Elly Takma was very happy and looked better than she had done for a
long time. Well, thought Cousin Adèle, who had long kept house for
Grandpapa Takma--she was a Takma too and unmarried--well, a first
little love-romance which a girl experiences when not much over twenty
and which makes her feel unhappy, an engagement broken off with a
fellow who used to go and see his mistress after spending the evening
with his betrothed: a romance of that sort does not influence a girl's
life; and, though Elly had moped for a while, Lot Pauws was making her
happy and making her look better, with a glad laugh on her lips and a
bright colour in her cheeks.
Cousin Adèle--Aunt Adèle, as Elly called her, Indian-fashion--buxom,
full-figured, fresh and young-looking for her age, had nothing of a
poor relation employed to do the housekeeping, but was altogether the
capable mistress of the house, seeing to everything, caring for nothing
but the details of her household and proud of her orderly home. She
had never been in India and ruled Grandpapa's house with true Dutch
conscientiousness, leaving Elly entirely to her hobby of the moment;
for Elly had her hobbies, which she rode until she attained absolute
perfection, after which she would take up a fresh one. At eighteen,
she had been a famous tennis-player, winning medals in tournaments,
well-known for her exquisite, powerful and graceful play, mentioned in
all the sporting-papers. After achieving perfection in tennis, she had
suddenly grown bored with it, hung up her racket, studded round with
the medals, by a pink ribbon in her bedroom and begun to work zealously
for the Charity Organization Society, doing much practical slumming
and sick-visiting; they thought highly of her in the committee. One
day, however, when a sick man showed her his leg with a hole in it,
she fainted and considered that she had overstepped her philanthropic
limits. She resigned the work; and, feeling a certain handiness
quivering at the tips of her sensitive fingers, she started making
her own hats and also modelling. She was successful in both pursuits:
the hats were so pretty that she thought seriously of setting up as
a milliner and working for her living. The modelling too was most
charming: after the first few lessons, she was modelling from the life;
and her head of _A Beggar Boy_ was accepted for exhibition. Then Elly
had fallen in love and was very much in love; her engagement lasted
three months; then it was broken off; and Elly, who did nothing by
halves, for all her varying interests, had suffered a great deal and
faded and pined and been dangerously ill, until one day she recovered,
with a feeling of melancholy as her only remembrance.
She was then twenty-three and had taken to writing. Under a pseudonym,
she published her own engagement in the form of a short story: it
was not a bad short story. Her new hobby brought her gradually into
contact with Charles Pauws, who also wrote, mostly for the newspapers:
articles, _causeries_. Elly was of opinion that she had soon reached
her literary limits. After this short story, which had blossomed in
her and blossomed out of her heart, she would never write anything
more. She was twenty-three, she was old. She had lived her life, with
different vicissitudes. Still there was something, there was Charles.
Soft, weak, passably witty, with his mother's attractive eyes, with his
fair hair carefully brushed, with his too pale blue ties, he was not
the man of her dreams; and she still felt, sometimes very grievously,
the sadness of her sorrow. But she was fond of him, she was very fond
of him and she considered that he was wasting his talent on trivial
work, on journalism, which he did with remarkable ease--after all, it
was an art in itself, Charles would retort--whereas his two novels were
so good; and he had attempted no serious work for the last ten years.
And in this girl, with her thoroughness--within limits--there arose,
on the now somewhat romantic ground of her melancholy and her sorrow,
the mission to rouse Lot to work, to produce real work, fine work. She
must work no longer for herself but for another, for Lot, who possessed
so many good qualities, but did not cultivate them earnestly. She saw
more and more of him; she had him to tea; they talked, talked at great
length; Lot, though not physically in love with her, thought it really
pleasant to be with Elly, allowed himself to be stimulated, began a
novel, stuck in the middle. She created in his mind the suggestion
that he wanted her. And he proposed to her. She was very happy and he
too, though they were not passionately in love. They were attracted
by the prospect of being together, talking together, living, working,
travelling together, in the smiling sympathy of their two souls: his
a rather small, vain, cynical, artistic soul, with above all much
kindly indulgence for others and a tinge of laughing bitterness and one
great dread, which utterly swayed his soul, the dread of growing old;
hers, at this moment, full of the serious thought of remaining true to
her mission and giving her life a noble object by wrapping it up in
another's.
Elly, that morning, was singing while the wind sent the early autumn
leaves driving in a shower of golden sunlight along the window-panes.
She was busy altering a winter hat, with a talent which she had not
quite lost, when Cousin--Aunt--Adèle entered the room:
"Grandpapa has had a bad night; I kept on hearing him moving."
"Yes, then he's troubled with buzzings which are just like voices,"
said Elly. "Grandpapa is always hearing those voices, you know. Dr.
Thielens looks upon them as a premonitory symptom of total deafness.
Poor Grandad! I'll go to him at once ... I must just finish my hat
first: I want to wear it to-day. We are going to old Mrs. Dercksz and
to Aunt Stefanie.... Auntie, I am so happy. Lot is so nice. And he is
so clever. I am certain that we shall be very happy. I want to travel a
great deal. Lot loves travelling.... There is some talk of our living
with Steyn and Ottilie. I don't know what to say. I would rather we
were by ourselves. Still, I don't know. I'm very fond of Mamma; and
she's Lot's mother after all. But I like harmony around me; and Steyn
and she quarrel. I call him Steyn, simply. _Meneer_ is too stiff; and I
can't call him Papa. Besides, Lot calls him Steyn too. It's difficult,
that sort of household. Steyn himself would think it odd if I called
him Papa.... Do you like the hat like this? I'll alter yours to-morrow.
Look, it's an absolutely new hat!... I'll go to Grandpapa now. Poor
Grandad, so he's had a bad night?..."
She left the door open. Aunt Adèle looked round: the room was lumbered
with hat-trimmings. The _Beggar Boy_ smiled in a corner; the medals
were studded round the racket, on its pink ribbon; the writing-table
was tesselated with squares of note-paper.
"What a litter!" said Aunt Adèle.
She dared not touch the papers, though she would have liked to tidy
them: she could not bear to see such a heap of scattered papers and
she had to restrain her itching fingers. But she cleared up the
hat-trimmings, quickly, and put them away in cardboard boxes. Then she
went downstairs, where the maids were turning out the dining-room.
Elly, flitting up the stairs, heard the blows beating on an arm-chair,
felt them almost on her own back, ran still quicker up the stairs, to
the next floor, where Grandpapa's room was. She stopped outside his
door, recovered her breath, knocked, opened the door and went in with a
calm step:
"How are you this morning, Grandad?"
The old gentleman sat at a knee-hole table, looking in a drawer; he
locked it quietly when Elly entered. She went up and kissed him:
"I hear you did not sleep well?"
"No, child, I don't think I slept at all. But Grandad can do without
sleep."
Grandpapa Takma was ninety-three: married late in life and his son
married late made it possible for him to have a granddaughter of
Elly's age. He looked younger, however, much younger, perhaps because
he tactfully mingled a seeming indifference to his outward appearance
with a really studied care. A thin garland of grey hair still fringed
the ivory skull; the clean-shaven face was like a stained parchment,
but the mouth, because of the artificial teeth, had retained its
young and laughing outline and the eyes were a clear brown, bright
and even keen behind his spectacles. His figure was small, slender
and slight as a young man's; and a very short jacket hung over his
slightly-arched and emaciated back: it was open in front and hung in
folds behind. The hands, too large in proportion to the man's short
stature, but delicately veined and neatly kept, trembled incessantly;
and there was a jerk in the muscles of the neck that twitched the head
at intervals. His tone was cheerful and lively, a little too genial
not to be forced; and the words came slowly and well-weighed, however
simple the things which they expressed. When he sat, he sat upright,
on an ordinary chair, never huddled together, as though he were always
on his guard; when he walked, he walked briskly, with very short steps
of his stiff legs, so as not to betray their rheumatism. He had been
an Indian civil servant, ending as a member of the Indian Council, and
had been pensioned years ago; his conversation showed that he kept pace
with politics, kept pace with colonial matters: he laughed at them,
with mild irony. In his intercourse with others, who were always his
juniors--for he had no contemporaries save old Mrs. Dercksz, _née_
Dillenhof, who was ninety-seven, and Dr. Roelofsz, eighty-eight--in his
intercourse he was kindly and condescending, realizing that the world
must seem other to people even of sixty and seventy than it did to him;
but the geniality was too great, was sometimes too exuberant not to be
assumed and not to make people feel that he never thought as he spoke.
He gave the impression of being a diplomatist who, himself always on
his guard, was sounding another to find out what he knew. Sometimes,
in his bright eyes, a spark shone behind the spectacles, as though he
had suddenly been struck by something, a very acute perception; and
the jerk of the neck would throw his head on one side, as though he
suddenly heard something. His mouth would then distort itself into a
laugh and he would hurriedly agree with whomever he was addressing.
What was most striking in him was that quick, tremulous lucidity in so
very old a man. It was as though some strange capacity had sharpened
his senses so that they remained sound and serviceable, for he still
read a great deal, with glasses; he was sharp of hearing; he was
particular in the matter of wine, with an unimpaired sense of smell;
he could find things in the dark. Only, sometimes, in the midst of a
conversation, it was as though an invincible drowsiness overcame him;
and his eyes would suddenly stare glassily in front of him and he would
fall asleep. They left him alone and had the civility not to let him
know it; and, five minutes later, he would wake up, go on talking,
oblivious of that momentary unconsciousness. The inward shock with
which he had woke was visible to no one.
Elly went to see her grandfather in the morning, always for a minute.
"We are going to pay calls this afternoon," said Elly. "On the family.
We have been nowhere yet."
"Not even to Grandmamma."
"We shall go to her first this afternoon. Grandad, we've been engaged
three days. And you can't go troubling everybody with your happiness
immediately."
"And you _are_ happy, child," Grandpapa began, genially.
"I think so...."
"I'm sorry I can't keep you with me, you and Lot," he continued,
lightly: he sometimes had an airy way of treating serious topics; and
his thin voice then lacked emphasis. "But you see, I'm too old for
that: a young household grafted on mine! Besides, to live by yourselves
is more charming.... Baby, we never talk of money, you and I. As you
know, Papa left nothing and he ran through your mother's money, lost it
in different businesses in Java; they none of them succeeded. Your poor
parents never had any luck. Well, Baby, I'm not a rich man, but I can
live like this, on my Mauritskade, because an old man doesn't want much
and Aunt Adèle manages things so cleverly. I've worked out that I can
give you two hundred guilders a month. But that's all, child, that's
all."
"But, Grandad, it's really very handsome...."
"Well, you can accept it from your grandfather. You're my heiress,
after all, though you're not all alone; no, Grandfather has others:
kind acquaintances, good friends.... It won't last very long now,
child. You won't be rich, for my house is my only luxury. All the rest,
as you know, is on an economical scale. But you will have enough,
especially later on; and Lot appears to make a good bit. Oh, it's not
money that matters to him, child: what matters to him is ... is ..."
"What, Grandad?"
A drowsiness suddenly overcame the old man. But, in a few minutes, he
resumed:
"There is some talk of your living with Steyn...."
"Yes, but nothing's decided."
"Ottilie is nice, but hot-tempered," said the old gentleman, sunk in
thought: he seemed to be thinking of other things, of more important
things especially.
"If I do, it will be for Mamma's sake, Grandad, because she is so much
attached to Lot. I would rather have my own little house. But we shall
travel a good deal in any case. Lot says that he can travel cheaply."
"You might be able to do it, child, with a little tact: live with the
Steyns, I mean. Ottilie is certainly very much alone, poor thing.
Who knows? Perhaps you would supply a little affection, a little
sympathy...."
His airy voice became softer, fuller, sounded more earnest.
"We shall see, Grandpapa. Will you stay upstairs, or are you coming
down to lunch?"
"No, send me something up here. I've not much appetite, I've no
appetite...."
His voice sounded airy again, like the whisper of a breeze.
"It's windy weather; and I think it's going to rain. Are you going out
all the same, this afternoon?"
"For a moment, I think.... To Mrs. Dercksz' ..."
"To Grandmamma's...."
"Yes, yes, better say Grandmamma. When you see her, call her Grandmamma
at once. It's less stiff: she will like it ... even though you're not
married to Lot yet...."
His voice sank; he sighed, as though he were thinking of other things,
of more important things; and, with the jerk in his neck, he started
up and remained like that for a second, with his head on one side, as
if he heard something, as if he were listening. Elly did not think
Grandpapa looking well to-day. The drowsiness overcame him again; his
head dropped and his eyes grew glassy. And he sat there, so frail and
fragile, as if one could have blown the life out of him like a dancing
feather. Elly, after a moment's hesitation, left him alone. The old
gentleman gave a start, when he heard the door close gently, and
recovered his full consciousness. He sat for a second or two without
moving. Then he unlocked the drawer of his writing-table, with which
he had been busy before, and took out the pieces of a letter that had
already been torn up. He tore the pieces still smaller, as small as
they possibly could be, and scattered them in his waste-paper-basket,
in among other discarded papers. After that he tore up a second letter,
after that a third, without reading them over. He scattered the tiny
pieces in the basket and shook the basket, shook the basket. The
tearing tired his stiff fingers; the shaking tired his arm.
"A few more this afternoon," he muttered. "It's getting time, it's
getting time...."