The Collector

I’m trying to explain why I’m breaking with my principles (about never committing violence). It is still my principle, but I see you have to break principles sometimes to survive. It’s no good trusting vaguely in your luck, in Providence or God’s being kind to you. You have to act and fight for yourself.

The sky is absolutely empty. Beautifully pure and empty.

As if the architects and builders would live in all the houses they built! Or could live in them all. It’s obvious, it stares you in the face. There must be a God and he can’t know anything about us.

(Same evening.) I’ve been very mean with him all day. Several times he’s tried to speak, but I’ve shut him up. Did I want him to bring me anything? I said, I want nothing. I am your prisoner. If you give me food I shall eat it to keep alive. Our relations from now on are strictly those of a prisoner and a warder. Now please leave me alone.

Luckily I’ve plenty to read. He’ll go on bringing me cigarettes (if he doesn’t I shan’t ask him for them) and food. That’s all I want of him.

He’s not human; he’s an empty space disguised as a human.

November 20th

I’m making him wish he never set eyes on me. He brought in some baked beans for lunch. I was reading on the bed. He stood for a moment and then started to go out. I jumped to the table, picked up the plate and hurled it at him. I don’t like baked beans, he knows it, I suppose he’d been lazy. I wasn’t in a temper, I just pretended. He stood there with the filthy little bits of orange sauce on his so-clean clothes and looking sheepish. I don’t want any lunch, I snapped at him. And turned my back.

I ate chocolates all the afternoon. He didn’t reappear until supper-time. There was caviare and smoked salmon and cold chicken (he buys them ready-cooked somewhere)—all things he knows I like—and a dozen other things he knows I like, the cu

Down here my moods change so rapidly. All determination to do one thing one hour; all for another the next.

It’s no use. I’m not a hater by nature. It’s as if somewhere in me a certain amount of good-will and kindness is manufactured every day; and it must come out. If I bottle it up, then it bursts out.

I wasn’t nice to him, I don’t want to be nice to him, I shan’t be nice to him. But it was a struggle not to be ordinary to him. (I mean little things like “that was a nice meal.”) As it was I said nothing. When he said, “Will that be all” (like a butler), I said, “Yes, you can go now,” and turned my back. He would have got a shock if he could have seen my face. It was smiling, and when he shut the door, I was laughing. I couldn’t help it again. Hysteria.

Something I have been doing a lot these last days. Staring at myself in the mirror. Sometimes I don’t seem real to myself, it suddenly seems that it isn’t my reflection only a foot or two away. I have to look aside. I look all over my face, at my eyes, I try to see what my eyes say. What I am. Why I’m here.

It’s because I’m so lonely. I have to look at an intelligent face. Anyone who has been locked away like this would understand. You become very real to yourself in a strange way. As you never were before. So much of you is given to ordinary people, suppressed, in ordinary life. I watch my face and I watch it move as if it is someone else’s. I stare myself out.

I sit with myself.

Sometimes it’s like a sort of spell, and I have to put my tongue out and wrinkle my nose to break it.

I sit down here in the absolute silence with my reflection, in a sort of state of mystery.

In a trance.

November 21st

It’s the middle of the night. I can’t sleep.

I hate myself.

I nearly became a murderess tonight.

I shall never be the same again.

It is difficult to write. My hands are bound. I’ve got the gag off.

It all began at lunch. I realized that I was having to struggle not to be nice to him. Because I felt I must talk to someone. Even him. At least he is a human being. When he went away after lunch, I wanted to call him back to talk. What I felt was quite different from what I decided I should feel two days ago. So I made a new decision. I could never hit him with anything down here. I’ve watched him so much with that in mind. And he never turns his back to me. Besides, there’s no weapon. So I thought, I’ve got to get upstairs and find something, some means. I had several ideas.

Otherwise I was afraid I would fall into the old trap of pitying him.

So I was a bit nicer at supper-time and said I needed a bath (which I did). He went away, came back, we went up. And there, it seemed a sign, specially left for me, was a small axe. It was on the kitchen window-sill, which is next to the door. He must have been chopping wood outside and forgotten to hide it. My always being down here.

We passed indoors too quickly for me to do anything then.

But I lay in the bath and thought. I decided it must be done. I had to catch up the axe and hit him with the blunt end, knock him out. I hadn’t the least idea where on the head was the best place to hit or how hard it had to be.

Then I asked to go straight back. As we went out through the kitchen door, I dropped my talcum powder and things and stood to one side, towards the window-sill, as if I was looking to see where they’d gone. He did just what I wanted and bent forward to pick them up. I wasn’t nervous, I picked the axe up very neatly, I didn’t scrape the blade and it was the blunt end. But then… it was like waking up out of a bad dream. I had to hit him and I couldn’t but I had to.

Then he began to straighten up (all this happened in a flash, really) and I did hit him. But he was turning and I didn’t hit straight. Or hard enough. I mean, I lashed out in a panic at the last moment. He fell sideways, but I knew he wasn’t knocked out, he still kept hold of me, I suddenly felt I had to kill him or he would kill me. I hit him again, but he had his arm up, at the same time he kicked out and knocked me off my feet.

It was too horrible. Panting, straining, like animals. Then suddenly I knew it was—I don’t know, undignified. It sounds absurd, but that was it. Like a statue lying on its side. Like a fat woman trying to get up off the grass.

We got up, he pushed me roughly towards the door, keeping a tight hold of me. But that was all. I had a fu

I thought someone may have heard, even though I couldn’t call out. But it was windy. Wet and cold. No one would have been out.

I’ve been lying on the bed. I soon stopped crying. I’ve been lying for hours in the dark and thinking.