Such a serene confidence upon her part distressed me cruelly, for the moment in which I heard her say, “We shall keep you,” I understood, for the first time in my life, what a firm hold on my mind the project of going away had taken—of going even farther than my brother, of going everywhere upon the face of the earth.
A sea-faring life terrified me, and I relished the idea of it as little as ever. To a little being like me, so greatly attached to my home, bound to it by a thousand sweet ties, the very thought of it made my heart bleed. And besides, how could I break the news of such a decision to my parents, how give them so much pain and thus flagrantly outrage their wishes! But to renounce all my plans, always to remain in the same place, to be upon this earth, and to see nothing of it—what a squalid, disenchanting future! What was the use to live, what the good of growing up for that?
And in that empty parlor with its disordered chairs, one even overturned, and while I was still under the dark spell of our sad farewells, there beside my mother, leaning against her with eyes turned away and with soul overwhelmed with sorrow, I suddenly remembered the old log-book which I had read at sunset last spring at Limoise. The short sentences written down upon the old paper with yellow ink came slowly back to me one after the other with a charm as lulling and perfidious as that exercised by a magic incantation:
“Fair weather . . . beautiful sea . . . light breeze from the south-east . . . Shoals of dolphins . . . passing to larboard.”
And with a shudder of almost religious awe, with pantheistic ecstasy, my inward eye saw all about me the sad and vast blue splendor of the South Pacific Ocean.
A great calm, tinged with melancholy, fell upon us after my brother's departure, and to me the days were monotonous in the extreme.
They had always thought of sending me to the Polytechnic school, but it had not been decided upon irrevocably. The wish to become a sailor, which had obtruded itself upon me almost against my will, charmed and terrified me in an almost equal degree; I lacked the courage necessary to settle such a grave matter with myself, and I always hesitated to speak of it. The upshot was that I decided to reflect over it until my next vacation, and thus by my irresolution and delay I secured to myself a few more months of careless childhood.
I still led as solitary a life as ever; it was very difficult for me to change the bent that my mind had taken in spite of my mental distress and in spite of my latent desire to roam far and wide over the earth. More than ever I stayed in the house and busied myself painting stage scenery, and playing Chopin and Beethoven; to all appearances I was tranquil and deeply absorbed in my dreams, and I became ever more and more attached to my home, to its every nook and corner, even to the stones in its walls. It is true that now and again I took a horseback ride, but I always went with a groom and never with children of my own age—I still had no young playmates.
My second year at college was much less painful than my first; it passed more quickly, and moreover I had formed an attachment for two of my classmates, my elders by a year or two, the only ones who had not the preceding year treated me disdainfully. The thin ice once broken, there had sprung up between us an ardent and sentimental friendship; we even called each other by our baptismal names, something that was contrary to school etiquette. Since we never saw each other except in the schoolroom, we were obliged to communicate in mysterious whispers under the teacher's eye, our relations, consequently, were inalterably courteous and did not resemble the ordinary friendship between boys. I loved them with all my heart; I would have allowed myself to be cut into bits for them; and, in all sincerity, I imagined that this affection would endure throughout my life.
My excessive exclusiveness caused me to treat the others in the class with great indifference and haughtiness; still a certain superficial self, necessary for social purposes, had already begun to take shallow root, and I knew better now how to remain on good terms with them, and at the same time to keep my true self hidden from them.