Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/112

96 forbear to cut his throat by the way. His mind was utterly and entirely on his work; I never heard him speak of much else; work and the difficulty of producing oneself, no matter with the help of what medium, was our everyday topic. And when desperate fits overtook us we bewailed the necessity of producing ourselves at all. Why was it in us? We didn't think anything good that we did; we didn't suppose we were ever going to compass anything decent, and work was a trouble, a fever of disappointment and stress, which we did not enjoy in the least. The pleasure of work, we assured one another again and again, was a pleasure we had never felt. By nature, inclination and habit we were incorrigibly idle; yet inside us was this spirit, this silly, useless, hammering beast that impelled us to the handling of pen and pencil, and made us sick and irritable and unhappy, and prevented us taking any pleasure in our dinner.

That was how we used to talk together when we were striding through the woods round Versailles or idling among storied tombs in the cemetery at Montmorency; and, dear me! what a lot of enjoyment we got out of it, and how good the sandwiches were when we rested for our luncheon! Sometimes Wladislaw talked of his mother, whom I apprehended to be a teak-grained Calvinistic lady with a certain resemblance to the hen who had reared a duckling by mistake. I wish now that I had heard more stories of that rigorous household of his youth, where the fires in winter were let out at four in the afternoon because his mother had the idea that one did not feel the cold so much in bed if inured to it by a sustained chill of some eight hours duration. She was probably quite right: one only wonders why she did not pursue the principle further and light no fires in the day, because proportionately, of course But no matter. And, indeed, there are no proportions in the case. Once reach the superlative