The household took its everyday course of a morning: the everyday life,
driven indoors by the merciless winter, the grey skies and blustering
wind, rolled on softly and evenly in the rooms and passages of the big
house. Not much came from outside, where the great trees in the garden
dripped with chill rain; nothing to stir the big house, which stood
there like a great lonely block on the villa-road, amid the sombre
mystery of its wind-blown trees. For the occupants of the big, gloomy
house had made as few acquaintances as possible among their neighbours,
though in the spring and summer Gerdy would take her racket daily to the
tennis-club.... In the winter, it was a quiet life indoors, varied only
by a walk, or a visit to a sick or poor neighbour, a quiet life between
the walls of the big rooms, with the wind tapping at the
window-panes....
The old grandmother sat mostly in the conservatory and looked out into
the garden, sagely nodding her silver-grey head. She no longer
recognized all the children and as a rule thought herself back at
Buitenzorg, in the midst of her own family; even when Klaasje sat
playing at her feet, she would think that it was little Gertrude,
Gertrude who had died, as a child, at Buitenzorg.... Constance, a
zealous housewife, active despite her fifty-five years, moved about the
house incessantly during the morning, with Marietje or Adeletje to help
her. Twenty-two and twenty-one respectively, they were always with
Constance: Marietje already full of unselfish consideration and
Adeletje delicate, not speaking much, sitting with her needlework
upstairs in their room; and, because of Alex' strange melancholy, it was
only Guy and Gerdy that represented joyous, healthy youth in the house,
that rich health and radiance which reminded Constance of their father,
of her brother Gerrit, who had been so noisy, broad and strong until he
fell ill, too ill to go on living....
Klaasje was very troublesome in the mornings, very restless, full of
freaks and cranks, always bothering the others to play with her or at
least to make a fuss over her; and Constance was so sorry that Klaasje
could not be upstairs in the nursery with Jetje and Constant, but
Mathilde would not have her there. And the poor, innocent child, twelve
years old by now, was jealous of Constant and Jetje and hated Mathilde,
as though, unconsciously, she felt in the children a childishness that
was natural and as though she knew that, after all, she herself was much
too big to play about like that and build houses with cards and
dominoes....
Above the great sombre house, against the great sombre skies and inside
the house itself there was always a strange melancholy of things that
had been.... It floated through the passages and creaked in the
furniture; it could be felt in the old grandmother's sitting at the
conservatory-window, in the pale, unchangingly sad face of Adeline, who
was so helpless; it appeared in the silent sorrow of Emilie, who was
spiritless and never spoke much these days. In the sombre house they sat
or moved in an atmosphere of bygone things which mingled with the
atmosphere of the house itself, as though they were small, pale souls,
broken by life and sheltering in the safe house, now that the winter
seemed endless and the heavy clouds were so oppressive.... A cloud of
recollection hung over the old woman, as she sat silently staring, as
she played with Klaasje, who would never grow up; a last reflexion of
sombre tragedy lingered around the simple mother of so many children, as
though her husband's suicide still struck her with tragic wonder that
life could strike so suddenly and fiercely and cruelly; it was as though
a strange psychological secret slumbered in the sad eyes of Emilie, who
was still a young woman; a secret which she would never speak....
Sombre was the house and sombre the everlasting wind that blew around
it; full of strange voices, of things of long ago; and they did not
brighten the house, those three sad, silent women, so different in age,
so sombre in their equal melancholy. They did not brighten the morning
which they spent there together, in the house on the long, rain-swept
road; and it was Constance herself, followed quietly by Marietje or
Adeletje, who woke the house, stairs and passages to life with her
active footfall and the shrill rattle of her keys.... The sound of a
piano came harshly from Mathilde's sitting-room upstairs; and it had
only to be heard to make the other piano in the drawing-room downstairs
cry out in pain under Gerdy's furious little fingers, until Constance
was startled at so much noise and hurriedly whispered to Marietje:
"Do tell Gerdy not to play when Mathilde is playing upstairs!..."
Marietje would then rush to the drawing-room and rebuke Gerdy; and,
because it was Aunt Constance' request, Gerdy's piano suddenly fell
silenced, leaving Mathilde's runs and flourishes to triumph overhead.
The children drove out daily with their nurse in the governess-court,
whatever the weather: it was Addie's principle and they throve on it;
and their youthfulness, stammering its first words, was like a bright,
rosy dawn of the future, as they went along the sombre stairs and dark
passages and rooms, casting a sudden golden radiance in that atmosphere
of the past, as though they were suddenly powdering through the brown of
the shadows, as though they were sprinkling the sound of children's
voices through the brown air, which had not caught a childish sound for
so many years....
When Addie was out, visiting his patients, Van der Welcke remained in
his room, reading and smoking, Uncle Jupiter, as Gerdy called him,
because he usually sat enveloped in the blue clouds of his cigarette;
and Guy did a little work, for his examination as a clerk in the postal
service, except when he went to Utrecht, where he was receiving private
tuition in geography. But when he was working at home, in his little
room, up on the third floor, his young, healthy restlessness constantly
made him get up and run downstairs, to borrow an atlas of Van der
Welcke, hang round Uncle Henri for a bit, smoke a cigarette with him,
then go back upstairs. He would look at his books and maps for three
minutes and then jump up again, stretch himself, take up his dumb-bells,
feeling stiff from the long sitting, and go downstairs once more.
Constance met him in the hall:
"Aren't you working, Guy?"
"Yes, I am, Auntie. Where are you off to?"
"To the store-cupboard."
He went with her and Marietje to the store-cupboard, conducted a raid
among the almonds and raisins, talked a lot of nonsense and made
Constance laugh, until she said:
"Come on, Guy ... run along upstairs."
But, because Adeletje looked after the flowers in the conservatory and
he saw her carrying a watering-can, he assisted her and even sponged the
leaves of an aralia, while Klaasje played at Grandmamma's feet, building
houses with cards, which she loved for the shrill colours of the
court-cards, and aces[1] and for the pretty figures of hearts and
diamonds, clubs and spades. He built a house for her; he teased Gerdy,
who was back at her piano, now that Mathilde had left off overhead,
until Truitje came to lay the table for lunch and he raced up three
flights of stairs, terrified, to work at all costs ... hang it all, yes,
to work!... He sat with his hands to his ears, so as not to hear, and
his eyes fixed on the maps; and, when the luncheon-bell rang, he
deliberately waited a few minutes, pretended to himself to be annoyed
because a morning passed so quickly and never came down to lunch less
than five minutes late, making the excuse that he had been working so
hard....
Now, in the winter, the short days passed in peaceful, sombre
domesticity: in the afternoon, Constance went for a walk or to see a
poor person, generally with Adeletje; paying or receiving a visit was
quite an event, which happened only three or four times during the
winter; only Gerdy sometimes entertained her tennis-club and gave the
members tea, upstairs in the girls' sitting-room, as though striving for
a little sociability from the outside.... And, in the yellow circle of
light shed by the lamps, the evening drowsed on gently after dinner,
with the wind whistling round the house, with Gerdy's bustle amid the
chink of her tea-things, with Guy and Adeletje rattling the dice:
"Two and five...."
"Double six.... Once more.... Imperial.... Once more.... Three and
five...."
And Mathilde sat with a book in her hands, her eyes expressing a weight
of silent boredom, while the room seemed full of things of the past, and
the voice of the wind outside and the mourning women--Granny, Adeline,
Emilie--like three generations of dreaming melancholy depressed her
until Addie came in, for a brief hour, before going upstairs again to
his reading....
[1] The aces in Dutch packs of cards are set in brightly-coloured
pictures, usually town-views.