Ecstasy

CHAPTER II

Cecile passed through the long hall, which was almost a gallery: servants stood by the doorway, a hum of voices came from behind it. The train of her dress rustled against the leaves of a palm fern, and this sound gave a sudden jar to the strung cords of her sensitiveness. She was a little nervous; her eyelids quivered slightly, and her mouth had a very earnest fold.

She walked in; there was much light, but very subdued, the light of candles. Two officers stepped aside for her as she hesitated. Her eyes glanced quickly round in search of Mrs Hoze. She observed her standing with two or three of her guests, with her grey hair, her kindly and yet haughty expression, rosy and smooth, with scarcely a wrinkle. Mrs Hoze advanced towards her.

“How charming of you not to have disappointed me!” she said, pressing Cecile’s hand, effuse in the urbane amiability of her hospitality.

She introduced Cecile here and there; Cecile heard names, which immediately afterwards escaped her.

“General, allow me … Mrs Van Even,” Mrs Hoze whispered, and left her, to speak to someone else. Cecile answered the general cursorily. She was very pale, and her eyelids quivered more and more. She ventured to throw a glance round the room.

She stood next to the general, forcing herself to listen, so as not to give strikingly silly replies; she was tall, slender and straight, her shoulders, blonde as marble in sunlight, blossoming out of a sombre vase of black: fine black trailing tulle, sprinkled over with small jet spangles: glittering black upon dull, transparent black. A girdle with tassels of jet, hanging low, was wound about her waist. So she stood, blonde; blonde and black, a little sombre amid the warmth and light of other toilettes; and, for unique relief, two diamonds in her ears, like dewdrops.

Her thin suede-covered fingers trembled as she manipulated her fan, a black tulle transparency, on which the same jet spangles glittered with black lustre. Her breath came short behind the strokes of the translucent fan as she talked with the general, a spare, bald, distinguished man, not in uniform, but wearing his decorations.

Mrs Hoze’s guests walked about, greeting one another here and there, a continuous humming of voices. Cecile saw Taco Quaerts come up to her; he bowed before her; she bowed coldly in return, not offering him her hand. He lingered a moment by her, exchanged a single word, then passed on, greeting other acquaintances.

Mrs Hoze had taken the arm of an old gentleman; a procession formed itself slowly. The servants threw back the doors; a table glittered beyond. The general offered Cecile his arm, and she looked behind her with a slow movement of her neck. She closed her eyelids a moment, to prevent the quivering which oppressed them. Her eyebrows contracted slightly with a disappointment, but smilingly she laid the tips of her fingers on the general’s arm, and with her closed fan smoothed away a crease from the tulle of her train.

II

When Cecile was seated she found Quaerts sitting on her right. Her disappointment vanished, the disappointment she had felt at not being taken in to dinner by him; but when she addressed him her look remained cold, as usual. She had what she wished; the expectation with which she had accepted this invitation was now fulfilled. Mrs Hoze had seen Cecile at the Van Attemas, and had gladly undertaken to restore the young widow to society. Cecile knew that Quaerts was one of Mrs Hoze’s visitors; she had heard from Amélie that he was among the invited, and she had accepted. That Mrs Hoze, remembering Cecile had met Quaerts before, had placed him next to her, was easy to understand.

Cecile was very inquisitive about herself. How would she feel? At least interested; she could not disguise that from herself. She was certainly interested in him, remembering what Jules had said, what Amélie had said. She now felt that behind the mere sportsman there lurked another, whom she longed to know. Why? What concern was it of hers? She did not know; but in any case, as a matter of simple curiosity, it awoke her interest. At the same time she remained on her guard; she did not think his visit had been strictly in order, and there were stories in which the name of a married woman was coupled with his.

She succeeded in freeing herself from her conversation with the general, who seemed to feel himself called upon to entertain her, and it was she who first spoke to Taco Quaerts.

“Have you begun to give Jules his riding-lessons?” she asked with a smile.

He looked at her, evidently a little surprised at her voice and her smile, which were both new to him. He returned a bare answer:

“Yes, Mevrouw, we were at the riding school only yesterday …”

She thought him clumsy to let the conversation drop like that, but he inquired with that slight shyness which became a charm in him who was so manly:

“So you are going out again, Mevrouw?”

She thought – she had thought so before also – that his questions were such as were never asked. There was always something strange about them.

“Yes.” she replied simply, not knowing indeed what else to say.

“Pardon me …” he said seeing that his words embarrassed her, “I asked, because …”

“Because?” she repeated, surprised.

He took courage, and explained: “When Dolf spoke of you he always used to say that you lived quietly … Now I could never picture you to myself returned among society; I had formed an idea of you, and now it seems to me that idea was a mistaken one.”

“An idea?” she asked. “What idea?”

“Perhaps you will not be pleased when I tell you. Perhaps even as it is you are displeased with me”, he said nervously.

“I have not the slightest reason to be either pleased or displeased with you. But please tell me what was your idea …”

“You are interested in it?”

“If you will tell me candidly, yes. But you must be candid!” and she threatened him with her finger.

“Then …” he began, “I thought of you as a woman of culture, desirable as an acquaintance – I still think all that – and as a woman who cared nothing for the world beyond her own sphere; – and that … I can now think no longer. I should like to say, and risk your thinking me very strange, that I am sorry no longer to be able to think of you in that way. I would almost have preferred not to meet you here …”

He laughed, perhaps to soften what was strange in his words. She looked at him with amazement, her lips half-opened, and suddenly it struck her that for the first time she was looking into his eyes. She looked into his eyes, and saw that they were a dark, dark grey around the black of the pupil. There was something in his eyes, she could not say what, but something magnetic, as if she could never again take away her own from them.

“How strange you can be sometimes!” she said, the words coming intuitively.

“Oh, I beg you, please do not be angry,” he almost implored her. “I was so glad when you spoke kindly to me. You were a little distant to me when last I saw you, and I should be so sorry if I angered you. Perhaps I am strange, but how could I possibly be commonplace with you? How could I possibly, even if you were to take offence? … Have you taken offence?”

“I ought to, but I suppose I must forgive you, if only for your candour!” she said, laughing. “Otherwise your remarks are anything but gallant.”

“And yet I intended no unmannerliness.”

“I suppose not.”

She remembered that she was at a big dinner-party. The guests ranged before and around her; the footmen waiting behind; the light of the candles sparkling on the silver and touching the glass with all the hues of the rainbow; on the table prone mirrors like sheets of water, surrounded by flowers, little lakes amidst moss-roses and lilies of the valley.

She sat silent a moment, still smiling, looking at her hand, a pretty hand, like a white precious thing upon the tulle of her gown; one of the fingers bore several rings, scintillating sparks of blue and white.

The general turned to her again; they exchanged a few words; the general was delighted that Mrs Van Even’s right-hand neighbour kept her entertained, and so enabled him to get on with his dinner. Quaerts turned to the lady on his right.

Both were pleased when they were able to resume their conversation.

“What were we talking about just now?” she asked.

“I know!” he replied mischievously.

“The general interrupted us …”

“You were not angry with me!”

“Oh yes,” she replied, laughing softly. “It was about your idea of me, was it not? Why could you no longer conceive me returned to society?”

“I thought you had grown a person apart.”

“But why?”

“From what Dolf said, from what I thought myself, when I saw you.”

“And why are you sorry now that I am not ‘a person apart’?” she asked, still laughing.

“From vanity: because I have made a mistake. And yet, perhaps I have not made a mistake …”

They looked at one another, and both, whatever else they might have been thinking, now thought the same thing: namely, that they must be careful with their words, because they were speaking of something very delicate and tender, something as frail as a soap-bubble, which could easily break if they spoke of it too loudly, the mere breath of their words might be sufficient. Yet she ventured to ask:

“And why do you believe that you are not mistaken?”

“I don’t quite know. Perhaps because I wish it so. Perhaps, too, because it is so true as to leave no room for doubt. Ah, yes, I am almost sure that I had judged rightly. Do you know why? Because otherwise I should have hidden myself and been matter-of-fact, and I find this impossible with you. I have given you more of my very self in this short moment than I have given people whom I have known for years in the course of all those years. Therefore, surely you must be a person apart.”

“What do you mean by ‘a person apart’?”

He smiled, he opened his eyes, she looked into them again, deeply into them.

“You understand quite well what I mean,” he said.

Fear for the delicate thing that might break came between them again. They understood one another as with a freemasonry of comprehension. Her eyes were magnetically held upon his.

“You are very strange!” she said again, automatically.

“No,” he said calmly, shaking his head, his eyes upon hers. “I am certain that I am not strange to you, although at this moment you may think so.”

She was silent.

“I am so glad to be able to talk to you like this!” he whispered. “It makes me very happy. And see, no one knows anything of it. We are at a big dinner: the people next to us catch our words: yet there is no one among them understands us, or grasps the subject of our conversation. Do you know the reason for this?”

“No,” she murmured.

“I will tell you; at least I think it is this: perhaps you know better, for you must know things better than I, you being so much subtler. I personally believe that each person has an environment about him, an atmosphere, and that he meets other people who have environments or atmospheres about them, sympathetic or antipathetic to his own.”

“That is pure mysticism!” she said.

“No,” Quaerts replied; “it is all very simple. When the two circles are antipathetic, each repels the other; but when they are sympathetic, then they glide one over the other with smaller or larger folds of sympathy. In rarer cases the circles almost coincide, but they always remain separate … Do you really think this so mystical?”

“One might call it the mysticism of sentiment. But I thought something of the sort myself …”

“Yes, yes, I can understand that,” he continued, calmly, as if he expected it. “I believe those around us could not understand what we are saying, because we two alone have sympathetic environments. But my atmosphere is of grosser texture than your own, which is very delicate.”

She was silent again, remembering her aversion to him – did she still feel that?

“What do you think of my theory?” he asked.

She looked up; her white fingers trembled in the tulle of her gown. She made a poor effort to smile.

“I think you go too far!” she stammered.

“You think I rush into hyperbole?”

She would have liked to say yes, but could not.

“No,” she said; “not that.”

“Am I wearying you? …”

She looked at him; deep into his eyes. She made a gesture to say no. She would have liked to say that he was too unconventional; but she could not find words. A drowsiness oppressed her whole being. The table, the people, the whole dinner seemed to her as through a haze of light. When she recovered she saw that a pretty woman sitting opposite, who now looked another way out of politeness, was gazing at her steadfastly. She did not know why this interested her, but she asked Quaerts: “Who is that lady over there, in pale blue, with dark hair?”

She saw that he started.

“That is young Mrs Hijdrecht,” he said calmly, his voice a little raised.

She turned pale; her fan flapped nervously to and fro. He had named the woman rumour said to be his mistress.

III

It seemed to Cecile as though that delicate, frail thing, that soap-bubble, had burst. She wondered if he had spoken to that dark-haired woman also of circles of sympathy. So soon as she was able, Cecile observed Mrs Hijdrecht. She had a warm, dull-gold complexion, fiery dark eyes, a mouth as of fresh blood. Her dress was cut very low; her throat and the slope of her breast came out insolently handsome, brutally luscious. A row of diamonds encircled her neck with a narrow line of white brilliancy. Cecile felt ill at ease. She looked away from the young woman, and turned to Quaerts, drawn magnetically towards him. She saw a cloud of melancholy stealing over the upper half of his face; over his forehead and his eyes, in which appeared a slight look of age. And she heard him say:

“What do you care about that lady’s name; we were just in the middle of such a charming conversation …”

She too felt sad now; sad for the soap-bubble that had burst. She did not know why, but she felt pity for him; sudden, deep, spontaneous pity.

“We can resume our conversation,” she said softly.

“Do not let us take it up where we left it,” he rejoined with feigned airiness. “I had become too serious.”

He spoke of other things: she answered little, and their conversation languished. They each occupied themselves with their neighbours. The dinner came to an end. Mrs Hoze rose and took the arm of the gentleman next her. The general escorted Cecile to the drawing-room, in the slow procession of the others.

The ladies remained alone, the men went to the smoking-room with young Hoze. Cecile saw Mrs Hoze coming towards her. She asked her if she had not been wearied at dinner; they sat down by one another, in a confidential tête-à-tête.

Cecile compelled herself to reply to Mrs Hoze, but she would gladly have gone elsewhere, to weep quietly, because everything passed so quickly, because the speck of the present was so small. Past, again, was the sweet charm of their conversation at dinner about sympathy, a fragile intimacy amid the worldly splendours about them. Past that moment, never, never to return: life sped over it with its onflowing, a flood of all-obliterating water. Oh, the sorrow of it; to think how quickly, like an intangible perfume, everything speeds away, everything that is dear to us …

Mrs Hoze left her; Suzette Van Attema came to talk to Cecile. She was in pink, and shining in all her aspect as if gold dust had rained over her, upon her movements, her eyes, her words. She spoke volubly to Cecile, telling interminable tales, to which Cecile did not always listen. Suddenly, through Suzette’s prattling, Cecile heard the voices of two women whispering behind her; she only caught a word here and there:

“Emilie Hijdrecht, you know …”

“Only gossip, I think; Mrs Hoze does not seem to heed it …”

“Ah! I am afraid I know better.”

The voices were lost in the hum of others. Cecile caught a sound just like Quaerts’ name. Suzette asked suddenly:

“Do you know young Mrs Hijdrecht, Auntie?”

“No.”

“Over there, with the diamonds. You know, they talk about her and Quaerts. Mamma does not believe it. He is a great flirt. You sat next to him, did you not?”

Cecile suffered severely in the secrecy of her sensitiveness. She shrank entirely within herself, doing all she could to appear different from what she was. Suzette saw nothing of her discomfiture.

The men returned. Cecile looked to see whether Quaerts would speak to Mrs Hijdrecht. But he wholly ignored her presence, and even, when he saw Suzette sitting with Cecile, came over to them to pay a compliment to Suzette, to whom he had not yet spoken.

It was a relief for Cecile when she was able to go. She longed for solitude, to recover herself, to return from her abstraction. In her brougham she scarcely dared breathe, fearful of something, she could not say what. When she reached home she felt a stifling heaviness which seemed to paralyse her, and with difficulty she passed up the stairway to her dressing-room.

And yet, as she stepped, there fell over her, as from the roof of her house, a haze of protecting safety. Slowly she went up, her hand, holding a long glove, pressing the velvet banister of the stairway. She felt as if she were about to swoon.

“But, my God … I am fond of him, I love him, I love him!” she whispered between her trembling lips, with sudden amazement.

It was as in a rhythm of astonishment that she wearily mounted the stairway, higher and higher, in a still surprise of sudden light.

“But I am fond of him, I love him, I love him!”

It sounded like a melody through her weariness.

She reached her dressing-room, where Greta had lighted the gas; she dragged herself inside. The door of the nursery stood half open; she entered it and threw up the curtain of Christie’s little bed. She fell on her knees, and looked at the child. The boy partly awoke, still in the warmth of a deep sleep; he crept a little from between the sheets, laughed and threw his arms about Cecile’s bare neck.

“Mamma dear!”

She pressed him tightly in the embrace of her slender white arms; she kissed his raspberry mouth, his drowsy eyes. Meantime the refrain sang on in her heart, right across the weariness, which broke, as it were, by the cot of her child: “I am fond of him, I love him, I love him, I love him …!”

IV

The mystery! Suddenly, on the staircase, it had beamed open before her in her soul, like a great flower of light, a mystic rose with glistening leaves, into whose golden heart she now looked for the first time. The analysis of which she was so fond was no longer possible: this was the Enigma of Love, the eternal Enigma, that had beamed open within her, transfixing with its rays the width and breadth of her soul, in the midst of which it had burst forth like a sun in the universe; it was no longer of use to ask, why, why. It was no longer of use to ponder and dream on it; it could only be accepted as the inexplicable phenomenon of the soul; it was a creation of sentiment, of which the god who created it would be as impossible to find in the essence of his reality as the God who had created the world out of chaos. It was the light breaking forth from the darkness; it was heaven disclosed above the earth. It existed, it was reality and no chimera; for it was wholly and entirely within her; a sudden, incontestable, everlasting truth, a felt fact, so real in its ethereal incorporeity that it seemed to her as if before that moment she had never known, never thought, never felt.

It was the beginning: the opening out of herself, the dawn of her soul’s life, the joyful miracle, the miraculous inception of love.

She passed the days which followed in self contemplation, wandering through her dreams as through a new country, rich with great light, where distant landscapes paled into light, fantastic, like meteors in the night, quivering in incandescence upon the horizon. It seemed to her as though she, a light, pious pilgrim, progressed along paradisial oases towards those distant scenes, there to find still more: the Goal … Only a little while ago her prospect had been but narrow and forlorn – her children gone from her, her loneliness wrapping her about like a night – and now, now she saw before her a long road, a wide horizon, glittering the whole way in light; nothing but light …

That was, all that was! It was no fine poet’s dream; it existed, it gleamed in her heart like a sacred jewel, like a mystic rose with stamina of light! A freshness as of dew fell over her, over her whole life; over the life of her senses; over the life of outward appearances; over the life of her soul; over the life of the truth indwelling. The world was new, fresh with young dew, the very Eden of Genesis, and her soul was a soul of newness, born anew in a metempsychosis of greater perfection, of closer approach to the ideal, that distant Goal – there, far away, hidden like a god in the sanctity of its ecstasy of light, in the radiance of its own being.

V

Cecile did not go out for a few days; she saw nobody. One morning she received a note; it ran:

“MEVROUW,

“I do not know if you were offended at my mystical utterances. I cannot recall distinctly what I said, but I remember that you told me that I was going too far. I hope you have not taken my indiscretion amiss. It would be a great pleasure to me to come to see you. May I hope that you will permit me to call on you this afternoon?

“With most respectful regards,

“QUAERERTS.”

As the bearer was waiting for a reply, she responded:

“DEAR SIR,

“I shall be pleased to see you this afternoon.

“CECILE VAN EVEN.”

When she was left alone she read the note over and over again; she looked at the paper with a smile, looked at the handwriting.

“How strange,” she thought. “This note, and everything that happens. How strange everything is!”

She remained dreaming a long time, with the note in her hand. Then she carefully folded it up, rose, walked up and down the room, sought in a bowl full of visiting cards, taking out two which she looked at for a long time. “Quaerts …” The name sounded differently from before … How strange it all was! And finally she locked away the letter and the two cards in a little empty drawer of her writing-table.

She stayed at home, and sent the children out with the nurse. She hoped that no one else would call, neither Mrs Hoze nor the Van Attemas. And staring before her she reflected a long, long time. There was so much she did not understand: properly speaking she understood nothing. As far as she was concerned, she had fallen in love; there was no analysing that, it must simply be accepted. But he, what did he feel, what were his emotions?

Her earlier antipathy? Sport … he was fond of sport ,she remembered … His visit, which was an impertinence … He seemed to wish now to atone, not to call again without her permission. His mystical conversation at the dinner-party … And Mrs Hijdrecht …

“How strange he is,” she reflected. “I cannot understand him; but I love him, I cannot help it. Love, love … how strange that it should exist! I never realised that it existed! I am no longer myself: I am becoming someone else? Why does he wish to see me? … And how singular: I have been married, I have two children! I feel just as if I had none. And yet, I am so fond of my little boys! But the other thing is so beautiful, so bright, so transparent, as if that alone were truth. Perhaps love is the only truths … It is as if everything in and about me were turning to crystal!”

She looked around her, surprised and troubled that her surroundings should have remained the same: the rosewood furniture, the folds of the curtains, the withered landscape of the Scheveningen Road outside. But it snowed, still and softly, with great slow flakes which fell heavily, as if they would purify the world. The snow was fresh and new, but yet the snow was not real nature to her, who always saw her distant landscape quivering in pure incandescence of light.

At four o’clock he came. She saw him for the first time since the self-revelation which had flashed upon her astounded sense. And when he came she felt the singularly rapturous feeling that in her eyes he was a demi-god, that he perfected himself in her imagination, that everything in him was good. Now that he sat there before her, she saw him for the first time, and she saw that he was physically beautiful. The strength of his body was exalted into the strength of a young god, broad, and yet slender, sinewed as with marble sinews of a statue; all this seeming so strange beneath the modernness of his frock coat. She saw his face completely for the first time. The cut of it was Roman, the head that of a Roman emperor, with its sensual profile, its small full mouth, living red under the brown gold of his curled moustache. The forehead was low, the hair cut very close, like an enveloping black casque, and over that forehead, with its one line, hovered sadness, like a mist of age, strangely contradicting the wanton youthfulness of mouth and chin. And then his eyes, which she already knew, his eyes of mystery, small and deep set, with the deeper depth of their pupils, which seemed now to veil themselves and then again to look out.

But strangest was, that from all his beauty, from all his being, from all his attitude, with his hands folded between his knees, there came out to her a magnetism, which dominated her, drawing her irresistibly towards him; as if she had suddenly, from the first moment of her self-revelation, become his, to serve him in all things. She felt this magnetism attracting her so violently that every power in her melted into heaviness and weakness. A weakness as if he might take her and carry her away, anywhere, wherever he wished; a weakness as if she no longer possessed her own thoughts, as if she had become nothing – apart from him.

She felt this intensely; and then came the very strangest of all, when he continued to sit there, at a respectful distance, his eyes bearing a respectful look, his voice falling in respectful accents. That was the strangest of all, that she saw him beneath her, while she felt him above her; that she wished to be his inferior, and he seemed to consider her higher than himself. She did not know how suddenly she so intensely realised this, but she did realise it, and it was the first pain love gave her.

“You are kind not to be angry with me,” he began.

There was often something caressing in his voice; it was not clear, and now and then even a little broken, but this just gave it a certain charm of quality.

“Why?” she asked.

“In the first place I did wrong to pay you that visit. Secondly, I was ill-mannered at Mrs Hoze’s dinner.”

“A whole catalogue of sins!” she laughed.

“Surely!” he continued, “and you are very good to bear me no malice.”

“Perhaps that is because I always hear so much that is good about you at Dolf’s.”

“Have you never noticed anything odd in Dolf?” he asked.

“No; what do you mean?”

“Has it never struck you that he has more of an eye for the great combinations of political questions than for the details of his own surroundings?”

She looked at him, smiling, astonished.

“Yes,” she said. “You are right. You know him well.”

“Oh, we have known one another from boyhood. It is curious; he never sees the things that lie close to his hand; he does not penetrate them. He is intellectually far-sighted.”

“Yes,” she assented.

“He does not know his wife, nor his daughters, nor Jules. He does not see what they have in them. He identifies each of them by means of a cypher fixed in his mind, which he forms out of the two most prominent traits of character, generally a little opposed. Mrs Van Attema seems to him to have a heart of gold, but to be not very practical: so much for her. Jules: a musical genius, but an untractable boy: settled.”

“Yes, he does not go very deeply into character,” she said. “For there is a great deal more in Amélie …”

“And he is quite at sea about Jules,” said Quaerts. “Jules is thoroughly tractable, and anything but a genius. Jules is nothing more than an exceedingly receptive boy, with a little rudimentary talent. And you … he misconceives you, too!”

“Me?”

“Entirely! Do you know what he thinks of you?”

“No.”

“He thinks you – let me begin by telling you this – very, very sympathetic, and a dear little mother to your boys. But he thinks also that you are incapable of growing very fond of anyone; he thinks you a woman without passion, and melancholy for no reason, except for weariness. He thinks you weary yourself!”

She looked at him quite alarmed, and saw him laughing mischievously.

“Never in my life am I weary!” she said, and laughed, too, with full conviction.

“Of course not!” he replied.

“How can you know?” she asked.

“I feel it!” he answered. “And, what is more, I know that the base of your character is not melancholy, not dark, but enthusiasm and light.”

“I am not so sure of that myself,” she scarcely murmured, heavy, with that weakness within her; happy, that he should estimate her so exactly. “And do you, too,” she continued, very airily, “think I am incapable of loving anyone very much?”

“Now that is a matter which I am not competent to judge,” he said, with such frankness that his whole countenance suddenly grew younger, and the crease disappeared from his forehead. “I cannot tell that!”

“You seem to know a great deal about me!”

“I have seen you so often already.”

“Barely four times.”

“That is often.”

She laughed brightly.

“Is that a compliment?”

“It is meant for one,” he replied. “You do not know how much it means to me to see you.”

How much it meant to him to see her! And she felt herself so small, so weak, and him so great, so perfect. With what decision he spoke, how certain he seemed of it all! It almost saddened her that it meant so much to him to see her a single time. He placed her too high; she did not wish to be placed so high.

And that delicate fragile something hung between them again, as it had hung between them at dinner. Then it had been broken by one ill-chosen word. Oh, that it might not be broken now!

“And now let us talk about you!” she said, with affected frivolousness. “Do you know that you take all sorts of pains to understand me, and that I know nothing of you? That cannot be fair.”

“If you knew how much I have given you already! I give myself to you entirely; from others I always conceal myself.”

“Why?”

“Because I am afraid of the others!”

“You afraid?”

“Yes. You think that I do not look as if I could feel afraid? I have something …”

He hesitated.

“Well?” she asked.

“I have something that is very dear to me, and about which I am very anxious, lest any should touch it.”

“And that is?”

“My soul. I am not afraid of your touching it, for you would not hurt it. On the contrary, I know it is very safe with you.”

She would have liked once more, mechanically, to reproach him with his strangeness: she could not. But he guessed her thoughts.

“You think me a very odd person, do you not? But how can I be otherwise with you?”

She felt her love expanding within her heart, widening it to its full capacity within her. Her love was as a domain, in which he wandered.

“I do not understand you yet; I do not know you yet!” she said softly. “I do not see you yet …”

“Would you be in any way interested to know me, to see me?”

“Surely.”

“Let me tell you then; I should like to do so, it would be a great joy to me.”

“I am listening to you most attentively.”

“One question beforehand: You cannot endure an athlete?”

“On the contrary, I do not mind the display and development of strength so long as it is not too near to me. Just as I like to hear a storm, when I am safely within doors. And I can look at acrobats with great pleasure.”

He laughed quietly.

“Nevertheless you held my particular predilection in great aversion?”

“Why should you think that?”

“I felt it.”

“You feel everything,” she said, almost in alarm. “You are a dangerous person.”

“So many think that. Shall I tell you why you took a special aversion in my case?”

“Yes.”

“Because you did not understand it in me; even though you may perhaps have observed that physical exercise is one of my strong passions.”

“I do not understand you at all.”

“I think you are right … But do not let me talk so much of myself; I prefer to talk of you.”

“And I of you. So be gallant to me for the first time in our acquaintance, and speak … of yourself.”

He bowed, with a smile.

“You will not think me tiresome?”

“Not at all. You were telling me of yourself. You were speaking of your love of exercise …”

“Ah! Yes … Can you understand that there are in me two distinct individuals?”

“Two distinct …”

“Yes. My soul, my real self; and then … there remains the other.”

“And what is that other?”

“Something ugly, something common, something grossly primitive. In one word, the brute.”

She shrugged her shoulders lightly.

“How dark you paint yourself. The same thing is more or less true of everybody.”

“Yes, but it troubles me more than I can tell you. I suffer; the lower hurts my soul, the higher, more than the whole world hurts it. Now do you know why I feel such a sense of security when I am with you? It is because I do not feel the brute that is in me … Let me go on a little longer, let me shrive myself; it does me good to tell you this. You thought I had only seen you four times? But I saw you often formerly, in the theatre, in the street, everywhere. There was always something strange for me when I saw you in the midst of accidental surroundings. And always, when I looked at you, I felt as if I were lifted to something more beautiful. I cannot express myself more clearly. There is something in your face, in your eyes, in your movements, I do not know what, but something better than in other people, something that addressed itself, most eloquendy, to my soul only. All this is so subtle and so strange … But you are no doubt thinking again that I am going too far, are you not? Or that I am raving?”

“Certainly, I never should have thought you such an idealist, such a sensitivist,” said Cecile softly.

“Have I leave to speak to you like this?”

“Why not?” she asked, to escape the necessity of replying directly.

“You might possibly fear lest I should compromise you …”

“I do not fear that for an instant!” she replied, haughtily, as in utter contempt of the world.

They were silent for a moment. That delicate, fragile thing, that might so easily break, still hung between them, thin, like a gossamer between them, lightly joining them together. An atmosphere of embarrassment hovered about them. They felt that the words which had passed between them were full of significance. Cecile waited for him to continue; but as he was silent she boldly took up the conversation:

“On the contrary, I value it highly that you have spoken to me like this. You were right; you have indeed given me much of yourself. I wish to assure you of my sympathy. I believe I understand you better now that I see you better.”

“I want very much to ask you something,” he said, “but I dare not.”

She smiled to encourage him.

“No, really I dare not,” he repeated.

“Shall I guess?” Cecile asked, jestingly.

“Yes; what do you think it is?”

She glanced round the room until her eye rested on the little table covered with books.

“The loan of Emerson’s Essays?” she hazarded.

But Quaerts shook his head and laughed.

“No, thank you,” he said. “I have bought the volume long ago. No, no; it is a much greater favour than the loan of a book.”

“Be bold then, and ask it,” Cecile went on jestingly.

“I dare not,” he said again. “I should not know how to put my request into words.”

She looked at him earnestly, into his eyes gazing steadily upon her, and then she said:

“I know what you want to ask me, but I will not say it. You must do that: so seek your words.”

“If you know, will you permit me then to say it?”

“Yes, for if my surmise is correct, it is nothing that you may not ask.”

“And yet it would be a great favour … But let me warn you beforehand that I look upon myself as someone of a much lower order than you.”

A shadow passed across her face, her mouth had a little contraction of pain, and she pressed him, a little unnerved:

“I beg you, ask. Just ask me simply.”

“It is a wish, then, that sympathy were sealed between you and me. Would you allow me to come to you when I am unhappy? I always feel so happy in your presence, so soothed, so different from the state of ordinary life, for with you I live only my better, my true self – you know what I mean.”

Everything melted again within her into weakness and heaviness; he placed her upon too high a pedestal; she was happy, because of what he asked her, but sad that he felt himself less than she.

“Very well,” she said, nevertheless, with a clear voice. “It is as you wish.”

And she gave him her hand, her beautiful, long, white hand, where on one white finger gleamed the sparks of jewels, white and blue. A moment, very reverently, he pressed her finger-tips between his own.

“Thank you,” he said in a hushed voice, a voice that was a little broken.

“Are you often unhappy?” asked Cecile.

“Always …” he replied, almost humbly, and as though embarrassed at having to confess it. “I do not know what it means, only that it has always been so. And yet from my childhood I have enjoyed much that people call happiness. But yet, yet … I suffer through myself. It is I who do myself the most hurt. And after that the world … and I must always hide myself. To the world I only show the individual who rides and fences and hunts, who goes into society and is dangerous for young married women …”

He laughed with his bad, low laugh, looking aslant into her eyes; she remained calmly gazing at him.

“Beyond that I give them nothing. I hate them; I have nothing in common with them, thank God!”

“You are too proud,” said Cecile. “Each of those people has his own sorrow, just as you have; the one suffers a little more coarsely; but they all suffer. And in that they all resemble yourself.”

“Each taken by himself, perhaps! But that is not how I take them; I take them in the lump, and I hate them. Do not you?”

“No,” she said calmly. “I do not believe I am capable of hating.”

“You are strong within yourself. You are sufficient to yourself.”

“No, no, not that, really not; but you … you are unjust towards the world.”

“Possibly: why does it always give me pain? Alone with you I forget that it exists, the outside world. Do you understand now why I was so sorry to see you at Mrs Hoze’s? You seemed to me to have lowered yourself. And it was because … because of this peculiarity I saw in you that I did not seek your acquaintance earlier. This acquaintance was fatally bound to come, and so I waited …”

Fate, what would it bring her? thought Cecile. But she could not think deeply; she seemed to herself to be dreaming of beautiful and subtle things which did not exist for other people, which only floated between them two.

There was no longer need to look upon them as illusions, it was as if she had overtaken the future! One short moment only did this endure as happiness; then again she felt pain, on account of his reverence.

VI

He was gone and she was alone, waiting for the children. She neglected to ring for the lamp to be lighted, and the twilight of the late afternoon darkened in the room. She sat motionless, and looked out before her at the withered trees.

“Why should I not be happy?” she thought. “He is happy with me; he is himself with me only; he cannot be so among other people. Why then can I not be happy?”

She felt pain; her soul suffered, it seemed to her for the first time. This, perhaps, was because now for the first time her soul had not been itself but another. It seemed to her that another woman must have spoken to him, to Quaerts, just now.

An exalted woman: a woman of illusions – the woman, in fact, he saw in her, and not the woman she was: lowly, a woman of love. Ah, she had had to restrain herself not to ask him: “Why do you speak to me like that? Why do you raise up your beautiful thoughts to me? Why do you not rather let them drip down upon me? For see, I do not stand so high as you think; and see, I am at your feet, and my eyes seek you above me.”

Should she have told him that she deceived him? Should she have asked him: “How is it that I lower myself when I mix with other people? What then do you see in me? I am only a woman, a woman of feebleness and dreams. I have come to love you, I do not know why.”

Should she have opened his eyes and said to him: “Look upon your own soul in a mirror; look upon yourself and see how you are a god walking upon the earth: a god who knows everything because he feels it, feels it because he knows it …” Everything? … No … not everything; for he deceived himself, this god, and thought to find an equal in her, who was but his creature. Should she have declared all this, at the cost of her modesty and his happiness? For this happiness – she felt perfectly assured – lay in seeing her in the way that he saw her.

“With me he is happy!” she thought. “And sympathy is sealed between us … It was not friendship, nor did he speak of love; he called it simply sympathy … With me he feels only his real self, and not that other … the brute that is in him … the brute …”

Then there came drifting over her a gloom as of gathering clouds, and she shuddered before that which suddenly rolled through her: a broad stream of blackness, as though its waters were filled with mud, which bubbled up in troubled rings, growing larger and larger. She took fear before this stream, and tried not to see it; but it sullied all her landscapes – so bright before, with their horizons of light – now with a sky of ink smeared above, like filthy night.

“How high he thinks, how noble his thoughts are!” Cecile still forced herself to imagine, in spite of …

But the magic was gone: her admiration of his lofty thoughts tumbled away into an abyss; then suddenly, by a lightning flash through the night of that inken sky, she saw clearly that his exalted intellect was a supreme sorrow to her.

It had become quite dark in the room. Cecile, afraid of the lightning which revealed her to herself, fell back upon the cushions of the settee.

She hid her face in her hands, pressing her eyes, as though she wished, after this moment of self-revelation, to be blind for ever.

But demoniacally it raged through her, a hurricane of hell, a storm of passion, which blew up out of the darkness of the landscape, lashing up the tossed waves of the foul stream towards the sky of ink.

“Oh!” she moaned. “I am unworthy of him … unworthy …”