Old Mrs. van Lowe's neighbours thought it a funny thing that, after
dinner that evening, the whole family arrived, one after the other, rang
the bell and went in, though it was not Sunday. Except on those
"family-group" Sundays, there was never much of a run on Mrs. van Lowe's
door. And they wondered what could be the matter; and, as it was very
warm, an August day, they opened all the windows, kept looking across
the street and even sent their maids to enquire of Mrs. van Lowe's
maids. But the maids did not know anything: they only thought it must be
something to do with the young mevrouw, the one in Paris--Mrs. Emilie,
as they called her--who had gone off with her brother.
"It's very queer about the Van Lowes," said the neighbours, looking out
of window at the old lady's front-door, at which somebody was ringing
again for the hundredth time.
"There come the Van Saetzemas."
"And here are those fat Ruyvenaers."
"What's up?"
"Yes, what can be up?"
"The servants say it's something to do with Emilie."
"A nice thing for the Van Ravens!"
"They say that Bertha has become quite childish, don't they?"
"I don't know about that: she just sits staring in front of her. They
never come now: they're living at Baarn."
"Here are the Van der Welckes."
"Like aunt, like niece."
"Now they're all there."
"All?"
"Yes, I've seen them all. Captain van Lowe and his wife, Paul, Dorine
and Karel."
"And Ernst?"
"He hasn't come yet."
"But then he doesn't always come."
"I wonder what's up."
"Yes, I wonder."
"There must be some scandal with Emilie."
"And, when you think of what the Van Naghels used to be.... Such big
people!"
"And now...."
"Absolute nobodies...."
"Oh, I think they're rather nice people!..."
"Yes, but they're all a bit touched, you know."
"Well, suppose we go to Scheveningen?..."
"Yes, let's go to Scheveningen. We may hear there what's happened...."
"Yes ... about Emilie, you know...."
And Mrs. van Lowe's neighbours went off to Scheveningen, with the
express object of hearing what had happened about Emilie....
Old Mrs. van Lowe was sitting in the conservatory, with the windows
open, and crying gently, like one who was too old to cry violently,
whatever the sorrow might be. Uncle Herman, Aunt Lot, all the children
had come in gradually, their faces blank with utter dismay; and they
were moving like ghosts about the large, dark rooms, where no one had
thought of having the gas lit.
"Herman!" the old lady cried, plaintively.
Uncle Ruyvenaer and Aunt Lot approached.
"Have you seen him, Herman?" asked the old lady, wringing her old,
knotted hands.
"No-o, Marie. But I ... I shall go to him to-morrow ... with Dr. van der
Ouwe."
"And who is with him now?"
"A male nurse, Mamma," said Gerrit. "We've seen to everything. He's
quite calm, Mamma dear, he's quite calm. It won't be very bad. It's only
temporary: it'll pass, the doctor said."
Cateau's bosom suddenly loomed through the open doorway of the
conservatory:
"Oh, Mam-ma," she said, "how _sad_ ... about Ernst! Who would ever have
im-a-gined ... that Ernst would become ... like _this_!"
And she bent over her mother-in-law and gave her a formal kiss, like the
kiss of a stranger paying a visit of condolence.
"And how are you, Mamma?" asked Karel, as though there were nothing the
matter. "I hope you're not suffering from the heat."
The old woman nodded dully, pressed his hand.
"All that I ask," said Adolphine, addressing her husband, Paul, Dorine
and Adeline, "is that you will not talk about it. Don't talk about it to
outsiders. The less it's talked about, the better pleased I shall be....
We have that Indian lack of reserve in our family, that habit of at once
going and telling everybody everything.... If people ask, we can say
that Ernst has had a nervous break-down; yes, that's it: let's arrange
to say that Ernst has had a nervous break-down...."
She asked them to give her their word; and they promised, in order to
keep her quiet.
"You'll see," she said, "this business with Ernst will mean that Van
Saetzema will once more fail to get elected to the town council."
Paul looked at her in stupefaction, failing to grasp the logic of her
remark. Then he said, calmly:
"Yes, you see funny things happen sometimes."
"Yes," said Adolphine, nodding her head to show how much she appreciated
the fact that Paul understood her. "It's horrid for _me_: you'll see,
Van Saetzema won't get in...."
"I believe that Ernst ... is the sanest of the lot of us!" thought Paul.
And, as he moved to a seat, he first looked to make sure that there were
no bits of fluff on the chair.
But Constance had come in; and, when the old lady saw her, she
half-rose, threw herself into her daughter's arms and began to sob more
violently than she had done. It was strange how she had gradually come
to look upon Constance once more as the nearest to her of her children,
this daughter whom she had not seen for years and years, until at last
Constance had returned to Holland and the family. As a mother, she had
never had a favourite; yet she would often, for months at a time, feel
drawn now more towards the one, then again towards the other. She was
growing old, she was getting the broken look which a mother's face
begins to wear as she sees sorrow coming into her children's lives: a
sorrow which, in her case, arrived so late that by degrees the illusion
had come to her that there would never be any sorrow. The sudden
break-up of Bertha's house--that house which she was so fond of
visiting, because she found in it the continuation of her own life, the
reflection of her own past grandeur--had fallen on her as a painful
blow: Van Naghel's sudden death; the sort of apathy into which Bertha
had sunk; the divorce between Van Raven and Emilie after Emilie had
refused to come back from abroad, preferring to stay in Paris with her
brother Henri, who had been sent down from Leiden: a divorce obtained in
the face of all the persuasion which Uncle van Naghel, the Queen's
Commissary in Overijssel, had brought to bear upon them; Louise living
with Otto and Frances, in order to help Frances, who was always ailing,
with the children, so that Bertha was living alone with Marianne in her
little villa at Baarn, now that Frans had taken his degree and gone to
India, while Karel and Marietje were at boarding-school. The big
household had broken up, in a few months, in a few days almost; and the
old grandmother, whose dearest illusion it had always been to keep
everything and everybody close together, had been seized with an
innocent wonder that things could happen so, that things had happened
so.... She no longer went about, finding a difficulty in walking; and,
because Bertha had become so apathetic and had also ceased to go about,
she had as it were lost Bertha and all who belonged to her. It had
produced a void around her which nothing was able to fill, even though
she saw Constance every day. A void, because with none of her other
children did the old lady find the same atmosphere of rank and position
which she had loved in the Van Naghels' ministerial household. She would
often complain now, a thing which she never used to do: she would
complain that Karel and Cateau were so selfish, so stiff and Dutch, that
they were getting worse every year; she would complain that at Gerrit's
the children were always so noisy, that Adeline was unable to manage
them, that both Gerrit and Adeline were much too weak to bring up so
many children--nine of them--with proper strictness; she would complain
that Adolphine was growing more and more envious and discontented,
because her husband did not make his way, because Carolientje was not
married, because the three boys were so troublesome; she would complain
of Dorine and Paul and had all sorts of little grievances against both
of them. Then, on the Sunday evenings, when the children and
grandchildren came to her, she felt the void which Van Naghel and Bertha
had left behind them, missed the sound of a few aristocratic names,
missed any reference to the Russian minister in her children's
conversation; and, with a little half-bitter laugh, she would say to the
Ruyvenaers that the family was no longer what it had been, called it a
_grandeur déchue_ and took a melancholy pleasure in the phrase, which
she would repeat again and again, as though finding consolation in its
gentle irony. And Constance had become the child towards whom she felt
most drawn in these dreary days, because Constance devoted herself
regularly to her old mother and also because she, Mamma, in her secret
heart, loved to talk with Constance about Rome, about De Staffelaer
even, about the Pallavicinis, the Odescalchis, whom Constance had known
in the old days; because Constance, whatever might be said against her,
was connected with the best Dutch families; because Constance had a
title; because Addie was the only one of her grandchildren who bore a
title, good family though the Van Naghels were. Oh, those grandchildren,
whom she now saw so seldom! And, now that the terrible thing had
befallen Ernst, the terrible thing which the children had at first
wished to conceal from her, but which she had guessed nevertheless,
because she had so long feared it, feared it indeed from the time when
Ernst was a tiny child--oh, what frightful convulsions he used to have
as a child!--now that the terrible thing had befallen Ernst, it was
Constance in whose arms she was first able to sob out her grief, in
whose arms she first felt how sorely she had been stricken in her
declining days:
"Connie," she cried, her voice broken with sobs, "Connie darling, it's
true!... Ernst ... Ernst is _mad_!"
And the word which no one had yet uttered to her, though she had guessed
what they meant, rang shrill through the fast-darkening room, in which
every whisper was suddenly hushed in terror at the shrill sound of the
old woman's high-pitched voice. Silence fell upon everything; and the
word sent a shudder through the room. The children looked at one
another, because Mamma had uttered the word which none of them had
spoken, though they had thought it silently. The word which Mamma
uttered so shrilly, almost screaming it at Constance, in the intolerable
pain of her sorrow, struck them all with a sudden dismay, because,
coming from Mamma's lips, it sounded like an open acknowledgment of what
they all knew but did not wish to acknowledge except among one another,
in great secrecy. They would merely say that Ernst was suffering from a
nervous break-down, nothing more. A nervous break-down was such a
comprehensive term! Anybody could go to a home for nervous patients for
a rest-cure. But the word uttered by Mamma to Constance in shrill
acknowledgment of the truth had cut through the dim room, where no one
had even thought of lighting the gas. Adolphine, Cateau, Karel, Uncle
Ruyvenaer, Floortje and Dijkerhof exchanged sudden glances, terrified,
struck with dismay, because they would never have been willing to utter
the word aloud, in open acknowledgment of the truth.
Aunt Lot's loud "Ah, _kassian_!"[1] now came from a corner of the dark
room; and Toetie was so much upset that she suddenly burst into sobs.
That was your Indian lack of self-restraint again, thought the Van
Saetzemas and Cateau; and it did not seem to them decent to let yourself
go like that, it made them feel that the business was a hopeless one.
But the door opened and the two doctors entered, groping their way in
the darkness: the old family-doctor, a retired army-surgeon, Van der
Ouwe; and Reeuws, a young nerve-specialist. At their entrance, Toetie,
abashed, ceased her sobbing. The doctors had come from the Nieuwe
Uitleg, where they had left Ernst reading peacefully, with the male
nurse, a stolid, powerful fellow, in an adjoining room. And, when the
brothers and sisters crowded round the two doctors, the older began,
quietly:
"Our poor Ernst can't stay where he is, all by himself. We must see and
get him to Nunspeet, at Dr. van der Heuvel's: that will do him good ...
the country, change of environment, nice, quiet people, who will look
after him...."
"Nunspeet?" asked Adolphine. "That's not...?"
"No," said the old doctor, decisively, understanding what she meant.
"It's not."
And he did not speak the word, left it to be implied, the word that must
not be uttered, the terrible word that denoted the house of shame, the
family-disgrace.
"It's a nice, pleasant villa, where Dr. van der Heuvel minds a few
nervous patients," he said, calmly and kindly, casting a glance round at
the brothers and sisters; and his grey head nodded reassuringly to all
of them.
They admired his tact; and they the more readily condemned Mamma's
shrill word, which had cut through the darkness and made them shudder,
they the more readily condemned Aunt Lot's exclamation and Toetie's
outbreak of sobbing.
And, breathing again, they lit the gas, suddenly noticing that the room
was pitch-dark now that the two doctors had gone to Mamma and were
telling her quietly that it would be all right and that Ernst was just a
little overstrained from being too much alone and poring too long over
his dusty books.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Malay: "Poor dear!"