“It is all unreal—I have lost touch. I can’t grasp anything. There’s a space,—‘infranchissable,’ between me and it. At times I feel that the only reality is the past, the remote past. My childhood is real to me, nothing much else. I remember my home in America, now this minute sitting in your room, more vividly than the house I left half an hour ago. Pleasure is a narcotic—I drug myself with it, but I don’t really understand joy—I understand sorrow. Joy is a perfume that evaporates—suffering is a poison that remains.”
Clémentine broke in abruptly.
“Ma chère amie—take my advice, I know what you need—take a lover.”
I burst out laughing, but she eyed me gravely.
“You laugh, but I know what I am saying. Your life is abnormal, don't go against nature.” She rolled over on an elbow and laid a hand on my knee. “You must love—it will wash away all your sick fancies. You’ll see. Any one you’ve a liking for will do; surely you like some one? Don’t be romantic, be practical. Face facts. Take things as they are, and you will find beauty, mystery, rapture and sanity. Beyond the little prosaic door of compromise you will find the world of dreams. Believe me, materialism is the only road to happy illusion, and to remain sane, we must have illusions.”
Well, that was her point of view, and she may have been right. I never found out. I didn’t take her advice. Perhaps had I done so, I would be in Paris now content with the illusion she promised me. Who knows?
That sort of thing is the solution of most lives. A growing lassitude, a growing fear, the feeling that one has missed life, that it will soon be too late, and at last we give in and take in the place of what we wanted, what we can get.
I couldn’t. There was no one about who in the slightest degree resembled a lover—my lover. And I was sick of the subject of love. For years and years and years it had been served up to me, for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner. Every theatre, every music hall, every novel one opened, every comic paper was full of it. Travestied, caricatured, perverted or idealized, but always the same old thing—sex—sex—sex in all its ramifications—always monotonously the same; it bored me to extinction.
Philibert, fastening on this woman then that one, all my friends falling in and out of love, like ducks round a muddy pond; it put me in a rage with the world.
The War came—and with it the end of a world.