‘What are you thinking, darling? Tell me what you’re thinking?’ she said, and she would not see that this had no connexion with the business of our being together.
‘Nothing, sweetheart,’ I said, and I wished she would be quiet; I wished she did not have to speak, but would let me be there next to her, feeling her with my hands.
‘When you’re alone in the forest all day, what do you have in your mind, Dick? Do you plan about your books, do you make stories, do you think of me ever?’
‘No, beloved, I just walk around,’ I said, ‘I guess I don’t think of anything much.’
‘Not of me, ever?’
‘When I do think I suppose it’s about you, Hesta.’
‘Tell me,’ she said, holding me close, ‘tell me what you think. Say things to me.’
‘I don’t know what to say, darling.’
‘Say nice things, whisper them to me.’
And it wasn’t any good. The only possible words that would come to me were ‘I love you’, and they had been said so often I could not believe she asked for them again.
I did not see why she wanted this thing of words; that was not the way I felt.
‘Let’s just be us,’ I said, ‘and not bother about all that.’
So she had to surrender then and take herself from my mind, and I knew at once when she was gone because there was an understanding between us at once, a single purpose that did not interfere with my thoughts locked away that I did not remember, and we loved each other simply without contradiction, and we were happy in our own way.
We had three weeks at Barbizon, and then I thought we might finish up with a fortnight at a gay place before going back to Paris, because after all it would be amusing to see people again, and to have the fun of spending money we could not afford. I did not know about places, nor did Hesta, and because we saw they had cheap holiday tickets we went to Dieppe. We stayed in a little hotel in the town.
The market-place was grand, and we used to potter around the stalls buying things we did not want. We bathed twice a day, and Hesta tanned a gorgeous brown, getting rid of her old pallor. None of the women I saw were anything like her. They could not touch her. Seeing her there amongst them gave me a marvellous feeling, because she looked so good, and as we were nearly always in a crowd, either at the Casino or on the beach, I found myself being terribly in love with her, and when we were finally alone back in the hotel I could not leave her alone. It seemed to me I had wasted a lot of time at Barbizon going off walking by myself all day when she was there. I tried to make up for it at Dieppe. We were both crazy. We did not mind. I thought I would just let myself go entirely and be mad before settling down again in the Rue du Cherche-Midi, and writing steadily through the autumn. I would have to be serious then, I would have to work; besides, the money would not last for ever. I should have to work on the book and get it published, and finish the play, too.That would all be when I got back. Meanwhile, forget everything but having nothing to do and being with Hesta. I wanted to make myself sick with loving her, so that afterwards a sort of weariness and satiety could come upon me, and I could go on with my work quite calmly and not be aware that she was there. I thought if I loved her a lot now I would not want to love her so much in the autumn, and then it would be all right for my book.
So beyond the market-place and the beach we did not bother a great deal about Dieppe. We went into the Casino sometimes, and Hesta heard a concert or two, but I remember nothing of all that, only our room at the hotel looking over a square, and there was a theatre opposite, and every morning an old man used to wander beneath our window with a sack over his shoulder, calling for old rags and bottles.
Hesta wore no stockings and no hat. She looked a child. Sometimes I felt rotten about it, I felt she ought not to be so young.
I have a picture of her in my mind sitting cross-legged on the bed without anything on. It was a terribly hot evening, and she had thrown her things off, and was combing her hair. I lay in a chair, looking at her, smoking a cigarette.
‘I wish,’ I said, ‘that you were a prostitute.’
She laughed. ‘Whatever for?’ she said.
‘Because then it wouldn’t matter so much. It wouldn’t matter a damn what one did,’ I said.
‘It doesn’t matter now,’ she said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said; ‘it’s wrong, you’re only nineteen.’
‘Age doesn’t count. I feel older than that, much older; I feel I’ve lived a long time.’
‘If you were a prostitute I could treat you anyhow, and just walk out, not caring.’
‘Do you want to?’ she said.
‘No - that’s why it’s difficult sometimes, being us.’
‘You know,’ she said, ‘you were awfully right about not marrying. It’s more fun like this, isn’t it? I mean we don’t feel settled at all. We can either of us go away if we like.’
I was surprised when she said this. Somehow it was all right for me to talk down marriage, but it looked wrong coming from her.
‘You’ve changed your views,’ I said.
‘Oh well! one gets a different outlook after a while,’ she said.
‘You’re not getting fed up?’
‘Dick, darling, don’t be absurd. I love you more than ever.’
It was funny, all the same.
‘It would be nice if you didn’t have to write and we could travel about all the time,’ she said.
‘What about your music?’
‘It doesn’t mean so much to me now. I don’t know why. Being with you is the only thing that matters. I wish, Dick, we just went from place to place, and it was always as mad as it is now, in Dieppe.’
‘We’d end up insane, sweetheart, a couple of mad things in an asylum.’
‘I’d like being mad that way,’ she said.
‘Only three days more. We’ll be back in Paris this time next week, Hesta. You won’t mind, will you? We’ll have had a good time.’
‘Yes - a lovely time.’
‘Shall we go over to the Casino, darling, and see what’s going on?’
‘No - let’s stay here.’
‘Don’t be lazy, babe; put on your things.’
‘No.’
‘Why, darling?’
‘I don’t want to go out.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘No - Dick, come over here.’
6
I did not mind getting back to Paris after Dieppe. It was as if I had exhausted my capacity for pleasure, I no longer wished to be slack with myself, and indulgent. I had had all that, I had got what I wanted out of those five weeks. I had emptied my brain and only bothered about the rest of me. It had been good, too, giving way, not thinking; it was a physical satisfaction that had brought strength in itself, a new freshness and an inward purification.
Now I knew I could go right ahead. The old dreams of Jake and Norway came to me no more, they did not hover close, ready to absorb my thoughts, as they had done during the heat of the summer. It was as though I had said farewell to them for ever. And Hesta was not an obsession. This was most important of all. No longer an obsession. She would not stand between me and my writing; she had her own place, and her own value. I did not fully understand why these things were. I did not understand why in June I had sat at the table in my room, with a blank page of paper in front of me; and the knowledge of her lying on the bed in the next room with a book had made the action of writing a mental and physical impossibility, while now in September I was able to write easily at almost any hour of the day, and whether or not she lingered in the house was something with which I had no concern, nor could it affect me in any way. She did not possess me, the image of her was not continuously before me as it had been, and the tearing need of her physical presence had loosened its grasp in some dim mysterious fashion. In June I had to keep getting up from my chair and going into the next room to see if she were there, and the very sight of her, the feeling that she was close, was a tremendous disturbance to
me, so that I could not control my will, and the time of writing was as nothing compared to the precious intensity of the time of loving.
Now I could sit in my room unmolested and calm, and the knowledge that she was next door was such a thing of certainty that it ceased to be a means of distraction. Even if she went out I knew she would come back; I knew she would be always there for me when I did want her. So I could put her aside, confident and undisturbed. I was curiously free, I could think now as I liked.
In June she had been so much in my blood that I had lost all liberty of thought and action; I belonged to her, I was possessed soul and body. To free myself of this I had been forced to break down her barriers of individuality and restraint, I had gone away for these five weeks with the idea of ridding myself of her by the very excess of love, by making her enter into submission and so with her own complete surrender she would fasten the chain on herself and give me my liberty. I had succeeded. I loved her more than ever, but I was free. She was no longer dominant, she was subject to me. She was part of the house, part of my life, part of the general order of things. I did not ask her what she thought about it; I accepted her as such. The summer was gone and now I could go on with my writing.
Adventure and love seemed childish immaterial things beside this business of ambition. It was a queer abstract quality; it seized hold of me, and lifted me towards some weird unattainable height, lost and happy, and I did not know what I wanted, but I knew that it was there, waiting for me, like a hidden secret, beautiful and strange. I had to reach out and find it.
I did not know whether I asked for glory and success, whether to achieve something meant words on a printed page, and my own name beneath, the material obvious satisfaction of people speaking to one another about me, of any man in any train reading what I had written, knowing me and I not knowing him, or whether it meant the glow of an inward exultation having no connexion with outward form, a happy privacy that none could share, the baring naked of myself to myself. I did not want to be a forced self-conscious writer, ready with a title and a dedication, but no story to tell, no mood to interpret; I wanted to reach the truth and the meaning of sincerity.
Somewhere dwelt the shadow of my father, the father who had reached his own fulfilment, but would not believe in that of his son. The desire to prove him false was interlinked with my ambition, and I could not sever them. He was not personal to me, he was not a man of flesh and blood who had denied a message of hope and sympathy to the son he had begotten; he was a poet who would not stand for ever on his little peak unrivalled, but one day I would meet him face to face. He would lower himself then, he would bare his head and be ashamed. I should not be deterred if there were many stumbling-blocks in my path: I had a new strength now to break them down. No one would stop me from reaching my mountain. I would be to myself like a leader among men.
I did not speak of these things to Hesta. They were mine alone, they were not for her. She was a woman, and we travelled different ways. I think she understood this much at last, for she had given up trying to enter into my mind. She no longer questioned me. She accepted me as I was, and she kept what I had given her. She was there, part of my background, there when I needed her. I had my writing, and I had her. These were sufficient unto me. So I sat all day in my room in the Rue du Cherche-Midi, and gave myself up to this power of writing, more dangerous than adventure, more satisfying than love.
We had an Indian summer in October; for ten days the sun shone like June. It was like the whisper of a temptation to break from work, and to take Hesta away into the country while it lasted. I had a vision of the forest at Fontainebleau with the leaves turned golden, falling softly upon the ground, and the short green bracken that had surrounded us in early summer grown high and yellow, with curling, feathery fingers.
Just one evening I considered in my mind whether or not I should suggest to her our going. We were coming home after dinner at the Rotonde. She was holding my arm and swinging her cap in her hand. I wondered whether I should say to her: ‘Darling, would you like us to run away for three days, and forget everything during those three days but this last glimpse of summer, and the fun of it, and you and I alone?’ or whether I should say nothing that night, not give way and speak on an impulse, but wait for my feelings in the morning.
I hesitated for a moment, and then I decided to wait until the morning. When I woke up the sky was overcast, and there was a patter of rain against the window. Hesta lay asleep, her head on her arm. If it was raining I did not see there was much point in our going. Perhaps the weather had now broken, anyway. Perhaps, when I came to consider it now, coldly and calmly, in the grey morning, and no longer sitting at the café with the last light casting a finger on the yellow of Hesta’s hair, perhaps it would be a stupid thing to do. Hesta was asleep, I could not discuss it with her. Yes, I supposed it was stupid. I would not think any more about it, and, anyway, I had writing to do.
After that day the weather was fine in intervals, but it never seemed to me to be fine enough to make the excuse for leaving Paris. So we did not go away, and in a week the old warmth was gone, the leaves scattered themselves about the ground, leaving the trees naked and shorn, and a little harsh breath of a wind blew sharply at the corners of the streets.
I forgot about the Indian summer. I had finished all three acts of my play, but the third did not satisfy me entirely, and I was re-writing the opening scenes. With a little care it should be all right. After that I planned to revise my novel and alter the end, also to tighten up the structure of it. I did not think it was quite long enough either.There seemed to be no ending to the output of work I should do. It was exciting, interesting; I could not help but feel myself someone of importance. When I had sufficient material my ambition was to go over to London and find a publisher. I did not think it would be a difficult matter. However, that was all for later.
It occurred to me one day that term must surely have started for Hesta’s professor of music, but she had not said anything to me about it. I remembered this one afternoon when we had finished lunch.
‘By the way,’ I said, ‘what’s happened about your music?’
‘I know,’ she said; ‘it’s rather awful, isn’t it, how lazy I’ve been.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I suppose now your old term will have started and you’ll be wanting to go on with it again.’
‘It seems such ages since I’ve touched a piano,’ she confessed, ‘I believe the Professor will be horrified. To tell you the truth, I’m a little scared.’
‘You can do just as you like about it, can’t you?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said.
The next morning she went off to see the professor and to arrange about another course of lessons.
I had quite forgotten she had been until the evening came, when I had finished work for the day. We had been silent during dinner, I rather full of my thoughts and my play, and she even quieter than usual, passing me things without a word.
I watched her crumbling a piece of bread in her fingers, and suddenly I wished she would be gay and laugh, because I could do with some gaiety now that the day was over. I did not want her to look dull like that; she ought to have been ready to fall in with my mood.
‘Don’t look so bored,’ I said.
She looked up at me and smiled: ‘I’m not bored.’
‘Well, do something to your face, darling.’
‘I’m sorry, I did not know I was being dull. Besides, I thought you were worried over your play.’
‘Oh! no, it’s coming along all right; I’m quite satisfied.’
‘I’m so glad, Dick.’
‘Oh! darling, you don’t know what a kick it gives me, being able to write. I can’t tell you.’
‘I can guess.’
‘No, you can’t.You’ve no idea. It’s grand. I mean there’s something about writing . . . By the way, how did your old lesson go off, I forgot all about it till this minute?’
‘Oh! that.’
‘Yes. Was it fun?’
‘No, not exactly.’
‘Boring, I suppose.’
‘It was funny seeing the Professor again.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He didn’t say much.’
‘Made a scene, I suppose, because you hadn’t practised. Old fool.’
‘Oh! well. . . .’
‘I bet your fingers were a bit stiff at first, but they’ll soon loosen up.’
‘Yes.’
‘When is the concert?’
‘The end of November, I think, or the early part of December.’
‘You’ll have to work.’
‘I’m not going to play in the concert.’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘I’m not good enough.’
‘Who says so? Why, you told me yourself he wanted you to play.’
‘Yes, but that was four months ago. It’s different now.’
‘I don’t see, darling.’
‘I haven’t practised at all, Dick, all the time.The other students worked right through the summer. They’re ahead of me now. It’s quite fair.’
‘Seems a damn shame to me.’
‘No - I understand. It’s my own fault. The Professor told me that with music you’ve got to work and work, never stopping, never letting anything else interfere. That’s the only way to get on. I haven’t bothered, so now I’m just one of his ordinary pupils who don’t matter.’