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Tuesday morning

May 25, 1915

YESTERDAY was simply hellish for me. My work went very well, but all the same, I suffered abominably. I felt so alien and so far away, and everybody cheated me, everybody was ugly and beyond words cruel. I finally got to such a state that I could go nowhere to eat because of the people and I could hardly speak. At half past ten I shut up shop and went to bed, but not to sleep. The three apaches of the cinema, l'Fantôme, Bébé and le faux curé, tried the key of the door all night and tip-toed on the landing. Finally through the shutters there came two chinks of day. Do I sound foolish and cowardly? Oh, but yesterday was simply hell. In the evening (I'd gone out to get a lamp glass. The concierge, with relish, had smashed mine) I sat in a little garden by a laburnum tree, I felt the dark dropping over me and the shadows enfolding me, and I died and came to life “time and time again” as Mrs. C. used to say. I went to buy bread at a funny shop. The woman hadn't got a nose and her mouth had been sewn up and then opened again at the side of her face. She had a wall eye. When she came into the lamp-light with the bread I nearly screamed; but she clapped her poor hand to her head and smiled at me. I cannot forget it.

This morning things are better. It is such a fine day. But I could not stand a month of yesterdays. I'd come home in a coffin.

[Note added by J. Middleton Murry:]

K. M. returned to London from Paris at the end of May. In November we left together for the South of France. I came back to England in December, leaving K. M. in Bandol. At the end of the year I returned to Bandol, and we lived for three months at the Villa Pauline.