Next day, though I pressed him to remain, Stroeve left me. I offered to
fetch his things from the studio, but he insisted on going himself; I
think he hoped they had not thought of getting them together, so that
he would have an opportunity of seeing his wife again and perhaps
inducing her to come back to him. But he found his traps waiting for
him in the porter’s lodge, and the concierge told him that Blanche had
gone out. I do not think he resisted the temptation of giving her an
account of his troubles. I found that he was telling them to everyone
he knew; he expected sympathy, but only excited ridicule.
He bore himself most unbecomingly. Knowing at what time his wife did
her shopping, one day, unable any longer to bear not seeing her, he
waylaid her in the street. She would not speak to him, but he insisted
on speaking to her. He spluttered out words of apology for any wrong he
had committed towards her; he told her he loved her devotedly and
begged her to return to him. She would not answer; she walked
hurriedly, with averted face. I imagined him with his fat little legs
trying to keep up with her. Panting a little in his haste, he told her
how miserable he was; he besought her to have mercy on him; he
promised, if she would forgive him, to do everything she wanted. He
offered to take her for a journey. He told her that Strickland would
soon tire of her. When he repeated to me the whole sordid little scene
I was outraged. He had shown neither sense nor dignity. He had omitted
nothing that could make his wife despise him. There is no cruelty
greater than a woman’s to a man who loves her and whom she does not
love; she has no kindness then, no tolerance even, she has only an
insane irritation. Blanche Stroeve stopped suddenly, and as hard as she
could slapped her husband’s face. She took advantage of his confusion
to escape, and ran up the stairs to the studio. No word had passed her
lips.
When he told me this he put his hand to his cheek as though he still
felt the smart of the blow, and in his eyes was a pain that was
heartrending and an amazement that was ludicrous. He looked like an
overblown schoolboy, and though I felt so sorry for him, I could hardly
help laughing.
Then he took to walking along the street which she must pass through to
get to the shops, and he would stand at the corner, on the other side,
as she went along. He dared not speak to her again, but sought to put
into his round eyes the appeal that was in his heart. I suppose he had
some idea that the sight of his misery would touch her. She never made
the smallest sign that she saw him. She never even changed the hour of
her errands or sought an alternative route. I have an idea that there
was some cruelty in her indifference. Perhaps she got enjoyment out of
the torture she inflicted. I wondered why she hated him so much.
I begged Stroeve to behave more wisely. His want of spirit was
exasperating.
“You’re doing no good at all by going on like this,” I said. “I think
you’d have been wiser if you’d hit her over the head with a stick. She
wouldn’t have despised you as she does now.”
I suggested that he should go home for a while. He had often spoken to
me of the silent town, somewhere up in the north of Holland, where his
parents still lived. They were poor people. His father was a carpenter,
and they dwelt in a little old red-brick house, neat and clean, by the
side of a sluggish canal. The streets were wide and empty; for two
hundred years the place had been dying, but the houses had the homely
stateliness of their time. Rich merchants, sending their wares to the
distant Indies, had lived in them calm and prosperous lives, and in
their decent decay they kept still an aroma of their splendid past. You
could wander along the canal till you came to broad green fields, with
windmills here and there, in which cattle, black and white, grazed
lazily. I thought that among those surroundings, with their
recollections of his boyhood, Dirk Stroeve would forget his
unhappiness. But he would not go.
“I must be here when she needs me,” he repeated. “It would be dreadful
if something terrible happened and I were not at hand.”
“What do you think is going to happen?” I asked.
“I don’t know. But I’m afraid.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
For all his pain, Dirk Stroeve remained a ridiculous object. He might
have excited sympathy if he had grown worn and thin. He did nothing of
the kind. He remained fat, and his round, red cheeks shone like ripe
apples. He had great neatness of person, and he continued to wear his
spruce black coat and his bowler hat, always a little too small for
him, in a dapper, jaunty manner. He was getting something of a paunch,
and sorrow had no effect on it. He looked more than ever like a
prosperous bagman. It is hard that a man’s exterior should tally so
little sometimes with his soul. Dirk Stroeve had the passion of Romeo
in the body of Sir Toby Belch. He had a sweet and generous nature, and
yet was always blundering; a real feeling for what was beautiful and
the capacity to create only what was commonplace; a peculiar delicacy
of sentiment and gross manners. He could exercise tact when dealing
with the affairs of others, but none when dealing with his own. What a
cruel practical joke old Nature played when she flung so many
contradictory elements together, and left the man face to face with the
perplexing callousness of the universe.