Constance began to love her loneliness more and more.
Her daily life was very uneventful: she could count the people with
whom she came into contact. First her husband and her son: there was
something gentler in her attitude towards Van der Welcke, something
almost motherly, which prevented her from getting angry with him,
even though the inclination welled up within her. Addie was as usual,
perhaps even a little more serious: this disquieted her. Then there was
Brauws, who came regularly. He dined with them regularly, on a fixed
day in the week, quite informally; and moreover he had become the
friend of both Van der Welcke and Constance and even of Addie. Then
there were Mamma, Gerrit and his little tribe and, now and again,
Paul. And then there was Van Vreeswijck; and Marianne, of course;
and latterly she had seen more of Bertha. For the rest she seemed to
drift away from all the others, even from warm-hearted Aunt Lot. She
kept in touch only with those with whom she was really in sympathy.
Still, though she had these few friends, she often had quite lonely
afternoons. But they did not depress her; she gazed out at the rain,
at the cloud-phantoms. And she dreamed ... along the path of light. She
smiled at her dream. Even though she very much feared the absurdity
of it for herself, she could not help it: a new youthfulness filled
her with a gentle glow, a new tenderness, like the delicate bloom of
a young girl's soul dreaming of the wonderful future.... And then she
would come back to herself suddenly and smile at her sentimentality
and summon up all her matronly common-sense; and she would think:
"Come, I oughtn't to be sitting like this!... Come, I oughtn't to be
acting like this and thinking of everything and nothing!... Certainly,
I like him very much; but why cannot I do that without these strange
thoughts, without dreaming and picturing all manner of things and
filling my head with romantic fancies ... as if I were a girl of
eighteen or twenty?... Oh, those are the things which we do not speak
about, the deep secret things which we never tell to anybody!... I
should never have suspected them in myself ... or that they could be
so exquisitely sweet to me. How strangely sweet, to dream myself back
to youth in visions which, though they never really take shape, yet
make a shining path to those cloudy skies, to imagine myself young
again in those dreams!... If I never had these thoughts and dreams
before, why do I have them now? Come, I oughtn't to be sitting like
this and thinking like this!... I make up a host of pretty stories,
sentimental little stories, and see myself, see us both, years ago,
as quite young children, both of us. He played and I played ... almost
the same game: he a boy, I a girl. It was as though he were seeking
me. It was as though I, in my childish dreams, divined something of
him, far, far away, as though there were a part of me that wanted to go
to him, a part of him that wanted to come to me.... Stop, I am giving
way again to those secret enthusiasms which lie deep down in my soul
like strange, hidden streams, those vague, romantic ferments such as I
imagined that young girls might have, but not I, a woman of my years,
a woman with my past, the mother of a big son.... I will not do it
any more, I will not.... It is morbid to be like this.... And yet
... and yet ... when the wind blows and the rain comes down, it is,
it still is the dear secret that brings the tears to my eyes.... If I
love him, quite silently, deep down within myself, why may I not just
dream like that? The absurdity of it exists only for me: nobody, nobody
knows of it. I have some one else hidden within me: a younger woman,
a sister, a young sister-soul, a girl's soul almost. It is absurd,
I know; but sometimes, sometimes it is so strong in me and I love him
so well and feel, just like a girl, that he is the first man I have
ever loved.... Oh, Henri! I can see now what that was: he was young;
it was at first mere play-acting, just like a comedy; then it became
passion, very quickly, a mad impulse, an almost feverish impulse to
hold him in my arms. That is all dead. Passion is dead.... This is
a dream, a young girl's dream. It is the beginning. It is absurd;
and I am often ashamed of it, for my own sake. But I cannot resist
it: it envelops me, just as the spring sunshine and the scent of the
may and the cherry-blossom in the Woods envelop one with languorous
sweetness. I cannot resist it, I can not resist it. My eyes go
towards those clouds, my soul goes towards those clouds, my dreams
go towards them ... and I love him, I love him.... I feel ashamed:
sometimes I dare not look my son in the face.... I love him, I love
him; and I feel ashamed: sometimes I dare not go across the street,
as though people would notice it, by the light on my face.... But ah,
no, that light does not shine from me, because I am old! It does from
Marianne, poor child, but not from me ... oh, thank God for that!... I
want to struggle against it, but it is stronger than I; and, when I
think of him, I feel as if I were numbed here in my chair. When he
comes into the room, I tremble, powerless to make a movement. Let me
be ashamed of myself, argue with myself, struggle as I may, it is so,
it is something real, as though I had never felt anything real in my
life: it is a dream and it is also reality...."
She often strove against it, but the dream was always too strong for
her, enveloping her as with a multitude of languorous spring scents. It
imparted a strange tenderness to her, to her fresh, round face, the
face of a woman in her prime, with the strange, soft, curly hair,
which the years were changing without turning grey. If he came, she
awoke from that dream, but felt herself blissfully languid and faint.
"I am not a girl," she thought, now that she heard herself speak;
but her fixed idea, that she was old, quite old, retreated a little
way into the background.
But, though she now no longer felt so old in her dream, after her
dream she thought herself ignorant. Oh, how ignorant she was! And
why had she never acquired an atom of knowledge in her wasted days,
in her squandered, empty years. When she was talking to Brauws--and
now that he came regularly, they often talked together, long and
earnestly, in the friendly twilight--she thought:
"How ignorant I am!"
She had to make an effort sometimes to follow him in the simplest
things that he said. She was obliged to confess to him that she
had never learnt very much. But he said that that was a good thing,
that it had kept her mind fresh. She shook her head in disclaimer;
she confessed that she was ignorant and stupid. He protested; but
she told him frankly that it sometimes tired her to follow him. And
she was so honest with him that she herself was sometimes surprised
at it. If ever their conversation became too hopelessly deep, she
preferred to be silent rather than lie or even seek an evasion in
words.... Ignorant, yes; and it distressed her to such an extent that,
one afternoon, when Henri was out and Addie at school, she went to
her son's room and opened his book-case. In addition to the ordinary
school-manuals, it contained a few boys'-books; and she laughed at
herself, her little tender, mocking laugh of gentle irony. But she
found a couple of volumes on Universal History, a present from Van der
Welcke to Addie, who was very fond of history; and she opened them
where she stood. She turned the pages. She was afraid that some one
might come in: the maid, perhaps, by accident. She sat down in the
only easy-chair, impregnated with the smoke of the cigarettes which
Van der Welcke smoked one after the other, silently, while Addie
was preparing his lessons; and she turned the pages and read. She
continued to suffer from that sense of her own absurdity. She felt
like a schoolgirl dreaming ... and learning her lessons. She went
on reading; and, when Truitje was looking for her all over the house
and she heard her ask the cook where on earth mevrouw could be, she
blushed violently, quickly put the books back on the shelves and left
the room. She would have liked to take the books with her, but dared
not; however, that evening at dinner she plucked up courage and said:
"Addie, Mr. Brauws was saying something about the French Revolution
the other day; and I felt so stupid at being so ignorant on the
subject. Have you any books about it?"
Yes, he had this book and that book, in fact he had always been
attracted by that period and had collected as many books upon it
as his scanty pocket-money permitted. He would bring them to her
after dinner. And she acquired a sort of passion for reading and
learning. She indulged it almost hastily, feverishly, without any
method, as though nervously anxious to make up for the deficiencies
of her own education. And at the same time she was frightened lest
other people--even Van der Welcke and Addie--should notice that fevered
haste; and she devoured book after book with studied cunning, sometimes
turning the pages over hurriedly, feverishly, then again reading more
attentively, but never leaving the books about, always replacing them
on her boy's shelves, or returning them to Brauws and Paul when they
had been borrowed from them, or carefully putting away those which she
had bought herself, so that her room apparently remained the same,
without the confusion and untidiness of a lot of books. Her reading
was a strange medley: a volume of Quack's Socialists, which Brauws
lent her; Zola's novel, L'OEuvre; a pamphlet by Bakunin and an odd
number of the Gids; a copy of The Imitation which had strayed among
Van der Welcke's books; Gonse on Japanese Art; Tolstoi's novels and
pamphlets. But it was a strange bold power of discrimination that
at once taught her to pick and choose amid the chaos of all this
literature, made her accept this and reject that: a psychological
analysis; a new work on modern social evolution; an aesthetic rhapsody
about a Japanese vase. She learnt quickly to look into them boldly and
to take from them what was able as it were to develop her; and out of
many of those books there flashed forth such entirely new revelations
of hitherto unperceived truths that often, tired, dazed, astounded,
she asked herself:
"Is there so much then? Is so much thought about, dreamt about,
so much sought for, lived for? Do people have those visions then,
those dreams? And does it all exist? And can it all be taken in by me,
by my intelligence?"
And, as she thought, it seemed as if crape veils were being raised
everywhere from before her and as if she, whose gaze had never wandered
from her family and friends, now saw, suddenly, through the distant
clouds, right into those cities, right into those civilizations, into
the future, into the past, into so much of the present as still hovered
closely around her own existence. She experienced shock after shock:
she felt dimly that even the terrible French Revolution, though it
did cost Marie-Antoinette her life, had its good side. Zola seemed
to her so magnificent that she was almost frightened at her own
enthusiasm and dared not put her feeling into words. And the noble
dreams of those apostles of humanity, even though they anathematized
the power of the State and money--all that she had unconsciously looked
upon, all her life, as indispensable to civilized society--made her
quiver first with alarm, then with compassion, then with terror, with
despair, with exultation.... She did not utter her thoughts; only,
in her conversations with Brauws, she felt that she was gradually
better able to follow him, that she was more responsive, less vague
in her replies.... If in all this, this new self-education, there was
something hurried and superficial, the tremulous haste of an eager,
nervous woman who fears that she is devoting herself too late to what
is vitally necessary, there was at the same time something fresh and
ingenuous, something youthful and unspoilt, like the enthusiasm of
a woman still young who, after her girlish dreams, wants to grasp
some part of the vivid, many-coloured, radiant life around her, who
grasps with joyous open hands at the colours and the sunbeams and
who, though she grasps wildly, nevertheless gathers fresh life in
her illusion.... She gathered fresh life. The wind that blew outside
seemed to blow through her soul; the rain that pelted seemed actually
to wash her face; the continual gusts on every hand blew the mist from
before her eyes, drew it aside like a curtain.... Her eyes sparkled;
and, when the winter had done blowing and raining, when suddenly,
without any transition, a breath of spring--the limpid blue of the sky,
the tender green of the stirring earth--floated over and through the
Woods, it was as though she yearned for movement. She managed, every
afternoon that Addie was free, to take him away from Van der Welcke
and to lure him out for a long walk, out of the town, over the dunes,
ever so far. Addie, with his eyes bright with laughing surprise,
thought it very jolly of her and would go with her, though he was no
walker and preferred bicycling, athirst for speed. But, in his young,
gallant boy's soul, he laughed softly, thought Mamma charming: grown
years younger, grown into a young woman, suddenly, in her short skirt,
her little cloth cape, with the sailor-hat on her curly hair and the
colour in her cheeks, slim-waisted, quick-footed, her voice clear,
her laugh sometimes ringing out suddenly. He thought of Papa and that
she was now becoming as young as he; and Addie felt himself old beside
her. He saw nothing of what was happening in his mother, even as nobody
saw it, for she kept it to herself, was no different to the others,
spoke no differently to the others, perhaps only just with a brighter
laugh. What she read, what she learnt, what she felt, what she thought:
all this was not perceptible to the others. It did not shine out from
her; and her foot merely moved a shade quicker, her speech became
a shade more spontaneous. But everything that blossomed and flamed
up in her she kept to herself, in the vast silence of her broad but
unshared vistas. To her husband she was gentler, to her son she was
younger. Only now, in those walks, perhaps Addie was the one person in
her life who noticed that, when Mamma happened to mention Mr. Brauws'
name, an unusual note sounded in her brighter, younger voice. A boy
of his age does not analyse a subtle perception of this kind; only,
without reasoning, without analysing, just instinctively, this boy of
fourteen thought of his father, whom he worshipped with a strange,
protecting adoration such as one gives to a brother or a friend--a
younger brother, a younger friend--and felt a pang of jealousy on
his behalf, jealousy of this man who did what Papa never did, talked
with Mamma for hours three or four times a week, so often in fact
that she was growing younger, that she had taken to reading, so as
no longer to be ignorant, that she had developed a need for walking
great distances. But the lad kept this jealousy locked up within
himself, allowed none to perceive it. Perhaps he was just a trifle
colder to him, to this man, the friend of the family, though Brauws
was so fond of him, Addie, almost passionately fond of him indeed:
Addie knew that. This jealousy for his father, jealousy of that friend
of the family, was very strong in him; and he felt himself to be the
child of both his parents, felt within himself their double heritage
of jealousy. The image of his father appeared constantly before him,
appeared between the images of Brauws and of his mother. But he let
her see nothing of it.
She gathered fresh life in those walks. When Addie was at school,
she walked alone, no longer fearing the loneliness out of doors,
she who had come to love her indoor loneliness and the still
deeper loneliness of her soul. It was as though, after dreaming and
educating herself--quickly, nervously, superficially and with youthful
simplicity--in what great men had thought and written, she felt herself
breathe again in the midst of nature. No longer from her arm-chair,
through the windows, along the bend of the curtains did she see the
great clouds, but she now saw them out of doors and overhead, blue,
white, immense, irradiated by the sun in the vault of the boundless
spring skies all vocal with birds, saw them as she stood on the dunes,
with the wind all round her head, all round her hair and blowing
through her skirts....
"I love him, I love him," a voice inside her sang softly and yet
insistently, while the wind's strong passion seemed to lift her up
and waft her along.
But in the movement of her hands there was something as though she
were resisting the wind, with a smile of gentle irony, of tender
mockery. The wind blew past, as if grumbling, and she walked on,
saw the sea. She seemed to look upon the sea for the first time. It
was as though, in the strong wind, under the blue-white clouds, the
sea streamed to her for the first time from the ethereal fount of
the horizon and were now rushing towards her, roaring and frothing,
like a triumph of multitudinous, white-crested horses. And the sky
and the sea were as one great triumph of mighty, omnipotent nature. A
nameless but overwhelming triumph seemed from out of those clouds
to hold reins in thousands of fists, the reins of the multitudinous
white-crested horses; and all that triumph of nature advanced towards
her like a riot of youth. It was as though every atom of her former
life, every memory flew away around her like sand, like dust, like
straw. It all flew away; and the waves broke, the sea uplifted itself
like an exulting menace, as though to carry her with it in the riotous
rush of its triumphant crested steeds, over all that small life,
over everything ... if she did not take care.
It was all big, wide, far-reaching, like a world. When she reached
home, she was tired out, sobered by the tram-ride and the last bit
of walking, past casual, shadowy people. Worn out, she fell asleep,
woke shortly before dinner, welcomed Addie in a dream. Until sometimes
she read her son's eyes, made an effort, plunged her face in a basin
of water, tried to be, to appear as she had always been. And then, in
the glass, she saw herself like that, to all appearance the same woman,
with just something livelier in her eyes, her gait, her movements. But
inside her everything was changed.
At home sometimes the past would still rise up before her, but
different, quite different. She seemed to withdraw from her former
personality and it was as though, far removed from the woman that she
had once been, she was now for the first time able to judge her past
from another point of view than her own. She saw suddenly what her
father must have suffered, Mamma, the brothers even, the sisters. She
realized for the first time the sacrifice which those old, pious
people, Henri's parents, had made. She thought in dismay of the injury
which she had done her first husband, De Staffelaer. She thought of
them all, in dismay at herself, in compassion for them. And she felt
sorry even for her husband and for what he had always querulously
resented, his shattered career, which had constituted his grudge,
his obsession, the excuse for his inertia: for Van der Welcke and
even for that grudge she felt compassion. How young he was when she
met him, when they had acted their comedy, their comedy which had
become deadly earnest! And she had at once fettered him to herself,
in ever-increasing antagonism! Then her eyes would rest on him with
a more understanding glance, sometimes almost with a certain pity,
as she looked into his eyes, his young blue boyish eyes, which Addie
had inherited from him, but which in the father looked younger,
more boyish than in the son. If, at the sound of his voice, the
inclination to speak to him irritably welled up in her from the
eternal antagonism between them, as from a gloomy spring deep down
in her, she would restrain herself, control herself with that new
sympathy and pity, answer gently, almost jokingly, and would let him
have the last word. And, now that she herself was in love and felt
herself live again, she had a sympathy that was almost motherly for
his love, even though she herself was beginning to feel young again,
and with it a strange tenderness for the two of them, Marianne and
Henri. She did not think of the danger for him; she still had only, in
her new world of romance, a sympathy for romance. He was her husband,
but she felt none of a wife's jealousy. And for Marianne she felt
the same strange compassion, as for a younger sister-in-love....
There came to her scarcely a fleeting thought of the immorality which
the world, people, small people--the whirlers in the little circle,
with their little prejudices and dogmas, their little creeds and
philosophies--would see in such strange views from a married woman
concerning herself and a friend, concerning her husband and the little
niece with whom her husband was evidently in love. She was a small
creature like all of them, she was a small soul, like all of them;
but her soul at least was growing, growing upwards and outwards; she
no longer felt depressed; and it seemed as if she were being borne
on wings to the greater cloud-worlds yonder, to the far cities, where
flashed the lightnings of the new revelations, the new realities....
Everything in her was changed....