I don’t see much of Olivier either. When I visit his mother, I don’t dare go into the room where I know he is at work; if I meet him by chance, I am so awkward and shy that I find nothing to say to him, and that makes me so unhappy that I prefer to call on his mother at the times when I know he will be out.
XII
Edouard’s Journal: Laura’s Wedding
Nov. 2nd.—Long conversation with Douviers. We met at Laura’s parents’, and he left at the same time as I and walked across the Luxembourg Gardens with me. He is preparing a thesis on Wordsworth, but from the few words he let fall, I feel certain that he misses the most characteristic points of Wordsworth’s poetry; he had better have chosen Tennyson. There is something or other inadequate about Douviers—something abstract and simple-minded and credulous. He always takes everything—people and things—for what they set out to be. Perhaps because he himself never sets out to be anything but what he is.
“I know,” he said to me, “that you are Laura’s best friend. No doubt I ought to be a little jealous of you. But I can’t be. On the contrary everything she has told me about you has made me understand her better herself and wish to become your friend. I asked her the other day if you didn’t bear me too much of a grudge for marrying her. She answered on the contrary, that you had advised her to.” (I really think he said it just as flatly as that.) “I should like to thank you for it, and I hope you won’t think it ridiculous, for I really do so most sincerely,” he added, forcing a smile but with a trembling voice and tears in his eyes.
I didn’t know what to answer him, for I felt far less moved than I should have been, and incapable of reciprocating his effusion. He must have thought me a little stony; but he irritated me. Nevertheless I pressed his hand as warmly as I could when he held it out to me. These scenes, when one of the parties offers more of his heart than the other wants, are always painful. No doubt he thought he should capture my sympathy. If he had been a little more perspicacious he would have felt he was being cheated; but I saw that he was both overcome by gratitude for his own nobility and persuaded that he had raised a response to it in me. As for me I said nothing, and as my silence perhaps made him feel uncomfortable: “I count,” he added, “on her being transplanted to Cambridge, to prevent her from making comparisons which might be disadvantageous to me.”
What did he mean by that? I did my best not to understand. Perhaps he wanted me to protest. But that would only have sunk us deeper into the bog. He is one of those shy people who cannot endure silences and who think they must fill them by being exaggeratedly forthcoming—the people who say to you afterwards, “I have always been open with you.” The deuce they have! But the important thing is not so much to be open oneself as to allow the other person to be so. He ought to have realized that his openness was the very thing that prevented mine.
But if I cannot be a friend of his, at any rate I think he will make Laura an excellent husband; for in reality what I am reproaching him with are his qualities. We went on to talk of Cambridge, where I have promised to pay them a visit.
What absurd need had Laura to talk to him about me?
What an admirable thing in women is their need for devotion! The man they love is as a rule a kind of clothes-peg on which to hang their love. How easily and sincerely Laura has effected the transposition! I understand that she should marry Douviers; I was one of the first to advise it. But I had the right to hope for a little grief.
Some reviews of my book to hand. The qualities which people are the most willing to grant me are just the very ones I most detest. Was I right to republish this old stuff? It responds to nothing that I care for at present. But it is only at present that I see it does not. I don’t so much think that I have actually changed, as that I am only just beginning to be aware of myself. Up till now I did not know who I was. Is it possible that I am always in need of another being to act as a plate-developer? This book of mine had crystallized according to Laura; and that is why I will not allow it to be my present portrait.
An insight, composed of sympathy, which would enable us to be in advance of the seasons—is this denied us? What are the problems which will exercise the minds of tomorrow? It is for them that I desire to write. To provide food for curiosities still unformed, to satisfy requirements not yet defined, so that the child of today may be astonished tomorrow to find me in his path.
How glad I am to feel in Olivier so much curiosity, so much impatient want of satisfaction with the past. …
I sometimes think that poetry is the only thing that interests him. And I feel as I reread our poets through his eyes, how few there
