Bergson, after many polite but chilling encounters, had thrown him a bone to knaw at, and working through to its marrow he made astonishing discoveries about time and space. If the philosophers would only refrain from calling quite simple things by dreadful big names, he reflected, knowledge would be less elusive. He was learning that Bergson championed the existence of a free spirit against the attacks of those who insisted on a mechanical universe; and if the writers of philosophical handbooks had only been frank enough to say so, instead of saying that Bergson was the high priest of the critico-epistemological idealism, life at college would have been one degree less difficult. He now understood Rhoda's impatience at his "five-syllable views of life."
From hours of mental struggle with the theories of creative evolution he would walk far across the city to hours in Marthe's cafe. The fact that he was under a cloud, that his being was in the grip of uncontrollable forces, that his emotions were flowing away from him and bearing his soul on the tide, though never admitted by him, was not unknown to Marthe. She was not the woman to accuse him of being in love with another; but she was the woman to sense it, to suffer from the knowledge, yet to mask her suffering. In a devious way it increased their extraordinary, tacit friendship. It was as though at last, because each was being drastically taxed by life, there was a common ground upon which they could meet. They came to the cafe with
