Since that first time, Mathilde was pricked with continual jealousy; and
in the mornings, when Addie went upstairs to Marietje van Saetzema's
room, she always followed him and stole into the wardrobe-closet next
door, always with her keys in her hand, so that, if she happened to be
caught, she might appear to be looking for some article of dress in one
of the presses. She listened at the partition and understood what they
were saying sometimes but not always, because Marietje spoke very low
and Mathilde could not always hear what she answered. But, as her eyes
glanced mechanically along the big flowers that formed the pattern of
the wall-paper, she suddenly noticed a broad crevice, where the wood had
split and the paper cracked and torn; and, with her heart leaping to her
throat, she peeped and peeped.... She had to squeeze between two
cupboards, she banged her head against the partition and was terrified
lest they had heard; but they heard nothing or else the noise did not
strike them, for the sound of their voices went on.... Mathilde now put
her eye to the crevice and was able, though with difficulty, to see into
the room, saw Marietje sitting with Addie sitting beside her, saw her
hand resting in his:
"Why does he hold her hand so long?" she thought. "Need he feel her
pulse as long as that?"
But he did not let go of Marietje's hand; and Mathilde became impatient,
also because she could not catch what they were saying:
"How softly they are talking and how confidential it all is!" she
thought.
And, when Marietje lifted her head a little, as with the movement of a
lily on its slender stem, Mathilde saw her smiling, saw her eyes
gleaming softly, saw the words taking birth as it were smiling on her
lips; and it seemed as though those words added a touch of colour to the
pale lips and a blush to the pale cheeks....
"How very much better she looks than when she came!" thought Mathilde,
though she wanted to call out to Addie and tell him to let go Marietje's
hand. "They are about the same age," she thought. "I am much younger
than she is."
And yet Marietje, though twenty-six, had a certain youthfulness, as of a
very young girl; and Mathilde could not get rid of the thought:
"They are--very nearly--the same age. It's ridiculous: a young doctor
like Addie ... with a young woman, a young girl like her. It's
ridiculous.... Why is he wasting his time on her now?"
She now saw the smile fade from Marietje's lips, saw the girl, on the
contrary, look very serious, tell a long and serious story:
"What can she be telling him?" thought Mathilde.
And she saw their faces come nearer to each other: it was as though
Addie were reassuring Marietje, explaining things; and now, now he laid
his hand on Marietje's head and she ... she lay back on the sofa.
"It's absurd," thought Mathilde, "this hypnotizing ... and that they
should be alone together for so long."
Soon the hypnotism took effect. Marietje fell asleep and Addie quietly
left the room. Mathilde waited a few minutes and also stole away,
meeting no one on the stairs....
What she had seen through the slit in the wall-paper was nothing; and
yet ... and yet she could not help constantly brooding over it.... She
now also noticed, at lunch, that Marietje was much more cheerful, that
her movements were much less languid, that she laughed with the other
girls; and she noticed that, after lunch, she helped Adèletje with the
plants in the conservatory, that she was beginning to join in the life
of the others, that she no longer went straight back to her room as she
used to do at first.... And constantly too, downstairs, in the
conservatory, she was struck by an intimacy between Marietje and
Addie.... Mathilde was quite sensible, though she was jealous of her
husband; she was jealous of all his patients; she was quite sensible and
thought:
"A certain affection between a young girl and a doctor, a young doctor,
who obviously has a good influence upon her, as Addie has, is easy
enough to understand."
And she wanted to go on thinking so sensibly, she, a woman of sound,
normal sense, but it was difficult, very difficult.... For Addie went
out and she at once saw Marietje's smile disappear, saw her happy
vivacity sink as it were ... and Marietje soon went upstairs, until she
came down again with Aunt Constance and Adèletje to go for a walk, as
they did every afternoon when the weather was not too bad.... Mathilde
remained upstairs, played the piano, looked out upon the sad, misty
road.... Oh, she loved her husband, she even loved him passionately and
she was living here for his sake; but wasn't it awful, wasn't it awful?
In Heaven's name wouldn't it be better just to move to a small house at
the Hague ... and accept the pinch of poverty?... She went to the next
room, to her children: they had been out and were playing prettily,
while the nurse sat at the window sewing; and now she did not know what
to do next.... What an existence, in the winter, in a village like this,
in a big house, a house full of sick people and mad people! As it
happened, through the window she saw Uncle Ernst walking along the road,
with his back bent under his long coat, talking to himself as he
returned to his rooms in the villa where he was being looked after: what
an existence, oh, what an existence ... for a young and healthy woman
like herself! She was never susceptible to melancholy; but she felt a
twilight descending upon her from the unrelieved sky overhead. She could
have wept.... And yet she could have stood it all, if only she had
possessed Addie entirely.... If only she could win him entirely, she
thought, suddenly; and suddenly it occurred to her that she did possess
him ... but not entirely, not entirely.... He escaped her, so to speak,
in part.... They had love, they had fervour in common; they had the
children in common; they had bonds of sympathy, physical sympathy
almost. She felt happy in his arms and he in hers; but for the rest he
escaped her. Something of his innermost being, something of his soul,
the quintessence of his soul, escaped her, whereas she gave herself
wholly to him and did not feel within herself those secret things which
refused to surrender themselves.... She felt it, she understood it now;
suddenly, under the grey melancholy of the skies, as though she suddenly
saw clearly in that twilight; she understood it: their love was merely
physical! Oh, he escaped her; and she did not know how she was ever to
win him entirely, so as to have him all to herself, all to herself!...
Perhaps if she began to take an interest in his patients, to share his
life in them? But she was jealous of those patients, who took Addie from
her for hours and days together; and she was jealous, very jealous of
Marietje.... But what then? How was she to win him?... And in this
rich-blooded woman, whose senses bloomed purple and fierce, there shot
up as with a riot of red roses the thought of winning him more and yet
more with her kisses, with her whole body, with all that she would give
him, with all that she would find for him, to wind tendrils round him
and bind him to her for ever and for ever.... And then, then also to
make him jealous of her, as she was jealous of him, by disturbing his
unruffled calm, the calm of a young, powerful man, with painful
suspicions, which would yet bring him wholly to her, so that she might
win him entirely....
Oh, wasn't it awful, wasn't it awful? As it was, she sat here the
livelong day and possessed her husband only in the evening, only at
night, as though she were food for nothing else. It went against the
grain; and suddenly, intuitively, she felt her jealousy of Addie's long
talks with Marietje more sharply than before. What need had he to talk
to her at such length? Oh, he ought not to neglect his wife so, he ought
not to think her good only for that: he ought to talk to her also, for
hours at a time, earnestly, strangely, gazing into her eyes, as he
talked to Marietje! Why did he not talk to her, his wife, like that?
What were these talks? What had those two to talk about? It was not only
about being ill and about medicines and not even only about hypnotism:
of that she was convinced. There existed between the two of them secret
things, about which they talked, things which they two alone knew....
Oh, how she felt her husband escape her, as though she were stretching
out her fingers at him covetously and as though she did indeed grip him
in her hot embrace ... only to lose him again at once!...
Her days passed in constant monotony. She was a healthy, superficial,
rather vain, very young woman, with a few vulgar aspirations; and she
suffered in her surroundings because she had an undoubted need for
healthy and superficial affection. She would have been happy leading a
simple, very carnal, very material married life, with plenty of money,
plenty of enjoyment, with children around her; and then she would have
laughed with pride and been good, as far as she was able. As it was, she
felt that, except physically, she was hardly the wife of her husband
and, despite her children, hardly accepted by his family and hardly
suffered in their house. And she peevishly blamed them all, thinking
that they were not kind to her, and she failed to perceive that what
separated her from them all was a lack of spiritual concord, of harmony,
of sympathy, because she had nothing that appealed to them and they had
nothing that appealed to her, because the emanations from her soul and
theirs never reached each other but flowed in two directions, because
everything that they understood in one another, even without words, she
did not understand, even though it were explained to her in words,
because she looked upon them as sick, mad, egoistical and nerve-ridden,
because they looked upon her as shallow and vulgar. It was an antipathy
of blood and of soul: nobody was to blame; and even that she did not
understand. The only one to blame, perhaps, was Addie, because, when
taking her for his wife, he had not listened to the soul within his soul
and had allowed himself to be led only by instinct and by his material
philosophy of regeneration:
"She is a healthy, simple woman. I want healthy, simple children. That's
how we ought all to be: healthy and simple as she is."
Were those not the ideas which had made him introduce her into the midst
of them all, as an object lesson, without listening to the still,
slumbering voices of his soul's soul?... And scarcely had those voices
awakened before he had been roused out of himself with the thought:
"After all, I found her. Why should I lose her now? Who am I, this one
or the other? And, if I am both those whom I feel within me, how can I
unite them and compel them into a single love for my wife, for the woman
who gives me healthy, simple children?"
And, every day that passed, he had known less for himself, whatever he
might know for all of them whom he approached and benefited by strange
influence, knowing less and less daily, until he saw himself plainly as
two and gave up the struggle, let himself go, allowed his soul to drift
at the will of the two streams that dragged him along, in weakness and
surrender and lack of knowledge for himself, whereas he sometimes knew
so clearly for others. Self-knowledge escaped him.... And, if Mathilde
had been able to see this, in her husband, she would have shrunk back
and been dismayed at what, all incomprehensible to her, existed secretly
in the most mystic part of him. She would have been shocked by it as by
a never-suspected riddle, she would have turned giddy as at a
never-suspected abyss down which she gazed without knowing where it
ended, a bottomless depth to her ignorant eyes and quite insusceptible
instincts. She would not have understood, she would have refused to
understand that there was no blame but only self-insufficiency and
inconsistency of soul, in silent antagonism and antipathy, because
Addie felt himself to be two. She would have wanted to blame ... them,
all of them, because "they were not nice to her," but not her husband,
for she loved him because of his sturdy young manliness, because of his
older earnestness and thoroughness, in which she failed to see the soul
of his soul. And she now wanted, unhappy as she was, to continue feeling
like that, neglected, offended, underrated, by all of them in that
large, gloomy house, in which everything, down to the dark oak
doorposts, was hostile and antagonistic to her, until she felt
frightened of mysteries in or upon which they hardly ever touched in
speaking, mysteries which were even almost welcome to the others and not
too utterly unintelligible in their communism of soul, from which she
was irrevocably excluded.