““Saul came into my room, prowling around and around, restless, and he saw the new notebook, and pounced on it. “Oh this is pretty,”he said. “What is it for?”“I don’t know yet.”“Then I want it,”he said. I nearly said: “All right, have it,”watching in myself a need to give spouting like water from a whale. I was annoyed at myself, because I wanted it, yet so nearly gave it to him. I knew this need to comply was part of the sadistic-masochistic cycle we are in. I said: “No, you can’t have it.”It cost me a great deal to say it—I even stammered. He took the book up and said, laughing: “Gimme, gimme, gimme.”I said: “No.”He had expected me to give it, because he had made a joke of the gimme, gimme; and now he stood glancing at me sideways, and murmuring, not laughing at all, gimme, gimme, gimme, in a child’s voice. He had become a child. I saw how the new personality, or rather, the old one, entered him like an animal entering a thicket. His body curved and crouched, became a weapon; his face, which when he is “himself,”is good-humoured, shrewd, sceptical, was the face of a little murderer. He whipped around, holding the book, ready to run for the door; (* 19) and I saw him clearly, the slum kid, member of a gang of slum kids, lifting something from a shop counter, or running from the police. I said: “No, you can’t have it,”as I would have done to a child, and he came to himself, slowly, all the tension going out of him; and he laid the book down, good-humoured again, even grateful. I thought how odd it was, that he should need the authority of someone who could say no, and yet it was my life he had drifted into, I who find it so hard to say no. Because now I had said no, and he laid the book down, every line of him expressing the deprived child who had had something he very badly wanted denied to him, I felt stricken. I wanted to say: Take it, for God’s sake, it’s not important. But now I couldn’t say it, and I was frightened at how quickly this unimportant thing, the new pretty book, had become part of the fight. He stood for a while, by the door, forlorn; while I watched him straighten himself, and saw how a thousand times in his childhood he had straightened himself, stiffened his shoulders, and “put it under his belt,”as he had told me everyone must do when they had trouble.””
