So Lorrimer and Rougette went off to Brittany, and Helstern and Frosine to Normandy, and it seemed very lonely without them all. Yet the days passed serenely enough in our little apartment in that quiet by-street. I was becoming more and more absorbed in The Great Quietus which already was beginning to show signs of unruliness. My Pegasus, harnessed to imagination, is hard to keep in hand, and I perceived that, soon it would take the bit in its teeth. Anastasia was deeply interested in some tapestry she was trying to imitate from a design in the Cluny Museum. Sometimes for hours as we both worked you would not hear a sound in the tiny room.
Then when we were tired of toiling we would go out on, to me, the pleasantest of all the boulevards, Montparnasse. We would walk down as far as the Invalides, and, returning, sit in front of the Dome or the Rotando Café and sip Dubonnets while we watched the passing throng. We mixed with the groups of artists and students that thronged the rue de la Grand Chaumiere with its gleaming signs of Croquis schools, where for half a franc one may sketch for three hours some nude damsel with a wrist watch and very dirty feet. Or we spent a tranquil evening in a Cinema, halfway down the Boulevard Raspail, whose cherry-coloured lights saves the people on the apartments across the way a considerable sum yearly in gas bills.
Days of simple joys! What a world of difference a few extra francs make. Economy still, but self-respecting economy, not sordid striving to make ends meet. Anastasia would not waste anything. The remains of the gigot for dinner appeared as a ragoût at lunch. The morning milk left over must serve as the evening soup. Often I groaned in spirit, and suggested a little more recklessness. But no! I must not forget we were poor. We must cut our coat according to our cloth.
It was useless to try and change her. She was of that race of born house-wives who have made France the rich nation it is to-day. Early in the morning see their kimono-clad arms protruded from their windows to shake the energetic duster; a little later see them seated, trim and smiling at the cash-desks in their husband’s shops. Centuries of prudence are in their veins; industry is to them a religion, and the instinct of thrift is almost tyrannical. I know one of them who insisted on her daughter marrying an Englishman because she had sent her to a school in Brighton for a year, and did not want to see the money wasted.
So, recognising the genius of the race, I submitted meekly to Anastasia’s sense of economy. Her greatest delight was to spend the afternoon in the great Magasins that lie behind the Opera. She would spend three hours there, walking them from end to end, turning over enormous quantities of stuff which she would throw aside in the contemptuous way of the born shopper, swooping hawk-like, pressing intrepidly through crowds that appalled me, breathing air that gave me a headache, and in the end returning with six sous of riband, declaring that she had had a glorious day.
Often I wonder how a woman who is tired if she walks a mile in the open air can walk ten in a close, heated department store without fatigue. As I walk in the street Anastasia lags hopelessly in the rear, but the moment we enter the Louvre or the Bon Marché there is a mighty change. The enthusiasm of the bargain stalker gleams in her eyes; she becomes alert, a creature of fierce and predatory activity. It is I who am helpless now, I who try in vain to keep up, as in some marvellous way she threads in and out that packed mob of sister bargain-stalkers. She is still fresh when I am ready to drop with exhaustion, and she knows the Galerie and the Printemps as well as I know my pocket. Her only weakness is for special bargains. How often has she bought fancy boxes of note-paper and envelopes, just because they were too cheap to resist. I have enough rose and cream stationery to last me the balance of my life. I believe she buys them for the sake of the box.
As the days went on I found myself becoming more and more in love with the lotus life of Bohemia. I began to dread making an engagement; it weighed on me like a burden. I wanted to be free, free to do what I liked every moment of my time. An engagement was a constraint. The chances were that when the time came I did not feel in a sociable mood. Yet I would have to take part in conversation that did not interest me; I would have to adapt my thoughts to the thoughts of others. So Society became to me a form of spiritual tyranny, a state where I could not be myself, but had to play the complacent ape among people who were often uncongenial.
The fact of the matter was, I was overworking myself, living again that strange intense life of the maker of books, heedless of the outside world, and more and more vividly intent on the glowing world of my dreams. When I felt the force flag within me I would stimulate myself anew with draughts of strong black coffee. More and more was I the martyr to my moods, a prey to strange enthusiasms, strange depressions.
For hours I would sit tense over my typewriter, all nerves and desire; now attacking it in a frenzy of whirling phrases, now wrestling with the god of scribes for a few feeble fumbling words. Words—how I loved them! What a glory it was to twist and torture them, to marshall and command them, to work them like jewels into the gleaming fabric of a story!
As I walked the streets I had moments of wonderful exaltation; moments when my brain would be full of strange gleams and shadows. I would know the joy that is theirs who feel for a moment the inner spirit of things. I would have the reeling sense of intoxication as the Right Word shot into my consciousness. As I walked, the ground beneath my feet would seem billowy, the world around strangely, deliciously unreal, and the people would take on a new and marvellous aspect. So light I felt, that I imagined my feet must have some prehensible quality preventing me flying upward.