Monday, September 29, 1902

Last, throw me on my back i' the seeded thyme,

And wanton, wishing I were born a bird.

I don't know why I'm so peevish, Diary. Nothing is even the slightest bit wrong really - - I've perfected the trick of looking utterly enraptured in prayer meeting while thinking exclusively of secular matters, and have been such an Angel of the Home that even the dread Mrs. Halloran hasn't been able to find fault with me of late. And I danced by the light o' the moon with poor Lurch Mackenzie (who has a Christian name and a mother who loves him, but I won't pretend I care to you, darling)- and even let him knead my lily-white (or freckled) knuckles in the most aggravating manner as I thought out a resolution to my poem. Declined in my best Presbyterian manner his offer of a kiss and a turn about the orchard.

The air is nervous- the wind howling round the side of the house, howling in the trees. The wind is a meteorological phenomenon, wholly incidental to human emotion- and the wind howls just as loudly tonight for stupid May, and snoring Father, and you, Mrs. Halloran, if you were in bed where you belonged. It howls for babies in their cradles who don't yet know what they are or what they've been born to, and it howls for dying people, old and young. At this moment, no doubt, Emily B.S. is lying awake in that awful heap of Ruth Dutton's house, congratulating herself that the wind is singing to her alone. Ugh! I don't know why I thought of her.

Have been cursing myself all day for using "bright" twice in a twelve-line poem. But that isn't it. It's everything. It's the scraps of songs the wind carries around and the way every fat old bird on High Street chirps at me to love my youth, as if they hadn't already forgotten and re-arranged their own to suit them, and the grey blank wall I see when I try to think about the future. Evie, Evie, you should be grateful! You're neither a dowd nor a monster nor cripplingly stupid, and for all you rant against Blake prosperity and Blake propriety, you've never had to muddle through without a family behind you. All that is something. The wind is nothing. The wind is one pocket of air falling on another, just as tomorrow's composition is one line of ink after another- or will be, sometime closer to morning. Time to leave off being childish and finish it.