furnace a mixture of coke, slack, wood-shavings, cannel coal and odds and ends of rope and raffia from the floor of my coal bin, and now it is all gone. I shall not buy any more. I am, I think, a tolerant, easy-going fellow, but when it is suggested that I should spend any more money on that accursed furnace this year, everything goes black before my eyes, and I fall on the floor, foaming at the mouth and uttering animal cries. Of course, I cannot freeze. I have a woodpile, and I shall keep my furnace burning with that. If, when it is all done, the weather is still cold, I shall move to an hotel. My furnace does not like wood, and makes horrid stinks when given wood to burn. It shoots smoke up its heating pipes, and heat up its chimney, and keeps my whole house at the temperature and atmosphere of an Indian tepee. But I do not care. I can endure anything better than spending money for another load of coal—half of which (the big half) will be coke. Anyhow, other big expenses loom before me. My lawn-mower simply must be sharpened; I avoided having this done during the war years (to avoid taking several men from more vitally necessary jobs) and now a large machine shop has undertaken the work, on a cost-plus basis.

• FRIDAY •

Nothing happened to me today which was not routine; my life grows duller and duller. Sometimes I think that I should take up a hobby, but the problem always is, which one? I could breed budgerigars, but I’m not sufficiently interested in budgerigars. I could become an authority on the history of something-or-other, but that would be so much like my ordinary work, that it would not recreate me. I once worked up a small enthusiasm for wood-carving, but when I found that it meant investing $100 or so in chisels and gouges, and haunting lumber yards in search of fine pieces of Spanish mahogany and sandalwood my enthusiasm waned. The trouble is that I don’t really like doing anything; I just like to sit, and when I sit I become bored. It’s a vicious circle, and I suppose I am what the psychologists call maladjusted.… I once knew a man whose hobby was making jewellery. He had a few stones and a few chunks of gold and silver, and he made rings and brooches which he gave to his friends. They were so horrible that nobody would wear them, but that was his fulfilment. I also knew a chap who did rotten bookbinding; his system was to take a book which you really liked, and bind it in suede leather which made your teeth grate. I finally got so I didn’t care whether he was fulfilled or not.

• SATURDAY •

Having averted my face from it for several weeks, I tackled the problem of Income Tax today. People of a mathematical turn of mind tell me that the forms are very simple if you attack them logically, but I am incapable of attacking an Income Tax form logically, or even coolly. Whatever my Better Self may say about citizenship and duty, my Worser Self remains convinced that it is a wicked shame that the government should take a big chunk of my earnings away from me, without so much as telling me what the money is to be used for. I know about the Baby Bonus, of course, but whose baby, specifically, am I bonussing with my money? Probably a damp, sour-smelling baby which I should hate if I met it face to face. Whose Old Age Pensions am I paying? Probably those of some lifelong prohibitionists, if the truth were known! People to whom I would not give a used paper handkerchief if I met them in the street are picking my pockets by means of this iniquitous Income Tax! The whole thing puts me into such a passion that I am incapable of adding and subtracting correctly. Clutching hands seem to snatch at me out of the paper until I scream and scream and scream.

-XVIII-

• SUNDAY AND MAY DAY •

A man who spent part of the winter up in the Kapuskasing district told me that the best-dressed people in Canada live there. They haven’t much to spend their money on beside personal adornment, and they go in for rich and colourful raiment of a kind never seen in the city. Manufacturers prepare special lines of Babylonian parkas and Tyrian windbreakers for the northland which are unknown in the cities of Ontario, where men dress in gray and blue sacking and allow their wives to choose their ties for them. In the north, this man told me, the trappers and loggers are great patrons of the beauty shops, and like to have their hair and beards arranged in crinkly marcels. I was not surprised to hear this, for man in a natural state is a vainglorious creature; it is only when he puts on the shackles of civilization that he becomes colourless, shamefaced, and slinking.… May Day today, which I celebrated by organizing a dance round the May Pole for some children, after which I treated them to chunks of May Pole sugar, which is scarce this season.

• MONDAY •

Today at lunchtime I saw a girl’s hat blow off into the street; she was a pretty girl (well—fairly pretty—not fat, anyhow), nicely dressed, and her distress was pitiable to see. The hat was a small round gray felt gourd, and after rolling about in the dirt for a while, it came to rest under a parked car. With the alertness of an old campaigner in the Sex War, I at once took cover in a shop door, for I knew that that girl would immediately be on the lookout for a man to get her hat for her, and I had no mind to crawl on my ulcers in the street, under somebody else’s oily old jalopy. Sure enough, she had her victim within three minutes; simpering pathetically he fished out the hat, and his reward was a smile—not nearly enough in these days of trouser shortage.… But at five o’clock I saw a young workman lose his cap in the street, and what happened? His companions jeered coarsely, young women sniggered and sharpened their fingers at him, and a big fat capitalist in a blue car rode right over his hat just as he was snatching for it. This typical display of the inequalities under which men struggle in the modern world saddened me so much that I hardly had strength to resist a young Jehovah’s Witness who tried to sell me a magazine on my way home.

• TUESDAY •

My cold is not better; it is worse, and I am confronted by one of those vexing problems for which there is no wholly satisfactory solution. Shall I stay at home, and enjoy the delights of mild invalidism, or shall I do my day’s work, and enjoy the gloomy pleasures of martyrdom? … To lie in bed, cosseted with hot-water bags and flannel chest-warmers, supping gruel, syllabubs, and tansy tea—that is the ideal state on a vile, rainy, soggy day like this. But again, to snuffle at my work, to throw paper handkerchiefs into the waste basket in monotonous rhythm, to cough pitifully and roll my rheumy eyes toward Heaven whenever anyone reproaches me—this, too, is bliss.… Then again a man with a cold is a privileged snarler; he can be as abrupt as he likes with his colleagues, and they are forced to believe that it is his illness which speaks through his lips, and not his habitual sweet spirit. Lying in bed, there is no one to snarl at, for if one snarls at one’s nurse she may retaliate with a mustard plaster—which is, of course, for one’s own good, and has nothing whatever to do with revenge.… I eventually decided in favour of work, and developed a cough which sounds like coal pouring down a chute.

• WEDNESDAY •

I listen to the radio a good deal these days, for my ears are enchanted by the wonders of the newscasts, though occasionally I shed a tear for the ignorance of the announcers. Today I heard Connecticut with the second “c” sounded—an inexcusable solecism, and yesterday I heard Count Bernadotte called “Bernadotty.” I am often told that radio announcers cannot be faultless; I know that, but I insist that they should speak like educated people, and not like members of the backward squad at the Frontier College. After all, they are paid to talk, and if they cannot speak well they are bad workmen, and deserve criticism like other bad workmen. If man has conquered the air merely to fill it with bombs and illiteracy, we might as well discount this civilization, and try a new one.

• THURSDAY •

Word reached me today that I am shortly to possess a handsome kitten; I have been on the track of a kitten of just the right sort for quite a time. Immediately turn my attention to suitable names. Nicholas is a fine name for a cat, and so is Solomon. Dr. Johnson called his cat Hodge, which convinces me that it must have been a rustic, bumpkin cat, with a miaow like a creaking door. All sorts of famous men have been cat-lovers, but unfortunately they have not left a record of their cat’s names. They may not have had names. According to the rhyme—

Alfred de Musset

Called his cat “pusset”;

(His accent was affected,

Which was only to be expected.)

Whereas, upon the other hand—

Richard Strauss

Called his cat “pauss.”

I should like to call my cat Bubastis, after the Cat Goddess of ancient Egypt, but my neighbours are very conservative, and would give me oblique glances if I crept about my garden calling “Bubastis, Bubastis” in a high, soft, cat-attracting voice. Cardinal Richelieu gave his white cat seven names, after seven different Popes, but my motives might be misunderstood if I followed his example (not being a Cardinal). The ideal name eludes me, but I shall find it at last.

• FRIDAY •

To the bank today, and stood in a queue right behind a man who appeared to be paying off the National Debt in pennies; he and the clerk counted them all several times with intense concentration, and after a while I began to count them too, to combat my boredom.… When at last the Golden Boy moved away, and I confronted the wicket, I was intimidated to find that the young lady behind it was several inches taller than I was, and looked down at me as though she thought I had not come honestly by the few dirty bills which I poked at her through the bars. By the time my trifling business was finished, I was cringing pitifully before this goddess.… But when I went to another wicket to get my book, I saw the true state of affairs. She was really a little girl, about the size I am accustomed to dandle on my knee, and she was standing on a box! It is this sort of misrepresentation on the part of banks which drives simple people to socialism. In the socialist state everybody will have to keep his feet flat on the floor, his head in the clouds, his shoulder to the wheel, his back to the wall, his ear to the ground, and his nose to the grindstone. And short girls will be made to stand under tables at the banquets of state officials, and retrieve the dropped napkins of the gorging Parteigenossen.

• SATURDAY •

Kitten arrived today—a tortoiseshell inclining toward tiger stripes; its milk-name was “Tiger”, and it may stick unless I can think of something better. It is a female, so Nicholas and Solomon must be abandoned. Cats marked in this way reveal Chinese ancestry, so I am told, but so far Tiger has shown none of the much-advertised Chinese calm. She has climbed the curtains, skated on the lid of the piano and displayed an utterly anti-Confucian passion for fish scraps, bits of chicken, custard, junket, bread-and-milk and similar fleshpots. A stickler for tradition, I wanted to butter her paws to accustom her to her new home, but the butter price will not permit it. Engaged in a lively discussion as to whether olive-oil was a permissible substitute. Made a punching-bag for Tiger out of a ball of paper and some string, and watched her box; kittens and babies are always able to reduce us to the last extreme of drooling fatuity; at last Tiger was settled for the night in a box containing an old sweater and a hotwater bottle, the latter being a substitute for her mother. I hope she doesn’t get a shock in the morning, when she finds her mother has turned cold, bald and a disagreeable shade of red.

-XIX-

• SUNDAY •

Went cheerfully through the whole day without realizing that the usual haphazard tinkering with the clocks was in progress, and that I should have been enjoying the benefits of Daylight Saving Time. I don’t really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind. I even object to the implication that I am wasting something valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen. As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the boney, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves.

• MONDAY •

An extremely attractive young woman of my acquaintance told me of an amatory adventure she had today. While at the grocer’s she noticed that she was an object of deep interest to a dark, passionate young man behind the counter. Wherever she went he followed her with a burning eye: his heavy breathing was audible at a considerable distance; when at last he caught her eye, he gave her a glance charged with 25,000 volts of tender meaning. As she is quite accustomed to these tributes she paid no attention and forgot about him entirely until her groceries were delivered. But then she found his name, address and telephone number, neatly written in black crayon on one of her bananas! The use of a banana as a billet doux would have interested the late Havelock Ellis. I suggested that the next time she should casually drop a lemon, as a sign that his suit is hopeless.

• TUESDAY •

As I sat outside the main dining room of the Royal York this evening, a large black dog appeared from nowhere and began to lick my hand, sit on my feet, wipe its nose on my trousers, and give other evidence of its esteem and regard. At the best of times I have a low opinion of Man’s Dumb Chum, and as I could see a headwaiter eyeing me balefully, as though about to call the hotel detective and the bouncer, I gave the creature a couple of sharp kicks in the slats and urged it to go elsewhere. But dogs love me just as inveterately as I hate them, and the creature took my abuse the way screen heroines take the soft cooings of Charles Boyer. This rattled me so much that I got up and moved to another chair, but the dog followed me, leaping up and down and wagging a tail like a wagon-tongue. Drastic action was called for, and so, with a Judas smile, I fed it a particularly ferocious coughdrop which I had in my pocket—a coughdrop of atomic strength—and that did the trick. It gave me a look of reproach which would have done credit to Beautiful Joe, and rushed away howling. When I last saw it, it was trying to get a drink out of an ornamental spittoon which was, however, filled with sand.

• WEDNESDAY •

Went to see an entertainment describing itself as Russian Ballet tonight. But it had sacrificed all the grace and carefully concealed art of Russian Ballet for a kind of athletic joyousness which was about as amusing as a high school gym exhibition. In the art of ballet, inspiration is most decidedly not ninety-five per cent. perspiration.

• THURSDAY •

If the purchase of costly, foolish little gadgets will do it, I should have a magnificent garden this year. Today I bought a hose-reel, a charming toy with a lot of green paint on it, for rolling up my hose and trundling it around the garden. The fact of the matter is that since the purchase of my wheelbarrow, I have lost all sense of values, and am ready to buy anything which looks like a garden tool. Although the wowsers pretend that men come to ruin through drink and women, the real truth of the matter is that more men are ruined by the purchase of expensive domestic junk than in any other way. Drink imposes its own limit, and women soon become a weariness of the flesh, but the passion for saucy little garden gadgets, bedizened with green paint and ballbearings, is never stilled. It gnaweth like a serpent and wasteth like a fever.

• FRIDAY •

In the morning paper, I see some pictures of flower arrangements done by Toronto interior decorators. In one of them some Arum lilies had been painted blue! Such tricks are not in the great Japanese tradition of flower arrangement. Indeed, when I studied the arrangement of flowers with the Hon. Miss Morning Mouth at the Imperial Greenhouses at Tokio, we were forbidden even to bend the stem of a flower or strengthen it with wire. I recall that one student (a pretty little creature called the Hon. Miss Bursting Cocoon) was caught by the Hon. Miss M. M. pressing the stem of a calceolaria with a hot iron, to make it straight, and she was in danger of expulsion. However, she made amends by writing one of those moving Japanese poems. It went like this:

I pressed a stem;

Ahem!

Now, when the moonlight falls on the jade
roof of the Imperial Brewery,

I am desolate.

• SATURDAY •

Had an inaugural use of my hose-reel today. It was not a success, being designed for hose of the type which some people attach (for reasons unknown to me) to their hot-water bottles. My hose was too strong for it, and the pretty little barrel kept unwinding just at the moment when I most wanted it to remain firm. The green paint came off on my hands in gobs, and the little hook which was supposed to keep the whole thing in a beautiful, shipshape roll, came off at once, and had to be replaced with a piece of string. What is more, when the machine is loaded with hose, the little wheels won’t revolve. Some day, perhaps, I may learn to resist the soft appeal of garden appurtenances which belong strictly in the category of toys.

-XX-

• SUNDAY •

Dirty weather today, culminating in hail later this afternoon. When I read about other people’s hail-storms in the papers, the hailstones are always described as being as big as pigeon’s eggs, and sometimes as big as baseballs; my hailstones were no bigger than grains of tapioca, and melted as soon as they reached the ground. It was a disappointing performance. Frankly, I think that there is a tendency deep in the human soul to exaggerate the size of hailstones. To combat the cold I relit my furnace, using some odds and ends of coal, coke, dust and semi-liquid black goo from the corners of my cellar. The fire gave off a strangling black smoke, but no heat whatever, and deposited something like coal tar on all my furniture, upholsteries, and even on my person. I was noticeably swarthy when I went to bed.

• MONDAY •

I see that the movie magnates think of reviving The Sign Of The Cross, with Charles Laughton having his feet tickled, Elissa Landi being eaten by lions, and Claudette Colbert bouncing up and down prettily in a bath of asses’ milk. It was one of those films in which Christianity and Romantic Love were inextricably confused; Christianity and Pure Love were equated with marrying the girl and restraining premarital caresses to an occasional light kiss on the lips; Paganism and Impure Love meant not marrying the girl, and occasionally joining her in her asses’ milk bathtub. But the most fascinatingly repulsive confusion of Christianity and Hollywood Mush that I have ever seen was in Ben Hur in which lovers were shown in the foreground of the scene of the Crucifixion, with the caption, “He died, but Love goes on forever.”

• TUESDAY •

Heard about the engagement of two people known to me. Immediately the old question sprang into my mind; “What can they see in each other?” Pondered on this and decided that it was a stupid question. After all, I suppose everybody is loveable to some degree, if you approach them in the right way. Very often when I am introduced to women, I think, “What is she really like behind the disguise which she wears?” And very often I discover that she is pleasant enough, and probably would expand and glow if she received enough affection.… This habit of mind is not unlike that of the wicked villains of French novels, who were frequently described as “stripping women with their eyes”; when I was younger I used to do that, but as my eyesight grew worse, I had to depend more and more on guesswork, and finally gave it up altogether. Nowadays I never even take off a woman’s overcoat with my eyes. I am far more interested in the detection of wigs and false teeth than in conjectural revelations of a beauty which rarely exists.

• WEDNESDAY •

My kitten Tiger is making the acquaintance of the whole world out-of-doors, and his amazement at such things as grass, plants and flower beds is pretty to watch; give him a border full of iris, and he thinks that he is in a jungle, and prowls realistically. Perhaps God made cats so that man might have the pleasure of fondling the tiger.… The kitten has a luxurious, Bohemian, unpuritanical nature. It eats six meals a day, plays furiously with a toy mouse and a piece of rope, and suddenly falls into a deep sleep whenever the fit takes it. It never feels the necessity to do anything to justify its existence; it does not want to be a Good Citizen; it has never heard of Service. It knows that it is beautiful and delightful, and it considers that a sufficient contribution to the general good. And in return for its beauty and charm it expects fish, meat, and vegetables, a comfortable bed, a chair by the grate fire, and endless petting. The people who yelp so persistently for social security should take a lesson from kittens; they have only to be beautiful and charming, and they will get it without asking.

• THURSDAY •

Was not pleased this morning to receive a circular from an insurance company, addressed “To The Householder Or Roomer.” It is not the implication that I take roomers which annoys me; I have nothing against boarding houses or boarders and have indeed filled the role of Roger the Lodger myself in many homes. No; it is the word “Roomer” itself which I dislike. The English language contains excellent and honourable words to meet all cases; a man who eats and sleeps in a house kept by somebody else is a boarder (unless he is an in-law, of course); a man who merely lives there and eats elsewhere is a lodger. If we accept the nasty word “roomer” into the language, we must accept its beastly counterpart “mealer.” “Do you room at Mrs. Murphy’s?” “No, but I meal there.” … What is more, I hate letters addressed to “The Householder Or Roomer,” because they try to cover altogether too much ground with a miserable circular and a one-cent stamp. Furthermore, I loathe and condemn all circulars printed in type which tries to look like the print of a typewriter; I regard them as even baser than letters signed with a rubber-stamp of a signature. I have never bought a cent’s worth of insurance from any company dealing in such nasty deceits, and I never will.

• FRIDAY •

Long letter today from a friend who loves cats, who calls me an “ailurophile”, which I realize, after a little thought, is Greek for cat-lover. “Glad you have a cat,” he says; “I don’t know how you managed so long without one. Every writer needs a cat. But you are wrong in saying that the names of the cats of great men are not on record. The earliest known cat was Bouhaki, who belonged to King Hana of the 11th Egyptian dynasty; and you must have heard of Mahomet’s cat Abuhareira. What about Mark Twain’s four cats, Apollinaris, Blatherskite, Sourmash and Zoroaster? What about Victor Hugo’s two—Chanoine and Mouche? What about Carlyle’s cat Columbine? What about Rossetti’s cat Zoe? What about Matthew Arnold’s cats Blacky and Atossa, and Horace Walpole’s two cats Fatima and Selima, and Theophile Gautier’s two, Seraphita and Zizi, and Swinburne’s Atossa, and Dicken’s cat Williamina (first called William, by mistake) to name only a few? Dr. Johnson owned not only Hodge, whom you mention, but also a kitten called Lilly. I am surprised that you could write without a cat; no other writer of the least consequence has been without one.”

• SATURDAY •

Have been thinking about what my correspondent said yesterday; maybe the trouble with modern literature is that too many writers have deserted cats and gone over to dogs; a dog is a physical, not an intellectual companion. Perhaps, after all, the Indians had a good idea in their system of totems; certainly some people seem to be Dog-men, whereas others are died-in-the-wool Cat-men; I have known quite a few Bird-women, and once I met a Monkey-woman, who was never happy unless accompanied by a small monkey which appeared to have had its trousers patched on the seat with bright green. It’s a strange world, and we are all more in the grip of primitive ideas than we care to acknowledge. The other day I saw a little girl trying to walk on a hardwood floor without touching the cracks. “The cracks are poison,” she explained, “and if you walk on them you’ll die.” Children invent magic; later in life we are still subject to this sway, but we invent “scientific” theories, and “philosophies” to make it intellectually respectable.

-XXI-

• SUNDAY •

The first picnic of the season, somewhat complicated by the difficulty of finding a piece of ground dry enough to sit on without receiving the impression that one had put one’s hind-quarters in cold storage. At last found a charming dingle (or gully, if you insist) and spread the refreshments; after all, a picnic is essentially a meal in the open air and there is no point in disguising the fact with attempts to appreciate the over-rated beauties of nature. There are two kinds of picnic which I hope to enjoy before I die; the first is the kind exalted in so many French paintings, in which the men lie on the grass and play mandolins and drink wine, while the ladies remove their clothes and paddle in a nearby river (see Le Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe by Manet); the second is an English Victorian picnic, with plenty of fine silver, a wine-cooler, a footman and a maid to serve the grub, and everybody dressed to the nines in sporting costume. The modern picnic, with peanut butter sandwiches and coffee, is good in its way, but lacks breadth and richness.

• MONDAY •

One of the candidates for the Prime Minister-ship is advertising that he was born in a log cabin, and apparently has a movie of the event to prove it. Why do so many people think it admirable to be born in a log cabin? To be born in a log cabin, during the past 60 or 70 years, merely indicates that one’s parents were shiftless; all the best people, whose parents were up-to-date in their views, were born in hospitals. A log cabin, with a dirt floor, wind whistling through the chinks in the walls, rain falling, snow drifting, and wolves howling outside the door, is no place to usher a child into the world; it is likely to pick up all kinds of nasty ailments right away. To the truly progressive mind, being born in a log cabin is a shameful circumstance, to be concealed from political opponents, who may insist that a child so born is likely to break out, even in middle age, with croup, or thrush, or diaper rash, or some other humiliating and unstatesmanlike disease, right in the middle of a peace conference.

• TUESDAY •

Without either effort or invitation on my part, politics has begun to colour my whole life. In Canada this is inevitable; what horse-racing is to Irishmen, or singing-contests to Welshmen, politics is to the Canadian. It is his absorbing passion, bred in the bone and coursing through his blood. It weighs upon him like atmospheric pressure, 16 pounds to the square inch. There are Canadians who take no interest in politics, but they are chiefly drawn from the class which converses in sign-language, eats with its hands, and cannot count above ten. The true Canadian can be brought back from the grave, lured from his treasure-chest or beguiled from his mistress’ bower by two things—an argument about religion or an argument about politics. I have seen elderly ladies who looked like waxwork advertisements for Mother’s Day become raging tigresses when politics has been mentioned, and babes scarcely weaned bash babes of uncongenial opinion with their dollies, as election day draws near. Indeed, as a babe I swung a mean Teddy Bear myself in defence of my party prejudices.

• WEDNESDAY •

Because I have let my furnace out I have to make grate fires every night, to dry out my armchair; otherwise its boggy embrace threatens me with sciatica and swimmer’s cramp. Making a grate fire means splitting kindling and lugging wood, and by the time I have finished these jobs, I am too hot to want a fire. There is a saying, attributed to Lincoln, that “he who splits his own wood, warms himself twice.” Frankly I don’t believe that Lincoln said any such thing; he split lots of wood himself, and knew what a bore it is. But when great men die, preachers and schoolteachers, and others who are in constant need of support in their battle against human nature, invent sayings of this kind and attribute them to the dead, who are unable to talk back. Probably when I am gone I shall be represented to posterity as a man who always ate all his spinach, advocated hard physical exercise, and never left undone what he could do today. These will be gross untruths, of course, and no child who bases his life upon them will ever be anything like me; it is thus that mentors of the young hornswoggle their little pupils and prevent them from becoming wise and great.

• THURSDAY •

A holiday, which I observed by getting back to the land. That is to say, I cut my lawn for the first time this year. The pleasure-grounds at Marchbanks Towers present an interesting example of optical illusion applied to landscape gardening; they do not look particularly extensive, but when you begin to pace out their dimensions, behind a decrepit lawn-mower, then they take on the proportions of Versailles.

• FRIDAY •

I see that some of his political supporters are telling President Truman that it will do him no good to be known throughout the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave as a fellow who plays the piano for relaxation; this, the politicos fear, may give the impression that Harry is a “longhair”, and not a “regular guy.” Here is a quaint sidelight on democracy, as interpreted by politicians.… I fear that I have a reactionary mind; I like to think of my leaders as wiser, more cultivated and more intelligent than myself; if they are not, God help us all! But the proper democratic attitude seems to be that a national leader should be the intellectual peer of a barbershop loafer, and as illiterate and undistinguished as possible.

• SATURDAY •

Painted some verandah furniture this afternoon, so that when summer comes I shall be ready to enjoy all four hours of it. Decided on a rather delicate and refined design—red and green on a white background—and paid twenty cents for a special brush to accomplish this work; I have never been one to skimp money on materials; a workman is as good as his tools, I have always maintained, and if I have to blow twenty cents on a paintbrush, I do it without a murmur.… Completed my work, and, as I was admiring the effect, it began to rain; this means that my paint will probably not dry for several days, and will be tacky for years. Unwary visitors, sitting on my verandah furniture, will carry away impressions of my red and green arabesques which I never intended.… I already have a green screen door, painted at enormous expense by a professional housepainter, which leaves every visitor with a green thumb. I can make a mess of my own house, without paying a professional painter to do so.

-XXII-

• SUNDAY •

Read an article in an American Sunday paper about the proper way to treat British war brides. This was a tidbit; “Kidding is hard to get used to, but you have to learn; it may consist of mimicking, to see if you can take it.… Later you may learn to kid back.… ” I pondered this, and my advice to war brides, in Canada, at least, is not to kid back; Canadians don’t like to be kidded or mimicked, though they are extremely fond of kidding and mimicking others. Stains on many a drawing-room carpet are all that remain of war brides who imitated the Ontario accent, or spoke slightingly of our folk-festivals, such as Mother’s Day. Kidding or mimicking is best done in your native land, with plenty of your compatriots around to see that the unfortunate foreigner takes it in the proper sporting spirit.

• MONDAY •

To a political rally tonight, a form of entertainment in which, like all Canadians, I take endless delight. Every country has its distinctive art form; in Spain the bullfight; in France the treading of the grapes; in Italy the battle of the flowers; in England the cricket-match; in Scotland tossing the telegraph pole and squeezing the bawbee; in Wales the Eisteddfod; and in Canada the political rally. The sight of six or seven serious-minded men in unpressed pants sitting on a platform on kitchen chairs throws us into an ecstasy; if their mild remarks are translated into hoarse roars by a public-address system, our joy knows no bounds; if the microphone is so cunningly adjusted that the stumpy have to strain to reach it and the lanky crouch to get near it, we are transported with delight. If we ourselves are sitting on chairs which squeal and complain when we move, we are happy; if a heckler is thrown out, we cheer; if the jamboree ends with the National Anthem three tones too high for our voices, we squeak like patriotic mice. O huzza for the political rally! Wow! Bam!! Powie!!

• TUESDAY •

Seriously disappointed in my kitten Tiger today. During the evening a mouse climbed up through a cold air grating near my chair and surveyed the room with satisfaction. Aha, I thought, and fetched Tiger, who was sleeping elsewhere. I put her down by the grating, but she immediately climbed up on a sofa and went back to sleep. The mouse appeared again, but I made such a noise waking Tiger up that I frightened it away. But Tiger was now disposed to play, so I exercised her with her personal punch-bag for twenty minutes or so. Then the mouse came back. Anticipating a splendid display of jungle ferocity and agility I pointed it out to Tiger, who sat down and looked at it philosophically. Sensing the situation the mouse began to make free of the room and ran about happily, while Tiger watched, and I tore out my hair in double-handfuls. At last, however, this unnatural cat decided to chase the mouse, and bumped her nose on a door just as the mouse dashed under it.… I wonder if Tiger’s glands work properly?

• WEDNESDAY •

Was talking today with a man who collects antiques, and he showed me some of his treasures. Among them was a beer mug made of pottery which had a life-like pottery frog attached to the bottom of it. The purpose of this pretty thing was to scare the liver and lights out of the drinker as he finished his pint. I think poorly of this sort of humour, smacking as it does of itching-powder, fake bedbugs, rude noisemakers, dribble glasses, and the detestable like. The frog-mug was reputed to be about 150 years old, and I was surprised to find that such a comparatively mild joke was appreciated in the eighteenth century. My delving in history had led me to believe that no joke was admired in those days which did not result at least in a broken leg or the loss of an eye. Merely making a man’s stomach heave with a fake frog must have seemed very poor sport to our rude forefathers, and was probably left to the ladies.

• THURSDAY •

To another political rally tonight; my thirst for politics is not to be slaked by mere epicene listening to the radio. And speaking of radio, the radio boys nearly broke up this rally by tapping the microphones, pulling wires, climbing over the speakers, and hooting into the amplifiers during the first twenty minutes of its progress. This made clear to me what I have long suspected, which is that the average radio man doesn’t know what makes radio work, and when it won’t work he is the embarrassed victim of his own gadget—Man at the mercy of the Machine. While all this was going on, some poor fellow was trying to make a speech, but nobody paid any attention to him; they were hoping one of the radio boys would be electrocuted before their very eyes, and expire in agony with forked lightning coming out of his boot-heels. But the Leader arrived in the nick of time, and the radio decided to settle down and enjoy the fun.… The Leader performed the amazing feat of speaking for 75 minutes without once taking a drink from the two glasses and the full jug on the table before him; I have seen lesser men consume a hogshead of water in the course of a fifteen minute speech. But a real statesman has something of the endurance of a camel; he fills up with raspberry vinegar in the morning, and speaks all day without further need for refreshment.

• FRIDAY •

Read a criticism of Canadians which says that we are great brooders, and attributes this in part to the fact that our winter lasts for seven months. This is nonsense; our winter lasts for nine months, in a lucky year. Of course, we let our fires out, and peck at the frosty ground in our gardens, and huddle into any patch of white, watery sunshine which breaks through the clouds during April and May, but we pay for our haste in colds and lumbago. In June, July and August, Canadians may do without a fire, but September and May are not to be trusted. Is it any wonder then that we brood? Is it surprising that our incidence of insanity is so great that it is a shame and a scandal to our country? I am just an ordinary brooder myself; I make no claim to being a Big League brooder; but I brood about my furnace several hours each day, even when it is out for the brief summer season. And I do well to brood, let me tell you!

• SATURDAY •

Much mail for me today, from fellows anxious that I should vote for them on Monday; the newspapers, too, say that they do not care how I vote, so long as I vote. This constant harping on the subject reminds me that the word “vote” actually means “prayer”, and this in turn recalls the remark of a very wise man that when the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.… I am glad that we do not have automatic voting machines here, as they do in the U.S.A. Like all machines, they exist primarily to go wrong, and when the late F. D. Roosevelt cast his last vote for himself the machine stuck and he swore at it, and then had to waste much valuable time apologizing for his ribaldry to women’s lodges, preachers’ unions and similar groups.… I have been listening to the radio hysterics of all three parties for a full week, and now I feel that the fate of the nation lies in my hands.

-XXIII-

• SUNDAY •

Admitted defeat today, and re-lit my furnace. A stickler for tradition, I let it out on the fifteenth of May, arguing that if spring had not come it could not be far away. But Nature, always ready with a nasty surprise for those who take her for granted, asserted herself and an Ice Age set in at Marchbanks Towers; nothing would dry that was wet; nothing that was dry would stay dry; outside it was cold, wet and raw; inside it was cold, wet and stuffy. There was nothing else for it; I went downstairs and faced the Monster. As I shoved kindling into his maw it seemed to me that he leered.… The life of Man is a struggle with Nature and a struggle with the Machine; when Nature and the Machine link forces against him, Man hasn’t a chance.

• MONDAY AND ELECTION DAY •

An election today, and everyone I met had a slightly woozy look, as though he had been sniffing ether on the sly. The streets were filled with cars, lugging voters to the polls; sometimes I wonder if that haulage business really pays; what guarantee does the free passenger give that he will vote for the man who provides him with a car? A really astute politician would send cars to pick up his known opponents, and would then carry them off, twenty-five miles or so into the country, and jettison them. Few of them would be able to walk home before the polls closed.… After the results were announced I was interested to see the wonderful unanimity of feeling which prevailed: the winning side was disposed to be generous, and told the losers that they wished they had done better; the losers, on the contrary, assured the winners that they had foreseen what would happen, and were in no way cast down by it; the socialists, who had been telling the world that they would win, proceeded forthwith to explain that they never dreamed of winning, and expressed delight that they had received any votes at all. Every one was so anxious to show complete satisfaction and good fellowship that a stranger, dropped by parachute, would have assumed that they were all on the winning side.… The losers’ hangover will begin tomorrow, when the ether wears off.

• TUESDAY •

To a circus tonight. A circus is the only entertainment which can follow an election without appearing to be anticlimax. The analogy between a circus and an election, indeed, could hardly be more complete: the tightrope walkers, the acrobats, the contortionists, the trained seals, the mangy old lions with no teeth and the clowns, the clowns, the clowns! ! !

• WEDNESDAY •

The coming of sunshine and warm weather has aggravated a tendency which I have observed for some time; I mean the custom of girls walking about the streets hand-in-hand. If I see a young man and a girl walking hand-in-hand I regard them as a little soft, but not beyond reclaim; but when I see girls walking thus, gazing into each others’ eyes, and laughing with laughter which is like the shattering of electric light bulbs in a tin biscuit-box, I wonder what’s afoot. This afternoon I saw a girl got up like Huckleberry Finn (blue trousers rolled up, an open shirt, and a rag round her head) squiring a smaller girl in a skirt across a street, and they were so lost in Love’s Young Ersatz Dream that they were almost run over by a car.… In my experience, limited and monastic though it has been, women do not greatly like other women; they prefer men as conversationalists, walking partners, and hand-holders; they refer to gatherings of their own sex as “hen-parties”, and regard them as dull.… I have always considered hero-worship in schoolboys, and heroine-worship in schoolgirls, as the most humiliating of adolescent diseases, worse even than pimples and damp hands.

• THURSDAY •

The circus flavour lasts. Everywhere I go these days I see little girls trying to make their dogs skip, little girls trying to balance themselves on rolling barrels, little boys trying to walk along fence-tops and little boys trying to evolve a “cod fight”, like clowns. The technique of the “cod fight” is simple; while the fighters seem to be hitting each other the most resounding blows, they are slapping their free hands together at about waist level; when they do this with enormous loose gloves, the effect is superb; but when two small boys try to do it with their bare hands, they usually hurt themselves, and discover that being a clown is a somewhat more specialized profession than they thought. This is an important discovery in anyone’s life.

• FRIDAY •

The humidity today was intense, and I was talking to a man who told me (not without a note of pride in his voice) that he had taken four baths since morning. It occurred to me to warn him that he would wash away all his natural oils and develop a nasty, mealy skin, but I refrained; if you warn people against too much bathing they tend to jump to the conclusion that you never bathe yourself, and begin sniffing at you unpleasantly whenever the mercury rises.… As a confirmed movie-goer, I am in a position to assure the public that the average Canadian does not bathe too much, and that his or her natural oils are in a splendid state of conservation.

• SATURDAY •

Was talking to a man today who advanced the theory that the violence of the recent election was attributable to the bad weather; wet, cold politicians, he said, were markedly more vicious than warm, sundrenched ones. Politicians, he continued, are like grapes; when they are allowed to ripen long upon the vine, they achieve a sweet, rich flavour, and give off a delightful aroma of wisdom and urbanity; but when they get too much rain and frost they are small, sour, thick-skinned and inclined to seediness.… Parliament he said (by now intoxicated with the insidious liquor of metaphor) was a wine, composed of all these diverse political grapes, and sometimes we got fine old fruity Parliaments, full flavoured and of exquisite bouquet, and sometimes we got little, sour Parliaments, provocative of bellyache; it all depended on the grapes.… Fascinated by his eloquence, I suggested that we should throw a few newly-elected members into a vat, and trample them with our bare feet, singing merry vintage songs the while, in order to see how the new brew would turn out; O for a beaker full of the Twentieth Parliament, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene!

-XXIV-

• SUNDAY •

Had some notion of a picnic today, but it rained. A man I know who lives in the woods tells me that the mosquitoes this year will be as big as sparrows, and may be expected to last until well into December. He bases this prediction on the way the beavers are building their dams. As everyone knows, beavers eat a lot of insects, and particularly mosquitoes (for the formic acid which the latter contain, and which assists the beaver in seeing under water) and a beaver’s burrow contains a special chamber for the storage of the insects caught during the summer season. Apparently the beavers this year are making these chambers unusually big, and from this my friend deduces that they expect a bumper crop of mosquitoes, of particularly large size.… I have always wished that I were better versed in nature lore of this kind.

• MONDAY •

To a picnic this afternoon on the shores of a lake which contained many islands; because of the soft dampness of the air and some tricks of light, the scene was strongly reminiscent of the Hebrides. Saw a garter snake, the first in a long time, and observed its beautiful squirmings and dartings from a prudent distance. I am told by my naturalist friends that these creatures are about a foot long and completely harmless, but in the matter of snakes I suffer from telescopic vision; if I stand too near a garter snake it assumes the proportions of a boa constrictor.… Fear of snakes seems unrelated to other kinds of physical courage. I have seen large, tough men jump and squeak like school-girls at the sight of a grass snake, and I have known two girls who thoroughly enjoyed a romp with any snake they met. Personally I have developed a suave but distant politeness toward reptiles of all sorts, and I prefer to see them in zoos, if at all.

• TUESDAY •

Noticed a mixed group of dogs playing today, and wondered whether they had any consciousness of breed, as we have of race; I can see no sign of it. The lordly Afghan seems willing to play tag with a terrier, and a spaniel plays with a St. Bernard without any apparent consciousness of the difference in size between them. There seems to be no Master Race, no Jewish Problem, and no Quebec and Ontario feeling among dogs.… Tonight to the movies—one of those dreary pieces about a musical genius who has fits and kills people. Why is it that genius on the screen is so frequently represented as a form of idiocy? Is it to comfort the mediocrities who have paid the price of admission to sit and think, “O how lucky we are not to be geniuses; how fortunate we are to be happily dumb and imperturbably numb!”

• WEDNESDAY •

The recurrent Canadian Flag controversy concerns no class of society more deeply than elocutionists, as one of them was explaining to me today. For years they have made a specialty of a rousing poem by the late E. Pauline Johnson (“Tonakela”) called Canadian Born, every verse of which ends with some such assertion as:

But each has one credential

Which entitles him to brag

That he was born in Canada,

Beneath the British Flag!

Canadian Born is what elocutionists call, in the parlance of their trade, “a ring-tailed peeler”, containing such noble and rampageous lines as:

The Dutch may have their Holland,

The Spaniard have his Spain;

The Yankee to the south of us

Must south of us remain!

—these latter words being delivered in a loud, quarrel-picking voice. I have heard it recited often (sometimes even in Indian costume) at church socials, political picnics, Dominion Day Celebrations, and kindred uproars, and it never fails to rouse the audience to blood-thirsty fury—sometimes directed toward the foes of their country, and sometimes toward the elocutionist herself (for it is generally assumed to be a piece for a lady to speak). Tonakela has gone to the Happy Hunting Ground, and the chances that any of our icebound modern Canadian poets will write another such patriotic bobby-dazzler are slight indeed.

• THURSDAY •

Hot all day, and hot tonight—too hot to do any work, though I had plenty to do. So went to a movie instead. Its charm lay in the fact that it lacked “love interest” completely. I am not interested in anybody’s love affairs except my own, and I think that many people feel the same way. Who wants to sit through several reels of inanity which has no purpose except to postpone the inevitable kiss or bedding? Love, as a theme for the movies, has had its day; give me more movies about horses and other such interesting things. I know exactly what the Beloved in the Song of Solomon meant when she cried “Comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love”.… Thunder storm in the night, which meant that I had to rise from my bed and flit about the house, like a wraith, shutting windows and falling over things people had left on the floor.

• FRIDAY •

Since I got a cat of my own, my life has been full of cats. Visited a lady today who has two beautiful black and white cats named Inky and Pinky. I hear news occasionally of my brother Fairchild’s Persian, named Button Boots. I see cats on the streets and by the roadside, where I never saw a cat before. A few days ago, making my way toward the In and Out shop, I was almost knocked over by a black Persian, as big as a spaniel, dashing past me, pursued by a man carrying a wrapped bottle. Whether it was a jinni which had escaped from the liquor I did not have time to enquire. As for my own kitten Tiger, I am learning things from her that I never knew before. First of all, I never knew that a kitten could burp, which Tiger does with all the abandon of an old mariner. Second, I never realized that a kitten could be completely and infallibly house-trained, and suddenly forget all it had been taught, reverting to intolerable Bohemianism. Also, why does she like to hide in the piano, plucking ghostly music from the strings with her claws? Is she a sphinx, or merely a humorist of a somewhat earthy sort?

• SATURDAY •

Worked in my garden this afternoon, until rain drove me indoors. Fed the kitten and observed that she ate from the front of her plate toward the back, thereby keeping all her food under her chin, in case an enemy should try to snatch a morsel from her. I have noticed many human beings who eat in precisely the same way, and I deduce that it is a continuance of jungle behaviour. Next time I see a man who crouches over his plate and scoops all his food from the outside edge, I shall let out a howl like a pterodactyl, and watch him give a primordial, prehistoric jump.

-XXV-

• SUNDAY •

As it was a fine day I sat on my verandah and permitted passers-by to stare at me. Staring is the great Sunday-afternoon pastime. People who go walking on the seventh day seem convinced that anyone who sits on a verandah is blind, deaf and silly. They wander along the streets, gaping like egg-bound pullets, and making remarks in voices which carry perfectly for a quarter of a mile in all directions. “That house needs a good coat of paint,” says one, and another replies, “If that were my lawn, I’d rip the whole thing up and re-sod it.” “Look at those vines,” someone cries indignantly; “they just ruin the brickwork and harbour vermin.” “You’d think those people would weed their beds once in a while, wouldn’t you?” counters his companion, while I sit upright and glare like a basilisk. But no passer-by ever pays any attention to me; they think I am a cigar-store Indian, or a stuffed souvenir of a hunting trip, probably. Some day I shall shout back. “Why don’t you wipe that child’s nose?” I shall scream, or “Did you buy that hat at a fire-sale?”

• MONDAY •

I am told that the strawberry crop this year will be a failure. I cannot remember a year in which this rumour has not been circulated. Probably it is like the rumours which fly about during the early part of December that Santa Claus has committed suicide.… However, I bought a few sour, green, imported berries, and ate them, just to make sure that I experienced some approximation of that most delicious of all flavours this year.

• TUESDAY •

To a movie tonight. It was a farce, and as often happens in farce, the actors thought that everything they said was much funnier if they shouted it at the top of their voices. The ladies also wore those peculiar lace negligees which are never seen anywhere but on actresses in farces. Women wear all sorts of garments when they want to be comfortable—magnificently cut housecoats, kimonos, flannel dressing gowns, and even old bathrobes which their husbands have discarded as unfit for further service—but they never wear those tight-fitting things with lace skirts split up the front, for the good reason that it is impossible to sit down in one, much less perform any of the feats appropriate to negligee.… I like movie magazines, but I have never dared to subscribe to one. I had a friend once who did so, and it was apparent that the magazine lent its subscription list rather carelessly to its advertisers, for he immediately began to receive free samples of lipstick, and offers from people who wanted to develop his bust a new scientific way—money back after 30 days if not satisfied. His landlady began to treat him with marked hauteur and he had to move.

• WEDNESDAY •

Listened to a broadcast of Shakespeare’s Richard III this afternoon, done by the Old Vic Theatre Company, which is in New York at present. Decided that Shakespeare would never be able to get a job writing scripts for the CBC, because he insists on dealing with controversial topics, and uses language which would bring a flood of complaining letters from the Holy Name Society of St. Jean de Crabtree Mills (P. Q.) and the Ladies’ Art, Culture, Poker-Work and China-Painting Club of Pelvis (Sask.).… Enjoyed the broadcast greatly, though I wondered why all the ghosts in the Dream Scene sounded as though they were speaking to Richard over the long-distance telephone. But that is the only way in which radio can suggest the supernatural, I suppose.

• THURSDAY •

Was roused this morning by a loud cawing, and looked out of my window to see a large crow sitting on a branch with its mouth full of bread, making daybreak hideous with its cries. This recalled to me Aesop’s fable about the crow which was flattered into singing by a fox, and dropped its piece of cheese as a result. It was obvious that this crow could sing and hold on to a huge piece of food at the same time. So much for that old scoundrel Aesop, whom I have long suspected of being better as a puritan moralist than as an accurate observer of nature. Read Aesop’s Fables in the light of everyday adult experience, and what do we find? We find that the man who gives up the substance for the shadow is often richly rewarded, and admired by posterity for his vision. We find that the dog in the manger can always get a well-paid job as a union leader, and the more difficult he is to appease, the greater is his success. We find that the lion who assists a mouse usually has to listen to a lot of saucy talk from the mouse about Imperialism. It is my belief that Aesop was a simpleton who took good care never to look about him, for fear of finding that the world did not gibe with his theories.

• FRIDAY •

I see by the papers that Scotland (or, more accurately, the Scottish Nationalist Party) is going to submit a brief to the United Nations on the unjust oppression of Scotland by England. Personally, I don’t think that England would ever give up Scotland without establishing a state of Pakistan for the protection of the Irishmen and Welshmen who contribute so much to the cultural and intellectual life of Glasgow, and the Englishmen and Jews who have won for the universities of St. Andrews and Edinburgh the reputation for brilliance which they now enjoy. My own ancestors descended upon England from Scotland a century or more ago, pausing at the border only long enough to change their name from Marjoribanks to its present form. I don’t imagine that their descendants would want to be herded back to the bleak hillsides from which they escaped after the Great Capercailzie Famine of 1745. Nowadays you won’t find a Marchbanks in Scotland even during the grouse season; most of us just do our grousing wherever we happen to be. “A tussock wowsie’s nae doitit,” as Bobbie Burns said, putting the whole thing in a nutshell.

• SATURDAY •

While I was cutting grass and weeding this afternoon I was greatly troubled by mosquitoes, flies and other nuisances, and in this way my attention was drawn toward the benevolent insects—bees, grasshoppers and the like. I recall reading in a book about insects that they evolve their own economic laws, and abide by them. Thus ants go in for full employment, while bees consider it worth while to support a monarchy and an aristocracy; grasshoppers are definite laissez-faire liberals, and dung-beetles are bourgeois capitalists. But what about accidents, I pondered? Ants are socialists, possessing a complete, nasty, compact little socialist state of their own; but what happens to their economic laws when I run my lawnmower over their anthill? They didn’t foresee that. And the bees get an unexpected handout from me when I put out honey boxes for them to clean; that boosts their economy unfairly. I am convinced that no insect sees me, except the mosquito, and yet in my garden I play Providence to the insect world without giving the matter a moment’s thought. I am the Unknown Factor, the Parcae in the lives of thousands of creatures with whom I am not even on nodding terms. A sweetly solemn thought.

-XXVI-

• SUNDAY •

Put out my hanging baskets yesterday, and woke this morning to find that the temperature had dropped to 42°. Just the sort of shabby trick that our Canadian summers are always playing. I well recall going for a picnic on the 24th of May in 1932, and returning home because it suddenly began to snow! It is this uncertainty of the weather which makes Canadians the morose, haunted, apprehensive people they are. The plays of Ibsen reflect the Canadian spirit admirably. For instance—

GERDA: Where are you going, Inspector?

INSPECTOR: Down to the waterfront to get a cod for supper. Don’t wait for me. I may commit suicide.

GERDA: God’s will be done. But in any case, wear your muffler, your rubbers, your ear muffs and your wraprascal. It may snow.

INSPECTOR: True, and if I decide against death I don’t want to catch a cold.

That is a snatch from Ibsen’s early drama The Wartime Housing Co-Ordinator. It was never much of a success.

• MONDAY •

A magnificent day, and I passed a considerable part of it wishing I did not have to work. The more complex our civilization becomes, the less fun there is in it and the more work there is to do. The ultimate in civilizations is that of the ants, who work ceaselessly, and have no fun at all. And what do they get out of it? Well—did you ever look at an ant’s face under a microscope? It looks exactly like a composite photograph of Henry Ford and John L. Lewis, with just a suggestion of the characteristic frozen mug of the Nazi High Command.… To the movies tonight and saw a very dull film which tried to make out that missionaries have a lot of fun. Well—did you ever look at a missionary’s face under a microscope? That is the result of trying to persuade the heathen that it is wrong to get stinko on the fermented juice of the banyan, without using profanity, police or physical violence. The fact that many missionaries are married also makes it hard to interest the heathen in the Christian institution of monogamy, which they confuse with monotony.

• TUESDAY •

Upon the advice of my physician (a distinguished man who has a perfect understanding of my case) I take a little rest each day after lunch. But recently my repose has been shattered by a bird which imitates the sound of a telephone-bell perfectly. I compose myself for slumber, then br-r-r-ring goes this accursed bird, and up I jump and rush indoors to the phone, to find that there is nothing stirring at the other end of the wire. Naturalists deny the existence of any such bird, but it lives in a maple tree just by my verandah, and I have seen it; it is about the size of a jay, and has a black and green plumage. If I can catch it there will be telephone-bird pie on the menu at Château Marchbanks.

• WEDNESDAY •

A very hot day, and owing to some lack of caution I had committed myself a week ago to do some heavy gardening today—to clean out a wilderness, in fact. The wilderness was a mosquito headquarters, and they were holding an œcumenical conference, which I broke up with a great display of personal bravery. There were times however when I debated whether it would not be easier to lie down and die on the spot than to go on with the job. I was forcibly reminded of a poem which I read years ago in Second or Third Book about a negro slave who collapsed in the field with his sickle in his hand, and died while thinking of his days of glory in Africa, where “the lordly Niger flowed”; he was too far gone to feel the heat of the sun, or the cruel overseer’s whip, or the indignity of his present position. That was just the way I felt. “Better death than work!” I cried, throwing myself into the jaws of my lawnmower, but it spat me out contemptuously. It is too dull to cut grass, let alone serve as an instrument of suicide.

• THURSDAY •

Was chatting today with a man who has just had a baby; that is to say, his wife actually had the baby, but as any one knows who has experienced it, the work of the superintendent in such processes is often as exhausting as that of the mother. He was weak and run down, and subject to dizzy spells, as the people who have just had babies always are in the advertisements, so I urged him to get himself a good nerve tonic, and did what I could to revive him with strawberries.… As men will, when they get together, we discussed the curious fact that, whenever it becomes known that you are going to have a baby, everybody hastens to tell you their favourite Horrible Tale about the Baby With Two Heads, or the Baby that Vanished, or the Baby that Got Mixed Up In The Hospital, and never knew whether it was a boy or a girl. Everybody likes to scare the wits out of an expectant father. I am going to write a book some day, called Radiant Fatherhood, which will make the whole thing seem beautiful and natural, and an experience to be cherished for a lifetime (which is, indeed, as long as one can cherish anything).

• FRIDAY •

The morning paper contains yet another repetition of the claim that the Bible is the best-selling book in the world, and that Pilgrim’s Progress comes next. I see this assertion in some form or other about once a month, but I have never seen any figures to prove it, and I suspect that it is merely something which a number of devout people would like to believe. Of course many Bibles are sold; I have seven Bibles myself, three of which I bought, and four of which I was given. But for Pilgrim’s Progress—does anybody ever finish it? As a child my gorge rose at the lugubriousness of Pilgrim, and I had a wicked hankering for Vanity Fair; after I grew up I tried to read it again, and failed. Bunyan was a notable stylist, but his mind was the mind of a sanctimonious tinker.

• SATURDAY •

I see that the Dominion Bureau of Agriculture is urging us to keep goats; the bureau writes about goats with tenderness and affection. Once it was my duty to look after a family of goats—a nanny, a billy and a kid—for a week during an outdoor production of As You Like It, and in that time I grew to like them, and even to trust them. They had some nasty ways, but were really much more intelligent and friendly than cows. It is a lie to say that they eat tin cans and underwear; they like glue, and esteem the label from a tin can as a great delicacy, but they do not eat the tin, and they simply turn their noses up at an old undershirt. Nor do they butt you if you treat them kindly. My only complaint was that they stank—not a dirty or unwholesome smell, but a powerful animal emanation—and after I tended the goats I had to change my clothes before I was acceptable in fastidious circles.… Goats have a lively sense of humour. They like to push and shove you to see if they can make you angry, and if you resent it, they jump up and down and laugh. But if you shove them back again, and hurl genial insults at them, they know that you are a good fellow, and accept you as a sort of honorary goat. I have had some high old times with goats.

-XXVII-

• HEYDEGUISE SUNDAY •

Off on my annual holiday today, to the United States for the first time since 1938. Crossed the St. Lawrence on a ferry, in company with fifteen million fuzzy insects; asked a man with a glass eye what they were; “Sand fleas,” he replied laconically. Did not believe him.… Stayed tonight in a hotel in the Adirondacks, which is famous because Theodore Roosevelt once changed horses there. Many relics of him were on display, including his raincoat, rucksack, and a horseshoe which was wittily labelled as “not from one of his horses.” Reflected that I have many such relics at Marchbanks Towers, including a bed in which Queen Elizabeth never slept, a pen which was not used to sign the Treaty of Versailles, and a cake which was not burned by King Alfred. Take this negative attitude toward antiques, and we all are richer than we ever imagined.

• MONDAY •

On the road all day, with pauses for refreshment and to look at dubious antiques. Visited the New York State Capitol at Albany, and saw a drum displayed in its entrance-hall which had been seized from the British in the Revolutionary War. Was filled with a wild impulse to break the glass, snatch it back again, and run like hell for the Canadian border, but as I had just finished lunch I decided that it would not really be a practicable plan. Pressed onward, and gaped in amaze at the magnificent palaces which line the Hudson River. Wanted to visit President Roosevelt’s former home at Hyde Park, but for some reason it was closed. Stopped for dinner at Tarrytown, and in the Florence Hotel there had an adventure so frightful that I shall not even confide it to the private pages of this Diary. Never, since Mr. Pickwick found himself trapped in the bedchamber of the Lady with Curl Papers, has a traveller suffered so acutely and so undeservingly.

• TUESDAY •

Entered New York this morning; it cost me ten cents at the Hendrick Hudson toll-bridge, which I thought rather expensive; I am used to getting into cities for nothing. However, when one is travelling, one must expect to spend a certain amount of money foolishly.… Had lunch in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art, which was about as pleasant as anything could be, for in addition to serving a top-notch lunch these enlightened Americans permit one to have a bottle of their own California wine at meals. In spite of this freedom I did not see anyone who was even slightly drunk, much less in a condition to swoon upon the ground, or hack at the modern statuary.… Afterward rode in Central Park in an open carriage (I am essentially a barouche man, and have never really accepted the motor car) and the driver attempted to cheat me out of a dollar, but was foiled. After some argument I drew myself up: “Shall we submit this to the arbitrament of a constable?” said I. “Aw Cheest!” he said, and drove away. New York, I perceive, contains almost as many rogues as Toronto.

• WEDNESDAY •

Having heard many travellers’ tales of the dreadful deceptions practised upon strangers in New York, I walked about the city today expecting to be accosted by men who wanted to sell me gold bricks, or possibly the controlling interest in Brooklyn Bridge. However, nothing of the sort happened. Decided that perhaps my appearance was too urbane, so this afternoon I tried chewing a straw and saying, “Wal I swan to thunderation!” every time I looked at a high building. Still no rush of confidence men. Perhaps the perils of New York are exaggerated.… The shops are full of things to buy—possibly too full. At any rate I suffer from a sensation of surfeit, when faced with so much merchandise, and don’t want to buy anything. I am content to stroll about the streets and admire the beauty of the women, which is somewhat standardized, but breathtaking none the less. Strawberry shortcake is standardized, but nobody ever gets too much of it.… And the charm of this city is that when one is tired it is possible to get a glass of beer without resorting to a stinking pest-hole called a Beverage Room.

• THURSDAY •

Wandered about the streets, enjoying whatever sights came my way. Looked into the Temple Emanu-El, the principal synagogue, and thought it vastly more beautiful than St Patrick’s, which, by the way, is having its face washed, and nothing can be seen of the outside of it but scaffolding and irritable, plethoric pigeons.… Saw also a man in sackcloth, with unkempt beard and hair, bearing a sign which read “Indict Senator Bilbo; UNO and World Government.” Recollecting J. S. Mill’s warning that a country where eccentricity is a matter for reproach is in peril, I tried not to stare at him too curiously, though his lacklustre eye and general appearance of madness fascinated me. Was talking to a lady this afternoon who said, “Have you been to the theatre yet, Mr. Marchbanks?” I replied, as politely as I could: “Madam, when I am in a city which possesses a theatre I am on hand whenever it is open to the public. I consider the theatre to be the most rational, enspiriting, rewarding and ecstatic of human entertainments, greatly superior to music and painting. Does that answer your question?” She fled in dismay, poor witling.

• FRIDAY •

Henceforth, when anyone asks me “Were you in ‘Twenty-One’ when you were in New York?” I shall say that I was, but my answer will be disingenuous. This evening a New Yorker took me to dinner, and as we discovered a mutual passion for Chinese food he whisked me to 21 Mott Street, an unimpressive establishment in Chinatown where I ate such food as only the gods and a few particularly favoured mortals are privileged to taste. After a careful inspection of the menu we decided to order the Wedding Banquet For Eighteen, and eat it all ourselves. This we did, augmenting it with many bowls of rice and uncounted cups of delicious Chinese tea. (At least, I stopped counting after my tenth cup.) Together, this congenial soul and I waded through such a mass of fried shrimps, chicken, pork, almonds, bean shoots, bamboo sprouts, ginger, soybean and crisp noodles as I never saw before in my life, while our female companions picked away daintily (in the way of women) at a few poor trifles provided for them. After this we went for a ride on the Staten Island ferry, to enjoy the air and contemplate our inward bliss.

• SATURDAY •

Left New York today. Passed through a ghost town called Piercefield, which contained more derelict houses than inhabited ones. I suppose young ghosts go there to get a little preliminary experience in haunting. I don’t know why they complain of a housing shortage in the U.S.A. when Piercefield is wide open.… Picnic lunch, and tried to open some bottles of root beer with a penknife, with the usual explosive, sticky, messy result. At last drove off in dudgeon to get a decent lunch at an hotel, and had no trouble in finding an excellent one. Why is it, I wonder, that the hotels even in New York State villages are so much pleasanter, better-smelling, and better provided with food than those in quite large Canadian cities? Consumed steak and lemon pie not far below New York standards.… On into the Adirondacks for the night and slept amid scenery that would delight a Welshman or a Scot. Mountains, like the sea, are in the blood.

-XXVIII-

• SUNDAY •

Some important atomic bomb tests were held today, but no consequences were observable in my part of the world. Half-consciously I had been expecting the end of everything, and had made preparations accordingly. I burned a few letters which I did not wish to have vaporized; when we are all reduced to atoms, who can tell what atoms will read other private atoms, as they hurtle through space? I put a few of my more prized possessions in prominent places so that they would be vaporized as prominently and showily as possible. I threw a few bricks and rocks into my furnace, so that its vaporization might be painful. Then I spent as much time as I could manage lying on a sofa so that if necessary, I might enter Eternity in a relaxed posture. But nothing happened.

• MONDAY •

Cut my grass today. I neglected it over the weekend, thinking that the atomic bomb might settle all such problems forever. As I plodded back and forth I reflected miserably upon my own political rootlessness, in a world where politics is so important. When I am with Tories I am a violent advocate of reform; when I am with reformers I hold forth on the value of tradition and stability. When I am with communists I become a royalist—almost a Jacobite; when I am with socialists I am an advocate of free trade, private enterprise and laissez-faire. The presence of a person who has strong political convictions always sends me flying off in a directly contrary direction. Inevitably, in the world of today, this will bring me before a firing squad sooner or later. Maybe the fascists will shoot me, and maybe the proletariat, but political contrariness will be the end of me; I feel it in my bones.… Tiger, my kitten has wandered away.

• TUESDAY •

Tiger not back for breakfast; that cat treats its home like an hotel.… No mail this morning. It is a constant source of surprise and indignation to me that, although half my life is spent in writing letters, nobody ever writes to me. Of course I got mail; there were the usual government handouts, addressed to me by chair-warmers at Ottawa and Toronto; there were the usual printed appeals urging me to hasten to Palestine and give my life in the cause of Jewish freedom; there were the usual people who wanted to give me a course in short-story writing, or convert me to the cult of colonic irrigation; there were thick reprints of speeches delivered by the presidents of insurance companies; there was a letter from a woman urging me to take up in this Diary the unsatisfactoriness of modern underpants, in which (she says) electrician’s tape is used instead of elastic. But not a word addressed to me personally—not even a postcard. Disheartening.

• WEDNESDAY •

Still no Tiger; worried about her. Enquired of some children if they had seen her. “Perhaps she has wandered off with the Toms; two of our kittens did,” said they. This alarmed me greatly. Wandered off with the Toms! What an appalling thought! What a revelation of feline delinquency! Do the Toms engage in a hideous traffic in young cats—White Slavery in the cat world? At night, when all is still and the human world lies wrapped in sleep, do raffish crews of roystering Toms rush through the streets, curling their silky moustaches and luring innocent little pussies to a Fate Worse Than Death? Is Tiger at this very moment living in Guilty Splendour in some underground Haunt? Surrounded by every luxury—fish-skeletons galore, Jersey cream in kegs, catnip unlimited—does she ever think of her simple home and the toads she used to play with in the back garden? I shall advertise for her.

• THURSDAY AND THE DELICATIZING OF ST. AUDREY •

Answer to my advertisement for Tiger. “Did youse lose a cat?” said a voice over the phone. “What kind of cat have you got?” I countered. “Kind of a yalla cat,” said the voice. “My cat was not yellow,” I replied indignantly, and hung up.… I see by the paper that an American gentleman called Mr. Walter Littlefield does not like the expression “the common man” and suggests that we adopt the word made famous by the sixteenth century morality play, and speak of “Everyman.” This is a good idea, but it won’t work. It would be vulgarized out of all recognition in six months. Not merely Everyman, but “Jake Q. Everyman” would appear in print, and on the very first Mother’s Day we would be asked to send carnations to “Everymom.”

• FRIDAY •

A man said today that he supposed I got a lot of free meals on my press-card when I was in New York; apparently he believes that legend that a newspaper writer has only to go into an expensive restaurant, eat himself out of shape, drink the bar dry, and then present his press-card in order to have the proprietor fall on his neck in gratitude. It is not true. When in New York I did have a sandwich in a modest grill, and did present my press-card when the bill arrived, but I had to pay all the same. It was not until I was outside that I realized that I had presented, not my current press-card, but an old one which I had preserved for sentimental reasons from the days when I was the entire editorial staff on the Skunk’s Misery Trombone, a lively little paper with a rather limited circulation. I suppose the restaurant proprietor had never heard of it; he was an uncultivated type, and addressed all his customers familiarly as “Joe.” I did not think that anything would be gained by arguing with him; people who call other people “Joe” are not usually strong in logic.

• SATURDAY •

Tiger is home again! She had not run off with the Toms but had, I suppose, lost her way in one of her tree-climbing expeditions and had passed a comfortable few days with people who fed her and (if I can judge by the condition of her coat) brushed her, as well. Reproached her bitterly for all the anguish of spirit she had caused.… Passed the afternoon cleaning my cellar. Hercules, cleaning the Augean stables, had an easy task in comparison. Ran to and fro with driblets of coal; piled wood which had been lying under coal; resurrected and viewed with dismay bits of linoleum which had lain under coal. Wretched though present-day coal is as a heater, it has one undeniable characteristic—it is dirtier, and gets into more obscure corners, than any coal ever previously sold. Finished the afternoon looking like Old Black Joe, and with a dismaying collection of rubbish which the garbage man will be too haughty to remove. I suppose I shall have to bury it by stealth in the flower beds.

-XXIX-

• SUNDAY •

Tiger, my kitten, is suffering from an ailment which is not uncommon among animals and children in hot weather. This is an intolerable nuisance, for when she ran away she was beautifully housebroken, and now she has forgotten her good manners. When a child has this trouble it is able to give a warning shriek when the demon seizes it, and one can then rush it to the proper quarter, strengthening its moral fibre with threats and entreaties as one runs; but Tiger is crafty, and watch her as I will, she always evades me at the critical moment, leaving her little surprise in a corner, or under a chair. I think she likes to see me on my knees, in a prayerful posture, plying the floor-cleaner and disinfectant, and soliloquizing in Old Testament language.

• MONDAY •

To visit some friends at their summer cottage, and had a very fine ride on the river in a power boat. When speaking to the owners of boats I become tongue-tied, for there are some of them who resent having their property called anything but “craft”, and turn green if one speaks of a “boat-ride.” I am not the ideal passenger, either, for I am no good at shoving the boat away from the shore, or snatching at ropes when we return to the dock. True, I come of a sea-going race, but not very recently; when Cæsar approached the shores of Britain several members of the Marchbanks family painted themselves blue and set out in their coracles to drive him away; owing to some miscalculation they failed to do it. But a coracle is a round affair, more like a soup-plate than a boat, and since the introduction of banana-shaped craft no Marchbanks has ever been anything but a land-lubber.

• TUESDAY •

To the movies tonight to see a film in which Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck played the parts of a female psychiatrist and an amnesia patient respectively. I can feast my eyes on Miss Bergman’s beauty without paying too much attention to what she says or does, but Master Peck is another matter. His notion of acting is directly contrary to that of such exponents of the art as Irving, Coquelin and Stanislavsky; he does not use his head, but casts the full burden upon his face, which he works furiously, breathing meanwhile through his mouth. His resemblance to Buster Keaton is disturbing to me also; I am always expecting him to be hit with a pie, or to fall into a tub of cement. In this piece that brilliant actor, Michael Chekov, acted the pants off Master Peck.

• WEDNESDAY •

Tiger is not better, so I took her to the veterinary this evening. He diagnosed her case as one of garbage-eating; when she ran away she must have treated herself to a bit of over-ripe fish. He gave me some pills for her, and also demonstrated the proper way to give pills to a cat; you suddenly draw the cat’s head backward, pry open its mouth, shove the pill down into its stomach with a pair of forceps, and whisk the pill briskly around in its insides. Then you let go, and the cat uses language that scorches its whiskers. I decided that I would use the alternative method, which is to powder the pill and slip it slyly into the cat’s food. A man who is accustomed to going right to the seat of the trouble with a sick cow, and giving pills like baseballs to Percheron stallions, may safely take liberties with Tiger, but I am not in his class as a beast-tamer, and I know it. “A cat is no fool, and she may resent this,” he said: I knew that, too.

• THURSDAY •

A man came to me today in a state of great agitation because he thought that there should be more streetlights, and that they should be turned on earlier. “Young people park in cars in those dark places and The Dear knows what goes on,” he said, trembling at the thought. I tried to calm him, telling him about Chastity, and how she that has that is clothed in complete steel, but he did not seem to put as much faith in Chastity as in Electricity.… I wonder why people always think that dreadful things happen in the dark? When I look back over my own past, and examine my police record and my conscience, I find that the peak-hours of Sin in my wild youth were between 11 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. If I were a Puritan, I would not worry about parked cars, where nothing much happens beyond the conventional slap-and-tickle which is virtually obligatory in youth; but I would creep abroad at mid-day, peeping behind the lace curtains of sober houses on quiet, tree-lined streets. It is there that I would find things to make my mouth go dry and my eyes pop.

• FRIDAY •

To the movies to see Charles Laughton as Captain Kidd. Although the period of the film was supposed to be the reign of William and Mary (1694-1702) we were treated to a panorama of London, in which the principal feature was Tower Bridge, which was built in 1894; Hollywood is particularly prone to such bone-headed errors, even though it does spend large sums on experts and historical research.

• SATURDAY •

I see that a girl who was in the Hamilton beauty contest is complaining that twelve of the sixty-two contestants wore “falsies” to give greater impressiveness to their pectoral development. This reminded me of the fact that before the war the cadets at the Royal Military College wore “falsies” also, concealed in their scarlet tunics, in order to add a few inches to their chests. I have seen many a convex cadet remove his tunic, only to reveal that he was concave. This was standard military practice until the red tunic went out, about the time of the South African war, and many a dashing cavalry officer was saved from death because the Zulu assegai, or hill-tribesman’s snickersnee, had become imbedded in his “falsies.” But now, alas, anything might lurk beneath the blouse of a battledress and the military “falsy” has fallen into disuse. Chest-wigs for the pectorally bald are still sold by the principal military out-fitters, I am told.

-XXX-

• SUNDAY •

Was reading a sermon by an eminent Montreal divine on the subject of frivolity, of which the divine disapproved. Pleasure, he said, was a legitimate indulgence; he would even go so far as to say that people needed pleasure in their lives; but he warned most seriously against frivolity. This interested me so much that I looked up the word in my dictionary, and found that it meant more than I had thought—“trivial, empty, paltry, lacking in character and depth of concentration” were only a few of the scathing comments in the definition.… Sighed heavily, for my schoolmasters used to accuse me of frivolousness; my inclination toward untimely levity annoyed them. And it has grown with the years. If I tended toward frivolity as a boy, I am incorrigibly settled in it now.

• MONDAY •

Watched a group of children playing school today; it seemed to me to be a depressing game for the holidays, but they enjoyed it hugely. Not many lessons were taught, but there was a great deal of spanking, asking permission to leave the room, and being sent to the principal. The most prized role was that of Teacher; the largest child got that by sheer physical prowess and the smaller ones were reduced to submission by violent threats.… I recall playing school when a child with a group of Roman Catholic children; the oldest was given the prized role of Sister Mary Somebody, who must have been an uncommonly severe disciplinarian. As a mere Protestant, I was only allowed to be the janitor; from time to time I was permitted to say “Is it warm enough for you, Sister?” whereupon Sister Mary Somebody would give me a stately nod of the head. I soon tired of the limited possibilities of the janitor’s part and went off to play by myself, while Sister Mary Somebody went on happily spanking, cuffing and scolding.

• TUESDAY •

Business took me to Toronto today, and I was amazed by the number of dead animals I passed on the highway. Most of them were skunks, though from time to time one saw a defunct rabbit, a squashed squirrel or a jellied groundhog. Why are skunks more prone to die on the highway than other animals? Is it because skunks, for thousands of years, have been used to stopping everything by sheer force of personality, and have not yet accustomed themselves to the automobile age? Certainly it is a lesson in the mutability of all earthly things to see a skunk, once nobly menacing and vainglorious, lying—a poor rag of grizzled fur—by the roadside. But it cannot be said of skunks, as it is of men, that they all smell alike in death.… And speaking of skunks, was it on purpose that the City of Toronto arranged that symphony of vile effluvia which assaults the nostrils on Fleet Street? Gas works, tannery, glue atelier and soap-rendering emporium all unite in a ferocious stench compared with which the bazaars of Calcutta are as morning roses washed with dew.

• WEDNESDAY •

My garden is a failure again this year. My morning-glory is not more than an inch above ground; my castorbeans (which should be like trees by now) are sickly shoots; a cow appears to have nested in the remains of my peony bed. The only things that are doing well are my runner beans, and some gourds, which are growing like Jack’s beanstalk and seem likely to push down a wall.… And do I care? No! If Nature doesn’t want to co-operate with me she knows what she can do.

• THURSDAY •

Because there is to be an Orange Walk tomorrow, I was drawn into a discussion of the Battle of the Boyne by two men who regarded it as a matter of the utmost contemporary importance. But I soon found that the Battle of the Boyne they were talking about was not the one I learned about in school; my Boyne was merely one in a series of small battles, and it was fought on July 1, and not on the Glorious Twelfth; and in my battle King William’s forces were principally composed of Dutch, French, Danish and English troops, and not of valiant Ulstermen; and in my battle the victory of King William was thought to have something to do with the fact that he had 35,000 men to his opponent’s 25,000, causing King James to run away, which was wise if not precisely valiant.… But my friends seemed to be talking about an entirely different fight. I quoted them Bernard Shaw’s wise dictum: “Peter the Fisherman did not know everything; neither did Martin Luther.” But they would pay no attention. If we were all robbed of our wrong convictions, how empty our lives would be.

• FRIDAY •

The Orange Walk today. I had to go to Toronto again and missed it, but all the way along the road I passed Orangemen gorgeously arrayed and wearing the set, determined expression of men who might have to fight for their convictions and rather hoped they would. Some of them carried bottles of fife-oil; this is a special lubricator which you drink yourself and then blow into the fife.… Arrived in Toronto, which is the Rome of the Orange Order, too late to see the parade there, though I kept meeting Orangemen and Orangewomen all day long, and even saw an Orangeinfant, so covered in rosettes and ribbons that it could hardly breathe.… It was a hot, exhausting day, and during the afternoon I was forced to refresh myself with a pot of Orange Pekoe tea.

• SATURDAY •

Should have worked in my garden, but lay in a deck-chair and read Damon Runyon instead. It is about this time of year that my gardening enthusiasm, so hot in the Spring, fails me, and I make my annual discovery that a weed is just as pretty as a flower if you look at it the right way.… Sometimes I think I got too much gardening when I was a boy, and I know that many people suffered in the same way. Indeed, a friend of mine tells me that his father won a prize for the finest garden in his home town for two years in succession, and that this triumph was based firmly upon the back-breaking labour of my friend and his brothers and sisters. Thus it is in many families; the father is the planner and overseer; the children are the toilers and fieldhands; and from this uneven division of labour a fine garden springs. Gardening is an undemocratic pursuit. Somebody crawls through the flowerbeds, weeding and grovelling like the beasts that perish; somebody else strolls in the cool of the evening, smelling the flowers. There is the garden-lord and the garden-serf. When we are all socialists gardens will vanish from the earth.

-XXXI-

• SUNDAY •

Agog today, preparing for the second instalment of my annual holiday. This year I had difficulty in finding a place to stay; for some reason no place where I have once been is ever able to give me a reservation again, and I had to do a lot of writing and wiring before I finally got a favourable answer from a place called Camp Laffalot, at Skeleton in Muskoka. I have packed my sola topee, my butterfly net, and—as I know Muskoka—my fur coat for wear after sundown. I can hardly contain my impatience until tomorrow. Yo-ho for Camp Laffalot!

• MONDAY •

On the road at dawn this morning. Stopped at Orillia to see Stephen Leacock’s manuscripts in the Public Library, but the Library was closed for all but a few hours a day; the Little Town is still a Little Town, apparently. Looked at the Champlain Monument in Couchiching Park, which is magnificent; another monument, called Somebody’s Mother, and flanked by four drinking fountains, assaults the vision as one enters and leaves the Park.… Drove on until I came to a sign—“You Are Now Entering Lovely Skeleton.” Appropriately enough this village consists entirely of frame houses. Without difficulty I found Camp Laffalot, and at once my nostrils were assailed by that pleasant and characteristic smell of damp woodwork which is peculiar to summer hotels. Three young females with legs of vivid scarlet and peeling noses mounted the stairs ahead of me; the custom of the burnt human sacrifice still persists in Muskoka, I observe.… This place has tolerable inside plumbing; all will be well.

• TUESDAY •

Woke at four a. m. to find that I was freezing; looked from my windows at Drowned Skeleton Lake, over which lay a heavy mist; pulled the bedside rug over me and shivered till morning.… A bell rang at 7:30, and the first thing I saw from my window as I crawled out of bed was two ample ladies, well advanced in middle life, hiking down to the lake in their bathing suits. Appalled by such hardihood, I huddled into a heavy suit and two sweaters, and went to breakfast; felt better after fruit, porridge, two eggs, a heap of toast, and an imperial gallon of hot coffee. By ten o’clock I was roasting, and had to discard everything that decency would permit; soon I shall be as half-baked as the girls I saw yesterday.… The name Laffalot, which I assumed to be Indian, is a droll contraction of Laugh A Lot, I find, and the invention of the proprietor, who hopes to put his guests in a good mood with it. He explained this to me himself. Ha ha, I thought; and later, after more reflection, tee hee.

• WEDNESDAY •

Have scraped acquaintance with some of the other denizens of Camp Laffalot. We sat on the lawn this morning, and in the fashion of guests at summer hotels, lied about our importance in our hometowns and hinted that we were richer than we looked. The only reason we were not at the Royal Muskoka or Bigwin Inn, we implied, was that we could not stand the stuffy crowd there, preferring the genial company at Camp Laffalot. We agreed that Drowned Skeleton Lake was the gem of the Muskokas, and that Laffalot had distinction and exclusiveness not granted to other summer hotels. These things settled, some of us went for a drive, to enjoy the scenery. Personally I get all the scenery I can conveniently hold in half an hour; and after a four-hour drive I estimated that I had said, “magnificent!” 422 times, “astounding!” 146 times, and “lovely!” 1066 times. These are the only words I know which apply to scenery, except “redundant”, which I use only in my thoughts.

• THURSDAY •

There is always a good deal of romance at a summer hotel. Was talking today to a pretty girl who told me that a young man was going to canoe 20 miles, portage 5 miles, and motor 60 miles to take her to a dance that night. I said that I wasn’t a bit surprised, and she would have flushed prettily if she had not already been cooked to the colour of underdone beef by the sun. She then pointed out islands in the lake to me, saying that there was a home on this one which cost $20,000, and that the boat-house on another one had cost $12,000, and that a nasty old miser who lived on another had a yacht for which he had had the effrontery to pay a mere $25,000. I was glad that somebody else was taking her to the dance; I am never comfortable with girls who can think higher than $3.50 at one time.

• FRIDAY •

Was talking this evening to a maiden lady of uncertain age who was thrown into a fantod when she discerned that I was a writer. “Don’t you dare to put me in a book, you naughty man,” she trilled. I toyed with the idea of saying that it would be a rare pleasure to press her between the sheets, but decided that there was a hint of indelicacy about such a remark which might be misconstrued. I then thought of saying that it would be a privilege to embalm her in prose, but that was worse. So I kept my mouth shut and tried to look mysterious, which gave me eyestrain. She did not know that I was a very base sort of writer; she probably thought I wrote novels, or perfume advertisements for Vogue. Having failed to extract a compliment from me, she proceeded to entertain me with a long and harrowing account of her dog’s last illness; the emotion generated by this tale made me hungry, but the cook kindly gave me a plate of cereal in the kitchen before I went to bed.

• SATURDAY •

Left Laffalot today; it would be effective, but untrue, to say that my going caused a pall to fall over Skeleton; the emotion, such as it was, was all on my side. In the course of a short week, I had learned to cope with the tropic days and Arctic nights of Drowned Skeleton Lake; I had learned to listen to the astounding tales of personal prowess told by the other guests, and to counter them with a few choice untruths of my own; I had learned to say, “Gad, what a beauty; I never saw such a big fellow” whenever I saw another guest come in from the lake with a fish the size of a minnow. I had learned to eat enormous meals with an appearance of merely picking at my plate. But the time had come to leave, and I left.… Motored to Toronto, and put up at my club, the Junior Deipnosophists, for the night. As usual, I forgot my toothbrush, and may have to go back to Skeleton to get it. I have had it for years, and it has a sentimental value which no new, luxuriantly-bristled, hard toothbrush could equal.

-XXXII-

• SUNDAY •

Not long ago a friend of mine opened the door of the garage at her summer cottage, and found a man inside who had hanged himself about two months before; what is more he had been cut down. She is deeply anxious to know (a) why he hanged himself; (b) if he hanged himself or was hanged; (c) who cut him down; (d) what it was about her garage that appealed to his morbid fancy. She will probably never know any of these things. It is thus that life falls short of the movies; in a film she would immediately have been accepted by the detective in the case as a full partner and would have shared his risks of life and limb until the criminal was in the hoosegow, and the full story was in the newspapers. But the real-life detective never even asked her to sit all night in the haunted garage and shoot on sight anyone who came down the ladder from the loft. We deplore this lack of imagination on the part of detectives, who never seem to catch anybody, anyway.

• MONDAY •

Visited some people today who had just moved into a new house. They were leading a circumscribed life, not walking where the varnish was tacky, not leaning where the paint was wet, and not falling too often into buckets of decorators’ paste. They had moved in, driven by necessity, before the workmen had finished, and the workmen resented it, as they always do. There is nothing a party of painters and decorators likes better than a large house, all to themselves, in which they can lead an ample and gracious life, occasionally doing a little work. The only way to oust them is to move in on top of them, and let the children play with all their more valuable tools after they have gone home at night.… This unhappy couple had only two points at which they could light; one was bed and the other was the verandah. All things concurring, they should have the workmen out before the snow flies.

• TUESDAY •

Received a letter written on Reform School stationery from a little girl who takes me to task because I spoke slightingly of Gregory Peck; she tells me that Photoplay Magazine esteems this Peck highly. I do not care a fig for Photoplay Magazine; I write for a highly exclusive public, subtle and pernickety in its tastes, and they are not to be bamboozled by any such pretentious tripe, nor by the antics of Master Peck, either. She concludes, “you better apologize.” The day I apologize to you, you contumacious mammothrept, there will be two moons in the sky.

• WEDNESDAY •

To the movies tonight to see The Song Of Bernadette, which opened with these words: “To those who believe, no explanation is necessary; to those who do not believe, no explanation is possible.” This seemed a very fair statement of the case, calculated to please all the Catholics, Orangemen and nullifidians present. The audience seemed to find Bernadette amusing at times. Up in the gallery something stirred; was it a bird, was it a bird? … I wonder what the Church of Rome thinks of Hollywood, its new ally? With so many Catholic films appearing, and a firm hold on the Hays Office, things are looking up for the Propaganda Fide. But I warn the hierarchy that Hollywood is fickle; five years ago it was whooping it up for the Jews; any time I expect a series of films extolling the spiritual grace and mystical fervour of the Continuing Presbyterians, in which Gregory Peck, Bing Crosby, and Jennifer Jones will all be pressed into service as pawky Scots, hooting and skirling the granite pieties of the Auld Lichts.

• THURSDAY •

Circumstances have made a movie fan out of me this week. Tonight was haled to see Gypsy Rose Lee in a drama which told of the reclamation of a crook by a tavern entertainer who held him in lubricious thrall; this palsied theme, handled with pleasant irony, made good entertainment.… I was especially impressed by Gypsy Rose Lee, and hereby publicly announce that she is my movie queen and, in my view, the most lovely and accomplished of all Hollywood’s lallapaloozas. She has elegance, wit and a charming voice, and if I were a younger man I should write to Hollywood and offer her a half-interest in my chicken farm.… It was a similar upsurge of emotion which led my uncle, the Rev. Hengist Marchbanks (author of the popular theological work Scatology and Eschatology) to offer marriage to Miss Lottie Gilson, known professionally as “The Little Magnet” in 1888. Needless to say she refused him, but he kept a picture of her (in red silk tights) pasted in the front of his copy of Cruden’s Concordance until he was called to his long rest in 1902.

• FRIDAY •

I see that the French are abandoning the guillotine as an instrument of execution, and are going to use electric chairs just as soon as they can generate enough electric power to fry a yegg. This depresses me. The guillotine had one great virtue in my eyes; it was picturesque.… As long as we maintain the essentially barbarous custom of capital punishment we might as well perform it in the most barbarous ways. Hanging is disgusting enough for anybody; the guillotine is deliciously messy: these methods of public vengeance have a kind of noble savagery about them. But frizzling a man in a chair until he looks like a piece of toast and the fillings in his teeth hum like tiny radios is just modern gadget-worship gone wild. Why not burn a criminal at the stake, if you want to give him a roasting?

• SATURDAY •

Painted a fence today. Passersby greeted me with remarks like, “Doing a little painting, eh?” or “Well, I see you are painting your fence.” A short-tempered man might have replied, “Oh, you’re quite mistaken; I’m making a fretwork watch-cosy for my Aunt Minnie,” but I am not short-tempered. Such remarks, stressing what is obvious, are not meant to be taken literally. They are what psychologists call “phatic communion”—that is to say, talk intended to establish a sense of fellowship rather than to convey any intelligent meaning.… There are a lot of people whose entire conversation is composed of phatic communion; carried to excess it earns them a reputation for phatheadedness.

-XXXIII-

• SUNDAY •

A sticky dull day; I awoke with the bedclothes sticking to me, my clothes stuck to me all day, and whenever I arose from a varnished chair there was an audible sound as my trousers tore themselves from the seat. Bathing and fanning were futile; the only thing to do was to keep still and suffer, but this palled during the afternoon and I climbed a hill and looked down over the town; steam rose from it and here and there church spires and factories rose shadow-like above the vapour bath.… What I always say about the Canadian climate is that it saves us millions of dollars in travel; we can freeze with the Esquimau, or sweat with the Zulu, or parch with the Arab, or drench with the Briton, and all in our own front gardens. Sometimes we even have some really beautiful weather, but not often enough to spoil us.

• MONDAY •

To the movies this evening and saw a double feature—the first part of which was good, and the second part so bad as to be hugely entertaining. It contained, among other things, the briefest conversion ever witnessed on stage or screen; a priestess of the Sky Goddess (who performed her religious duties by wriggling her caboose in a provocative manner and tossing gardenias to handsome strangers) was told about the Fatherhood of God by an aged beachcomber in 30 seconds; she immediately rushed to her co-religionists, who were preparing to roast the hero, and shouted “Big Ju-Ju him say no kill”, and at once all the amateur cooks knelt, while a shower of rain fell and put out the sacrificial fire. I laughed myself into a serious state of debility during this exhibition, which involved the services of some of the worst actors to be seen anywhere, even on the screen.

• TUESDAY •

A man was asking me for information about Dr. Guillotin. I know little about him, except that he was a physician; that he was 51 when he came into prominence in 1789, and that he persuaded the French Constituent Assembly to adopt the killing-machine which we connect with the Revolution. “My machine will take off a head in a twinkling, and the victim will feel nothing but a sense of refreshing coolness,” he said to that body. Contrast the humanity of Guillotin with the malignity of the inventor of the electric chair, who causes his victim a sudden sense of intolerable heat; rightly is the chair called “the hot squat.” … Death by the guillotine was not immediate, by the way; several of the bodies struggled and attempted to rise after the knife had fallen, and there is a horrifying and well-authenticated account of the head of one nobleman which was seen to wink as it lay in the basket.… A Russian scientist, I see, has had great success in reviving men who have been dead for some time; this is going to mean a serious revision of our notions about death and the hereafter.

• WEDNESDAY AND ST. EMMA THE STEATOPYGITE •

A day of intense heat and demanding work coincided, reducing me to a condition of dripping exhaustion, and furious rebellion against the clothes the male is expected to wear under such circumstances. I am forced to the conclusion that ours is a Lost Age, a period of transition between one great historical epoch and another, and that one of the surest proofs of our moral, spiritual and æsthetic inadequacy is the sartorial thralldom in which men are held. Women—the fattest, oldest and most repulsive—strip for the heat; men—however emancipated they may be in other ways—continue to wear a collection of hot, foolish and ugly garments, designed to bind and chafe at every possible point. These are mad, bad, degenerate days, and no good will come of them, mark my words.

• THURSDAY •

Hullabaloo today about the results of the British General Election, which is interpreted in some circles as a mighty triumph for the Common Man. I suppose it is, for it has turned out of office Winston Churchill, who certainly ranked high among the Uncommon Men of our times. I confess that I find the modern enthusiasm for the Common Man rather hard to follow. I know a lot of Common Men myself, and as works of God they are admittedly wonderful; their hearts beat, their digestions turn pie and beef into blood and bone, and they defy gravity by walking upright instead of going on all fours; these are marvels in themselves, but I have not found that they imply any genius for government or any wisdom which is not given to Uncommon Men.… In fact, I suspect that the talk about the Common Man is popular cant; in order to get anywhere or be anything a man must still possess some qualities above the ordinary. But talk about the Common Man gives the yahoo element in the population a mighty conceit of itself, which may or may not be a good thing for democracy which, by the way, was the result of some uncommon thinking by some very uncommon men.

• FRIDAY •

Papers full of the British election. For the first time, so far as I know, mention is made of Mr. Attlee’s “attractive, blue-eyed, youthful wife.” It is a continual source of astonishment to me that prominent men always seem to be married to exceptional and attractive women. I recall how attractive Mrs. Baldwin seemed to be to the press when Honest Stan went to Downing Street; Mrs. Chamberlain, also, was a woman in a thousand. The charitable conclusion, of course, is that these wonderful women make their husbands great, and keep in the background while the simpleminded fellow enjoys all the fun.… I wonder if the day will ever come when the wife of a new prime minister or president is described thus: “Mrs. Blank is a dumpy, unattractive woman, who dresses in the worst possible taste, and has frequently embarrassed her husband by her inept remarks in public places; it is generally recognized that he would have achieved office years ago if she had not put her foot in it on so many important occasions.” … But no: it is a cherished legend that the wives of eminent men are composed of equal parts of Venus and Juno.

• SATURDAY •

To a picnic this afternoon, and had a lot of fun with an echo. There is nothing to compare with an echo for making a man feel god-like; he shouts to the skies, and a great voice returns from the distant hills. But do men ever shout god-like remarks at echoes? No! They shout “Phooey!” and “Boob!” and such-like vulgarities. Once, when I was a mere youth, I belonged to a choral society which rendered an echo-song by Orlando di Lasso, dating from the 16th century, and which consisted wholly of one part of the choir shouting Italian equivalents of Phooey and Boob at the other, with an occasional Ha Ha thrown in to give an air of gaiety. Man’s treatment of echoes is continued in his treatment of radio; having conquered the air to a point where the precepts of the great prophets, and the music of the supreme musicians, might flow over the whole earth, man devotes his invention to elaborations upon the Phooey and Boob theme, with an occasional mention of breakfast food and soap. I dread the day when the First Cause, disgusted with man, will Itself shout Phooey and Boob, and throw our whole Universe down some cosmic drain.

-XXXIV-

• SUNDAY •

Visited some people at a summer cottage today and, as often happens on these occasions, arrived just as there was a lot of hard work to be done. This time it was shifting a bathing float from the beach to the water, and we did it by the method used to build the Pyramids—slave power. After an hour of heaving and straining the accursed thing was in the water and I escaped with nothing more than a cut thumb and a great deal of mud on my person; some of the other guests were in far worse condition. We had earned our tea many times over, and the obvious jubilance of our host did little to cheer us.… A summer cottage can be a lovesome thing, God wot! but not unless it has proper plumbing. I am no lover of those old and picturesque privies which have assumed the gravity-defying obliquity of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Employing a special form of Yoga I transcend the physical side of my nature and avoid them utterly.

• MONDAY •

An extremely hot day, which I spent on the train surrounded by fractious children, prostrate old ladies and all the usual victims of a temperature of 92 degrees. Nature has endowed me with a magnificent cooling system, and if I could go naked in hot weather, I could bear anything; but convention demands that I swathe myself in layer upon layer of cloth, and as a result I feel as though I were in a cold compress which had unaccountably become lukewarm; the sensation is uncomfortable but not unbearable.… Had a two-hour wait at a small junctional point, so I strolled about, viewing the town, and musing idly on the architectural hideousness of Ontario. This town had tried to smarten itself by hacking down most of its trees, giving an indescribable impression of ravagement, like the skull of a woman who has gone bald through a fever.

• TUESDAY •

Even hotter today, a fact which was drawn to my attention by several boobs who asked me if it was hot enough for me? I enjoyed the heat, and took three tepid baths; sometimes I think that I might do well to move to a semi-tropical country; people who do so are said to become lackadaisical, losing their initiative; but I lose my initiative in cold weather, so perhaps it would work the other way for me, and I would become a demon of energy.… Every man I met today was perspiring so grossly that I may risk the indelicacy of using the word “sweaty” to describe their collective condition. But I did not see a single woman who appeared to be suffering in this way. Why? Why are women dry when men are wet? Why don’t women ever sweat? It is this characteristic, more than any other, which led our ancestors to put woman on a pedestal.

• WEDNESDAY •

Bruce Hutchison, I see, hotly denies the charge which someone has made that Canadians have no sense of humour. Canada, says he, invented the story about the little boy who got his head stuck in a chamber-pot and had to be taken to a tinsmith to get it off. I wonder what makes him think so. I have a book which quotes the story, at great length, from an English work published in the 1860’s and I have seen it in at least one American collection.… But Hutchison may be right about our national sense of humour, for when once we take up a joke, we never let it go. Old, crippled jokes, worn out in the Barren Lands and the outermost stretches of the Antipodes come to Canada at last, sure that they will have a happy home here for at least a century, and will raise a laugh from affectionate familiarity, if for no other reason. “Not Original, But Faithful To Death” is our motto in matters of humour. We like a joke to go off in our faces, like an exploding cigar, and then we can laugh heartily and get back to glum platitudes again. This characteristic is particularly noticeable in Parliament.

• THURSDAY •

Did some painting this afternoon; this is one household chore which I really do well. I admit that I have no skill fixing doors which stick, or repairing the cords of electric irons, or opening choked sewers, but I can paint anything and make a better job of it than most of the greenhorns who are to be found working for professional decorators these days; “No Bubbles Marchbanks” I am called in amateur painting circles. Ability as a housepainter and a passion for musical comedy are two characteristics which I share with the late Adolf Hitler—the only two, I believe.… What is more, I can paint without drinking milk; most professional housepainters seem to live entirely on milk; and I believe that they regard it as a potent charm against painter’s colic. I once painted a whole building (a two-storey henhouse) without consuming any liquid beyond a glass or two of water. But last time I had professional decorators in my house they left 18 milk bottles in it. They were especially fond of chocolate milk and every now and then, in hot weather, a bubble in my paintwork breaks, and emits a long-imprisoned belch of chocolate.

• FRIDAY •

This evening a friend of mine, who has recently become a keen amateur of astrology, attempted to cast my horoscope. According to his calculations, I have missed my vocation; I should either have been a postman or a real-estate agent. He also told me that in order to be in tune with my astrological influence, I should dress in pinks, pale blues and yellows; he warned me against over-indulgence in food and drink and a tendency toward diseases of the digestive machinery; he told me my lucky gem and my lucky flower; he told me that if I worked hard (either as a postman or a real estate agent) I should eventually enjoy a measure of success. I treated him with the derision he deserved.… Although I have no use for people who try to draw up astrological charts with a little knowledge gained from popular books on the subject, I cannot see why astrology should not be given a measure of credence. To believe in it demands an act of faith, but think of all the other things, no less improbable, we believe on acts of faith! If we believe in the findings of astronomers and theologians and physicists, who are always proving each other wrong, I don’t see why we should not believe astrologers, who are quite often right.

• SATURDAY •

As I was cutting my grass today, a passer-by said, “Hullo; are you cleaning up your yard?” By this I knew him to be a Canadian of at least three generations’ standing, for no other English-speaking race uses the word “yard” to describe a lawn, surrounded by flower beds. To me a yard is a small enclosed area, perhaps paved, in which clothes are lined. I looked the word up in my dictionary, and found that the use of yard to describe a garden was labelled as dialect. Presumably it came to Canada many years ago, and took root here. The true Canadian would describe the gardens of Versailles as “Louis XIV’s front yard”, without any sense of insufficiency.… The exact opposite of our national habit may be observed in England where any grassless, desolate, junk-filled bit of vacant ground is called “the garden”.… Another word which persists in Canada and the U.S. is “stoep” for a sitting-out place, although most of us now use the elegant Portugese word “verandah.” Thus a Canadian of the uncompromising old stock sits on his stoep and looks at his yard, whereas his more cosmopolitan children sit on the verandah and look at the garden. If the verandah roof leaks, it may also be called a “loggia.”

-XXXV-

• SUNDAY •

Attended a small gathering this evening where one of the guests went frankly and unashamedly to sleep and put in a good two hours on a sofa; I hasten to add that this was not alcoholic stupor, but fatigue, caused by giving aid and comfort at a children’s party earlier in the day. The incident reminded me of a shameful evening in my own life when I went sound asleep while Prof. Ralph Flenley was explaining some obscure aspects of the Napoleonic wars. To contradict a professor is enough to make him hate you, but to go to sleep while he is talking curdles the milk of human kindness in his breast.

• MONDAY •

Since the war the mortality among animals, domestic and wild, has surely doubled. Last Friday and Saturday I passed a dead hen, two dead cats, a groundhog which had been called home, and a spaniel which was noisily engaged in making its way toward Abraham’s bosom. Today I spied a brown shape on the road which I could not identify, and I asked the lady who was driving me to stop; she did so, and I found that it was a porcupine. I pointed out to her that the animal showed no sign of having died a violent death, and might have had heart-disease; she replied that it looked somewhat run-down to her. I ignored this cheap raillery, and examined the corpse; the porcupine is not a lovely object, and lacks dignity in death.

• TUESDAY •

Was talking to a man tonight who had seen service with the R.A.F. in Africa, in Sierra Leone. He tells me that in that part of the world a young woman’s dowry is likely to be reckoned in sewing-machines, which she buys with the pay which she received in return for special services rendered to the white troops. A girl with six or seven sewing-machines can afford to pick and choose among the eligible young men of her own race. The custom of the dowry has virtually died out among all except the most wealthy, in our Anglo-American civilization. A young man who takes a wife must choose her for her beauty of charracter, or of figure, alone. He stands to get nothing else with her except the expenses inseparable from housekeeping and raising a family. The average Canadian bridegroom cannot even count on six sewing-machines. It’s the man who pays, and pays, and pays.

• WEDNESDAY •

A hullabaloo has arisen because a Cabinet Minister told some union representatives to get the hell out of his club, where they were pestering him as he tried to eat a sandwich. The heart of many an industrialist has warmed to this man as they have longed to say the same thing themselves on many occasions, but feeling in labour circles is intense.… As a politician myself (leader, secretary and permanent executive of Marchbanks’ Humanist Party) I understand the Minister’s action perfectly. There comes a time in every man’s life when he wants to tell somebody who is pestering him to go to hell, and if he does not indulge the whim he is likely to get psychic strabismus, which, in its turn, leads to spiritual impotence. And spiritual impotence is the curse of our country as it is.

• THURSDAY •

I see that Alfred Hitchcock intends to make a film version of Hamlet, only he will change it about considerably, and will leave out the poetry; Cary Grant is to star in this masterpiece. I can just see it; Hamlet will no longer be a Prince, but a truck-driver in a small American town; he will be ultra-democratic, and everybody will call him “Ham.” His Mom will have bumped off his Pop in order to marry his uncle Claudius who thereby inherits the trucking business. Ham and his pal Horatio, and Ophelia (who is Ham’s sugarpuss), will uncover this dirty work by showing Mom and Claudius some home movies of a similar case. Ophelia will have comic scenes with an undertaker, but will not really die, because she will have to marry Ham in the last reel, and help him with his trucks. Ham and Ophy may even have a screwball sequence in which they both pretend to be crazy, because everybody thinks craziness is so cute these days. It’s a natural! … Of course the Hays Office could never permit a film version of the Shakespearean Hamlet, because its theme is too closely bound up with incest to be tolerable to the pure minds of moviegoers. The movies insist that a good boy must love his dear old Mom, but wisely, and not too well.

• FRIDAY •

This is the time of year when households are shaken to their foundations by the annual Pickle War. There was a time when the only limit on the amount of pickles “done down” each year was that imposed by the physical endurance of the sweating squaws. When women began to faint and fall into the seething cauldrons of Chili Sauce, the time had come to call a halt (unless you happened to like Chile Con Carne, and hired girls happened to be cheap). But with sugar rationed, the problem is now how much of each pickle is to be made? Personally, I favour Marchbanks’ Peach Pickle, which is made thus: put half a fine peach in the bottom of a brandy glass, add two fingers of brandy, two teaspoonfuls of sugar, and fill up with cream; drink at once. A simpler version is this: sugar a peach lightly, put it in a brandy glass, add two fingers of cream, and fill up with brandy; drink at once. Or here is a quick recipe for lazy cooks; eat a peach, and immediately drink a tumblerful of brandy. The last has the advantage of conserving the sugar, and is highly recommended for this reason, I understand. Marchbanks’ Peach Pickle is guaranteed to add zest to the simplest meal; it is also the quickest pickle you ever had.

• SATURDAY •

To the movies tonight, and was given a seat next to a woman who brought a baby, which was certainly not more than eight months old. It was suffering with gas on its stomach, so she had laid it upside down over her knees, and was rolling it to and fro as she watched the picture. The occasional high-pitched belches and moans of the suffering moppet worked upon my sympathies until I could no longer concentrate on Rita Hayworth, and as long experience has taught me that it is dangerous to come between a mother and her child—even when she is treating it cruelly—I moved. The child had been upside down for half an hour, and I began to fear that it might die; it smelled rather dead, though it still wriggled slightly.… Found that I had taken a seat next to an elderly woman who was enjoying the film in her bare feet; she had a pair of shoes, but she held them in her lap—to save them, I suppose. These incidents made me thankful for Rita Hayworth who was young, beautiful, clothed, right side up, and apparently in excellent health.

-XXXVI-

• SUNDAY •

Passed a large part of the day eating grapes. There are people who say that our Canadian blue grapes are harsh and prick the mouth with tiny barbs. To me, they seem matchless in flavour and colour, and I consume them by the basket, picking, chomping and spitting in a golden autumnal dream.… Once, years ago, I watched a chimpanzee in the London Zoo; the Latin name over his cage was Simia Satyrus, and truly he seemed like some bawdy, happy old satyr from the Golden Age when the world was young, and Rights, and Duties, and Social Problems were still maggots in the womb of time. He lay on his back with his arms folded under his head, and bit great mouthfuls of grapes from a bunch which he held in his toes. Every now and then he looked out at me, spat seeds, and shook with silent laughter, as though to say, “If you had any sense, old boy, you’d join me; this is the life.” I have often regretted that I did not accept his invitation. A nice private cage and plenty of grapes—what more can life offer?

• MONDAY •

I see an advertisement in the papers for “Pre-Arranged Funerals.” If you want to, you can arrange your own funeral, and pay for it before you die. This scheme combines forethought with a special form of insurance, and I think I shall make arrangements for my own funeral this afternoon. Death has no terrors for me, but sometimes I break out in a cold sweat when I think what a preacher might say about me when I was no longer able to contradict him and check his facts. I shall write my own funeral oration, and I shall also decide what music shall lull my mourners. If strains of Maunder or Stainer were played at my defunctive orgies I should certainly rise from the dead and strangle those responsible.… If I can raise the money to cover expenses I think I shall arrange to have a sin-eater at my funeral, in the manner of my Celtic ancestors, and also a feast for the mourners, with cold meats, Stilton cheese, fruitcake, and plenty of sherry and port. I feel that nothing would make up for my absence so well as a sufficient quantity of good dry sherry.

• TUESDAY •

I see that an English movie studio is going to make a film of the life of Karl Marx. This should be a natural for films. Karl’s poor old Dad is a miner, see? And this rich guy who owns the mine is a so-and-so, see? And Karl’s Mom is the hired help in the mine-owner’s house, and one day the mine-owner throws a rice-pudding at her because it was burned, y’ catch on? And the same day a lump of coal falls on Dad Marx’s foot, and he can’t go down the mine no more. And the Marxes are treated bad because they’re Jews, see? And Karl’s sister is taken away by the rich mine-owner’s son and put in a Boudoir, see? So Karl gets this idea that Manhood is more than Money, and he organizes some kind of an old-time A.F. of L. or I.W.W., and the workers march to the mine-owner’s house and burn it and elect Karl boss of the mine, and his sister gets out of the Boudoir and marries Karl’s best friend, and in the last shot you see Karl as an old man with a bunch o’ whiskers writing this book about Capital. It’s in Technicolour, mostly red.… Of course the real story of Karl Marx would not do for the movies; he was too incorrigible a borrower, and too indifferent a father, to be worthy of the talents of Gregory Peck, or even Paul Muni. Anyway, he lived his whole life in the extreme of bourgeois dullness.

• WEDNESDAY •

A lecturer on health was somewhat embarrassed recently when a member of his audience rose and said: “What will become of the health of Canada with the coming generation of mothers drinking and smoking as they do?” Dipping into my immense knowledge of social history, I cannot recall any generation of mothers which has not had its own deleterious indulgences. The mothers of yester-year did not smoke and drink rye, but they consumed dangerous quantities of strong tea, and sought oblivion by imbibing freely of Peruna, a nerve tonic which contained about as much alcohol as a bottle of imported Scotch. And their mothers smoked clay pipes and drank the liquor from the bottoms of silos, just to keep off germs. In spite of these things, they lived to ripe ages, and were often very merry and entertaining old parties. We can overdo the health business. Remember the old song—“A little of what you fancy does you good.” A very sound philosophy, clearly expressed.

• THURSDAY •

To the movies tonight to see a highly coloured piece about some people called Frédéric Chopin and George Sand, though any resemblance between them and the historical characters so named was coincidental, and had been avoided pretty carefully. The voluptuous Lady Korda played George Sand, and when she appeared in masculine dress she looked far more like the historical Chopin than the young bruiser who had been given that part. The historical George Sand was so lacking in attraction of the physical kind that Alfred de Musset once described her as a cow, quite dispassionately.… The film had been constructed along the approved lines of Hollywood history: Chopin was insulted and oppressed by the rich (whereas in actual fact he was fawned upon by the nobility and gentry almost from birth); he was a revolutionary, and a great whooper-up for the Common Man (though in fact he never met any common men except occasional piano movers and preferred the company of the most brilliant group of his time); he let George Sand bamboozle him (though in fact they nagged each other tirelessly, and he could not stand the racket made by her swarm of children); he dearly loved his native Poland (though he was actually half-French and took care never to go near Poland once he got away from it). A strange film, brightly coloured, sweet and gassy, like a fruit salad.

• FRIDAY •

I am getting a cold. At present it is in what we medical men call “the period of incubation.” This means that there is nothing specifically wrong with me, but I am conscious of uneasiness in my throat, and my head feels as though somebody had pumped soda water (with pinpoint carbonation, of course) into my brains, causing them to go bubble-bubble-bubble in a ticklish way every now and again. My ears, too, have not their accustomed sharpness, and everybody who talks to me seems to have a mouthful of mashed potatoes.… To me the annoying thing about the cold germ is that it has such a poor sense of timing; when I am in perfect health, but would welcome a chance to stay in bed for two or three days, I could not catch a cold if I slept in a freezing locker; but when I am too busy to fuss over trifles I catch colds with the greatest ease, and have to go on working in spite of them. I know that physicians advise against this, but I have yet to see a physician take a few days in bed because of a cold. They generally keep going as long as they can be carried from patient to patient.

• SATURDAY •

In the night my cold passed from the stage of incubation to the stage of exasperation, and I woke with weeping eyes, a streaming nose, no sense of taste, and very little sense of hearing. Went to work, kicking dogs, swearing at children, and pushing old women under buses. There is a misanthrope in every man, and the cold germ usually brings him well to the fore.… In the afternoon visited some people, all of whom had colds, and we passed an agreeable hour or so exchanging symptoms.… Later at an informal birthday party, and had a slice of cake with real icing on it, a rarity in these times. I haven’t any sympathy with people who do not celebrate their birthdays; I like to see the utmost done in the way of cakes, gifts, and jollifications. To a philosopher the passing of another year is not a melancholy incident; he may be a year older, but if he is worth his salt he is also a year wiser.

-XXXVII-

• SUNDAY •

Took some photographs today, as I was lucky enough to get a reel of film yesterday. Amateur photography bears the same relation to the real thing that amateur theatricals bear to the productions of London or Broadway. When I take a photograph I usually manage to get at least one object into the picture which taste and delicacy would exclude from it; if I take a baby there is certain to be a puddle under it; if I take a dewy damsel in a winsome pose, she is sure to have a bottle of hair restorer or eradicator protruding from her pocket; let me train my camera upon a fragrant old lady in her lavender gown, and an ill-timed eructation will cause her to come out on the film looking like a bar-fly; nobody ever seems to be properly tucked in, buttoned up, or combed and washed when I take them. There are people who believe that Nature always provides a reverse, or opposite, of everything she creates. I am obviously the opposite of Youssuf Karsh; if I had photographed Churchill it would certainly have been just after a bottle had broken in his pocket.

• MONDAY •

A letter today from a reader who is in hospital with a broken leg; he tells me that he has at last discovered who I am. I would not be too sure of that; there are at least two men, I know, who pretend that they are Samuel Marchbanks, and as they are my employers I dare not expose them. I have actually seen one of these scoundrels address a meeting at which I was present, pretending to be me! I have also heard the suggestion that Samuel Marchbanks is really a woman.… This gentleman wants to know if I have many readers of his own age (28). I don’t know, to be truthful, though I understand that I am widely read in Old Folks Homes, orphanages, asylums for alcoholics, and Refuges for Gentlewomen in Reduced Circumstances; in poorhouses, too, I am a general favourite. This is because I am always compassionate toward the weak and lowly, and scornful toward the rich, the book-learned and the privileged. Years ago, when I was a mere lad, I discovered that the way to win the hearts of the lowly was to tell them that they were the salt of the earth; this is a lie, but they love it.

• TUESDAY •

In the paper I see a picture of Shirley Temple buying her trousseau. Deary me, how time flies! Surely ‘twas but yesterday that this loveable mite held all the world in chubby thrall. Even the Dionne Quintuplets, five to one, could not get the better of her in the great battle of publicity. And now she is a grown woman, trying to find a few pairs of step-ins with real elastic in the top.… A Hollywood tycoon once explained to me that the whole of Shirley’s grip on the film public began and ended with the way in which she said “Oh my goodness!” This line appeared in all her films, and where the ordinary moppet would say “Oh my goodness!” with perfect, if nasal, articulation, Shirley said “Oh my gooness!” This bit of delicious juvenility reduced strong men to doting tears, and caused fond mothers to smack their young whenever the aforesaid young dared to sound the “d” in “goodness.” When Shirley said “Oh my gooness!” and flashed dimples like Neon signs, she aroused the essential jellyfish in us all; we were at her mercy, even when she sang The Good Ship Lollipop and clumped laboriously through a tap-dance. But Ichabod, Ichabod, the gooness is departed from Shirley.

• WEDNESDAY •

There are times when I wonder, calmly and dispassionately, whether life is really worth living. Every Autumn there comes a period during which it is impossible to keep warm, though the lighting of the furnace would be rash folly. I have just enough black jelly-beans in my cellar to feed my Monster from October 15 until May 5. Light up now, and I shall freeze in the Spring. But if things go on as they are, I shall be far gone in consumption before October 15; I have a Harry Lauder cough, and when I laugh (which is not often with things the way they are) it sounds like somebody sifting ashes. I should heap my fireplace with wood, and squat upon the flames like a Hindu widow in suttee, but the woodman has not brought my wood yet, and after he does I shall have to rope and tie a buzz-saw entrepreneur before I can burn it. True, I have some stuff which purports to be fireplace coal, but it gives no heat. Indeed, all it does is throw fragments of itself on my carpet, burning large and shameful holes.… I see that somebody is advertising for a “Boy’s Commode.” In my young days those things were Great Levellers, making no distinction of sex.

• THURSDAY •

These are the days when lukewarm gardeners like myself debate earnestly whether they should cut the grass just once more, or not. There is a school of thought which maintains that it is bad for a lawn to be too closely cropped when the first frost comes; there is an opposing school which says that a lawn which is left shaggy in the autumn will be slow and spotty next spring.… Frankly, I have exhausted any pleasure that mowing lawns ever held for me, and I wish I could get a boy to take over the job for a reasonable price.… When I was a lad I mowed an enormous lawn every week for years on end, and was thankful for a dry crust and a glass of polluted water when the job was done. I attribute my present rock-like character to this stern early training.

• FRIDAY •

The world was scheduled to end today, but something must have gone wrong. The Rev. Charles Long of Pasadena, California, said it, and I made a note of it on my memorandum pad. Deciding that Oblivion might as well overtake me when I was busy, I went about my accustomed tasks all day, keeping an eye peeled for any untoward happenings. At about 11:35 a. m. I heard a shrill sound which I thought might be the Trump of Doom, but it proved to be a child outside in the street, who had swallowed his gum and was bewailing the loss. As night drew on I wondered if it were worth while making a fire, but again I reflected that I might as well die warm, and it was well that I did so, for the world did not end at all.… This makes the eighth prediction of general doom that I have survived without harm, and every single one has been made by the shaman, fakir or medicine man of some sect in the U.S.A. I am beginning to question the Divine Inspiration of these creatures.

• SATURDAY •

Went out this afternoon to see if there were any autumn tints yet visible, and had a very good time, sweetened by the knowledge that I should have stayed at home to do a dozen pressing household jobs.… Home, and made a fire and sat by it, eating grapes, and thinking what a fine season autumn is. Chose an apple, and was just about to bite into it when a solemn thought struck me that apples are now 75 cents a basket, and this in turn fathered the sober reflection that some autumns are better than others. Put the apple back in its basket, only slightly tooth-pocked.… Passed the evening looking out clothes for the Europeans, and found that I had more than I imagined, including a great many pairs of socks. Handed these over to an experienced sock-rehabilitator of my acquaintance, who made them as good as new. The thought that some Greek or Dutchman will be wearing my socks this winter gives me a new sense of the brotherhood of man.

-XXXVIII-

• SUNDAY •

In bed, and feel very low; no Calvinist ever approached the Sabbath with a heavier heart or a greater contempt for the flesh than I do today. A neglected cold is wreaking its revenge upon me. I pick up a novel to beguile the leaden-footed hours: in the first chapter is an account of how a man died through neglecting a cold. Oh! … Have just devoured the bread and milk which comprises my dinner. My entrails are now a prehistoric swamp where reptiles and horned monsters romp.

• MONDAY •

Thought a good deal about death today, and particularly about my own Last Words if I should expire of this grievous malady. The fashion for Last Words has declined during the last century. The most interesting case of Disputed Last Words that I know of concerns William Pitt, the Great Commoner; there are those who say he died exclaiming, “Oh my country! How I leave my country!” though an opposed school of historians claims that what he really said was, “I think I could eat one of Bellamy’s veal pies.”… However, I was unable to concoct a satisfactory dying speech for myself; I am too ill for the strenuous intellectual labour involved. And this gives me a clue to the genesis of many famous Last Words: they are carefully composed, polished and memorized years before death, and then, when the Grim Reaper seems near, they can be spoken with full effect.… But in these degenerate days too many people die in hospitals, and as it is a well-known fact that no nurse ever lets a patient get a word in edgewise, Last Words are an impossibility.

• TUESDAY •

Visited the doctor today at his office; he has a machine there which he wants to use on me. While waiting for him took close cognizance of the picture on his wall. Most doctors content themselves with Sir Luke Fildes’ touching masterwork The Doctor, in which a bearded physician leans over the bed of a sick child, trying to look as though he knew what ailed it.… But this picture showed a young soldier lying on a rough bed, covered with his jacket; his eyes are closed and it is plain that he has gone to that land where “nor physician troubleth nor enema grieveth”, as the Good Book says. At a table by his side sits his superior officer, his eyes moist, looking at the contents of the young man’s wallet; another officer, gazing out of the window, has succumbed to manly tears.… Of course, it may be that I interpret this picture wrongly; maybe the young fellow on the bed is drunk, and his two superior officers are crying because he hasn’t enough money on him to be worth robbing. I don’t know, and, by the time the doctor had finished with me, I didn’t care.

• WEDNESDAY •

My physician has given me a sedative, swearing by Aesculapius, Panacea and Pharmacopoeia that it will do me good. I read The Great Gatsby until the drug renders me insensible, after which I am a victim of evil dreams, in which I am continually being shot at by ill-disposed persons. I struggle to escape; I try to call for help, but I am powerless. At last I am able to arouse myself, and wonder whether the cure is not worse than the disease. The only perceptible effect of the sedative on me was to parade the disjecta membra of my scrambled ego before my mind’s eye.

• THURSDAY •

Felt better today, and made a mighty effort to get out of bed; could only endure this for half an hour. Retired ungracefully, and passed the time by reading a book about famous murders. I suppose there are dozens of murders done every year which are never discovered; so far as I can judge, the types of murderers who are captured are two: (a) ignoramuses who kill in hot blood, with plenty of witnesses and a profusion of bloody axes, initialed handkerchiefs and whatnot as clues; (b) people who try to be too clever, and who invent subtle schemes of murder, and alibis for themselves. But the woman who pushes her aged husband downstairs, or the man who feeds his wife lobsters and whiskey, is rarely charged with murder, because the method is direct and simple. The best murder, of course, is achieved by driving our victim to murder himself, and this is by no means as difficult as it might seem; indeed, it was done often during the market crash of 1929, when the rain of stockbrokers jumping from upstairs windows made a walk down St. Catherine’s Street quite dangerous.

• FRIDAY •

Got up this afternoon with great success, and this has altered my whole attitude toward life. No wonder invalids are crochety, crabby people. There are, in fact, two approaches to invalidism: (a) You can be a Sickbed Hitler, and insist on running everything and everybody from your Bedroom Chancellery; (b) You can be an Uncomplaining Sufferer, which means that you must tell everybody you had a bad night when you really slept like a horse, and you must do all you can to indicate that you are in continual pain, which you endure with nobility. Both these plans are great fun, but I think the Uncomplaining Sufferer has the best racket of all. He can make his relatives sacrifice to him for years, and feel cheap as they do it. If I ever become chronically ill I shall see what can be done to combine the two methods, producing a monster of valetudinarianism to be known to science as the Tyrannosaurus Marchbankensis, or Nurses’ Nightmare.

• SATURDAY •

During my stay in bed I have done my best to keep up with my work as a book-reviewer, and have waded through a mountain of muck. Every day in every way I agree more and more with the anonymous reviewer who wrote:

And much though each new book keeps lit my light,

Defrauding me of sleep my dubious sleight,

I often wonder what the authors read

One half so rotten as the stuff they write.

Tomorrow I go back into the great world, which has managed to do admirably without me for a week: the strikers have struck just as noisily without me: the international politicians have arranged several deadlocks and disagreements although I was unable to help them; that Mighty Mendicant, the Government, has stretched out its beggar’s hand, whining piteously for a few hundred millions, although I was not by to encourage it. The world does so well without me, that I am moved to wish that I could do equally well without the world.

-XXXIX-

• SUNDAY AND CINDERMAS •

My annual duel with my furnace has begun. Perhaps “duel” is not the right word, for it suggests a contest of lightninglike thrust and parry, and my fight with the furnace is much more like medieval jousting—a slow but hideously powerful and destructive combat. At present my aim is to keep a fire low enough to warm my house without dehydrating me and all my possessions; this I do by throttling the furnace, keeping all air from it, and treating it with ostentatious contempt, as though I did not care whether it went out or not. It retorts by belching its hot breath all through the house, cracking the surface of the furniture, and making the floors groan and pop in the night. There is a tank in my furnace into which I pour water every day, and the superstition is that this water mingles with the hot air and produces a balmy climate all through my house. But in actual fact gremlins drink this water, and the mice in my cellar commit the Happy Despatch in it, and the air from the furnace is like the parching simoom of the East Indies. Frankly I hate furnaces, and would far rather have a big Quebec heater, upon which I could spit when I was disgusted with it. Spit on a furnace, and it doesn’t even hiss.

• MONDAY •

Whenever I win a bout with my furnace, it always retorts by producing a particularly large and dirty supply of ash. In twenty years, I suppose, furnaces like the one which I now harbour in my cellar will be antiques, and we shall look back laughingly at the era of the bi-weekly ash collection. But at present it is a stern reality. The ashes have to be taken out of the entrails of the furnace, sifted by hand, and then conveyed in tubs and buckets to the street. After I have done this, I look as though I had been working in a flour mill, and smell as though I had been travelling from Montreal to Toronto in a smoking car. It is enough to put me in a bad temper for a whole evening.… Some day I am going to have a house heated by the rays of the sun in the most modern manner. Or perhaps I shall enjoy the luxury of a furnace man, and while he struggles and fights with the furnace, I shall sit upstairs dressed like Mr. Capitalistic Interests in a C.C.F. cartoon, laughing and drinking cherry bounce, and shouting “More heat, more heat!” in a tyrannous voice. I have always thought that I should like to be a tyrant, but it costs money.

• TUESDAY •

My furnace had its first ugly fit of the season today. When I opened its front door this morning for the usual health inspection, I noticed that it had a bad breath and a nasty, coated back-draft. However, it took its food without much complaint and I thought no more about it. By this evening, however, it had dyspepsia, and the usual cures did no good at all. So for the first time in the Furnace Season I sat up with it, coaxing its appetite from time to time with tiny shovelfuls of coke, a dainty which it much enjoys. I have grown so used to sitting in the cellar that I hardly notice it any more. But I must put a stronger globe in the light socket; the present one is too dim for pleasant reading. And I might knock up a bookshelf over the preserve cupboard to hold a few appropriate favourites such as Orpheus In Hades, The Light That Failed, The Sacred Flame, The Stoker, and, of course, Man vs. Machine.

• WEDNESDAY EVE OF ST. LEGER •

This afternoon I tried to rake my lawn clear of leaves, but felt like Hercules cleaning the Augean stables, and soon gave it up. It would be easier to climb the trees in September and pick the leaves than to try to scrape them up from the ground, and I think that I shall do so next year. “What are you doing in that tree, Mr. Marchbanks?” the neighbours will cry, their suspicions aroused. “I am harvesting my leaves,” I shall reply, with pardonable superiority. After that, of course, everyone will take it up.

• THURSDAY •

A lady suggested a scheme to me this evening for improving the standard of education in Canada, and all Canadian standards with it. The plan is beautiful in its simplicity: (1) quadruple the present salaries of the teaching profession; (2) insist that all teachers be worth what they are paid; (3) make the teaching profession the hardest to enter of all professions. Another lady had another suggestion, which was that all teachers be paid the same high salary; obviously a teacher should be as skilful and as learned to teach beginners as advanced students. But I fear that Canada cares too little about real education for either of these schemes to gain acceptance.… A gentleman then joined me in a prolonged complaint about Canada’s high tax on books; it is precisely the same, he said, as putting a tax on a university education.

• FRIDAY •

A friend who was interested in my observations on famous Last Words draws my attention to this passage in George Santayana’s Persons And Places: “On one of the many occasions when he (Santayana’s father) thought, or dreaded, that he might be on his deathbed, he felt a sudden desire for some boiled chicken, without in the least giving up his asseveration that he was dying; and as his deafness prevented him from properly modulating his voice, he cried out with a shout that resounded through the whole house: ‘La Uncion y la gallina!’ … which is to say ‘Extreme Unction and a Chicken’ ” Undoubtedly these are noble Last Words, combining as they do a prudent regard for both worlds, but as the elder Santayana did not die on this occasion, they are not Last Words in the true sense.… Very irritating Last Words would be, “I forgive you all,” which would leave one’s relatives in a condition of baffled and angry stupefaction.… Charles I had a brilliant inspiration when, on the scaffold, he turned to the attendant bishop and said, “Remember, Juxon.” Since then hundreds of people have puzzled their brains as to what it was that Juxon was to remember. If it was an adjuration (very natural under the circumstances) to put Rough on Rats in Cromwell’s soup, it is obvious that Juxon forgot, unforgivably.

• SATURDAY •

More furnace martyrdom; cold today, and the fire which I have nursed so lovingly was inadequate. I have kept it low, yet not dangerously low, and it refused to burn up when the need arose. So, in an unwise fit of temper, I gave it a severe poking, and went out for a couple of hours. When I came home again the thermometer was just at 90 degrees F.… Set to work to bring the monster under control, opening all checks and even shovelling ashes through the fire door to quench the flames. I was afraid that the furnace would be consumed by its own heat, and suddenly subside in a mass of molten metal.… I have deceived myself about my furnace; I thought that I had the upper hand of it, and that its proud spirit was broken. But no! The Old Nick is as active in its iron bosom as ever. Some day I shall destroy that furnace or it will destroy me.

-XL-

• SUNDAY •

Was talking today to an irate father whose little boy had recently joined the temperance movement. It appears that an agent of the temperance interests (it is known that they have all kinds of money at their command, because they are heavily subsidized by the soft drink cartel) had attracted a number of children into a church hall after school and had shown them movies of the inside of a drunkard’s stomach in technicolour; this impressed the tots greatly, and after the temperance agent had plied them with chocolate milk, they all signed a pledge to taste not, touch not, nor yet smell of the cork, and received certificates establishing their membership in the Wee Wowsers’ Total Abstinence Fraternity.… What annoyed this man was that his particular Wee Wowser had come home armed with the sword of the spirit, and had lectured him on the evils of beer; I gather that the Wee Wowser was told that what looked like soul-saving to him looked much like infant impudence to his father, and his membership in the Wee Wowsers terminated at that instant.

• MONDAY •

A friend of mine lost confidence in himself today because he discovered that he had put the garbage can carefully in the luggage compartment of his car, and had stood his wife’s dressing-case on the curb to await the offal officer. I assured him that I had been doing things like that for years, and attributed it to abstraction of the kind from which Professor Einstein suffers.

• TUESDAY •

My brother Fairchild paid me one of his infrequent visits today, and asked to watch while I stoked my furnace. This was unfortunate, for Fairchild is a bigoted Back-to-Fronter, while I am a determined Middler. That is to say, Fairchild stokes his furnace by raking the live coal from the back to the front, and putting his new coal in the resulting trough, whereas I make a bed of coals with the poker, and put my new coal in a heap in the middle. I was brought up a Back-to-Fronter, but I changed to Middle-ism when I married my furnace. The feeling which Back-to-Fronters have for Middlers is comparable to that which Roman Catholics cherish for adherents of the Greek Orthodox Church.… However, while Fairchild stood by I stoked the furnace in my usual way, and I noticed his jaw tighten and his temples throb. In a low voice, he asked me whether I expected to make a good fire that way? I said that I did, and to spare him embarrassment, I leaned toward the fire-door at that moment. I think it was the big poker he used when he struck, but luckily I caught the blow on my shoulder, and was able to push his head in an ash-bucket while I screamed for help. When the police came we were locked in a deathgrip on the cellar floor.… We parted fairly good friends, but my furnace went out in the night. The slightest thing upsets it.

• WEDNESDAY •

Tonight on the radio Maggie Teyte sang Oft In The Stilly Night better than I ever expect to hear it sung again. Beauty of tone, intelligence and poetic feeling—all were there. I must have heard the song murdered a score of times by male quartettes, female vocalizers and other assassins. And of course I recall it from schooldays when it was usually rendered thus:

Off in a stilly NIGHT

Ere Slummer’s chainuz BOWN me

Fon memry bringza LIGHT

Uvuther dayza ROWN me.

I often wonder if school teachers know what a crime they commit by giving children fine verse to murder. Children are savages, and do not like any verse except gems of their own compostiion, such as:

Julius Cæsar

Was an old geezer

Who froze his feet

In an ice-cream freezer.

True poetry should be left to adults; school lessons kill whatever taste for poetry the average child may have.

• THURSDAY •

Thought I would go to the movies tonight, but when I arrived at the place I found a long queue, and neither Greer Garson nor Gregory Peck is a person whom I will stand in line to see. So I went for a country walk instead, and as it was a fine moonlight night, I enjoyed myself very much.

• FRIDAY •

For a brief drive in the country today; was amazed by the number of farm dogs who seem anxious to quit this life and join their ancestors in whatever future existence a discerning providence has provided for dogs. They rush at every car, attempting to hurl themselves under the wheels, and when they fail (which they do quite often, being slow and stupid) they bite at the tires, hoping to cause a puncture. In the World of Tomorrow dogs who want to commit the Happy Despatch will present themselves before a Government Board, explain their reasons for wishing to die, and if successful, will receive a cyanide bone, coated with synthetic beef gravy. The expense of this service will, of course, be borne by the taxpayers. Dogs who fail to make a case for themselves will receive the Order of Mother Hubbard (first class).

• SATURDAY •

It was so warm today that I let my furnace go out; it thinks it went out of its own accord, but I know better; I starved it, and it expired.… Bought a new rake, and seized the opportunity to sharpen my penknife, free, on the various stones in the hardware store. Then set about tasks of raking leaves, emptying flowerpots, cutting back bushes, and preparing Marchbanks Towers for its long winter’s nap. I am still waiting for my winter wood, which is apparently marooned in a swamp somewhere and cannot be reached; it will arrive simultaneously with the first snow, I predict, and I will have my usual jolly weekend piling it. Otherwise no squirrel is better prepared for winter than I; I am looking for a cidermill in good condition, and will buy it if I can find it, though I understand that apples are going to be very scarce this year; but I have a scheme of my own for making cider out of oranges.

-XLI-

• SUNDAY •

To a christening this afternoon, a ceremony in which I always take a large measure of innocent delight. At best it is a race between the parson and the infant, both gathering steam and momentum as the moment of immersion approaches; if the parson is still audible above the outraged screams of the child after this point, I award the victor’s palm to him. The shrieking of the child, of course, is merely the Old Adam protesting against an invasion of his property.… I understand that in most churches a first-aid box is kept in the vestry for the use of parsons who have suffered damage during a christening; I have seen men of God horribly clawed by infants who possessed extraordinary resistance to Grace.… Sometimes I have doubted the efficacy of the baptismal rite; so many children seem to be in full possession of the Old Adam, or, more accurately, the Old Nick is in full possession of them.

• MONDAY •

To the bank this afternoon, and was once again amazed by the nonchalance with which the young women behind the bars treat my balance. To me it is a matter of the most profound significance; to them it is a mere sum in addition and subtraction. Without being in the least aware of it, they can drive their cruel pens deep into my heart. That is, they are not aware of it unless I sink upon the floor with a despairing cry and attempt to disembowel myself with my pen-knife; then they call the assistant manager to throw me out. Banks hate suicides on the premises—looks bad.

• TUESDAY •

To the movies tonight to see a piece written by Sir Arthur Pinero and produced with complete and humiliating failure on the stage in 1922, and now served up by Hollywood as something new and dainty. Its theme (which is the old and laughably untrue one that Love Conquers All) might have been handled acceptably by Barrie, but Pinero, who had all the delicate appreciation of human nature that one expects in police court lawyers and auctioneers, made a mess of it, and Hollywood has piled its own mess on top of the original. A pilot who has been injured and disfigured in the war marries a girl of remarkable ugliness, and in the throes of the Tender Passion they are transformed, and seem beautiful to one another; but they do not seem beautiful to anyone else, and this is supposed to be tragic, though it appears entirely normal and explicable to me. Pinero was no hand at such confectionery; he was happier with plushy Edwardian trollops such as Paula Tanqueray and the notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, who could sin, repent and have hysterics without disturbing their elaborate hair-dos or making their corsets creak more than was considered decent.

• WEDNESDAY •

Saw some posters today, adjuring hunters to make sure that their cigarette stubs were doused before they threw them away; the solemn assurance was given that one carelessly thrown match might start a forest fire. I wish that the government officials who dream up these posters would come and light my furnace for me some time with one of their carelessly thrown matches, or a cigarette stub. Tonight I laboured fifty minutes cleaning out my furnace (which had passed quietly away at 8:30 a.m.) and putting paper and kindling in its maw, preparatory to re-lighting; then I put a few carefully lighted matches inside and awaited results. There were none. Remembering the posters, I threw a lighted match carelessly into the fire-door; it went out at once. Next I tried a cigarette stub; it went out too. So at last I made a torch of twisted paper, and that worked. I can only conclude that it is easier to start a forest fire than it is to light my furnace.

• THURSDAY •

Suffered an acute attack of the humdudgeon today; the symptoms of this illness are a sense of failure, self-contempt and mental fatigue; there is no cure for it; application to the bottle merely brings on a crying-jag; a walk in the park suggests ideas of suicide; while the fit lasts all seems dross; sufferers from the humdudgeon should be left alone, though if they can be persuaded to lie down, with a pillow under the knees, it helps.… It was during a fit of the humdudgeon, on a Sunday afternoon in London, that De Quincey made his first experiment at opium-eating, to allay the pains of toothache. He never completely abandoned the habit, and lived to the ripe old age of 75, coked to the gills quite a lot of the time.

• FRIDAY •

Everything is relative, I suppose, but I wish that the law, or a Chamber of Commerce, or somebody, would define the word “lifetime” as it is used by merchants. Fourteen months ago I bought a suit which was made of a cloth which I was assured would not—could not—wear out; the tailor jabbed pencils through it to show me how tough the fabric was. I have given it good care, and the sleeves and cuffs are undeniably worn through; the lifetime fabric is just wartime shoddy. A few years ago I was sold a Harris tweed suit, which I was assured would last my lifetime; I wore both elbows through in just over three years. And I have never had a pen with a lifetime guarantee which lasted five years. Yet the days of our years are three-score years and ten.

• SATURDAY •

Long discussion this evening with a man who wants to revise our system of funerals and burial. The Vikings, he points out, lived in their ships and loved them, and when they died their bodies were laid out in their ships and sent off to sea. Ours, he points out, is an automobile civilization, and if we had any real respect for the dead, we would sit them at the wheel of the car in which they spent so much of life, and which they loved so dearly, and we would then allow the machine to dash along a special funeral speedway and eventually over a cliff. There is a poetic sweep about this notion which appeals to me strongly. For non-drivers like myself, of course, the plan might prove somewhat humiliating, but perhaps an arrangement could be made to whisk me into oblivion on castors, cunningly let into the heels of my burial boots.

-XLII-

• SUNDAY •

Was reading some of the letters of Edgar Allen Poe today, and they confirmed me in my belief that a man’s private correspondence should never be published. He does not write his letters with a horde of snoopy strangers in mind, and he says things which he would never say for publication. Poe was a great literary artist, and we have all the poems and stories which he wanted the public to see; why publish letters in which he makes a fool of himself, drooling weakly to his child wife, and tearfully addressing his mother-in-law as “Dearest Muddy”?

• MONDAY •

Was talking to a most unusual physician tonight—a man who scorns vitamins and laughs uproariously at talk of allergies. Medicine, he said, was an art and not a science, and could only be usefully practised after deep study of human nature and of each individual patient. This attitude, he said, was commonplace among the great physicians of the past, but was out of favour with the modern school of pill-peddlers, who like to do their diagnosis by machine as much as possible, and prefer not to see the patient if they can possibly manage with a piece of him. Too many doctors are deeply interested in disease, but don’t care much for people, he said.… This all sounded like good sense to me, though I put in a word or two for the overworked physicians, whose patients always expect a bottle of medicine, and love to be treated for any disease under the sun, but hate to be accused of Original Sin, which is what is wrong with most of them.

• TUESDAY •

To Toronto on some business, and found it noisier and dirtier than ever. Of course, visitors see Toronto at its worst. I had to fly around the business section, meeting this one here, and phoning that one there and my impression was all of tiresome noise, stench and rush. But native Torontonians rarely encounter this; they sit in their luxurious offices, with their feet on desks, smoking big cigars and wondering how long it will be before they can run around the corner for their hourly cup of coffee. At home their wives and children live in the pastoral surroundings of Bayview, where grass grows in the streets, in Forest Hill, where the wild maztoth blooms luxuriantly all the year round, or in Lawrence Park, where cows and sheep graze peacefully on the lawns. The calm, white, expressionless face of a real Torontonian is never creased with care, and his collar is never soiled with smuts from the chimneys. Those frantic, feverish, sweating wretches who run about the downtown area are all visitors from the country, rushing madly to do a week’s business in a few hours.

• WEDNESDAY •

This afternoon bent to the task of carving a pumpkin face as a Hallowe’en surprise for some children I know; this is a neglected branch of art which I have made peculiarly my own. I scorn the mediocre pumpkin face with triangular eyes and nose, and a gash of a mouth: mine has a noble nose, a mouth full of teeth, eyes which search your soul when the pumpkin is illuminated, and a leer which sums up the whole spirit of Hallowe’en. The only proper way to illuminate a pumpkin head is with the stub of a candle; electric light is harsh and lacking in mystery.

• THURSDAY AND ALL HALLOW’S EVE •

Hallowe’en, and a fine windy night. There was a ring at my door, and when I opened it a frightful ghost, about three feet high, confronted me. “Who are you?” I demanded in a voice which trembled with fright. “I’m Charles,” whispered the spirit, and whisked my proffered orange into the folds of its ectoplasm.… Not long after the ghost of Charles had disappeared, I heard a groan, and went outside just in time to see a gang of hooligans running up the street, having ripped my gate off its hinges. I cursed them with a slow, lingering, horrible curse imparted to me by my grandmother, who was a witch. They will not feel the full effect of this curse for a week or so, but then parts of them will begin to turn black, and drop off, and they will be regarded as undesirable even in the circles of society in which they now move.… There was a good deal of writing on windows with soap, too, mostly confined to such comments as “Ha ha” and “Boo.” The world is so constituted that people who feel like writing on windows can never think of anything funny to write, while those who can think of funny things have too much brains to want to write them on windows.

• FRIDAY AND ALL HALLOWMAS •

The folk-spirit in poetry is not dead. Today I heard some children singing Sing A Song O’ Sixpence, the last verse of which runs:

The maid was in the garden

Lining out the clothes;

Along came a blackbird

And snapped off her nose.

But to this a youthful poet in the group had added a delightful sequel:

She went to the doctor

To get a wooden nose,

And when she came home,

She couldn’t blow her nose.

I hope to see this addition incorporated in the next edition of Mother Goose.

• SATURDAY •

People make their livings in the oddest ways. I heard today about a man who has become wealthy through the manufacture of “slumber slippers”—soft little slippers like ballet shoes which are placed on the feet of corpses. All God’s chillun got special shoes.… And a man in Winnipeg has become well-off through the cultivation and sale of sunflower seeds, for the chewing trade. It seems that great numbers of immigrants from Middle Europe like to chew sunflower seeds, spitting out the husks and eating the tiny, oily kernel, which tastes like a nut.… I should like to get into one of these queer trades, and make my fortune: I wonder how neon false teeth would be, so that lovers could smile at one another in the dark? Or pipe-cleaners with blunted ends, so that they could safely be used as ear-reamers? Or a pair of stays that rings a bell when the occupant has eaten enough, for fat women on diets? The possibilities are infinite.

-XLIII-

• SUNDAY •

For years I have been known to a large circle of sports enthusiasts as the Nimrod of the Fly-Swatter; I take no interest in other blood-sports, but when it comes to swatting flies I admit few equals and no superiors. I prefer a swatter with a rubber flapper to the ordinary wire affair; the wire mashes the game, but the rubber slaps it into oblivion and leaves the carcass unmutilated, and suitable for stuffing or table use.… It is not generally realized that when a fly rises from a standing position, it jumps backward; it is necessary to allow for this jump when swatting. I have also noticed that amateurs, particularly women, swat at flies as though they were driving spikes; this causes a noticeable breeze, and the fly is warned. The way to swat a fly is this: grip the swatter firmly but not tensely, hold it six inches over the quarry, and then swat with a decisive but not vindictive motion. If the fly escapes, do not pursue it with yells and wild swipes of the swatter; wait until it lights again, and swat like a gentleman and a sportsman. With my rubber swatter, I can often stun a fly while it is in the air, but you had better not try this; only an Annie Oakley like myself has the finesse for such refinements.

• MONDAY •

Business called me to Toronto, where I found the lobby of the Royal York thronged with men in handsome blue uniforms which were richly ornamented with gold lace, gold rope and gold insignia; many of them wore impressive medals and ribbons, and I heard one of them address another as “General.” All of them carried swords, the scabbards of which appeared to be composed of gold and ivory, and one of them was accompanied by a lady of dominating appearance who wore a purple cloak of military cut, and a hat with a prodigious ostrich plume in it. I assumed that they must be foreign grandees, perhaps a government-in-exile, until I noticed that fighting men in ordinary khaki and blue did not salute them, but seemed indeed to look upon them with ill-concealed amusement; I saw one airman point them out to his dinner partner with what I can only describe as a contumelious gesture.… I made discreet enquiries, and learned that the gorgeous creatures were attending a convention of a fraternal order—the Ancient and Honourable Order of Poltergeists, I believe. There is a corroboree of some sort at the Royal York every week.

• TUESDAY •

Every day I pass a beverage room in the course of my duties, and at least every second day an habitué of the place pursues me for a hundred yards or so, telling me in a low, compelling voice how badly he needs twenty-five cents. I have given him money several times, chiefly from a fear that he will fall dead at my feet, if I refuse, but I am beginning to be indifferent to his fate. What is more, an uncharitable suspicion dawns in my mind that he uses my money to buy beer. Now if he spends all his daily income, which is my twenty-five cents, on drink, he is obviously an improvident oaf, and the despair of economists, and the next time he appears trembling and muttering at my side I shall tell him so. If he were a true Canadian he would spend five cents of my quarter on food and drink, he would save five cents, and he would pay the other fifteen for Income Tax and the Baby Bonus. That is what I have to do. Why should he live a life of pleasure, spending his whole income on drink, when I have to slave and pinch to keep him and several thousand civil servants in luxury? This is the sort of social injustice which makes communists of white-collar workers like me.

• WEDNESDAY •

When I was born good fairies clustered round my cradle, showering me with wit, beauty, grace, freedom from dandruff, natural piety and other great gifts, but the Wicked Fairy Carabosse (who had not been invited to the party) crept to my side and screamed, “Let him be cursed with Inability To Do Little Jobs Around The House”, and so it has always been. I cannot drive a nail straight, or mend an electric iron, or make a door stop sticking, or change a fuse. I do not glory in my inefficiency; I suffer under it. Whenever anything goes wrong with my household arrangements, I have to get a man in to mend it—no small task in these days—and I know that he despises me as he does the fiddling little job and takes away a dollar of my money. People who are good at odd jobs are blessed above common mortals; I have some trifling skill in swatting flies and shining shoes, but otherwise I am a nuisance in the house. If I were ever shipwrecked on a desert island with several thousand feet of lumber, a complete set of carpenter’s tools, and 100 cases of assorted foods, I should die in a week of exposure and starvation.

• THURSDAY •

Attended a concert in the line of duty, and suffered agonies with my cough. There are coughers at every concert, but none like me; I am to ordinary coughers what the late Chaliapin was to a schoolgirl singing in her mother’s drawing-room; I am a virtuoso cougher, and when I cough at a concert it is like the trumpets of Joshua outside the walls of Jericho. Artists have been known to stop in midsong, and stare into the auditorium in horrified amazement; a circus man I once knew said it put him in mind of an elephant trumpeting. I cannot help it; it is my cross, and I must bear it as best I may. Hardly had the concert begun, until I felt horrid ticklings and heavings in my throat, and I knew at once that I was a goner. I hastily ate a Smith Bros. cough drop, but it was powerless against the rising fury of my cough; I held in by sheer power of will until the first song was over, and then I allowed my cough to drown the generous applause. This went on until the interval, when I was able to get a drink of water. Every song, for me, was a struggle with a cough which raged to escape. I heard the artist telling the head usher to find that dog and put it out, and I trembled in fear. But later in the evening the demon within me relented, and I was able to enjoy the music, though exhausted by my struggle.

• FRIDAY •

Received a telephone call from a friend of mine, who wanted to know who invented the water-closet; he has had one in his house for years, but has only recently become curious about it. The answer is that it was first devised by the Elizabethan nobleman, Sir John Harington, who in 1596 described his invention, which he was certain would mitigate the plague, and what did the world do? It condemned him as a man whose mind dwelt on filth. Thus the very name of this great benefactor of mankind is known to about one person in 5,000, whereas the inventor of the zip-fastener was given an LL.D. by the University of Upsala. What a world!

• SATURDAY •

Undertook to bathe a small child and put it to bed, in the absence of its mother; this is not a fitting pursuit for a man whose temperament is philosophical and whose habits are sedentary. Several times I under-estimated the elusiveness of a small creature covered from head to foot in soapsuds, and almost fell into the tub myself. The child took this for frolicsomeness on my part, and began to throw water on me; I toyed with the idea of stripping, in order to meet this situation on fair terms, but rejected the plan as undignified. When at last I had landed my fish and begun to dry it, the unforeseen problem of ticklishness obtruded itself, and then hair-brushing created a great hullabaloo. When at last it was in bed, and had had all the drinks of water and Kleenex it demanded, I was a nervous and physical wreck.

-XLIV-

• SUNDAY •

To the zoo this afternoon, just to see how the animals liked the cold weather. The bear looked restless and banged his cage resoundingly from time to time; the raccoon and the skunk had retired for the winter; the foxes looked as though the cement floor gave them cold feet. But the ducks were very hearty, and nipped at the toes of my boots in a spirited manner; a duck nipping at one’s boot is a good joke, but a duck nipping at one’s nether regions when one is in a bathing suit is something entirely different. The pheasants were moulting—a process which is chronic with them, though the Ringneck Cock was in his finest plumage and a glorious sight. Two owls had been added to the collection, and were resenting it; I know of no animal which has a capacity for dignified outrage equal to that of an owl.

• MONDAY •

A correspondence school has written to me, inviting me to take a course in writing; this is a type of criticism which I resent. “You do not have to be a genius to become a successful writer,” they say, in what is meant to be a reassuring manner. Then they go on to urge me to look in my own neighbourhood for subjects. “Dig below the surface of your home town,” they say; frankly I am afraid that this method would not win me “a big income and interesting friends,” as they promise, but merely a pack of lawsuits.… People who have taken the course write eagerly, “Last week I hit The Country Gentleman; this week I hit Mademoiselle; next week I hope to hit the American Mother!” Frankly I don’t think this course would suit me; I don’t want to hit any of those people, though I might toss a pie at the American Mother, just for fun.… But I like the promise the people make that they will teach me how to create tense moments, and how to play on the heart-strings; I have never been any good at either of those things. And I particularly like their offer to teach me how to be funny; any school which can make a man funny by correspondence must possess a secret which has been hidden from the rest of mankind for some thousands of generations. It would be nice to be unfailingly, perpetually, remorselessly funny, day in and day out, year in and year out until somebody murdered you, now wouldn’t it?

• TUESDAY •

Walked home this evening in the dusk, and passed a surprising number of couples of High School age conversing in low, tense voices as they leaned over bicycles or huddled under trees. Poets insist that Spring is the time of mating, but personal observation convinces me that the austere, bright nights of late Autumn are equally favourable to romance. The interesting thing about these lovers’ conversations are the pauses. The lad asks some question which (to my ears, at least) has no amorous significance, and the girl then casts down her eyes, fingers her Latin Grammar in an agitated manner, and after a breathless interval (during which I try to keep on walking without getting out of earshot) replies, “Oh, I guess so”, or “Oh, I just as leave”, causing her swain to breathe hard and gulp.… Why doesn’t he throw himself on the ground, saying, “You are my Soul, my Better Self, be mine or I stab myself with this pair of protractors”; then she could reply, “Nay, press me not, I am Another’s.” In that way they could really have some romantic fun and store up things to tell their grandchildren. No style, no breadth, that’s the trouble with the modern High School set.

• WEDNESDAY •

An unseasonable warm spell forces me to reverse my tactics with my furnace; instead of begging the thing to give me a little heat, I am now imploring it to relax its efforts. Perverse as always, it huffs and puffs and frizzles me with its breath.… However, I have got a load of wood, with not more than a fair amount of soft stuff, punk and limbs in it, and I shall conduct Marchbanks’ Annual Wood Bee on Saturday. Hard cider and doughnuts will be served to all helpers.

• THURSDAY •

Was talking to a woman who has just had a baby, and who passed her period of recovery in a public ward in a Great Canadian City. There were nine other women in the room with her, and she said that they talked all the time—mostly about names for babies and the peculiar behaviour of their husbands. When these husbands came visiting one piece of dialogue was invariable:

HUSBAND: “Do you want anything to read?”

WIFE: (patting her bedside table) “No, no; I have MY BOOK.

… My informant was burned up with curiosity to know what these books were which were spoken of in such a portentous manner; she was able to discover that in all nine cases the “book” was a magazine of true love stories, or of confessions. This is an interesting sidelight on Canadian reading habits. Furthermore, she said that she never saw one of her nine companions open her “book” upon any occassion.… My informant read several books during her recovery, to the amazement and ill-concealed indignation of her room-mates. It was their opinion that too much reading was a sign of being stuck-up, and furthermore liable to harm the baby’s eyes—by sympathetic magic, I suppose.

• FRIDAY •

Was in a music store, buying more gramophone records, when a man came in and asked for a ditty called Just a Rose From My Mother’s Grave. He expressed great admiration for this lugubrious piece. I was reminded of an earlier song on a somewhat different theme, entitled We Shall Miss Her Old Gray Hairs, or Let’s Drive A Nail In Dear Old Mother’s Face. This in turn led my thoughts to an even more affecting ballad, called They’re Moving Father’s Grave To Build A Sewer, which I last heard rendered with the most moving pathos and delicacy of expression by a high official of the National Film Board.

• SATURDAY •

This afternoon hove wood into my cellar and piled it; the heaving was a wild, brutal ecstasy, but the piling was a weary penance. It was necessary for me to grab up as much wood as I could hold, and scuttle under the rafters and furnace-pipes in a crouching position, rather as an ape rushes through the forest with a stolen bunch of bananas. After an hour or two of this my back began to hurt, and my philosophy took a violent turn toward pessimism. It was at this time also that my woodpile began to slip and slide, and drop on my feet. After some very delicate engineering I got it to stay in place, and decided not to tempt fate by putting any more on it, so I retired to an upstairs room and settled down with a book and a foaming glass of burdock blood-bitters.… During the night a mouse tramped rather heavily on the cellar floor, and I heard a thunderous roll as my woodpile sank into ruin.

-XLV-

• SUNDAY •

Woke with an aching head and a vile taste in my mouth—the consequence of piling wood yesterday; the pursuit of pleasure always leaves me in splendid condition (a fact which puzzles and irritates the Moral Element among my friends) but hard work gives me the most intolerable hangovers. Obviously Nature is evolving a new type of man, geared for a life of pleasure, and I am the first model.… But on the principle of “a hair of the dog” I went out and heaved and piled the rest of my wood, having reconstructed the woodpile which fell down yesterday. By the time I was finished, I was on the verge of physical and mental breakdown. Though thousands of people indulge themselves in it regularly, and even develop a taste for it, there is no doubt in my mind (and that of scientists whom I employ to prove it) that Work is a dangerous and destructive drug, and should be called by its right name, which is Fatigue.

• MONDAY •

Attended a concert in a collegiate auditorium tonight, and sat in the front row in order to have room for my legs; in the ordinary concert-hall seat (designed by and for dwarfs) I have to sit side-saddle, while numbness seizes first one haunch and then the other. But being in the front row I had a fine view of the empty orchestra pit, and during a rowdy rendition of Chopin’s Scherzo in B Minor a tiny mouse crept from under the piano in the pit and began to dance, lightly, elegantly and charmingly. When the music twiddled, the mouse twiddled: when the music bounced, the mouse bounced; there was no arabesque of sound which the mouse was not able to transmute into an arabesque of movement. When it was all over I applauded the mouse vigorously, assuming that it was a protégé of the Board of Education. I learned later, however, that the concert committee had been put out by the fact that the mouse got in, somehow, without a ticket.… Why are school mice always so fat and sleek? Is it because they have access to unlimited floor-oil?

• TUESDAY •

There is a special grubby joylessness about life these days which oppresses the spirit. As I look out of my window there is not a green leaf or a flowering plant to be seen; dust blows everywhere; a woman passes, and pulling at her arm is a little boy dressed in a snow suit, in which he is hot and fretful; a man with a paunch stalks by, looking as though all his meals in the last fifteen years had soured his stomach; a girl goes by wearing an elaborate hairdo, a pea-jacket and a pair of short slacks, from which her dirty legs emerge; she is pigeon-toed, but she holds her head proudly; an elderly woman in an ill-chosen hat waits for a bus; she breathes through her mouth and stares at the passers-by. Is there any hope in these people? Could immortal souls inhabit such frames without showing some spark through the eyes, or in a smile? November is a month to breed pessimists.

• WEDNESDAY •

Was discussing wart-cures with a physician this evening. He says that in his experience the best one is this: rub the wart with a slice of bacon, then go outdoors on a night when the moon is full, throw the bacon over your left shoulder and then, as the bacon rots, the wart will vanish. “But what if a cat eats the bacon?” I asked; “The wart will vanish that much sooner,” said he.… Naturally this led to talk of magic, and a lady present spoke of an old woman known to her grandmother, whose custom it was, (when her luck was bad) to bind her churn with willow-withes, and beat it with a stick; then whoever it was that was wishing her ill would come to the door and beg forgiveness. This was in Canada, about 1850–60. Our pioneer ancestors had a lot of simple fun that we miss.

• THURSDAY •

Life, for a man of my temperament, is an endless procession of vexing domestic problems. Shall I have my storm-windows put on, or not? At present the weather is warmer than it was most of last May, and it is only by the most rigorous repression of my furnace that I keep my house liveable. But I know that Winter will come upon me like a thief in the night, blowing its raw breath through every chink, ruffling the carpets on the floors and whipping the pictures off the walls. God pity all the poor souls in Wartime Housing on a night like that! And then I shall not be able to get anyone to creep up a ladder in the icy blast, bearing 15 square feet of glass in his arms. Shall I do it now, or shall I wait a little longer? My indecision will be the ruin of me, I know it. But oh, the heat of storm windows in warm weather! I will.… I won’t.… I will.… I WON’T. Come then, Boreas, and be damned! It is better to tarry than to burn.

• FRIDAY •

Waiting for a bus today, I listened to the conversation of two women who were waiting also; they were exchanging symptoms. Such tales of nervous breakdown, bad dreams, uncontrollable crying, pains in the legs, bladder weakness and general debility I have never heard: although they stood side by side they shouted as though they were conversing in a hurricane, and as their symptoms grew worse and worse, their voices grew louder and shriller. They talked so loudly that I had no need of my formidable powers of eavesdropping. To my unskilled eye they looked healthy, though unwholesome and glum.… Most people like to be ill, and ask nothing more than a chance to rehearse their ailments. In some dark corner of their minds (I use the word loosely) there lurks the notion that if they ever admit that they feel quite well the gods will at once punish them with some direful malady.

• SATURDAY •

Rain all day. What can a man do on a rainy day which is also his half-holiday? I am never at a loss for an answer to that question. Immediately after lunch, I went to bed, and bade farewell to the world for a few hours. The telephone rang. “It can’t be anyone of any consequence,” I thought: “every sane man is in bed this afternoon.” After a while the ringing ceased.… Later there was a knock at the door. “Nobody is up to any good this afternoon,” I said to myself; “that is doubtless someone wanting to sell me a ticket on a sanctified raffle, or a dozen repulsive Christmas cards, or a copy of the Christmas War Whoop, or a pillow stuffed with pine needles.—A pox upon them.” The knocker went away.… “If everybody spent one half-day in bed,” I reflected, “there would be no need of a United Nations Organization; world peace would come as a matter of course, the divorce rate would be cut in two, and even grim-visaged labour leaders would become creatures of light and spirit.” At this point Oblivion claimed me.

-XLVI-

• SUNDAY •

Was looking through a book today which had a good deal to say about prayer as a mental exercise. Prayer, it said, was not a formal thing, and could be indulged in anywhere; pray on the bus, while eating your dinner, or while taking a bath, it said; it was particularly scornful of the notion that prayer should be done on the knees; much better to say one’s prayers lying in bed.… Now this may be all right as mental exercise, but it entirely neglects the function of prayer as physical exercise. Most people, if they don’t kneel to pray, never kneel at all, and kneeling is good for you. The Moslems understand the value of prayer as exercise, and several times a day they prostrate themselves with their heads toward Mecca; I once knew a Moslem who said that this kept the most sedentary of his sect in good physical trim. The Chinese, before the revolution, made a great point of the kotow, in which you kneel gracefully and touch your forehead to the ground when in in the presence of your superiors, or in temples; this kept them admirably supple and healthy, and when the revolution put an end to the kotow the Chinese went straight to the bad. The present decline of Christianity may be traced to this habit of praying in bed, which is bad for the Christian liver.

• MONDAY •

A doctor tells me that he has observed a number of cases of poultry diseases among middle-aged women in the last few weeks; apparently the women are regular attendants at Bingo games, where they absent-mindedly consume large quantities of the corn which is used for counters; then they go home and drink several cups of tea, and the trouble begins. Sometimes he says, it is simple distension of the crop, and can be cured by purchasing a set of celluloid Bingo counters, but often the disease has gone too far for anything but severe measures. He mentioned one patient of his (whom he referred to as a White Wyandotte type) whose wattles had turned greyish and whose eyes had filmed over simply from a prolonged surfeit of Bingo corn. Another woman he mentioned (a table Plymouth Rock) showed every symptom of pip, and waddled about his office uttering pitiful squawks and occasionally falling over on her side. Still another was far gone in fowl-convulsions, and he did not think she would last for the Christmas trade.… I tried to cheer him up by pointing out the sturdy character which the Scotch built on a diet of oats; he said that he was afraid that Bingo corn would turn Canada into a nation of sick hens.

• TUESDAY •

The Russians are acclaiming Robbie Burns as a genius—a sort of primeval, pre-Marx Communist. This proves only that the Russians are not reading Burns’ works complete. His dislike of aristocracy pleases them, no doubt, but his hatred of orthodoxy and bureaucracy cannot go down very well. Probably the Russian editions of his works are carefully expurgated, and such verses as The De’il’s Awa Wi’ The Exciseman are omitted. By judicious expurgation I could prepare a Shakespeare which would be an eloquent plea for Communism, and I daresay that I could prepare a cipher which would show that Shakespeare’s plays were written by Joe Stalin.… My advice to the Russians is that they should give thanks that Burns is dead, and not alive in Russia today. He would be a great bother to the commissars of literature and popular thought, before they decided to kill him.

• WEDNESDAY •

Was introduced to an elderly lady today who offered me two fingers to shake; they were cold, damp and blue, like uncooked sausages. Her conduct in this matter did not please me greatly, for I would much have preferred to have no hand at all, rather than half a hand. It was the custom in the last century to give a few fingers—three, two, or in extreme cases, one—to people whom one regarded as social inferiors, or in some way undesirable. I only know one man who still does it, and as he does it to everybody I assume that he has a high regard for himself. The story is told that the late Arthur Balfour once offered a man one finger to shake, and the man vindictively shook it to such a degree that Balfour was unable to write for a week. Moderation in the handshake is highly desirable; neither the blacksmith grip, which crushes the hand into the semblance of hamburger, nor the chilly extension of two or three fingers. I think handshaking is overdone, in any case; why do we not compliment our friends by shaking hands with ourselves, like Chinamen, or boxers who have won a match?

• THURSDAY •

Was talking to a woman today who kept giving out strange squeaks and groans, as though she had mice in her corsage; I soon diagnosed her trouble; her corsets were creaking, and whenever she moved the stresses and strains of her underpinning were audible. This reminded me of one of my earliest business ventures, when I patented and attempted to sell Marchbanks’ Patent Stay Oil, a scented unguent which was rubbed well into the corsets before putting them on. It rendered the stays supple, without weakening their repressive powers. I was unlucky in the time I chose to market my invention; it was just when rubber corsets were coming into fashion, and the heavier corset of canvas, steel, whalebone and leather thongs was falling into disuse. But there are still a few women who need my Stay Oil, and I am thinking of getting one of the big cosmetic houses to try it on the public again.

• FRIDAY •

Was talking to a young woman today who informed me that she had no soul. I think she hoped to shock me by this declaration, but it was old stuff to me. The world is full of bright young things and cynical old things who think they have no souls. They appear to regard the soul as a part of their personalities upon which the Christian Church has established squatters’ rights, and they very properly resent such intrusion. As to defining the soul, they never attempt it, though I gather that they regard it as a sort of vapour floating about the heart—not unlike gas on the stomach. For a belief in the soul, and the deity of which the soul is a reflection, they substitute belief in such chimaeras as Progress, General Education, Single Tax, cold baths, colonic irrigation, free love, women’s rights, vegetarianism, the Century of the Common Man, the infallibility of radio commentators, social security, and their laughable congeners and equivalents. As a result, their souls become anæmic and debilitated, and their faces have the unlit look of vacant houses.

• SATURDAY •

Quite a heavy snowfall today, and I decided that it was time to prune my hedge for the winter; there is no sense in being hasty about these things. Pruned, and got thorns in my hands; then put on a storm door. Exhausted by these labours, retired to bed and read a book which the critics insist is very funny, but which impressed me as a melancholy affair.… One of the great lacks of our time is a body of really comic literature; when I want a good laugh, I am forced to turn to the writings of Dorothy Dix.… Lay at ease, thinking how nice it would be if I were to receive a telegram saying that I had been left a million dollars, free of tax; then reflected that there is really nothing that I want, which I could buy with a million dollars. I should like to travel and see the world, but no millionaire can do so today. Decided that what I really ought to do is to give away the $37.72 which I have in the bank, and declare myself destitute; then governments and benevolent societies would vie with each other to give me money and assure me of “social security.” The day has arrived at last when the poor are going to inherit the earth.

-XLVII-

• SUNDAY •

Impossible to postpone any longer the tidying of some attic closets, so faced the task with a heavy heart. Under the debris of the years discovered an astonishing quantity of old wallpaper. I have never seen an attic yet which did not contain a lot of old wallpaper, and this makes me wonder why it is that a paperhanger doesn’t feel safe unless he has a lot more material than he really needs. I learned how to calculate the amount of paper needed for a room when I was at school: you multiply the square footage of the walls by the cubic contents of the floor and ceiling combined, and double it; you then allow half the total for openings such as windows and doors; then you allow the other half for matching the pattern; then you double the whole thing again to give a margin for error, and then you order the paper. Result: every attic contains enough extra wallpaper to print a complete Sunday edition of the New York Times.

• MONDAY •

Peeped nervously from behind my lace curtains today to see if the Offal Officer would really take away all the assorted junk which I banished from my attic yesterday; he did, and he even wore some of it as he drove down the street.… Christmas draws near, with its desperate challenge to every man to buy presents for people whose taste he does not know, or who have no discernible taste of any kind. I buy a few Christmas cards as a beginning, knowing full well that they will not be enough for my needs. The Christmas spirit has not yet taken possession of me.

• TUESDAY •

In the course of a conversation about drinks this evening, a man told me that I am wrong in supposing that no joy goes into the making of Ontario wines. Vintage time in the Niagara Peninsula, he says, is a season of Bacchic revel and riot; the merry Niagara farmers and their plump, rosy-cheeked wives roll up their blue jeans and tread out the grapes in an elaborate ritual dance, singing this song the while:

Io, Father Bacchus, Io, Io!

And hurrah for the Chairman of the L.C.B.O.!

Merrily we sing

As we dance in a ring,

Banishing our troubles

With gulps of gas and bubbles!

Io, Father Bacchus, Io, Io,

And hurrah for the Chairman of the L.C.B.O.!

When night falls, they all drape exquisite garlands of flowers about the priapic statues of the Chairman of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario which stand in every vineyard, and then depart into the woods in pairs. It is very dangerous to follow them.

• WEDNESDAY •

A year ago today I was in a motor accident—not a large one, but big enough to make me nervous of cars even yet. Without wishing to do so I still press hard on the dashboard of any car I am riding in, mumble warnings to the driver under my breath, and cringe and scrunch whenever another car comes within spitting distance. For peace of mind I should really ride with my back to the engine, and sometimes I do, but on a long drive I get tired of kneeling on the back seat, and besides it gives people in other cars a wrong impression.

• THURSDAY •

To Toronto, the Ontario Babylon, on business. In a restaurant a notice asks me not to whine for more sugar or butter “to spare the staff embarrassment”; later I am in a shop where a sign urges me to show all my parcels at the desk “to avoid possible embarrassment!” People must embarrass awfully easily in Toronto.… Passed hastily through Toyland, and saw children being introduced to Santa Claus. Two or three harrassed men were busy shooing the tots away from S. C. down a ramp; they all wanted to turn around and barge back into the crowd whence they had come, disarranging the queue. This is an instinct deep in the childish heart. What does Omar Khayyam say?—

Myself when young did eagerly frequent

A Santa Claus to Toyland yearly sent—

Then turned, and vainly tried to butt my way

Outward by the same path as in I went.

Saw also a toy train big enough to pull children and a few adults. Would fain have had a ride on it, but I had no child with me, and feared that I might excite remark and even rebuke if I tried to pass myself off as a nursery-school type. The train had an excellent whistle which sent me, just as Sinatra sends the bobby-sockers. Whoo! it went, mellowly and invitingly: Whoo! Whoo!

• FRIDAY •

Toronto is already in the toils of Christmas, and from several windows the hollow Ho Ho! of a mechanical Santa Claus may be heard. Children watch these creatures with hard calculating eyes, wondering if the old man is really crazy, or only pretending to be, like Hamlet.… Everywhere I went Christmas preparations were going on, but they all seemed to be of a secular nature. Gnomes, elves, giants and Disney oddities abounded, and there were a few angels, but even they had been Disneyized, and made cute, rather than spiritual. A Man from Mars would never know that Christmas was a religious festival from what he sees here. Is it the final triumph of Protestantism that it has pushed the sacred origin of Christmas so far into the background that most people are able to ignore it?

• SATURDAY •

Dashed out this morning to get some more Christmas cards; I am not what could be called a greeting-card type, but at Christmas I bow to the general custom. Saw a great many which inspired me with nausea, being depictions of jolly doggies hanging up their stockings, or pretty pussies doing the same thing; several cards were in what is called “the semi-sacred manner”, showing the Holy Family with figures and postures strongly recalling the kewpies who used to appear in the advertisements of a famous tomato soup. St. Nicholas, too, appeared on many cards as a frowsy old drunk in a red ski suit, fingering his bulbous nose. In short, everything possible had been done to rob Christmas of its beauty, dignity and significance. It was not in this spirit that Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, and it is not in this spirit that I, personally, shall celebrate Christmas. I can stand almost anything except vulgar infantilism, and against that I shall war as long as there is breath in my body.

-XLVIII-

• SUNDAY •

My brother Fairchild is my guest today, and as there is always something of an unusual nature going on in Fairchild’s vicinity, I kept a close watch on him, and soon surprised him in the act of shaving himself with a little electric machine which he kept in a leather case. It was, he said, a razor, and not a miniature sheep-shearer, as I thought; held close to the face, it chewed the whiskers off with tiny teeth; he passed it over the rugosities of his countenance with a great air of virtuosity, and I must admit that the little machine seemed to work. I asked him if it did not excite his face too much to have electricity applied to it? Was there no tendency for the skin to loosen and hang in folds? He denied this with more heat than was really necessary, for my question was purely academic. Later I crept off to the bathroom and cut myself with a razor I have used for years; I have a fear of new-fangled contrivances. Fairchild is the daring member of the family.

• MONDAY •

This Christmas shopping leads a man into the most alarming situations. Decided today to get a bottle of toilet water for my Great-Aunt Lettice, and sought out a shop which had a big display of unguents, balms, lotions, electuaries and the like. Asked for a bottle of scent, and a young woman with more curves than the Burma Road brought out two or three, and poured drops from them on her wrist and arm. Then to my horror she invited me to sniff them! I did so, tentatively. She rippled her muscles like a wrestler. “Young woman, have you any idea where this may lead?” I cried, but she smiled in an oblique manner and said that it was impossible to tell anything about perfume if it were not applied to flesh. At that moment my pastor passed her, and muttered something in my ear about the Temptation of St. Anthony; I blushed to such a degree that I scorched a handkerchief in my hip pocket.… At last, after what seemed ages, she sold me a bottle of something at four dollars an ounce, which I fear Aunt Lettice will have to wear in the privacy of her own chamber, for if she ventured into a drawing room with it on she would immediately become the object of embarrassing attentions, and might have to make a run for shelter. I really wanted some lavender water, but this stuff is called Très Ooomph, and is guaranteed to rouse the dead.

• TUESDAY •

Addressed Christmas cards tonight. There was a time when I used to hunt for the most suitable card for everyone on my list. I chose cards covered with lambs and reindeer for children, snow-scenes for friends who were wintering in Florida, High Church cards for friends of a ritualistic tendency, Low Church cards for evangelicals, Thick Church cards for those whose religion impressed me as a bit thick, cards with coaches and jolly drunken Englishmen on them for my jolly drunken American friends, and so forth. It was a lot of work, and I gave it up long ago. Now I buy my cards in large inexpensive bundles, and send them out in whatever order they happen to come.… Like everybody else I am sending cards this year to people who sent me cards last year, but whom I forgot last year, and who will not send me cards this year. This desperate game goes on for decades, and there seems to be no way of stopping it.… On several cards I put messages such as, “Why don’t you write?” or “Am writing soon”, which is a lie. I have no intention of writing them, but in an excess of Christmas spirit I pretend that serious illness, or the press of affairs, is the only thing which keeps me from sending them a long letter every week.

• WEDNESDAY •

Was driving with a motorist today who nearly ran down several pedestrians who persisted in crossing streets against the traffic lights; he thought they did it on purpose, and I really think they were trying to commit suicide; some had a hopeless O-God-let-me-die look on their faces, while others wore the fixed grin of idiocy. It seems to me that when people dearly want to die, motorists should be encouraged to assist them.… This evening read in Nellie McClung’s autobiography that a properly licensed dog has the same right to use the street as a citizen. I am glad that citizens do not exercise their rights as freely as dogs do, however.… Not long ago a clergyman said to me, apropos a scruffy dog he had with him, “Wouldn’t it be a wonderful world if there were nothing but dogs? No wars, no racial discrimination, all friends.” Was so stunned by this idea that I said “Yes, indeed” before I knew what I was about. Hurried home and washed my mouth out with soap.

• THURSDAY •

To the government liquor store today, to lay in a Christmas stock. Wartime shortages turn the celebration of Christmas into a matter of makeshifts. Still no Chinese Rice Wine, which I like to burn on the top of my Christmas pudding, in the real old English style; will have to do the best I can with brandy, but it will not be the same as Fow Mu Chung Guk. Chinese Rice Wine, I understand, is made by stewing a whole duck in a large pot of rice and water; then the duck is thrown away, and lichees are added to the mixture, which is left on the back of the stove until it blackens, and begins to emit low sneering noises and greenish gas. It is then bottled (in old birds’ nests) and buried in a graveyard for a few years until it is ready for export. The vintage years are those in which the ducks are most torpid. There is an old Chinese vintner’s proverb which is roughly translated as:

Don’t use a giddy duck

To make Fow Mu Chung Guk.

I can tell at a single sip whether the duck used in a bottle of this delicious beverage has been sufficiently dormant.

• FRIDAY •

My Chinese laundryman, hearing that I have been unable to get any Rice Wine to burn on my Christmas pudding, turned up in my office today with a flagon of the precious distillment. “O brilliant-hued chrysanthemum of Eastern Ontario,” he said, kotowing deeply, “this utterly contemptible one entreats you to accept his laughably inadequate tribute to your sublime genius; drink, O Marchbanks, and gladden the heart of your wash-worm.” I uncorked the bottle, and the room was filled with the heady bouquet of dragon’s bones. “This ineffectual trifler with the written word is choked by the copiousness of his thanks, O magical rehabilitator of world-weary underpants,” I replied, bowing graciously and pouring out a couple of glasses of the liquor; we drank, ceremoniously, and exchanged a few more polite observations. Before he left I reached into the bottom of my desk, and presented him with a pound of opium which I happened to have; he bit off a quid and chewed it with evident satisfaction as he put on three sweaters, two suits of pyjamas, a buffalo robe and a rain-cape, before leaving. It was what we Sinologues call “A three-coat cold day.”

• SATURDAY •

A few friends in this evening. Wanted to give them mint julep, though this is the wrong season for mint. But the scientific knowledge of a Marchbanks laughs at such trifling difficulties. Prepared the other ingredients, then brought down a bottle of Oil of Peppermint, which I sometimes take for indigestion: on the label it said “Adult dose: 5 to 30 drops”, so I put 30 drops in each glass, never having been one to skimp on hospitality.… Guests looked rather strange, and showed a tendency to suck in air through their teeth. One, standing by the fire, belched suddenly with such force that his toupée fell into the grate and was badly scorched; his wife remarked sourly that at least it helped to kill the smell of humbugs.… I drank my julep to the dregs, just to show them that it could be done. The only trouble with me is, I’m ahead of my time.

-XLIX-

• SUNDAY •

A small girl of my acquaintance sang me a Christmas carol which she had learned in school. It was the familiar one which begins:

Good King Wenceslas looked out

On the Feast of Stephen—

and I expressed my appreciation of her performance warmly. This was a mistake on my part, for she began to cross-examine me about the words. Why was Stephen feasting outside in the snow? If Stephen had enough food for a feast why didn’t he give some of it to the poor man who was gathering winter fuel, instead of leaving it all to King Wenceslas? I tried to explain that a Feast did not really mean a feast, and that Stephen was not really there, but I saw disbelief and scorn rising in her eyes. No wonder children think that all adults are crazy.

• MONDAY •

Woke this morning with a sense of sick shock, realizing that Christmas is near at hand and I have not done any shopping. Worried about this until at last I rushed out and made a tour of the shops, and was depressed to find how much stuff there was for sale which I would not give to a relative, let alone a friend. Decided finally that the hardware merchants had the nicest things, and bought an adze for my little nephew Gobemouche, a spokeshave for my brother Fairchild, a maul for my brother Hickathrift, and three files, a crow, two jemmies, four lock-picks and a dozen hickory axe-helves for other members of the Marchbanks tribe, as well as gift bottles of TNT for their wives. I toyed with the idea of giving them all panes of glass in handy sizes, but recalled the tendency of Christmas family gatherings to get out of hand, and broken glass can be nasty stuff, when one is doing Sir Roger de Coverley in one’s bare feet. Better be on the safe side, and stick to edged tools.

• TUESDAY •

Alack the day! Christmas gifts are not what they were. Was looking through the diary of my uncle, the Rt. Rev. Hengist Marchbanks (who lived to be 96 and was Bishop of Baffinland when he died) and discovered that in December, 1845, when he was a lad of thirteen, he made his own presents. This is what he says: “Made dear Mama a trunk today, for I know that she wants one sorely. Cut down a sturdy oak this morning, and hollowed out the body of it with my adze; hewed the solid block into a charming lady’s travelling trunk. Slew and skinned a Shorthorn bull, which showed symptoms of mumps, and stretched the skin tightly over the wooden casing; it makes a truly handsome covering. Tomorrow I shall line the case with clean copies of The Christian Guardian, and my surprise for Mama will be complete. Am giving Papa the usual jug of corn whisky, which I drained from the bottom of the silo this evening. Tested it to make sure it was good, and fell into a profound swoon. Popped a few prunes into the jug, to give the liquor body.” Those were the days of really thoughtful, personal gifts.

• WEDNESDAY •

Met a small boy today—a sinister child with a stern jaw and a brooding hot eye—who had just mailed his letter to Santa Claus. “I told him what my minimum demands were,” he said, “and I’m giving him till the 25th to come across—or else—” I blinked, and asked him to explain. He continued: “Claus has been in the driver’s seat too long; everybody has always lickspittled to him and made him think he’s a big-shot; well, the time has come for Organization; he thinks we can’t get along without him, but we’ll show him that he can’t get along without us; he expects a year’s good conduct for a few gew-gaws at Christmas; from now on there’ll have to be a Christmas every month, and an eight-hour day for good conduct, with all statutory holidays and two weeks vacation in the summer; Claus has been exploiting us.” He marched off, and as he turned to give me a knowing leer he inadvertently fell down an open manhole. I watched it for a few minutes, but he did not reappear. Walked home slowly, thinking about Fate.

• THURSDAY •

I see that a rich fellow in the U.S.A. has bought a fine tapestry as a Christmas present for his wife. I like tapestries, and have thought of weaving a few myself, in the grand manner, but with modern subjects. For instance, Dr. Brock Chisholm, with his foot on the recumbent body of Santa Claus, holding aloft a volume of The American Journal of Psychiatry, from which streams forth a golden light, would make a very pretty tapestry, suitable for a dentist’s waiting room. Or a large piece depicting the inventor of the fountain pen meeting the inventor of the typewriter, and each of them scowling horribly at the other, would be suitable for a tycoon’s office, as would also a depiction of the inventor of the rubber hotwater bottle, shielding himself from the onslaught of the inventor of the electric pad, while plunging a dagger into the breast of the inventor of the china hotwater bottle (or “stone pig”). Or how would it be if I did a really immense tapestry, showing industrialists and union leaders dancing on the prone form of a Consumer, while in the background Inflation snatched them up to the skies, by the hair? It could be hung in the Union Station at Toronto, to take away that bare look it has.

• FRIDAY •

A man asked me today if I had heard of the theory that the North American Indians are of partial Welsh descent, stemming from a pre-Leif-Erickson Cymric explorer? I have gone farther; I think I have proved the theory to be correct. About two years ago I chanced to meet an Indian in a woodland walk, and I facetiously addressed him thus:

MARCHBANKS: “Dyna gapel y Bedyddwyr, onid e?” (Translation: “Look you, are you not the son of Mrs. Jones the Gas?”)

INDIAN: “Nage, nage; dyna gapel y Methodistiad Calfinaidd.” (Translation: “Indeed to goodness no! I am the love-child of Rev. Hopkin Hopkins.”)

MARCHBANKS: “Ple mae’r Ficerdy?” (Translation: “Pless my soul, whateffer! do you understand me?”)

INDIAN: “Dyna fe; dyna’r Ficer hefyd.” (Translation: “Yes indeed, whateffer.”)

MARCHBANKS: “Dyna deulu’r gof yn cerdded gyda mama modryba chwaer y crydd.” (Translation: “Then let us sit down here and refresh ourselves with elegant conversation.”)

INDIAN: (Speaking Indian for a change) “Golliwogagog, hoganogagog egganoggagog.” (Translation: “I am all agog.”)

In the course of the conversation the Indian told me that his ancestors came to North America, inspired by the example of a Welshman named, I think, Jonel Oowis, who was reverenced as a god by the simple North Americans.

• SATURDAY •

Visited a friend this evening who had procured a bottle of a very special tonic called Noilly Prat; in the interest of temperance, we experimented to see how much of the tonic it was necessary to put with a jigger of gin in order to kill the horrid taste. After several tries we got the measurements exactly right.… Driving home, passed through a small town where Saturday Night was in full swing. Farmers shouted conversation from buggy to buggy; their wives stood in the general store, gossiping and criticizing the goods; girls walked up and down the street, arm in arm, pretending not to notice the young men who leaned on door-posts, haw-hawing and passing remarks. It was all rather idyllic and rural, and reminded me of my far-off youth in Skunk’s Misery, before I was tarnished by the fetid breath of city life. I suppose everybody has these softheaded spells, when they think it would be fun to live in a small town. They pass quickly, of course.

-L-

• SUNDAY •

A man was lecturing me on the benefits of deep breathing this evening. “Fresh air cleanses the bloodstream and keeps the mind alert,” he said, sucking in deep draughts of cigar smoke which undoubtedly polluted his bloodstream and fogged his brain. “When you’ve got pneumonia—gasping for breath—you pay a pretty penny for oxygen out of a tank; but all day, every day, the precious stuff is everywhere around you, begging to be breathed, and do you breathe it?” He puffed in my face, ferociously. “No, you don’t. You’re a shallow breather, a thorax-man, like millions of others. Well, don’t say I didn’t tell you.” I promised that I would never say he didn’t tell me, and felt rather guilty about the whole matter. Walking home, I breathed as deeply as I could for several blocks. It made me dizzy. I am a poor creature unworthy of the fresh air which Providence has lavished upon me.

• MONDAY •

My brother Fairchild has been having rather a difficult time with magic. Hoping to ingratiate himself with his children, he bought them some magic tricks, with which he thought that they might mystify their little friends. Having made this false step, he was soon involved in the appalling task of teaching the children to perform the tricks. Teaching a child to do even the simplest sleight-of-hand is like teaching a hippopotamus to embroider pillow-slips. The result of the whole mad scheme was tears, bad temper, and frustration for Fairchild.… I sympathize with him. Once, in the bleak past, I cherished a desire to be a magician; I would have been quite content if I could have achieved the modest skill of, say, Thurston or Blackstone. I laboured before a mirror with coins, cards, eggs, handkerchiefs and billiard balls for weeks, my arms aching, until one bitter day when I came to my senses and admitted that nothing short of psycho-analysis and blood transfusions could make a conjuror of me. For the same reasons that I cannot carpenter shelves, fix leaky taps or tend a furnace, I was unable to pluck fifty quarters out of the air or pull a rabbit out of a hat.

• TUESDAY •

Passed a bank this evening which was being re-modelled. Workmen were taking down the iron cages in which the tellers used to be kept. If anything marks the decline of belief in private property, it is this. Not so long ago, putting a teller into his cage was a solemn ceremony; the manager locked him in, and there he stayed until the manager let him out; while he was in the cage he spoke in a hushed voice, like a man who had swallowed a bomb, and he handled money with a kind of religious awe. In some English banks he did not even touch the money: he pushed it around with a brass scoop. Whenever he was handed a cheque, he held it up to the light, crackled it at his left ear, and sniffed at it before he cashed it. And when he was let out of the cage he had to strip before the manager, and prove that he had not secreted any doubloons about his person. But the modern teller is a carefree soul, able to run all over the bank if he likes, and ready to hobnob with Tom, Dick and Harry. It is all part of the breakdown of the monetary system.

• WEDNESDAY AND ST. FRISGIG THE FRICATRICE •

Two different manifestations of the same attitude toward women forced themselves on my notice this afternoon. On the street I passed a young couple just as the boy wrenched the girl toward him by the shoulder. “Aw, yuh little nincompoop, yuh!” he said, as he gave her a shake; she replied with a spirited, but uncultured, reflection on his legitimacy. Five minutes later I opened a magazine at a luridly coloured advertisement for perfume. In it another young man, in evening dress, was gazing at the shoulder of his female companion with glowing eyes, like a vegetarian about to bite into an onion; his hands hovered in the air behind her, as though he might suddenly snatch her, just as the boy in the street had snatched. The caption of the picture was “Potent Essence of Desire to Touch”.… I shall never understand life, but I suppose the lesson of this is that if young men do not grab you and call you a little nincompoop, you need a perfume which will force them to do so. The girl in the advertisement was cool, exquisite and beautiful; the girl in the street was tousled, and had been barking her shins on rocking-chairs for weeks, I should judge. But both of them, apparently, were able to rouse men to wild flights of shoulder-madness.

• THURSDAY •

Heard a lady greeting her physician this afternoon.… “Well, doctor,” she said, breezily, “I hope you’ve been keeping well?” He gulped a couple of times and staggered a little, but his presence of mind did not desert him, for he immediately turned the conversation to a less ticklish subject. Of course it is terribly bad form to ask a doctor how he feels; it is almost the same thing as giving him a dig with a surgical scalpel, or telling him that he would not puff so much if he got more exercise. Doctors like to give the impression that they have no fluctuations of health, and are always in the absolute pink of condition. Nevertheless, in spite of the bad manners it would show, I should love to put a doctor on the spot about his health. “Let me see your tongue,” I should like to say; “Oh, dear me, doctor, how did you ever let your tongue get in that frightful condition? Have you been licking the carpet with it? How’s the pulse? Good heavens, it feels like a boogie-woogie bass! Take off all your clothes and lie down on this cold leather couch while I hit you all over with this little hammer. Aha! makes you jump, does it? That’s bad! Let me tickle the soles of your feet. Don’t giggle! This is serious! You’re on the skids, doc; better give up eating, drinking, smoking and anything else you happen to like.” … But this is idle daydreaming.

• FRIDAY •

Did some more odds and ends of Christmas shopping today. Bought fifteen dozen handkerchiefs for female relatives. I don’t know what women do with their handkerchiefs; every year I give away a car-load of them, but I have never known a woman who had a handkerchief on her person at any time when she needed one. Older women always keep their handkerchiefs upstairs so that they can send their younger relatives after them. Young women never have handkerchiefs, and when they cry (which they do very frequently during courtship, and usually for no good reason) they always borrow a handkerchief from the man in the case. When they marry, they appoint their husbands Handkerchief Bearer in Chief for the rest of his life. Sometimes they carry boxes of paper handkerchiefs, when they have colds, but never the cloth variety. And why are women’s handkerchiefs so small? What a woman really needs is a handkerchief as big as a table-cloth, pinned to her bosom with a blanket-pin.

• SATURDAY •

The pest who was nagging me last week about deep-breathing was at me this evening on the subject of water-drinking. “How much water do you drink a day?” he asked, finishing a glass of my beer. “About half a paper cupful,” I replied, knowing that it was not a satisfactory answer. He made a great show of disgust. “Four gallons a day is the minimum—the bare minimum,” he said, when he could speak. “That would be about two pails,” I said mildly; “I don’t think I could drink that much in a day—not if I expected to do anything else, that is.” “It would flush your system,” he persisted; “you’re probably a mass of crystallization inside. Try it tomorrow”.… Later he phoned me. “By the way,” he said, trying to be casual, “I made a slight mistake. Should have said four quarts—not four gallons.” Poor boob! he really means four pints, which is too much, anyway. He is reading a health book, and giving all his acquaintances the benefit. It is one of the mistakes of democracy that it teaches such people to read.

-LI-

• SUNDAY •

Rummaging in some of my personal debris today I found two Christmas cards which I bought in 1939 and forgot to send out. They will be very handy this year if I can find envelopes to fit them.… I was really searching for pen nibs, of which I have a large but unsatisfactory store. In these days when people write with ballbearings and solid ink, and at the bottom of the lake while swimming, and otherwise miraculously, I am an embittered reactionary scraping away with a wooden pen which I dip after every eighth word. I do this because I like a particular sort of flexible nib which cannot be obtained in any fountain pen that I have ever owned or tried. But alas! such nibs are now very hard to find, and in despair I buy every nib I see, hoping to find a substitute for my unobtainable favourites. Consequently I have enough nibs to open a stationery store, none of which really pleases me. I know that I am at anchor in the stream of progress, but I don’t care. It has pleased God to make me a dipper man, and who am I to struggle against the Divine Will? (This is the same line of argument which sustained my late uncle, the Rt. Rev. Hengist Marchbanks, Bishop of Baffinland, in his lifelong struggle against the heathen abomination of blotting-paper; he always sprinkled sand on what he had written, to dry it).

• MONDAY •

I get the strangest stuff in the mail. A letter turned up this morning which began “Dear God—”, but what followed was so confused that I could not make out whether this was a cry from the writer’s heart, or a somewhat elaborate compliment to myself. The same post brought an invitation from the Book-of-the-Month Club, asking me to bestow the benediction of my presence upon its membership. The pamphlet by which this invitation was conveyed was beautifully printed and ornamented with finely reproduced illustrations from Alice In Wonderland. The richness of the printing, however, was not balanced by the literary quality of the matter printed, which was, for a book club, rather poorly expressed. This added to my conviction that Americans are especially susceptible to things which appeal to their eyes, like pictures, rather than things which appeal to their ears, like pieces of prose. In the same way they like fruit which looks delicious, rather than less impressive fruit which really tastes delicious. No book clubs for me today thank you.

• TUESDAY •

Somehow or other the rumour has spread among some children I know that I am a conjuror and they are always teasing me to do magic. My skill is not great, but their standards are very low, and usually I manage to satisfy them. This afternoon a little girl demanded that I should do something miraculous, so I swallowed a fork, and, after feigning indigestion very laughably, I produced it from the sole of my boot. She was impressed, but not completely satisfied. “There’s no blood on it,” said she.… Children have disgustingly literal minds, and hearts of stone.

• WEDNESDAY •

Thought a good deal today about games for a Christmas party. There are plenty of dull games, of course, in which one is given a piece of paper and put off in a corner to write the names of all the rivers one can think of beginning with “G”, and there are embarrassing games in which one is tied back to back with a total stranger of the opposite sex and instructed to get free without breaking the strings. But between boredom and ribald lunacy there are some excellent games; the kind I particularly like are those in which one runs all over the house, hiding in the bathtubs and the coalpile, and jumping at people in the dark; the nearer a game approximates to the plot of a Boris Karloff film, the better I like it. There are also games in which the whole company passes judgment on the intelligence, charm and youth of each player in turn; the delight of such amusements is the narrow path they tread between good humour and malignance; many a beautiful friendship has been ruptured by such shenanigans.

• THURSDAY •

At last it seems that I have a Christmas gift for everybody who has a right to expect one from me, and for a few who have none. I see no signs whatever that anyone has a gift for me, but I am used to that; I have always found it more pleasant to give than to receive. (Advt.).… A man was complaining to me today about the agonies he goes through with Athlete’s Foot; apparently his wife and his daughter suffer from this ailment also. He seemed to think that there was something rather distinguished about having Athlete’s Foot as badly as he had it; he ranked it with such noble maladies as Coronary Thrombosis and Paralysis Agitans. I was not impressed. At one time in my life I mixed a good deal with shepherds and sheep-breeders, and a lot of their sheep suffered from Athlete’s Foot, only they called it foot-rot, pronounced “fut-rot.” The sheep got it by standing around in damp grass, staring at one another. Futrot was treated with a nasty substance called Stockholm Tar; if it brought no relief, the sheep was knocked over the head with a club. I think I shall suggest to my friend that he and his wife and daughter try Stockholm Tar for a few weeks, and if they do not improve, the next step is obvious.

• FRIDAY AND PARCELMAS •

Frantic wrapping of parcels. Through some idiosyncracy of character, I always seem to give people things which are hard to wrap. The adze for my nephew Gobemouche, for instance, keeps bursting through the gold paper which I bought to wrap it, paying an exorbitant fifteen cents a sheet. And Fairchild’s spokeshave keeps spokeshaving its way through thickness after thickness of tissue; it was a mistake to take it out of the burlap in which it came. I refuse to put my gifts under the Christmas tree unwrapped, for part of the pleasure of Christmas is watching the faces of the recipients of one’s gifts as they tear off the concealing folds. Sometimes the objects of my benevolence have been moved to tears; often they are so thunderstruck that they cannot speak. The time I gave my Aunt Lettice the turtle nicely wrapped and in a jeweller’s box, she fainted dead away; if I had just hung the turtle on the tree unwrapped it wouldn’t have been the same thing at all.

• SATURDAY AND CHRISTMAS EVE •

Christmas Eve, and a great deal of scurrying hither and yon, and lending one’s forefinger to people who want to use it in tying knots. Having wrapped my gifts in the attic, I have to carry them down to the foot of the Christmas tree. As I did all my Christmas shopping in a hardware store this is no easy task, and a couple of adzes and some axe-helves slipped out of my arms and tumbled down the stairs with deafening crashes at every step: tried to cover the noise by singing Silent Night, Holy Night lustily.… Later joined my relatives for an impromptu Christmas concert, and was moved to tears when my little nephew Gobemouche recited ’Twas Christmas Eve in The Workhouse; later he offered to recite a piece called Eskimo Nell, but was not allowed to do so for some reason which was not made clear to me.… When the others had gone to bed, crept down to the Christmas tree and read all the tags on the parcels, by the light of a candle-end: very few for me. Heard a thumping in the fireplace and thought for a wild moment that it was Santa Claus, but it was my brother Fairchild, covered with soot; he too had been peeping and had taken refuge up the chimney when he heard me coming. We retired to the kitchen, and ate pieces of cold plum pudding.

-LII-

• SUNDAY AND CHRISTMAS •

Christmas Day: hurry-scurry, hamper-scamper, tohu-bohu and brouhaha. The happy excited voices of children sounding like the laughter of angels at 8 a.m. and sounding rather more like the squeaking of slate pencils or the filing of a tin can at 5 p. m. Conversations conducted in yells, and the incessant rustling of tissue paper. Everyone lays claim to a Dickensian appetite, but shows signs of latter-day squeamishness when faced with a third helping of plum pudding. In some cases, torpor and somnolence have their way; in others, excitement rises to the point of acute Anxiety Neurosis. But it is all very happy, with occasional surface irritations.… Christmas is best for children, and for those who are growing old; in middle life one’s capacity for enjoyment is under the constraint of a thousand responsibilities.

• MONDAY AND POSTMORTEMAS •

Boxing Day. There is a tradition that one will have a happy month in the coming year for every mince pie one eats on this day. In deference to tradition I did what I could, but choked on the first bite of October, and had to lie down with a cold cloth on my brow for some time afterward.… While in this melancholy condition reflected that the joy of Christmas has been rather heavily overlaid by the necessity to cope with immense meals, spend a lot of money giving people things they don’t really want, and subdue children who have been driven to the uttermost pitch of neurasthenia by the excitement and over-indulgence of it all. Perhaps this was merely the result of the gastro-intestinal megrim from which I was recovering.

• TUESDAY •

Was reading the funnies today (just to keep in touch with what the common people are thinking) and was struck by the change which has taken place in what may be called the dynamics of humour. When I first began to read the funnies this subject was simple; the great professor of humorous dynamics was Bud Fisher, the creator of Mutt and Jeff. When Mutt hit Jeff with a spittoon, the noise which came out of Jeff’s head was “Pow”, which was clearly printed at the appropriate spot; if Mutt threw Jeff out of a window, the trajectory of his flight was labelled “Zowie.” Jiggs never made these noises; nothing ever came out of his head except stars and comets. But nowadays this dynamic field is vastly expanded. When a boxer is given a knockout blow his chin emits the word “BLAM” in big letters; when a man is kicked by a horse or a mule his afflicted part says “Zok!” Two of the dynamic sounds greatly used in Barney Google, have vanished from my ken; they were “Plop” (for falling on the floor) and “Wham” for being struck with a broom. There’s no doubt about it, science is on the march in every sphere.

• WEDNESDAY •

This morning was compelled to listen to a long distance call. The telephone company was, as usual, quick and polite in getting my office, but then I became involved in a sparring match with the caller’s secretary, who was determined not to let me speak to him until his full impressiveness and executive splendour had been paraded before me. This involved many repetitions of “Are you ready to speak to Mr. Squealy?” “Just a moment please,” “Are you ready at your end, Mr. Marchbanks?” “Hold the line, please, Mr. Squealy isn’t quite ready yet.” This went on for quite a time and was punctuated with sounds like “Bzzzzt” which I think the secretary caused by blowing a raspberry into the phone. All this nonsense begot a somewhat morose attitude in my mind, and when at last Mr. Squealy burst upon me in all his glory, I was surly with him. Secretaries who seek to build up their bosses by such means merely make their Mr. Squealies detested by all honest men.

• THURSDAY •

A bus driver was telling me today about how he had been robbed of his underwear and a package of pork chops while driving his bus. Unfortunately a traffic snarl cut him off in the middle of the story, and I did not find out whether he was wearing the underwear at the time or whether it was in the parcel. I have seen a conjuror take off his shirt without removing his coat, and I suppose a clever thief might strip a man in the same way. I brooded on this problem for some time, and was reminded of my cousin Manfred Marchbanks, the organist who once shocked the daylights out of a lady pupil by telling her that he was going to show her how to change her combinations without taking her feet off the pedals.… Later was in a hardware store when a man knocked over several dollars worth of window glass; he showed the most admirable self-possession, though I thought he breathed rather more powerfully through his nose than a man would do who was utterly unmoved. When I do something like that I shriek and moan like one of the tragedians with the Habimah Players, and have to have feathers burned under my nose before I am fit for anything.

• FRIDAY •

I see by the papers that Paramount is going to make a film called Coming Through The Rye in which the chief part of Bobby Burns will be played by Bing Crosby. It is to be “a semi-biographical story”, I observe. I can just imagine it. Young Bing Burns is the child of poor but talkative parents who have terrific Scots accents. As Bing grows to manhood (or what passes for it in the movies) he discovers that he has The Gift Of Song. One day, when he is coming through the rye, he meets a body, and thinks that it is a sheep, and nonchalantly kicks it out of the way; it proves to be Highland Mary (Linda Darnell) who has a terrific Brooklyn accent, and who has disguised herself as a sheep in order to keep warm. Bing tells her that his Love is Like A Red, Red Rose. But there is an impediment; she is loved also by a birkie ca’d a lord, wha struts and stares, and a’ that; though thousands tremble at his word he’s but a coof for a’ that. Bing rouses the tenantry against him, and personally brains him with an oat-cake. George Washington, who happens to be visiting Scotland, recognizes that Bing Burns is a true democrat and invites him to America. Bing and Linda marry, and get tight on Scotch whisky; they are na’ fu’, they’re nay tha’ fu’, they’ve but a drappie in their ee’. They are last seen on a boat bound for America, and Bing is singing a special number composed by Eli Feitelbaum, called The Star-Spangled Briar-Bush.

• SATURDAY •

The last day of the year, and I passed part of the evening in melancholy reflection upon the waste of time which has always been my greatest sin. If only I could drive myself to do physical jerks for an hour a day, read improving books for an hour a day, practise on the piano for an hour a day, philosophize and ponder on life for an hour a day, eat less, drink less, sleep less, work harder, eat wholemeal bread, drink eight gallons of water a day, stop smoking, and overcome my ribald disdain for nice simple people who, whatever their short-comings, Mean Well—if only I could do all these things, what a wonderful fellow I should be! This line of thought made me so discontented with myself that I had not the heart to toast the New Year, and midnight found me crouching by a dying fire, glumly eating a bowl of breakfast food and wondering if suicide might not be best for me and for my fellow-men. Roused myself at last to make a final entry in this diary, which I leave with something of the feeling experienced by Gibbon when he completed the Decline and Fall.… To the reader who has read thus far, Adieu.