Ecstasy

CHAPTER I

Dolf Van Attema, for an after-dinner walk, had taken the opportunity of calling on his wife’s sister, Cecile Van Even, in the Scheveningen Road. He was waiting in her little boudoir, walking to and fro among the rosewood furniture and the old moiré settees, over and over again, with three or four long steps, measuring the width of the tiny room. On an onyx pedestal, at the head of a chaise-longue, burned an onyx lamp, glowing sweetly within its lace shade, a great six-petalled flower of light.

Mevrouw was still with the children, putting them to bed, the maid had told him; so he could not see his godson, little Dolf, that evening. He was sorry. He would have liked to go upstairs and romp with Dolf as he lay in his little bed; but he remembered Cecile’s request, and his promise of an earlier occasion, when a romp of this sort with his uncle had kept the boy lying awake for hours.

So he waited, smiling at his obedience, measuring the little boudoir with his steps – the steps of a firmly-built man, broad and squat, no longer in his first youth, showing symptoms of baldness under his short, brown hair, with small blue-grey eyes, kindly and pleasant of glance, and a mouth which was firm and determined, in spite of the smile in the midst of the ruddy growth of his short Teutonic beard.

A log smouldered on the little hearth of nickel and gilt, and two little flames flickered discreetly – a fire of peaceful intimacy in that twilight atmosphere of lace-shielded lamplight. Intimacy and discreetness shed over the whole little room an aroma as of violets; a suggestion of the scent of violets nestled, too, in the soft tints of the draperies and furniture – rosewood and rose moiré – and hung about the corners of the little rosewood writing-table, with its silver appointments, and photographs under smooth glass frames. Above the writing-table hung a small white Venetian mirror. The gentle air of modest refinement, the subdued, almost prudish, tenderness floating about the little hearth, the writing-table, and the chaise-longue, gliding between the quiet folds of the fading hangings, had something soothing, something to quiet the nerves; so that Dolf presently ceased his work of measurement, sat down, looked around him, and finally remained staring at the portrait of Cecile’s husband, the Minister of State, dead eighteen months back.

After that he had not to wait long before Cecile came in. She advanced towards him, smiling as he rose from his seat, pressed his hand, excused herself that the children had detained her. She always put them to sleep herself, her two boys, Dolf and Christie, and then they said their prayers, one beside the other in their little beds. The scene came back to Dolf as she spoke of the children; he had often seen it.

Christie was not well, he was so listless; she hoped it might not turn out to be measles.

There was motherliness in her voice, but she did not seem a mother as she reclined, girlishly slight, on the chaise-longue, the soft glow behind her of the lamp on its stem of onyx. She was still in the black of her mourning. Here and there the light behind her touched her flaxen hair with a frail golden halo; the loose gown of crêpe she wore accentuated the girlish slenderness of her figure with the gently curving lines of her long neck and somewhat narrow shoulders; her arms hung with a certain weariness as her hands lay in her lap; gently curving, too, were the lines of her girlish youth of bust and slender waist, slender as a vase is slender; so that she seemed a still expectant flower of maidenhood, scarcely more than adolescent, not nearly old enough to be the mother of her children, her two boys of six and seven.

Her features were lost in the shadow – the lamplight touching her hair with gold – and Dolf could not at first see into her eyes; but presently, as he grew accustomed to the shadow, these shone softly out from the dusk of her features. She spoke in her low-toned voice, a little faint and soft, like a subdued whisper; she spoke again of Christie, of his godchild Dolf, and then asked news of Amélie, her sister.

“We are all well thank you! You may well ask how we are, we hardly ever see you.”

“I so seldom go out,” she said as an excuse.

“That is just where you make a mistake; you do not get enough air, enough society. Amélie was only saying so at dinner today, and so I came round to ask you to join us tomorrow evening.”

“Is it a party?”

“No; nobody.”

“Very well, I will come. I shall be very pleased.”

“Yes, but why do you never come of your own accord?”

“I can’t summon up the energy.”

“How do you spend your evenings?”

“I read, I write, or I do nothing at all. The last is really the most delightful; I only feel myself alive when I do nothing.”

He shook his head and replied: “You are a funny girl. You really don’t deserve that we should like you as much as we do.”

“How?” she asked, archly.

“Of course it makes no difference to you, you are just as well without us!”

“You mustn’t say that; it’s not true. Your sympathy is very necessary to me, but it takes so much to get me to go out. When I am once in my chair I sit thinking, or not thinking, and I find it difficult to stir.”

“What a horribly lazy life!”

“There it is! … You like me so much: can’t you forgive me my laziness, especially when I have promised you to come round tomorrow.”

“Very well,” he said, laughing, “of course you are free to live as you choose. We like you just the same, in spite of your neglect.”

She laughed, reproached him for using ugly words, and rose slowly to pour out a cup of tea for him. He felt a caressive softness creeping over him, as if he would have liked to stay there a long time, talking and sipping tea in that violet-scented atmosphere of subdued refinement; he, the man of action, the politician, member of the Second Chamber, every hour of whose day was filled up with committees here and committees there.

“You were saying that you read and wrote a good deal: what do you write?” he asked.

“Letters.”

“Nothing but letters?”

“I like writing letters. I corresponded with my brother and sister in India.”

“But, that is not the only thing?”

“Oh, no.”

“What else do you write then?”

“You are growing indiscreet, are you not?”

“What nonsense!” he laughed back, as if he were quite within his right. “What is it? Literature?”

“No. My diary.”

He laughed loudly and joyously. “You keep a diary! What do you want with a diary? Your days are all exactly alike.”

“Indeed they are not.”

He shrugged his shoulders quite nonplussed; she had always been a riddle to him. She knew this, and loved to mystify him.

“Sometimes my days are very nice, and sometimes very horrid.”

“Really!” he said, smiling, looking at her out of his kind little eyes; but he did not understand.

“And so sometimes I have a great deal to write in my diary,” she continued.

“Let me see some of it.”

“When I am dead.”

A mock shiver ran through his broad shoulders.

“Brrr! how gloomy!”

“Dead! What is there gloomy about that?” she asked, almost gaily; but he rose to go.

“You frighten me,” he said jestingly. “I must be returning home; I have a great deal of work to do still. So we’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Thanks, yes, tomorrow.”

He took her hand, and she struck a little silver gong for him to be let out. He stood looking at her a moment, with a smile in his beard.

“Yes, you are a funny girl, and yet we all like you!” he repeated, as if he wished to excuse himself in his own eyes for this sympathy. He bent down and kissed her on the forehead: he was so much older than she.

“I am very glad you all like me,” she said. “Till tomorrow. Then goodbye.”

He went and she was alone. The words of their conversation seemed still to be floating in the silence, like vanishing atoms. Then the silence became complete, and Cecile sat motionless, leaning back in the three little cushions of the chaise-longue, black in her crêpe against the light of the lamp, gazing out before her. All around her descended a vague dream as of little clouds, in which faces shone for an instant, from out of which came low voices without logical sequence of words, an aimless confusion of recollection. It was the dreaming of one on whose brain lay no obsession, either of happiness or of grief, the dreaming of a mind filled with peaceful light; a wide, still, grey Nirvana, in which all the trouble of thinking flows away, and the thought merely wanders back over former impressions, taking them here and there, without selection. For Cecile’s future appeared to her as a monotonous sweetness of unruffled peace, where Dolf and Christie grew up into boys, students, men, while she herself remained nothing but the mother, for in the unconsciousness of her spiritual life she did not know herself.

She did not know that she was more wife than mother, however fond she might be of her children. Swathed in the clouds of her dreaming, she did not feel there was something missing, by reason of her widowhood; she did not feel loneliness nor a need of someone beside her, nor regret that yielding air alone flowed about her, in which her arms might shape themselves and grope in vain for something to embrace.

The capacity for these needs was there, but so deep hidden in her soul’s unconsciousness that she did not know of its existence, that one day it might assert itself and rise up slowly, up and up, an apparition of clearer melancholy. For such melancholy as was in her dreaming seemed to her to belong to the past, to the memory of the kind husband she had lost, and never, never, to the present, to an unrealised sense of her loneliness.

Whoever had told her now that something was wanting in her life would have roused her indignation; she herself imagined that she had all she wanted; and highly she valued the calm contentment of the innocent egoism in which she and her children breathed, a contentment she thought complete. When she dreamed, as now, about nothing in particular – little dream-clouds fleeing across the field of her imagination, with other cloudlets in the wake – sometimes great tears would well in her eyes, and trickle slowly down her cheek; but to her these were only tears of an unspeakably vague melancholy, a light load upon her heart, barely oppressive, and then for some reason she did not know, for she had ceased to mourn the loss of her husband. In this manner she could pass whole evenings, simply sitting dreaming, never oppressed with herself, nor reflecting how the people outside hurried and tired themselves, aimlessly, without being happy, while she was happy; happy in the cloudland of her dreams.

The hours sped, and her hand was too heavy to reach for the book upon the table beside her; heaviness at last permeated her so thoroughly that one o’clock arrived, and she could not yet decide to get up and go to her bed.

II

Next evening, when Cecile entered the Van Attema’s drawing room, slowly, with languorous steps, in the sinuous black of her crêpe, Dolf advanced towards her and took her hand:

“I hope you will not be annoyed. Quaerts called, and Dina had told the servants we were at home. I am sorry …”

“It does not matter!” she whispered back, a little irritated nevertheless, in her sensitiveness, at unexpectedly meeting this stranger, whom she did not remember ever to have seen at Dolf’s, who now rose from where he had been sitting with old Mrs Hoze, Dolf’s great-aunt, Amélie, and the two daughters, Anna and Suzette.

Cecile kissed the old lady, and greeted the rest of the circle in turn, welcomed with a smile by all of them. Dolf introduced:

“My friend Taco Quaerts … Mrs Van Even, my sister-in-law.”

They sat a little scattered round the great fire on the open hearth, the piano close to them in the corner, its draped back turned to them, and Jules, the youngest boy, sitting behind it, playing Rubinstein’s Romance in E, and so absorbed that he had not heard his aunt come in.

“Jules …” Dolf cried.

“Leave him alone,” said Cecile.

The boy did not reply, and went on playing. Cecile, across the piano, saw his tangled hair and his eyes abstracted in the music. A suspicion of melancholy slowly rose within her; like a weight it climbed up her breast and stifled her breathing. From time to time forte notes falling suddenly from Jules’ fingers gave her little shocks in her throat, and a strange feeling of uncertainty seemed winding her about as with vague meshes; a feeling not new to her, in which she seemed no longer to possess herself, to be lost and wandering in search of herself, in which she did not know what she was thinking, nor what at this very moment she might say.

Something dropped into her brain, a momentary suggestion. Her head sank a little, and, without hearing distincdtly, it seemed to her that once before she had heard this romance played so, exactly so, as Jules now played it, very, very long ago, in some former existence long gone, in just the same circumstances, in this very circle of people, before this very fire; the tongues of the flame shot up with the same flickerings as from the logs of ages back, and Suzette blinked with the same expression she had worn then on that former …

Why was it that she should be sitting here again now, in the midst of them all? Why should it be, sitting like this round a fire, listening to music? How strange it was, and what strange things there were in this world! … Still, it was pleasant to be in this company, sweetly sociable, quiet, without many words, the music behind the piano dying plaintively away – until it suddenly stopped. Mrs Hoze’s voice had a ring of sympathy as she murmured in Cecile’s ear:

“So we are getting you back, my child? You are coming out from your solitude again?”

Cecile pressed her hand with a little laugh:

“But have I ever hidden myself? I have always been at home.”

“Yes, but we had to come to you. You have always remained at home, have you not?”

Cecile laughed again quietly.

“You are not angry with me, are you?”

“No, dear, of course we are not angry; you have had so much sorrow.”

“Yes; I seem to have lost everything.”

How was it she suddenly realised this? She never had had any feeling but of contentment in her own home, among the clouds of her daydreams, but outside, among other people, she immediately felt that she had lost everything, everything.

“But you have your children …”

“Yes …”

She answered faintly, wearily, with a sense of loneliness, oh! terrible loneliness, like one floating aimlessly in space, borne upon thinnest air, in which yearning arms grope in vain.

Mrs Hoze stood up. Dolf came to take her into the other room to play whist.

“And you too, Cecile?” he asked.

“No; you know I don’t …”

He did not press her; there was Quaerts and the girls who would play.

“What are you doing there, Jules?” he asked, glancing over the piano.

The boy had remained sitting there, forgotten. He now rose and appeared, tall, grown out of his strength, with strange eyes.

“What were you doing?”

“I … I was looking for something … a piece of music.”

“Don’t sit moping in that style, my boy!” growled Dolf kindly, with his deep voice. “What’s become of these cards again, Amélie?”

“I don’t know,” said his wife, looking about vaguely. “Where are the cards, Anna?”

“Aren’t they in the box with the counters?”

“No,” Dolf grumbled, “nothing is ever where it should be.”

Anna got up, looked, found the cards in the drawer of a boulle cabinet. Amélie too had risen; she stood arranging the music on the piano. She was forever ordering things in her rooms, and immediately forgetting where she had put them, tidying with her fingers, and perfectly absent in her mind.

“Anna, draw a card too. You can come in later!” cried Dolf from the other room.

The two sisters remained along with Jules.

The boy sat down on a footstool near Cecile.

“Mamma, do leave my music alone.”

Amélie sat down near Cecile.

“Is Christie better?”

“He is a little livelier today.”

“I am glad. Have you never met Quaerts before?”

“No.”

“Really? He comes here so often.”

Cecile looked through the open folding-doors at the card table. Two candles stood upon it. Mrs Hoze’s pink face was lit up clearly, smooth and stately; her coiffure gleamed silver-grey. Quaerts sat opposite her; Cecile noticed the round, vanishing silhouette of his head, the hair cut very close, thick and black above the glittering white streak of his collar. His arms made little movements as he threw down a card, or gathered up a trick. His person had something about it of great power, something energetic and sturdy, something of everyday life, which Cecile disliked.

“Are the girls fond of cards?”

“Suzette is, Anna not so much; she is not quite so brisk.”

Cecile saw that Anna sat behind her father, staring with eyes which did not understand.

“Do you go out much with them now?” Cecile asked.

“Yes, I am obliged to: Suzette likes going out, but not Anna. Suzette will be a pretty girl, don’t you think?”

“Suzette is a nasty coquettish thing,” said Jules. “At our last dinner-party …”

He suddenly stopped.

“No, I can’t tell you. It’s not right to tell tales, is it, Auntie?”

Cecile smiled.

“No, certainly it’s not.”

“I want always to do what is right.”

“That is very good.”

“No, no!” he said deprecatingly. “Everything seems to me so bad, do you know. Why is everything so bad?”

“But there is much that is good too, Jules.”

He shook his head.

“No, no!” he repeated. “Everything is bad. Everything is very bad. Everything is selfishness. Just mention something that is not selfish!”

“Parental love!”

But Jules shook his head again.

“Parental love is ordinary selfishness. Children are a part of their parents, who only love themselves when they love their children.”

“Jules!” cried Amélie. “You talk far too rashly. You know I don’t like it: you are much too young to talk like that. One would think you knew everything.”

The boy was silent.

“And I always say that we never know anything. We never know anything, don’t you think so too, Cecile? I, at least, never know anything, never …”

She looked round the room absently. Her fingers smoothed the fringe of her chair, tidying up. Cecile put her arm softly round Jules’ neck.

III

It was Quaerts’ turn to sit out from the card-table, and although Dolf pressed him to continue playing, he rose. She saw him coming towards the room where she still sat with Amélie – Jules sitting at her feet – engaged in desultory talk, for Amélie could never maintain a conversation, always wandering and losing the threads. She did not know why, but Cecile suddenly wore a most serious expression, as if she were discussing very important matters with her sister; though all she said was:

“Jules should really take lessons in harmony, when he composes so nicely …”

Quaerts had approached her; he sat down next to them with a scarcely perceptible shyness in his manner, with a gentle hesitation in the brusque force of his movements. But Jules fired up.

“No, Auntie; I want to be taught as little as possible. I don’t want to learn names and principles and classifications, I could not do it. I only compose like this,” suiting his phrase with a vague movement of his fingers.

“Jules can hardly read, it’s a shame!” said Amélie.

“And he plays so sweetly,” said Cecile.

“Yes, Auntie; I remember things, I pick them out on the piano. Ah! it’s not very clever; it just comes out of myself, you know.”

“That is just what is fine.”

“No, no! You have to know the names and principles and classifications. You must have that in everything. I shall never learn technique; I can’t do anything.”

He closed his eyes a moment; a look of sadness flitted across his restless face.

“You know, a piano is so … so big, such a piece of furniture, isn’t it? But a violin, oh, how delightful! You hold it to you like this, against your neck, almost against your heart; it is almost part of you, and you caress it, like this, you could almost kiss it! You feel the soul of the violin throbbing inside the wood, and then you only have a string or two, which sing everything.

“Jules …” Amélie began.

“And, oh, Auntie, a harp! A harp, like this, between your legs, a harp which you embrace with both your arms: a harp is just like an angel, with long golden hair. Ah, I have never yet played on a harp!”

“Jules, leave off!” cried Amélie, angrily. “You drive me silly with that nonsense! I wonder you are not ashamed, before Mr Quaerts.”

“Before Taco? Do you think I have anything to be ashamed of, Taco?” said Jules in surprise.

“Of course not, my boy.”

The sound of his voice was like a caress. Cecile looked at him, astonished; she would have expected him to make fun of Jules. She did not understand him, but she disliked him very much, so healthy and strong, with his energetic face and his fine expressive mouth, so different from Amélie and Jules and herself.

“Of course not, my boy.”

Jules looked up at his mother contemptuously …

“You see! Taco is a good chap.” He twisted his stool round towards Quaerts, laying his head against his knee.

“Jules!”

“Pray let him be, Mevrouw.”

“Everyone spoils that boy …”

“Except yourself,” said Jules.

“I,” cried Amélie, indignantly. “I spoil you out and out! I wish I could send you to the Indies! Then you would be more of a man! But I can’t do it; and your father spoils you too. I don’t know what will become of you!”

“What is to become of you, Jules?” asked Quaerts.

“I don’t know. I mustn’t go to college, I am too weak a chap to do much work.”

“Would you like to go to the Indies someday?”

“Yes, with you. Not alone; oh, to be alone, always alone! I shall always be alone, it is terrible to be alone!”

“But, Jules, you are not alone now,” said Cecile.

“Oh, yes, yes, in myself I am alone, always alone …” he pressed himself against Quaerts’ knee.

“Jules, don’t talk so stupidly,” cried Amelie, nervously.

“Yes, yes!” said Jules, with a sudden half sob. “I will hold my tongue! But don’t talk about me!” He locked his hands and implored them, dread in his face. They all stared at him, but he buried his face in Quaerts’ knees, as though deadly frightened of something …

IV

Anna had played execrably, to Suzette’s despair: she could not even remember the trumps! and Dolf called to his wife:

“Amélie, do come in for a rubber; at least if Quaerts does not wish to. You can’t give your daughter very many points, but you are not quite so bad!”

“I would rather stay and talk to Mrs Van Even,” said Quaerts.

“Go and play without minding me, if you prefer, Mr Quaerts,” said Cecile, in a cold voice, as towards someone she utterly disliked.

Amélie dragged herself away with an unhappy face. She, too, did not play a brilliant game, and Suzette always lost her temper when she made mistakes.

“I have so long been hoping to make your acquaintance, Mevrouw, that I should not like to miss the opportunity tonight,” answered Quaerts.

She looked at him: it troubled her that she could not understand him. She knew him to be somewhat of a gallant. There were stories in which the name of a married woman was coupled with his. Did he wish to try his blandishments upon her? She had no hankering for that sort of pastime; she had never cared for flirtations.

“Why?” she asked, calmly, immediately regretting the word; for her question sounded like coquetry, and she intended anything but that.

“Why?” he repeated. He looked at her in slight embarrassment as he sat near her, with Jules on the ground between them, against his knee, his eyes closed.

“Because … because,” he stammered, “because you are my friend’s sister, I suppose, and I used never to see you here …”

She made no answer: in her seclusion she had forgotten how to talk, and she did not take the least trouble about it.

“I used often to see you formerly at the theatre,” said Quaerts, “when Mr Van Even was still alive.”

“At the opera?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Ah! I did not know you then.”

“No.”

“I have not been out in the evening for a long time, on account of my mourning.”

“And I always choose the evening to pay my visits here.”

“So it is easily explained that we have never met.”

They were silent for a moment. It seemed to him she spoke very coldly.

“I should like to go to the opera!” murmured Jules with closed eyes. “Ah no, after all, I think I would rather not.”

“Dolf told me that you read a great deal,” Quaerts continued. “Do you keep up with modern literature?”

“A little. I do not read so very much.”

“No?”

“Oh, no. I have two children, and consequently not much time for it. Besides, it has no particular fascination for me; life is so much more romantic than any novel.”

“So you are a philosopher?”

“I? Oh, no, I assure you, Mr Quaerts. I am the most commonplace woman in the world.”

She spoke with her wicked little laugh and her cold voice: the voice and the laugh she employed when she feared lest she should be wounded in her secret sensitiveness, and when therefore she hid herself deep within herself, offering to the outside world something very different from what she really was. Jules opened his eyes and sat looking at her, and his steady glance troubled her.

“You live in a charming place, on the Scheveningen Road.”

“Yes.”

She realised suddenly that her coldness amounted to rudeness, and she did not wish this, even if she did dislike him. She threw herself back negligently; she asked at random, quite without concern, merely for the sake of conversation:

“Have you many relations in the Hague?”

“No; my father and mother live at Velp, and the rest of my family are at Arnhem chiefly. I never fix myself anywhere; I cannot remain long in one place. I have lived for a considerable time in Brussels.”

“You have no occupation, I believe?”

“No; as a boy my longing was to enter the navy, but I was rejected on account of my eyes.”

Involuntarily she looked into his eyes: small, deep-set eyes, the colour of which she could not determine. She thought they looked sly and cunning.

“I have always regretted it,” he continued. “I am a man of action. There is always within me the desire of movement. I console myself as best I can with sport.”

“Sport?” she repeated coldly.

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

“Quaerts is a Nimrod and a Centaur, and a Hercules, are you not?” said Jules.

“Ah, Jules,” said Quaerts, with a laugh, “names and theories and classifications. Which class do you really place me in?”

“Among the very, very few people I really love!” the boy answered, ardently, and without hesitation. “Taco, when are you going to give me my riding-lessons?”

“Whenever you like, my son.”

“Yes, but you must fix the day for us to go to the riding-school. I won’t fix a day, I hate fixing days.”

“Well, tomorrow? Tomorrow is Wednesday.”

“Very well.”

Cecile noticed that Jules was still staring at her. She looked at him back. How was it possible that the boy could like this man? How was it possible that it irritated her and not him – all that healthiness, that strength, that power of muscle and rage of sport? She could make nothing of it; she understood neither Quaerts nor Jules, and she herself drifted away again into that mood of half-consciousness, in which she did not know what she thought, nor what at that very moment she might say; in which she seemed to be lost, and wandering in search of herself.

She rose, tall, frail, in her crêpe, like a queen who mourns; touches of gold in her flaxen hair, where a little jet aigrette glittered like a black mirror.

“I am going to see who is winning,” she said, and went to the card-table in the other room. She stood behind Mrs Hoze, seeming to be interested in the game, but across the light of the candles she peered at Quaerts and Jules. She saw them talking together, softly, confidentially, Jules with his arm on Quaerts’ knee. She saw Jules looking up, as if in adoration, into the face of this man, and then the boy suddenly threw his arms around his friend in a wild embrace, while this latter kept him off with a patient gesture.

V

The next evening Cecile revelled even more than usual in the luxury of being able to stay at home. It was after dinner; she sat on the chaise-longue in her little boudoir with Dolf and Christie, an arm thrown round each of them, sitting between them, so young, like an elder sister. In her low voice she was telling them:

“Judah came up to him, and said, Oh my lord, let me stay as a bondsman instead of Benjamin. For our father, who is such an old man, said to us when we went away with Benjamin: My son Joseph I have already lost; surely he has been torn in pieces by the wild beasts. And if you take this one also from me, and any harm befall him, I shall become grey with sorrow, and die. Then (Judah said) I said to our father that I would be responsible for his safety, and that I should be very naughty if we did not bring Benjamin home again. And therefore I pray you, Oh my lord, let me be your bondsman, and let the lad go back with his brethren. For how can I go back to my father if the lad be not with me …”

“And Joseph, Mamma, what did Joseph say?” asked Christie. He nestled closely against his mother, this poor slender little fellow of six, with his fine golden hair, and his eyes of pale forget-me-not blue, his little fingers hooking themselves nervously into Cecile’s gown, rumpling the crêpe.

“Then Joseph could no longer restrain himself, and ordered his servants to leave him; then he burst into tears, crying, Do you not know me? I am Joseph.”

But Cecile could not continue, for Christie had thrown himself on her neck in a frenzy of despair, and she heard him sobbing against her.

“Christie! My darling!”

She was greatly distressed; she had grown interested in her own recital and had not noticed Christie’s excitement, and now he was sobbing against her in such violent grief that she could find no word to quiet him, to comfort him, to tell him that it ended happily.

“But, Christie, don’t cry, don’t cry! It ends happily.”

“And Benjamin, what about Benjamin?”

“Benjamin returned to his father, and Jacob came down to Egypt to live with Joseph.”

“Was it really like that? Or are you making it up?”

“No, really my darling. Don’t, don’t cry any more.”

Christie grew calmer, but he was evidently disappointed. He was not satisfied with the end of the story; and yet it was very pretty like that, much prettier than if Joseph had been angry, and put Benjamin in prison.

“What a baby to cry!” said Dolf. “It was only a story.”

Cecile did not reply that the story had really happened, because it was in the Bible. She had suddenly become very sad, in doubt of herself. She fondly dried the child’s eyes with her pocket-handkerchief.

“And now, children, bed. It’s late!” she said, faintly.

She put them to bed, a ceremony which lasted a long time; a ceremony with an elaborate ritual of undressing, washing, saying of prayers, tucking-in, and kissing. When after an hour she was sitting downstairs again alone, she first realised how sad she felt.

Ah no, she did not know! Amélie was quite right: one never knew anything, never! She had been so happy that day; she had found herself again, deep in the recesses of her most secret self, in the essence of her soul; all day she had seen her dreams hovering about her as an apotheosis; all day she had felt within her the consuming love of her children. She had told them stories out of the Bible after dinner, and suddenly, when Christie began to cry, a doubt had arisen within her. Was she really good to her little boys? Did she not, in her love, in the tenderness of her affection for them spoil and weaken them? Would she not end by utterly unfitting them for a practical life, with which she did not come into contact, but in which the children, when they grew up, would have to move? It flashed through her mind: parting, boarding-schools, her children estranged from her, coming home big, rough boys, smoking and swearing, cynicism on their lips and in their hearts; lips which would no longer kiss her, hearts in which she would no longer have a place. She pictured them already with the swagger of their seventeen or eighteen years, tramping across her rooms in their cadet’s and midshipman’s uniforms, with broad shoulders and a hard laugh, flicking the ash from their cigars upon the carpet. Why did Quaerts’ image suddenly rise up in the midst of this cruelty? Was it chance or a consequence? She could not analyse it; she could not explain the presence of this man, rising up through her grief in the atmosphere of her antipathy. But she felt sad, sad, sad, as she had not felt sad since Van Even’s death; not vaguely melancholy, as she so often felt, but sad, undoubtedly sorrowful at the thought of what must come. Oh! to have to part with her children! And then, to be alone … Loneliness, everlasting loneliness! Loneliness within herself; that feeling of which Jules had such dread; withdrawn from the world which had no charm for her, sunk away alone into all emptiness! She was thirty, she was old, an old woman. Her house would be empty, her heart empty! Dreams, clouds of dreaming, which fly away, which rise like smoke, revealing only emptiness. Emptiness, emptiness, emptiness! The word each time fell hollowly, with hammer strokes, upon her breast. Emptiness, emptiness …

“Why am I like this?” she asked herself. “What ails me? What has altered?”

Never had she felt that word emptiness throb within her in this way: that very afternoon she had been gently happy, as ordinarily. And now! She saw nothing before her, no future, no life, nothing but broad darkness. Estranged from her children, alone within herself …

She rose up with a half moan of pain, and walked across the boudoir. The discreet half-light troubled her, oppressed her. She turned the key of the lace-covered lamp; a golden gleam crept over the rose folds of the silk curtains like glistening water. A fire burned on the hearth, but she felt cold.

She stood by the little table; she took up a card, with one corner turned down, and read: “T. H. Quaerts.” A coronet with five balls was engraved above the name. “Quaerts!” How short it sounded! A name like the smack of a hard hand. There was something bad, something cruel in the name: “Quaerts, Quaerts …”

She threw down the bit of card, angry with herself. She felt cold, and not herself, just as she had felt at the Van Attemas’ the evening before.

“I will not go out again. Never again, never!” she said, almost aloud. “I am so contented in my own house, so contented with my life, so beautifully happy … That card! Why should he leave a card? What do I want with his card? …”

She sat down at her writing-table and opened her blotting-book. She wished to finish a half-written letter to India but she was in quite a different mood from when she had begun it. So she took from a drawer a thick book, her diary. She wrote the date, then reflected a moment, tapping her teeth nervously with the silver penholder.

But then, with a little ill-tempered gesture, she threw down the pen, pushed the book aside, and, letting her head fall into her hands, sobbed aloud.

VI

Cecile was astonished at this unusually long fit of abstraction, that it should continue for days before she could again enter into her usual condition of serenity, the delightful abode from which, without wishing it, she had wandered. But she compelled herself, with gentle compulsion, to recover the treasures of her loneliness. She argued with herself that it would be some years before she would have to part from Dolf and Christie: there was time enough to grow accustomed to the idea of separation. Besides, nothing had altered either about her, or within her, and so she let the days glide slowly over her, like gently flowing water.

In this way, gently flowing by, a fortnight had elapsed since the evening she spent at Dolf’s. It was a Saturday afternoon; she had been working with the children – she still taught them herself – and she had walked out with them; and now she sat again in her favourite room awaiting the Van Attemas, who came every Saturday at half-past four to afternoon tea. She rang for the servant, who lighted the blue flame of methylated spirit. Dolf and Christie were with her; they sat upon the floor on footstools, cutting the pages of a children’s magazine to which Cecile subscribed for them. They were sitting quietly and well-bred, like children who grow up in a feeble surrounding, in the midst of too much refinement, too pale, with hair too long and too blonde, Christie especially, whose little temples were veined as if with lilac blood. Cecile stepped by them as she went to glance over the tea-table, and the look she cast upon them wrapped the children in a warm embrace of devotion. She was in her calmly happy mood; it was so pleasant that she would soon see the Van Attemas coming in. She liked these hours in the afternoon when her silver tea-kettle hissed over the blue flame. An exquisite intimacy filled the room; she had in her long, shapely feminine fingers that special power of witchery, that gentle art of handling by which everything, over which they merely glided, acquired a look of herself; an indefinable something, of tint, of position, of light, which the things had not until the touch of those fingers came across them.

There came a ring. She thought it rather early for the Van Attemas, but she rarely saw anyone else in her seclusion from the outer world – therefore it must be they. A few moments, however, and Greta came in, with a card. Was Mevrouw at home, and could the gentleman see her?

Cecile recognised the card from a distance: she had seen one like it quite recently. Yet she took it up, glanced at it discontentedly, with drawn eyebrows.

What an idea! Why did he do it? What did it mean? But she thought it unnecessary to be impolite and refuse to see him. After all he was a friend of Dolf’s.

“Show Meneer up,” she said.

Greta went, and it seemed to Cecile as though something trembled in the intimacy which filled the room; as if the objects over which her fingers had just passed took another aspect, a look of fright. But Dolf and Christie had not changed; they were still sitting looking at the pictures, with occasional remarks falling softly from their lips. The door opened, and Quaerts entered the room. He had in still greater measure than before his air of shyness as he bowed to Cecile. To her this air was incomprehensible in him, who seemed so strong, so determined.

“I hope you will not think me indiscreet, Mevrouw, taking the liberty to visit you.”

“On the contrary, Mr Quaerts,” she said coldly. “Pray sit down.”

He sat down and placed his hat on the floor. “I am not disturbing you, Mevrouw?”

“Not in the least; I am expecting Mrs Van Attema and her daughters. You were so polite as to leave a card on me; but you know, I see nobody.”

“I know it, Mevrouw. Perhaps it is to that knowledge the indiscretion of my visit is due.”

She looked at him coldly, politely, smilingly. There was a feeling of irritation in her. She felt a desire to ask him frankly why he had come.

“How is that?” she asked, her mannerly smile converting her face into a veritable mask.

“I feared I should not see you for a long time, and I should consider it a great privilege to be allowed to know you more intimately.”

His tone was in the highest degree respectful. She raised her eyebrows, as if she did not understand, but the accent of his voice was so very courteous that she could not find a cold word with which to answer him.

“Are those your two children?” he asked, with a glance towards Dolf and Christie.

“Yes,” she replied. “Get up, boys, and shake hands with Meneer.”

The children approached timidly, and put out their little hands. He smiled, looked at them penetratingly with his small, deep-set eyes, and drew them to him.

“Am I mistaken, or is not the little one very like you?”

“They both resemble their father,” she replied.

It seemed to her she had set a shield of mistrust about herself, from which the children were excluded, within which she found it impossible to draw them. It troubled her that he held them, that he looked at them as he did.

But he set them free, and they went back to their little stools, gentle, quiet, well-behaved.

“Yet they both have something of you,” he insisted.

“Possibly,” she said.

“Mevrouw,” he resumed, as if he had something important to say to her, “I wish to ask you a direct question: tell me honestly, quite honestly, do you think me indiscreet?”

“Because you pay me a visit? No, I assure you, Mr Quaerts. It is very polite of you. Only if I may be candid.”

She gave a little laugh.

“Of course,” he said.

“Then I will confess to you that I fear you will find little in my house to amuse you, I see nobody …”

“I have not called on you for the sake of the people I might meet at your house.”

She bowed, smiling as if he had paid her a special compliment.

“Of course I am very pleased to see you. You are a great friend of Dolf’s, are you not?”

She tried continually to speak differently to him, more coldly, defiantly; but he was too courteous, and she could not do it.

“Yes,” he replied, “Dolf and I have known each other a long time. We have always been great friends, though we are so entirely different.”

“I like him very much; he is always very kind to us.”

She saw him look smilingly at the little table. Some reviews were scattered about it, and a book or two; among these a little volume of Emerson’s essays.

“You told me you did not read much,” he said, mischievously.

“I should think …”

And he pointed to the books.

“Oh,” said she, carelessly, with a slight shrug of her shoulders, “a little …”

She thought him tiresome; why should he remark that she had hidden herself from him? Why, indeed, had she hidden herself from him?

“Emerson,” he read, bending forward a little. “Forgive me,” he added quickly. “I have no right to spy upon your pursuits. But the print is so large; I read it from here.”

“You are far-sighted?” she asked, laughing.

“Yes.”

His politeness, a certain respectfulness, as if he would not venture to touch the tips of her fingers, placed her more at her ease. She still felt antipathy towards him, but there was no harm in his knowing what she read.

“Are you fond of reading?” asked Cecile.

“I do not read much: it’s too great a pleasure to me for that; nor do I read all that appears, I am too eclectic.”

“Do you know Emerson?”

“No …”

“I like his essays very much. They look so far into the future. They place one upon a delightfully exalted level.”

She suited her phrase with an expansive gesture, and her eyes lighted up.

Then she observed that he was following her attentively, with his respectfulness. And she recovered herself; she no longer wished to talk with him about Emerson.

“It is very fine indeed,” was all she said, in a most uninterested voice, to close the conversation. “May I give you some tea?”

“No, thank you, Mevrouw; I never take tea at this time.”

“Do you look upon it with so much scorn?” she asked, jestingly.

He was about to answer, when there was a ring at the bell, and she cried:

“Ah, here they are!”

Amélie entered, with Suzette and Anna. They were a little surprised to see Quaerts. He said he had wanted to call on Mrs Van Even. The conversation became general. Suzette was very merry, full of a dance fair, at which she was going to assist, in a Spanish costume.

“And you, Anna?”

“Oh, no, Auntie,” said Anna, shrinking together with fright. “Imagine me at a fancy fair? I should never sell anybody anything.”

“It is a gift,” said Amélie, with a far-away look.

Quaerts rose: he bowed with a single word to Cecile, when the door opened. Jules came in with books under his arm, on his road home from school.

“How do you do, Auntie? Hallo, Taco, are you going away just as I arrive?”

“You drive me away,” said Quaerts, laughing.

“Ah, Taco, do stay a little longer!” begged Jules, enraptured to see him, in despair that he had chosen this moment to leave.

“Jules, Jules!” cried Amélie, thinking it was the proper thing to do.

Jules pressed Quaerts, took his two hands, forced him, like the spoilt child that he was. Quaerts laughed the more. Jules in his excitement knocked some books from the table.

“Jules, be quiet!” cried Amélie.

Quaerts picked up the books, while Jules persisted in his bad behaviour. As Quaerts replaced the last book he hesitated; he held it in his hand, he looked at the gold lettering: “Emerson …”

Cecile watched him.

“If he thinks I am going to lend it to him he is mistaken,” she thought.

But Quaerts asked nothing: he had released himself from Jules and said goodbye. With a quip at Jules he left.

VII

“Is this the first time he has been to see you?” asked Amélie.

“Yes,” replied Cecile. “A superfluous politeness, was it not?”

“Taco Quaerts is always very correct in matters of etiquette,” said Anna, defending him.

“But this visit was hardly a matter of etiquette,” Cecile said, laughing merrily. “Taco Quaerts seems to be quite infallible in your eyes.”

“He waltzes delightfully!” cried Suzette. “The other day at the Eekhof’s dance …”

Suzette chattered on; there was no restraining Suzette that afternoon; she seemed to hear already the rattling of her castanets.

Jules had a fit of crossness coming on, but he stood still at a window, with the boys.

“You don’t much care about Quaerts, do you, Auntie?” asked Anna.

“I do not find him very sympathetic,” said Cecile. “You know, I am easily influenced by my first impressions. I can’t help it, but I do not like those very healthy, strong people, who look so sturdy and manly, as if they walked straight through life, clearing away everything that stands in their way. It may be a morbid antipathy in me, but I can’t help it that I always dislike a super-abundance of robustness. These strong people look upon others who are not so strong as themselves much as the Spartans used to look upon their deformed children.”

Jules could restrain himself no longer.

“If you think that Taco is no better than a Spartan you know nothing at all about him,” he said fiercely.

Cecile looked at him, but before Amélie could interpose he continued:

“Taco is the only person with whom I can talk about music, and who understands every word I say. And I don’t believe I could talk with a Spartan.”

“Jules, how rude you are!” cried Suzette.

“I don’t care!” he exclaimed furiously, rising suddenly, and stamping his foot. “I don’t care! I won’t hear Taco abused, and Aunt Cecile knows it, and only does it to tease me. I think it is very mean to tease a child, very mean …”

His mother and his sisters tried to calm him with their authority. But he seized his books.

“I don’t care! I won’t have it!”

He was gone in a moment, furious, slamming the door, which muttered at the shock. Amélie shook with nervousness.

“Oh, that boy!” she hissed out, shivering. “That Jules, that Jules …”

“It is nothing,” said Cecile, gently, excusing him. “He is excitable …”

She had grown a little paler, and glanced towards her boys, Dolf and Christie, who looked up in dismay, their mouths wide open with astonishment.

“Is Jules naughty, Mamma?” asked Christie.

She shook her head, smiling. She felt strangely weary, indefinably so. She did not know what it meant; but it seemed to her as if distant perspectives opened up before her eyes, fading away into the horizon, pale, in a great light. Nor did she know what this meant; but she was not angry with Jules, and it seemed to her as if he had not lost his temper with her, but with somebody else. A sense of the enigmatical deepness of life, the unknown of the soul’s mystery, like to a fair, bright endlessness, a faraway silvery light, shot through her in a still rapture.

Then she laughed.

“Jules,” she said, “is so nice when he gets excited.”

Anna and Suzette broke up the circle, and played with the boys, looking at their picture books. Cecile spoke only to her sister. Amélie’s nerves were still quivering.

“How can you defend those tricks of Jules?” she asked, in a relenting voice.

“I think it so noble of him to stand up for those he likes. Don’t you think so too?”

Amélie grew calmer. Why should she be disturbed if Cecile was not?

“Oh yes, yes …” she replied, “I don’t know. He has a good heart I believe, but he is so unmanageable. But, who knows? … perhaps the fault is mine; if I understood better, if I had more tact …”

She grew confused; she sought for something more to say, found nothing, wandering like a stranger through her own thoughts. Then, suddenly, as if struck by a ray of certain knowledge she said …

“But Jules is not stupid. He has a good eye for all sorts of things, and for persons too. For my part, I believe you judge Taco Quaerts wrongly. He is a very interesting man, and a great deal more than a mere sportsman. I don’t know what it is, but there is something about him different from other people, I couldn’t say precisely what …

“I wish Jules got on better at school. He is not stupid, but he learns nothing. He has been two years now in the third class. The boy has no application. He makes me despair of him.”

She was silent again, and Cecile too remained silent.

“Ah,” said Amélie, “I daresay it is not his fault. Perhaps it is my fault. Perhaps he takes after me …”

She looked straight before her: sudden, irrepressible tears filled both her eyes, and fell into her lap.

“Amy, what is the matter?” asked Cecile, kindly.

But Amélie had risen, so that the girls, who were still playing with the children, might not see her tears. She could not restrain them, they streamed down, and she hurried away into the adjacent drawing room, a big room, where Cecile never sat.

“What is the matter, Amy?” repeated Cecile.

She threw her arms about her sister, made her sit down, pressed her head against her shoulder.

“How do I know what it is?” sobbed Amélie. “I do not know, I do not know … I am wretched because of that feeling in my head. After all, I am not mad, am I? Really, I don’t feel mad, or as if I were going mad! But I feel sometimes as if everything had gone wrong in my head, as if I couldn’t think. Everything runs through my brain. It is a terrible feeling!”

“Why don’t you see a doctor?” asked Cecile.

“No, no, he might tell me I was mad, and I am not. He might try to send me into an asylum. No, I won’t see a doctor. I have every reason to be happy otherwise, have I not? I have a kind husband and dear children; I have never had any great sorrow. And yet I sometimes feel deeply miserable, unreasonably miserable! It is always as if I wanted to reach some place and could not succeed. It is always as if I were hemmed in …”

She sobbed violently; a storm of tears rained down her face. Cecile’s eyes, too, were moist; she liked her sister, she felt for her. Amélie was only ten years her senior, and already she had something of an old woman about her, withered, mean, her hair growing grey at the temples, under her veil.

“Cecile, tell me, Cecile,” she said suddenly, through her sobs, “do you believe in God?”

“Of course, Amy.”

“I used to go to church, but it was no use … I don’t go any more … Oh, I am so unhappy! It is very ungrateful of me, I have so much to be grateful for … Do you know, sometimes I feel as if I would like to go at once to God, all at once!”

“Pray, Amy, do not excite yourself so.”

“Ah, I wish I were like you, so calm. Do you feel happy?”

Cecile nodded, smiling. Amélie sighed; she remained lying a moment with her head against her sister’s shoulder. Cecile kissed her, but suddenly Amélie started:

“Be careful,” she whispered, “the girls might come in here. They … they need not see that I have been crying.”

Rising, she arranged herself before the looking-glass, carefully dried her veil with her handkerchief, smoothed the string of her bonnet.

“There, now they won’t know,” she said. “Let us go in again. I am quite calm. You are a dear girl …”

They went into the little room.

“Come, girls, we must go home,” said Amélie, in a voice which was still unsettled.

“Have you been crying, Mamma?” asked Suzette immediately.

“Mamma was a little upset about Jules,” said Cecile quickly.

VIII

Cecile was alone; the children had gone upstairs to get ready for dinner. She tried to get back her distant perspectives, fading into the pale horizon; she tried to get back the silvery endlessness which had shot through her as a vision of light. But it confused her too much: a kaleidoscope of recent petty memories: the children, Quaerts, Emerson, Jules, Suzette, Amélie. How strange, how strange was life! … The outer life; the coming and going of people about us; the sounds of words which they utter in accents of strangeness; the endless changing of phenomena; the concatenation of those phenomena, one with the other; strange, too, the presence of a soul somewhere, like a god within us, never in its essence to be known, save by itself. Often, as now, it seemed to Cecile that all things, even the most commonplace, were strange, very strange; as if nothing in the world were absolutely commonplace; as if everything were strange together; the strange form and exterior expression of a deeper life, that lies hidden behind everything, even the meanest objects; as if everything displayed itself under an appearance, a transitory mask, while underneath lay the reality, the very truth. How strange, how strange was life … For it seemed to her as if she, under all the ordinariness of that afternoon tea-party, had seen something very extraordinary; she did not know what, she could not express nor even think it; it seemed to her as if beneath the coming and going of those people there had glittered something: reality, ultimate truth beneath the appearance of their happening to come to take tea with her.

“What is it? What is it?” she asked. “Am I deluding myself, or is it so? I feel it so …”

It was very vague, and yet so very clear …

It seemed to her as if there was an apparition, a haze of light behind all that had happened there. Behind Amélie, and Jules, and Quaerts, and that book he had just held in his hand … Did those apparitions of light mean anything, or …

But she shook her head.

“I am dreaming, I am giving way to fancy,” she laughed within herself. “It was all very simple; I only make it complicated because I take pleasure in doing so.”

But as soon as she thought this, there was something that denied the thought absolutely; an intuition which should have made her guess the essence of the truth, but which did not succeed in doing so. For sure there was something, something behind all that, hiding away, lurking as the shadow lurks behind the thing …

Her thoughts still wandered over the company she had had, then halted finally at Taco Quaerts. She saw him sitting there again, bending slightly forward towards her, his hands locked together hanging between his knees, as he looked up to her. A barrier of aversion had stood between them like an iron bar. She saw him sitting there again, though he was gone. That again was past; how quickly everything moved; how small was the speck of the present!

She rose, sat down at her writing-table, and wrote:

“Beneath me flows the sea of the past, above me drifts the ether of the future, and I stand midway upon the one speck of reality, so small that I must press my feet firmly together not to lose my hold. And from the speck of my present my sorrow looks down upon the sea, and my longing up to the sky.

“It is scarcely life to stand upon this ledge, so small that I hardly appreciate it, hardly feel it beneath my feet, and yet to me it is the one reality. I am not greatly occupied about it: my eyes only follow the rippling of those waves towards the distant haven, the gliding of those clouds towards the distant spheres: vague manifestations of endless mutability, translucent ephemeras, visible incorporeities. The present is the only thing that is, or rather that seems to be; but not the sea below nor the sky above; for the sea is but memory, and the air but an illusion. Yet memory and illusion are everything: they are the wide inheritance of the soul, which alone can escape from the speck of the moment to float away upon the sea towards the haven which forever retreats, to rock upon the clouds towards the spheres which retreat and retreat …”

Then she reflected. How was it she had written so, and why? How had she come to do it? She went back upon her thoughts: the present, the speck of the present, which was so small … Quaerts, Quaerts’ very attitude, rising up before her just now. Was it in any way owing to him that she had written down these sentences? The past a sorrow, the future an illusion … Why, why illusion?

“And Jules, who likes him,” she thought. “And Amélie, who spoke of him … but she knows nothing. What is there in him, what lurks behind him, what is he himself? Why did he come here? Why do I dislike him so? Do I dislike him? I cannot see into his eyes.”

She would have liked to do this once; she would have liked to make sure that she disliked him, or that she did not – whichever it might be. She was curious to see him once more, to know what she would think and feel about him then …

She had risen from her writing-table, and now lay at full length on the chaise-longue, her arms folded behind her head. She no longer knew what she dreamed, but she felt peacefully happy. Dolf and Christie were coming down the stairs. They came in, it was dinner-time.

“Jules was naughty just now, really, was he not, Mamma?” asked Christie again, with a doubtful face.

She drew the frail little fellow softly to her, took him tightly in her arms, and gently kissed his moist, pale mouth.

“No, really not, my darling!” she said. “He was not naughty, really …”