“‘Would you break my heart, Louise?’ I said. ‘You know I love you.’
“‘No, Julien,’ she answered very softly, ‘but I do not want you to break your own.’
“‘What do you mean, Louise?’
“But she would not say immediately, and when the time came for us to go back to the cottage, she kissed me nervously on the cheek and whispered that she might be enough for me now, but not later on; that she was only a silly girl. Of course I loved her all the more, and thinking of her, could not work much during the day at the tea trade, but wrote books at night feverishly in order to immortalise my love. All that summer we walked among the flowers, and one day I asked her to marry me. She shook her head, and her eyes were wet and sorrowful.
“‘Not yet,’ she whispered.
“‘I don’t want to marry you now,’ I cried, the impetuous, eager fool that I was, ‘I only want to know if you love me enough to marry me some day. I want to feel that I possess you.’
“She laughed a little shaky laugh, and I took her close to kiss her; but she drew back slightly, and immediately I felt that I wasn’t wanted, and to cover my humiliation I spoke coldly and brutally. Fool that I was!” he cried bitterly.
The drone of a tramcar passing towards Catford along the newly-made high road a mile below the wood rose in pitch as it went faster with its first burden of artisans and factory hands. The stranger brooded, thinking of that time before the field had been built upon. And yet he was still a youth, alone with me in the early hours of the winter morning, standing in the long grass at the eastern edge of the wood. Almost immediately he went on: his voice became wild with yearning.
“Spring came again, with the larks battling over the Seven Fields and the wind anemones rising like wan-white stars above the dead leaves. I fretted with brooding why she withheld herself. I was intensely poetical and equally egoistical. The great artist rises above egoism, the little one is killed by it, and becomes embittered—egoism narrows the view and ruins happiness. But I could not help it—I was held in chains by the tyranny of my own immature thoughts. Ah, God, if I had only known!”
His thin hands covered the pale face, his shoulders shook, and once again the bean-sticks were a smudge.