Cecile was alone; the children had gone upstairs to tidy themselves
for dinner. She tried to get back her distant vistas, fading into
the pale horizon; she tried to recover the silvery endlessness which
had shot through her as a vision of light. But instead her brain was
all awhirl with a kaleidoscope of very recent petty memories: the
children, Quaerts, Emerson, Jules, Suzette, Amelie. How strange, how
strange life was!... The outer life; the coming and going of people
about us; the sounds of words which they utter in strange accents;
the endless interchange of phenomena; the concatenation of those
phenomena, one with the other; strange, too, the presence of a soul
somewhere inside us, like a god within us, never to be known in our own
essence. Often, as indeed now, it seemed to Cecile that all things,
even the most commonplace things, were strange, very strange, as if
nothing in the world were absolutely commonplace, as if everything
were strange: the strange form and outward expression of a deeper
life that lies hidden behind everything, even the meanest objects;
as if everything displayed itself under an appearance, a mask of
pretence, while the reality, the very truth, lay underneath. How
strange, how strange life was!... For it seemed to her as if she,
under that very usual afternoon tea, had seen something very unusual;
she did not know what, she could not express it nor even think it
thoroughly; it seemed to her as if beneath the coming and going of
those people something had glittered: a reality, an ultimate truth
under the appearance of that casual afternoon tea.
"What is it? What is it?" she wondered. "Am I deluding myself, or is
it so? I feel that it is so...."
It was all very vague and yet so very clear.... It seemed to her
as though there were a vision, a haze of light behind all that had
happened there, behind Amelie and Jules and Quaerts and the book
which he had picked up from the floor and held in his hand for a
moment.... Did that vision, that haze of light mean anything, or....
But she shook her head:
"I am dreaming, I am giving way to fancy," she laughed, within
herself. "It was all very simple; I only make it complex because it
amuses me to do so."
But she had no sooner thought this than she felt something which
denied the thought absolutely, an intuition which should have made
her guess the essence of the truth, but did not quite succeed. Surely
there was something, something behind it all, hiding away, lurking
as the shadow lurked behind the thing; and the shadow appeared to
her as a vision and haze of light....
Her thoughts still wandered over all those people and finally halted
at Taco Quaerts. She saw him sitting there again, bending slightly
forward in her direction, his hands folded and hanging between his
knees, as he looked up to her. A barrier of aversion had stood between
them like an iron bar. She saw him sitting there again, though he was
gone. That again was past: how quickly everything moved; how small
was the speck of the present!
She rose, sat down at her writing-table and wrote:
"Beneath me flows the sea of the past; above me drifts the ether
of the future; and I stand midway upon the one speck of reality,
so small that I must press my feet firmly together lest I lose my
hold. And from the speck of the present my sorrow looks down upon
the sea and my longing up to the sky.
"It is scarcely life to stand upon this speck, so small that I hardly
appreciate it, hardly feel it beneath my feet; and yet to me it is the
one reality. I am not greatly occupied about it: my eyes only follow
the rippling of those waves towards distant horizons, the gliding of
those clouds towards distant spheres, vague manifestations of endless
change, translucent ephemeras, visible incorporeities. The present
is the only thing that is, or rather that seems to be. The speck is,
or at least appears to be, but not the sea below nor the sky above,
for the sea is but a memory and the air but an illusion. Yet memory
and illusion are everything: they are the wide inheritance of the
soul, which alone can escape from the speck of the moment to float
upon the sea towards the horizons which retreat, to drift upon the
clouds towards the spheres which retreat and retreat...."
Then she reflected. How was it that she had written all this and
why? How had she come to write it? She went back upon her thoughts:
the present, the speck of the present, which was so small.... Quaerts,
Quaerts' very attitude, rising up before her just now. Was he in any
way concerned with her writing down those sentences? The past a sorrow;
the future an illusion.... Why, why illusion?
"And Jules, who likes him," she thought. "And Amelie, who spoke of him
... but she knows nothing.... What is there in him, what lurks behind
him: his visionary image? Why did he come here? Why do I dislike him
so? Do I dislike him? I cannot see into his eyes...."
She would have liked to do this once; she would have liked to make
sure that she disliked him or that she did not: one or the other. She
was curious to see him once more, to know what she would think and
feel about him then....
She had risen from her writing-table and now lay at full length on
the sofa, with her arms folded behind her head. She no longer knew
what she dreamt, but she felt peacefully happy. She heard Dolf and
Christie come down the stairs. They came in, it was dinner-time.
"Jules was really naughty just now, wasn't he, Mummy?" Christie asked
again, with a grave face.
She drew the frail little fellow gently to her, took him tightly in
her arms and fondly kissed his moist, pale-raspberry lips:
"No, really not, darling!" she said. "He wasn't naughty, really...."