“If you like it. I shall love it, the rest, the good air. Just one week.”
“And let’s take the Môme with us. Frosine will let her go. It will be such a treat for her. Perhaps, too, Helstern will spare a few days and join us.”
“Ah, it will all be so nice.”
So next day I bundled up Tom, Dick and Harry, and under the name of Silenus Starset, I sent it off to the publishers of my other novels.
“I’ve been thinking, Little Thing,” I said, “that when we come back we’d better give up the apartment and take a room. We can save over twenty francs a month like that. It won’t be for long. When the novel’s accepted, there will be an end of our troubles.”
“Just as you like it. I’ve been very happy.”
Helstern promised to meet us in the forest, so that afternoon with the Môme and a hundred francs we took the train to Barbizon. If we had not both been avid for it, that holiday would have been worth while only to see the rapture of the Môme. It was her first sight of the real country, and she was delirious with delight. Anastasia had a busy time answering her questions, trying to check her excitement, gently restraining her jerking arms and legs. Her eyes shone, her tongue rattled, her head pivoted eagerly, and many on the train watched her with amusement.
As we rolled through the country of Millet, the westering sun slanted across the level fields, catching the edges of the furrows, and launching long shadows across the orchards. We took rooms in a cottage in Barbizon. From the sun-baked street a step, and we were in the thick of the forest, drowned in leafy twilight and pine-scented solitude. And with every turn, under that canopy of laughing leaves, the way grew wilder and more luring. The molten sunshine dripped through branches, flooding with gold the ferny hollows, dappling with amber the russet pathway. Down, through the cool green aisles it led in twilights of translucent green, mid pillering oak and yielding carpets of fine-powdered cones. And ever the rocks grew more grotesque, taking the shapes of griffins and primordial beasts, all mottled with that splendid moss of crimson, green, and gold. Then it grew on one that wood nymphs were about, that fawns were peeping from the lightning-splintered oaks, and that the spell of the forest was folding one around.
On the second day Helstern joined us. He was gloomily enthusiastic, pointing out to me beauties of form and colour I would have idly passed. He made me really feel ashamed of my crassness. What a gifted, acute chap! But, oh, how atrabilious!
“For Heaven’s sake, old man,” I said one day, “don’t be so pessimistic.”