The Ferelyns occupied the upper part of a small house over a grocer’s
shop in the Hugo de Grootstraat. There they lived in a cramped,
depressing atmosphere of economy; Frans had had but little left him by
his parents, and he was therefore compelled with his wife to live on
small salary while on furlough. They settled in the Hague, the city in
which both of them had lived since their childhood, where they had
first met one another, where they had expected still to find their
former friends and their old associations, although Frans had expressed
the opinion that they would do better to make their stay in a smaller
town. But Jeanne’s father, Mr. van Tholen, was also living in the Hague
on his pension, leading a solitary life, little visited by his friends,
and gradually forsaken by his children, as they married or went into
situations. It was therefor that Jeanne persuaded her husband,
notwithstanding their slender purse, to stay in the Hague. She would be
economical, she promised, and she kept her word, although by nature she
was not much inclined that way.
So they remained in the Hague, in spite of many disappointments. In the
four years that they had not seen each other, Jeanne found her father
much aged, more discontented and irritable than she had known him
before. The days of yore were past and gone, thought she: her happy
youth in the old, sunny home, with her mother and her brothers and
sisters; her innocent pranks with school-mates; her girlish dreams
under the lilac and jasmine in their garden; her engagement days, full
of ideal fantasies, with Frans. The souvenirs which she had hoped to
find in Holland were scattered far and wide like shrivelled leaves, and
much as she had longed in the burning Indies for the damp and fog of
her fatherland, she now, bowed down under her disappointments and under
her forced economy, looked forward to a return to that matter-of-fact,
easy-going life she had enjoyed in the Kadoe with her cow, her fowls,
and her goat. And yet, plucky in spite of the thousand and one little
troubles that beset her daily life, she struggled on. Doctor Reyer
visited her Dora every other day; but she fancied she saw a nervous
haste in the popular young physician which made him count every minute
of his visit. He stayed a moment, laid his ear on Dora’s little chest,
assured her that her cough was going, impressed upon Jeanne not to
allow the child to leave the house, and left in his brougham, whilst he
made a note in his pocket-book with his gold-cased pencil, and glanced
through the list of his patients. Frans, with his severe headaches and
his low fever, he had referred to a physician in Utrecht, to whom he
had minutely described the patient’s case; and Frans had gone to
Utrecht and returned, much dissatisfied at the vague way in which the
physician had spoken to him. Whenever Doctor Reyer came to visit Dora,
Frans went out, feeling annoyed with him and his Utrecht physician, who
between them had been unable to cure him; and he buried his headaches
and his continued cold shiverings in a gruff solitude within the four
walls of his little private office on the first floor. Something like a
twinge of conscience came over him when he heard Jeanne up-stairs
talking to the doctor; and Dora, in her peevish little way, was crying
in her efforts to escape the ordeal of examination; but he did not
move; all doctors were quacks who could talk very wisely, but could not
cure him when one was ill.
Jeanne conducted the doctor down-stairs, talking the while, and Frans
in his office heard Reyer ask after him, heard her say something and
call the servant to show him out. Then, as the carriage rolled away,
she came in.
“Do I disturb you?” she asked, in her soft, subdued voice.
“No, certainly not; why?”
“Why did you not come up-stairs for a moment, Frans? Reyer asked after
you.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“What is the use?” he said with irritation. “They send you to their
Leiden or Utrecht celebrities, who make you pay a tientje [1] for a two
minutes’ talk.”
“But what do you want, then? You can’t expect to be cured by magic of a
complaint from which you have suffered for the last two years. I think
you ought to do more for your health than you have done in the three
months we have been here. You have come to Europe for that purpose,
have you not?”
“Certainly; but first I must find some one in whom I can place more
confidence than Reyer. Reyer is a doctor à la mode, a recommendation of
the van Raats, very polite and gentlemanly, but much too superficial
and hasty for me. Why, he is gone ere you have seen him.”
“But you don’t speak to him frankly. I ask him about Dora and force him
to stay longer, and really, now that he knows us better, he seems to
take greater interest in us. And everybody says he is clever; it is not
only the van Raats who believe in him.”
“Well, I shall see; there’s plenty of time yet. Sometimes you are just
like a drop of water on a stone, continually drip, drip, drip. You are
for ever hammering, hammering away at that doctor story,” he cried,
impatient and dissatisfied with himself, and he opened his
writing-case, as though to give her to understand that he had no more
time.
She went, and gently closed the door behind her. Up-stairs in the
nursery she found their only servant, a young girl of sixteen, in a
dirty apron and unkempt hair, making the beds; while Dora, with the two
boys Wim and Fritsje, were playing in the next room.
“I will close the door, then you can air the room, Mietje,” said
Jeanne, and she closed the folding doors, and with a smile sat down
beside the children, at a table near the window, covered all over with
little socks, pinafores, frocks, all to be repaired. Oh! what tiresome,
wasteful children they were, to be sure! She sighed, and her small thin
hand fumbled about the things, and her eyes filled with tears. Why was
she not stronger? how she would have enjoyed getting through all her
household duties! Now she found it so hard to lift herself out of the
listlessness into which she felt herself sinking, as into a yawning
abyss; from the lifeless languor which seemed to encircle her as with
velvet arms; and yet—there was so much to be done she durst not yield
herself up to idle dreaming, nor rake up her old, wide-scattered
recollections, like so many burnt-out cinders, and forget herself in
her longing for the illusions of former days. Stern reality stared her
in the face, in the shape of a great rent in Dora’s woollen frock, and
in the washing that was waiting to be counted before being sent to the
laundry.
And yet even now, while her hand went fumbling about the little socks
and vests, she let herself be drawn deeper and deeper into the soft
down of her listlessness; she bestirred herself with no energy to set
about her work, and she did not hear the shrill quarrelling voices of
the children.
She would so gladly have infused a flood of sunshine, a wealth of
harmony into her humble home; but she was no fairy, and she felt
herself so weak even now, and already no longer able to withstand
life’s small troubles, so that she dared not hope for a much rosier
future. Indeed, when she thought of the future at all, it was not
without fear and trembling, as a vague terror shaped itself into an
indefinable form before her mind’s eye, so dread and awful that she
could find no words with which to depict it.
Her head fell on her hand, and now and again a tear dropped on the
linen in front of her. Oh! how sweet would be her slumbers, if but the
caress of one who loved her might be hers, one in whose affection she
would have felt herself safe from all danger! And she thought of her
Frans, and how he had asked her to be his in their garden, under the
blossoming lilac; and now she worried him, and had become like a drop
of water on a stone—drip, drip, drip.
Ah! she knew it; she had not made him happy; she was a great
disappointment to him, but it was not her fault if he thought to find
more in her than she possessed; a stupid, simple, weak little woman,
with a great need of much, very much love and tenderness, and with
something of sentimental poesy in her little soul.
And sighing, she raised herself, and told the children not to make so
much noise, papa was down-stairs and had a headache.
Then she looked about on the table after her work-basket, but she had
left it in the sitting-room, and so she ordered Dora, like a big girl,
to look after her little brothers for a while. She usually spoke to the
child as though she were a grown-up daughter, and Dora often helped
her, very pleased that ma found her so useful. And Jeanne went
down-stairs to the sitting-room, and began looking for the basket, when
Frans came in.
He had heard her coming down-stairs, and wanted to see her for a
moment, as a feeling of self-reproach overmastered him. He approached
her unawares, softly, on the tips of his slippered feet. He took her
gently by the arms.
She felt frightened for a moment, and when she looked up she saw in his
eyes that very tenderness for which she longed, and with a little smile
in which there almost lurked something like fear, he asked her—
“Are you angry?”
Her eyes suddenly grew moist, and she nestled her head on his shoulder,
and laid her arm round his neck, and shook her head.
“Really not?”
Again she shook her head, laughing amid her falling tears, and she
closed her weeping eyes and felt his moustache on her lips as he kissed
her. How quickly he repented when he had been unkind, and what a luxury
it was to forgive him!
“Come, don’t cry then; it wasn’t so bad as all that.”
She gave a sigh of relief and clung closer to him.
“If only you are a little gentle and kind to me—oh, then I feel myself
so—so strong, then I feel equal to anything.”
“Darling little woman!”
Again he kissed her, and under the warm love of his lips she forgot the
icy cold of the fireless room, which caused her to shiver as she clung
to his arms.