On the stairs shone the speckless landlady, a cheerful creature in
black cap and white apron, her bodice laced with ornamental green and
red ribbons. She gave a cry of joy, and flew to meet him, broom in
hand. "Welcome home, Heer Spinoza! How glad the little ones will be
when they get back from school! There's a pack of knaves been
slandering thee right and left; some of them tried to pump Henri, but
we sent them away with fleas in their ears--eh, Henri?"
Henri smiled sheepishly.
"Most pertinacious of all was a party of three--an old man and his
daughter and a young man. They came twice, very vexed to find thee
away, and feigning to be old friends of thine from Amsterdam; at least
not the young man--his lament was to miss the celebrated scholar he
had been taken to see. A bushel of questions they asked, but not many
pecks did they get out of _me_."
A flush had mantled upon Spinoza's olive cheek. "Did they give any
name?" he asked with unusual eagerness.
"It ends in Ende--that stuck in my memory."
"Van den Ende?"
"Or suchlike."
"The daughter was--beautiful?"
"A goddess!" put in the painter.
"Humph!" said the vrouw. "Give _me_ the young man. A cold marble
creature is not my idea of a goddess."
"'Tis a Greek goddess," said Spinoza with labored lightness. "They are
indeed old friends of mine--saving the young man, who is doubtless a
pupil of the old. He is a very learned philologist, this Dr. van den
Ende: he taught me Latin--"
"And Greek goddesses," flashed the vrouw affectionately.
Spinoza tried to say something, but fell a-coughing instead, and began
to ascend to his room. He was agitated: and it was his principle to
quit society whenever his emotions threatened to exceed philosophical
moderation.
"Wait! I have thy key," cried the goodwife, pursuing him. "And oh!
what dust in thy room! No wonder thou art troubled with a phthisis!"
"Thou didst not arrange anything?" he cried in alarm.
"A flick with a feather-brush, as I took in thy letters--no more; my
hand itched to be at thy papers, but see! not one is in order!"
She unlocked his door, revealing a little room in which books and
papers mingled oddly with the bedroom furniture and the tools and
bench of his craft. There were two windows with shabby red curtains.
On nails hung a few odd garments, one of which, the doublet anciently
pierced by the fanatic's dagger, merely served as a memento, though
not visibly older than the rest of his wardrobe. "Who puts a mediocre
article into a costly envelope?" was the philosopher's sartorial
standpoint. Over the mantel (on which among some old pipes lay two
silver buckles, his only jewellery) was pinned a charcoal sketch of
Masaniello in shirt-sleeves, with a net on his shoulder, done by
Spinoza himself, and obviously with his own features as model: perhaps
in some whimsical moment when he figured himself as an intellectual
revolutionary. A portfolio that leaned against a microscope contained
black and white studies of some of his illustrious visitors, which
caught happily their essential features without detail. The few other
wall-pictures were engravings by other hands. Spinoza sat down on his
truckle-bed with a great sigh of content.
"_Desideratoque acquiescimus lecto_," he murmured. Then his eye roving
around: "My spiders' webs are gone!" he groaned.
"I could not disarrange aught in sweeping _them_ away!" deprecated the
goodwife.
"Thou hast disarranged _me_! I have learnt all my wisdom from watching
spiders!" he said, smiling.
"Nay, thou jestest."
"In no wise. The spider and the fly--the whole of life is there. 'Tis
through leaving them out that the theologies are so empty. Besides,
who will now catch the flies for my microscope?"
"I will not believe thou wouldst have the poor little flies caught by
the great big spiders. Never did I understand what Pastor Cordes
prated of turning the other cheek till I met thee."
"Nay, 'tis not my doctrine. Mine is the worship of joy. I hold that
the effort to preserve our being is virtue."
"But thou goest to church sometimes?"
"To hear a preacher."
"A strange motive." She added musingly: "Christianity is not then
true?"
"Not true for me."
"Then if thou canst not believe in it, I will not."