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ECSTASY:
A STUDY OF HAPPINESS
A Novel
By
LOUIS COUPERUS
Author of "Small Souls," "Old People
and the Things that Pass," etc.
Translated by
Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
New York
Dodd, Mead and Company
1919
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
This delicate story is Louis Couperus' third novel. It appeared in the
original Dutch some twenty-seven years ago and has not hitherto been
published in America. At the time when it was written, the author was
a leading member of what was then known as the "sensitivist" school
of Dutch novelists; and the reader will not be slow in discovering
that the story possesses an elusive charm of its own, a charm marking
a different tendency from that of the later books.
Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
Chelsea, 2 June, 1919
ECSTASY: A STUDY OF HAPPINESS
CHAPTER I
1
Dolf Van Attema, in the course of an after-dinner stroll, had called on
his wife's sister, Cecile van Even, on the Scheveningen Road. He was
waiting in her little boudoir, pacing up and down, among the rosewood
chairs and the vieux rose moire ottomans, over and over again, with
three or four long steps, measuring the width of the tiny room. On
an onyx pedestal, at the head of a sofa, burned an onyx lamp, glowing
sweetly within its lace shade, a great six-petalled flower of light.
Mevrouw was still with the children, putting them to bed, the maid had
told him; so he would not be able to see his godson, little Dolf, that
evening. He was sorry. He would have liked to go upstairs and romp with
Dolf where he lay in his little bed; but he remembered Cecile's request
and his promise on an earlier occasion, when a romp of this sort with
his uncle had kept the boy awake for hours. So Dolf van Attema waited,
smiling at his own obedience, measuring the little boudoir with his
steps, the steps of a firmly-built man, short, broad and thick-set,
no longer in his first youth, showing symptoms of baldness under his
short brown hair, with small blue-grey eyes, kindly and pleasant of
glance, and a mouth which was firm and determined, in spite of the
smile, in the midst of the ruddy growth of his crisp Teutonic beard.
A log smouldered on the little hearth of nickel and gilt; and two
little flames flickered discreetly: a fire of peaceful intimacy in
that twilight atmosphere of lace-shielded lamplight. Intimacy and
discreetness shed over the whole little room an aroma as of violets;
a suggestion of the scent of violets nestled, too, in the soft tints of
the draperies and furniture--rosewood and rose moire--and hung about
the corners of the little rosewood writing-table, with its silver
appointments and its photographs under smooth glass frames. Above
the writing-table hung a small white Venetian mirror. The gentle
air of modest refinement, the subdued and almost prudish tenderness
which floated about the little hearth, the writing-table and the
sofa, gliding between the quiet folds of the faded hangings, had
something soothing, something to quiet the nerves, so that Dolf
presently ceased his work of measurement, sat down, looked around
him and finally remained staring at the portrait of Cecile's husband,
the minister of State, dead eighteen months back.
After that he had not long to wait before Cecile came in. She advanced
towards him smiling, as he rose from his seat, pressed his hand,
excused herself that the children had detained her. She always put them
to sleep herself, her two boys, Dolf and Christie, and then they said
their prayers, one beside the other in their little beds. The scene
came back to Dolf as she spoke of the children; he had often seen it.
Christie was not well, she said; he was so listless; she hoped it
might not turn out to be measles.
2
There was motherliness in her voice, but she did not seem a mother as
she reclined, girlishly slight, on the sofa, with behind her the soft
glow of the lace flower of light on its stem of onyx. She was still
in the black of her mourning. Here and there the light at her back
touched her flaxen hair with a frail golden halo; the loose crape
tea-gown accentuated the maidenly slimness of her figure, with the
gently curving lines of her long neck and somewhat narrow shoulders;
her arms hung with a certain weariness as her hands lay in her lap;
gently curving, too, were the lines of her girlish youth of bust and
slender waist, slender as a vase is slender, so that she seemed a
still expectant flower of maidenhood, scarcely more than adolescent,
not nearly old enough to be the mother of her children, her two boys
of six and seven.
Her features were lost in the shadow--the lamplight touching her
hair with gold--and Dolf could not at first see into her eyes; but
presently, as he grew accustomed to the shade, these shone softly
out from the dusk of her features. She spoke in her low-toned voice,
a little faint and soft, like a subdued whisper; she spoke again of
Christie, of his god-child Dolf and then asked for news of Amelie,
her sister.
"We are all well, thank you," he replied. "You may well ask how we are:
we hardly ever see you."
"I go out so little," she said, as an excuse.
"That is just where you make a mistake: you do not get half enough
air, not half enough society. Amelie was saying so only at dinner
to-day; and that's why I've looked in to ask you to come round to us
to-morrow evening."
"Is it a party?"
"No; nobody."
"Very well, I will come. I shall be very pleased."
"Yes, but why do you never come of your own accord?"
"I can't summon up the energy."
"Then how do you spend your evenings?"
"I read, I write, or I do nothing at all. The last is really the most
delightful: I only feel myself alive when I am doing nothing."
He shook his head:
"You're a funny girl. You really don't deserve that we should like
you as much as we do."
"How?" she asked, archly.
"Of course, it makes no difference to you. You can get on just as
well without us."
"You mustn't say that; it's not true. Your affection means a great
deal to me, but it takes so much to induce me to go out. When I am
once in my chair, I sit thinking, or not thinking; and then I find
it difficult to stir."
"What a horribly lazy mode of life!"
"Well, there it is!... You like me so much: can't you forgive me my
laziness? Especially when I have promised you to come round to-morrow."
He was captivated:
"Very well," he said, laughing. "Of course you are free to live as
you choose. We like you just the same, in spite of your neglect of us."
She laughed, reproached him with using ugly words and rose slowly to
pour him out a cup of tea. He felt a caressing softness creep over
him, as if he would have liked to stay there a long time, talking and
sipping tea in that violet-scented atmosphere of subdued refinement:
he, the man of action, the politician, member of the Second Chamber,
every hour of whose day was filled up with committees here and
committees there.
"You were saying that you read and wrote a good deal: what do you
write?" he asked.
"Letters."
"Nothing but letters?"
"I love writing letters. I write to my brother and sister in India."
"But that is not the only thing?"
"Oh, no!"
"What else do you write then?"
"You're growing a bit indiscreet, you know."
"Nonsense!" he laughed back, as if he were quite within his
right. "What is it? Literature?"
"Of course not! My diary."
He laughed loudly and gaily:
"You keep a diary! What do you want with a diary? Your days are all
exactly alike!"
"Indeed they are not."
He shrugged his shoulders, quite non-plussed. She had always been a
riddle to him. She knew this and loved to mystify him:
"Sometimes my days are very nice and sometimes very horrid."
"Really?" he said, smiling, looking at her out of his kind little eyes.
But still he did not understand.
"And so sometimes I have a great deal to write in my diary," she
continued.
"Let me see some of it."
"By all means ... after I'm dead."
A mock shiver ran through his broad shoulders:
"Brr! How gloomy!"
"Dead! What is there gloomy about that?" she asked, almost merrily.
But he rose to go:
"You frighten me," he said, jestingly. "I must be going home; I have
a lot to do still. So we see you to-morrow?"
"Thanks, yes: to-morrow."
He took her hand; and she struck a little silver gong, for him to
be let out. He stood looking at her a moment longer, with a smile in
his beard:
"Yes, you're a funny girl, and yet ... and yet we all like you!" he
repeated, as if he wished to excuse himself in his own eyes for
this affection.
And he stooped and kissed her on the forehead: he was so much older
than she.
"I am very glad that you all like me," she said. "Till to-morrow,
then. Good-bye."
3
He went; and she was alone. The words of their conversation seemed
still to be floating in the silence, like vanishing atoms. Then the
silence became complete; and Cecile sat motionless, leaning back in
the three little cushions of the sofa, black in her crape against the
light of the lamp, her eyes gazing out before her. All around her a
vague dream descended as of little clouds, in which faces shone for
an instant, from which low voices issued without logical sequence of
words, an aimless confusion of recollection. It was the dreaming of
one on whose brain lay no obsession either of happiness or of grief,
the dreaming of a mind filled with peaceful light: a wide, still,
grey Nirvana, in which all the trouble of thinking flows away and
the thoughts merely wander back over former impressions, taking them
here and there, without selecting. For Cecile's future appeared to
her as a monotonous sweetness of unruffled peace, in which Dolf and
Christie grew up into jolly boys, young undergraduates, men, while she
herself remained nothing but the mother, for in the unconsciousness
of her spiritual life she did not know herself entirely. She did not
know that she was more wife than mother, however fond she might be
of her children. Swathed in the clouds of her dreaming, she did not
feel that there was something missing, by reason of her widowhood;
she did not feel loneliness, nor a need of some one beside her, nor
regret that yielding air alone flowed about her, in which her arms
might shape themselves and grope in vain for something to embrace. The
capacity for these needs was there, but so deep hidden in her soul's
unconsciousness that she did not know of its existence nor suspect
that one day it might assert itself and rise up slowly, up and up,
an apparition of more evident melancholy. For such melancholy as was
in her dreaming seemed to her to belong to the past, to the memory of
the dear husband whom she had lost, and never, never, to the present,
to an unrealized sense of her loneliness.
Whoever had told her now that something was wanting in her life
would have roused her indignation; she herself imagined that she had
everything that she wanted; and she valued highly the calm happiness of
the innocent egoism in which she and her children breathed, a happiness
which she thought complete. When she dreamed, as now, about nothing
in particular--little dream-clouds fleeing across the field of her
imagination, with other cloudlets in their wake--sometimes great tears
would well into her eyes and trickle slowly down her cheek; but to
her these were only tears of an unspeakably vague melancholy, a light
load upon her heart, barely oppressive and there for some reason which
she did not know, for she had ceased to mourn the loss of her husband.
In this manner she could pass whole evenings, simply sitting dreaming,
never wearying of herself, nor reflecting how the people outside
hurried and tired themselves, aimlessly, without being happy, whereas
she was happy, happy in the cloudland of her dreams.
The hours sped and her hand was too slack to reach for the book upon
the table beside her; slackness at last permeated her so thoroughly
that one o'clock arrived and she could not yet decide to get up and
go to her bed.