Constance, after this talk with Bertha, for days felt easier in her
mind, as though filled with an indefinable contentment that bid fair to
soothe and heal. Yes, she hoped that, gradually, she would win them all
back like that, all her near ones, whom she had lost for years. She saw
Mamma daily; and in these regular meetings between mother and child
there was the sweetness of finding each other after long years of almost
uninterrupted separation, a sweetness touched with a melancholy that
held no bitterness, a mingling of glad tears and smiles over the
happiness of it all. Also, Constance had now found Bertha again; and,
though they did not see each other until Mamma's Sunday-evening, still
there was more sisterly confidence between them, while Marianne grew to
like running in at the Kerkhoflaan and would stay to dinner or go
cycling with Van der Welcke and Addie. In this way, light bonds were
established. As for Karel and Cateau, Constance was sorry, for in Karel
she still remembered the brother with whom she used to play on the
boulders in the river at Buitenzorg; but she had felt at once that she
must not expect much from Karel, now that he and his wife had become
mutual images of placid egotism, wrapped in their well-fed, middle-class
life, in the sheltered comfort of their warm, shut house. No, Karel, she
felt, she had lost, though they were conventionally civil to each other.
With Gerrit it was pleasanter. Gerrit and Adeline would come now and
then to take tea in the evening, after the children had gone to bed.
Only it was a pity that Gerrit always insisted on crabbing and poking
fun at the Van Naghels and their friends. This, Constance thought, was
not very tactful towards Van der Welcke, because, though he and she did
not go into society, it so happened that Van der Welcke had a good many
old friends, at the club, who belonged to the aristocratic set. Gerrit
was a boisterous, lively fellow, fair-haired, handsome, broad-shouldered
and vigorous in his hussar's uniform; but his boisterousness was
sometimes, she thought, rather overdone; and she suspected that Van der
Welcke did not like Gerrit, thought him a little vulgar. And so she was
always on the alert to take up the cudgels for Gerrit against her
husband; and Van der Welcke said nothing about Gerrit and was even
amiable and talkative when Gerrit and Adeline were there. Adeline was a
dear little woman, a fair-haired, little doll-mother, with her seven
children, like a family of flaxen-haired dolls: the oldest a girl turned
eight, the youngest a baby of a year or so; and Gerrit was always making
jokes about not leaving off yet; and indeed Adeline was expecting
another in the autumn. So Constance got on well with Gerrit and Adeline,
but still she felt out of touch with this brother too, even though
Gerrit had such a charming way of bringing back the memory of their
early days, when they used to play in the river at Buitenzorg. Yes, she
was an interesting child then, Gerrit always said: there was something
so nice about her; she was full of imagination; and it was curious to
hear this great, heavy hussar going into ecstasies over that little
sister of the old days: a frail, fair-haired little girl, in her white
_baadje;_ she used to walk on her pretty little bare feet over the
boulders and invent all sorts of fables and fairy-tales, which her elder
brothers were not quite capable of understanding and yet had to play at,
good-humouredly, for the two brothers were very fond of their little
sister. Yes, Gerrit always said, he had not understood until afterwards
how much poetry there was in Constance in the days when she dreamed
those stories, those fables, in which she often played a fairy, or a
_poetri_ out of the Javanese legends: at such times, she would wreathe
her hair with a garland of broad leaves; she would look like Ophelia, in
the water, decked with tropical blossoms; and the brothers must needs
follow the tiny bare feet and the fancies of their little sister, who
looked marvellously charming as she ran over the great rocks, ran
through the foaming water, ran in crystal green shadows, which quivered
over the river, under the heavy awning of the foliage. Yes, that had
left a great impression on Gerrit; and he often talked about it:
"Constance, do you remember? What a nice little girl you were then,
though you were a little queer!..."
Until Constance would laugh and ask if she was no longer nice now that
she no longer ran about barefoot in a white _baadje_ with purple
_kembang-spatoe_[20] on her temples. Then Gerrit shook his head and
said, yes, she was very nice still, but ... but.... And, diving back
into his recollections, he said that, two years later, she suddenly
changed, became grown-up and a prig and would dance with no one but the
secretary-general.... And then Constance cried with laughter, because
Gerrit could never forget that secretary-general. Yes, she would only
dance with the biggest big-wigs: she was a mass of vanity, a real
daughter of the _Toean Besar_.[21] And it was as though Gerrit were bent
upon getting back that little younger sister who used to make up
fairy-tales in the river behind the Palace at Buitenzorg,
notwithstanding that he was now a big, heavy, powerful fellow and a
captain of hussars. Then Constance would look at him, handsome, broad,
fair-haired, vigorous, enjoying his drink or his good cigar, and she
reflected that she did not know Gerrit and did not understand Gerrit:
very vaguely she felt something in him escape her, felt it so vaguely
that it was hardly a thought, but merely a haze passing over her
bewilderment. Adeline sat very quietly in the midst of it, smiling
pleasantly at those reminiscences, at those games of the old days:
"Yes, it's extraordinary, the way children play by themselves!" she
said, simply; and then she would tell prettily of the games of her own
fair-haired brood.
But Gerrit would shake his head: no, that was romping, what his boys
did, but the other thing was playing, real playing. Until Constance
laughingly asked him to talk of something else than her bare feet. And
then the conversation took a more ordinary turn; and it was as if both
Gerrit and Constance felt that, although they liked each other, they had
not yet found each other. And in this there was a very gentle melancholy
that could hardly be formulated.
Constance did not see much of Ernst. She and Van der Welcke and Addie
had once lunched with him at his rooms and he had been a most amiable
host: he showed her the old family-papers, which, after Papa's death, he
had asked leave to keep, because he took most interest in them and they
would be in good hands. He would leave them to Gerrit's eldest son:
Gerrit was the only one of the four brothers who, so far, had provided
heirs. He showed her his old china and called her attention to the
different marks that were signs of its value. Next, he spread out an old
piece of brocade, embroidered with seed-pearls, and said very seriously
that it was a stomacher from a dress of Queen Elizabeth's. When
Constance laughed and ventured to express a doubt, he became rather
grave and almost angry, but graciously changed the conversation, as one
does, a little condescendingly, with people who have said something
stupid, who have not the same culture as ourselves.
When they sat down to lunch in his room with its beautiful old
colouring, the table was so carefully laid, the flowers so tastefully
arranged, with all the grace of a woman's hand, and the lunch was so
exquisite and dainty that Constance, amazed, had paid him a compliment.
He half-filled an antique glass with champagne and drank to welcome her
to Holland. There was about him, about his surroundings, about his
manner, something refined and something timid, something feminine and
something shy, something lovable and yet something reserved, as though
he were afraid of wounding himself or another. He had obviously devised
this reception in order to give pleasure to Constance. The conversation
flagged: Ernst never completed his sentences; and his eyes were always
wandering round the room.... After lunch, he was a little more
communicative and he then asked her if she had ever thought on the grace
and symbolism of a vase. She listened with interest, while she saw
something in Van der Welcke's glance as though he thought that Ernst was
mad; and Addie listened very seriously, full of tense and silent
astonishment. A vase, Ernst said, was like a soul--and he took in his
hand a slender Satsuma vase of ivory-tinted porcelain, with the elegant
arabesques waving delicately as a woman's hair--it was like a soul. For
Ernst there were sad and merry vases, proud and humble vases; there were
lovelorn vases and vases of passion; there were vases of desire; and
there were dead vases, which only came to life again when he put a
flower in them. He said all this very seriously, without a smile and
also without the rhapsody of an artist or a poet: he talked almost
laconically about his vases, as though any other view would have been
quite impossible.... Constance had not seen him since that day, because
he was the only one who did not come regularly to Mamma's
Sunday-evenings. And she retained an impression of that afternoon spent
with her brother Ernst as of something exotic and strangely symbolical,
something, it was true, which she had liked and found pleasant and
refined, but which, all the same, lacked the familiar cordiality of a
brother and sister meeting again after a separation of years.
As regards Adolphine and her children, Constance, after a first sense of
recoil, had, almost unconsciously, laid down rules for her feelings,
though perhaps she did not see those rules so very clearly outlined in
her mind. But, unconsciously, she positively refused to dislike
Adolphine and, on the contrary, was positively determined to think
everything about Adolphine pleasant and attractive: her husband, her
house, her children and her ideas. If any one, even Mamma, said the
least thing about Adolphine, she at once espoused her cause, violently.
Through circumstances, such as the arranging of her own house and
Emilie's wedding, she had not, as yet, been often to the Van Saetzemas';
but she promised herself not to neglect this in future and, with the
greatest tact, to advise Adolphine in all sorts of matters. It operated
strangely in Constance: the feeling of recoil, which, after all, was
there; an absolute determination to act against this feeling of recoil;
and, combined with these two, a silent wish, a gentle resolve to improve
Adolphine in one way and another. She insisted that Addie should ask
Adolphine's boys to lunch one Sunday; and, though her nerves were racked
and she driven almost mad by their rude manners and coarse voices, she
had controlled herself and deliberately played the kind auntie. Addie,
sacrificing himself for Mamma's sake, had gone out walking with his
cousins, but had taken the first opportunity of giving the young louts
the slip. Knowing his mother's idiosyncrasies, he did not say much when
he returned and even declared that they were not half bad fellows. When
his father, however, asked him if he understood why Mamma encouraged
those unmannerly cubs, Addie stoically replied, because they were
cousins: one of Mamma's ideas; family-affection. Constance, meanwhile,
was so tired of the three young Van Saetzemas that she did not venture
to repeat the experiment.
Constance thought Dorine uncertain. Dorine was very pleasant, sometimes,
to go shopping with, or would go shopping herself for Constance--it was
she who asked, not Constance--and then, at other times, Dorine would be
cold and nervously irritable. This was because Dorine had a positive
mania for doing all sorts of things for other people, but, at the same
time, was always craving for appreciation and never thought that she was
sufficiently appreciated by any member of the family for whose benefit
she ran about. But the mania was too strong for her; and she went on
running about, for Mamma, for Bertha, for Constance, for Adolphine, and
was always grumbling to herself that she was not appreciated. Yes, she
would like to see their faces if she, Dorine, said, one day, that she
was tired! What would they say, she wondered, if she ventured to suggest
that one sometimes gets wet in the rain? Thus she always grumbled to
herself, fitful, dissatisfied, discontented and yet never able to make a
comfortable corner for herself, in the boarding-house where she lived,
always tearing along the streets from one sister to the other. It was as
though she had a mania that drove her ever onwards. She was miserable if
a day came when she had no errands to run; and she would go to Adolphine
and say:
"Look here, if you'd like me to go to Iserief's and ask about those
pillow cases for Floortje, you've only got to say so; I'm going that way
anyhow."
And then, when she went that way, she muttered to herself:
"At it again! Of course, there's only Dorine to inquire about Floortje's
pillow-cases! Why can't the girl go herself? Or why don't they send the
maid?"
Paul was the one whom Constance saw most often of all the brothers and
sisters. He had begun by finding in her a fairly sympathetic listener
for his endless unbosomings and philosophizings; then Van der Welcke
liked him best and they sometimes had a cigarette together in the
smoking-room; he was the most of a brother to them of the four: just an
ordinary brother. He would arrive in the morning and run straight up to
Constance' room, while she was still dressing, and declare that of
course he could come in, though she was in her petticoat. When not too
long-winded, he had an interesting way of talking which Van der Welcke
appreciated. He always looked at Addie with the eye of a philosopher;
and Addie liked him, found him great fun, with his exquisite trousers
and wonderful neckties. Constance was fond of him; and it was in Paul
that she had really for the first time met a brother again: in Paul, who
had come least within her ken in the old days, when she was a girl of
twenty and he a child of thirteen.
[20] Tropical flowers.
[21] The great house, _i.e._, the Viceregal Palace at Buitenzorg.