Ecstasy

CHAPTER III

Quaerts lived on the Plein, above a tailor, where he occupied two small rooms, furnished in the most ordinary style. He might have lived far better, but he was indifferent to comfort; he never gave it a thought in his own place; when he came across it elswhere it did not attract him. But it troubled Jules that Quaerts should live in this fashion, and the boy had long wished to embellish his rooms. He was busy at this moment hanging some trophies on an armourrack, standing on a pair of steps, humming a tune he remembered from an opera. Quaerts gave no heed to what Jules was doing; he lay immobile on the sofa, at full length, in his flannels, unshorn, his eyes fixed upon the florid decoration of the Palace of Justice, tracing a background of architecture behind the withered trees of the Plein.

“Look, Taco, will this do?” asked Jules, after hanging an Algerian sabre between two creeses, and draping the folds of a Javanese sarong between.

“Beautifully,” answered Quaerts. But he did not look at the trophies, and continued gazing at the Palace. He lay motionless. There was no thought in him; only listless dissatisfaction with himself, and consequent sadness. For three weeks he had led a life of debauch, to deaden consciousness, or perhaps he did not know precisely what: something that was in him, something that was fine, but tiresome in ordinary life. He had begun with shooting, in North Brabant, over a friend’s land. It lasted a week; there were eight of them; sport in the open air, followed by sporting dinners, with not only a great deal of wine, certainly the best, but still more genever, also very fine, like a liqueur. Turbulent excursions on horseback in the neighbourhood; madnesses perpetrated at a farm – the peasant-woman carried round in a barrel, and locked up in the cowhouse – mischievous exploits worthy only of unruly boys and savages; at the end of it all, in a police-court, a summons, with a fine and damages. Wound up to a pitch of excitement with too much sport, too much oxygen, and too much wine, five of the pack, among whom was Quaerts, had gone on to Brussels. There they had stayed almost a fortnight, leading a life of continual excess – champagne and larking; a wild joy of living, which, naturally enough at first, has in the end to be screwed up and screwed up higher still, to make it last a couple of days longer; the last nights spent weariedly over écarté, with none but the fixed idea of winning, the exhaustion of all their violence already pulsing through their bodies, like nervous relaxation, their eyes gazing without expression upon the cards of the game.

During that time Quaerts had only once thought of Cecile; and he had not followed up the thought. She had no doubt arisen three or four times in his brain, a vague image, white and transparent; an apparition which had vanished again immediately, leaving no trace of its passage. All this time too he had not written to her, and it had only once struck him that a silence of three weeks, after their last conversation, must at least seem strange to her. There it had remained. He was back now; he had lain three days long at home on his bed, on his sofa, tired, feverish, dissatisfied, disgusted with everything, everything; then one morning, remembering that it was Wednesday, he had thought of Jules and his riding-lesson.

He sent for Jules, but too lazy to shave or dress, he remained lying where he was. And he still lay there, realising nothing. There before him was the Palace. Next to it the Privy Council. At the side he could see the White Club, and William the Silent standing on his pedestal in the middle of the Plein: that was all exceedingly interesting. And Jules was hanging up trophies: also interesting. And the most interesting of all was the stupid life he had been leading. What tension to give the lie to his ennui! Had he really amused himself during that time? No; he had made a pretence of being amused: the peasant-woman episode and the écarté; the sport had been bad; the wine good, but he had drunk too much of it. And then that particularly filthy champagne … at Brussels … And what then? He had absolute need of it, of a life like that, of sport and wild enjoyment; it served to balance the other thing that was in him, that was tiresome for him in ordinary life.

But why was it not possible to preserve some mean, in one as well as in the other? He was well equipped for ordinary life, and with that he possessed something in addition; why could he not remain balanced between those two spheres of disposition? Why was he always tossed from one to the other, as a thing belonging to neither? How fine he could have made his life with only the least tact, the least self-restraint! How he might have lived in a healthy joy of purified animal existence, tempered by a higher joyousness of soul! But tact, self-restraint – he had none of these; he lived according to his impulses, always in extremes; he was incapable of half indulgences. And in this lay his pride as well as his regret; his pride that he felt “wholly” whatever he felt, that he was unable to make terms with his emotions; and his regret, that he could not make terms and bring into harmony the elements which warred forever within him.

When he had met Cecile, and had seen her again, and yet once more, he had felt himself carried wholly to the one extremity, the summit of exaltation, of pure crystal sympathy, in which the circle of his atmosphere – as he had said – glided over hers, a caress of pure chastity and spirituality, as two stars, spinning closer together, might mingle their atmospheres for a moment, like breaths. What smiling happiness had been within his reach, as a grace from Heaven!

Then, then, he had felt himself toppling down, as if he had rocked over the balancing-point; and he had longed for the earthly, for great simplicity of emotion, for primitive enjoyment of life, for flesh and blood. He remembered now how, two days after his last conversation with Cecile, he had seen Emilie Hijdrecht, here in his rooms, where at length, stung by his neglect, she had ventured to come to see him one evening, heedless of all caution. With a line of cruelty round his mouth he recalled how she had wept at his knees, how in her jealousy she had complained against Cecile, how he had bidden her be silent, and not pronounce Cecile’s name. Then, their mad embrace, an embrace of cruelty: cruelty on her part against the man whom time after time she lost when she thought him secured for good and all, whom she could not understand, to whom she clung with all the violence of her brutal passion, a purely animal passion of primitive times; cruelty on his part against the woman he despised, while in his passion he almost stifled her in his embrace.

II

And what then? How to find the mean between the two poles of his nature. He shrugged his shoulders. He knew he could never find it. He lacked some quality, or a certain power, necessary to find it. He could do nothing but allow himself to swing to and fro. Very well then: he would let himself swing. There was nothing else to do. For now, in the lassitude following his outburst of savagery, he began to experience again an ardent longing, like someone who, after a long evening passed in a ball-room, heavy with foul air of gaslight and a stifling crush and oppression of human breath, craves a high heaven and width of atmosphere; a passionate longing towards Cecile. And he smiled, glad that he knew her, that he was able to go to her, that it was his privilege to enter into the chaste enclosure of her sanctity, as into a temple; he smiled, glad that he felt this longing, and proud, exalting himself above all other men. Already he tasted the pleasure of confessing to her how he had lived during the last three weeks; and already he heard her voice, although he could not distinguish the words …

Jules descended from the ladder. He was disappointed that Quaerts had not followed his arrangement of the weapons upon the rack, and his drapery of the stuff around them. But he had quietly continued his work, and now that it was finished, he came down and went quietly to sit upon the floor, with his head against the foot of the sofa where his friend lay thinking. Jules never said a word; he looked straight before him, a little sulkily, knowing that Quaerts was looking at him.

“Jules!” said Quaerts.

But Jules did not answer, still staring.

“Tell me, Jules! Why do you like me so much?”

“How should I know?” answered Jules, with thin lips.

“Don’t you know?”

“No. How can you know why you are fond of anyone?”

“You ought not to be so fond of me, Jules. It’s not good.”

“Very well, I will be less so in the future.”

Jules rose suddenly, and took his hat. He held out his hand, but, laughing, Quaerts held him.

“You see, scarcely anyone is fond of me, save … you and your father. Now, I know why your father is fond of me, but not why you are.”

“You are always wanting to know something.”

“Is that so very wrong?”

“Certainly. You will never be satisfied. Mamma always says that no one knows anything.”

“And you?”

“I … nothing …”

“What do you mean … nothing?”

“I know nothing at all … Let me go.”

“Are you cross, Jules?”

“No; but I have an engagement.”

“Can’t you wait until I have dressed, then we can go together? I am going to Aunt Cecile’s.”

Jules objected.

“Very well, only hurry.”

Quaerts rose up. He now saw the arrangement of the weapons, about which he had quite forgotten: “You have done it very prettily, Jules,” he said, admiringly. “Thank you very much.”

Jules did not answer, and Quaerts went through into his dressing-room. The lad sat down on the sofa, bolt upright, looking out upon the Palace, across the bareness of the withered trees. His eyes filled with great round tears, which fell down. Stiff and motionless, he wept.

III

Cecile had passed those same three weeks in a state of ignorance which had filled her with pain. Through Dolf she had indeed heard that Quaerts was away shooting, but beyond that nothing. A thrill of joy electrified her when the door behind the screen opened, and she saw him enter the room. He stood before her before she could recover herself, and as she was trembling she did not rise up, but still sitting, reached out her hand to him, her fingers quivering imperceptibly.

“I have been out of town,” he began.

“So I heard …”

“Have you been well all this time?”

“Quite well, thank you.”

He noticed she was somewhat pale, that she had a light blue shadow under her eyes, and that there was lassitude in all her movements. But he thought there was nothing extraordinary in that, or that perhaps she seemed pale in the cream colour of her soft white dress, like silken wool, even as her form was yet slighter in the constraint of the scarf about her waist, with its long white fringe falling to her feet. She sat alone with Christie, the child upon his footstool with his head in her lap, a picture-book upon his knees.

“You two are a perfect Madonna and Child,” said Quaerts.

“Little Dolf is gone out to walk with his godfather,” she said, looking fondly upon her child, and gently motioning to him.

At which bidding the little boy stood up and shyly approached Quaerts, offering him a tiny hand. Quaerts took him up and set him upon his knee.

“How light he is!”

“He is not strong,” said Cecile.

“You coddle him too much.”

She laughed.

“Pedagogue!” she said, bantering. “How do I coddle him?”

“I always find him nestling against your skirts. He must come with me one of these days. You should let him try some gymnastics.”

“Jules horse-riding and Christie gymnastics!” she exclaimed.

“Yes, sport in fact,” he replied, with a look of malice.

She looked back at him, and sympathy smiled from the depths of her gold-grey eyes. He felt thoroughly happy, and with the child still upon his knees he said:

“I come to confess to you … Lady!”

Then, as though startled, he put the child away from him.

“To confess?”

“Yes … Christie, go back to Mamma; I must not keep you by me any longer.”

“Very well,” said Christie, with great wondering eyes.

“The child would forgive too easily,” said Quaerts.

“And I, have I anything to forgive you?” she asked.

“I shall be only too happy if you will see it in that light.”

“Begin then.”

“Le petit Jésus …” he hesitated.

Cecile stood up; she took the child, kissed him, and sat him on a stool by the window with his picture-book. Then she came back to the chaise-longue.

“He will not hear …”

And Quaerts began the story, choosing his words; he spoke of the shooting, the escapades, the peasant-woman, and of Brussels. She listened attentively, with dread in her eyes at the violence of such a life, the echo of which reverberated in his words, even though the echo was softened by his reverence.

“And is all this a sinfulness needing absolution?” she asked, when it was finished.

“Is it not?”

“I am no madonna, but … a woman whose ideas have been somewhat emancipated. If you were happy in what you did it was no sin, for happiness is good … Were you happy then, I ask you? For in that case what you did was … good.”

“Happy?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“No … therefore I have sinned, sinned against myself, have I not? Forgive me … Lady.”

She was troubled at the sound of his voice, which, caressively broken, wrapped her about in a charm; she was troubled to see him sitting there, filling with his personality a place in her room beside her. In one second she lived whole hours, feeling her calm love heavy within her, a not oppressive weight, feeling a longing to throw her arms about him and tell him that she worshipped him; feeling also fervent sorrow at what he had confessed: that again he had been unhappy. Hardly able to control herself in her compassion, she stood up, stepped towards him, and laid her hand upon his shoulder:

“Tell me, do you mean all this? Is it all true? Is it true that you have lived as you say, and yet have not been happy?”

“Perfectly true, on my soul.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“I could not do otherwise.”

“You were unable to force yourself to moderation?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then I should like to teach you.”

“And I should not like to learn, from you. For it is and always will be my best happiness to be immoderate also where you are concerned; excessive in the emotion of my secret self, my soul, just as I have now been excessive in the grossness of my evident self.”

Her eyes grew dim, she shook her head, her hand still upon his shoulder.

“That is not right,” she said, deeply distressed.

“It is a joy … for both those beings. I must be so … I cannot but be immoderate … both demand it.”

“But that cannot be right,” she insisted. “Pure enjoyment …”

“The lowest, but also the highest …”

A shiver passed through her, a deadly fear for him.

“No, no,” she persisted. “Do not think that. Do not do it. Neither the one nor the other. Really, it is all wrong. Pure joy, unbridled joy, even the highest, is not good. In that way you force your life. When you speak so, I am afraid for your sake. Try to recover some balance. You have so many possibilities of being happy.”

“Oh, yes …”

“Yes; but what I mean is, do not be fanatical. And … and also, for the love of God, do not again run so madly after pleasure.”

He looked up at her, he saw her beseeching him with her eyes, with the expression of her face, with her whole attitude as she stood bending slightly forward. He saw her beseeching him, as he heard her, and then he knew that she loved him. A feeling of bright rapture came upon him, as if something high descended upon him to guide him. He did not stir – he felt her hand thrilling at his shoulder – afraid, lest with the smallest movement he should drive that rapture away. It did not occur to him for a moment to speak one word of tenderness to her, or to take her in his arms and press her to him; she was so transfigured in his eyes that any such profane desire remained far away from him.

Yet he felt at that moment that he loved her; but as he had never yet loved any before; so completely and exclusively, with the noblest that is hidden away in the soul, often unknown even to itself. He felt that he loved her with newborn feelings of frank youth and fresh vigour, and pure unselfishness. And it seemed to him that it was all a dream of something which did not exist, a dream lightly woven about him, a web of sunbeams.

“Lady!” he whispered. “Forgive me …”

“Promise then …”

“Willingly, but I shall not be able to keep my promise. I am weak …”

“No.”

“Ah, I am. But I give my promise, and I promise also to try my utmost to keep it. Will you forgive me now?”

She nodded to him; her smile fell on him like a burst of sunlight. Then she went to the child, took him in her arms, and brought him to Quaerts:

“Put your arms round his neck, Christie, and give him a kiss.”

He took the child from her; he threw his little arms about his neck, and kissed him on the forehead.

“Le petit Jésus!” he whispered.

IV

They stayed long talking to one another, and no one came to disturb them. The child had gone back to sit by the window. Twilight began to strew pale ashes in the room. He saw Cecile sitting there, sweetly white; the melody of her half-breathed words came rippling towards him benignly. They talked of many things: of Emerson; Van Eeden’s new poem in the Nieuwe Gids; views of life. He accepted a cup of tea only for the pleasure of seeing her move with the febrile lines of her graciousness, standing before the tea-table in the corner. In her white dress there was something about her of marble grown lissom with inspiration and warm life. He sat motionless, listening reverently, swathed in a still rapture of delight; a mood which defied analysis, without a visible origin, springing from their sympathetic fellowship as a flower springs from an invisible seed after a drop of rain and a kiss of sunshine. She too was happy; she no longer felt the pain his reverence had caused her. True she was a little sad by reason of what he had told her, but she was happy for the sake of the speck of the present. No longer did she see that dark stream, that inken sky, that night landscape; everything now was light and calm, and happiness breathed about her, tangible, a living caress. Sometimes they ceased speaking and looked towards the child, reading; or he would ask them something and they would answer. Then they smiled one to another because the child was so good and did not disturb them.

“If only this could continue for ever,” he ventured to say, though still fearing lest a word might break the crystalline transparency of their happiness. “If you could only see into me now, how all in me is peace. I do not know why, but so it is. Perhaps because of your forgiveness. Forgiveness is a thing so dear to people of weak character.”

“But I cannot think your character weak. It is not. You tell me you know sometimes how to place yourself above ordinary life, whence you can look down upon its griefs as on a comedy which makes one laugh sadly for a minute, but which is not true. I too believe that life as we see it is only a symbol of a true life concealed beneath it, which we do not see. But I cannot, for my part, rise beyond the symbol, while you can. Therefore you are strong and know yourself great.”

“How strange, when I just think myself weak, and you great and powerful. You dare to be what you are, in all your harmony; I always hide, and am afraid of people individually, though sometimes I am able to rise above life in the mass. But these are riddles which it is vain for me to attempt to solve, and though I have not the power to solve them, at this moment I feel nothing but happiness. Surely I may say that once, audibly, may I not – audibly?”

She smiled to him in the blessedness of making him happy.

“It is the first time I have felt happy in this way,” he continued. “Indeed it is the first time I have felt happy at all …”

“Then do not analyse it.”

“There is no need. It is standing before me in all its simplicity. Do you know why I am happy?”

“Do not analyse it …” she repeated, frightened.

“No,” he said, “but may I tell you, without analysis?”

“No, do not,” she stammered, “because … because I know …”

She besought him, very pale, with folded trembling hands. The child looked at them; he had closed his book, and come to sit down on his stool by his mother, with a look of merry sagacity in his pale blue eyes.

“I obey you,” said Quaerts, with some difficulty.

And they were both silent, their eyes expanded as with the lustre of a vision. It seemed to be gently beaming about them, through the pale ashen twilight.

V

This evening Cecile had written a great deal into her diary, and now she paced up and down in her room, with locked hands hanging down, her head slightly bowed, and with a fixed look. There was anxiety about her mouth. Before her was the vision, as she had conceived it. He loved her with his soul alone, not as a woman who is pretty and good; with a higher love than that, with the finest fibre of his being – his real being – with supreme emotion of the very essence of his deepest soul. Thus she felt that he had loved her and no other way, with contemplation, with adoration. Thus she felt it in truth through that identity of sympathy by which each of them knew what passed within the other. And that was his happiness – his first, as he said – thus to love her, and no other wise.

Oh, she well understood him. She understood his illusion, what he saw in her; and now she knew that, if she really wished to love him for his, and not for her own sake, she must seem no other before him, she must preserve his illusion of a woman not of flesh, who desired nothing of the earth, as other women were to him; who should be soul alone; a sister soul to his. But while she saw before her this vision of her love, calm and radiant, she saw also the struggle which awaited her; the struggle with herself, with her own distress: distress that he thought upon her so highly, and named her madonna, the while she longed only to be lowly and his slave. She would have to seem the woman he saw in her, for the sake of his happiness, and the part would be a heavy one for her to support, for she loved him, ah! with such simplicity, with all her woman’s heart, wishing to give herself to him entirely, as only once in her life a woman gives herself, whatever the sacrifice might cost her, the sacrifice made in ignorance of herself, and perhaps later to be made in bitterness and sorrow.

The outward appearance of her conduct and her inward consciousness of herself; the conflict of these would fall heavily upon her, but she thought upon the struggle with a smile, with joy beaming through her heart, for this bitterness would be endured for him, deliberately for him, alone for him. Oh, the luxury to suffer for one loved as she loved him; to be tortured with longing within oneself, that he might not come to her with the embrace of his arms and the kiss of his mouth; and to feel that the torture was for the sake of his happiness, his! To feel that she loved him sufficiently to go to him with wide arms and beg for alms of his caresses; but also to feel that she had more love for him than that, and higher, and that – not out of pride or bashfulness, which are really egoism, but solely from sacrifice of herself to his happiness – she never would, never could, be a suppliant in that sense.

To suffer, to suffer for him! To wear a sword through her soul for him! To be a martyr for her god, for whom there was no happiness save through her martyrdom! And she had passed her life, long, long years, without having felt until this day that such luxury could exist, not as fantasy in rhymes, but as reality in her heart. She had been a young girl, and had read the poets and what they rhyme of love, and she had thought she understood it all, with a subtle comprehension; yet without ever having had the least acquaintance with the emotion itself. She had been a young woman, had been married, had borne children. Her married life dashed through her mind in a lightning-flash of memory, and she stopped still before the portrait of her dead husband, standing there on its easel, draped in sombre plush. The mask it wore was of ambition: an austere, refined face, with features sharp, as if engraved in fine steel; coldly intelligent eyes with a fixed portrait look; thin, clean-shaven lips, closed firmly like a lock. Her husband! And she still lived in the same house where she had lived with him, where she had had to receive her many guests when he was Foreign Minister.

Her receptions and dinners flickered up in her mind, scenes of worldliness, and she clearly recalled her husband’s eye taking in everything with a quick glance of approval or condemnation: the arrangement of her rooms, her dress, the ordering of her parties. Her marriage had not been an unhappy one; her husband was a little cold and unexpansive, wrapped wholly in his ambition, but he was attached to her after his fashion, even with tenderness; she too had been fond of him; she thought at the time that she was marrying him for love: her dependent womanliness loving the male, the master. Of a delicate constitution, probably undermined by excessive brain-work, he had died after a short illness. Cecile remembered her sorrow, her loneliness with the two children, about whom he had already feared lest she should spoil them. And her loneliness had been sweet to her, among the clouds of her dreaming …

This portrait – a costly life-size photograph; a carbon impression dark with a Rembrandt shadow – why had she never had it copied in oils, as she had at first intended? The intention had died down of itself; for months she had not thought of the matter, now suddenly it recurred to her … And she felt no self-reproach or remorse. She would not now have it done. It was well enough as it was. She thought of the dead man without sorrow. She had never had cause to complain of him; he had never had anything with which to reproach her.

And now she was free; she became conscious of the fact with exultation. Free to feel what she would. Her freedom arched above her as a blue firmament in which new love ascended with a dove’s immaculate flight. Freedom, air, light! She turned away from the portrait with a smile of rapture; she thrust her arms above her head as if she would measure her freedom, the width of the air, as if she would go to meet the light. Love, she was in love! There was nothing but love; nothing but the harmony of their souls, the harmony of her handmaiden’s soul with the soul of her god, an exile upon the earth. Oh, how blessed that this harmony could exist between him so exalted and her so lowly! But he must not see her lowliness; she must remain the madonna, for his sake, in the martyrdom of his reverence, in the dizziness of the high place to which he raised her, beside himself. She felt this dizziness shuddering about her like rings of light. She threw herself upon her sofa, and locked her fingers; her eyelids quivered, and then she remained staring towards some very distant point.

VI

Jules had been away from school for a day or two with a bad headache, which had made him look pale, and given him an air of sadness; but he was a little better now, and growing weary of his own room he went downstairs to the empty drawing-room and sat at the piano. Papa was at work in his study, but it would not interfere with papa if he played. Dolf spoilt him, seeing something in his son that was wanting in himself and that therefore attracted him, as this had possibly formerly attracted him in his wife also; Jules could do no wrong in his eyes, and if the boy had only been willing, Dolf would have spared no expense to give him a careful musical education. But Jules opposed himself violently to anything in any way resembling lessons, and maintained besides that it was not worthwhile. He had no ambition; his vanity was not tickled by his father’s hopes in him and appreciation of his playing; he played for himself only, to express himself in the vague language of musical sounds. At this moment he felt himself alone, abandoned in the great house, though he knew that papa was at work two rooms away, and that when he pleased he could take refuge on papa’s great couch; he felt within himself an almost physical feeling of dread at his loneliness, which caused something to reel about him, an inward sense of inner desolation.

He was fourteen years old, but he felt himself neither child nor boy: a certain feebleness, a need almost feminine of dependency, of devotion to someone who would be everything to him, had already, in his earliest childhood, struck into his virility, and it shivered through him in his dread of this inner loneliness, as if he were afraid of himself. He suffered greatly from the vague moods in which that strange something oppressed him; then, not knowing where to hide his inner being, he would go to play, so that he might lose himself in the great sound-soul of music. His thin, nervous fingers would grope over the keys, and false chords would be struck in his search; then he would let himself go, find some single motive, very short, of plaintive minor melancholy and caress that motive in his joy at having found it, caress it until it returned each moment as a monotony of sorrow, thinking it so beautiful that he could not leave it. So well did they sing all that he felt, those four or five notes, that he would play them over and over again, until Suzette would burst into the room and make him stop lest she should be driven mad.

Thus he played now. It was pitiful at first; he barely recognised the notes; harsh discords wailed up and cut into his poor brain, still smarting from his headache. He moaned as if he were in pain afresh; but his fingers were hypnotised, they could not desist, they still sought on, and the notes became purer; a short phrase released itself with a cry, a cry which continually returned on the same note, suddenly high after the bass of the prelude. This note came as a surprise to Jules; that fair cry of sorrow frightened him, and he was glad to have found it, glad to have so sweet a sorrow. Then he was no longer himself; he played on until he felt it was not himself who was playing, but another within him who compelled him; he found the full pure chords as by intuition; through the sobbing of the sounds ran the same musical figure, higher and higher, with silver feet of purity, following the curve of crystal rainbows lightly spanned on high; reaching the topmost point of the crystal arch it struck a cry, this time in very drunkenness, out into the major, throwing up wide arms in gladness to heavens of intangible blue. Then it was like souls of men, which first live and suffer and utter their complaint, and then die, to glitter in forms of light whose long wings spring from their pure shoulders in sheets of silver fight; they trip one behind the other over the rainbows, over the bridges of glass, blue, and rose, and yellow; and there come more and more, kindreds and nations of souls; they hurry their silver feet, they press across the rainbows, they laugh and sing and push one another; in their jostling their wings clash together, scattering silver down.

Now they stand all on the top of the arc, and look up, with the great wondering of their laughing childeyes; and they dare not, they dare not, but others press on behind them, innumerable, more and more, and yet more; they crowd upwards to the topmost height, their wings straight in the air, close together. Now, now they must; they may hesitate no longer. One of them, taking deep breath, spreads his flight, and with one shock, springs out of the thick throng into the ether. Soon many follow, one after another, till their shapes swoon in the blue; all is gleam about them. Now, far below, thin as a thin thread, the rainbow arches itself, but they do not look at it; rays fall towards them – these are souls, which they embrace – they go with them in locked embraces. And then the light. Light beaming over all; all things liquid in everlasting light; nothing but light, the sounds sing the light, the sounds are the light, there is nothing now but the Light, everlasting …

“Jules!”

He looked up vacantly. He smiled now, as if awakened from a dream; he rose, went to her, to Cecile. She stood in the doorway; she had remained standing there while he played; it had seemed to her that he was playing a part of herself.

“What were you playing, Jules?” she asked.

He was quite awake now, and distressed, fearing he must have made a terrible noise in the house …

“I don’t know, Auntie,” he said.

She hugged him, suddenly, violently, in gratitude … To him she owed It, the great Mystery, since the day when he had broken out in anger against her …