Chapter XXI

Chapter XXIThe door opened and Bertha, Louise and Marianne entered. And they stepped so suddenly right across Constance’ thoughts that she was startled at their appearance: mother and daughters in deep mourning. She had not seen Bertha except on that first hurried visit immediately after Van Naghel’s death and on the day of the funeral, six weeks ago; and she knew very little of what was happening; she had seen Marianne only once. And now that they both stepped right across her thoughts, into that narrow circle—which she condemned, though she herself was unable to move out of it—a great compassion suddenly surged through her, like a torrent. Bertha looked very pale, tired, wasted, grown all at once into an old woman, hopeless and resigned, as though broken under much silent sorrow. Louise’s face wore a rather more tranquil expression; but Marianne beside her, delicate and white, still more delicate and white in her black dress, also diffused an almost tearful melancholy. Mamma rose and went towards them. It was the first time since her husband’s death that Bertha had come to Mamma’s Sunday-evening; and the gesture with which the old woman rose, approached her daughter, embraced her and led her to the sofa where she had been sittingshowed the same open-armed and open-hearted motherly affection with which, as Constance remembered, Mamma had received her, Constance, at the door, on the landing, on the first evening of her own return. Dear Mamma!It touched her so much that she herself rose, went to Bertha, kissed her tenderly, kissed Louise and Marianne. Her voice, for the first time for many a day, had a sisterly note in it that took Bertha by surprise. She pressed Constance’ hand and, after the others had spoken to her, sat down quietly near Mamma, Aunt Lot and Constance. How pale, dejected and resigned she was! She seemed to be looking helplessly around her, to be looking for some one to assist her, to be wishing to say something, to somebody, that would have relieved her. She sighed:“I have come, Mamma ... but I cannot stay long,” she said. “I am very tired. There are all those business matters; and, though Adolph is very kind and sympathetic and is a great help, it is terribly complicated and I sometimes feel half-dead with it all.... It’s lucky that I have Otto and Frances; I don’t know what I should do without them.... You know we are going to live in the country?...”“You were thinking about it the other day, dear,” said Mamma, anxiously, “but it wasn’t decided yet ... Bertha,mustI lose you?”“Dear Mamma, it’s better in the country. Adolph wanted us to look round in Overijssel, but I would rather be at Baarn, for instance: it’s nearer to the Hague and you....”“Why, Baarn, my child? There’s nobody there but Amsterdam people, business-people: such a very different set from ours!...”“We sha’n’t expect to make friends, Mamma, at first. I shall be alone with the girls. Otto and Frances have found a little house at the Hague: it’s lucky that Otto is provided for at the Foreign Office. The minister spoke very nicely about him the other day.... Frans and Henri must finish their university-course quickly now,” she said, in a hesitating tone. “Karel is going to a boarding-school, for I can’t manage him. And Marietje too: she was going soon, in any case. So there will be just the three of us: Louise, Marianne and I.... Things have changed very much, all at once, Aunt Lot. We want to live quietly. In the first place, we shall just have to live quietly; and the girls are quite content to do so....”It again seemed to Constance as if Bertha were looking for somebody in the room, were hushing something up. Constance had Emilie’s name on her lips, but she did not like to ask. Mamma knew nothing more than that Emilie and Van Raven sometimes had differences.“I shall have a lot of trouble and worry beforeme,” said Bertha. “But, when it is all settled and we have our little villa....”She sank back in her chair and stared before her with dim eyes.Constance took her hand compassionately, held it tight. It looked as though Bertha, after that busy life which had suddenly snapped with Van Naghel’s death, an hour after their last dinner-party, no longer knew what to do or say, felt derelict and helpless....Though there was so much business to attend to, she seemed stunned all at once, in the grip of a strange lethargy, as though everything was now finished, as though there was nothing left now that there would soon be no more visits to pay, no receptions to hold, no dinners to give; now that Van Naghel no longer came home from the Chamber, tired and irritable from an afternoon’s heckling; now that there would be no more calculating how they could manage to spend a thousand guilders less a month; now that she would simply have to live quietly on what she and the girls possessed. And it seemed as if she no longer knew how or why she should go on living, now that she would no longer have to give her dinners and pay her visits ... for her children, particularly her girls. Louise and Marianne had said to her so calmly that they wanted very soon to begin living quietly that Bertha now began to wonder:“Why did I always make so much fuss, if the girls cared for it so little? Why did I go on till I was old and worn out?”It was true, that had been Van Naghel’s ambition: he had wanted to see his house a politicalsalon. What he wished had happened. Now it was all over. Now there was nothing to be done but to live quietly, in the little villa at Baarn; to make no debts; to let the boys finish their college-course as quickly as possible; and then to educate Karel and Marietje and let theirs be a different life from the others’: how she did not know....Bertha remained sitting wearily, staring vaguely before her, half-listening to the sympathetic words, uttered with an emphatic Indian accent, of Aunt Lot, who kept saying:“Kassian!...”1But suddenly an access of nervousness seemed to startle her out of her depression. She looked round again, as though seeking for somebody ... somebody to say something to. Her glance fastened for a moment on Aunt Lot and then on Constance. Suddenly she rose, with a little laugh, as though she wanted to speak to Louise, farther away. But the nervous pressure of her hand seemed to be urging Constance also to get up, to go with her, somewhere, anywhere.... They went through the other drawing-room, past the card-table at whichUncle, Adolphine, Karel and Dotje were sitting, past the other with Cateau, Van Saetzema, Dijkerhof and Pop; and the conversation at both tables at once flagged; the cards fell hurriedly one after the other.... They were talking about Bertha, thought Constance, as Bertha drew her gently to the little boudoir, the room where the wine and cakes were set out, where Papa van Lowe’s portrait hung, stern and inexorable; the little room where they all of them went when they had anything confidential to say to one another, when there was a scene, or a difference, or a private discussion. And Constance at once remembered how, five months ago, she had appealed to Van Naghel and Bertha in this very room; how they had refused to receive her “officially” at their house; how Van der Welcke had lost his temper, flown into a rage, made a rush for Van Naghel.... She was now here with Bertha once more; and Papa’s portrait stared down coldly and severely upon the two sisters.They looked at each other in silence. Bertha glanced round timidly: she felt that, in the big drawing-room, at the card-tables, the brothers and sisters had at once begun to talk again, criticizing her, because she had retired for a moment with Constance ... with Constance. And, lowering her voice to a hardly audible whisper, she murmured:“Constance ... Constance ...”“What is it, Bertha?”“Help me ... help me ... be kind to me.”“But what’s the matter?”“Oh dear, nobody knows about it yet, but I can’t keep it all ... here ... to myself!”“Tell me what it is and what I can do.”“I don’t know what you can do. But, Constance, I felt I had to ... had to ... tell you....”“Tell me then.”“Nobody, nobody knows yet ... except Louise and Marianne.”“What is it?”“Emilie ... Emilie has....”“Has what?”“She has gone away ... with Henri....”“Gone away?”“Run away perhaps ... with Henri.... I don’t know where. Van Raven doesn’t know where. Nobody knows. Adolph van Naghel, my brother-in-law the commissary, has made enquiries ... and has found out nothing.... We dissuaded her from seeking a divorce; so did Adolph. Then, no doubt because of that, she ran away with Henri, with her brother. She absolutely refuses to live with Eduard. She has run away.... Constance, where has she gone to? I don’t know! Constance, it’s a terrible thing! But keep it to yourself, don’t tell anybody. Mamma doesn’t know. I want to pretend, if there’s nothing else for it, if they don’t come back, that she has gone on a little journey, a trip somewhere,alone with her brother. We must pretend that, Constance. I don’t think they intend to come back. Henri has been very excited lately: he fought Eduard, came to blows with him, for ill-treating his sister. You know how fond they are of each other, Emilie and Henri. It’s almost unnatural, in a brother and sister. Now they’ve run away.... Oh dear, Constance, I am so terribly unhappy!”She threw herself into Constance’ arms, sobbed, with her arms round Constance’ neck:“Constance, Constance, help me!... I have no one to turn to, no one I can talk to. Adolph is helping me with the business-matters; Otto too. Louise is very kind; but she and Otto think that Emilie ought to divorce her husband, on the ground of cruelty. But, Constance, in our class, men don’t beat their wives! It never happens. It’s an awful thing. It only happens with the lower orders!... Oh dear, Constance, I am so unhappy!... The business-matters will be settled.... But there are debts. I thought that we were living within our income, but I don’t know: there appear to be debts. Bills mount up so.... I did so hope that the boys would finish their course. Frans will; but now Henri ... that mad idea ... going away with Emilie ... running away ... nobody knows where.... Oh dear, Constance, Iamso unhappy: help me, do help me!”She lay back limply in Constance’ arms and thetears flowed incessantly down her pale face, which in those few weeks had fallen away till it was the face of an old woman. She lay there feeble and ill; and it seemed as if Van Naghel’s death, coming suddenly as an additional catastrophe on that evening of misfortunes—her guests in the drawing-room, Emilie hiding upstairs, Van Raven waiting below—had so terribly shaken her composure, the composure of a prudent, resourceful woman of the world, that she was simply compelled to speak of private matters which she would never have mentioned before.... An instinct drove her into Constance’ arms, drove her to unbosom herself to Constance as the only one who could understand her. Her near-sighted, blinking eyes sought anxiously, through her tears, to read the expression on Constance’ face. And she was so broken, so shattered that Constance had to make an effort to realize that it was really Bertha whom she held in her arms.The ill-feeling which she had cherished for months past was gone. None of it remained in her soul, in her heart, as though she had passed out of the depths of that atmosphere to purer heights of understanding and feeling. Only for a moment did she still remember that evening when she herself, in this same room, had implored Bertha and Van Naghel to help her “rehabilitate” herself in the eyes of their friends and of the Hague. It seemed long ago, years ago. She could hardly understand herself:that she could have begged so earnestly for something that was so small, of such little importance to her soul, to the world. She could not have done it now.... She did not understand how she could so long have cherished a grudge against Van Naghel, against Bertha ... because they did not ask her to their official dinners, when the invitation would have given her the rehabilitation which she sought. At the present moment, she did not even desire that rehabilitation, did not care about it, treated it as something that had become of no value: an idea which had withered and shrivelled within her and which blew away like a dead leaf to far-off spacious skies.... Addie? He did not need his mother’s rehabilitation in the eyes of the Hague. The boy would make his own way in life.... Oh, how small she had been, to beg for it; to go on bearing a grudge, months on end, for something so little, so infinitesimal ... so absolutely non-existent!... She felt that something had grown up inside her and was looking down upon all that earlier business.... No, there was no bitterness left. She felt a deep pity and a sisterly affection for this poor, old woman, Bertha, who now lay feebly and impotently in her arms, begging ... for what? She collected her thoughts: what could she do, how could she help Bertha? Her thoughts crowded upon one another rapidly; she thought vaguely of Van der Welcke, of Addie: what could they do, how couldthey help Bertha, how get upon the track of Emilie and Henri? And in the end she could think of nothing to say but:“Yes, Bertha, the best thing will be to pretend that Emilie has gone for a trip with her brother. We will put it like that, if necessary. What does Van Raven want to do?”“He won’t consent to a divorce.... And it would be an awful thing, you know.... Oh, Constance, they have not been married ten months!”A weariness suddenly came over her, like the abrupt extinction of all the little mundane interests that had always meant so much to her.“But,” she murmured, “if he beats her ... perhaps it is better that they should be divorced.... I don’t know.... We are going to Baarn: there is a small villa to let there. I should prefer to take it at once and go down there with Louise and Marianne.... Karel gives me a lot of trouble: he doesn’t behave well, no, he doesn’t behave well. And he is still so young. Perhaps he will go to live with Adolph, his guardian, who will be very strict with him. I don’t know what to do, I can do nothing.... I used to do everything with Van Naghel, he and I together. He was really good and kind. We were always thinking of the children, both of us. He was tired ... of being in the Cabinet; but he went on, for the children’s sake....”Her unconscious simplicity, in implying that VanNaghel was in the Cabinet for the sake of his children and not of his country, seemed to strike Constance for the first time: she almost smiled, held Bertha closer to her.“He couldn’t very well resign ... and he didn’t want to,” Bertha continued, feebly. “And now I don’t know what to do. I feel so very much alone; and yet I was once a capable woman, wasn’t I, Constance? Now I no longer feel capable. Perhaps that life was too crowded. And, Constance, what was the use of it all? My children, our children, for whom we lived, are none of them happy. I have grown weary and old ... for nothing. I wish that we were at Baarn now. I want to live there quietly, with the two girls. Louise is nice, so is Marianne. They neither of them want to go about any more. They’re not happy, no, they are not happy. Oh, my poor, poor children!... You must never tell Mamma, Constance. Mamma doesn’t know: dear Mamma! There is no need for her to know, poor dear! Better leave her under the impression that all is well with us, even though Van Naghel is gone....”And she sobbed at the thought that she was alone. Then, suddenly, she drew herself up a little, made Constance take a chair, sat down beside her and asked, peering anxiously through her tears into Constance’ face:“Constance, tell me ... Marianne?”“Yes, Bertha?”“Are you fond of Marianne?”“Yes, very.”“Still?”“Yes, still.”“Constance....”“Yes, Bertha?”“It is just as well ... that we are going to Baarn.... Tell me, Constance: Van der Welcke....”“Well?”“What sort of a man is he?”“What do you mean, Bertha?” asked Constance, gently.“Is ... is it his fault?... Is he a gentleman?”Constance defended her husband calmly, but not without astonishment that Bertha could speak so frankly aboutthat... as if they both knew all about it:“No, Bertha, I don’t think that Henri ... that it is Henri’s fault. I don’t think it’s Marianne’s fault either. Bertha, I don’t believe they can help it. They have an attraction for each other, a very great attraction....”A tenderness came over her soul, like a glow, like a glowing compassion.“Constance, they must not let themselves go. They must struggle against it.”“Who can tell what they are doing, Bertha? Who can tell what goes on inside them?”“No, they are not struggling.”“Who can tell?”“No, no.... Constance, it is just as well that we are going to Baarn.”They heard voices in the drawing-room, loud voices, with an Indian accent. The Ruyvenaers were going:“Good-bye, Ber-r-rtha,” said Aunt Lot, looking through the door. “We’re going, Ber-r-rtha.”Constance and Bertha went back to the drawing-room. Bertha forgot to wipe the tears from her eyes, kissed Aunt Lot. Adolphine and Cateau came up to Bertha:“Ber-tha,” whined Cateau; and this time she whined with a vengeance. “We just want-ed to say awordto you. Emilie-tje mustnotget a di-vorce.”“No,” said Adolphine, “if she goes and gets a divorce, the family will become impossible. It’ll create a scandal, if they are divorced.”“Ye-es,” Cateau droned aloud, “it would be a scan-dal, Ber-tha. Don’t you think sotoo, Constance?”“There’s no question of it ... for the moment,” said Constance. “Emilie has gone abroad for a bit with Henri; and the change is sure to do her good and make her a little calmer.”“Oh?... Has she gone a-broad?”“Where to?” asked Adolphine, all agog.“They were to go to Paris,” said Constance, without hesitating.“O-oh?... Has Emilie-tje gone to ... Pa-ris?”“Yes, with her brother,” Constance repeated.A minute later, she found an opportunity of saying quietly to Bertha:“It’s better like that, Bertha; better to say it as if it was quite natural... If you don’t say it yourself ... and they come to hear....”“Thank you, Constance ... thank you.”“Oh, Bertha.... I wish I could do something for you!”“You have helped me as it is.... Thank you.... That’s all that I can say....”She lay back helplessly in her chair, staring dimly before her. Constance followed her glance. She saw that Van der Welcke had come, very late. He was sitting in the conservatory—where the boys had cleared away the cards after their game, as Grandmamma always expected them to do—sitting a little in the shadow, but still visible. He was bending over towards Marianne, who sat beside him, her face a white patch in the darkness: a frail little black figure making a faint blur in the dim conservatory, where the gas was now turned out. She seemed to be weeping silently, sat crushing her handkerchief. He appeared to be saying something,anxiously and tenderly, while he bent still nearer to her. Then, suddenly, he took her hand, pressed it impulsively. Marianne looked up in alarm. Her eyes met, at the far end of the long drawing-room, the eyes of Aunt Constance, the dull, staring eyes of her mother. She drew away her hand ... and her pale face flushed with a glow of shame....Grandmamma stood in the middle of the drawing-room, a little sad at the gloom which the recent mourning had cast over her rooms. The children took their leave.1Poor thing!Chapter XXIIConstance began to love her loneliness more and more.Her daily life was very uneventful: she could count the people with whom she came into contact. First her husband and her son: there was something gentler in her attitude towards Van der Welcke, something almost motherly, which prevented her from getting angry with him, even though the inclination welled up within her. Addie was as usual, perhaps even a little more serious: this disquieted her. Then there was Brauws, who came regularly. He dined with them regularly, on a fixed day in the week, quite informally; and moreover he had become the friend of both Van der Welcke and Constance and even of Addie. Then there were Mamma, Gerrit and his little tribe and, now and again, Paul. And then there was Van Vreeswijck; and Marianne, of course; and latterly she had seen more of Bertha. For the rest she seemed to drift away from all the others, even from warm-hearted Aunt Lot. She kept in touch only with those with whom she was really in sympathy.Still, though she had these few friends, she oftenhad quite lonely afternoons. But they did not depress her; she gazed out at the rain, at the cloud-phantoms. And she dreamed ... along the path of light. She smiled at her dream. Even though she very much feared the absurdity of it for herself, she could not help it: a new youthfulness filled her with a gentle glow, a new tenderness, like the delicate bloom of a young girl’s soul dreaming of the wonderful future.... And then she would come back to herself suddenly and smile at her sentimentality and summon up all her matronly common-sense; and she would think:“Come, I oughtn’t to be sitting like this!... Come, I oughtn’t to be acting like this and thinking of everything and nothing!... Certainly, I like him very much; but why cannot I do that without these strange thoughts, without dreaming and picturing all manner of things and filling my head with romantic fancies ... as if I were a girl of eighteen or twenty?... Oh, those are the things which we do not speak about, the deep secret things which we never tell to anybody!... I should never have suspected them in myself ... or that they could be so exquisitely sweet to me. How strangely sweet, to dream myself back to youth in visions which, though they never really take shape, yet make a shining path to those cloudy skies, to imagine myself young again in those dreams!... If I never had these thoughts and dreams before, why do Ihave them now? Come, I oughtn’t to be sitting like this and thinking like this!... I make up a host of pretty stories, sentimental little stories, and see myself, see us both, years ago, as quite young children, both of us. He played and I played ... almost the same game: he a boy, I a girl. It was as though he were seeking me. It was as though I, in my childish dreams, divined something of him, far, far away, as though there were a part of me that wanted to go to him, a part of him that wanted to come to me.... Stop, I am giving way again to those secret enthusiasms which lie deep down in my soul like strange, hidden streams, those vague, romantic ferments such as I imagined that young girls might have, but not I, a woman of my years, a woman with my past, the mother of a big son.... I willnotdo it any more, I willnot.... It is morbid to be like this.... And yet ... and yet ... when the wind blows and the rain comes down, itis, it still is the dear secret that brings the tears to my eyes.... If I love him, quite silently, deep down within myself, why may I not just dream like that? The absurdity of it exists only for me: nobody,nobodyknows of it. I have some one else hidden within me: a younger woman, a sister, a young sister-soul, a girl’s soul almost. It is absurd, I know; but sometimes, sometimes it is so strong in me and I love him so well and feel, just like a girl, thatheis the first man I have ever loved.... Oh, Henri! I cansee now whatthatwas: he was young; it was at first mere play-acting, just like a comedy; then it became passion, very quickly, a mad impulse, an almost feverish impulse to hold him in my arms. That is all dead. Passion is dead.... This is a dream, a young girl’s dream. It is the beginning. Itisabsurd; and I am often ashamed of it, for my own sake. But I cannot resist it: it envelops me, just as the spring sunshine and the scent of the may and the cherry-blossom in the Woods envelop one with languorous sweetness. I cannot resist it, I cannotresist it. My eyes go towards those clouds, my soul goes towards those clouds, my dreams go towards them ... and I love him, I love him.... I feel ashamed: sometimes I dare not look my son in the face.... I love him, I love him; and I feel ashamed: sometimes I dare not go across the street, as though people would notice it, by the light on my face.... But ah, no, that light does not shine from me, because I am old! It does from Marianne, poor child, but not from me ... oh, thank God for that!... I want to struggle against it, but it is stronger than I; and, when I think of him, I feel as if I were numbed here in my chair. When he comes into the room, I tremble, powerless to make a movement. Let me be ashamed of myself, argue with myself, struggle as I may, it is so, it is something real, as though I had never felt anything real in my life: it is a dream and it is also reality....”She often strove against it, but the dream was always too strong for her, enveloping her as with a multitude of languorous spring scents. It imparted a strange tenderness to her, to her fresh, round face, the face of a woman in her prime, with the strange, soft, curly hair, which the years were changing without turning grey. If he came, she awoke from that dream, but felt herself blissfully languid and faint.“I am not a girl,” she thought, now that she heard herself speak; but her fixed idea, that she was old, quite old, retreated a little way into the background.But, though she now no longer felt so old in her dream, after her dream she thought herself ignorant. Oh, how ignorant she was! And why had she never acquired an atom of knowledge in her wasted days, in her squandered, empty years. When she was talking to Brauws—and now that he came regularly, they often talked together, long and earnestly, in the friendly twilight—she thought:“How ignorant I am!”She had to make an effort sometimes to follow him in the simplest things that he said. She was obliged to confess to him that she had never learnt very much. But he said that that was a good thing, that it had kept her mind fresh. She shook her head in disclaimer; she confessed that she was ignorant and stupid. He protested; but she told himfrankly that it sometimes tired her to follow him. And she was so honest with him that she herself was sometimes surprised at it. If ever their conversation became too hopelessly deep, she preferred to be silent rather than lie or even seek an evasion in words.... Ignorant, yes; and it distressed her to such an extent that, one afternoon, when Henri was out and Addie at school, she went to her son’s room and opened his book-case. In addition to the ordinary school-manuals, it contained a few boys’-books; and she laughed at herself, her little tender, mocking laugh of gentle irony. But she found a couple of volumes on Universal History, a present from Van der Welcke to Addie, who was very fond of history; and she opened them where she stood. She turned the pages. She was afraid that some one might come in: the maid, perhaps, by accident. She sat down in the only easy-chair, impregnated with the smoke of the cigarettes which Van der Welcke smoked one after the other, silently, while Addie was preparing his lessons; and she turned the pages and read. She continued to suffer from that sense of her own absurdity. She felt like a schoolgirl dreaming ... and learning her lessons. She went on reading; and, when Truitje was looking for her all over the house and she heard her ask the cook where on earth mevrouw could be, she blushed violently, quickly put the books back on the shelves andleft the room. She would have liked to take the books with her, but dared not; however, that evening at dinner she plucked up courage and said:“Addie, Mr. Brauws was saying something about the French Revolution the other day; and I felt so stupid at being so ignorant on the subject. Have you any books about it?”Yes, he had this book and that book, in fact he had always been attracted by that period and had collected as many books upon it as his scanty pocket-money permitted. He would bring them to her after dinner. And she acquired a sort of passion for reading and learning. She indulged it almost hastily, feverishly, without any method, as though nervously anxious to make up for the deficiencies of her own education. And at the same time she was frightened lest other people—even Van der Welcke and Addie—should notice that fevered haste; and she devoured book after book with studied cunning, sometimes turning the pages over hurriedly, feverishly, then again reading more attentively, but never leaving the books about, always replacing them on her boy’s shelves, or returning them to Brauws and Paul when they had been borrowed from them, or carefully putting away those which she had bought herself, so that her room apparently remained the same, without the confusion and untidiness of a lot of books. Her reading was a strange medley: a volume of Quack’sSocialists, which Brauws lent her;Zola’s novel,L’Œuvre; a pamphlet by Bakunin and an odd number of theGids; a copy ofThe Imitationwhich had strayed among Van der Welcke’s books; Gonse on Japanese Art; Tolstoi’s novels and pamphlets. But it was a strange bold power of discrimination that at once taught her to pick and choose amid the chaos of all this literature, made her accept this and reject that: a psychological analysis; a new work on modern social evolution; an æsthetic rhapsody about a Japanese vase. She learnt quickly to look into them boldly and to take from them what was able as it were to develop her; and out of many of those books there flashed forth such entirely new revelations of hitherto unperceived truths that often, tired, dazed, astounded, she asked herself:“Is there so much then? Is so much thought about, dreamt about, so much sought for, lived for? Do people have those visions then, those dreams? And does it all exist? And can it all be taken in by me, by my intelligence?”And, as she thought, it seemed as if crape veils were being raised everywhere from before her and as if she, whose gaze had never wandered from her family and friends, now saw, suddenly, through the distant clouds, right into those cities, right into those civilizations, into the future, into the past, into so much of the present as still hovered closely around her own existence. She experienced shock after shock: she felt dimly that even the terrible FrenchRevolution, though it did cost Marie-Antoinette her life, had its good side. Zola seemed to her so magnificent that she was almost frightened at her own enthusiasm and dared not put her feeling into words. And the noble dreams of those apostles of humanity, even though they anathematized the power of the State and money—all that she had unconsciously looked upon, all her life, as indispensable to civilized society—made her quiver first with alarm, then with compassion, then with terror, with despair, with exultation.... She did not utter her thoughts; only, in her conversations with Brauws, she felt that she was gradually better able to follow him, that she was more responsive, less vague in her replies.... If in all this, this new self-education, there was something hurried and superficial, the tremulous haste of an eager, nervous woman who fears that she is devoting herself too late to what is vitally necessary, there was at the same time something fresh and ingenuous, something youthful and unspoilt, like the enthusiasm of a woman still young who, after her girlish dreams, wants to grasp some part of the vivid, many-coloured, radiant life around her, who grasps with joyous open hands at the colours and the sunbeams and who, though she grasps wildly, nevertheless gathers fresh life in her illusion.... She gathered fresh life. The wind that blew outside seemed to blow through her soul; the rain that pelted seemed actually to wash her face;the continual gusts on every hand blew the mist from before her eyes, drew it aside like a curtain.... Her eyes sparkled; and, when the winter had done blowing and raining, when suddenly, without any transition, a breath of spring—the limpid blue of the sky, the tender green of the stirring earth—floated over and through the Woods, it was as though she yearned for movement. She managed, every afternoon that Addie was free, to take him away from Van der Welcke and to lure him out for a long walk, out of the town, over the dunes, ever so far. Addie, with his eyes bright with laughing surprise, thought it very jolly of her and would go with her, though he was no walker and preferred bicycling, athirst for speed. But, in his young, gallant boy’s soul, he laughed softly, thought Mamma charming: grown years younger, grown into a young woman, suddenly, in her short skirt, her little cloth cape, with the sailor-hat on her curly hair and the colour in her cheeks, slim-waisted, quick-footed, her voice clear, her laugh sometimes ringing out suddenly. He thought of Papa and that she was now becoming as young as he; and Addie felt himself old beside her. He saw nothing of what was happening in his mother, even as nobody saw it, for she kept it to herself, was no different to the others, spoke no differently to the others, perhaps only just with a brighter laugh. What she read, what she learnt, what she felt, what she thought: all this was not perceptibleto the others. It did not shine out from her; and her foot merely moved a shade quicker, her speech became a shade more spontaneous. But everything that blossomed and flamed up in her she kept to herself, in the vast silence of her broad but unshared vistas. To her husband she was gentler, to her son she was younger. Only now, in those walks, perhaps Addie was the one person in her life who noticed that, when Mamma happened to mention Mr. Brauws’ name, an unusual note sounded in her brighter, younger voice. A boy of his age does not analyse a subtle perception of this kind; only, without reasoning, without analysing, just instinctively, this boy of fourteen thought of his father, whom he worshipped with a strange, protecting adoration such as one gives to a brother or a friend—a younger brother, a younger friend—and felt a pang of jealousy on his behalf, jealousy of this man who did what Papa never did, talked with Mamma for hours three or four times a week, so often in fact that she was growing younger, that she had taken to reading, so as no longer to be ignorant, that she had developed a need for walking great distances. But the lad kept this jealousy locked up within himself, allowed none to perceive it. Perhaps he was just a trifle colder to him, to this man, the friend of the family, though Brauws was so fond of him, Addie, almost passionately fond of him indeed: Addie knew that. This jealousy for his father, jealousy of thatfriend of the family, was very strong in him; and he felt himself to be the child of both his parents, felt within himself their double heritage of jealousy. The image of his father appeared constantly before him, appeared between the images of Brauws and of his mother. But he let her see nothing of it.She gathered fresh life in those walks. When Addie was at school, she walked alone, no longer fearing the loneliness out of doors, she who had come to love her indoor loneliness and the still deeper loneliness of her soul. It was as though, after dreaming and educating herself—quickly, nervously, superficially and with youthful simplicity—in what great men had thought and written, she felt herself breathe again in the midst of nature. No longer from her arm-chair, through the windows, along the bend of the curtains did she see the great clouds, but she now saw them out of doors and overhead, blue, white, immense, irradiated by the sun in the vault of the boundless spring skies all vocal with birds, saw them as she stood on the dunes, with the wind all round her head, all round her hair and blowing through her skirts....“I love him, I love him,” a voice inside her sang softly and yet insistently, while the wind’s strong passion seemed to lift her up and waft her along.But in the movement of her hands there was something as though she were resisting the wind, with a smile of gentle irony, of tender mockery.The wind blew past, as if grumbling, and she walked on, saw the sea. She seemed to look upon the sea for the first time. It was as though, in the strong wind, under the blue-white clouds, the sea streamed to her for the first time from the ethereal fount of the horizon and were now rushing towards her, roaring and frothing, like a triumph of multitudinous, white-crested horses. And the sky and the sea were as one great triumph of mighty, omnipotent nature. A nameless but overwhelming triumph seemed from out of those clouds to hold reins in thousands of fists, the reins of the multitudinous white-crested horses; and all that triumph of nature advanced towards her like a riot of youth. It was as though every atom of her former life, every memory flew away around her like sand, like dust, like straw. It all flew away; and the waves broke, the sea uplifted itself like an exulting menace, as though to carry her with it in the riotous rush of its triumphant crested steeds, over all that small life, over everything ... if she did not take care.It was all big, wide, far-reaching, like a world. When she reached home, she was tired out, sobered by the tram-ride and the last bit of walking, past casual, shadowy people. Worn out, she fell asleep, woke shortly before dinner, welcomed Addie in a dream. Until sometimes she read her son’s eyes, made an effort, plunged her face in a basin of water, tried to be, to appear as she had always been. Andthen, in the glass, she saw herself like that, to all appearance the same woman, with just something livelier in her eyes, her gait, her movements. But inside her everything was changed.At home sometimes the past would still rise up before her, but different, quite different. She seemed to withdraw from her former personality and it was as though, far removed from the woman that she had once been, she was now for the first time able to judge her past from another point of view than her own. She saw suddenly what her father must have suffered, Mamma, the brothers even, the sisters. She realized for the first time the sacrifice which those old, pious people, Henri’s parents, had made. She thought in dismay of the injury which she had done her first husband, De Staffelaer. She thought of them all, in dismay at herself, in compassion for them. And she felt sorry even for her husband and for what he had always querulously resented, his shattered career, which had constituted his grudge, his obsession, the excuse for his inertia: for Van der Welcke and even for that grudge she felt compassion. How young he was when she met him, when they had acted their comedy, their comedy which had become deadly earnest! And she had at once fettered him to herself, in ever-increasing antagonism! Then her eyes would rest on him with a more understanding glance, sometimes almost with a certain pity, as she looked into his eyes, his youngblue boyish eyes, which Addie had inherited from him, but which in the father looked younger, more boyish than in the son. If, at the sound of his voice, the inclination to speak to him irritably welled up in her from the eternal antagonism between them, as from a gloomy spring deep down in her, she would restrain herself, control herself with that new sympathy and pity, answer gently, almost jokingly, and would let him have the last word. And, now that she herself was in love and felt herself live again, she had a sympathy that was almost motherly for his love, even though she herself was beginning to feel young again, and with it a strange tenderness for the two of them, Marianne and Henri. She did not think of the danger for him; she still had only, in her new world of romance, a sympathy for romance. He was her husband, but she felt none of a wife’s jealousy. And for Marianne she felt the same strange compassion, as for a younger sister-in-love....There came to her scarcely a fleeting thought of the immorality which the world, people, small people—the whirlers in the little circle, with their little prejudices and dogmas, their little creeds and philosophies—would see in such strange views from a married woman concerning herself and a friend, concerning her husband and the little niece with whom her husband was evidently in love. She was a small creature like all of them, she was a small soul, likeall of them; but her soul at least was growing, growing upwards and outwards; she no longer felt depressed; and it seemed as if she were being borne on wings to the greater cloud-worlds yonder, to the far cities, where flashed the lightnings of the new revelations, the new realities....Everything in her was changed....Chapter XXIIIMax Brauws was a thinker as well as a man of action; and each of these two personalities insisted on having its period of domination. After his college days, he had wandered over Europe for years, vaguely seeking an object in life. Deep down in himself, notwithstanding all his restless activity, he remained a dreamer, as he had been in his childhood and boyhood. It seemed as if that which he had sought in his dreams when playing as a boy on the fir-clad hills and over the moors went on beckoning him, darkly and elusively, a mystic, nebulous veil on the dim horizons of the past; and, when he ran towards them, those far horizons, they receded more and more into the distance, fading little by little; and the veil was like a little cloud, melting into thin air.... He had wandered about for years, his soul oppressed by a load of knowledge, by the load of knowing all that men had thought, planned, believed, dreamed, worshipped, achieved. An almost mechanically accurate memory had arranged those loads in his brain in absolute order; and, if he had not been above all things driven by the unrest of his imagination, with its eternal dreaming and its eternal yearning to find what it sought, he would have become a quiet scholar, living in the country,far from cities, with a great library around him; for very often, when spent with weariness, he had a vision of an ideal repose. But the unrest and the yearning had always driven him on, driven him through the world; and they had both made him seek, for himself as well as for others, because, if he had found for others, he would also have found for himself. They, the unrest and the yearning, had driven him on towards the great centres of life, towards the black gloom of the English and German manufacturing-towns, towards the unhappy moujiks in Russia, towards the famine-stricken villages of Sicily, all in a heart-rending passion to know, to have seen, penetrated and experienced all the misery of the world. And the capitals had risen up around him like gigantic Babels of fevered pride, accumulations of egotisms; the smoke of the manufacturing-towns had smeared along the horizon of his life the soot-black clouds through which he could not see and in which the days remained eternally defiled; the Russian snow-landscapes had spread out as eternal, untraversable steppes—steppes and steppes and steppes—of absolutely colourless despair; in Italy he had beheld an appalling contrast between the magnificence of the country—the glory of its scenery, the melancholy of its art—and the sorrows of the afflicted nation, which, as in a haze of gold, against a background of sublime ruins and shimmering blue, along rows of palaces full of noble treasures, utteredits cry of hunger, shook its threatening fist, because the old ground brought forth not another olive, not one, after the excesses of the past, exhausted by the birth-pangs of the untold glories of old....His mind, schooled in book-lore, also read life itself, learnt to know it, fathomed it with a glance. He saw the world, saw its wickedness, its selfishness, saw especially its awful, monstrous hypocrisy. Like so many leering, grinning masks, with treacherous honeyed smiles, contradicting the furtive glances of the diabolical eyes, he saw the powers of the world above the world itself: a huge nightmare of compact distress, the greedy, covetous, grasping fingers hidden as though ready to clutch at the folds of the majestic purple, ready to strike like vultures’ claws. And he saw—O terrible vision!—the world as a helpless, quivering mass lying for centuries under that eternal menace. He saw it everywhere. Then he wanted to free himself with a gigantic effort from the sphinx-like domination of his impotence, with its eternally unseeing eyes, its eternally silent lips, its undivining mind; and his movement was as that of one who lies crushed under granite, the granite of that omnipotent sphinx of impotence, who, with her eternal immovability, seemed to be saying nothing but this:“I am unchangeable, eternally; against me everything is eternally dashing itself to pieces; against me your dreams scatter into mist. I alone am, but I amthat which is unchangeable: human impotence, your own impotence. Lie still at my feet, do not move: I alone am.”That was the vision of his hopeless eyes. But desperation drove him on, wandering ever on and on to other lands, to other capitals, to other towns black with smoke: the smoke through which nothing shone, not a single gleam of hope. And for years it was the same: wandering, seeking, not finding; only seeing, knowing, realizing. But the more he saw, knew and realized, the more terrible it was to him that he could not find the very first word of the solution, the more terrible it became to him that only the sphinx remained, the immovable granite impotence; and her blank gaze seemed to utter her solitary revelation:“I alone am. I am impotence; but I am immovable, I am omnipotent.”Then he had felt in himself the need to do still more, to be really a doer, a common workman, as they all were, everywhere, the poor and wretched. And he went to America, in order no longer to think, read, ponder, dream, see or know, but to do what they were all doing, the poor and wretched. And it was as he had succeeded in telling Constance at last, after so many hesitations: everything that was atavistic in him had prevented him from becoming a brother, a fellow-worker. But he was scarcely back in Europe before he felt the air around himfull of noble aims, passionate hopes; and Peace had shone before his eyes. He spoke; and his words were as the words of one inspired; and everybody went to hear him. He had spoken in Holland; he now went to Germany and spoke there. He wrote his book there:Peace. He went on doing and moving, until he was laid low not only with the fatigue of thinking and meditating, but also with the strain of constantly travelling hither and thither, of constantly appearing in overcrowded halls, of speaking in a clear, resonant voice to thousands of people. For a moment he said to himself that he was doing something, something even greater and better than his manual labour in America had been. For a moment he said to himself that he had found, if not everything, at least something, an atom of absolute good, and that he was imparting that atom to the world. But dull discouragement came and smote him, as well as physical strain, and left him saying to himself:“They cheer and applaud, but nothing is changed. Everything remains as it is, as if I had never spoken.”His impatience demanded an immediate realization and the sight of the ideal flashing across the horizon. And then he lost all hope even for the future, for the brighter ages that were dawning. A mocking laugh, a sarcastic word in a report on his lectures was enough to shatter him for weeks.He hid himself like a leper, or allowed himself to be luxuriously lapped in the leafy melancholy of the German mountain-forests, or went, farther and higher, into the Alps, made reckless ascents, just himself and a guide, as though, along the pure world of the slippery glaciers, he hoped to find what he had sought in vain in the Old World and the New, in the world of all and of himself.Then he remained for weeks lingering on in a lonely little village in Switzerland, high up among the eternal snows, as though he wished to purify himself of all the dust of his humanity. Merely through breathing the exquisite rareness of the air, especially at night, when in the higher heavens the stars shone nearer to him, twinkling out their living rays, it seemed as if the pure cold were cleansing him to his marrow, to his soul. He gazed back almost peacefully upon his life as a man of thought and action, thought and action being two things in which a man is able to indulge only if he be willing to live, for others and for himself. If anything of his thought, of his action remained drifting in those lower atmospheres of the suffering world, he was certain that this would be so little, so infinitesimally small, that he himself did not perceive it, like an atom of dust floating in the immensity of the future. Perhaps then the atom would prove to be a little grain and, as such, be built into the substance of the ideal. But, even if this were so, his thought andhis action and their possible results seemed to him so small, so slight that he was filled with humility. And in this humility there was a pride in being humble; for did he not remember all the complacency, the dogmatism, the conviction, the assurance, the self-consciousness, all the pedantry that battened down there?Amid the serenity of the mountains, as he sent his gaze roaming over the frost-bound horizons, all within him became pure and crystal-clear, his soul a very prism. He saw its colours lying there plainly, shining, glittering, with none of the foulness of that lower world. And these weeks were weeks of the deepest and most health-giving rest that he had ever known.He now felt very lonely. He was not the man to give himself up to the simple enjoyment of this healing rest. He loved best to feel the multitude around him, to fling out his strong arms wide towards humanity, feeling his most ardent and happiest glow when embracing humanity. But, after his discouragements, he seemed to have thrust it gently, though kindly, a little farther from him, had abandoned it, had sequestered himself, in order to recover from himself and from humanity in the ample, restful silence of utter solitude. He now felt very lonely. And a longing awoke in him, stirring but feebly as yet, for love to come towards him now, because hitherto love had always gone out from him, eagerand passionate; a longing to be sought himself, for once in his life; to see arms opened to him this time, waiting to embrace him, to press him to a loving heart.... A feeling of melancholy softened him, made him small and human, while the mountain-wind swept past on giant wings....He looked back upon his life. That was one thing which it had never known: that concentration of all feeling on an individual. With him, any whole-hearted feeling had always been for the many. When he looked back, he saw spectres wandering through the past: the individual, the unit, just a faint blur here and there; he had never felt that all-devouring passion for them, the individuals. And yet, as a child, as a boy, playing his dream-game amid woods, fields, heather and stream, for whom had his longing been? To find all of them, humanity, or the one individual soul? He did not know; but a dreamer he had always remained, for all his thinking and doing. And now, after the many had brought him sorrow, he began to dream, for the first time, of the one....Of the one ... the one individual soul that would open wide arms to him and approach him with a loving embrace ... one individual soul.... Had his quest always been the self-deception of impotence and was it possible that now that quest had become a search for the one individual soul? Suddenly, through his longing, he remembered an evening:a table with flowers and candles; men talking amid the smoke of their cigars; the burly figure of a fair-haired officer; and some strange words which that officer had just uttered as though unconsciously, in the course of ordinary conversation: a vision calling up early years of childhood, childish play, a little girl, fair, with red flowers at her temples, dressed in white, running barefoot over great boulders in a river full of rocks, under the heavy foliage of the tropical trees, and beckoning, beckoning with her little hand to the two elder brothers who were playing with her, fascinated by their little sister....There, in that room, through the smoke of the cigars, amid the hum of indifferent talk, in three or four sentences, no more, that big, fair-haired man had said it, said it just casually, with a softening of his rough, noisy voice:“It was wonderful, the way she had of playing. She would run over the rocks and pluck the flowers. Lord, how adorable she looked, the little witch! And we boys used to run with her, run after her, as far as ever she pleased. She only had to beckon to us ... the damned, adorable little witch!”And the oath sounded like a caress; and the whole thing was only a picture lasting two or three seconds, no more; and then they returned to the smell of coffee and liqueurs, the cigar-smoke, the noisy voice growing rough again, becoming coarse and jovial as the burly, fair-haired soldier told some mess-room taleimmediately afterwards, after that reminiscence. But in him, Brauws, the reminiscence had lingered, as though always visible: the picture shining in the tenderness with which the brother had spoken of his sister; and it seemed to him as though he himself had seen, but more vaguely and dimly, once in his life, on those Dutch horizons of his childhood, a blur like that of the little figure, the bright, fair-faced child, even the little red note of her flowers.... Oh, how vague it was, how visionary! You thought of it ... and it had gone, all of it, leaving hardly the memory of a perfume, nay, hardly the reflection of a memory! Really, it was nothing, nothing, too airy for thought and impossible to describe in words, however tenderly chosen. It was nothing: if he thought about it for more than the one second that the reflection flashed across him, it was gone, quite lost....He was feeling very lonely now.... Oh, to think of the passing years with their millions of meetings, so many men and women just brushing against one another, in that casual passing, just looking into one another’s eyes, with the indifferent look of non-recognition, and then passing one another again, never seeing one another after!... And perhaps among them the one had passed, her eyes looking indifferently into his eyes, a bit of her body or dress brushing against his body or dress ... and she was gone, gone, lost altogether forever. Was that how it had happened in his life? Or not? Waslife sometimes merciful at the eleventh hour, giving the one, the individual soul, as a consolation, as a reward for that love for the many?Now he felt quite lonely, he who was a dreamer as well as a thinker and a man of action. And an irresistible wish to be no longer lonely made him come down suddenly from that ring of glittering peaks. There was nothing waiting for him in Holland, nothing to draw him towards those low lands of his birth, into the swarm of utterly indifferent people, full of petty insignificance, save alone, perhaps, that it was there—in the same house where the vision had been conjured up—there that the soul was waiting, there that the one individual soul would bide his coming.“It is only a fancy,” he now thought. “A fancy ... at my age! No, if any such thing had to happen, it would have happened in the years of youth in which we have the right to feel, to dream, to seek ... to seek for the one. Now that so many years, silent, dead years, lie heaped up around her and around me ... and between us, now it becomes absurd to feel, to dream, to seek those sweet solaces which we feel, dream and seek only when we are very young, but not when we have lost even our right to the remembrance of our youth, the reflection of our childish memories....”Still he came down from the mountains....

Chapter XXIThe door opened and Bertha, Louise and Marianne entered. And they stepped so suddenly right across Constance’ thoughts that she was startled at their appearance: mother and daughters in deep mourning. She had not seen Bertha except on that first hurried visit immediately after Van Naghel’s death and on the day of the funeral, six weeks ago; and she knew very little of what was happening; she had seen Marianne only once. And now that they both stepped right across her thoughts, into that narrow circle—which she condemned, though she herself was unable to move out of it—a great compassion suddenly surged through her, like a torrent. Bertha looked very pale, tired, wasted, grown all at once into an old woman, hopeless and resigned, as though broken under much silent sorrow. Louise’s face wore a rather more tranquil expression; but Marianne beside her, delicate and white, still more delicate and white in her black dress, also diffused an almost tearful melancholy. Mamma rose and went towards them. It was the first time since her husband’s death that Bertha had come to Mamma’s Sunday-evening; and the gesture with which the old woman rose, approached her daughter, embraced her and led her to the sofa where she had been sittingshowed the same open-armed and open-hearted motherly affection with which, as Constance remembered, Mamma had received her, Constance, at the door, on the landing, on the first evening of her own return. Dear Mamma!It touched her so much that she herself rose, went to Bertha, kissed her tenderly, kissed Louise and Marianne. Her voice, for the first time for many a day, had a sisterly note in it that took Bertha by surprise. She pressed Constance’ hand and, after the others had spoken to her, sat down quietly near Mamma, Aunt Lot and Constance. How pale, dejected and resigned she was! She seemed to be looking helplessly around her, to be looking for some one to assist her, to be wishing to say something, to somebody, that would have relieved her. She sighed:“I have come, Mamma ... but I cannot stay long,” she said. “I am very tired. There are all those business matters; and, though Adolph is very kind and sympathetic and is a great help, it is terribly complicated and I sometimes feel half-dead with it all.... It’s lucky that I have Otto and Frances; I don’t know what I should do without them.... You know we are going to live in the country?...”“You were thinking about it the other day, dear,” said Mamma, anxiously, “but it wasn’t decided yet ... Bertha,mustI lose you?”“Dear Mamma, it’s better in the country. Adolph wanted us to look round in Overijssel, but I would rather be at Baarn, for instance: it’s nearer to the Hague and you....”“Why, Baarn, my child? There’s nobody there but Amsterdam people, business-people: such a very different set from ours!...”“We sha’n’t expect to make friends, Mamma, at first. I shall be alone with the girls. Otto and Frances have found a little house at the Hague: it’s lucky that Otto is provided for at the Foreign Office. The minister spoke very nicely about him the other day.... Frans and Henri must finish their university-course quickly now,” she said, in a hesitating tone. “Karel is going to a boarding-school, for I can’t manage him. And Marietje too: she was going soon, in any case. So there will be just the three of us: Louise, Marianne and I.... Things have changed very much, all at once, Aunt Lot. We want to live quietly. In the first place, we shall just have to live quietly; and the girls are quite content to do so....”It again seemed to Constance as if Bertha were looking for somebody in the room, were hushing something up. Constance had Emilie’s name on her lips, but she did not like to ask. Mamma knew nothing more than that Emilie and Van Raven sometimes had differences.“I shall have a lot of trouble and worry beforeme,” said Bertha. “But, when it is all settled and we have our little villa....”She sank back in her chair and stared before her with dim eyes.Constance took her hand compassionately, held it tight. It looked as though Bertha, after that busy life which had suddenly snapped with Van Naghel’s death, an hour after their last dinner-party, no longer knew what to do or say, felt derelict and helpless....Though there was so much business to attend to, she seemed stunned all at once, in the grip of a strange lethargy, as though everything was now finished, as though there was nothing left now that there would soon be no more visits to pay, no receptions to hold, no dinners to give; now that Van Naghel no longer came home from the Chamber, tired and irritable from an afternoon’s heckling; now that there would be no more calculating how they could manage to spend a thousand guilders less a month; now that she would simply have to live quietly on what she and the girls possessed. And it seemed as if she no longer knew how or why she should go on living, now that she would no longer have to give her dinners and pay her visits ... for her children, particularly her girls. Louise and Marianne had said to her so calmly that they wanted very soon to begin living quietly that Bertha now began to wonder:“Why did I always make so much fuss, if the girls cared for it so little? Why did I go on till I was old and worn out?”It was true, that had been Van Naghel’s ambition: he had wanted to see his house a politicalsalon. What he wished had happened. Now it was all over. Now there was nothing to be done but to live quietly, in the little villa at Baarn; to make no debts; to let the boys finish their college-course as quickly as possible; and then to educate Karel and Marietje and let theirs be a different life from the others’: how she did not know....Bertha remained sitting wearily, staring vaguely before her, half-listening to the sympathetic words, uttered with an emphatic Indian accent, of Aunt Lot, who kept saying:“Kassian!...”1But suddenly an access of nervousness seemed to startle her out of her depression. She looked round again, as though seeking for somebody ... somebody to say something to. Her glance fastened for a moment on Aunt Lot and then on Constance. Suddenly she rose, with a little laugh, as though she wanted to speak to Louise, farther away. But the nervous pressure of her hand seemed to be urging Constance also to get up, to go with her, somewhere, anywhere.... They went through the other drawing-room, past the card-table at whichUncle, Adolphine, Karel and Dotje were sitting, past the other with Cateau, Van Saetzema, Dijkerhof and Pop; and the conversation at both tables at once flagged; the cards fell hurriedly one after the other.... They were talking about Bertha, thought Constance, as Bertha drew her gently to the little boudoir, the room where the wine and cakes were set out, where Papa van Lowe’s portrait hung, stern and inexorable; the little room where they all of them went when they had anything confidential to say to one another, when there was a scene, or a difference, or a private discussion. And Constance at once remembered how, five months ago, she had appealed to Van Naghel and Bertha in this very room; how they had refused to receive her “officially” at their house; how Van der Welcke had lost his temper, flown into a rage, made a rush for Van Naghel.... She was now here with Bertha once more; and Papa’s portrait stared down coldly and severely upon the two sisters.They looked at each other in silence. Bertha glanced round timidly: she felt that, in the big drawing-room, at the card-tables, the brothers and sisters had at once begun to talk again, criticizing her, because she had retired for a moment with Constance ... with Constance. And, lowering her voice to a hardly audible whisper, she murmured:“Constance ... Constance ...”“What is it, Bertha?”“Help me ... help me ... be kind to me.”“But what’s the matter?”“Oh dear, nobody knows about it yet, but I can’t keep it all ... here ... to myself!”“Tell me what it is and what I can do.”“I don’t know what you can do. But, Constance, I felt I had to ... had to ... tell you....”“Tell me then.”“Nobody, nobody knows yet ... except Louise and Marianne.”“What is it?”“Emilie ... Emilie has....”“Has what?”“She has gone away ... with Henri....”“Gone away?”“Run away perhaps ... with Henri.... I don’t know where. Van Raven doesn’t know where. Nobody knows. Adolph van Naghel, my brother-in-law the commissary, has made enquiries ... and has found out nothing.... We dissuaded her from seeking a divorce; so did Adolph. Then, no doubt because of that, she ran away with Henri, with her brother. She absolutely refuses to live with Eduard. She has run away.... Constance, where has she gone to? I don’t know! Constance, it’s a terrible thing! But keep it to yourself, don’t tell anybody. Mamma doesn’t know. I want to pretend, if there’s nothing else for it, if they don’t come back, that she has gone on a little journey, a trip somewhere,alone with her brother. We must pretend that, Constance. I don’t think they intend to come back. Henri has been very excited lately: he fought Eduard, came to blows with him, for ill-treating his sister. You know how fond they are of each other, Emilie and Henri. It’s almost unnatural, in a brother and sister. Now they’ve run away.... Oh dear, Constance, I am so terribly unhappy!”She threw herself into Constance’ arms, sobbed, with her arms round Constance’ neck:“Constance, Constance, help me!... I have no one to turn to, no one I can talk to. Adolph is helping me with the business-matters; Otto too. Louise is very kind; but she and Otto think that Emilie ought to divorce her husband, on the ground of cruelty. But, Constance, in our class, men don’t beat their wives! It never happens. It’s an awful thing. It only happens with the lower orders!... Oh dear, Constance, I am so unhappy!... The business-matters will be settled.... But there are debts. I thought that we were living within our income, but I don’t know: there appear to be debts. Bills mount up so.... I did so hope that the boys would finish their course. Frans will; but now Henri ... that mad idea ... going away with Emilie ... running away ... nobody knows where.... Oh dear, Constance, Iamso unhappy: help me, do help me!”She lay back limply in Constance’ arms and thetears flowed incessantly down her pale face, which in those few weeks had fallen away till it was the face of an old woman. She lay there feeble and ill; and it seemed as if Van Naghel’s death, coming suddenly as an additional catastrophe on that evening of misfortunes—her guests in the drawing-room, Emilie hiding upstairs, Van Raven waiting below—had so terribly shaken her composure, the composure of a prudent, resourceful woman of the world, that she was simply compelled to speak of private matters which she would never have mentioned before.... An instinct drove her into Constance’ arms, drove her to unbosom herself to Constance as the only one who could understand her. Her near-sighted, blinking eyes sought anxiously, through her tears, to read the expression on Constance’ face. And she was so broken, so shattered that Constance had to make an effort to realize that it was really Bertha whom she held in her arms.The ill-feeling which she had cherished for months past was gone. None of it remained in her soul, in her heart, as though she had passed out of the depths of that atmosphere to purer heights of understanding and feeling. Only for a moment did she still remember that evening when she herself, in this same room, had implored Bertha and Van Naghel to help her “rehabilitate” herself in the eyes of their friends and of the Hague. It seemed long ago, years ago. She could hardly understand herself:that she could have begged so earnestly for something that was so small, of such little importance to her soul, to the world. She could not have done it now.... She did not understand how she could so long have cherished a grudge against Van Naghel, against Bertha ... because they did not ask her to their official dinners, when the invitation would have given her the rehabilitation which she sought. At the present moment, she did not even desire that rehabilitation, did not care about it, treated it as something that had become of no value: an idea which had withered and shrivelled within her and which blew away like a dead leaf to far-off spacious skies.... Addie? He did not need his mother’s rehabilitation in the eyes of the Hague. The boy would make his own way in life.... Oh, how small she had been, to beg for it; to go on bearing a grudge, months on end, for something so little, so infinitesimal ... so absolutely non-existent!... She felt that something had grown up inside her and was looking down upon all that earlier business.... No, there was no bitterness left. She felt a deep pity and a sisterly affection for this poor, old woman, Bertha, who now lay feebly and impotently in her arms, begging ... for what? She collected her thoughts: what could she do, how could she help Bertha? Her thoughts crowded upon one another rapidly; she thought vaguely of Van der Welcke, of Addie: what could they do, how couldthey help Bertha, how get upon the track of Emilie and Henri? And in the end she could think of nothing to say but:“Yes, Bertha, the best thing will be to pretend that Emilie has gone for a trip with her brother. We will put it like that, if necessary. What does Van Raven want to do?”“He won’t consent to a divorce.... And it would be an awful thing, you know.... Oh, Constance, they have not been married ten months!”A weariness suddenly came over her, like the abrupt extinction of all the little mundane interests that had always meant so much to her.“But,” she murmured, “if he beats her ... perhaps it is better that they should be divorced.... I don’t know.... We are going to Baarn: there is a small villa to let there. I should prefer to take it at once and go down there with Louise and Marianne.... Karel gives me a lot of trouble: he doesn’t behave well, no, he doesn’t behave well. And he is still so young. Perhaps he will go to live with Adolph, his guardian, who will be very strict with him. I don’t know what to do, I can do nothing.... I used to do everything with Van Naghel, he and I together. He was really good and kind. We were always thinking of the children, both of us. He was tired ... of being in the Cabinet; but he went on, for the children’s sake....”Her unconscious simplicity, in implying that VanNaghel was in the Cabinet for the sake of his children and not of his country, seemed to strike Constance for the first time: she almost smiled, held Bertha closer to her.“He couldn’t very well resign ... and he didn’t want to,” Bertha continued, feebly. “And now I don’t know what to do. I feel so very much alone; and yet I was once a capable woman, wasn’t I, Constance? Now I no longer feel capable. Perhaps that life was too crowded. And, Constance, what was the use of it all? My children, our children, for whom we lived, are none of them happy. I have grown weary and old ... for nothing. I wish that we were at Baarn now. I want to live there quietly, with the two girls. Louise is nice, so is Marianne. They neither of them want to go about any more. They’re not happy, no, they are not happy. Oh, my poor, poor children!... You must never tell Mamma, Constance. Mamma doesn’t know: dear Mamma! There is no need for her to know, poor dear! Better leave her under the impression that all is well with us, even though Van Naghel is gone....”And she sobbed at the thought that she was alone. Then, suddenly, she drew herself up a little, made Constance take a chair, sat down beside her and asked, peering anxiously through her tears into Constance’ face:“Constance, tell me ... Marianne?”“Yes, Bertha?”“Are you fond of Marianne?”“Yes, very.”“Still?”“Yes, still.”“Constance....”“Yes, Bertha?”“It is just as well ... that we are going to Baarn.... Tell me, Constance: Van der Welcke....”“Well?”“What sort of a man is he?”“What do you mean, Bertha?” asked Constance, gently.“Is ... is it his fault?... Is he a gentleman?”Constance defended her husband calmly, but not without astonishment that Bertha could speak so frankly aboutthat... as if they both knew all about it:“No, Bertha, I don’t think that Henri ... that it is Henri’s fault. I don’t think it’s Marianne’s fault either. Bertha, I don’t believe they can help it. They have an attraction for each other, a very great attraction....”A tenderness came over her soul, like a glow, like a glowing compassion.“Constance, they must not let themselves go. They must struggle against it.”“Who can tell what they are doing, Bertha? Who can tell what goes on inside them?”“No, they are not struggling.”“Who can tell?”“No, no.... Constance, it is just as well that we are going to Baarn.”They heard voices in the drawing-room, loud voices, with an Indian accent. The Ruyvenaers were going:“Good-bye, Ber-r-rtha,” said Aunt Lot, looking through the door. “We’re going, Ber-r-rtha.”Constance and Bertha went back to the drawing-room. Bertha forgot to wipe the tears from her eyes, kissed Aunt Lot. Adolphine and Cateau came up to Bertha:“Ber-tha,” whined Cateau; and this time she whined with a vengeance. “We just want-ed to say awordto you. Emilie-tje mustnotget a di-vorce.”“No,” said Adolphine, “if she goes and gets a divorce, the family will become impossible. It’ll create a scandal, if they are divorced.”“Ye-es,” Cateau droned aloud, “it would be a scan-dal, Ber-tha. Don’t you think sotoo, Constance?”“There’s no question of it ... for the moment,” said Constance. “Emilie has gone abroad for a bit with Henri; and the change is sure to do her good and make her a little calmer.”“Oh?... Has she gone a-broad?”“Where to?” asked Adolphine, all agog.“They were to go to Paris,” said Constance, without hesitating.“O-oh?... Has Emilie-tje gone to ... Pa-ris?”“Yes, with her brother,” Constance repeated.A minute later, she found an opportunity of saying quietly to Bertha:“It’s better like that, Bertha; better to say it as if it was quite natural... If you don’t say it yourself ... and they come to hear....”“Thank you, Constance ... thank you.”“Oh, Bertha.... I wish I could do something for you!”“You have helped me as it is.... Thank you.... That’s all that I can say....”She lay back helplessly in her chair, staring dimly before her. Constance followed her glance. She saw that Van der Welcke had come, very late. He was sitting in the conservatory—where the boys had cleared away the cards after their game, as Grandmamma always expected them to do—sitting a little in the shadow, but still visible. He was bending over towards Marianne, who sat beside him, her face a white patch in the darkness: a frail little black figure making a faint blur in the dim conservatory, where the gas was now turned out. She seemed to be weeping silently, sat crushing her handkerchief. He appeared to be saying something,anxiously and tenderly, while he bent still nearer to her. Then, suddenly, he took her hand, pressed it impulsively. Marianne looked up in alarm. Her eyes met, at the far end of the long drawing-room, the eyes of Aunt Constance, the dull, staring eyes of her mother. She drew away her hand ... and her pale face flushed with a glow of shame....Grandmamma stood in the middle of the drawing-room, a little sad at the gloom which the recent mourning had cast over her rooms. The children took their leave.1Poor thing!

Chapter XXI

The door opened and Bertha, Louise and Marianne entered. And they stepped so suddenly right across Constance’ thoughts that she was startled at their appearance: mother and daughters in deep mourning. She had not seen Bertha except on that first hurried visit immediately after Van Naghel’s death and on the day of the funeral, six weeks ago; and she knew very little of what was happening; she had seen Marianne only once. And now that they both stepped right across her thoughts, into that narrow circle—which she condemned, though she herself was unable to move out of it—a great compassion suddenly surged through her, like a torrent. Bertha looked very pale, tired, wasted, grown all at once into an old woman, hopeless and resigned, as though broken under much silent sorrow. Louise’s face wore a rather more tranquil expression; but Marianne beside her, delicate and white, still more delicate and white in her black dress, also diffused an almost tearful melancholy. Mamma rose and went towards them. It was the first time since her husband’s death that Bertha had come to Mamma’s Sunday-evening; and the gesture with which the old woman rose, approached her daughter, embraced her and led her to the sofa where she had been sittingshowed the same open-armed and open-hearted motherly affection with which, as Constance remembered, Mamma had received her, Constance, at the door, on the landing, on the first evening of her own return. Dear Mamma!It touched her so much that she herself rose, went to Bertha, kissed her tenderly, kissed Louise and Marianne. Her voice, for the first time for many a day, had a sisterly note in it that took Bertha by surprise. She pressed Constance’ hand and, after the others had spoken to her, sat down quietly near Mamma, Aunt Lot and Constance. How pale, dejected and resigned she was! She seemed to be looking helplessly around her, to be looking for some one to assist her, to be wishing to say something, to somebody, that would have relieved her. She sighed:“I have come, Mamma ... but I cannot stay long,” she said. “I am very tired. There are all those business matters; and, though Adolph is very kind and sympathetic and is a great help, it is terribly complicated and I sometimes feel half-dead with it all.... It’s lucky that I have Otto and Frances; I don’t know what I should do without them.... You know we are going to live in the country?...”“You were thinking about it the other day, dear,” said Mamma, anxiously, “but it wasn’t decided yet ... Bertha,mustI lose you?”“Dear Mamma, it’s better in the country. Adolph wanted us to look round in Overijssel, but I would rather be at Baarn, for instance: it’s nearer to the Hague and you....”“Why, Baarn, my child? There’s nobody there but Amsterdam people, business-people: such a very different set from ours!...”“We sha’n’t expect to make friends, Mamma, at first. I shall be alone with the girls. Otto and Frances have found a little house at the Hague: it’s lucky that Otto is provided for at the Foreign Office. The minister spoke very nicely about him the other day.... Frans and Henri must finish their university-course quickly now,” she said, in a hesitating tone. “Karel is going to a boarding-school, for I can’t manage him. And Marietje too: she was going soon, in any case. So there will be just the three of us: Louise, Marianne and I.... Things have changed very much, all at once, Aunt Lot. We want to live quietly. In the first place, we shall just have to live quietly; and the girls are quite content to do so....”It again seemed to Constance as if Bertha were looking for somebody in the room, were hushing something up. Constance had Emilie’s name on her lips, but she did not like to ask. Mamma knew nothing more than that Emilie and Van Raven sometimes had differences.“I shall have a lot of trouble and worry beforeme,” said Bertha. “But, when it is all settled and we have our little villa....”She sank back in her chair and stared before her with dim eyes.Constance took her hand compassionately, held it tight. It looked as though Bertha, after that busy life which had suddenly snapped with Van Naghel’s death, an hour after their last dinner-party, no longer knew what to do or say, felt derelict and helpless....Though there was so much business to attend to, she seemed stunned all at once, in the grip of a strange lethargy, as though everything was now finished, as though there was nothing left now that there would soon be no more visits to pay, no receptions to hold, no dinners to give; now that Van Naghel no longer came home from the Chamber, tired and irritable from an afternoon’s heckling; now that there would be no more calculating how they could manage to spend a thousand guilders less a month; now that she would simply have to live quietly on what she and the girls possessed. And it seemed as if she no longer knew how or why she should go on living, now that she would no longer have to give her dinners and pay her visits ... for her children, particularly her girls. Louise and Marianne had said to her so calmly that they wanted very soon to begin living quietly that Bertha now began to wonder:“Why did I always make so much fuss, if the girls cared for it so little? Why did I go on till I was old and worn out?”It was true, that had been Van Naghel’s ambition: he had wanted to see his house a politicalsalon. What he wished had happened. Now it was all over. Now there was nothing to be done but to live quietly, in the little villa at Baarn; to make no debts; to let the boys finish their college-course as quickly as possible; and then to educate Karel and Marietje and let theirs be a different life from the others’: how she did not know....Bertha remained sitting wearily, staring vaguely before her, half-listening to the sympathetic words, uttered with an emphatic Indian accent, of Aunt Lot, who kept saying:“Kassian!...”1But suddenly an access of nervousness seemed to startle her out of her depression. She looked round again, as though seeking for somebody ... somebody to say something to. Her glance fastened for a moment on Aunt Lot and then on Constance. Suddenly she rose, with a little laugh, as though she wanted to speak to Louise, farther away. But the nervous pressure of her hand seemed to be urging Constance also to get up, to go with her, somewhere, anywhere.... They went through the other drawing-room, past the card-table at whichUncle, Adolphine, Karel and Dotje were sitting, past the other with Cateau, Van Saetzema, Dijkerhof and Pop; and the conversation at both tables at once flagged; the cards fell hurriedly one after the other.... They were talking about Bertha, thought Constance, as Bertha drew her gently to the little boudoir, the room where the wine and cakes were set out, where Papa van Lowe’s portrait hung, stern and inexorable; the little room where they all of them went when they had anything confidential to say to one another, when there was a scene, or a difference, or a private discussion. And Constance at once remembered how, five months ago, she had appealed to Van Naghel and Bertha in this very room; how they had refused to receive her “officially” at their house; how Van der Welcke had lost his temper, flown into a rage, made a rush for Van Naghel.... She was now here with Bertha once more; and Papa’s portrait stared down coldly and severely upon the two sisters.They looked at each other in silence. Bertha glanced round timidly: she felt that, in the big drawing-room, at the card-tables, the brothers and sisters had at once begun to talk again, criticizing her, because she had retired for a moment with Constance ... with Constance. And, lowering her voice to a hardly audible whisper, she murmured:“Constance ... Constance ...”“What is it, Bertha?”“Help me ... help me ... be kind to me.”“But what’s the matter?”“Oh dear, nobody knows about it yet, but I can’t keep it all ... here ... to myself!”“Tell me what it is and what I can do.”“I don’t know what you can do. But, Constance, I felt I had to ... had to ... tell you....”“Tell me then.”“Nobody, nobody knows yet ... except Louise and Marianne.”“What is it?”“Emilie ... Emilie has....”“Has what?”“She has gone away ... with Henri....”“Gone away?”“Run away perhaps ... with Henri.... I don’t know where. Van Raven doesn’t know where. Nobody knows. Adolph van Naghel, my brother-in-law the commissary, has made enquiries ... and has found out nothing.... We dissuaded her from seeking a divorce; so did Adolph. Then, no doubt because of that, she ran away with Henri, with her brother. She absolutely refuses to live with Eduard. She has run away.... Constance, where has she gone to? I don’t know! Constance, it’s a terrible thing! But keep it to yourself, don’t tell anybody. Mamma doesn’t know. I want to pretend, if there’s nothing else for it, if they don’t come back, that she has gone on a little journey, a trip somewhere,alone with her brother. We must pretend that, Constance. I don’t think they intend to come back. Henri has been very excited lately: he fought Eduard, came to blows with him, for ill-treating his sister. You know how fond they are of each other, Emilie and Henri. It’s almost unnatural, in a brother and sister. Now they’ve run away.... Oh dear, Constance, I am so terribly unhappy!”She threw herself into Constance’ arms, sobbed, with her arms round Constance’ neck:“Constance, Constance, help me!... I have no one to turn to, no one I can talk to. Adolph is helping me with the business-matters; Otto too. Louise is very kind; but she and Otto think that Emilie ought to divorce her husband, on the ground of cruelty. But, Constance, in our class, men don’t beat their wives! It never happens. It’s an awful thing. It only happens with the lower orders!... Oh dear, Constance, I am so unhappy!... The business-matters will be settled.... But there are debts. I thought that we were living within our income, but I don’t know: there appear to be debts. Bills mount up so.... I did so hope that the boys would finish their course. Frans will; but now Henri ... that mad idea ... going away with Emilie ... running away ... nobody knows where.... Oh dear, Constance, Iamso unhappy: help me, do help me!”She lay back limply in Constance’ arms and thetears flowed incessantly down her pale face, which in those few weeks had fallen away till it was the face of an old woman. She lay there feeble and ill; and it seemed as if Van Naghel’s death, coming suddenly as an additional catastrophe on that evening of misfortunes—her guests in the drawing-room, Emilie hiding upstairs, Van Raven waiting below—had so terribly shaken her composure, the composure of a prudent, resourceful woman of the world, that she was simply compelled to speak of private matters which she would never have mentioned before.... An instinct drove her into Constance’ arms, drove her to unbosom herself to Constance as the only one who could understand her. Her near-sighted, blinking eyes sought anxiously, through her tears, to read the expression on Constance’ face. And she was so broken, so shattered that Constance had to make an effort to realize that it was really Bertha whom she held in her arms.The ill-feeling which she had cherished for months past was gone. None of it remained in her soul, in her heart, as though she had passed out of the depths of that atmosphere to purer heights of understanding and feeling. Only for a moment did she still remember that evening when she herself, in this same room, had implored Bertha and Van Naghel to help her “rehabilitate” herself in the eyes of their friends and of the Hague. It seemed long ago, years ago. She could hardly understand herself:that she could have begged so earnestly for something that was so small, of such little importance to her soul, to the world. She could not have done it now.... She did not understand how she could so long have cherished a grudge against Van Naghel, against Bertha ... because they did not ask her to their official dinners, when the invitation would have given her the rehabilitation which she sought. At the present moment, she did not even desire that rehabilitation, did not care about it, treated it as something that had become of no value: an idea which had withered and shrivelled within her and which blew away like a dead leaf to far-off spacious skies.... Addie? He did not need his mother’s rehabilitation in the eyes of the Hague. The boy would make his own way in life.... Oh, how small she had been, to beg for it; to go on bearing a grudge, months on end, for something so little, so infinitesimal ... so absolutely non-existent!... She felt that something had grown up inside her and was looking down upon all that earlier business.... No, there was no bitterness left. She felt a deep pity and a sisterly affection for this poor, old woman, Bertha, who now lay feebly and impotently in her arms, begging ... for what? She collected her thoughts: what could she do, how could she help Bertha? Her thoughts crowded upon one another rapidly; she thought vaguely of Van der Welcke, of Addie: what could they do, how couldthey help Bertha, how get upon the track of Emilie and Henri? And in the end she could think of nothing to say but:“Yes, Bertha, the best thing will be to pretend that Emilie has gone for a trip with her brother. We will put it like that, if necessary. What does Van Raven want to do?”“He won’t consent to a divorce.... And it would be an awful thing, you know.... Oh, Constance, they have not been married ten months!”A weariness suddenly came over her, like the abrupt extinction of all the little mundane interests that had always meant so much to her.“But,” she murmured, “if he beats her ... perhaps it is better that they should be divorced.... I don’t know.... We are going to Baarn: there is a small villa to let there. I should prefer to take it at once and go down there with Louise and Marianne.... Karel gives me a lot of trouble: he doesn’t behave well, no, he doesn’t behave well. And he is still so young. Perhaps he will go to live with Adolph, his guardian, who will be very strict with him. I don’t know what to do, I can do nothing.... I used to do everything with Van Naghel, he and I together. He was really good and kind. We were always thinking of the children, both of us. He was tired ... of being in the Cabinet; but he went on, for the children’s sake....”Her unconscious simplicity, in implying that VanNaghel was in the Cabinet for the sake of his children and not of his country, seemed to strike Constance for the first time: she almost smiled, held Bertha closer to her.“He couldn’t very well resign ... and he didn’t want to,” Bertha continued, feebly. “And now I don’t know what to do. I feel so very much alone; and yet I was once a capable woman, wasn’t I, Constance? Now I no longer feel capable. Perhaps that life was too crowded. And, Constance, what was the use of it all? My children, our children, for whom we lived, are none of them happy. I have grown weary and old ... for nothing. I wish that we were at Baarn now. I want to live there quietly, with the two girls. Louise is nice, so is Marianne. They neither of them want to go about any more. They’re not happy, no, they are not happy. Oh, my poor, poor children!... You must never tell Mamma, Constance. Mamma doesn’t know: dear Mamma! There is no need for her to know, poor dear! Better leave her under the impression that all is well with us, even though Van Naghel is gone....”And she sobbed at the thought that she was alone. Then, suddenly, she drew herself up a little, made Constance take a chair, sat down beside her and asked, peering anxiously through her tears into Constance’ face:“Constance, tell me ... Marianne?”“Yes, Bertha?”“Are you fond of Marianne?”“Yes, very.”“Still?”“Yes, still.”“Constance....”“Yes, Bertha?”“It is just as well ... that we are going to Baarn.... Tell me, Constance: Van der Welcke....”“Well?”“What sort of a man is he?”“What do you mean, Bertha?” asked Constance, gently.“Is ... is it his fault?... Is he a gentleman?”Constance defended her husband calmly, but not without astonishment that Bertha could speak so frankly aboutthat... as if they both knew all about it:“No, Bertha, I don’t think that Henri ... that it is Henri’s fault. I don’t think it’s Marianne’s fault either. Bertha, I don’t believe they can help it. They have an attraction for each other, a very great attraction....”A tenderness came over her soul, like a glow, like a glowing compassion.“Constance, they must not let themselves go. They must struggle against it.”“Who can tell what they are doing, Bertha? Who can tell what goes on inside them?”“No, they are not struggling.”“Who can tell?”“No, no.... Constance, it is just as well that we are going to Baarn.”They heard voices in the drawing-room, loud voices, with an Indian accent. The Ruyvenaers were going:“Good-bye, Ber-r-rtha,” said Aunt Lot, looking through the door. “We’re going, Ber-r-rtha.”Constance and Bertha went back to the drawing-room. Bertha forgot to wipe the tears from her eyes, kissed Aunt Lot. Adolphine and Cateau came up to Bertha:“Ber-tha,” whined Cateau; and this time she whined with a vengeance. “We just want-ed to say awordto you. Emilie-tje mustnotget a di-vorce.”“No,” said Adolphine, “if she goes and gets a divorce, the family will become impossible. It’ll create a scandal, if they are divorced.”“Ye-es,” Cateau droned aloud, “it would be a scan-dal, Ber-tha. Don’t you think sotoo, Constance?”“There’s no question of it ... for the moment,” said Constance. “Emilie has gone abroad for a bit with Henri; and the change is sure to do her good and make her a little calmer.”“Oh?... Has she gone a-broad?”“Where to?” asked Adolphine, all agog.“They were to go to Paris,” said Constance, without hesitating.“O-oh?... Has Emilie-tje gone to ... Pa-ris?”“Yes, with her brother,” Constance repeated.A minute later, she found an opportunity of saying quietly to Bertha:“It’s better like that, Bertha; better to say it as if it was quite natural... If you don’t say it yourself ... and they come to hear....”“Thank you, Constance ... thank you.”“Oh, Bertha.... I wish I could do something for you!”“You have helped me as it is.... Thank you.... That’s all that I can say....”She lay back helplessly in her chair, staring dimly before her. Constance followed her glance. She saw that Van der Welcke had come, very late. He was sitting in the conservatory—where the boys had cleared away the cards after their game, as Grandmamma always expected them to do—sitting a little in the shadow, but still visible. He was bending over towards Marianne, who sat beside him, her face a white patch in the darkness: a frail little black figure making a faint blur in the dim conservatory, where the gas was now turned out. She seemed to be weeping silently, sat crushing her handkerchief. He appeared to be saying something,anxiously and tenderly, while he bent still nearer to her. Then, suddenly, he took her hand, pressed it impulsively. Marianne looked up in alarm. Her eyes met, at the far end of the long drawing-room, the eyes of Aunt Constance, the dull, staring eyes of her mother. She drew away her hand ... and her pale face flushed with a glow of shame....Grandmamma stood in the middle of the drawing-room, a little sad at the gloom which the recent mourning had cast over her rooms. The children took their leave.

The door opened and Bertha, Louise and Marianne entered. And they stepped so suddenly right across Constance’ thoughts that she was startled at their appearance: mother and daughters in deep mourning. She had not seen Bertha except on that first hurried visit immediately after Van Naghel’s death and on the day of the funeral, six weeks ago; and she knew very little of what was happening; she had seen Marianne only once. And now that they both stepped right across her thoughts, into that narrow circle—which she condemned, though she herself was unable to move out of it—a great compassion suddenly surged through her, like a torrent. Bertha looked very pale, tired, wasted, grown all at once into an old woman, hopeless and resigned, as though broken under much silent sorrow. Louise’s face wore a rather more tranquil expression; but Marianne beside her, delicate and white, still more delicate and white in her black dress, also diffused an almost tearful melancholy. Mamma rose and went towards them. It was the first time since her husband’s death that Bertha had come to Mamma’s Sunday-evening; and the gesture with which the old woman rose, approached her daughter, embraced her and led her to the sofa where she had been sittingshowed the same open-armed and open-hearted motherly affection with which, as Constance remembered, Mamma had received her, Constance, at the door, on the landing, on the first evening of her own return. Dear Mamma!

It touched her so much that she herself rose, went to Bertha, kissed her tenderly, kissed Louise and Marianne. Her voice, for the first time for many a day, had a sisterly note in it that took Bertha by surprise. She pressed Constance’ hand and, after the others had spoken to her, sat down quietly near Mamma, Aunt Lot and Constance. How pale, dejected and resigned she was! She seemed to be looking helplessly around her, to be looking for some one to assist her, to be wishing to say something, to somebody, that would have relieved her. She sighed:

“I have come, Mamma ... but I cannot stay long,” she said. “I am very tired. There are all those business matters; and, though Adolph is very kind and sympathetic and is a great help, it is terribly complicated and I sometimes feel half-dead with it all.... It’s lucky that I have Otto and Frances; I don’t know what I should do without them.... You know we are going to live in the country?...”

“You were thinking about it the other day, dear,” said Mamma, anxiously, “but it wasn’t decided yet ... Bertha,mustI lose you?”

“Dear Mamma, it’s better in the country. Adolph wanted us to look round in Overijssel, but I would rather be at Baarn, for instance: it’s nearer to the Hague and you....”

“Why, Baarn, my child? There’s nobody there but Amsterdam people, business-people: such a very different set from ours!...”

“We sha’n’t expect to make friends, Mamma, at first. I shall be alone with the girls. Otto and Frances have found a little house at the Hague: it’s lucky that Otto is provided for at the Foreign Office. The minister spoke very nicely about him the other day.... Frans and Henri must finish their university-course quickly now,” she said, in a hesitating tone. “Karel is going to a boarding-school, for I can’t manage him. And Marietje too: she was going soon, in any case. So there will be just the three of us: Louise, Marianne and I.... Things have changed very much, all at once, Aunt Lot. We want to live quietly. In the first place, we shall just have to live quietly; and the girls are quite content to do so....”

It again seemed to Constance as if Bertha were looking for somebody in the room, were hushing something up. Constance had Emilie’s name on her lips, but she did not like to ask. Mamma knew nothing more than that Emilie and Van Raven sometimes had differences.

“I shall have a lot of trouble and worry beforeme,” said Bertha. “But, when it is all settled and we have our little villa....”

She sank back in her chair and stared before her with dim eyes.

Constance took her hand compassionately, held it tight. It looked as though Bertha, after that busy life which had suddenly snapped with Van Naghel’s death, an hour after their last dinner-party, no longer knew what to do or say, felt derelict and helpless....

Though there was so much business to attend to, she seemed stunned all at once, in the grip of a strange lethargy, as though everything was now finished, as though there was nothing left now that there would soon be no more visits to pay, no receptions to hold, no dinners to give; now that Van Naghel no longer came home from the Chamber, tired and irritable from an afternoon’s heckling; now that there would be no more calculating how they could manage to spend a thousand guilders less a month; now that she would simply have to live quietly on what she and the girls possessed. And it seemed as if she no longer knew how or why she should go on living, now that she would no longer have to give her dinners and pay her visits ... for her children, particularly her girls. Louise and Marianne had said to her so calmly that they wanted very soon to begin living quietly that Bertha now began to wonder:

“Why did I always make so much fuss, if the girls cared for it so little? Why did I go on till I was old and worn out?”

It was true, that had been Van Naghel’s ambition: he had wanted to see his house a politicalsalon. What he wished had happened. Now it was all over. Now there was nothing to be done but to live quietly, in the little villa at Baarn; to make no debts; to let the boys finish their college-course as quickly as possible; and then to educate Karel and Marietje and let theirs be a different life from the others’: how she did not know....

Bertha remained sitting wearily, staring vaguely before her, half-listening to the sympathetic words, uttered with an emphatic Indian accent, of Aunt Lot, who kept saying:

“Kassian!...”1

But suddenly an access of nervousness seemed to startle her out of her depression. She looked round again, as though seeking for somebody ... somebody to say something to. Her glance fastened for a moment on Aunt Lot and then on Constance. Suddenly she rose, with a little laugh, as though she wanted to speak to Louise, farther away. But the nervous pressure of her hand seemed to be urging Constance also to get up, to go with her, somewhere, anywhere.... They went through the other drawing-room, past the card-table at whichUncle, Adolphine, Karel and Dotje were sitting, past the other with Cateau, Van Saetzema, Dijkerhof and Pop; and the conversation at both tables at once flagged; the cards fell hurriedly one after the other.... They were talking about Bertha, thought Constance, as Bertha drew her gently to the little boudoir, the room where the wine and cakes were set out, where Papa van Lowe’s portrait hung, stern and inexorable; the little room where they all of them went when they had anything confidential to say to one another, when there was a scene, or a difference, or a private discussion. And Constance at once remembered how, five months ago, she had appealed to Van Naghel and Bertha in this very room; how they had refused to receive her “officially” at their house; how Van der Welcke had lost his temper, flown into a rage, made a rush for Van Naghel.... She was now here with Bertha once more; and Papa’s portrait stared down coldly and severely upon the two sisters.

They looked at each other in silence. Bertha glanced round timidly: she felt that, in the big drawing-room, at the card-tables, the brothers and sisters had at once begun to talk again, criticizing her, because she had retired for a moment with Constance ... with Constance. And, lowering her voice to a hardly audible whisper, she murmured:

“Constance ... Constance ...”

“What is it, Bertha?”

“Help me ... help me ... be kind to me.”

“But what’s the matter?”

“Oh dear, nobody knows about it yet, but I can’t keep it all ... here ... to myself!”

“Tell me what it is and what I can do.”

“I don’t know what you can do. But, Constance, I felt I had to ... had to ... tell you....”

“Tell me then.”

“Nobody, nobody knows yet ... except Louise and Marianne.”

“What is it?”

“Emilie ... Emilie has....”

“Has what?”

“She has gone away ... with Henri....”

“Gone away?”

“Run away perhaps ... with Henri.... I don’t know where. Van Raven doesn’t know where. Nobody knows. Adolph van Naghel, my brother-in-law the commissary, has made enquiries ... and has found out nothing.... We dissuaded her from seeking a divorce; so did Adolph. Then, no doubt because of that, she ran away with Henri, with her brother. She absolutely refuses to live with Eduard. She has run away.... Constance, where has she gone to? I don’t know! Constance, it’s a terrible thing! But keep it to yourself, don’t tell anybody. Mamma doesn’t know. I want to pretend, if there’s nothing else for it, if they don’t come back, that she has gone on a little journey, a trip somewhere,alone with her brother. We must pretend that, Constance. I don’t think they intend to come back. Henri has been very excited lately: he fought Eduard, came to blows with him, for ill-treating his sister. You know how fond they are of each other, Emilie and Henri. It’s almost unnatural, in a brother and sister. Now they’ve run away.... Oh dear, Constance, I am so terribly unhappy!”

She threw herself into Constance’ arms, sobbed, with her arms round Constance’ neck:

“Constance, Constance, help me!... I have no one to turn to, no one I can talk to. Adolph is helping me with the business-matters; Otto too. Louise is very kind; but she and Otto think that Emilie ought to divorce her husband, on the ground of cruelty. But, Constance, in our class, men don’t beat their wives! It never happens. It’s an awful thing. It only happens with the lower orders!... Oh dear, Constance, I am so unhappy!... The business-matters will be settled.... But there are debts. I thought that we were living within our income, but I don’t know: there appear to be debts. Bills mount up so.... I did so hope that the boys would finish their course. Frans will; but now Henri ... that mad idea ... going away with Emilie ... running away ... nobody knows where.... Oh dear, Constance, Iamso unhappy: help me, do help me!”

She lay back limply in Constance’ arms and thetears flowed incessantly down her pale face, which in those few weeks had fallen away till it was the face of an old woman. She lay there feeble and ill; and it seemed as if Van Naghel’s death, coming suddenly as an additional catastrophe on that evening of misfortunes—her guests in the drawing-room, Emilie hiding upstairs, Van Raven waiting below—had so terribly shaken her composure, the composure of a prudent, resourceful woman of the world, that she was simply compelled to speak of private matters which she would never have mentioned before.... An instinct drove her into Constance’ arms, drove her to unbosom herself to Constance as the only one who could understand her. Her near-sighted, blinking eyes sought anxiously, through her tears, to read the expression on Constance’ face. And she was so broken, so shattered that Constance had to make an effort to realize that it was really Bertha whom she held in her arms.

The ill-feeling which she had cherished for months past was gone. None of it remained in her soul, in her heart, as though she had passed out of the depths of that atmosphere to purer heights of understanding and feeling. Only for a moment did she still remember that evening when she herself, in this same room, had implored Bertha and Van Naghel to help her “rehabilitate” herself in the eyes of their friends and of the Hague. It seemed long ago, years ago. She could hardly understand herself:that she could have begged so earnestly for something that was so small, of such little importance to her soul, to the world. She could not have done it now.... She did not understand how she could so long have cherished a grudge against Van Naghel, against Bertha ... because they did not ask her to their official dinners, when the invitation would have given her the rehabilitation which she sought. At the present moment, she did not even desire that rehabilitation, did not care about it, treated it as something that had become of no value: an idea which had withered and shrivelled within her and which blew away like a dead leaf to far-off spacious skies.... Addie? He did not need his mother’s rehabilitation in the eyes of the Hague. The boy would make his own way in life.... Oh, how small she had been, to beg for it; to go on bearing a grudge, months on end, for something so little, so infinitesimal ... so absolutely non-existent!... She felt that something had grown up inside her and was looking down upon all that earlier business.... No, there was no bitterness left. She felt a deep pity and a sisterly affection for this poor, old woman, Bertha, who now lay feebly and impotently in her arms, begging ... for what? She collected her thoughts: what could she do, how could she help Bertha? Her thoughts crowded upon one another rapidly; she thought vaguely of Van der Welcke, of Addie: what could they do, how couldthey help Bertha, how get upon the track of Emilie and Henri? And in the end she could think of nothing to say but:

“Yes, Bertha, the best thing will be to pretend that Emilie has gone for a trip with her brother. We will put it like that, if necessary. What does Van Raven want to do?”

“He won’t consent to a divorce.... And it would be an awful thing, you know.... Oh, Constance, they have not been married ten months!”

A weariness suddenly came over her, like the abrupt extinction of all the little mundane interests that had always meant so much to her.

“But,” she murmured, “if he beats her ... perhaps it is better that they should be divorced.... I don’t know.... We are going to Baarn: there is a small villa to let there. I should prefer to take it at once and go down there with Louise and Marianne.... Karel gives me a lot of trouble: he doesn’t behave well, no, he doesn’t behave well. And he is still so young. Perhaps he will go to live with Adolph, his guardian, who will be very strict with him. I don’t know what to do, I can do nothing.... I used to do everything with Van Naghel, he and I together. He was really good and kind. We were always thinking of the children, both of us. He was tired ... of being in the Cabinet; but he went on, for the children’s sake....”

Her unconscious simplicity, in implying that VanNaghel was in the Cabinet for the sake of his children and not of his country, seemed to strike Constance for the first time: she almost smiled, held Bertha closer to her.

“He couldn’t very well resign ... and he didn’t want to,” Bertha continued, feebly. “And now I don’t know what to do. I feel so very much alone; and yet I was once a capable woman, wasn’t I, Constance? Now I no longer feel capable. Perhaps that life was too crowded. And, Constance, what was the use of it all? My children, our children, for whom we lived, are none of them happy. I have grown weary and old ... for nothing. I wish that we were at Baarn now. I want to live there quietly, with the two girls. Louise is nice, so is Marianne. They neither of them want to go about any more. They’re not happy, no, they are not happy. Oh, my poor, poor children!... You must never tell Mamma, Constance. Mamma doesn’t know: dear Mamma! There is no need for her to know, poor dear! Better leave her under the impression that all is well with us, even though Van Naghel is gone....”

And she sobbed at the thought that she was alone. Then, suddenly, she drew herself up a little, made Constance take a chair, sat down beside her and asked, peering anxiously through her tears into Constance’ face:

“Constance, tell me ... Marianne?”

“Yes, Bertha?”

“Are you fond of Marianne?”

“Yes, very.”

“Still?”

“Yes, still.”

“Constance....”

“Yes, Bertha?”

“It is just as well ... that we are going to Baarn.... Tell me, Constance: Van der Welcke....”

“Well?”

“What sort of a man is he?”

“What do you mean, Bertha?” asked Constance, gently.

“Is ... is it his fault?... Is he a gentleman?”

Constance defended her husband calmly, but not without astonishment that Bertha could speak so frankly aboutthat... as if they both knew all about it:

“No, Bertha, I don’t think that Henri ... that it is Henri’s fault. I don’t think it’s Marianne’s fault either. Bertha, I don’t believe they can help it. They have an attraction for each other, a very great attraction....”

A tenderness came over her soul, like a glow, like a glowing compassion.

“Constance, they must not let themselves go. They must struggle against it.”

“Who can tell what they are doing, Bertha? Who can tell what goes on inside them?”

“No, they are not struggling.”

“Who can tell?”

“No, no.... Constance, it is just as well that we are going to Baarn.”

They heard voices in the drawing-room, loud voices, with an Indian accent. The Ruyvenaers were going:

“Good-bye, Ber-r-rtha,” said Aunt Lot, looking through the door. “We’re going, Ber-r-rtha.”

Constance and Bertha went back to the drawing-room. Bertha forgot to wipe the tears from her eyes, kissed Aunt Lot. Adolphine and Cateau came up to Bertha:

“Ber-tha,” whined Cateau; and this time she whined with a vengeance. “We just want-ed to say awordto you. Emilie-tje mustnotget a di-vorce.”

“No,” said Adolphine, “if she goes and gets a divorce, the family will become impossible. It’ll create a scandal, if they are divorced.”

“Ye-es,” Cateau droned aloud, “it would be a scan-dal, Ber-tha. Don’t you think sotoo, Constance?”

“There’s no question of it ... for the moment,” said Constance. “Emilie has gone abroad for a bit with Henri; and the change is sure to do her good and make her a little calmer.”

“Oh?... Has she gone a-broad?”

“Where to?” asked Adolphine, all agog.

“They were to go to Paris,” said Constance, without hesitating.

“O-oh?... Has Emilie-tje gone to ... Pa-ris?”

“Yes, with her brother,” Constance repeated.

A minute later, she found an opportunity of saying quietly to Bertha:

“It’s better like that, Bertha; better to say it as if it was quite natural... If you don’t say it yourself ... and they come to hear....”

“Thank you, Constance ... thank you.”

“Oh, Bertha.... I wish I could do something for you!”

“You have helped me as it is.... Thank you.... That’s all that I can say....”

She lay back helplessly in her chair, staring dimly before her. Constance followed her glance. She saw that Van der Welcke had come, very late. He was sitting in the conservatory—where the boys had cleared away the cards after their game, as Grandmamma always expected them to do—sitting a little in the shadow, but still visible. He was bending over towards Marianne, who sat beside him, her face a white patch in the darkness: a frail little black figure making a faint blur in the dim conservatory, where the gas was now turned out. She seemed to be weeping silently, sat crushing her handkerchief. He appeared to be saying something,anxiously and tenderly, while he bent still nearer to her. Then, suddenly, he took her hand, pressed it impulsively. Marianne looked up in alarm. Her eyes met, at the far end of the long drawing-room, the eyes of Aunt Constance, the dull, staring eyes of her mother. She drew away her hand ... and her pale face flushed with a glow of shame....

Grandmamma stood in the middle of the drawing-room, a little sad at the gloom which the recent mourning had cast over her rooms. The children took their leave.

1Poor thing!

1Poor thing!

Chapter XXIIConstance began to love her loneliness more and more.Her daily life was very uneventful: she could count the people with whom she came into contact. First her husband and her son: there was something gentler in her attitude towards Van der Welcke, something almost motherly, which prevented her from getting angry with him, even though the inclination welled up within her. Addie was as usual, perhaps even a little more serious: this disquieted her. Then there was Brauws, who came regularly. He dined with them regularly, on a fixed day in the week, quite informally; and moreover he had become the friend of both Van der Welcke and Constance and even of Addie. Then there were Mamma, Gerrit and his little tribe and, now and again, Paul. And then there was Van Vreeswijck; and Marianne, of course; and latterly she had seen more of Bertha. For the rest she seemed to drift away from all the others, even from warm-hearted Aunt Lot. She kept in touch only with those with whom she was really in sympathy.Still, though she had these few friends, she oftenhad quite lonely afternoons. But they did not depress her; she gazed out at the rain, at the cloud-phantoms. And she dreamed ... along the path of light. She smiled at her dream. Even though she very much feared the absurdity of it for herself, she could not help it: a new youthfulness filled her with a gentle glow, a new tenderness, like the delicate bloom of a young girl’s soul dreaming of the wonderful future.... And then she would come back to herself suddenly and smile at her sentimentality and summon up all her matronly common-sense; and she would think:“Come, I oughtn’t to be sitting like this!... Come, I oughtn’t to be acting like this and thinking of everything and nothing!... Certainly, I like him very much; but why cannot I do that without these strange thoughts, without dreaming and picturing all manner of things and filling my head with romantic fancies ... as if I were a girl of eighteen or twenty?... Oh, those are the things which we do not speak about, the deep secret things which we never tell to anybody!... I should never have suspected them in myself ... or that they could be so exquisitely sweet to me. How strangely sweet, to dream myself back to youth in visions which, though they never really take shape, yet make a shining path to those cloudy skies, to imagine myself young again in those dreams!... If I never had these thoughts and dreams before, why do Ihave them now? Come, I oughtn’t to be sitting like this and thinking like this!... I make up a host of pretty stories, sentimental little stories, and see myself, see us both, years ago, as quite young children, both of us. He played and I played ... almost the same game: he a boy, I a girl. It was as though he were seeking me. It was as though I, in my childish dreams, divined something of him, far, far away, as though there were a part of me that wanted to go to him, a part of him that wanted to come to me.... Stop, I am giving way again to those secret enthusiasms which lie deep down in my soul like strange, hidden streams, those vague, romantic ferments such as I imagined that young girls might have, but not I, a woman of my years, a woman with my past, the mother of a big son.... I willnotdo it any more, I willnot.... It is morbid to be like this.... And yet ... and yet ... when the wind blows and the rain comes down, itis, it still is the dear secret that brings the tears to my eyes.... If I love him, quite silently, deep down within myself, why may I not just dream like that? The absurdity of it exists only for me: nobody,nobodyknows of it. I have some one else hidden within me: a younger woman, a sister, a young sister-soul, a girl’s soul almost. It is absurd, I know; but sometimes, sometimes it is so strong in me and I love him so well and feel, just like a girl, thatheis the first man I have ever loved.... Oh, Henri! I cansee now whatthatwas: he was young; it was at first mere play-acting, just like a comedy; then it became passion, very quickly, a mad impulse, an almost feverish impulse to hold him in my arms. That is all dead. Passion is dead.... This is a dream, a young girl’s dream. It is the beginning. Itisabsurd; and I am often ashamed of it, for my own sake. But I cannot resist it: it envelops me, just as the spring sunshine and the scent of the may and the cherry-blossom in the Woods envelop one with languorous sweetness. I cannot resist it, I cannotresist it. My eyes go towards those clouds, my soul goes towards those clouds, my dreams go towards them ... and I love him, I love him.... I feel ashamed: sometimes I dare not look my son in the face.... I love him, I love him; and I feel ashamed: sometimes I dare not go across the street, as though people would notice it, by the light on my face.... But ah, no, that light does not shine from me, because I am old! It does from Marianne, poor child, but not from me ... oh, thank God for that!... I want to struggle against it, but it is stronger than I; and, when I think of him, I feel as if I were numbed here in my chair. When he comes into the room, I tremble, powerless to make a movement. Let me be ashamed of myself, argue with myself, struggle as I may, it is so, it is something real, as though I had never felt anything real in my life: it is a dream and it is also reality....”She often strove against it, but the dream was always too strong for her, enveloping her as with a multitude of languorous spring scents. It imparted a strange tenderness to her, to her fresh, round face, the face of a woman in her prime, with the strange, soft, curly hair, which the years were changing without turning grey. If he came, she awoke from that dream, but felt herself blissfully languid and faint.“I am not a girl,” she thought, now that she heard herself speak; but her fixed idea, that she was old, quite old, retreated a little way into the background.But, though she now no longer felt so old in her dream, after her dream she thought herself ignorant. Oh, how ignorant she was! And why had she never acquired an atom of knowledge in her wasted days, in her squandered, empty years. When she was talking to Brauws—and now that he came regularly, they often talked together, long and earnestly, in the friendly twilight—she thought:“How ignorant I am!”She had to make an effort sometimes to follow him in the simplest things that he said. She was obliged to confess to him that she had never learnt very much. But he said that that was a good thing, that it had kept her mind fresh. She shook her head in disclaimer; she confessed that she was ignorant and stupid. He protested; but she told himfrankly that it sometimes tired her to follow him. And she was so honest with him that she herself was sometimes surprised at it. If ever their conversation became too hopelessly deep, she preferred to be silent rather than lie or even seek an evasion in words.... Ignorant, yes; and it distressed her to such an extent that, one afternoon, when Henri was out and Addie at school, she went to her son’s room and opened his book-case. In addition to the ordinary school-manuals, it contained a few boys’-books; and she laughed at herself, her little tender, mocking laugh of gentle irony. But she found a couple of volumes on Universal History, a present from Van der Welcke to Addie, who was very fond of history; and she opened them where she stood. She turned the pages. She was afraid that some one might come in: the maid, perhaps, by accident. She sat down in the only easy-chair, impregnated with the smoke of the cigarettes which Van der Welcke smoked one after the other, silently, while Addie was preparing his lessons; and she turned the pages and read. She continued to suffer from that sense of her own absurdity. She felt like a schoolgirl dreaming ... and learning her lessons. She went on reading; and, when Truitje was looking for her all over the house and she heard her ask the cook where on earth mevrouw could be, she blushed violently, quickly put the books back on the shelves andleft the room. She would have liked to take the books with her, but dared not; however, that evening at dinner she plucked up courage and said:“Addie, Mr. Brauws was saying something about the French Revolution the other day; and I felt so stupid at being so ignorant on the subject. Have you any books about it?”Yes, he had this book and that book, in fact he had always been attracted by that period and had collected as many books upon it as his scanty pocket-money permitted. He would bring them to her after dinner. And she acquired a sort of passion for reading and learning. She indulged it almost hastily, feverishly, without any method, as though nervously anxious to make up for the deficiencies of her own education. And at the same time she was frightened lest other people—even Van der Welcke and Addie—should notice that fevered haste; and she devoured book after book with studied cunning, sometimes turning the pages over hurriedly, feverishly, then again reading more attentively, but never leaving the books about, always replacing them on her boy’s shelves, or returning them to Brauws and Paul when they had been borrowed from them, or carefully putting away those which she had bought herself, so that her room apparently remained the same, without the confusion and untidiness of a lot of books. Her reading was a strange medley: a volume of Quack’sSocialists, which Brauws lent her;Zola’s novel,L’Œuvre; a pamphlet by Bakunin and an odd number of theGids; a copy ofThe Imitationwhich had strayed among Van der Welcke’s books; Gonse on Japanese Art; Tolstoi’s novels and pamphlets. But it was a strange bold power of discrimination that at once taught her to pick and choose amid the chaos of all this literature, made her accept this and reject that: a psychological analysis; a new work on modern social evolution; an æsthetic rhapsody about a Japanese vase. She learnt quickly to look into them boldly and to take from them what was able as it were to develop her; and out of many of those books there flashed forth such entirely new revelations of hitherto unperceived truths that often, tired, dazed, astounded, she asked herself:“Is there so much then? Is so much thought about, dreamt about, so much sought for, lived for? Do people have those visions then, those dreams? And does it all exist? And can it all be taken in by me, by my intelligence?”And, as she thought, it seemed as if crape veils were being raised everywhere from before her and as if she, whose gaze had never wandered from her family and friends, now saw, suddenly, through the distant clouds, right into those cities, right into those civilizations, into the future, into the past, into so much of the present as still hovered closely around her own existence. She experienced shock after shock: she felt dimly that even the terrible FrenchRevolution, though it did cost Marie-Antoinette her life, had its good side. Zola seemed to her so magnificent that she was almost frightened at her own enthusiasm and dared not put her feeling into words. And the noble dreams of those apostles of humanity, even though they anathematized the power of the State and money—all that she had unconsciously looked upon, all her life, as indispensable to civilized society—made her quiver first with alarm, then with compassion, then with terror, with despair, with exultation.... She did not utter her thoughts; only, in her conversations with Brauws, she felt that she was gradually better able to follow him, that she was more responsive, less vague in her replies.... If in all this, this new self-education, there was something hurried and superficial, the tremulous haste of an eager, nervous woman who fears that she is devoting herself too late to what is vitally necessary, there was at the same time something fresh and ingenuous, something youthful and unspoilt, like the enthusiasm of a woman still young who, after her girlish dreams, wants to grasp some part of the vivid, many-coloured, radiant life around her, who grasps with joyous open hands at the colours and the sunbeams and who, though she grasps wildly, nevertheless gathers fresh life in her illusion.... She gathered fresh life. The wind that blew outside seemed to blow through her soul; the rain that pelted seemed actually to wash her face;the continual gusts on every hand blew the mist from before her eyes, drew it aside like a curtain.... Her eyes sparkled; and, when the winter had done blowing and raining, when suddenly, without any transition, a breath of spring—the limpid blue of the sky, the tender green of the stirring earth—floated over and through the Woods, it was as though she yearned for movement. She managed, every afternoon that Addie was free, to take him away from Van der Welcke and to lure him out for a long walk, out of the town, over the dunes, ever so far. Addie, with his eyes bright with laughing surprise, thought it very jolly of her and would go with her, though he was no walker and preferred bicycling, athirst for speed. But, in his young, gallant boy’s soul, he laughed softly, thought Mamma charming: grown years younger, grown into a young woman, suddenly, in her short skirt, her little cloth cape, with the sailor-hat on her curly hair and the colour in her cheeks, slim-waisted, quick-footed, her voice clear, her laugh sometimes ringing out suddenly. He thought of Papa and that she was now becoming as young as he; and Addie felt himself old beside her. He saw nothing of what was happening in his mother, even as nobody saw it, for she kept it to herself, was no different to the others, spoke no differently to the others, perhaps only just with a brighter laugh. What she read, what she learnt, what she felt, what she thought: all this was not perceptibleto the others. It did not shine out from her; and her foot merely moved a shade quicker, her speech became a shade more spontaneous. But everything that blossomed and flamed up in her she kept to herself, in the vast silence of her broad but unshared vistas. To her husband she was gentler, to her son she was younger. Only now, in those walks, perhaps Addie was the one person in her life who noticed that, when Mamma happened to mention Mr. Brauws’ name, an unusual note sounded in her brighter, younger voice. A boy of his age does not analyse a subtle perception of this kind; only, without reasoning, without analysing, just instinctively, this boy of fourteen thought of his father, whom he worshipped with a strange, protecting adoration such as one gives to a brother or a friend—a younger brother, a younger friend—and felt a pang of jealousy on his behalf, jealousy of this man who did what Papa never did, talked with Mamma for hours three or four times a week, so often in fact that she was growing younger, that she had taken to reading, so as no longer to be ignorant, that she had developed a need for walking great distances. But the lad kept this jealousy locked up within himself, allowed none to perceive it. Perhaps he was just a trifle colder to him, to this man, the friend of the family, though Brauws was so fond of him, Addie, almost passionately fond of him indeed: Addie knew that. This jealousy for his father, jealousy of thatfriend of the family, was very strong in him; and he felt himself to be the child of both his parents, felt within himself their double heritage of jealousy. The image of his father appeared constantly before him, appeared between the images of Brauws and of his mother. But he let her see nothing of it.She gathered fresh life in those walks. When Addie was at school, she walked alone, no longer fearing the loneliness out of doors, she who had come to love her indoor loneliness and the still deeper loneliness of her soul. It was as though, after dreaming and educating herself—quickly, nervously, superficially and with youthful simplicity—in what great men had thought and written, she felt herself breathe again in the midst of nature. No longer from her arm-chair, through the windows, along the bend of the curtains did she see the great clouds, but she now saw them out of doors and overhead, blue, white, immense, irradiated by the sun in the vault of the boundless spring skies all vocal with birds, saw them as she stood on the dunes, with the wind all round her head, all round her hair and blowing through her skirts....“I love him, I love him,” a voice inside her sang softly and yet insistently, while the wind’s strong passion seemed to lift her up and waft her along.But in the movement of her hands there was something as though she were resisting the wind, with a smile of gentle irony, of tender mockery.The wind blew past, as if grumbling, and she walked on, saw the sea. She seemed to look upon the sea for the first time. It was as though, in the strong wind, under the blue-white clouds, the sea streamed to her for the first time from the ethereal fount of the horizon and were now rushing towards her, roaring and frothing, like a triumph of multitudinous, white-crested horses. And the sky and the sea were as one great triumph of mighty, omnipotent nature. A nameless but overwhelming triumph seemed from out of those clouds to hold reins in thousands of fists, the reins of the multitudinous white-crested horses; and all that triumph of nature advanced towards her like a riot of youth. It was as though every atom of her former life, every memory flew away around her like sand, like dust, like straw. It all flew away; and the waves broke, the sea uplifted itself like an exulting menace, as though to carry her with it in the riotous rush of its triumphant crested steeds, over all that small life, over everything ... if she did not take care.It was all big, wide, far-reaching, like a world. When she reached home, she was tired out, sobered by the tram-ride and the last bit of walking, past casual, shadowy people. Worn out, she fell asleep, woke shortly before dinner, welcomed Addie in a dream. Until sometimes she read her son’s eyes, made an effort, plunged her face in a basin of water, tried to be, to appear as she had always been. Andthen, in the glass, she saw herself like that, to all appearance the same woman, with just something livelier in her eyes, her gait, her movements. But inside her everything was changed.At home sometimes the past would still rise up before her, but different, quite different. She seemed to withdraw from her former personality and it was as though, far removed from the woman that she had once been, she was now for the first time able to judge her past from another point of view than her own. She saw suddenly what her father must have suffered, Mamma, the brothers even, the sisters. She realized for the first time the sacrifice which those old, pious people, Henri’s parents, had made. She thought in dismay of the injury which she had done her first husband, De Staffelaer. She thought of them all, in dismay at herself, in compassion for them. And she felt sorry even for her husband and for what he had always querulously resented, his shattered career, which had constituted his grudge, his obsession, the excuse for his inertia: for Van der Welcke and even for that grudge she felt compassion. How young he was when she met him, when they had acted their comedy, their comedy which had become deadly earnest! And she had at once fettered him to herself, in ever-increasing antagonism! Then her eyes would rest on him with a more understanding glance, sometimes almost with a certain pity, as she looked into his eyes, his youngblue boyish eyes, which Addie had inherited from him, but which in the father looked younger, more boyish than in the son. If, at the sound of his voice, the inclination to speak to him irritably welled up in her from the eternal antagonism between them, as from a gloomy spring deep down in her, she would restrain herself, control herself with that new sympathy and pity, answer gently, almost jokingly, and would let him have the last word. And, now that she herself was in love and felt herself live again, she had a sympathy that was almost motherly for his love, even though she herself was beginning to feel young again, and with it a strange tenderness for the two of them, Marianne and Henri. She did not think of the danger for him; she still had only, in her new world of romance, a sympathy for romance. He was her husband, but she felt none of a wife’s jealousy. And for Marianne she felt the same strange compassion, as for a younger sister-in-love....There came to her scarcely a fleeting thought of the immorality which the world, people, small people—the whirlers in the little circle, with their little prejudices and dogmas, their little creeds and philosophies—would see in such strange views from a married woman concerning herself and a friend, concerning her husband and the little niece with whom her husband was evidently in love. She was a small creature like all of them, she was a small soul, likeall of them; but her soul at least was growing, growing upwards and outwards; she no longer felt depressed; and it seemed as if she were being borne on wings to the greater cloud-worlds yonder, to the far cities, where flashed the lightnings of the new revelations, the new realities....Everything in her was changed....

Chapter XXII

Constance began to love her loneliness more and more.Her daily life was very uneventful: she could count the people with whom she came into contact. First her husband and her son: there was something gentler in her attitude towards Van der Welcke, something almost motherly, which prevented her from getting angry with him, even though the inclination welled up within her. Addie was as usual, perhaps even a little more serious: this disquieted her. Then there was Brauws, who came regularly. He dined with them regularly, on a fixed day in the week, quite informally; and moreover he had become the friend of both Van der Welcke and Constance and even of Addie. Then there were Mamma, Gerrit and his little tribe and, now and again, Paul. And then there was Van Vreeswijck; and Marianne, of course; and latterly she had seen more of Bertha. For the rest she seemed to drift away from all the others, even from warm-hearted Aunt Lot. She kept in touch only with those with whom she was really in sympathy.Still, though she had these few friends, she oftenhad quite lonely afternoons. But they did not depress her; she gazed out at the rain, at the cloud-phantoms. And she dreamed ... along the path of light. She smiled at her dream. Even though she very much feared the absurdity of it for herself, she could not help it: a new youthfulness filled her with a gentle glow, a new tenderness, like the delicate bloom of a young girl’s soul dreaming of the wonderful future.... And then she would come back to herself suddenly and smile at her sentimentality and summon up all her matronly common-sense; and she would think:“Come, I oughtn’t to be sitting like this!... Come, I oughtn’t to be acting like this and thinking of everything and nothing!... Certainly, I like him very much; but why cannot I do that without these strange thoughts, without dreaming and picturing all manner of things and filling my head with romantic fancies ... as if I were a girl of eighteen or twenty?... Oh, those are the things which we do not speak about, the deep secret things which we never tell to anybody!... I should never have suspected them in myself ... or that they could be so exquisitely sweet to me. How strangely sweet, to dream myself back to youth in visions which, though they never really take shape, yet make a shining path to those cloudy skies, to imagine myself young again in those dreams!... If I never had these thoughts and dreams before, why do Ihave them now? Come, I oughtn’t to be sitting like this and thinking like this!... I make up a host of pretty stories, sentimental little stories, and see myself, see us both, years ago, as quite young children, both of us. He played and I played ... almost the same game: he a boy, I a girl. It was as though he were seeking me. It was as though I, in my childish dreams, divined something of him, far, far away, as though there were a part of me that wanted to go to him, a part of him that wanted to come to me.... Stop, I am giving way again to those secret enthusiasms which lie deep down in my soul like strange, hidden streams, those vague, romantic ferments such as I imagined that young girls might have, but not I, a woman of my years, a woman with my past, the mother of a big son.... I willnotdo it any more, I willnot.... It is morbid to be like this.... And yet ... and yet ... when the wind blows and the rain comes down, itis, it still is the dear secret that brings the tears to my eyes.... If I love him, quite silently, deep down within myself, why may I not just dream like that? The absurdity of it exists only for me: nobody,nobodyknows of it. I have some one else hidden within me: a younger woman, a sister, a young sister-soul, a girl’s soul almost. It is absurd, I know; but sometimes, sometimes it is so strong in me and I love him so well and feel, just like a girl, thatheis the first man I have ever loved.... Oh, Henri! I cansee now whatthatwas: he was young; it was at first mere play-acting, just like a comedy; then it became passion, very quickly, a mad impulse, an almost feverish impulse to hold him in my arms. That is all dead. Passion is dead.... This is a dream, a young girl’s dream. It is the beginning. Itisabsurd; and I am often ashamed of it, for my own sake. But I cannot resist it: it envelops me, just as the spring sunshine and the scent of the may and the cherry-blossom in the Woods envelop one with languorous sweetness. I cannot resist it, I cannotresist it. My eyes go towards those clouds, my soul goes towards those clouds, my dreams go towards them ... and I love him, I love him.... I feel ashamed: sometimes I dare not look my son in the face.... I love him, I love him; and I feel ashamed: sometimes I dare not go across the street, as though people would notice it, by the light on my face.... But ah, no, that light does not shine from me, because I am old! It does from Marianne, poor child, but not from me ... oh, thank God for that!... I want to struggle against it, but it is stronger than I; and, when I think of him, I feel as if I were numbed here in my chair. When he comes into the room, I tremble, powerless to make a movement. Let me be ashamed of myself, argue with myself, struggle as I may, it is so, it is something real, as though I had never felt anything real in my life: it is a dream and it is also reality....”She often strove against it, but the dream was always too strong for her, enveloping her as with a multitude of languorous spring scents. It imparted a strange tenderness to her, to her fresh, round face, the face of a woman in her prime, with the strange, soft, curly hair, which the years were changing without turning grey. If he came, she awoke from that dream, but felt herself blissfully languid and faint.“I am not a girl,” she thought, now that she heard herself speak; but her fixed idea, that she was old, quite old, retreated a little way into the background.But, though she now no longer felt so old in her dream, after her dream she thought herself ignorant. Oh, how ignorant she was! And why had she never acquired an atom of knowledge in her wasted days, in her squandered, empty years. When she was talking to Brauws—and now that he came regularly, they often talked together, long and earnestly, in the friendly twilight—she thought:“How ignorant I am!”She had to make an effort sometimes to follow him in the simplest things that he said. She was obliged to confess to him that she had never learnt very much. But he said that that was a good thing, that it had kept her mind fresh. She shook her head in disclaimer; she confessed that she was ignorant and stupid. He protested; but she told himfrankly that it sometimes tired her to follow him. And she was so honest with him that she herself was sometimes surprised at it. If ever their conversation became too hopelessly deep, she preferred to be silent rather than lie or even seek an evasion in words.... Ignorant, yes; and it distressed her to such an extent that, one afternoon, when Henri was out and Addie at school, she went to her son’s room and opened his book-case. In addition to the ordinary school-manuals, it contained a few boys’-books; and she laughed at herself, her little tender, mocking laugh of gentle irony. But she found a couple of volumes on Universal History, a present from Van der Welcke to Addie, who was very fond of history; and she opened them where she stood. She turned the pages. She was afraid that some one might come in: the maid, perhaps, by accident. She sat down in the only easy-chair, impregnated with the smoke of the cigarettes which Van der Welcke smoked one after the other, silently, while Addie was preparing his lessons; and she turned the pages and read. She continued to suffer from that sense of her own absurdity. She felt like a schoolgirl dreaming ... and learning her lessons. She went on reading; and, when Truitje was looking for her all over the house and she heard her ask the cook where on earth mevrouw could be, she blushed violently, quickly put the books back on the shelves andleft the room. She would have liked to take the books with her, but dared not; however, that evening at dinner she plucked up courage and said:“Addie, Mr. Brauws was saying something about the French Revolution the other day; and I felt so stupid at being so ignorant on the subject. Have you any books about it?”Yes, he had this book and that book, in fact he had always been attracted by that period and had collected as many books upon it as his scanty pocket-money permitted. He would bring them to her after dinner. And she acquired a sort of passion for reading and learning. She indulged it almost hastily, feverishly, without any method, as though nervously anxious to make up for the deficiencies of her own education. And at the same time she was frightened lest other people—even Van der Welcke and Addie—should notice that fevered haste; and she devoured book after book with studied cunning, sometimes turning the pages over hurriedly, feverishly, then again reading more attentively, but never leaving the books about, always replacing them on her boy’s shelves, or returning them to Brauws and Paul when they had been borrowed from them, or carefully putting away those which she had bought herself, so that her room apparently remained the same, without the confusion and untidiness of a lot of books. Her reading was a strange medley: a volume of Quack’sSocialists, which Brauws lent her;Zola’s novel,L’Œuvre; a pamphlet by Bakunin and an odd number of theGids; a copy ofThe Imitationwhich had strayed among Van der Welcke’s books; Gonse on Japanese Art; Tolstoi’s novels and pamphlets. But it was a strange bold power of discrimination that at once taught her to pick and choose amid the chaos of all this literature, made her accept this and reject that: a psychological analysis; a new work on modern social evolution; an æsthetic rhapsody about a Japanese vase. She learnt quickly to look into them boldly and to take from them what was able as it were to develop her; and out of many of those books there flashed forth such entirely new revelations of hitherto unperceived truths that often, tired, dazed, astounded, she asked herself:“Is there so much then? Is so much thought about, dreamt about, so much sought for, lived for? Do people have those visions then, those dreams? And does it all exist? And can it all be taken in by me, by my intelligence?”And, as she thought, it seemed as if crape veils were being raised everywhere from before her and as if she, whose gaze had never wandered from her family and friends, now saw, suddenly, through the distant clouds, right into those cities, right into those civilizations, into the future, into the past, into so much of the present as still hovered closely around her own existence. She experienced shock after shock: she felt dimly that even the terrible FrenchRevolution, though it did cost Marie-Antoinette her life, had its good side. Zola seemed to her so magnificent that she was almost frightened at her own enthusiasm and dared not put her feeling into words. And the noble dreams of those apostles of humanity, even though they anathematized the power of the State and money—all that she had unconsciously looked upon, all her life, as indispensable to civilized society—made her quiver first with alarm, then with compassion, then with terror, with despair, with exultation.... She did not utter her thoughts; only, in her conversations with Brauws, she felt that she was gradually better able to follow him, that she was more responsive, less vague in her replies.... If in all this, this new self-education, there was something hurried and superficial, the tremulous haste of an eager, nervous woman who fears that she is devoting herself too late to what is vitally necessary, there was at the same time something fresh and ingenuous, something youthful and unspoilt, like the enthusiasm of a woman still young who, after her girlish dreams, wants to grasp some part of the vivid, many-coloured, radiant life around her, who grasps with joyous open hands at the colours and the sunbeams and who, though she grasps wildly, nevertheless gathers fresh life in her illusion.... She gathered fresh life. The wind that blew outside seemed to blow through her soul; the rain that pelted seemed actually to wash her face;the continual gusts on every hand blew the mist from before her eyes, drew it aside like a curtain.... Her eyes sparkled; and, when the winter had done blowing and raining, when suddenly, without any transition, a breath of spring—the limpid blue of the sky, the tender green of the stirring earth—floated over and through the Woods, it was as though she yearned for movement. She managed, every afternoon that Addie was free, to take him away from Van der Welcke and to lure him out for a long walk, out of the town, over the dunes, ever so far. Addie, with his eyes bright with laughing surprise, thought it very jolly of her and would go with her, though he was no walker and preferred bicycling, athirst for speed. But, in his young, gallant boy’s soul, he laughed softly, thought Mamma charming: grown years younger, grown into a young woman, suddenly, in her short skirt, her little cloth cape, with the sailor-hat on her curly hair and the colour in her cheeks, slim-waisted, quick-footed, her voice clear, her laugh sometimes ringing out suddenly. He thought of Papa and that she was now becoming as young as he; and Addie felt himself old beside her. He saw nothing of what was happening in his mother, even as nobody saw it, for she kept it to herself, was no different to the others, spoke no differently to the others, perhaps only just with a brighter laugh. What she read, what she learnt, what she felt, what she thought: all this was not perceptibleto the others. It did not shine out from her; and her foot merely moved a shade quicker, her speech became a shade more spontaneous. But everything that blossomed and flamed up in her she kept to herself, in the vast silence of her broad but unshared vistas. To her husband she was gentler, to her son she was younger. Only now, in those walks, perhaps Addie was the one person in her life who noticed that, when Mamma happened to mention Mr. Brauws’ name, an unusual note sounded in her brighter, younger voice. A boy of his age does not analyse a subtle perception of this kind; only, without reasoning, without analysing, just instinctively, this boy of fourteen thought of his father, whom he worshipped with a strange, protecting adoration such as one gives to a brother or a friend—a younger brother, a younger friend—and felt a pang of jealousy on his behalf, jealousy of this man who did what Papa never did, talked with Mamma for hours three or four times a week, so often in fact that she was growing younger, that she had taken to reading, so as no longer to be ignorant, that she had developed a need for walking great distances. But the lad kept this jealousy locked up within himself, allowed none to perceive it. Perhaps he was just a trifle colder to him, to this man, the friend of the family, though Brauws was so fond of him, Addie, almost passionately fond of him indeed: Addie knew that. This jealousy for his father, jealousy of thatfriend of the family, was very strong in him; and he felt himself to be the child of both his parents, felt within himself their double heritage of jealousy. The image of his father appeared constantly before him, appeared between the images of Brauws and of his mother. But he let her see nothing of it.She gathered fresh life in those walks. When Addie was at school, she walked alone, no longer fearing the loneliness out of doors, she who had come to love her indoor loneliness and the still deeper loneliness of her soul. It was as though, after dreaming and educating herself—quickly, nervously, superficially and with youthful simplicity—in what great men had thought and written, she felt herself breathe again in the midst of nature. No longer from her arm-chair, through the windows, along the bend of the curtains did she see the great clouds, but she now saw them out of doors and overhead, blue, white, immense, irradiated by the sun in the vault of the boundless spring skies all vocal with birds, saw them as she stood on the dunes, with the wind all round her head, all round her hair and blowing through her skirts....“I love him, I love him,” a voice inside her sang softly and yet insistently, while the wind’s strong passion seemed to lift her up and waft her along.But in the movement of her hands there was something as though she were resisting the wind, with a smile of gentle irony, of tender mockery.The wind blew past, as if grumbling, and she walked on, saw the sea. She seemed to look upon the sea for the first time. It was as though, in the strong wind, under the blue-white clouds, the sea streamed to her for the first time from the ethereal fount of the horizon and were now rushing towards her, roaring and frothing, like a triumph of multitudinous, white-crested horses. And the sky and the sea were as one great triumph of mighty, omnipotent nature. A nameless but overwhelming triumph seemed from out of those clouds to hold reins in thousands of fists, the reins of the multitudinous white-crested horses; and all that triumph of nature advanced towards her like a riot of youth. It was as though every atom of her former life, every memory flew away around her like sand, like dust, like straw. It all flew away; and the waves broke, the sea uplifted itself like an exulting menace, as though to carry her with it in the riotous rush of its triumphant crested steeds, over all that small life, over everything ... if she did not take care.It was all big, wide, far-reaching, like a world. When she reached home, she was tired out, sobered by the tram-ride and the last bit of walking, past casual, shadowy people. Worn out, she fell asleep, woke shortly before dinner, welcomed Addie in a dream. Until sometimes she read her son’s eyes, made an effort, plunged her face in a basin of water, tried to be, to appear as she had always been. Andthen, in the glass, she saw herself like that, to all appearance the same woman, with just something livelier in her eyes, her gait, her movements. But inside her everything was changed.At home sometimes the past would still rise up before her, but different, quite different. She seemed to withdraw from her former personality and it was as though, far removed from the woman that she had once been, she was now for the first time able to judge her past from another point of view than her own. She saw suddenly what her father must have suffered, Mamma, the brothers even, the sisters. She realized for the first time the sacrifice which those old, pious people, Henri’s parents, had made. She thought in dismay of the injury which she had done her first husband, De Staffelaer. She thought of them all, in dismay at herself, in compassion for them. And she felt sorry even for her husband and for what he had always querulously resented, his shattered career, which had constituted his grudge, his obsession, the excuse for his inertia: for Van der Welcke and even for that grudge she felt compassion. How young he was when she met him, when they had acted their comedy, their comedy which had become deadly earnest! And she had at once fettered him to herself, in ever-increasing antagonism! Then her eyes would rest on him with a more understanding glance, sometimes almost with a certain pity, as she looked into his eyes, his youngblue boyish eyes, which Addie had inherited from him, but which in the father looked younger, more boyish than in the son. If, at the sound of his voice, the inclination to speak to him irritably welled up in her from the eternal antagonism between them, as from a gloomy spring deep down in her, she would restrain herself, control herself with that new sympathy and pity, answer gently, almost jokingly, and would let him have the last word. And, now that she herself was in love and felt herself live again, she had a sympathy that was almost motherly for his love, even though she herself was beginning to feel young again, and with it a strange tenderness for the two of them, Marianne and Henri. She did not think of the danger for him; she still had only, in her new world of romance, a sympathy for romance. He was her husband, but she felt none of a wife’s jealousy. And for Marianne she felt the same strange compassion, as for a younger sister-in-love....There came to her scarcely a fleeting thought of the immorality which the world, people, small people—the whirlers in the little circle, with their little prejudices and dogmas, their little creeds and philosophies—would see in such strange views from a married woman concerning herself and a friend, concerning her husband and the little niece with whom her husband was evidently in love. She was a small creature like all of them, she was a small soul, likeall of them; but her soul at least was growing, growing upwards and outwards; she no longer felt depressed; and it seemed as if she were being borne on wings to the greater cloud-worlds yonder, to the far cities, where flashed the lightnings of the new revelations, the new realities....Everything in her was changed....

Constance began to love her loneliness more and more.

Her daily life was very uneventful: she could count the people with whom she came into contact. First her husband and her son: there was something gentler in her attitude towards Van der Welcke, something almost motherly, which prevented her from getting angry with him, even though the inclination welled up within her. Addie was as usual, perhaps even a little more serious: this disquieted her. Then there was Brauws, who came regularly. He dined with them regularly, on a fixed day in the week, quite informally; and moreover he had become the friend of both Van der Welcke and Constance and even of Addie. Then there were Mamma, Gerrit and his little tribe and, now and again, Paul. And then there was Van Vreeswijck; and Marianne, of course; and latterly she had seen more of Bertha. For the rest she seemed to drift away from all the others, even from warm-hearted Aunt Lot. She kept in touch only with those with whom she was really in sympathy.

Still, though she had these few friends, she oftenhad quite lonely afternoons. But they did not depress her; she gazed out at the rain, at the cloud-phantoms. And she dreamed ... along the path of light. She smiled at her dream. Even though she very much feared the absurdity of it for herself, she could not help it: a new youthfulness filled her with a gentle glow, a new tenderness, like the delicate bloom of a young girl’s soul dreaming of the wonderful future.... And then she would come back to herself suddenly and smile at her sentimentality and summon up all her matronly common-sense; and she would think:

“Come, I oughtn’t to be sitting like this!... Come, I oughtn’t to be acting like this and thinking of everything and nothing!... Certainly, I like him very much; but why cannot I do that without these strange thoughts, without dreaming and picturing all manner of things and filling my head with romantic fancies ... as if I were a girl of eighteen or twenty?... Oh, those are the things which we do not speak about, the deep secret things which we never tell to anybody!... I should never have suspected them in myself ... or that they could be so exquisitely sweet to me. How strangely sweet, to dream myself back to youth in visions which, though they never really take shape, yet make a shining path to those cloudy skies, to imagine myself young again in those dreams!... If I never had these thoughts and dreams before, why do Ihave them now? Come, I oughtn’t to be sitting like this and thinking like this!... I make up a host of pretty stories, sentimental little stories, and see myself, see us both, years ago, as quite young children, both of us. He played and I played ... almost the same game: he a boy, I a girl. It was as though he were seeking me. It was as though I, in my childish dreams, divined something of him, far, far away, as though there were a part of me that wanted to go to him, a part of him that wanted to come to me.... Stop, I am giving way again to those secret enthusiasms which lie deep down in my soul like strange, hidden streams, those vague, romantic ferments such as I imagined that young girls might have, but not I, a woman of my years, a woman with my past, the mother of a big son.... I willnotdo it any more, I willnot.... It is morbid to be like this.... And yet ... and yet ... when the wind blows and the rain comes down, itis, it still is the dear secret that brings the tears to my eyes.... If I love him, quite silently, deep down within myself, why may I not just dream like that? The absurdity of it exists only for me: nobody,nobodyknows of it. I have some one else hidden within me: a younger woman, a sister, a young sister-soul, a girl’s soul almost. It is absurd, I know; but sometimes, sometimes it is so strong in me and I love him so well and feel, just like a girl, thatheis the first man I have ever loved.... Oh, Henri! I cansee now whatthatwas: he was young; it was at first mere play-acting, just like a comedy; then it became passion, very quickly, a mad impulse, an almost feverish impulse to hold him in my arms. That is all dead. Passion is dead.... This is a dream, a young girl’s dream. It is the beginning. Itisabsurd; and I am often ashamed of it, for my own sake. But I cannot resist it: it envelops me, just as the spring sunshine and the scent of the may and the cherry-blossom in the Woods envelop one with languorous sweetness. I cannot resist it, I cannotresist it. My eyes go towards those clouds, my soul goes towards those clouds, my dreams go towards them ... and I love him, I love him.... I feel ashamed: sometimes I dare not look my son in the face.... I love him, I love him; and I feel ashamed: sometimes I dare not go across the street, as though people would notice it, by the light on my face.... But ah, no, that light does not shine from me, because I am old! It does from Marianne, poor child, but not from me ... oh, thank God for that!... I want to struggle against it, but it is stronger than I; and, when I think of him, I feel as if I were numbed here in my chair. When he comes into the room, I tremble, powerless to make a movement. Let me be ashamed of myself, argue with myself, struggle as I may, it is so, it is something real, as though I had never felt anything real in my life: it is a dream and it is also reality....”

She often strove against it, but the dream was always too strong for her, enveloping her as with a multitude of languorous spring scents. It imparted a strange tenderness to her, to her fresh, round face, the face of a woman in her prime, with the strange, soft, curly hair, which the years were changing without turning grey. If he came, she awoke from that dream, but felt herself blissfully languid and faint.

“I am not a girl,” she thought, now that she heard herself speak; but her fixed idea, that she was old, quite old, retreated a little way into the background.

But, though she now no longer felt so old in her dream, after her dream she thought herself ignorant. Oh, how ignorant she was! And why had she never acquired an atom of knowledge in her wasted days, in her squandered, empty years. When she was talking to Brauws—and now that he came regularly, they often talked together, long and earnestly, in the friendly twilight—she thought:

“How ignorant I am!”

She had to make an effort sometimes to follow him in the simplest things that he said. She was obliged to confess to him that she had never learnt very much. But he said that that was a good thing, that it had kept her mind fresh. She shook her head in disclaimer; she confessed that she was ignorant and stupid. He protested; but she told himfrankly that it sometimes tired her to follow him. And she was so honest with him that she herself was sometimes surprised at it. If ever their conversation became too hopelessly deep, she preferred to be silent rather than lie or even seek an evasion in words.... Ignorant, yes; and it distressed her to such an extent that, one afternoon, when Henri was out and Addie at school, she went to her son’s room and opened his book-case. In addition to the ordinary school-manuals, it contained a few boys’-books; and she laughed at herself, her little tender, mocking laugh of gentle irony. But she found a couple of volumes on Universal History, a present from Van der Welcke to Addie, who was very fond of history; and she opened them where she stood. She turned the pages. She was afraid that some one might come in: the maid, perhaps, by accident. She sat down in the only easy-chair, impregnated with the smoke of the cigarettes which Van der Welcke smoked one after the other, silently, while Addie was preparing his lessons; and she turned the pages and read. She continued to suffer from that sense of her own absurdity. She felt like a schoolgirl dreaming ... and learning her lessons. She went on reading; and, when Truitje was looking for her all over the house and she heard her ask the cook where on earth mevrouw could be, she blushed violently, quickly put the books back on the shelves andleft the room. She would have liked to take the books with her, but dared not; however, that evening at dinner she plucked up courage and said:

“Addie, Mr. Brauws was saying something about the French Revolution the other day; and I felt so stupid at being so ignorant on the subject. Have you any books about it?”

Yes, he had this book and that book, in fact he had always been attracted by that period and had collected as many books upon it as his scanty pocket-money permitted. He would bring them to her after dinner. And she acquired a sort of passion for reading and learning. She indulged it almost hastily, feverishly, without any method, as though nervously anxious to make up for the deficiencies of her own education. And at the same time she was frightened lest other people—even Van der Welcke and Addie—should notice that fevered haste; and she devoured book after book with studied cunning, sometimes turning the pages over hurriedly, feverishly, then again reading more attentively, but never leaving the books about, always replacing them on her boy’s shelves, or returning them to Brauws and Paul when they had been borrowed from them, or carefully putting away those which she had bought herself, so that her room apparently remained the same, without the confusion and untidiness of a lot of books. Her reading was a strange medley: a volume of Quack’sSocialists, which Brauws lent her;Zola’s novel,L’Œuvre; a pamphlet by Bakunin and an odd number of theGids; a copy ofThe Imitationwhich had strayed among Van der Welcke’s books; Gonse on Japanese Art; Tolstoi’s novels and pamphlets. But it was a strange bold power of discrimination that at once taught her to pick and choose amid the chaos of all this literature, made her accept this and reject that: a psychological analysis; a new work on modern social evolution; an æsthetic rhapsody about a Japanese vase. She learnt quickly to look into them boldly and to take from them what was able as it were to develop her; and out of many of those books there flashed forth such entirely new revelations of hitherto unperceived truths that often, tired, dazed, astounded, she asked herself:

“Is there so much then? Is so much thought about, dreamt about, so much sought for, lived for? Do people have those visions then, those dreams? And does it all exist? And can it all be taken in by me, by my intelligence?”

And, as she thought, it seemed as if crape veils were being raised everywhere from before her and as if she, whose gaze had never wandered from her family and friends, now saw, suddenly, through the distant clouds, right into those cities, right into those civilizations, into the future, into the past, into so much of the present as still hovered closely around her own existence. She experienced shock after shock: she felt dimly that even the terrible FrenchRevolution, though it did cost Marie-Antoinette her life, had its good side. Zola seemed to her so magnificent that she was almost frightened at her own enthusiasm and dared not put her feeling into words. And the noble dreams of those apostles of humanity, even though they anathematized the power of the State and money—all that she had unconsciously looked upon, all her life, as indispensable to civilized society—made her quiver first with alarm, then with compassion, then with terror, with despair, with exultation.... She did not utter her thoughts; only, in her conversations with Brauws, she felt that she was gradually better able to follow him, that she was more responsive, less vague in her replies.... If in all this, this new self-education, there was something hurried and superficial, the tremulous haste of an eager, nervous woman who fears that she is devoting herself too late to what is vitally necessary, there was at the same time something fresh and ingenuous, something youthful and unspoilt, like the enthusiasm of a woman still young who, after her girlish dreams, wants to grasp some part of the vivid, many-coloured, radiant life around her, who grasps with joyous open hands at the colours and the sunbeams and who, though she grasps wildly, nevertheless gathers fresh life in her illusion.... She gathered fresh life. The wind that blew outside seemed to blow through her soul; the rain that pelted seemed actually to wash her face;the continual gusts on every hand blew the mist from before her eyes, drew it aside like a curtain.... Her eyes sparkled; and, when the winter had done blowing and raining, when suddenly, without any transition, a breath of spring—the limpid blue of the sky, the tender green of the stirring earth—floated over and through the Woods, it was as though she yearned for movement. She managed, every afternoon that Addie was free, to take him away from Van der Welcke and to lure him out for a long walk, out of the town, over the dunes, ever so far. Addie, with his eyes bright with laughing surprise, thought it very jolly of her and would go with her, though he was no walker and preferred bicycling, athirst for speed. But, in his young, gallant boy’s soul, he laughed softly, thought Mamma charming: grown years younger, grown into a young woman, suddenly, in her short skirt, her little cloth cape, with the sailor-hat on her curly hair and the colour in her cheeks, slim-waisted, quick-footed, her voice clear, her laugh sometimes ringing out suddenly. He thought of Papa and that she was now becoming as young as he; and Addie felt himself old beside her. He saw nothing of what was happening in his mother, even as nobody saw it, for she kept it to herself, was no different to the others, spoke no differently to the others, perhaps only just with a brighter laugh. What she read, what she learnt, what she felt, what she thought: all this was not perceptibleto the others. It did not shine out from her; and her foot merely moved a shade quicker, her speech became a shade more spontaneous. But everything that blossomed and flamed up in her she kept to herself, in the vast silence of her broad but unshared vistas. To her husband she was gentler, to her son she was younger. Only now, in those walks, perhaps Addie was the one person in her life who noticed that, when Mamma happened to mention Mr. Brauws’ name, an unusual note sounded in her brighter, younger voice. A boy of his age does not analyse a subtle perception of this kind; only, without reasoning, without analysing, just instinctively, this boy of fourteen thought of his father, whom he worshipped with a strange, protecting adoration such as one gives to a brother or a friend—a younger brother, a younger friend—and felt a pang of jealousy on his behalf, jealousy of this man who did what Papa never did, talked with Mamma for hours three or four times a week, so often in fact that she was growing younger, that she had taken to reading, so as no longer to be ignorant, that she had developed a need for walking great distances. But the lad kept this jealousy locked up within himself, allowed none to perceive it. Perhaps he was just a trifle colder to him, to this man, the friend of the family, though Brauws was so fond of him, Addie, almost passionately fond of him indeed: Addie knew that. This jealousy for his father, jealousy of thatfriend of the family, was very strong in him; and he felt himself to be the child of both his parents, felt within himself their double heritage of jealousy. The image of his father appeared constantly before him, appeared between the images of Brauws and of his mother. But he let her see nothing of it.

She gathered fresh life in those walks. When Addie was at school, she walked alone, no longer fearing the loneliness out of doors, she who had come to love her indoor loneliness and the still deeper loneliness of her soul. It was as though, after dreaming and educating herself—quickly, nervously, superficially and with youthful simplicity—in what great men had thought and written, she felt herself breathe again in the midst of nature. No longer from her arm-chair, through the windows, along the bend of the curtains did she see the great clouds, but she now saw them out of doors and overhead, blue, white, immense, irradiated by the sun in the vault of the boundless spring skies all vocal with birds, saw them as she stood on the dunes, with the wind all round her head, all round her hair and blowing through her skirts....

“I love him, I love him,” a voice inside her sang softly and yet insistently, while the wind’s strong passion seemed to lift her up and waft her along.

But in the movement of her hands there was something as though she were resisting the wind, with a smile of gentle irony, of tender mockery.The wind blew past, as if grumbling, and she walked on, saw the sea. She seemed to look upon the sea for the first time. It was as though, in the strong wind, under the blue-white clouds, the sea streamed to her for the first time from the ethereal fount of the horizon and were now rushing towards her, roaring and frothing, like a triumph of multitudinous, white-crested horses. And the sky and the sea were as one great triumph of mighty, omnipotent nature. A nameless but overwhelming triumph seemed from out of those clouds to hold reins in thousands of fists, the reins of the multitudinous white-crested horses; and all that triumph of nature advanced towards her like a riot of youth. It was as though every atom of her former life, every memory flew away around her like sand, like dust, like straw. It all flew away; and the waves broke, the sea uplifted itself like an exulting menace, as though to carry her with it in the riotous rush of its triumphant crested steeds, over all that small life, over everything ... if she did not take care.

It was all big, wide, far-reaching, like a world. When she reached home, she was tired out, sobered by the tram-ride and the last bit of walking, past casual, shadowy people. Worn out, she fell asleep, woke shortly before dinner, welcomed Addie in a dream. Until sometimes she read her son’s eyes, made an effort, plunged her face in a basin of water, tried to be, to appear as she had always been. Andthen, in the glass, she saw herself like that, to all appearance the same woman, with just something livelier in her eyes, her gait, her movements. But inside her everything was changed.

At home sometimes the past would still rise up before her, but different, quite different. She seemed to withdraw from her former personality and it was as though, far removed from the woman that she had once been, she was now for the first time able to judge her past from another point of view than her own. She saw suddenly what her father must have suffered, Mamma, the brothers even, the sisters. She realized for the first time the sacrifice which those old, pious people, Henri’s parents, had made. She thought in dismay of the injury which she had done her first husband, De Staffelaer. She thought of them all, in dismay at herself, in compassion for them. And she felt sorry even for her husband and for what he had always querulously resented, his shattered career, which had constituted his grudge, his obsession, the excuse for his inertia: for Van der Welcke and even for that grudge she felt compassion. How young he was when she met him, when they had acted their comedy, their comedy which had become deadly earnest! And she had at once fettered him to herself, in ever-increasing antagonism! Then her eyes would rest on him with a more understanding glance, sometimes almost with a certain pity, as she looked into his eyes, his youngblue boyish eyes, which Addie had inherited from him, but which in the father looked younger, more boyish than in the son. If, at the sound of his voice, the inclination to speak to him irritably welled up in her from the eternal antagonism between them, as from a gloomy spring deep down in her, she would restrain herself, control herself with that new sympathy and pity, answer gently, almost jokingly, and would let him have the last word. And, now that she herself was in love and felt herself live again, she had a sympathy that was almost motherly for his love, even though she herself was beginning to feel young again, and with it a strange tenderness for the two of them, Marianne and Henri. She did not think of the danger for him; she still had only, in her new world of romance, a sympathy for romance. He was her husband, but she felt none of a wife’s jealousy. And for Marianne she felt the same strange compassion, as for a younger sister-in-love....

There came to her scarcely a fleeting thought of the immorality which the world, people, small people—the whirlers in the little circle, with their little prejudices and dogmas, their little creeds and philosophies—would see in such strange views from a married woman concerning herself and a friend, concerning her husband and the little niece with whom her husband was evidently in love. She was a small creature like all of them, she was a small soul, likeall of them; but her soul at least was growing, growing upwards and outwards; she no longer felt depressed; and it seemed as if she were being borne on wings to the greater cloud-worlds yonder, to the far cities, where flashed the lightnings of the new revelations, the new realities....

Everything in her was changed....

Chapter XXIIIMax Brauws was a thinker as well as a man of action; and each of these two personalities insisted on having its period of domination. After his college days, he had wandered over Europe for years, vaguely seeking an object in life. Deep down in himself, notwithstanding all his restless activity, he remained a dreamer, as he had been in his childhood and boyhood. It seemed as if that which he had sought in his dreams when playing as a boy on the fir-clad hills and over the moors went on beckoning him, darkly and elusively, a mystic, nebulous veil on the dim horizons of the past; and, when he ran towards them, those far horizons, they receded more and more into the distance, fading little by little; and the veil was like a little cloud, melting into thin air.... He had wandered about for years, his soul oppressed by a load of knowledge, by the load of knowing all that men had thought, planned, believed, dreamed, worshipped, achieved. An almost mechanically accurate memory had arranged those loads in his brain in absolute order; and, if he had not been above all things driven by the unrest of his imagination, with its eternal dreaming and its eternal yearning to find what it sought, he would have become a quiet scholar, living in the country,far from cities, with a great library around him; for very often, when spent with weariness, he had a vision of an ideal repose. But the unrest and the yearning had always driven him on, driven him through the world; and they had both made him seek, for himself as well as for others, because, if he had found for others, he would also have found for himself. They, the unrest and the yearning, had driven him on towards the great centres of life, towards the black gloom of the English and German manufacturing-towns, towards the unhappy moujiks in Russia, towards the famine-stricken villages of Sicily, all in a heart-rending passion to know, to have seen, penetrated and experienced all the misery of the world. And the capitals had risen up around him like gigantic Babels of fevered pride, accumulations of egotisms; the smoke of the manufacturing-towns had smeared along the horizon of his life the soot-black clouds through which he could not see and in which the days remained eternally defiled; the Russian snow-landscapes had spread out as eternal, untraversable steppes—steppes and steppes and steppes—of absolutely colourless despair; in Italy he had beheld an appalling contrast between the magnificence of the country—the glory of its scenery, the melancholy of its art—and the sorrows of the afflicted nation, which, as in a haze of gold, against a background of sublime ruins and shimmering blue, along rows of palaces full of noble treasures, utteredits cry of hunger, shook its threatening fist, because the old ground brought forth not another olive, not one, after the excesses of the past, exhausted by the birth-pangs of the untold glories of old....His mind, schooled in book-lore, also read life itself, learnt to know it, fathomed it with a glance. He saw the world, saw its wickedness, its selfishness, saw especially its awful, monstrous hypocrisy. Like so many leering, grinning masks, with treacherous honeyed smiles, contradicting the furtive glances of the diabolical eyes, he saw the powers of the world above the world itself: a huge nightmare of compact distress, the greedy, covetous, grasping fingers hidden as though ready to clutch at the folds of the majestic purple, ready to strike like vultures’ claws. And he saw—O terrible vision!—the world as a helpless, quivering mass lying for centuries under that eternal menace. He saw it everywhere. Then he wanted to free himself with a gigantic effort from the sphinx-like domination of his impotence, with its eternally unseeing eyes, its eternally silent lips, its undivining mind; and his movement was as that of one who lies crushed under granite, the granite of that omnipotent sphinx of impotence, who, with her eternal immovability, seemed to be saying nothing but this:“I am unchangeable, eternally; against me everything is eternally dashing itself to pieces; against me your dreams scatter into mist. I alone am, but I amthat which is unchangeable: human impotence, your own impotence. Lie still at my feet, do not move: I alone am.”That was the vision of his hopeless eyes. But desperation drove him on, wandering ever on and on to other lands, to other capitals, to other towns black with smoke: the smoke through which nothing shone, not a single gleam of hope. And for years it was the same: wandering, seeking, not finding; only seeing, knowing, realizing. But the more he saw, knew and realized, the more terrible it was to him that he could not find the very first word of the solution, the more terrible it became to him that only the sphinx remained, the immovable granite impotence; and her blank gaze seemed to utter her solitary revelation:“I alone am. I am impotence; but I am immovable, I am omnipotent.”Then he had felt in himself the need to do still more, to be really a doer, a common workman, as they all were, everywhere, the poor and wretched. And he went to America, in order no longer to think, read, ponder, dream, see or know, but to do what they were all doing, the poor and wretched. And it was as he had succeeded in telling Constance at last, after so many hesitations: everything that was atavistic in him had prevented him from becoming a brother, a fellow-worker. But he was scarcely back in Europe before he felt the air around himfull of noble aims, passionate hopes; and Peace had shone before his eyes. He spoke; and his words were as the words of one inspired; and everybody went to hear him. He had spoken in Holland; he now went to Germany and spoke there. He wrote his book there:Peace. He went on doing and moving, until he was laid low not only with the fatigue of thinking and meditating, but also with the strain of constantly travelling hither and thither, of constantly appearing in overcrowded halls, of speaking in a clear, resonant voice to thousands of people. For a moment he said to himself that he was doing something, something even greater and better than his manual labour in America had been. For a moment he said to himself that he had found, if not everything, at least something, an atom of absolute good, and that he was imparting that atom to the world. But dull discouragement came and smote him, as well as physical strain, and left him saying to himself:“They cheer and applaud, but nothing is changed. Everything remains as it is, as if I had never spoken.”His impatience demanded an immediate realization and the sight of the ideal flashing across the horizon. And then he lost all hope even for the future, for the brighter ages that were dawning. A mocking laugh, a sarcastic word in a report on his lectures was enough to shatter him for weeks.He hid himself like a leper, or allowed himself to be luxuriously lapped in the leafy melancholy of the German mountain-forests, or went, farther and higher, into the Alps, made reckless ascents, just himself and a guide, as though, along the pure world of the slippery glaciers, he hoped to find what he had sought in vain in the Old World and the New, in the world of all and of himself.Then he remained for weeks lingering on in a lonely little village in Switzerland, high up among the eternal snows, as though he wished to purify himself of all the dust of his humanity. Merely through breathing the exquisite rareness of the air, especially at night, when in the higher heavens the stars shone nearer to him, twinkling out their living rays, it seemed as if the pure cold were cleansing him to his marrow, to his soul. He gazed back almost peacefully upon his life as a man of thought and action, thought and action being two things in which a man is able to indulge only if he be willing to live, for others and for himself. If anything of his thought, of his action remained drifting in those lower atmospheres of the suffering world, he was certain that this would be so little, so infinitesimally small, that he himself did not perceive it, like an atom of dust floating in the immensity of the future. Perhaps then the atom would prove to be a little grain and, as such, be built into the substance of the ideal. But, even if this were so, his thought andhis action and their possible results seemed to him so small, so slight that he was filled with humility. And in this humility there was a pride in being humble; for did he not remember all the complacency, the dogmatism, the conviction, the assurance, the self-consciousness, all the pedantry that battened down there?Amid the serenity of the mountains, as he sent his gaze roaming over the frost-bound horizons, all within him became pure and crystal-clear, his soul a very prism. He saw its colours lying there plainly, shining, glittering, with none of the foulness of that lower world. And these weeks were weeks of the deepest and most health-giving rest that he had ever known.He now felt very lonely. He was not the man to give himself up to the simple enjoyment of this healing rest. He loved best to feel the multitude around him, to fling out his strong arms wide towards humanity, feeling his most ardent and happiest glow when embracing humanity. But, after his discouragements, he seemed to have thrust it gently, though kindly, a little farther from him, had abandoned it, had sequestered himself, in order to recover from himself and from humanity in the ample, restful silence of utter solitude. He now felt very lonely. And a longing awoke in him, stirring but feebly as yet, for love to come towards him now, because hitherto love had always gone out from him, eagerand passionate; a longing to be sought himself, for once in his life; to see arms opened to him this time, waiting to embrace him, to press him to a loving heart.... A feeling of melancholy softened him, made him small and human, while the mountain-wind swept past on giant wings....He looked back upon his life. That was one thing which it had never known: that concentration of all feeling on an individual. With him, any whole-hearted feeling had always been for the many. When he looked back, he saw spectres wandering through the past: the individual, the unit, just a faint blur here and there; he had never felt that all-devouring passion for them, the individuals. And yet, as a child, as a boy, playing his dream-game amid woods, fields, heather and stream, for whom had his longing been? To find all of them, humanity, or the one individual soul? He did not know; but a dreamer he had always remained, for all his thinking and doing. And now, after the many had brought him sorrow, he began to dream, for the first time, of the one....Of the one ... the one individual soul that would open wide arms to him and approach him with a loving embrace ... one individual soul.... Had his quest always been the self-deception of impotence and was it possible that now that quest had become a search for the one individual soul? Suddenly, through his longing, he remembered an evening:a table with flowers and candles; men talking amid the smoke of their cigars; the burly figure of a fair-haired officer; and some strange words which that officer had just uttered as though unconsciously, in the course of ordinary conversation: a vision calling up early years of childhood, childish play, a little girl, fair, with red flowers at her temples, dressed in white, running barefoot over great boulders in a river full of rocks, under the heavy foliage of the tropical trees, and beckoning, beckoning with her little hand to the two elder brothers who were playing with her, fascinated by their little sister....There, in that room, through the smoke of the cigars, amid the hum of indifferent talk, in three or four sentences, no more, that big, fair-haired man had said it, said it just casually, with a softening of his rough, noisy voice:“It was wonderful, the way she had of playing. She would run over the rocks and pluck the flowers. Lord, how adorable she looked, the little witch! And we boys used to run with her, run after her, as far as ever she pleased. She only had to beckon to us ... the damned, adorable little witch!”And the oath sounded like a caress; and the whole thing was only a picture lasting two or three seconds, no more; and then they returned to the smell of coffee and liqueurs, the cigar-smoke, the noisy voice growing rough again, becoming coarse and jovial as the burly, fair-haired soldier told some mess-room taleimmediately afterwards, after that reminiscence. But in him, Brauws, the reminiscence had lingered, as though always visible: the picture shining in the tenderness with which the brother had spoken of his sister; and it seemed to him as though he himself had seen, but more vaguely and dimly, once in his life, on those Dutch horizons of his childhood, a blur like that of the little figure, the bright, fair-faced child, even the little red note of her flowers.... Oh, how vague it was, how visionary! You thought of it ... and it had gone, all of it, leaving hardly the memory of a perfume, nay, hardly the reflection of a memory! Really, it was nothing, nothing, too airy for thought and impossible to describe in words, however tenderly chosen. It was nothing: if he thought about it for more than the one second that the reflection flashed across him, it was gone, quite lost....He was feeling very lonely now.... Oh, to think of the passing years with their millions of meetings, so many men and women just brushing against one another, in that casual passing, just looking into one another’s eyes, with the indifferent look of non-recognition, and then passing one another again, never seeing one another after!... And perhaps among them the one had passed, her eyes looking indifferently into his eyes, a bit of her body or dress brushing against his body or dress ... and she was gone, gone, lost altogether forever. Was that how it had happened in his life? Or not? Waslife sometimes merciful at the eleventh hour, giving the one, the individual soul, as a consolation, as a reward for that love for the many?Now he felt quite lonely, he who was a dreamer as well as a thinker and a man of action. And an irresistible wish to be no longer lonely made him come down suddenly from that ring of glittering peaks. There was nothing waiting for him in Holland, nothing to draw him towards those low lands of his birth, into the swarm of utterly indifferent people, full of petty insignificance, save alone, perhaps, that it was there—in the same house where the vision had been conjured up—there that the soul was waiting, there that the one individual soul would bide his coming.“It is only a fancy,” he now thought. “A fancy ... at my age! No, if any such thing had to happen, it would have happened in the years of youth in which we have the right to feel, to dream, to seek ... to seek for the one. Now that so many years, silent, dead years, lie heaped up around her and around me ... and between us, now it becomes absurd to feel, to dream, to seek those sweet solaces which we feel, dream and seek only when we are very young, but not when we have lost even our right to the remembrance of our youth, the reflection of our childish memories....”Still he came down from the mountains....

Chapter XXIII

Max Brauws was a thinker as well as a man of action; and each of these two personalities insisted on having its period of domination. After his college days, he had wandered over Europe for years, vaguely seeking an object in life. Deep down in himself, notwithstanding all his restless activity, he remained a dreamer, as he had been in his childhood and boyhood. It seemed as if that which he had sought in his dreams when playing as a boy on the fir-clad hills and over the moors went on beckoning him, darkly and elusively, a mystic, nebulous veil on the dim horizons of the past; and, when he ran towards them, those far horizons, they receded more and more into the distance, fading little by little; and the veil was like a little cloud, melting into thin air.... He had wandered about for years, his soul oppressed by a load of knowledge, by the load of knowing all that men had thought, planned, believed, dreamed, worshipped, achieved. An almost mechanically accurate memory had arranged those loads in his brain in absolute order; and, if he had not been above all things driven by the unrest of his imagination, with its eternal dreaming and its eternal yearning to find what it sought, he would have become a quiet scholar, living in the country,far from cities, with a great library around him; for very often, when spent with weariness, he had a vision of an ideal repose. But the unrest and the yearning had always driven him on, driven him through the world; and they had both made him seek, for himself as well as for others, because, if he had found for others, he would also have found for himself. They, the unrest and the yearning, had driven him on towards the great centres of life, towards the black gloom of the English and German manufacturing-towns, towards the unhappy moujiks in Russia, towards the famine-stricken villages of Sicily, all in a heart-rending passion to know, to have seen, penetrated and experienced all the misery of the world. And the capitals had risen up around him like gigantic Babels of fevered pride, accumulations of egotisms; the smoke of the manufacturing-towns had smeared along the horizon of his life the soot-black clouds through which he could not see and in which the days remained eternally defiled; the Russian snow-landscapes had spread out as eternal, untraversable steppes—steppes and steppes and steppes—of absolutely colourless despair; in Italy he had beheld an appalling contrast between the magnificence of the country—the glory of its scenery, the melancholy of its art—and the sorrows of the afflicted nation, which, as in a haze of gold, against a background of sublime ruins and shimmering blue, along rows of palaces full of noble treasures, utteredits cry of hunger, shook its threatening fist, because the old ground brought forth not another olive, not one, after the excesses of the past, exhausted by the birth-pangs of the untold glories of old....His mind, schooled in book-lore, also read life itself, learnt to know it, fathomed it with a glance. He saw the world, saw its wickedness, its selfishness, saw especially its awful, monstrous hypocrisy. Like so many leering, grinning masks, with treacherous honeyed smiles, contradicting the furtive glances of the diabolical eyes, he saw the powers of the world above the world itself: a huge nightmare of compact distress, the greedy, covetous, grasping fingers hidden as though ready to clutch at the folds of the majestic purple, ready to strike like vultures’ claws. And he saw—O terrible vision!—the world as a helpless, quivering mass lying for centuries under that eternal menace. He saw it everywhere. Then he wanted to free himself with a gigantic effort from the sphinx-like domination of his impotence, with its eternally unseeing eyes, its eternally silent lips, its undivining mind; and his movement was as that of one who lies crushed under granite, the granite of that omnipotent sphinx of impotence, who, with her eternal immovability, seemed to be saying nothing but this:“I am unchangeable, eternally; against me everything is eternally dashing itself to pieces; against me your dreams scatter into mist. I alone am, but I amthat which is unchangeable: human impotence, your own impotence. Lie still at my feet, do not move: I alone am.”That was the vision of his hopeless eyes. But desperation drove him on, wandering ever on and on to other lands, to other capitals, to other towns black with smoke: the smoke through which nothing shone, not a single gleam of hope. And for years it was the same: wandering, seeking, not finding; only seeing, knowing, realizing. But the more he saw, knew and realized, the more terrible it was to him that he could not find the very first word of the solution, the more terrible it became to him that only the sphinx remained, the immovable granite impotence; and her blank gaze seemed to utter her solitary revelation:“I alone am. I am impotence; but I am immovable, I am omnipotent.”Then he had felt in himself the need to do still more, to be really a doer, a common workman, as they all were, everywhere, the poor and wretched. And he went to America, in order no longer to think, read, ponder, dream, see or know, but to do what they were all doing, the poor and wretched. And it was as he had succeeded in telling Constance at last, after so many hesitations: everything that was atavistic in him had prevented him from becoming a brother, a fellow-worker. But he was scarcely back in Europe before he felt the air around himfull of noble aims, passionate hopes; and Peace had shone before his eyes. He spoke; and his words were as the words of one inspired; and everybody went to hear him. He had spoken in Holland; he now went to Germany and spoke there. He wrote his book there:Peace. He went on doing and moving, until he was laid low not only with the fatigue of thinking and meditating, but also with the strain of constantly travelling hither and thither, of constantly appearing in overcrowded halls, of speaking in a clear, resonant voice to thousands of people. For a moment he said to himself that he was doing something, something even greater and better than his manual labour in America had been. For a moment he said to himself that he had found, if not everything, at least something, an atom of absolute good, and that he was imparting that atom to the world. But dull discouragement came and smote him, as well as physical strain, and left him saying to himself:“They cheer and applaud, but nothing is changed. Everything remains as it is, as if I had never spoken.”His impatience demanded an immediate realization and the sight of the ideal flashing across the horizon. And then he lost all hope even for the future, for the brighter ages that were dawning. A mocking laugh, a sarcastic word in a report on his lectures was enough to shatter him for weeks.He hid himself like a leper, or allowed himself to be luxuriously lapped in the leafy melancholy of the German mountain-forests, or went, farther and higher, into the Alps, made reckless ascents, just himself and a guide, as though, along the pure world of the slippery glaciers, he hoped to find what he had sought in vain in the Old World and the New, in the world of all and of himself.Then he remained for weeks lingering on in a lonely little village in Switzerland, high up among the eternal snows, as though he wished to purify himself of all the dust of his humanity. Merely through breathing the exquisite rareness of the air, especially at night, when in the higher heavens the stars shone nearer to him, twinkling out their living rays, it seemed as if the pure cold were cleansing him to his marrow, to his soul. He gazed back almost peacefully upon his life as a man of thought and action, thought and action being two things in which a man is able to indulge only if he be willing to live, for others and for himself. If anything of his thought, of his action remained drifting in those lower atmospheres of the suffering world, he was certain that this would be so little, so infinitesimally small, that he himself did not perceive it, like an atom of dust floating in the immensity of the future. Perhaps then the atom would prove to be a little grain and, as such, be built into the substance of the ideal. But, even if this were so, his thought andhis action and their possible results seemed to him so small, so slight that he was filled with humility. And in this humility there was a pride in being humble; for did he not remember all the complacency, the dogmatism, the conviction, the assurance, the self-consciousness, all the pedantry that battened down there?Amid the serenity of the mountains, as he sent his gaze roaming over the frost-bound horizons, all within him became pure and crystal-clear, his soul a very prism. He saw its colours lying there plainly, shining, glittering, with none of the foulness of that lower world. And these weeks were weeks of the deepest and most health-giving rest that he had ever known.He now felt very lonely. He was not the man to give himself up to the simple enjoyment of this healing rest. He loved best to feel the multitude around him, to fling out his strong arms wide towards humanity, feeling his most ardent and happiest glow when embracing humanity. But, after his discouragements, he seemed to have thrust it gently, though kindly, a little farther from him, had abandoned it, had sequestered himself, in order to recover from himself and from humanity in the ample, restful silence of utter solitude. He now felt very lonely. And a longing awoke in him, stirring but feebly as yet, for love to come towards him now, because hitherto love had always gone out from him, eagerand passionate; a longing to be sought himself, for once in his life; to see arms opened to him this time, waiting to embrace him, to press him to a loving heart.... A feeling of melancholy softened him, made him small and human, while the mountain-wind swept past on giant wings....He looked back upon his life. That was one thing which it had never known: that concentration of all feeling on an individual. With him, any whole-hearted feeling had always been for the many. When he looked back, he saw spectres wandering through the past: the individual, the unit, just a faint blur here and there; he had never felt that all-devouring passion for them, the individuals. And yet, as a child, as a boy, playing his dream-game amid woods, fields, heather and stream, for whom had his longing been? To find all of them, humanity, or the one individual soul? He did not know; but a dreamer he had always remained, for all his thinking and doing. And now, after the many had brought him sorrow, he began to dream, for the first time, of the one....Of the one ... the one individual soul that would open wide arms to him and approach him with a loving embrace ... one individual soul.... Had his quest always been the self-deception of impotence and was it possible that now that quest had become a search for the one individual soul? Suddenly, through his longing, he remembered an evening:a table with flowers and candles; men talking amid the smoke of their cigars; the burly figure of a fair-haired officer; and some strange words which that officer had just uttered as though unconsciously, in the course of ordinary conversation: a vision calling up early years of childhood, childish play, a little girl, fair, with red flowers at her temples, dressed in white, running barefoot over great boulders in a river full of rocks, under the heavy foliage of the tropical trees, and beckoning, beckoning with her little hand to the two elder brothers who were playing with her, fascinated by their little sister....There, in that room, through the smoke of the cigars, amid the hum of indifferent talk, in three or four sentences, no more, that big, fair-haired man had said it, said it just casually, with a softening of his rough, noisy voice:“It was wonderful, the way she had of playing. She would run over the rocks and pluck the flowers. Lord, how adorable she looked, the little witch! And we boys used to run with her, run after her, as far as ever she pleased. She only had to beckon to us ... the damned, adorable little witch!”And the oath sounded like a caress; and the whole thing was only a picture lasting two or three seconds, no more; and then they returned to the smell of coffee and liqueurs, the cigar-smoke, the noisy voice growing rough again, becoming coarse and jovial as the burly, fair-haired soldier told some mess-room taleimmediately afterwards, after that reminiscence. But in him, Brauws, the reminiscence had lingered, as though always visible: the picture shining in the tenderness with which the brother had spoken of his sister; and it seemed to him as though he himself had seen, but more vaguely and dimly, once in his life, on those Dutch horizons of his childhood, a blur like that of the little figure, the bright, fair-faced child, even the little red note of her flowers.... Oh, how vague it was, how visionary! You thought of it ... and it had gone, all of it, leaving hardly the memory of a perfume, nay, hardly the reflection of a memory! Really, it was nothing, nothing, too airy for thought and impossible to describe in words, however tenderly chosen. It was nothing: if he thought about it for more than the one second that the reflection flashed across him, it was gone, quite lost....He was feeling very lonely now.... Oh, to think of the passing years with their millions of meetings, so many men and women just brushing against one another, in that casual passing, just looking into one another’s eyes, with the indifferent look of non-recognition, and then passing one another again, never seeing one another after!... And perhaps among them the one had passed, her eyes looking indifferently into his eyes, a bit of her body or dress brushing against his body or dress ... and she was gone, gone, lost altogether forever. Was that how it had happened in his life? Or not? Waslife sometimes merciful at the eleventh hour, giving the one, the individual soul, as a consolation, as a reward for that love for the many?Now he felt quite lonely, he who was a dreamer as well as a thinker and a man of action. And an irresistible wish to be no longer lonely made him come down suddenly from that ring of glittering peaks. There was nothing waiting for him in Holland, nothing to draw him towards those low lands of his birth, into the swarm of utterly indifferent people, full of petty insignificance, save alone, perhaps, that it was there—in the same house where the vision had been conjured up—there that the soul was waiting, there that the one individual soul would bide his coming.“It is only a fancy,” he now thought. “A fancy ... at my age! No, if any such thing had to happen, it would have happened in the years of youth in which we have the right to feel, to dream, to seek ... to seek for the one. Now that so many years, silent, dead years, lie heaped up around her and around me ... and between us, now it becomes absurd to feel, to dream, to seek those sweet solaces which we feel, dream and seek only when we are very young, but not when we have lost even our right to the remembrance of our youth, the reflection of our childish memories....”Still he came down from the mountains....

Max Brauws was a thinker as well as a man of action; and each of these two personalities insisted on having its period of domination. After his college days, he had wandered over Europe for years, vaguely seeking an object in life. Deep down in himself, notwithstanding all his restless activity, he remained a dreamer, as he had been in his childhood and boyhood. It seemed as if that which he had sought in his dreams when playing as a boy on the fir-clad hills and over the moors went on beckoning him, darkly and elusively, a mystic, nebulous veil on the dim horizons of the past; and, when he ran towards them, those far horizons, they receded more and more into the distance, fading little by little; and the veil was like a little cloud, melting into thin air.... He had wandered about for years, his soul oppressed by a load of knowledge, by the load of knowing all that men had thought, planned, believed, dreamed, worshipped, achieved. An almost mechanically accurate memory had arranged those loads in his brain in absolute order; and, if he had not been above all things driven by the unrest of his imagination, with its eternal dreaming and its eternal yearning to find what it sought, he would have become a quiet scholar, living in the country,far from cities, with a great library around him; for very often, when spent with weariness, he had a vision of an ideal repose. But the unrest and the yearning had always driven him on, driven him through the world; and they had both made him seek, for himself as well as for others, because, if he had found for others, he would also have found for himself. They, the unrest and the yearning, had driven him on towards the great centres of life, towards the black gloom of the English and German manufacturing-towns, towards the unhappy moujiks in Russia, towards the famine-stricken villages of Sicily, all in a heart-rending passion to know, to have seen, penetrated and experienced all the misery of the world. And the capitals had risen up around him like gigantic Babels of fevered pride, accumulations of egotisms; the smoke of the manufacturing-towns had smeared along the horizon of his life the soot-black clouds through which he could not see and in which the days remained eternally defiled; the Russian snow-landscapes had spread out as eternal, untraversable steppes—steppes and steppes and steppes—of absolutely colourless despair; in Italy he had beheld an appalling contrast between the magnificence of the country—the glory of its scenery, the melancholy of its art—and the sorrows of the afflicted nation, which, as in a haze of gold, against a background of sublime ruins and shimmering blue, along rows of palaces full of noble treasures, utteredits cry of hunger, shook its threatening fist, because the old ground brought forth not another olive, not one, after the excesses of the past, exhausted by the birth-pangs of the untold glories of old....

His mind, schooled in book-lore, also read life itself, learnt to know it, fathomed it with a glance. He saw the world, saw its wickedness, its selfishness, saw especially its awful, monstrous hypocrisy. Like so many leering, grinning masks, with treacherous honeyed smiles, contradicting the furtive glances of the diabolical eyes, he saw the powers of the world above the world itself: a huge nightmare of compact distress, the greedy, covetous, grasping fingers hidden as though ready to clutch at the folds of the majestic purple, ready to strike like vultures’ claws. And he saw—O terrible vision!—the world as a helpless, quivering mass lying for centuries under that eternal menace. He saw it everywhere. Then he wanted to free himself with a gigantic effort from the sphinx-like domination of his impotence, with its eternally unseeing eyes, its eternally silent lips, its undivining mind; and his movement was as that of one who lies crushed under granite, the granite of that omnipotent sphinx of impotence, who, with her eternal immovability, seemed to be saying nothing but this:

“I am unchangeable, eternally; against me everything is eternally dashing itself to pieces; against me your dreams scatter into mist. I alone am, but I amthat which is unchangeable: human impotence, your own impotence. Lie still at my feet, do not move: I alone am.”

That was the vision of his hopeless eyes. But desperation drove him on, wandering ever on and on to other lands, to other capitals, to other towns black with smoke: the smoke through which nothing shone, not a single gleam of hope. And for years it was the same: wandering, seeking, not finding; only seeing, knowing, realizing. But the more he saw, knew and realized, the more terrible it was to him that he could not find the very first word of the solution, the more terrible it became to him that only the sphinx remained, the immovable granite impotence; and her blank gaze seemed to utter her solitary revelation:

“I alone am. I am impotence; but I am immovable, I am omnipotent.”

Then he had felt in himself the need to do still more, to be really a doer, a common workman, as they all were, everywhere, the poor and wretched. And he went to America, in order no longer to think, read, ponder, dream, see or know, but to do what they were all doing, the poor and wretched. And it was as he had succeeded in telling Constance at last, after so many hesitations: everything that was atavistic in him had prevented him from becoming a brother, a fellow-worker. But he was scarcely back in Europe before he felt the air around himfull of noble aims, passionate hopes; and Peace had shone before his eyes. He spoke; and his words were as the words of one inspired; and everybody went to hear him. He had spoken in Holland; he now went to Germany and spoke there. He wrote his book there:Peace. He went on doing and moving, until he was laid low not only with the fatigue of thinking and meditating, but also with the strain of constantly travelling hither and thither, of constantly appearing in overcrowded halls, of speaking in a clear, resonant voice to thousands of people. For a moment he said to himself that he was doing something, something even greater and better than his manual labour in America had been. For a moment he said to himself that he had found, if not everything, at least something, an atom of absolute good, and that he was imparting that atom to the world. But dull discouragement came and smote him, as well as physical strain, and left him saying to himself:

“They cheer and applaud, but nothing is changed. Everything remains as it is, as if I had never spoken.”

His impatience demanded an immediate realization and the sight of the ideal flashing across the horizon. And then he lost all hope even for the future, for the brighter ages that were dawning. A mocking laugh, a sarcastic word in a report on his lectures was enough to shatter him for weeks.He hid himself like a leper, or allowed himself to be luxuriously lapped in the leafy melancholy of the German mountain-forests, or went, farther and higher, into the Alps, made reckless ascents, just himself and a guide, as though, along the pure world of the slippery glaciers, he hoped to find what he had sought in vain in the Old World and the New, in the world of all and of himself.

Then he remained for weeks lingering on in a lonely little village in Switzerland, high up among the eternal snows, as though he wished to purify himself of all the dust of his humanity. Merely through breathing the exquisite rareness of the air, especially at night, when in the higher heavens the stars shone nearer to him, twinkling out their living rays, it seemed as if the pure cold were cleansing him to his marrow, to his soul. He gazed back almost peacefully upon his life as a man of thought and action, thought and action being two things in which a man is able to indulge only if he be willing to live, for others and for himself. If anything of his thought, of his action remained drifting in those lower atmospheres of the suffering world, he was certain that this would be so little, so infinitesimally small, that he himself did not perceive it, like an atom of dust floating in the immensity of the future. Perhaps then the atom would prove to be a little grain and, as such, be built into the substance of the ideal. But, even if this were so, his thought andhis action and their possible results seemed to him so small, so slight that he was filled with humility. And in this humility there was a pride in being humble; for did he not remember all the complacency, the dogmatism, the conviction, the assurance, the self-consciousness, all the pedantry that battened down there?

Amid the serenity of the mountains, as he sent his gaze roaming over the frost-bound horizons, all within him became pure and crystal-clear, his soul a very prism. He saw its colours lying there plainly, shining, glittering, with none of the foulness of that lower world. And these weeks were weeks of the deepest and most health-giving rest that he had ever known.

He now felt very lonely. He was not the man to give himself up to the simple enjoyment of this healing rest. He loved best to feel the multitude around him, to fling out his strong arms wide towards humanity, feeling his most ardent and happiest glow when embracing humanity. But, after his discouragements, he seemed to have thrust it gently, though kindly, a little farther from him, had abandoned it, had sequestered himself, in order to recover from himself and from humanity in the ample, restful silence of utter solitude. He now felt very lonely. And a longing awoke in him, stirring but feebly as yet, for love to come towards him now, because hitherto love had always gone out from him, eagerand passionate; a longing to be sought himself, for once in his life; to see arms opened to him this time, waiting to embrace him, to press him to a loving heart.... A feeling of melancholy softened him, made him small and human, while the mountain-wind swept past on giant wings....

He looked back upon his life. That was one thing which it had never known: that concentration of all feeling on an individual. With him, any whole-hearted feeling had always been for the many. When he looked back, he saw spectres wandering through the past: the individual, the unit, just a faint blur here and there; he had never felt that all-devouring passion for them, the individuals. And yet, as a child, as a boy, playing his dream-game amid woods, fields, heather and stream, for whom had his longing been? To find all of them, humanity, or the one individual soul? He did not know; but a dreamer he had always remained, for all his thinking and doing. And now, after the many had brought him sorrow, he began to dream, for the first time, of the one....

Of the one ... the one individual soul that would open wide arms to him and approach him with a loving embrace ... one individual soul.... Had his quest always been the self-deception of impotence and was it possible that now that quest had become a search for the one individual soul? Suddenly, through his longing, he remembered an evening:a table with flowers and candles; men talking amid the smoke of their cigars; the burly figure of a fair-haired officer; and some strange words which that officer had just uttered as though unconsciously, in the course of ordinary conversation: a vision calling up early years of childhood, childish play, a little girl, fair, with red flowers at her temples, dressed in white, running barefoot over great boulders in a river full of rocks, under the heavy foliage of the tropical trees, and beckoning, beckoning with her little hand to the two elder brothers who were playing with her, fascinated by their little sister....

There, in that room, through the smoke of the cigars, amid the hum of indifferent talk, in three or four sentences, no more, that big, fair-haired man had said it, said it just casually, with a softening of his rough, noisy voice:

“It was wonderful, the way she had of playing. She would run over the rocks and pluck the flowers. Lord, how adorable she looked, the little witch! And we boys used to run with her, run after her, as far as ever she pleased. She only had to beckon to us ... the damned, adorable little witch!”

And the oath sounded like a caress; and the whole thing was only a picture lasting two or three seconds, no more; and then they returned to the smell of coffee and liqueurs, the cigar-smoke, the noisy voice growing rough again, becoming coarse and jovial as the burly, fair-haired soldier told some mess-room taleimmediately afterwards, after that reminiscence. But in him, Brauws, the reminiscence had lingered, as though always visible: the picture shining in the tenderness with which the brother had spoken of his sister; and it seemed to him as though he himself had seen, but more vaguely and dimly, once in his life, on those Dutch horizons of his childhood, a blur like that of the little figure, the bright, fair-faced child, even the little red note of her flowers.... Oh, how vague it was, how visionary! You thought of it ... and it had gone, all of it, leaving hardly the memory of a perfume, nay, hardly the reflection of a memory! Really, it was nothing, nothing, too airy for thought and impossible to describe in words, however tenderly chosen. It was nothing: if he thought about it for more than the one second that the reflection flashed across him, it was gone, quite lost....

He was feeling very lonely now.... Oh, to think of the passing years with their millions of meetings, so many men and women just brushing against one another, in that casual passing, just looking into one another’s eyes, with the indifferent look of non-recognition, and then passing one another again, never seeing one another after!... And perhaps among them the one had passed, her eyes looking indifferently into his eyes, a bit of her body or dress brushing against his body or dress ... and she was gone, gone, lost altogether forever. Was that how it had happened in his life? Or not? Waslife sometimes merciful at the eleventh hour, giving the one, the individual soul, as a consolation, as a reward for that love for the many?

Now he felt quite lonely, he who was a dreamer as well as a thinker and a man of action. And an irresistible wish to be no longer lonely made him come down suddenly from that ring of glittering peaks. There was nothing waiting for him in Holland, nothing to draw him towards those low lands of his birth, into the swarm of utterly indifferent people, full of petty insignificance, save alone, perhaps, that it was there—in the same house where the vision had been conjured up—there that the soul was waiting, there that the one individual soul would bide his coming.

“It is only a fancy,” he now thought. “A fancy ... at my age! No, if any such thing had to happen, it would have happened in the years of youth in which we have the right to feel, to dream, to seek ... to seek for the one. Now that so many years, silent, dead years, lie heaped up around her and around me ... and between us, now it becomes absurd to feel, to dream, to seek those sweet solaces which we feel, dream and seek only when we are very young, but not when we have lost even our right to the remembrance of our youth, the reflection of our childish memories....”

Still he came down from the mountains....

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