Chapter XVI

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."