“Yes, I do see and I follow what you are saying, but in spite of all that, and with the best will in the world, I cannot really see how you hope to be chosen when you cannot make a choice for yourself?”
“I know it seems ridiculous but that is how it is. Because you see, left to myself, I would find any man suitable: any man in the world would seem suitable on the one condition that he wanted me just a little. A man who so much as noticed me would seem desirable just for that very reason, and so how on earth would I be capable of knowing who would suit me when anyone would, on the one condition that they wanted me? No, it’s impossible. Someone else must decide for me, must guess what would be best. Alone I could never know.”
“Even a child knows what is best for him.”
“But I am not a child, and if I let myself go and behaved like a child and gave in to the first temptation I came across—after all I am perfectly aware that it is there at every street corner—why then I would follow the first person who came along, the first man who just wanted me. And I would follow him simply for the pleasure I would have in being with him, and then, why then I would be lost, completely lost. You could say that I could easily make another kind of life for myself, but as you can see I no longer have the courage even to think of it.”
“But have you never thought that if you leave this choice entirely to another person it need not necessarily be the right one and might make for unhappiness later?”
“Yes, I have thought of that a little, but I cannot think now, before my life has really begun, of the harm I might possibly do later on. I just say one thing to myself and that is: if the very fact of being alive means that we can do harm, however much we don’t want to, just by choosing or making mistakes, if that is an inevitable state of affairs, why then, I too will go through with it. If I have to, if everyone has to, I can live with harm.”
“Please don’t get so excited: there will be someone one day who will discover that you exist both for him and for others, you must be sure of that. And yet you know one can almost manage to live with this lack of which you speak.”
“Which lack? Of never being chosen?”
“If you like, yes. As far as I am concerned I should be so surprised if anyone chose me, that I should simply laugh.”
“While I should be in no way surprised, I am afraid I would find it perfectly natural. It is just the contrary which astonishes me, and it astonishes me more each day. I cannot understand it and I never get used to it.”
“It will happen. I promise you.”
“Thank you for saying so. But are you saying that just to please me, or can people tell these things? Can you guess it already just from talking to me?”
“I expect such things can be guessed, yes. To tell you the truth, I said that without thinking much, but not at all because I thought it would please you. It must have been because I could see it.”
“And you? How are you so sure the opposite is true of you.”
“Well, I suppose it is because. . . . Yes, just because I am not surprised. I think it must be that. I am not at all surprised that no one has chosen me, while you are so amazed that you have not yet been singled out.”
“In your place, you know, I would force myself to want something, however hard it might be. I would not remain as you are.”
“But what can I do? Since I don’t feel this same need it could only come to me. . . . Well, from the outside. How else could it be?”
“You know you almost make me wish I was dead.”
“Is it I in particular who has that effect, or were you just speaking in general?”
“Of course I was only speaking in general. In general about us both.”
“Because there is another thing I would not really like, and that is to have provoked in anyone, even if only once, a feeling as violent as that.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“And I would like to thank you too.”
“But for what?”
“I don’t really know. For your niceness.”
Two
THE CHILD CAME OVER quietly from the far side of the Park and stood beside the girl.
“I’m thirsty,” he announced.
The girl took a thermos and a mug from the bag beside her.
“I can well imagine,” said the man, “that he must be thirsty after eating those sandwiches.”
The girl uncorked the thermos. Warm milk gleamed in the sunshine.
“But as you see,” she said, “I have brought him some milk.”
The child drank the milk greedily, then gave the mug back to the girl. A milky cloud stayed round his lips. The girl wiped them. The man smiled at the child.
“If I said what I did,” he remarked, “it was only to try and make myself clear. For no other reason.”
Completely indifferent the child contemplated this man who was smiling at him. Then he went back to the sand pit. The girl’s eyes followed him.
“His name is James,” she said.
“James,” the man repeated.
But he was no longer thinking of the child.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” he went on, “how a trace of milk stays round a child’s mouth when he has drunk it? It’s strange. In some ways they are so grown up: they seem to talk and walk like everyone else and then when it comes to drinking milk, one realizes. . . .”
“He doesn’t say ‘milk,’ he says ‘my milk.’”
“When I see something like that milk I suddenly feel full of hope although I could never say why. As if some pain was deadened. I think perhaps that watching these children reminds me of the lions in that Garden. I see them as minute lions, but lions all the same.”
“Yet they don’t seem to give you the same kind of happiness as those lions did in their cages facing the sun?”
“They give me a certain happiness but you are right, not the same one. Somehow children always make one feel obscurely worried, and it is not that I particularly like lions; it would be untrue to say that. It was just a way of putting things.”
“I wonder if you attach too much importance to that town with the result that the rest of your life suffers by comparison? Or is it just that never having been there I can hardly be expected to understand the happiness it gave you?”
“And yet it is probably to someone like you that I should most like to talk about it.”
“Thank you. It was kind of you to say that. But you know I didn’t want to imply that I was particularly unhappy, more unhappy I mean than anyone else would be in the same position. I was speaking of something quite different, something which I am afraid could not be solved by seeing any country, anywhere in the world.”
“I’m sorry. You see when I said that I should like to talk most about that country to someone like you I did not mean for a second that you were unhappy without knowing it, and that telling you certain things would make you feel better. I simply meant that you seemed to me to be a person who might understand what one was trying to say better than most people. That’s all. But I expect I have talked too much about that town and it is natural that you should have misunderstood.”
“No, I don’t think it is that. All I wanted was to put