Then, holding my head clutched in both hands, and glaring at the machine, I would try to catch up the broken thread of my ideas.
What an unsatisfactory life! Dull as ditchwater for days, then suddenly a change, a bewildering sense of fecundity, a brilliant certainty of expression. Lo! in an hour I had accomplished the work of a week. But such hours were becoming more and more rare with me, and more and more had I recourse to the deadly black coffee. And if the return of my stories hurt my pride, that of my novel was like a savage, stunning blow. I ground my teeth and (carefully observing that there was no fire in the grate) I hurled it dramatically to the flames. Then Anastasia reverently picked it up, tenderly arranged it, and prepared it for another sally.
“This will be the last time,” I would swear. “You can send it one time more; then—to hell with it.”
And I would laugh bitterly as I thought of its far different fate if only I would sign it with the name I had a right to sign it with. What a difference a mere name made! Was it then that my work was only selling on account of my name? Was it then that in itself it had no merit? Was I really a poor, incompetent devil who had succeeded by a fluke? “I must win,” I cried in the emptiness of the garret. “My pride, my self-respect demand it. If I fail I swear I’ll never write again.”
There were times when I longed to go out and work with pick and shovel. Distressed with doubt I would gaze down at the dancing waters of the Seine and long to be one of those men steering the barges, a creature of healthy appetites with no thought beyond work, food and sleep. Oh, to get away on that merry, frolicsome water, somewhere far from this Paris, somewhere where trees were fluttering and fresh breezes blowing.
Ah! that was the grey Christmas. Everything the same as last—the booths, the toy-vendors, the holly and the mistletoe, the homeward-hurrying messengers of Santa Claus—everything the same, yet oh, how different! Where now was the singing of the heart, the thrilling to life’s glory? Did I dream it all? Or was I dreaming now? As I toiled, toiled within myself, how like a dream was all that happened without! Yes, all of the last year seemed so unreal that if I had awakened in America and had found this Paris and all it had meant an elaborate creation of the magician Sleep, I would not have been greatly surprised. It has always been like that with me, the inner life real, the outer a dream.
I walked the crowded Boulevards again, but with no Little Thing by my side. Ah! here was the very café where we sat a while and heard a woman sing a faded ballad. Poor Little Thing! She was not on my arm now. And, come to think of it, she too used to sing in those days, sing all the time. But not any more, never a single note.
At that moment she was watching by the bedside of the Môme, she who herself needed care and watching. She had been the good, good wife, yet I had never cared for her as I ought. I was always like that, longing for the things I had not, careless of what I had. Perhaps even if the child had lived I would have transferred my affections elsewhere. But I couldn’t bear to think of that. No, my love for the child would have been an ideal that nothing could dim.
But if Christmas was grey, New Year’s Day was black. Anastasia came back with bad news from the sick room. The Môme was gradually growing weaker. Helstern had brought her a golden-brown Teddy bear and had held it out to her, but she had looked at it with the heart-breaking indifference of one who had no more need to take an interest in such things. Her manner had that aloofness, that strange, wise calmness that makes the faces of dying children so much older, so much loftier than the faces of their elders. It is the pitying regard of those who are on the brink of freedom for us whom they leave in the prison of the flesh.
“Little Thing,” I said one day, gazing grimly at the tobacco tin that acted as our treasury, “what are we to do? We’ve only one franc seventy-five left us, and the rent is due to-morrow.”