"We can see how we feel. She only asked us for eleven. We can easily dress and go, it we want to."
So it was settled.
As Claude had not yet begun to work he took a long and solitary walk in the afternoon. He made his way to Battersea Park, and spent nearly two hours there. That day he felt as if a crisis, perhaps small but very definite, had arisen in his life. For some five months now he had been inactive. He had lost the long habit of work. He had allowed his life to be disorganized. No longer had he a grip on himself and on life. From to-morrow he must get that grip again. In the isolation of the studio he would surely be able to get it. Yet he felt very doubtful. He did not know what he wanted to do. He seemed to have drifted very far away from the days when his talent, or his genius, spoke with no uncertain voice, dictated to him what he must do. In those days he was seldom in doubt. He did not have to search. There was no vagueness in his life. The Bible, that inexhaustible mine of great literature, prompted him to music. But, then, he was living in comparative solitude. Quiet days stretched before him, empty evenings. He could give himself up to what was within him. Even now he could have quiet days. He had recently passed not a few with the French Revolution. But the evenings of course were not, could not be, empty. He often went out with Charmian. He was beginning to know something of the society in which she had always lived. There were many pleasant, some charming, people in it. He found a certain enjoyment in the little dinners, the theater parties, even in the few receptions he had been to. But he was obliged to acknowledge to himself that, when in this society, he disliked the fact that he was an unknown man. This society did not give him the incentive to do anything great. On the other hand it made him dislike being—or was it only seeming?—small. Charmian's attitude, too, had often rendered him secretly uneasy when they were among people together. He had been conscious of a lurking dissatisfaction in her, a scarcely repressed impatience. He did not know exactly what was the matter. But he felt the alert tension of the woman who is not satisfied with her position in a society. It had reacted upon him. He had felt as if he were closely connected with it, though he had not quite understood how.
All this now rose up, seemed to spread out before his mind as he walked in Battersea Park. And he said to himself, "It can't go on. I simply must get to work on something. I must get a grip on myself and my life again." He remembered the heat of his soul after he had heard Jacques Sennier's opera, the passion almost to do something great that had glowed in him, the longing for fame. Then he had said to himself: "My life shall feed my art. I'll live, and by living I'll achieve." Out of that heat no rare flower had arisen. He had come out into the world. He had married Charmian, had travelled in Italy. And that was all.
That day he was angry with himself, was sick of his idle life. But he did not feel within him the strong certainty that he would be able to take his life in hand and transform it, which drives doubt and sorrow out of a man. He kept on saying, "I must!" But he did not say, "I shall!"
The fact was that the mainspring was missing from the watch. Claude was living as if he loved, but he was not loving.
At half-past seven he passed up the handsome steps and under the arch which led to his studio.
The caretaker with gouty hands met him. This man had been a soldier, and still had a soldier's eyes, and a way of presenting himself, rather sternly and watchfully, to those arriving in "my building," as he called the house full of studios, which was military. But gout, and it is to be feared drink, had long ago made him physically flaccid, and mentally rather sulky and vague. He looked a wreck, and as if he guessed that he was a wreck. An artist on the first floor had labelled him, "The derelict looking for tips to the offing."
"The lady's here, sir," he observed, on seeing Claude.
"Is she?"