squalid, tacit recriminations of her parents. And after that, nothingness, more memories changed from a torture to her only solace. Unless he lived still … and found his way back.
He looked up when the horses stopped, and saw that he had come to the end of the row, which from youthful habitude he had followed accurately, without injury to a stalk of corn. He was still the prey of conflicting emotions. He did not know what to do with himself. Action – to fight. He should have liked to catch Bender again to lecture him on his small-spiritedness … though he saw the absurdity of accepting that man as a representative of the outer world – of which a considerable portion would be wondering what had become ofhim, and which had a regard for him sufficiently favourable. He was allowing this matter to disturb him, was acting as though nothing else existed but these few people, and as though there were nothing to be done but to accept their point of view, their limitations, and ineffectiveness. But something must happen. Things could not go on in this way. For weeks he had felt an oppression amounting at times to physical sensation.
There was his writing. But he expected the galley proofs of his latest book in a couple of weeks; and he had permitted the lack of typewriter and reference works to keep him from the beginning of even the first draft of his next one. He had determined upon spending his summer here, and he would do so, though every day put him further at the mercy of the woman who had waited at the completion of every page he had ever written, whose imagined wonder only the most intense compacted inspiration could dim. Even the utterly sapped weariness of mind and body after long creative effort hardly could make his longing tolerable – inspiriting so that he could bend to more effort again.
In a bright, fevered dream, with tangential flying wraiths of hope, so had the years, the best years, gone. While each book became more monumental than the last, he promised himself that the end of each would mark his return, his finally triumphant return, his bearing-off of that girl, never to see this confined place again. She feared, she feared. But for him there was more security even in flight, and any place in the world represented less of a danger to their love than this sheltered countryside in a remote part of Canada.
Well, if ever she consented, there would be no delay, no hesitation. How poignantly had every step been printed in his mind long ago, so that whenever the suggestion came hebusied himself automatically with travellers’ letters of credit, calculations of railway and steamship lines, hotels. … It was still impossible to believe that they could rest there happily, even in the definitive achievement of their love. Even if the old people – died.
No, they’d go away. They would be like children, happily lost babes in the woods of this wondrous world. At last the grip upon him would loosen: he would do none but his best creative work, a flowering of unbelievable peace, of immense happiness. They would look back upon these people, these fields in the way they should be regarded; perhaps at last, by the operation of the irony in life, they would seek out others like them. They would look back with removed pity, even with the quality of affection one has for an old dog dead long years ago. What was memory for but that? Yes, it was possible, he smiled to himself bitterly, that they could yet see something of benignance in even these tortured times….
Perhaps the fault lay all in himself, not – as he had always felt – a strong man. Was it a lack of inclination over some deeper lack? Didn’t he want her badly enough? He had seen enough of men that it profited him nothing to ask himself how others would have acted in his circumstances. He might – but his mind recoiled. He could not connect such impulses with the defined image of Ada Lethen. And since in the world he had had his opportunities and
He looked up when the horses stopped, and saw that he had come to the end of the row, which from youthful habitude he had followed accurately, without injury to a stalk of corn. He was still the prey of conflicting emotions. He did not know what to do with himself. Action – to fight. He should have liked to catch Bender again to lecture him on his small-spiritedness … though he saw the absurdity of accepting that man as a representative of the outer world – of which a considerable portion would be wondering what had become ofhim, and which had a regard for him sufficiently favourable. He was allowing this matter to disturb him, was acting as though nothing else existed but these few people, and as though there were nothing to be done but to accept their point of view, their limitations, and ineffectiveness. But something must happen. Things could not go on in this way. For weeks he had felt an oppression amounting at times to physical sensation.
There was his writing. But he expected the galley proofs of his latest book in a couple of weeks; and he had permitted the lack of typewriter and reference works to keep him from the beginning of even the first draft of his next one. He had determined upon spending his summer here, and he would do so, though every day put him further at the mercy of the woman who had waited at the completion of every page he had ever written, whose imagined wonder only the most intense compacted inspiration could dim. Even the utterly sapped weariness of mind and body after long creative effort hardly could make his longing tolerable – inspiriting so that he could bend to more effort again.
In a bright, fevered dream, with tangential flying wraiths of hope, so had the years, the best years, gone. While each book became more monumental than the last, he promised himself that the end of each would mark his return, his finally triumphant return, his bearing-off of that girl, never to see this confined place again. She feared, she feared. But for him there was more security even in flight, and any place in the world represented less of a danger to their love than this sheltered countryside in a remote part of Canada.
Well, if ever she consented, there would be no delay, no hesitation. How poignantly had every step been printed in his mind long ago, so that whenever the suggestion came hebusied himself automatically with travellers’ letters of credit, calculations of railway and steamship lines, hotels. … It was still impossible to believe that they could rest there happily, even in the definitive achievement of their love. Even if the old people – died.
No, they’d go away. They would be like children, happily lost babes in the woods of this wondrous world. At last the grip upon him would loosen: he would do none but his best creative work, a flowering of unbelievable peace, of immense happiness. They would look back upon these people, these fields in the way they should be regarded; perhaps at last, by the operation of the irony in life, they would seek out others like them. They would look back with removed pity, even with the quality of affection one has for an old dog dead long years ago. What was memory for but that? Yes, it was possible, he smiled to himself bitterly, that they could yet see something of benignance in even these tortured times….
Perhaps the fault lay all in himself, not – as he had always felt – a strong man. Was it a lack of inclination over some deeper lack? Didn’t he want her badly enough? He had seen enough of men that it profited him nothing to ask himself how others would have acted in his circumstances. He might – but his mind recoiled. He could not connect such impulses with the defined image of Ada Lethen. And since in the world he had had his opportunities and
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