And this book of which I am now writing the last pages: I have come down to the Albany, at Hastings, for a week to finish it. For five days I have scarcely spoken to a soul except to the waiter and the girl who brings me my shaving water and prepares my bath for me in the morning. I have shut myself up in my room all day, writing. I have enjoyed the writing of it more, I think, than that of any of my other books. But already, even before it is finished, it has begun to become a parcel of the past. Already I am living in to-morrow. I am thinking of the relief I shall feel on Saturday as I catch the 8.30 for Charing Cross: I am playing football against the Exiles. There will be nothing on my mind as there was last week to mar the enjoyment of the match. I shall not afterwards have to rush away to catch an early train. I shall go with the rest of the team to de Hem’s, and we shall dance our dance in Dansey Yard, and we shall toast our victory in pints of lukewarm ale, and by eleven o’clock we shall feel the world to be a very companionable spot. And on Monday morning I shall go back to the office, and at about eleven Douglas Goldring will drop in with the latest 1917 club scandal, and an enquiry about the sales of his new novel; but I shall be for once indifferent to 1917 club scandal. I shall tell him that since he saw me last I have written 20,000 words, and that for another month I do not propose to put pen to paper, and we shall discuss with what wines we are to heighten our enjoyment on Friday of Polly at the Kingsway. And in the evening, as I walk homewards up the North End Road, I shall notice the first signs of budding leaves, heralds of spring and sunshine, and the long June days. “Cricket is coming,” I shall tell myself. The last Test Match in South Africa is over; only another month of football. It is high time that I was thinking of putting some oil on those old bats of mine. And now that my book is finished, my season’s cricket, I shall remind myself, will be unharassed by financial worries. I shall play three times a week, and on the fourth sit at Lord’s in the top gallery of the pavilion and watch Hearne and Hendren pile another double century on to their list of third-wicket partnerships.
And when summer is over and once again in mid-September I take down from its shelf my red-and-white jersey and my studded boots; when these pages are with the booksellers and the critics, I shall be hard at work on another and, it is to be hoped, less unworthy book. To-day will be as dead then as yesterday is now. I shall be disappointed, naturally, if people do not like my book; but I shall not be broken-hearted. There is time in plenty.
But I also know that forty years from now, when the corner has been reached, when I have definitely turned my back upon the future,—the dull, uninteresting, unromantic future; the future that can bring me no new thing—when I have set out upon my second journey into the unknown, my journey “à la recherche du temps perdu”; when I shall try to recreate the past through an endless series of associations; the smell of wet stone that will recall to me the cloisters and high garden walls of Sherborne; the taste of cocoa that will recapture for me the depression of Sunday nights in the autumn of 1915 and the spring of 1916, when after an early dinner and a cup of cocoa I set out with my father to catch the last train from Euston back to camp; the sound of dance music, of “The Sheik” and “Honolulu Eyes”; the chance glimpses through a carriage window of a square-towered church, of the sudden aspect of sunlight on old stone; when, through the associated memory of taste and sight and smell and sense, I shall recompose that picture of all that my life has been and is not; then I know that I shall take down again from the shelf the books that I have written in the early twenties, and that they will possess for me a significance that they have never had for me before, and they can have for no one else. They will be the spade with which I shall unearth the past.
I do not know what he will be like, the old man who, forty years from now, will read them; what will be left to him of the thing that I now imagine to be myself. I do not know whether he will be sad or happy, married or single, rich or poor, lonely or befriended. I do not know what injuries the years may do to him, or what recompenses bring him. This only I know: with whatever else he parts he will never part with the books that he has written. And as he sits turning these pages at nightfall before his fire, he will find here once again the vigour, the turmoil, and the confidence of twenty-five.
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