At the Hague, Mathilde felt a certain gratification, a satisfaction; and
the bustle of the early weeks gave her a pleasant feeling of excitement
and made her forget the despairing thoughts of the last few weeks spent
at Driebergen. They had an attractive little new house in a side-street
off the Bezuidenhout itself. It was freshly painted, bright in
colouring; and she found it delightful to be able to furnish the house,
now that summer was approaching, with light, modern furniture which
looked and suggested a doll's house, with the small rooms and the
abundance of light-coloured muslin in the drawing-room and conservatory,
which she thought looked nice and cheerful. The first spring light
entered hard and shrill; and the new colours of the wallpapers showed up
in the first sunny days, crying out at Addie when he returned from his
visits in his smart little brougham. And she displayed a certain
solicitude that above all he should be nicely dressed, that he should
look very well-groomed: she insisted on his ordering a couple of new
suits. He had not a large practice yet, but that was sure to come: she
was full of hope. In the afternoons, she would go out, rejoicing in the
shopping-streets, in all the errands which she had to do, in the
old-acquaintances whom she met, people whom she had known in her
parents' house--they were both dead now--and occupying a somewhat lower
social scale than her own at present. And she loved especially to show
herself to her relations--a few uncles and aunts and cousins in her
elaborate new dresses: Baroness van der Welcke.... And, in her
gratification, in her satisfaction, in her new environment, created by
herself in sympathy with her commonplace illusions, it was as though she
had suddenly wiped all Driebergen out of her life, as though they had
never existed, the nearly three crowded early years of her marriage
yonder, in the melancholy, rainy village, in the sombre house, the
haunted house full of lunatics and invalids. A newness, fresh and
commonplace as the paint of her house, reigned all around her; she
inhaled newness and was grateful to Addie; but that which, despite
herself, had begun to grow refined in her, through her intercourse with
antagonistic but yet finer natures than her own, now became blunted at
once; and the days of real misery which she had undergone now, in her
superficial thoughts, seemed very far away, as though they had been
never lived but only dreamed, as read in a book, but never felt. The
feeling had not burst forth from her, like a plant that buds, but had
moved slowly around her, like a wind that blows or a drifting cloud. It
had moved her, but had not metamorphosed her. Now, in her own
atmosphere, she was blossoming up, fully, like a flower transplanted to
the earth which it needed in order to blossom entirely.
And yet, though she recovered herself, she was not quite herself again.
Even though she no longer craved to know and to receive that which
escaped her in Addie, yet she continued to know that something in him
did escape her; and, however eagerly, in her simple entreaty, she had
begged that he would love her, now, even though she uttered the same
request, almost with a childish plaint--"Addie, you _do_ love me, don't
you?"--she had to admit to herself that she now saw him really very far
above herself, not only in that which escaped her, but also in that
which she understood: the daily sacrifice which he was making by living
at the Hague, by acting as she had asked, seeking to establish a
practice as she wished, by shifting the tenor of his life, as with a
strong grip of the hand, in the direction which would make her happy,
her, the woman who no longer loved him as she had done ... as she had
done when she felt him akin to herself, in the healthy normal life of
physical natures.... He was that still, but he was also different; and
that different thing was not akin to her, nor was the superiority with
which he sacrificed himself. The superiority, the sacrifice oppressed
her.... She soon forgot; and, when she was out of doors, going along the
shops, meeting acquaintances who admired her, she was happy. When she
came home, waiting with her two children for Addie's return, she
suddenly felt oppressed:
"I grew melancholy at Driebergen," she would think.
But now she was in her new, freshly-painted house; and she was oppressed
and felt unattractive; she dragged with her something that she could not
shake off. She often wept, sobbed, as at Driebergen, but there, she
knew, it was only about Marietje van Saetzema, whereas here she did not
know what she was sobbing for.... At meals, sitting with him alone, she
was silent, or else spoke harshly, without intending to. She did not sit
with him when he was working, though he asked her to. When he wanted to
kiss her, she drew back. At night she often locked herself in, pretended
to be asleep.... Only in the children did she feel in harmony with him,
did she agree with him, with his system of feeding them, of sending them
out every day in all weathers. The children united them, now and then,
for a few moments.... When the children were in bed, their life
together became strangely unreal, as though both were asking themselves
why, why? And it grew worse daily. He was now living exactly as she
wished; and it seemed to him as if he had no life of his own. The
keeping up of his reading, in the evenings, became mechanical; and
mechanically he went once, sometimes twice, a week to Driebergen,
remaining there for half the day. They saw him looking strange,
unsettled, old, with wrinkles in his forehead and a gloom of despair in
his eyes.
"My dear old chap," Van der Welcke said, one day, "I can see that things
are not going well with you. Do you remember how your father, not so
very long ago, with the only bit of wisdom that ever fell to his share,
advised you to seek your own life for yourself?... You're seeking it
less and less ... for yourself. Things are not well with you down there
... at the Hague."
"Father, I have so little right to seek my own life for myself."
"And yet we all do it."
"There was a time, once, when you didn't. You then gave up your life for
me."
"I did that quite naturally. I don't know what's happening inside you
... but it looks to me as if you were forcing yourself. Here you're at
home, here you feel a man: you love this house, you love the work you
used to do here...."
"I don't belong to myself any more."
"You never did belong to yourself. As a child, you belonged to your
silly parents ... who got the better of you entirely; and now you belong
to your wife. I expect it's your fate."
"If it has to be...."
"I should so much like to see you happy, Addie. Bless my soul, old chap,
we should all like to see it. We're all suffering on your account. Your
poor mother's suffering."
"Does she talk about it to you?"
"No, we never talk much together, as you know, but still...."
"Do you understand each other better?"
"No, but that's not the question. The question at this moment is your
happiness...."
"Father, I am not unhappy. Things are really all right with me."
"You've got that cold, distant voice, my boy, which I know so well in
you, which you put on when you're hiding yourself and not facing things.
I never mistake it."
Van der Welcke got up, walked restlessly across the room, all blue with
smoke, walked back again and suddenly stopped in front of Addie and took
his son's head in his two hands:
"My boy, why was it necessary that your fate should be the same as your
father's, an unhappy marriage?"
"Father...."
"Don't deny it. Why should you? Aren't we two friends who have always
known all about each other? As a child, you were my friend. We were
always like brothers. Why must your fate be the same as your father's,
an unhappy marriage? You, who are so clever where others are concerned."
Addie suddenly clutched hold of his father. Van der Welcke continued:
"Why must you always know so little that will help yourself?... At the
time, I raised no objection. You were fond of the woman; you always knew
your mind with such certainty; I thought that you knew things for
yourself; I let you have your way. I was jealous because you were
getting married; so was your mother; we should have been jealous of any
woman. We didn't like the girl you brought us; we thought, 'It's our
jealousy that makes us not like her. She's Addie's wife; she's taking
our boy from us.' We had no right to think like that. We tried to stifle
our jealousy. We received Mathilde, hoping, almost knowing for certain,
that you were finding your own happiness in her, because you always knew
your mind.... You didn't know it in your own case.... You knew
everything so positively in ours.... You also knew so positively, so
plainly, that the profession which I tried to urge upon you was not the
thing for you: you found your own vocation. You were a small boy; and
you know it all so clearly and positively.... When you grew up and
became a man, you no longer knew things. Isn't that so?... Why should
your fate be the same as your father's? I was a ne'er-do-well, when I
made my mistake; you were a calm, serious man...."
It was as if his father were depriving Addie of all his strength, but he
merely said, in his almost cool, even, restrained tones:
"Dear Father, really ... things are all right between Mathilde and me.
Even Mamma understood, in the end, that she did not feel happy here, at
home; and Mamma agreed that she would feel more at home and happier in
her own house, however small...."
"But I'm not speaking of Mathilde's happiness, I'm speaking of
yours...."
"That goes with it, that must go with it, Father...."
And so it always remained: he spoke out no more than that, gave no more
of himself than that and was outwardly almost cold with chill shuddering
and repellant when spoken to about himself. That he had made a mistake,
that he had not known things for himself he clearly perceived; but all
his efforts were directed towards the attempt to repair what he had
managed, through his ignorance where himself was concerned, to spoil or
destroy in his wife's life.
Because he knew that she soon forgot things, he thought that he would
succeed, if he devoted himself to her entirely, if he lived with a view
to her happiness and ceased to live with a view to his own higher
instincts, his own sympathies, his own vocation and activities. And,
even if she did not forget everything at once, he would hope that, if he
persisted, she would end by forgetting entirely.
On days when she was bright and cheerful, he was satisfied, in silence
and with a certain inward sombreness, because things were going as he
was compelling them to go. On days when she was snappish and locked
herself into her room and was evidently unhappy and no longer knew how
to explain her melancholy, he suddenly saw his young life before him as
a dismal ruin, as a desolate block of masonry in a dark night, as a
desperate climbing and climbing in the dusk, with no goal of light
ahead. Then he would look at his young, crowing children and wonder
whether one day--and that perhaps soon--they would comfort him and her,
their parents, even as he had comforted his. He did his work listlessly,
visited his patients listlessly, even though no one ever noticed
anything in him. He would ride through the streets of the Hague in his
smart little brougham; and his eyes looked dully before them and he
longed for his bicycle and the Driebergen roads, the silent, gloomy
roads, sodden with rain and weighed down under by the heavy skies where
his sick poor awaited him in their mean little dwellings, in vain,
seeing him only for a single moment once a week. He was filled with
bitterness: with a listless sneer at himself he reflected that he might
just as well have satisfied his parents' wishes and Grandmamma's wishes,
in the old days, and become a diplomatist. It would have been nearly the
same as what he was doing now: putting himself forward as a young
fashionable doctor who practised hypnotism and who was sought after,
especially by the ladies, because he was good-looking and a baron.
He sank into deeper and deeper dejection and felt roused only for a
moment when treating a serious patient.