She slept that night with the resolve beneath her pillow to be up and
out before breakfast, but her weariness after long travelling and the
February darkness of the early morning kept her sleeping till eight
o'clock. Awakening and remembering where she was, she jumped up and
looked out of the window. She saw the beginnings of the forest
hardly a field's distance from their little garden of firs. The
fresh air brushed her cheek and throat. Oh, she must be out--out to
examine France by daylight. So after quick dressing and a hurried
breakfast, she put on a warm coat and hastened through the garden
gate.
The road on to which their little avenue ran was called, as she
observed after walking a little distance in the direction from which
they had come last night, the Rue du Château. All the French history
and French literature she had ever read seemed touched to life by the
three words. The château, her father had told her, had been
inhabited by the Duc d'Orléans, Madame de Genlis, Queen Hortense and
the Duc de Bourbon; and she imagined these people walking down the
cobbles where she was walking. Madame de Genlis, as a writer of a
hundred books and a famous figure in a stirring age, interested her
most. She surely was Daphne's spiritual ancestor.
But not only these romantic names of the past thrilled her; the words
over the shops, _épicier, charcuterie, estaminet_, and the
advertisements of _apéritifs_ were exotic and quickening. At the
Place de la Forge the Rue du Château ran into a wider thoroughfare
called the Rue de Paris. Could any name be more suggestive? Could
anything be more typical than the tiny statue of the Virgin and Child
in a little niche at the corner house, looking down on the road to
Paris? In the middle of the Place was a large fountain, from whose
centre rose a painted metal statue of a worker with his scythe,
stripped to the waist and drinking from a gourd as he paused in his
labour. Big-hipped women with shawls about their shoulders and their
heads _en cheveux_ were filling their buckets there. Little girls
passed, carrying loaves as long as children. Boys with socks and
bare calves, wearing little capes and porters' caps, walked over the
cobbles to school. And the French language in the treble voices of
children first came alive to Daphne.
She turned to her right towards a plastery church, and on its walls
saw the words, _Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité_; and the whole
Revolution with a crowd of ghosts hovered about her consciousness.
She walked on till she came to a dusty square, and from here she
decided to climb through the side streets to the forest again. As
she approached its skied arras of trees, a horn sounded from a café
in its fringe, and awoke with its notes Henry IV and Marguerite de
Valois and the whole pageant of Dumas.
But a few minutes more and she was in the forest, walking on a rutty
and mossed road between untidy trees. On her right she saw traces of
a decayed and tumbled wall overrushed by the tangled boscage.
Farther, and she came to a ruined gateway with tumbled brick pillars
on either side. Within was nothing but the confusion of trees and
the interwoven riot of underbrush. One could hardly trace what had
been the stately carriage-way. Still affixed to a tree was the
weather-worn notice of some haughty castellan, "_Propriété Privée.
Défense d'entrer. Pièges à feu._" She strolled on, trying to follow
the line of tumbled wall, and thinking of that gate and the words,
"Forbidden to enter"; and suddenly she saw, as she looked over it,
woodcutters stacking faggots, and hatless, aproned women gathering
twigs.
Though impressed by the futility of ambition, she felt the very
melancholy an urge to write. "Broken gates of ruined châteaux," she
murmured to herself. "Broken gates...." Tinkling bells disturbed
her dreaming, and round a curve in the trees came a bareheaded girl
with a flock of white goats.
That afternoon she took a pencil and some scribbling paper, and
walked in the winter sunshine round and round the narrow house,
wondering what to write about. She had bad moments when she felt
that in all her life there was no emotion on which she could draw,
and that her invention, when put to the test, was completely sterile.
Still, it was pleasant to moon about the garden thus, striving to see
in the populous regions of the past a tale worth telling.
But the next day she was secretly glad that the brain-tiring subject
could be put aside in favour of the first exciting visit to Paris.
And during the next few weeks she persuaded herself that she might
legitimately neglect her actual writing, since she would be
completing her preparation for the great work by all the education to
be sucked out of intelligent visits to Paris.... No, it was not an
excuse to escape from effort, but real hard work.
And February passed into March, and the spring came peeping in the
trees of Montmorency, and still there was nothing on the scribbling
paper--except scribbles.
But if she had not written much, she and Miss Carrell had learned
Paris like a loved book. They talked proudly of the Palais Royal,
the Louvre, the Boulevard des Italiens, the Palais de Justice and the
Pantheon. Sometimes Mr. Bruno joined them in the evening and they
dined on the boulevards, watching the crowds and the traffic hurry
by, to the music of the paper women shrieking, "_La Presse! La
Presse!_" They had been to the Opera, and Daphne, lifted to the roof
by the singing of the soprano in the finale of the first act, and by
the storm of applause at the curtain's fall, began to wonder whether
her own genius might not really find its issue in great singing or
great acting. She felt no longer sure of being a great writer. She
was sure only that she was a genius.
April, May and June passed in an alternation of gay sightseeing in
Paris and lonely fancy-gathering in the Montmorency Forest. Both
were forms of delight, but there was a distinction. Visiting the
city was entertainment and stimulation, but the solitary saunter
a-dream among the burgeoning trees was that serene happiness that
could only be called blessedness. She did not believe a more perfect
serenity could be attained. And it could only be compassed alone.
Had she had companions who could understand, it might have been very
good to talk over her aspirations sometimes; but there were none.
Her father was either too busy, or his knowledge too overawing, to be
told of his ridiculous daughter's pretentious schemes. No, she would
surprise him one day. So she wandered alone with her thoughts like
the girl with the white goats. Bliss it was: and there hardly
emerged the fear, though it moved to birth at times, that this was
the bliss of a drug--that the long, luxurious brooding on what she
would one day do was daily unfitting her for doing it.
In July, when they should have gone to Switzerland, Mr. Bruno decided
that his work would not allow him to gratify this desire till next
year. Nor should Owen, who had now joined them, take Daphne to the
mountains, for himself had fixed his heart on doing that. So he sent
both children to the Belgian coast, where they spent delightful days
in Ostend and Middelkerke and Westende. This was to be every minute
a holiday, decided Daphne, and writing was abandoned for bathing and
sailing, and mild gambling at casinos and dancing at hotels. To
recline on and finger the fine shingle, or watch the little rills
running down their channels in the corrugated sand, or to sit up and
hurl flat stones so that they leapt and ricochetted on the smooth sea
was to live with childish memories. This holiday she discovered
Owen: that he was a tall, presentable boy with the graceful figure of
his father; and astonishingly efficient, managing all their money
affairs and so leaving her to lax enjoyment. The fact was, each for
the first time was proud of the other.
In September, when they returned to St. Leu, she realised that her
holiday was over and she must now start again on her work. But as
she and her brother pushed open the gate of the little garden of firs
she was dismayed to find herself dreading the task and the repetition
of the long, worrying hours that ended in a few scribbled lines and
unmeasurable discouragement. The shock was like a moment of
overthrow. Was she one who had the creative temperament without the
power to create? No, no; that would be too awful a disappointment.
She was indolent, that was all. When she was supposed to be
unpacking upstairs she was really facing a revelation. She was
mentally and physically slothful. And why? Why, when she knew she
was charged with a vitality of body and mind? It was habit. It was
the legacy of her childhood. She walked to the window and looked out
upon the forest. Loth to do it, she was yet angrily blaming her
father and all the careless people about the steps of her childhood
who had allowed her to learn indolence and practise it to perfection.
Once the chaos stirred and the spirit of creation moved above it.
She had been drifting about the forest glades, strewn with old leaves
and broken twigs, and after descending a flexuous lane, happened upon
a white church. It was Taverney Church, and five hundred years old,
from the evidence of its clerestory windows, which were as lovely as
those of an Early English cathedral. Beyond it thronged the houses
of Taverney. She walked into its walled cemetery, a strangely silent
place bounded on three sides by the forest trees and on the fourth by
the high wall of the church. Epitaphs were always interesting, so
she wandered among the graves, moved to sadness by the tawdry wreaths
of wire and beads and the china flowers. One grave, because it had
many such offerings and a border of pansies, stayed her to examine it
closer. On the stone slab she read:
"_Ici Repose
Geneviève Rollier,_"
and in silver lettering on one cross of beads, "_A Notre Mère_"; on
another, "_A Notre Amie_"; and on a wreath that seemed by right the
largest, "_A Mon Epouse_." There was a scroll across some dirty
china flowers with the words, "_Nous ne t'oublierons jamais_." She
stared at it, unconscious of a drooping mouth. She was wondering
what Géneviève had achieved before her husband and her children laid
her there; whether their loving offerings had outlasted their
sadness; whether Géneviève's life had been worth while.
Suddenly she looked up. She knew that never before had she been so
conscious of her response to all the pain in life. It pleased her
that she could sense it thus and be troubled by it. Here was the
secret of how to write it. You must really feel with men--and what
had she felt so far? How completely self-centred her life had been!
And as long as it was self-centred you could not really feel with
others.... She would like to begin being unselfish--a saint perhaps;
the peer of St. Theresa as well as of Madame de Genlis.
Out of her pity for this woman, why should she not write an imaginary
life? Yes, she would do it. They would be here many months, and how
she would enjoy studying local colour, local history and local
temperaments! ... It was so much easier to study conditions and jot
down notes, in a book than to grind at a table.... She caught that
thought as it flitted through her mind, and wrung its neck. "Madame
Rolland" should be a masterpiece, and she would spare no labour on it.
Throughout that autumn and winter she did struggle on odd days to get
something on paper. But oh, it was difficult! How often was she
tempted to throw down her pencil and dream again! And that
inspiration in Taverney Churchyard--where was it? She had to bully
and shake her memory to find out what the emotion had been. And it
would be a great relief sometimes to decide she must walk back to the
cemetery and find out.
With the spring came all the excitement of thinking about their
summer visit to Switzerland and Italy. But April brought moments of
dismay. The Uitlanders of the Transvaal, some dusty country
thousands of mile away in South Africa, had sent a petition to the
Queen for protection from strange Dutchmen called Boers. And Mr.
Bruno, pleased with the drama of it and with his own keen vision and
understanding, talked of an inevitable war.
"Of course there'll be war. Any one with twopence worth of
imagination and knowledge of Englishmen can see how the tale will
write itself.... So what about your continental trotting now, Duffy?"
She hardly knew whether to think him teasing or to be alarmed.
"But what on earth has it got to do with us going to Switzerland?"
"Everything. You've never seen a real war, have you? Small things
like authors' incomes are apt to disappear. And now you're going to
see a war, when English people won't be able to show their faces on
the Continent for fear of being spat on."
"Oh, Daddy, it won't happen. It can't. At least, not till we've
been and come back."
So Mr. Bruno hoped, too indolent, really, to believe otherwise. And
when the Dutchmen of Cape Colony moved to mediate between England and
the Transvaal Boers he affected a great relief.
"Yes, Duffy, I think you might pack--with a heart full of thanks to
these godly old men of the Africander Bund. They've been your good
fairies. At any rate, nothing'll happen for some months yet."