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How long can things go on like this? We wander hither and thither, and have no abiding place, as if we were fugitives condemned to be eternally on the move. And we feign enjoyment of this perpetual unsettlement. Jeanne has long ago seen through the pitiable farce, but she continues to play her part loyally out of gratitude for the small kindness I have shown her. We get on quite well together. Jeanne reads in my face when it is best to speak, and when to be silent.
She is happiest on shore with terra firma beneath her feet, while I like best the gliding days and nights on board ship; the sky above, the sea beneath me, my brain vacant, and all my senses lulled to sleep. It reminds me of the early days on my solitary island, when every trifling incident was an affair of huge importance. The flight of a seagull, the top of a mast above the horizon—a ship sailing by in the night. We spend the day on our deck chairs, half dozing over a book, or conversing in a company voice; but at night we throw ulsters over our nightgowns and pace the deck, our natures expanding like flowers which only shed their perfume after dark.
I have become very fond of Jeanne. Her poor, withered heart, too early developed, too soon faded, awakes a certain gentle compassion within me. All my opinions are accepted by her eagerly as golden rules for the ordering of life. If only I could forget! existence might be bearable. But I cannot forget. The glance which showed me the corpse of his love follows me continually everywhere. The humiliation in that glance! I don’t love him, and I don’t hate him. I am getting too lukewarm to hate. But contempt rankles—Jeanne is careful to say nothing that can hurt me, and yet sometimes she hurts me by being too tactfully silent! I don’t want to be pitied, so we while away hours over our toilette.
How long can it go on?
Athens.
Here it is as nice as anywhere else. I struggle bravely to let myself be enchanted with Greece’s past, but in reality I care as little about it as I care for the potshares on the Keramaikos.
We are attending Professor Dörpfeld’s lectures on “The Acropolis,” and I am more interested in the way the man says things than in concentrating my mind on what he says. He has made himself so thoroughly familiar with the plastic beauty of the world, that finally the invisible words that fall from his lips seem to have become plastic, too. I take no interest in why the pillars are thickest in the middle. It is the olive groves, and the lights and shadows flitting over Athens, that charm and engross me.
Jeanne takes it all in like a gaping-mouthed schoolgirl; she studies the history of art in the hotel. I have given her leave to go on an excavating expedition, but without me. I strongly object to riding through snow up to my waist, sleeping in tents on the bare ground, and living on mutton and canned goods. My laziness is growing.