Marietje van Saetzema stood at the window and looked out into the
street. She looked down the whole street, because the house, a
corner-house, stood not in the length of it, but in the width,
half-closing the street, making it a sort of courtyard of big houses.
The street stretched to some distance; and another house part-closed the
farther end, turning it actually into a courtyard, occupied by
well-to-do people. The two rows of gables ran along with a fine
independence of chimney-stacks, of little cast-iron pinnacles and
pointed zinc roofs, little copper weathercocks and little balconies and
bow-windows, as though the architects and builders had conspired to
produce something artistic and refused to design one long monotonous
gable-line. But the new street--it was about twenty years old--had
nevertheless retained the Dutch trimness that characterizes the
dwellings of the better classes: the well-scrubbed pavements ran into
the distance, growing ever narrower to the eye, with their grey hem of
kerb-stone, their regularly-recurring lamp-posts; in the middle of the
street was a plantation: oval grass-plots surrounded by low railings, in
which were chestnut-trees, neatly pruned, and, beneath them, a neat
shrubbery of dwarf firs. The fronts of the houses glistened with
cleanliness after the spring cleaning; the tidily-laid bricks displayed
their rectangular outlines clearly, even at a distance; the
window-frames were bright with fresh paint, dazzling cream-colour or
pale brown; the blinds, neatly lowered in front of the shining
plate-glass windows, were let down in each house precisely the same
depth, as though mathematically measured; and the houses concealed their
inner lives very quietly behind the straight, nicely-balanced lace
curtains. And this was very characteristic, that above each gable there
jutted a flagstaff, held aslant with iron pins, the staff painted a
bright red, white and blue--the national colours--as though wound about
with ribbons, with a freshly-gilded knob at the top. All those
flagstaffs--a forest of staffs, with their iron pins, for ever aslant on
the gables--waited patiently to hoist their colours, to wave their
bunting, twice a year, for the Queen and her mother, the Regent.
Marietje looked out. It was May; and the chestnuts in the grass-plots
tried to outstretch and unfurl their soft, pale-green fans, now folded
and bent back against their stalks. But a mad wind whirled through the
street, which was like a courtyard of opulence, and the wind scourged
the still furled chestnut-fans. The girl looked at them compassionately
as they were whipped to and fro by the wind, the eager young leaves
which, full of vernal life and pride of youth, were trying hard to
unfold. The tender leaves were full of hope, because yesterday the sun
had shone, after the rain, out of a flood-swept sky; and they thought
that their leafy days were beginning, their life of leaves budding out
from stalk and twig. They did not know that the wind was always at work,
lashing, as with angry scourges, with stinging whips; they did not know
that their leafy parents had been lashed last year, even as they were
now; and, though they loved the wind, upon which they dreamt of floating
and waving and being merry and happy, they never expected to be lashed
with whips even before they had unfurled all the young bravery of their
green.
The wind was pitiless. The wind lashed through the air like one
possessed, like a madman that had no feeling: strong in his might and
blind in his heartlessness. And the girl's pity went out to the eager
leaves, the young, hoping leaves, which she saw shaken and pulled and
scourged and driven withered across the street. The blind, all-powerful
north-east wind filled the street: the weathercocks spun madly; the iron
pins of the flagstaff creaked goutily and painfully; the flagstaffs
themselves bent as though they were the masts of a fleet of houses
moored in a roadstead of bricks.
The girl looked out into the street. It was a May morning. Standing in
front of one house and looking for all the world like sailors on a ship
were men dressed in white sailors'-jackets, busy fixing ladders and
climbing up them to clean the plate-glass windows. They swarmed up the
ladders, carrying pails of water; and, in the midst of the forest of
masts, of the red-white-and-blue flagstaffs, they looked like seamen
gaily rigging a ship.
Along the street went the brightly-painted carts of a laundry, a
pastrycook, a butter-factory. Hard behind came loud-voiced hawkers
pushing barrows with oranges and the very first purple-stained
strawberries. And the whole economy of eating and drinking of those tidy
houses, whose life lay hidden behind their lace curtains, filled the
morning street. Butcher-boys prevailed. Each house had a different
butcher. Broad and sturdy, the boys walked along in their clean, white
smocks, carrying their wicker baskets of quivering meat held, with a
fist at the handle, firmly on shoulder or hip, bending their bodies a
little because of the weight; and they rang at all the doors. Sometimes,
a couple bicycled swiftly down the street. At all the houses they
delivered loads of meat: beefsteaks and rumpsteaks and fillet-steaks and
ribs and sirloins of beef and balls of forced-meat; the maid-servants
took the meat in at the front-doors, with an exchange of chaff, and then
closed the door again with a bang. The butcher-boys largely prevailed;
but the greengrocers, with their barrows arranged with fresh vegetables,
were also many in number. The dairy, with its cart filled with polished
copper cans, rang at every door; and notable for its ostentatious
neatness was a van conveying beer in cans: the driver, who was
constantly getting down and ringing, wore a sort of brown shooting-suit,
with top-boots and a motor-cap; the cart was painted with earthenware
cans swelling out in relief from the panels. A barrel-organ quavered on,
playing a very doleful tune: the organ-man ground out a bit of
dolefulness, stopped and then pushed on again; his old woman rang at
every door, put the coppers she received in her pocket, as if she were
collecting so many debts. Each time, the maids, in their lilac-print
dresses, appeared at the doors, or leant out and looked from the open
windows of the bedrooms, or called out and flung down the rich man's
dole of coppers. Domestic economy filled the street, while the wind, the
blundering, mighty wind, blew on. A gentleman passed on his way to his
office, hugging a portfolio. Two girls flew by on bicycles; a lady
hurried along on some urgent errand. But, for the rest, there was
nothing but the economy of eating and drinking. It filled the street, it
rang and rang and rang until all the houses chimed with the ringing. And
the houses took in their supplies, the street grew quiet: only the wind
blew the young chestnut-leaves to pieces and the flagstaffs groaned on
their creaking, gouty pins....
Marietje turned away. She was a pale, fair-haired little thing of
sixteen, with pale-blue eyes and a white, bloodless skin. Her hair,
brushed off her forehead, was already done up behind into a knob. She
wore a little pinafore to protect her frock. And now she sat down at the
piano and began to tap out her scales.
The room in which Marietje was practising was the drawing-room. It was a
fairly large room on the first floor, but it was so terribly crammed
with furniture, arranged in studied confusion, with an affectation of
elegance, that there was hardly space to move about or sit. On the backs
of all the chairs hung fancy antimacassars, flattened by the pressure of
reclining forms, with faded and crumpled ribbons. On all sorts of little
tables stood nameless ornaments: little earthenware dogs and china
smelling-bottles, set out as in a tenpenny bazaar. The wall-paper
displayed big flowers, the carpet more big flowers, of a different
species, while on the curtains blossomed a third kind of flower; and the
colours of all these flowers yelled at one another like so many
screeching parrots. In the corners of the room rose dusty Makart
bouquets, which decorated those same corners year in, year out.
Marietje played her scales in the drawing-room, while the wind howled
down the chimney, which smelt of soot after the winter fires.
Conscientiously Marietje played her scales with her stubborn little
fingers, constantly making the same mistake, which she did not hear and
therefore did not correct, thinking that it was right as it was. Now and
then, she looked up through the window: "Poor trees!" thought Marietje.
"Poor leaves! See how the wind's killing them; and they're hardly open
yet!..."
She played on, conscientiously, but she dearly wished that she could
make the wind stop, to save the leaves, the young chestnut-leaves. She
remembered, it was just the same thing last spring. The spring before
that, it was the same too. And then, when the chestnut-leaves were at
last able to unfurl themselves, in a quiet, windless moment, then they
were scorched and shrivelled for the whole summer, for their whole leafy
lives. Poor trees! Poor leaves!...
The stubborn fingers went on conscientiously, tapping out the scales and
constantly playing that same wrong note with almost comical persistency:
ting! The front-door bell was constantly going ting-a-ling, ting-a-ling!
All those noises--the wind: whew, boo! The scales: ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta,
ta-ta; ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta. The front-door bell: ting-a-ling,
ting-a-ling! The barrel-organs in the street, two going at the same
time. The colours indoors: the colours of the wall-paper and curtains
and carpet, screeching like parrots. The cries of the costermongers
outside: "Strawberrees!... Fine strawberrees!" The rattle of the
greengrocers' carts, clattering over the noisy cobble-stones--all these
noises rang out together and it was as though the wind defined and
accentuated each individual sound, blowing away a mist from each sound,
leaving only the rough, resonant kernel of each sound to ring out
against the glittering plate-glass windows, along the goutily-creaking
flagstaffs, into this room, where the parrot-colours jabbered aloud....
It blew and rang and screeched and jabbered; and the girl with her
continual false note--ting!--heard none of it, but thought only, "Oh,
those poor trees! Oh, those poor leaves!" in her gentle little,
hypersensitive soul. Used as she was to the wind, the noises and the
colours, she saw nothing but the trees, heard nothing but the rustling
of the leaves, nor heard her own persistent little false note: ting!
Ting-a-ling, ting-a-ling went the bell; and the wind must have rushed
through the front-door and up the stairs, for the drawing-room door blew
open as lightly as though the great door had been no more than a sheet
of note-paper; the maid came pounding up the stairs, the stairs creaked,
another door slammed; the maid, at the door, screamed out something loud
through the house, loud through the wind, loud through all the sounds
and colours; another voice sounded sharply in reply; the maid went
pounding down again, the stairs creaked and bang went the door:
"Will you please go upstairs, mevrouw?"
"Come upstairs, Cateau!"
"But am I re-ally not disturb-ing you, Adolph-ine?"
"No, come up."
"What a _wind_, eh, Phi-i-ine? Eh? How it's blow-ing!"
Ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta; ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta, went Marietje's
scales, as Mamma entered with Aunt Cateau. Whew, boo! blew the wind.
C-r-rack, cr-r-rack! went the flagstaff outside the window....
"Good-morn-ing, Marie-tje. And _tell_ me, Phi-i-ine, was it a reg-ular
din-ner?"
"Yes, it was a formal dinner."
"Oh, so they _do_ see peo-ple? And I _thought_ they lived so qui-etly.
We are nev-er asked there; are _you_, Adolph-ine?"
"No, never."
"I do think she might al-so some-times show a little polite-ness to her
brothers and sis-ters. We nev-er see peo-ple, as you know, _don't_ you,
Adolph-ine? Ka-rel doesn't _care_ for it; he only cares for qui-et. _I_
should rather _like_ it. But it's Ka-rel, you see, who doesn't _care_
for it. And who were there, Adolph-ine?"
"Oh, well, they know nobody, so it looked to me rather like a failure.
Nobody except that Vreeswijck. No doubt, they'd had one or two refusals,
for they'd asked Paul to make up the party."
"Oh, _Paul_? No doubt, one or two _must_ have refused!"
"Yes, of course."
"Well, re-ally, Con-stance is ... But then _I_ don't call a din-ner like
that a _success_. Do _you_, Adolph-ine?"
"No, I thought it ridiculous. A dinner-party of four!"
"Were the men _dressed_?"
"Yes, dressed."
"And Con-stance? Low-necked?"
"No, not low-necked, but smart as paint. And champagne!"
"Re-ally! Cham-pagne as we-ell?"
"Yes, a cheap brand. And the rooms so dark: I didn't think it
respectable. Such a dim light, you know. Quite disreputable, I thought,
with those three men," said Adolphine, whispering because of Marietje.
"She can't hear, she's play-ing. Oh, re-ally! And what next?"
"Well, I think, if Constance wants to see people in that sort of way,
she could have done so just as well in Brussels. She's supposed to have
come here for the family."
"But she doesn't _ask_ the fam-ily. Oh, you mustn't count _us_,
Phi-i-ine. We al-ways live ve-ry qui-etly. It's Ka-rel, you see."
"But I feel sure now that she means to get presented at Court."
"Yes, by Vrees-wijck, no doubt. Will he present her to the _Queen?_"
asked Cateau, rounding her owl's eyes.
"Oh, no!" said Adolphine, irritably. "But they mean to push themselves
with his assistance."
"Oh, is _that_ the way it's done? You see, _we_ know no-thing about the
_Court_. You wouldn't get Ka-rel to go to _Court_ for any-thing! Not if
you _paid_ him! But _now_ it's _quite_ cert-ain."
"Yes, I'm convinced of it now."
"About the _Court?_"
"Yes."
"Oh! Well, I al-ways thought that Con-stance would have too much _tact_
for _that_. And may I have a look at Floortje's trous-seau now,
Adolph-ine? She'll be mar-ried _quite_ soon now, _won't_ she? In a week?
Ah! And I al-ways think it so _nice_ to be mar-ried in _May_, don't
_you_, Adolph-ine?"
The two sisters' voices whined and snarled, the stairs creaked, the
doors slammed. Ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta, went the scales. Whew, boo,
whew! went the wind, roaring down the sooty chimney. Cr-r-rack!
Cr-r-rack! went the gouty flagstaff. "Strawberrees!... Fine
strawberrees!" shouted the costermonger outside. Ting! went Marietje's
obstinate false note.
The girl looked up through the window.
"Those poor trees!" thought Marietje. "Oh, those poor leaves!..."