‘Sure of what?’
‘Sure of life, love, you - I don’t know. Listen, do you really want to get married?’
‘Not if you don’t want to.’
‘Don’t you see it would be awful?’
‘Perhaps . . .’
‘You do see?’
‘I expect you’re right, Dick.’
‘Besides, there’s no need. We don’t have to worry over other people. You’re independent and so am I. That guardian doesn’t mean a thing, does he?’
‘No.’
‘It’s not as if you were poor.’
‘No.’
‘What made you think of it?’
‘Just an idea. We won’t say anything about it again, Dick.’
‘Darling, it’s wonderful in a way, just to think you thought of it - I mean, as if you cared about me a bit - but it would be awful, wouldn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘The thing is, you must leave the pension and come and live with me here.’
‘There wouldn’t be room.’
‘Sure - I’ll get the room next door. It’s empty. I asked about it the other day. It’ll be all right. It doesn’t matter what you do here, anyway. Tell you what. We’ll sleep in one room and use this as a sitting-room.’
‘What about my piano?’ she said.
‘Oh! Lord. Listen, have you got to go on with your music after this term?’
‘I can’t give it up, Dick.’
‘Couldn’t you give it up for a bit?’
‘I don’t want to . . . P’raps I could go and practise somewhere; there must be places.’
‘We might buy a piano if it comes to that,’ I said.
‘No, it would disturb your writing.’
‘Well, I don’t know.’
‘What can we do?’
‘It’s up to you, darling. I want you to come and live with me more than anything in the world, but if there’s going to be a scene about your music . . .’ I shrugged my shoulders.
‘I might give it up for a little while.’
‘Honestly, darling, I don’t see that it would do you any harm,’ I said.
‘It will be so hot, too, later on, won’t it?’
‘Terribly hot.’
‘And, anyway, term ends in a few weeks. Perhaps if I don’t practise through the summer the rest might help my fingers.’
‘I’m sure it would, sweetheart.’
‘I’d like to have worked up for the concert next term, though. The Professor is giving a concert, Dick; it’s very important, famous people go, and he only picks out his best pupils to play. It sounds conceited, but - he said something about me.’
‘Well, you can always see, can’t you, later?’ I said, rather bored.
‘Yes - I suppose so. . . .’
‘And you’ll leave the blasted pension and come here, won’t you?’
‘Yes, Dick.’
‘We’ll have the most perfectly marvellous time, darling. It won’t seem true at first, when you don’t go back at nights.’
‘It will be nice. . . .’
‘You can do whatever you like all the time; we might go away a bit in August, we might go to Fontainebleau and stay.’
‘Could we go to the sea?’ she said.
‘Oh no - not the sea. I hate the sea.’
‘The mountains?’
‘Mountains are bloody. . . . No darling, we’ll go somewhere, never mind now.’
‘I’m going to look after you, Dick.’
‘Sweetheart - I don’t need looking after.’
‘Yes, you do.’
‘Darling. . . .’
‘You need looking after more than anyone, and I’ve wanted to for so long, Dick. I’m going to do so much for you.’
‘Are you?’ I said.
‘Yes, as if I were years older than you, and you were dependent on me. I shall love it. All day - getting sausages for you, anything.’
‘Sweetheart. . . .’
‘Running out and buying you Gruyère cheese. Mending things - I can’t mend at all. You don’t mind, do you?’
‘No.’
‘When I think about it I have a pain here, in my heart, as though I can’t breathe, because it’s too much - too much.’
‘Oh! Hesta, beloved.’
‘Dick - I do wish I could have a baby.’
‘A baby? Good Lord! whatever for?’
‘I don’t know. Sometimes I think I’ll die unless I have a baby.’
‘Hesta, darling, you’re crazy! I can’t imagine anything more of a cope. Think of it screaming about the place.’
‘Yes.’
‘Gosh! you make me laugh more than anyone. You - and a baby. What a mad idea. It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s a joke, isn’t it?’
‘Yes . . . it’s a joke.’ She turned away.
‘I guessed you couldn’t be serious. Listen, when are you going to leave the pension. Soon, very soon?’
‘I’ll try.’
‘This week?’
‘No.’
‘Next week?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘I can’t wait to have you here, Hesta.’
‘It won’t be long.’
‘You’ll get fed up with me, sweet.’
‘Why?’
‘I shan’t ever leave you alone.’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘You’re not going yet, are you?’
‘What’s the time?’
‘We’ve nearly an hour, beloved.’
‘Shall we go to the Dôme?’
‘No, Hesta.’
‘We can’t go on staying here. . . .’
‘Yes, darling. Darling, come here. You’re going to stay. I want you to stay.’
She came and lay down beside me, and put her arms round me, and we were together.
And I said later: ‘This is our thing, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Nobody else, ever?’
‘No, never.’
‘We’ll always go on being happy?’
‘Yes, always.’
Hesta’s term finished at the end of June, and she came to live with me in the Rue du Cherche-Midi. She told the people at the pension that relations had come over from England and taken a flat in Paris, and they wanted her to be with them. To her vague guardian she wrote that she was sharing a room with a girl who had left the pension and was studying music, too. She said that it was quieter in the new place, and it would improve her French. Nobody made any attempt to find out the truth. It did not seem to matter at all what she did.There were no worries of that kind. I was afraid that Hesta would be lost without her piano at first, but she said it was all right, and I forgot to ask if she missed it after a while. She said there was fun in buying things to make the two rooms attractive. She loved the Rue du Cherche-Midi; she used to wander up and down in it in the mornings, while I sat in my room trying to write, and she would come back very excited with an old chair under her arms, or a little cupboard, or a quaint picture dragged from the depths of one of the dusty little shops.
‘It’s nice, isn’t it?’ she said, and I smiled. ‘Yes, that’s fun,’ and went on with my writing. I had left the book for a while and had started a play. I had written the first act. I was very pleased with it; it seemed such an achievement to have written the first act of a play. I was uncertain about the length, though; I was not sure how long an act should last. It did not take any time to read through. Perhaps that was only because I knew it so well, and the words flipped by, scarcely read, known from memory. I finished the act one evening, flushed and proud, and we went out to celebrate.
We had dinner, and then drove in a taxi round the Bois. We had drinks at the Grande Cascade. It was good, leaning back in a chair, looking at Hesta, lovely in a blue frock, and knowing we loved each other and lived together in a couple of rooms in Montparnasse, and we were both young, but we knew a lot, and I had just written the first act of a play.
I read it to her the nex
t day, and she said it was wonderful. I was not sure if I could go by her, though.
‘You mustn’t say that just because you love me,’ I said; ‘you must tell me what you really think, without any prejudice. I shan’t mind.’
‘Honestly I like it,’ she said; ‘I shouldn’t tell you if I didn’t. Of course, one thing strikes me - it’s lovely to listen to, but you know what people are about action in a play - nothing seems to happen very much, does it?’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said; ‘there’s action the whole time. It keeps going from one thing to another, it all comes in the dialogue.’
‘Yes,’ said Hesta, ‘but people like to see things too, they don’t just want to be told what’s going on. And that man - I think his speeches are just a little too long. Nobody in real life could go on like that without getting out of breath. A good deal of what he says doesn’t seem to have much to do with the story.’
‘Hang it, darling, all those lines are pretty nearly epigrams, though I say so myself. They’re supposed to give polish; haven’t you ever read Wilde?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, then?’
‘But, Dick, Wilde’s lines were very short and to the point; this man goes on and on.’
‘He’s a great thinker; that’s his character.’
‘I see.’
‘And, anyway, you have to have talk in a play. Dialogue is the main thing. I couldn’t write the sort of stuff that’s full of pistol-shots, and murders, and rot.’
‘No.’
‘There’ll be more action in the second act, of course; the first is more like a prologue.’
‘I see.’
‘You don’t like it?’
‘Yes, I do, really I do. I think you’re terribly clever.’
‘No, you don’t, you think it’s rotten.’
‘Oh! Dick, how can you say that?’
‘I know.’
‘Honestly, it’s wonderful; I promise you it is. I don’t know how you do it at all.’
‘Oh! well. . . .’
‘Promise me, Dick, you don’t think I don’t like it?’
‘Well, you didn’t sound very keen.’
‘I love it, I love it. You do believe me, don’t you?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Come over here and let me kiss you. You look all grumpy with your hair ruffled, like a little boy.’
‘You’re laughing at me.’
‘I’m not. It’s only when you look like that I have to smile, I love you so.’
‘I expect I’m a dud, anyway.’
‘No, my angel, you’re the most marvellous writer that’s ever been.’
‘That’s a bloody lie.’
‘Don’t be cross, sweetheart. Really, it’s a lovely, lovely play.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yes.’
I went and knelt with my head in her lap. Being with her was better than any blasted writing. She bent down and touched the back of my neck with her lips.
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘You must go and work, Dick.’
‘I don’t want to work any more.’
In July the heat began to be terrific. The rooms were as stifling and as unbearable now as they had been icy in winter. There did not seem to be any air at all. We dragged the mattress before the window and tried to sleep on the floor. Hesta damped a sheet in water and hung it in front of the window. We tried fanning each other in turns, but this was so ridiculous that we burst out laughing in the middle, and then got hotter than ever because Hesta would be looking lovely and I could not leave her alone. The days were terrible. I tried to write with a bandage of cold water tied round my head, and the pen slipped from my fingers, slippery with sweat; ideas were stubborn, my mind was clogged and greasy. Workmen were doing something to the building opposite; they had erected scaffolding, and they started knocking and hammering about six in the morning and went on all day. They had long iron planks they kept smashing down on each other, and bolts that had to be driven in, and then one of the fellows had a barrow full of stones he emptied every few minutes, the sound of all this mingled with the scrape of a spade. It was inferno.
Hesta kept the shutter close, to keep out the noise and the heat, and then it was dark. She went about with nothing on but a thin dressing-gown. The workmen whistled and called out to her when they caught a glimpse of her. The heat seemed to tire her even more than it did me, although she had nothing to do. She looked very white, and she was thinner, too. She used to lie down most of the time on the bed and read. I supposed that all this wasn’t doing her much good. The heat did not help my second act either. Hesta would look up from her book. ‘How is it?’ she said, ‘getting tired?’ And I would answer irritably because it was not going well, and I had scarcely written five lines, and I wondered why she had to ask me at all. I began to kick at sitting there day after day with nothing to show for it, my mind hazy and woollen like a blanket, my body weary for no reason, flabby for want of exercise and air, and the thought would come to me that last year I had been riding a horse in the mountains of Norway with Jake.
And a queer, almost irresistible longing would steal upon me to chuck everything, to chuck writing and Paris and Hesta and to get away alone again on a ship with the wind in my face. The feel of a deck, and the smell of the sea, and the voices of men only in my ears, and then coming to some other port I did not know, with new faces and new words, a shadow by a street corner, and leading from a city there would be trees waving on a hill-side, and a path across the mountains.
‘What is it, Dick?’ said Hesta, and ‘Nothing, darling,’ I answered, but I went on staring out of the window biting the end of my pen, with a dream drifting farther away from me, disappearing like a little white cloud in the sky.
‘You look dreary, sweetheart, and sad,’ said Hesta.
‘Oh! I’m all right, it’s the heat,’ I said.
Somewhere, though, there was a ship leaving a harbour, a grey barque towed by a tug, and when she was clear of the land the sails were shaken out upon the yards, filling slowly with the wind, and a man looked down from a tremendous height upon the deck below, the breeze in his hair, his hands blistered by the ropes, and he saw the coast slip away from him like a thin wisp of land, smudged and dim, while beneath him the green sea curled away from the bows of the ship, and he was alone and free.
Somewhere the tall trees shivered below the mountains, and the sun set behind a purple ridge, casting a pink fingerprint upon the unbroken snow; the falls crashed down into the valleys, and there wasn’t any sun, there wasn’t any heat, only the still pure air and the white light.
‘Perhaps,’ said Hesta, ‘it would do you good if we went to Barbizon. We could stay in one of those little hotels.’ Her voice brought me back again, and I saw the village of Barbizon, the one street with the artists’ houses on either side, the rail-line for the train, the lumbering char-à-bancs arriving every lunch-time with their crowd of tourists.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we might as well go to Barbizon as anywhere.’
‘You seemed to like it so much two months ago.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
So we went to Barbizon in the first week in August.
During the next few weeks I seemed to let loose all the energy that had been stored within me for so long. I used to walk for miles. I should think I explored practically every inch of the forest. Hesta got tired easily, she came with me at first, but she found it difficult to keep up with my pace. I was always a long way ahead, and then I would have to pause and wait for her, she a little figure in the distance scrambling through the bracken and over the stones, tearing her dress and scratching her bare legs.
‘Could I sit for a bit, do you think?’ she would say, panting, brushing her hair behind her ears. ‘I would love a tiny rest just for a moment, but you go on, you don’t bother about me,’ she said.
I would feel a swine dragging her after me on these expeditions, but she would keep protesting she was not really tir
ed; it was only that she was not used to the pace.
Then, after the first few times, she said that she knew she was spoiling the day for me, and would I go off alone, because she would be perfectly happy in the garden of the hotel at Barbizon; it was restful and quiet, she had plenty of books, and, anyway, she had a piano in a queer room that nobody ever used.
I said I hated that arrangement, but I soon found it was all right, and I could now go terrific distances without having the thought of her lagging behind to worry me, and it was nice to imagine her sitting quietly in the garden at Barbizon or mooning over her piano, and it was fun getting back to her in the evenings. Not seeing so much of her during the day seemed to make me appreciate her all the more when we were together. I had a new thing suddenly about being alone. It was as if I had made a discovery. It was strange, it had never appealed to me before. Last year, back in the mountains, I could not have borne a moment of it alone, I would have been lost and helpless without Jake. There used to be a tremendous excitement in the idea of a crowd of people, even people I did not know. Voices, laughter, the suggestion of life going on at a terrific pace, things happening continuously, sound, movement, and men and women. Now I felt as if I had not gathered the intensity of those days in the mountains with Jake, as though all the time I had observed the outward beauty of what I saw, and had not seen the inner peace and loveliness that were there. I had always been in a state of excitement to get on to the next place. If I was there now I would not be excited any more, I would linger a long while in the same shadow of a tree, I would not bother about a little path winding away over a hill. And there would be a pleasure in this very sensation of complete solitude.
It was strange, feeling all this. I supposed it was the reaction after the heat and the turmoil of Paris; it was the result of brain-fag, of worrying over the play. I was glad now that we had come to Barbizon.
The shelter of the clustering trees seemed a protection, the movement of the leaves in the forest sounded like a whisper, a message of sympathy and understanding. So I would walk, and walk, and then throw myself down upon the grass under the trees, and lie there, quite still, losing myself in a sleep that had no dreams. After that, after the weird and inexplicable exultation of being alone, it was good to get back to Hesta. It was good to feel her arms round me, and her cheek against my cheek. This was the best part of having her, the physical tangibility of her, feeling her, holding her, sinking into some great depth of silence that seemed the embodiment of peace and security. I wanted her to let me stay like that, not to be roused, not to go through the fever and unrest, the antagonism and the crisis of love, but for all my mental protestation, my first mute disinclination, the very holding of her would prove this impossible, the touch of her hands against my back made resistance a sorry thing, and the old slumbering longings stirred within me, so that I had to give way, I had to deny passivity and be her lover. And I would be glad to give way, I would not want the peace and the security any more. Even this she spoilt, though, by not accepting the understanding born of physical contact; she would search beyond this, she would try to wander into my mind, to share that with me, to be part of this as well.