I'll Never Be Young Again (31 page)

‘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 tired; 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.

‘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.