the town, he felt the old dislike and boredom that all dark bloods and races could awake in him an importunate and unreasonable desire, beneath these soft, dull skies of grey, for something bright, sharp, Northern, fierce, and wild, in life—for something gold and blue and shining, the lavish flesh of great blond women, the surge of savage drunkenness, the fatal desperation of strong joy. The dark, strange faces of the Frenchmen all around, and all the hard perfection of that life, at once so alien and so drearily familiar, the unwearied energies of their small purposes fixed there in the small perfection of their universe, so dully ignorant of the world, so certain of itself, filled him suddenly with exasperation and dislike. He was tired suddenly of their darkness, their smallness, their hardness, their cat-like nervousness, their incessant ebullience, their unwearied and yet joyless vitalities, and the dreary monotony of their timeless greed.
He was tired of Orléans, tired of the Vatels; most of all tired, with a feeling of weary disgust and dislike, of the old Countess and all the small tricks and schemings of her life.
And with this sudden weariness and distaste, this loss of interest in a life which had for a week or two devoured his interest, the old torment and unrest of spirit had returned. Again the old question had returned in all its naked desolation: “Why here? And where shall I go now? What shall I do?” He saw, with a return of the old naked shame, in a flash of brutal revelation, the aimless lack of purpose in his wandering. He saw that there had been no certain reason, no valid purpose, for his coming here to Orléans, and with a sense of drowning horror, as if the phial of his spirit had exploded like a flash of ether and emptied out into the formless spaces of a planetary vacancy, he felt that there was no purpose and no reason for his going anywhere.
And yet the demons of unrest and tortured wandering had returned with all their fury: he knew that he must leave, that he must go on to some other destination, and he knew nowhere to go. Like a drowning man who clutches at a straw, he sought for some goal or purpose in his life, some justification for his wanderings, some target for his fierce desire. A thousand plans and projects suggested themselves to him, and each one seemed more futile, hopeless, barren than the rest. He would return to Paris and “settle down and write.” He would go back to England, get a room in London, go to Oxford, the Lake District, Cornwall, Devon—a thousand towns and places, evoked by a thousand fleeting memories, returned to argue some reasonable purpose for his blind wandering.
