In the night express, the young wife sat thinking. Lot lay asleep, with
a rug over him, in one corner of the carriage, but the little bride
could not sleep, for an autumnal wind was howling along the train;
and so she just sat silently, in the other corner, thinking. She had
now given her life to another and hoped for happiness. She hoped that
she had a vocation and that she would have devotion to bestow. That
was happiness; there was nothing else; and Aunt Thérèse was right,
even though she, Elly, conceived devotion, happiness and vocation so
very differently. She wanted more than the feeling, the thought; she
wanted, above all, action. Even as she had always given herself to
action, though it was only tennis at first--and sculpture later and in
the end the pouring out of her own sorrow in words and the sending of
it to an editor, to a publisher--so she now longed to devote herself
to action, or at least to active collaboration. She looked wistfully
at Lot and felt that she loved him, however differently it might be
from the way in which she had loved the first time. She loved him
less for her own sake, as when she had been in love before, and loved
him more for his sake, to rouse him to great things. It was all very
vague, but there was ambition in it and ambition, springing from love,
for his sake. What a pity that he should fritter away his talent in
witty little articles and hastily-written essays. That was like his
conversation, light and amusing, unconvinced and unconvincing; and he
could do better than that, much better. Perhaps writing a novel was
also not the great thing; perhaps the great thing _was_ writing, but
not a novel. What then? She sought and did not yet find, but knew for
certain--or thought she knew--that she _would_ find and that she would
rouse Lot.... Yes, they would be happy, they would continue happy....
Out there, in Italy, she would find it. She would find it in the past,
in history, perhaps; in things that were past, in beautiful noble
things that were dead, peacefully dead and still beautiful.... Then why
did she feel so melancholy? Or was it only the melancholy which she had
always felt, so vaguely, and which was as a malady underlying all her
activity and which broke in the inflection of her quick, voluble voice:
the melancholy because her youth, as a child without parents, brothers
or sisters, had bloomed so quietly in the old man's big house. He had
always been kind and full of fatherly care for her; but he was so old
and she had felt the pressure of his old years. She had always had old
people around her, for, as far back as she could remember anything, she
remembered old Grandmamma Dercksz and Dr. Roelofsz: she knew them, old
even then, from the time when she was a little child. Lot also, she
thought--though the life of a man, who went about and travelled, was
different from that of a girl, who stayed at home--Lot also had felt
the pressure of all that old age around him; and that, no doubt, was
the reason why his dread of growing old had developed into a sort of
nervous obsession. Aunt Stefanie and the uncles at the Hague were old
and their friends and acquaintances seemed to have died out and they
moved about, without contemporaries, a little lonesomely in that town,
along the streets where their houses were, to and fro, to and fro among
one another.... It was so forlorn and so very lonely; and it engendered
melancholy; and she had always felt that melancholy in her youth....
She had never been able to keep her girl-friends. She no longer saw the
girls of the tennis-club; her fellow-pupils at the Academy she just
greeted with a hurried nod when she passed them in the street. After
her unfortunate engagement, she had withdrawn herself more than ever,
except that she was always with Lot, walking with him, talking to him;
he also was lonely at the Hague, with no friends: he was better off for
friends, he said, in Italy.... How strange, that eternal loneliness and
sense of extinction around both of them! No friends or acquaintances
around them, as around most people, as around most families. It was
doubtless because of the oppression of those two very old people;
but she could not analyse beyond that and she felt that something
escaped her which she did not know, but which was nevertheless there
and pressed upon her and kept other people away: something gloomy, now
past, which remained hovering around the old man and the old woman and
which enveloped the others--the old woman's children, the old man's
only grandchild--in a sort of haze, something indescribable but so
definitely palpable that she could almost have taken hold of it by
putting out her hand....
It was all very vague and misty to think about, it was not even
possible to think about it; it was a perception of something chill,
that passed, nothing more, no more than that; but it sometimes
prevented her breathing freely, taking pleasure in her youth, walking
fast, speaking loud: when she did that, she had to force herself with
an effort. And she knew that Lot felt the same: she had understood it
from two or three very vague words and more from the spirit of those
words than from their sound; and it had given her a great soul-sympathy
for Lot. He was a strange fellow, she thought, looking at him as he
slept. Outwardly and in his little external qualities and habits, he
was a very young boy, a child sometimes, she thought, with round his
childishness a mood of disillusionment that sometimes uttered itself
quite wittily but did not ring sincere; beneath the exterior lay a
disposition to softness, a considerable streak of selfishness and a
neurotic preoccupation where he was himself concerned, tempered by
something that was almost strength of character in dealing with his
mother, for he was the only one who could get on with Mamma. With
this temperament he possessed natural gifts which he did not value,
though it was really necessary for him to work. He presented a medley
of contradictions, of seriousness and childishness, of feeling and
indifference, of manliness and of very feeble weakness, such as she
had never seen in any man. He was vainer of his fair hair than of his
talent, though he was vain of this too; and a compliment on his tie
gave him more pleasure than a word of praise for his finest essay. And
this child, this boy, this man she loved: she considered it strange
when she herself thought of it, but she loved him and was happy only
when he was with her.
He woke up, asked her why she was not sleeping and now took her head on
his breast. Tired by the train and by her thoughts, she fell asleep;
and he looked out at the grey dawn, which broke over the bleak and
chilly fields after they had passed Lyons. He yearned for sea, for blue
sky, for heat, for everything that was young and alive: the South of
France, the Riviera and then Italy, with Elly. He had disposed of his
life and he hoped for happiness, happiness in companionship of thought
and being, because loneliness induces melancholy and makes us think the
more intensely of our slow decay....
"She is very charming," he thought, as he looked down upon her where
she slept on his breast; and he resisted the impulse to kiss her now
that she had just fallen asleep. "She is very charming and she has
a delicate artistic sense. I must tell her to start modelling again
... or to write something: she's good at both. That was a very fine
little book of hers, even though it is so very subjective and a great
deal too feminine. There is much that is good in life, even though
life is nothing but a transition which can't signify much in a world
that's rotten. There must be other lives and other worlds. A time must
come when there will be no material suffering, at most a spiritual
suffering. Then all our material anxieties will be gone.... And yet
there is a great charm about this material life ... if we forget all
wretchedness for a moment. A spell of charm comes to everybody: I
believe that mine has come. If it would only remain like this; but
it won't. Everything changes.... Better not think about it, but work
instead: better do some work, even while travelling. Elly would like
it. At Florence, the Medicis; in Rome, the whole papacy.... I don't
know which I shall select: it must be one of the two. But there's such
a lot of it, such a lot of it.... Could I write a fine history of
civilization, I wonder?... I hate collecting notes: all those rubbishy
odds and ends of paper.... If I can't see the whole thing before me, in
one clear vision, it's no good. I can't study: I have to see, to feel,
to admire or shudder. If I don't do that, I'm no good. An essay is what
I'm best at. A word is a butterfly: you just catch it, lightly, by the
wings ... and let it fly away again.... Serious books on history and
art are like fat beetles, crawling along.... _Tiens!_ That's not a bad
conceit. I must use it one day in an article: the butterfly wafted on
the air ... and the heavy beetle...."
They were approaching Marseilles; they would be at Nice by two o'clock
in the afternoon....