Holland Fiction Series
ELINE VERE
TRANSLATED FROM THE DUTCH OF
LOUIS COUPERUS
BY
J. T. GREIN
WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY EDMUND GOSSE
NEW·YORK
D. APPLETON AND CO.
1892
INTRODUCTION.
THE DUTCH SENSITIVISTS.
In the intellectual history of all countries we find the same
phenomenon incessantly recurring. New writers, new artists, new
composers arise in revolt against what has delighted their grandfathers
and satisfied their fathers. These young men, pressed together at
first, by external opposition, into a serried phalanx, gradually win
their way, become themselves the delight and then the satisfaction of
their contemporaries, and, falling apart as success is secured to them,
come to seem lax, effete, and obsolete to a new race of youths, who
effect a fresh æsthetic revolution. In small communities, these
movements are often to be observed more precisely than in larger ones.
But they are very tardily perceived by foreigners, the established
authorities in art and literature retaining their exclusive place in
dictionaries and handbooks long after the claim of their juniors to be
observed with attention has been practically conceded at home.
For this reason, partly, and partly also because the mental life of
Holland receives little attention in this country, no account has yet
been taken of the revolution in Dutch taste which has occupied the last
six or seven years. I believe that the present occasion is the first on
which it has been brought to the notice of any English-speaking public.
There exists, however, in Holland, at this moment, a group of young
writers, most of them between thirty-five and twenty-five years of age,
who exhibit a violent zeal for literature, passing often into
extravagance, who repudiate, sometimes with ferocity, the rather sleepy
Dutch authorship of the last forty years, and who are held together, or
crushed together, by the weight of antiquated taste and indifference to
executive merit which they experience around them. Certain facts seem
to be undeniable: first, that every young man of letters in Holland,
whose work is really promising, has joined the camp; and secondly,
that, with all the ferment and crudity inseparable from prose and verse
composed in direct opposition to existing canons of taste, the poems
and the stories of these young Dutchmen are often full of beauty and
delicacy. They have read much in their boyhood; they have imitated
Rossetti and Keats; they have been fascinated by certain Frenchmen, by
Flaubert, by Goncourt, particularly by Huysmans, who is a far-away
kinsman of their own; they have studied the disquieting stories of
Edgar Poe. But these influences are passing away, and those who know
something of current Dutch belles-lettres can realize best how
imperatively a ploughing up of the phlegmatic tradition of Dutch
thought was required before a new crop of imagination could spring up.
Rejecting the conventional aspects of contemporary Dutch literature, I
will now attempt to give some sketch of the present situation as it
appears to a foreign critic observing the field without prejudice. The
latest novelist of great importance was Madame Gertrude
Bosboom-Toussaint, who was born in 1821. After having written a long
series of historical romances for nearly forty years, this intelligent
woman and careful writer broke with her own assured public, and took up
the discussion of psychological questions. She treated the problem of
Socialism in Raymond de Schrijnwerker and the status of woman in Majoor
Frans. Madame Bosboom-Toussaint died in 1886, just too early to welcome
the new school of writers, with whom she would probably have had more
sympathy than any of her contemporaries. Her place in popular esteem
was taken for a short time by Miss Opzomer (A. S. C. Wallis), whose
long novels have been translated into English, In dagen van strijd (“In
Troubled Times”) and Vorstengunst (“Royal Favor”). She had genuine
talent, but her style was heavy and tedious. After the new wind began
to blow, although she was still young, she married, went to Hungary,
and gave up writing novels.
Three authors of importance, each, by a curious coincidence, born in
the year 1826, fill up the interval between the old and new generation.
These are Dekker, Busken-Huët, and Vosmaer. Edward Douwes Dekker, whose
novel of Max Havelaar dates from 1858, was a man of exceptional genius.
Bred in the interior of Java, he observed the social conditions of life
in the Dutch Indies as no one else had done, but his one great book
remained a solitary one. He died in 1887 without having justified the
very high hopes awakened by that extraordinary and revolutionary work.
The career of Konrad Busken-Huët was very different. The principal
literary critic of Holland in his generation, he aimed at being the
Sainte-Beuve of the Dutch, and in his early days, as the dreaded
“Thrasybulus” of journalism, he did much to awaken thought. His volumes
of criticism are extremely numerous, and exercised a wholesome
influence during his own time. He died in Paris in April, 1886. These
two writers have had a strong effect on the prose style of the younger
school of essayists and novelists. They lived long enough to observe
the dawn of the new literature, and their relations with the latest
writers were cordial if somewhat reserved.
What Douwes Dekker and Busken-Huët did in prose, was effected in poetry
by Carel Vosmaer. This estimable man, who died in 1888, was well known
throughout Europe as an art-critic and an authority on Rembrandt. In
Holland he was pre-eminent as the soul of a literary newspaper, the
Nederlandsche Spectator, which took an independent line in literary
criticism, and affected to lead public taste in directions less
provincial and old-fashioned than the rest of the Dutch press. Vosmaer
wrote also several volumes of more or less fantastic poetry, a
translation of Homer into alexandrines, and an antiquarian novel,
Amazone, 1881. But Vosmaer’s position was, above all, that of a
precursor. He, and he alone, saw that a new thing must be made in Dutch
poetical literature. He, and he alone, was not satisfied with the
stereotyped Batavian tradition. At the same time Vosmaer was not, it
may be admitted, strong enough himself to found a new school; perhaps
even, in his later days, the Olympian calm which he affected, and a
certain elegant indolence which overcame him, may have made him
unsympathetic to the ardent and the juvenile. At all events, this
singular phenomenon has occurred. He who of all living Dutchmen was,
ten or fifteen years ago, fretting under the poverty of thought and
imagination in his fatherland and longing for the new era to arrive, is
at this moment the one man of the last generation who is most exposed
to that unseemly ferocité des jeunes which is the ugliest feature of
these æsthetic revolutions. I have just been reading, with real pain,
the violent attack on Vosmaer and his influence which has been
published by that very clever young poet, Mr. Willem Kloos (De Nieuwe
Gids, December, 1890). All that cheers me is to know that the whirligig
of time will not forget its revenges, and that, if Mr. Kloos only lives
long enough, he will find somebody, now unborn, to call him a
“bloodless puppet.”
Of one other representative of the transitional period, Marcellus
Emants, I need say little. He wrote a poem, Lilith, and several short
stories. Much was expected of him, but I know not what has been the
result.
The inaugurator of the new school was Jacques Perk, a young poet of
indubitable genius, who was influenced to some degree by Shelley, and
by the Florence of the Dutch Browning, Potgieter. He wrote in 1880 a
Mathilde, for which he could find no publisher, presently died, and
began to be famous on the posthumous issue of his poems, edited by
Vosmaer and Kloos, in 1883.
The sonnets of Perk, like those of Bowles with us a hundred years ago,
were the heralds of a whole new poetic literature. The resistance made
to the young writers who now began to express themselves, and their
experience that all the doors of periodical publication in Holland were
closed to them, led to the foundation in 1885 of De Nieuwe Gids, a
rival to the old Dutch quarterly, De Gids. In this new review, which
has steadily maintained and improved its position, most of the
principal productions of the new school have appeared. The first three
numbers contained De Kleine Johannes (“Little Johnny”), of Dr. Frederik
van Eeden, the first considerable prose-work of the younger generation.
This is a charming romance, fantastic and refined, half symbolical,
half realistic, which deserves to be known to English readers. It has
been highly appreciated in Holland. To this followed two powerful books
by L. van Deyssel, Een Liefde (“A Love”) and De Kleine Republiek (“The
Little Republic”). Van Deyssel has written with great force, but he has
hitherto been the enfant terrible of the school, the one who has
claimed with most insolence to say precisely what has occurred to him
to say. He has been influenced, more than the rest, by the latest
French literature.
While speaking of the new school, it is difficult to restrain from
mentioning others of those whose work in De Nieuwe Gids and elsewhere
has raised hopes of high performance in the future. Jacques van Looy, a
painter by profession, has published, among other things, an
exquisitely finished volume of Proza (“Prose Essays”). Frans Netscher,
who deliberately marches in step with the French realists, is the
George Moore of Holland; he has published a variety of small sketches
and one or two novels. Ary Prins, under the pseudonym of Coopland, has
written some very good studies of life. Among the poets are Willem
Kloos, Albert Verwey, and Herman Gorter, each of whom deserves a far
more careful critical consideration than can here be given to him.
Willem Kloos, indeed, may be considered as the leader of the school
since the death of Perk. It was to Kloos that, in the period from 1880
to 1885, each of the new writers went in secret for encouragement,
criticism, and sympathy. He appears to be a man of very remarkable
character. Violent and passionate in his public utterances, he is
adored by his own colleagues and disciples, and one of the most gifted
of them has told me that “Kloos has never made a serious mistake in his
estimate of the force of a man or of a book.” His writings, however,
are very few, and his tone in controversy is acrid and uncompromising,
as I have already indicated. He remains the least known and the least
liked, though the most powerful, of the band. The member of the new
generation whose verse and prose alike have won most acceptance is,
certainly, Frederik van Eeden. His cycle of lyrical verse, Ellen, 1891,
is doubtless the most exquisite product of recent Dutch literature.
For the peculiar quality which unites in one movement the varied
elements of the school which I have attempted thus briefly to describe,
the name Sensitivism has been invented by one of themselves, by Van
Deyssel. It is a development of impressionism, grafted upon naturalism,
as a frail and exotic bud may be set in the rough basis of a thorn. It
preserves the delicacy of sensation of the one and strengthens it by
the exactitude and conscientiousness of the other, yet without giving
way to the vagaries of impressionism or to the brutality of mere
realism. It selects and refines, it re-embraces Fancy, that maiden so
rudely turned out of house and home by the naturalists; it aims, in
fact, at retaining the best, and nothing but the best, of the
experiments of the French during the last quarter of a century.
Van Deyssel greets L’Argent with elaborate courtesy, with the respect
due to a fallen divinity. He calls his friends in Holland to attend the
gorgeous funeral of naturalism, which is dead; but urges them not to
sacrifice their own living Sensitivism to the imitation of what is
absolutely a matter of past history. It will be seen that Dutch
Sensitivism is not by any means unlike French Symbolism, and we might
expect prose like Mallarmé’s and verse like Moréas’s! As a matter of
fact, however, the Dutch seem, in their general attitude of reserve, to
leave their mother-tongue unassailed, and to be as intelligible as
their inspiration allows them to be.
To one of these writers, however, and to one of the youngest, it is
time that I should turn. The first member of the new Dutch school to be
presented, in the following pages, to English readers, is Louis Marie
Anne Couperus. Of him, as the author of this book, I must give a fuller
biography, although he is still too young to occupy much space by the
record of his achievements. Louis Couperus was born on the 10th of
June, 1863, at the Hague, where he spent the first ten years of his
life. He was then taken in company with his family to Java, and resided
five years in Batavia. Returning to the Hague, where he completed his
education, he began to make teaching his profession, but gradually
drifted into devoting himself entirely to literature. He published a
little volume of verses in 1884, and another, of more importance,
called Orchideeën (“Orchids”), in 1887, Oriental and luscious. But he
has succeeded, as every one allows, much better in prose. His long
novel of modern life in the Hague, called Eline Vere, is an admirable
performance. Of Noodlot (literally to be translated “Fate” or
“Destiny”) our readers will judge for themselves at a later date. Such
is the brief chronicle of a writer from whom much is expected by the
best critics of his own country.
Edmund Gosse.
ELINE VERE.
CHAPTER I.
They were close to each other in the dining-room, which had been turned
into a dressing-room. In front of a mirror stood Frédérique van
Erlevoort, with her hair hanging loose, looking very pale under a thin
layer of powder, her eyebrows blackened with a single stroke of the
pencil.
“Do hurry up, Paul! We shall never get ready,” she said, a little
impatiently, glancing at the clock.
Paul van Raat was kneeling at her feet, and his fingers draped a long
thin veil of crimson and gold in folds from her waist. The gauze hung
like a cloud over the pinkness of her skirt; her neck and arms, white
as snow with the powder, were left free, and sparkled with the glitter
of the chains and necklaces strung across one another.
“Whew, what a draught! Do keep the door shut, Dien!” Paul shouted to an
old servant who was leaving the room with her arms full of dresses.
Through the open door one could see the guests—men in evening dress,
ladies in light costumes: they passed along the azaleas and palms in
the corridor into the large drawing-room; they smiled at the sight of
the old servant, and threw surreptitious glances into the dining-room.
They all laughed at this look behind the scenes. Frédérique alone
remained serious, realizing that she had the dignity of a princess of
antiquity to keep up.
“Do make haste, Paul!” she pleaded. “It’s past half-past eight
already!”
“Yes, yes, Freddie, don’t get nervous; you’re finished,” he answered,
and adroitly pinned a few jewels among the gauze folds of her
draperies.
“Ready?” asked Marie and Lili Verstraeten, coming out of the room where
the stage had been fixed up, a mysterious elevation almost effaced in
semi-darkness.
“Ready,” answered Paul. “And now calmly, please,” he continued, raising
his voice and looking round with an air of command.
The warning was well needed. The three boys and the five girls who did
duty as ladies’-maids, were rushing about the room laughing, shouting,
creating the greatest disorder. In vain Lili tried to save a gilt
cardboard lyre from the hands of the son of the house, a boy twelve
years old, while their two rascally cousins were just on the point of
climbing up a great white cross, which stood in a corner, and was
already yielding under their onslaughts.
“Get away from that cross, Jan and Karel! Give up that lyre, you
other!” roared Paul. “Do look after them, Marie. And now, Bet and Dien,
come here; Bet with the lamp, Dien at the door; all the rest out of the
road! There’s no more room; look on from the garden through the window
of the big drawing-room; you’ll see everything beautifully, at a
distance. Come along, Freddie, carefully, here’s your train.”
“You’ve forgotten my crown.”
“I’ll put it on when you’re posed. Come on.”
The three girls hurried to get away, the boys squatted in a corner of
the room, where they could not be seen, and Paul helped Freddie to
climb on to the stage.
Marie, who, like Lili, was not yet draped, talked through the closed
window with the fireman, who was waiting, muffled up, in the snowy
garden, to let off the Bengal light. A great reflector stared through
the window like a pale, lustreless sun.
“First white, then green, then red,” Marie called out, and the fireman
nodded.
The now deserted dressing-room was dark, barely lit by the lamp which
Bet held in her hand, while Dien stood at the door.
“Carefully, Freddie, carefully,” said Paul.
Frédérique sank down gently into the cushions of the couch; Paul
arranged her draperies, her chains, her hair, her diadem, and placed a
flower here and there.
“Will that do?” she asked with tremulous voice, taking up the pose she
had studied beforehand.
“You’re delicious; beautiful! Now then, Marie, Lili, come here.”
Lili threw herself on the floor, Marie leaned against the couch with
her head at Frédérique’s feet. Paul draped both girls quickly in
coloured shawls and veils, and twisted strings of gems round their arms
and in their hair.
“Marie and Lili, look as if you were in despair. Wring your hands more
than that, Lili! More despair, much more despair! Freddie, more
languishing, turn your eyes up, set your mouth in a sadder expression.”
“Like that?”
Marie screamed.
“Yes, that will do! That’s better; now be quiet, Marie. Is everything
ready?”
“Ready!” said Marie.
Paul arranged one or two more things, a crease, a flower, doubtful
whether everything was right.
“Come, let’s start,” said Lili, who was in a very uncomfortable
position.
“Bet, take away the lamps; Dien, shut that door, and then come here,
both of you, one on each side of the folding doors of the big room.”
They were all in the dark, with beating hearts, while Paul tapped at
the window, and joined the boys in the corner.
Slowly and doubtfully the Bengal light flamed up against the reflector,
the folding doors opened solemnly, a clear white glow lit up the
tableau.
Smiling and bowing, while the conversation suddenly changed into a
muffled murmur, the guests pressed forward into the large drawing-room
and the conservatory, blinded by a burst of light and colour. Men got
out of the way of a couple of laughing girls. In the background boys
climbed on the chairs.
“The death of Cleopatra!” Betsy van Raat read out to Mrs. Van
Erlevoort, who had handed her the programme.
“Splendid! magnificent!” one heard on every side.
Ancient Egypt seemed to have come alive again in the white glow of the
light. Between luxurious draperies something like an oasis could be
perceived, a blue sky, two pyramids, some palms. On her couch,
supported by sphinxes, lay Cleopatra, at the point of death, an adder
curling round her arm. Two slaves were prostrate in despair at her
feet. The parti-coloured vision of oriental magnificence lasted a few
seconds; the poetry of antiquity revived under the eyes of a modern
audience.
“That’s Freddie,” said Betsy. “How lovely!” and she pointed out the
dying queen to Mrs. Van Erlevoort, who was dazzled by all this luxury.
Now, however, the mother recognized her daughter in the beautiful
motionless statue lying before her.
“And that’s Marie, and the other—oh, that’s Lili—irrecognizable! What
beautiful costumes! how elaborate! You see that dress of Lili’s, violet
and silver? I lent her that.”
“How well they do it,” murmured the old lady.
The white glow of the light began to flicker, the doors were closed.
“Splendid, auntie, splendid!” Betsy cried, as Mrs. Verstraeten, the
hostess, passed her.
Twice the tableau was recalled, first in a flood of sea-green, then in
fiery red. Freddie, with her adder, lay immovable, and only Lili
quivered in her forced attitude. Paul looked out from his corner with a
beaming face; everything was going well.
“How quiet Freddie lies! And everything is so rich, and yet not
overdone. Something like a picture of Makart’s,” said Betsy, opening
her feather fan.
“Your daughter is tired of life very early, madam,” lisped young de
Woude van Bergh, bowing towards Mrs. van Erlevoort, Freddie’s mother.
After the third repetition of the tableau Mrs. Verstraeten went to the
dressing-room. She found Frédérique and Lili laughing while they got
out of their Egyptian attire, looking for endless pins in every fold.
Paul and Marie stood on the steps, and, lighted by two of the servants,
pulled Cleopatra’s dress to pieces. Dien fussed about, picking up the
dropped draperies and the fallen chains. The three boys rolled over one
another on a mattress.
“Was it pretty, mamma?” cried Lili.
“Was it pretty, madam?” cried Frédérique, at the same time.
“Beautiful! They would have liked to see it again.”
“What again! I’m nearly dead already,” cried Lili; and she tumbled into
an arm-chair, throwing a great bundle off it upon the floor. Dien gave
way to despair; at that rate she would never get done.
“Lili, rest yourself,” cried Paul, from the top of his steps in the
other room; “you’ll get tired in that attitude. Aunt Verstraeten, tell
Lili to rest herself,” and he threw some coloured carpets off the cords
on which they had been hanging. Dien went on folding up.
“Dien, white sheets and white tulle this way, quick,” cried Marie. Dien
misunderstood her, and came back with the wrong article.
Then all began to talk at once, and every one asked for something else,
and there arose a very Babel of confusion. At the top of the staircase
Paul made a gesture of despair, but no one took any notice.
“I am utterly worn out!” said he, crouching down in impotent rage. “No
one does anything. It all falls to my lot!”
Madame Verstraeten, having in her turn begged Lili to rest herself, had
gone to tell the servants not to forget the youthful artistes. As a
result, the men soon came in, carrying big trays laden with glasses of
wine and lemonade, pastry and sandwiches. The confusion only increased.
The three boys were served with various good things on their mattress,
over which one of the servants spilt a stream of lemonade. Up flew
Marie, in a torrent of rage, and with Dien’s assistance quickly pulled
the mattress away from under the boys, into the next room.
“Frédérique, do give a hand there,” cried Paul, in a voice shrill with
irritation. As for keeping any further sort of control over the three
lads, that he had given up as hopeless. Ere long, however, the noisy
young customers were driven, loudly shrieking and stumbling one over
another, out of the room by Dien.
Then there was a little more quietness, but everybody was doing
something, except Lili.
“There’s a muddle!” she muttered to herself. Then she sat down and
brushed her hair, wavy and blond cendré, and that done, she took up her
powder-puff, and sprinkled a snowy layer over her arms.
Dien returned, very much out of breath, shaking her head, and with a
kindly smile on her face.
“Dien, white sheets and tulle quickly,” Freddie, Marie, and Paul all
cried together. Paul came down from his place on the stairs, placed the
big cross, the weight of which nearly crushed him, on the platform, and
at the foot he laid the mattress and a snug arrangement of pillows.
“Dien, white sheets and tulle; all the tulle and muslin you can find.”
And Dien and the other servants brought it, one soft mass of white.
Madame Verstraeten sat down beside her niece, Betsy van Raat. She was
married to Paul’s elder brother.
“What a pity Eline is not here! I had so depended on her to fill up the
long intervals with a little music. She sings so nicely.”
“She was really not feeling well, aunt. She is very sorry, you may be
sure, that she can’t be here, in honour of uncle’s birthday.”
“What is the matter with her?”
“I don’t quite know. Nerves, I think.”
“She really ought not to give herself up to these fits. With a little
energy she could easily get over that nervousness.”
“Well, you see, aunt, this nervousness is the modern bane of young
women, it is the fin de siècle epidemic,” said Betsy, with a faint
smile.
Madame Verstraeten sighed and nodded.
“By the bye,” said she, “I suppose the girls will be too tired
to-morrow evening to go to the opera. Would you care to have our box?”
Betsy reflected for a moment.
“I have a little dinner to-morrow, aunt; but still I should like the
box. It is only the Ferelyns and Emilie and Georges who are coming, but
the Ferelyns are going early because little Dora is not well, so I
could easily go with Emilie and Georges, and be in time to see an act.”
“Well, that is settled then. I shall send you the tickets,” said Madame
Verstraeten rising.
Betsy rose too. George de Woude van Bergh was just about to speak to
her, but she took no notice. She thought him a terrible bore that
evening; he had spoken to her twice, and each time said the same thing,
something about the tableaux. No; there was no conversation in him at
all. And to-morrow night too she would have to meet him again; what an
enjoyable prospect! Aunt’s box was quite a godsend. There stood her
husband, in the conservatory, together with some gentlemen, Mr.
Verstraeten, Mr. Hovel, Otto and Etienne van Erlevoort, they talking
and he listening, his heavy body crushing the leaves of a palm, a
somewhat stupid smile playing about his expressionless, good-humoured
face. Oh, how he bored her! She thought him insufferable. And what a
figure he cut in a dress coat! In his great-coat at all events he had a
manly appearance.
Walking towards him she said, “Do say something to somebody, Henk. You
look like a fixture in that corner there. Can’t you move? you do appear
to enjoy yourself. Your necktie is all on one side.”
He muttered something and fumbled about his neck. She turned away and
was soon at her ease in the midst of a noisy little group. Even
melancholy Madame van Ryssel, Freddie’s sister, formed one of them.
Emilie de Woude was unmarried and bore her thirty-eight years with an
enviable grace: her pleasant, animate features charmed all who met her.
She was much like her younger brother George, but about her there was
something genial—a great contrast to his studied ceremoniousness.
Attracted by her amusing anecdotes, Emilie sat, the central figure in a
joyous little group. She was just telling them of her recent fall on a
patch of frozen snow, at the feet of a gentleman who had remained
motionless, staring at her, instead of helping her to her feet.
“Just fancy my muff on the left, my hat on the right, myself in the
centre, and right in front of me a man staring at me with open-mouthed
amazement.”
There was the tinkling of a bell; Emilie broke off her story and ran
away from her audience. The folding doors were opened, and there was a
general rush to the front.
“I can’t see at all,” said Emilie, rising on tiptoe.
“Come here on my chair, miss,” cried a young girl behind her.
“You are a little dear, Toos, really. Will you allow me to pass by,
Madame van der Stoor? your daughter has come to my aid.”
Madame van der Stoor, who, under a pseudonym, dabbled much in poetry,
moved a step back, with an acrid smile about her lips. She felt a
little disgusted at Emilie’s sans-gêne; she herself never made an
attempt to get a better view, it was not the thing to show an
unfashionable interest in the entertainment.
Emilie and Cateau van der Stoor were soon standing on one chair,
holding each other’s waists.
“Oh, how pretty!” cried Emilie, and then remained silent in rapt
attention. From out of the billows of a foaming sea arose a rough-hewn
cross of marble whiteness, round the base of which a fragile fair woman
clung in mortal agony, whilst a heaving wave of tulle covered her feet;
and with the fierceness of despair her slender fingers grasped the Rock
of Ages.
“It is Lili,” was heard here and there.
“How graceful she is, that Lili!” whispered Emilie to Cateau. “But how
can she hang there like that? How can she bear it so long?”
“She is surrounded with pillows; but still it must be very tiring,”
said Toos. “Of course you can’t see anything of the pillows, miss.”
“Of course not. But it is very nice; I have never seen anything so
poetic before.... Say, Toos, I thought you were going to take part?”
“So I am, but only in the last tableau, with Etienne van Erlevoort. I
shall have to be going soon to dress.”
Quickly she got down from her chair. The light grew dim, the folding
doors were closed. Applause rang throughout the room. But ere long the
white vision of surging foam was repeated, and an angel hovered over
the cross, and held out her hand to the swooning woman.
Stronger and stronger grew the applause.
“Of course Marie cannot keep a serious face again,” said Emilie,
shaking her head. “She will burst out laughing in a moment.”
And really something like a smile seemed to be trembling about the
little mouth of the angel, the nervous twitching of the eyebrows
contrasting very oddly with the pathetic expression of her features.
Although it was evident enough that the artistes were tired, not one of
them being able to remain perfectly motionless, the last tableau was
received with enthusiastic cheers. It was encored again and again. The
tableau consisted of an allegorical representation of the Five Senses,
the parts being taken by the four young girls, attired in rich
dresses—cloth of gold, brocade ermine—and by Etienne, Frédérique’s
youngest brother, who, in the garb of a minstrel, represented the sense
of Hearing.
The tableaux were concluded.
It was now two o’clock, and Mr. and Madame Verstraeten received the
thanks of their guests as they left them.
“Do you remain to supper with Cateau?” said Madame Verstraeten to
Madame van der Stoor; “quite sans cérémonie, you know.”
Madame van der Stoor, however, feared it was too late; she would just
wait for her daughter.
The artistes who had doffed their costumes entered the room and were
overwhelmed with the thanks of those guests still remaining, while
Emilie played a march on the piano. As an intimate friend she stayed to
supper with van Raat and Betsy.
“You are coming to-morrow, are you not, Toos? the photographer is
coming at two,” said Marie.
“Yes,” said Cateau, “I shall be here.”
Utterly worn out, the artistes flung themselves down in the comfortable
chairs in the conservatory, where a dainty little supper was served.
“What was prettiest? What was prettiest?” all cried together
Then there was a general expression of opinion, to the accompaniment of
clattering plates and forks, and the jingling of glasses.