THE HIGH SEA
525
She began to dress, with a feeling of exhilaration. The long fight
was over, the question had been asked, the answer was not what she
h?..d hoped for, but it was an answer. We will go on for a while and
it will be worse and worse, and we will say and do more and more
outrageous things to each other, and one day the final death-giving
blows will be struck. Remember you cannot go back, because there is
no place to go. The past is never where you think you left it, you are
not the !;arne person. The place you are going toward does not exist
yet, you must build it when you come to the right spot. Oh God,
don't let me forget any more what really happened to me. Don't let
me forget.
When she saw David she felt very tenderly towards him.
If
she
could possibly help it, she would not quarrel with
him
any more. Yet
the first words she spoke were full of provocation, she could hear
them as they must sound to David. She could not stop herself. As
she poured his coffee, she looked about the dining room and greeted
every one who entered. "I see all the drunks and sea sicks are up and
about,"
~.he
said, "Even your cabin mates. Do you ever get lonely
in there, darling? Ever feel like coming in to visit Elsa and me?"
"Was that it?" asked David. "I knew there was something. Go
ahead and tell me." He braced himself with the spurious courage of a
man in the dentist's chair.
"That's all," said Jenny. "Unless you can remember something
more. You never remember what happens when you're drunk?" she
asked. "I think that must be divinely convenient."
He looked down at his plate and said nothing. She studied the
very fine clear modelling in the outer comers of his eyes, and the
touching inner corners with their thin blue veins. The nose was good,
too. The set of the ears. The whole head. She had made hundreds of
sketches of his head, trying to catch exactly what she saw, but it was
never like; perhaps she could bring it out in color. The face was a
curious mixture of sensibility with something very hard and something
else very petty: perhaps it was in the mouth. David ate as if there
were no God, and he never gained an ounce. There was a starved
look about him. She had never even heard of anybody who could
sleep as David did, like a dead man; sometimes it was frightening.
She would go back on tiptoe to have another look at him, listening
to his breathing. On Sundays and holidays, he slept for sixteen hours
on end. He would wake looking tired, and as
if
he never hoped to
catch up on his sleep. He loved to loll in water without ever learning
to swim, and he could lie sunning himself for hours, idle as a dog.
When he drank, deliberately he went on until he was in a stupor. He
