The Collector

 C. It was a teacher I had. When I was a kid. He showed me how. He collected. Didn't know much. Still set the old way. (_Something to do with the angle of the wings. The modern way is to have them at right angles_.) And my uncle. He was interested in nature. He always helped.

 M. He sounds nice.

 C. People interested in nature always are nice. You take what we call the Bug Section. That's the Entomological Section of the Natural History Society back home. They treat you for what you are. Don't look down their noses at you. None of that.

 M. They're not always nice. (_But he didn't get it_.)

 C. You get the snob ones. But they're mostly like I say. A nicer class of people than what you . . . what I meet . . . met in the ordinary way.

 M. Didn't your friends despise you? Didn't they think it was sissy?

 C. I didn't have any friends. They were just people I worked with. (After a bit he said, they had their silly jokes.)

 M. Such as?

 C. Just silly jokes.

 I didn't go on. I have an irresistible desire sometimes to get to the bottom of him, to drag things he won't talk about out of him. But it's bad. It sounds as if I care about him and his miserable, wet, unwithit life.

 When you use words. The gaps. The way Caliban sits, a certain bowed-and-upright posture -- why? Embarrassment? To spring at me if I run for it? I can draw it. I can draw his face and his expressions, but words are all so used, they've been used about so many other things and people. I write "he smiled." What does that mean? No more than a kindergarten poster painting of a turnip with a moon-mouth smile. Yet if I draw the smile . . .

 Words are so crude, so terribly primitive compared to drawing, painting, sculpture. "I sat on my bed and he sat by the door and we talked and I tried to persuade him to use his money to educate himself and he said he would but I didn't feel convinced." Like a messy daub.

 Like trying to draw with a broken lead.

 All this is my own thinking.

 I need to see G.P. He'd tell me the names of ten books where it's all said much better.

 How I hate ignorance! Caliban's ignorance, my ignorance, the world's ignorance! Oh, I could learn and learn and learn and learn. I could cry, I want to learn so much.

 Gagged and bound.

 I'll put this to bed where it lives under the mattress. Then I'll pray to God for learning.

    _October 22nd_

 A fortnight today. I have marked the days on the side of the screen, like Robinson Crusoe.

 I feel depressed. Sleepless. I must, must, must escape.

 I'm getting so pale. I feel ill, weak, all the time.

 This terrible silence.

 He's so without mercy. So incomprehensible. What does he want? What is to happen?

 He must see I'm getting ill.

 I told him this evening that I must have some daylight. I made him look at me and see how pale I am.

 Tomorrow, tomorrow. He never says no outright.

 Today I've been thinking he could keep me here forever. It wouldn't be very long, because I'd die. It's absurd, it's diabolical -- but there is no way of escape. I've been trying to find loose stones again. I could dig a tunnel round the door. I could dig a tunnel right out. But it would have to be at least twenty feet long. All the earth. Being trapped inside it. I could never do it. I'd rather die. So it must be a tunnel round the door. But to do that I must have time. I must be sure he is away for at least six hours. Three for the tunnel, two to break through the outer door. I feel it is my best chance, I mustn't waste it, spoil it through lack of preparation.

 I can't sleep.

 I must do something.

 I'm going to write about the first time I met G.P.

 Caroline said, oh, this is Miranda. My niece. And went on telling him odiously about me (one Saturday morning shopping in the Village) and I didn't know where to look, al-though I'd been wanting to meet him. She'd talked about him before.

 At once I liked the way he treated her, coolly, not trying to hide he was bored. Not giving way before her, like everyone else. She talked about him all the way home. I knew she was shocked by him, although she wouldn't admit it. The two broken marriages and then the obvious fact that he didn't think much of her. So that I wanted to defend him from the beginning.

 Then meeting him walking on the Heath. Having wanted to meet him again, and being ashamed again.

 The way he walked. Very self-contained, not loosely. Such a nice old pilot-coat. He said hardly anything, I knew he really didn't want to be with us (with Caroline) but he'd caught us up; he can't have spotted from behind who we were, he was obviously going the same way. And perhaps (I'm being vain) it was something that happened when Caroline was going on in her silly woman-of-advanced-ideas way -- just a look between us. I knew he was irritated and he knew I was ashamed. So he went round Kenwood with us and Caroline showed off.

 Until she said in front of the Rembrandt, don't you think he got the teeniest bit bored halfway through -- I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel. You know? And she gave him her stupid listen-to-me laugh.