The Later Life Part 16

"But what did you say?"

"Nothing--after your friendly encouragement--but what was rude."

"I have no great reverence for t.i.tles," she said, quickly.

She said it so suddenly and spontaneously that it surprised even herself; and she asked herself, the next second:

"Why do I say that? And is it true, now? Or is it not true?"

She herself did not know.

"You haven't, perhaps, but Hans has.... But I was rude especially because, after you had asked me so kindly and graciously, I still would not talk about my life."

"But you were to do that when we knew each other better...."

"People never know each other well. Still...."

"What?"

"I don't know.... May I tell you something about myself from time to time? Perhaps it won't interest you as much as, from politeness, you wish me to think; but ... when I've done it ... I shall feel relieved.... Heavens, how difficult words are!"

"And yet you are accustomed to speak for hours!..."

"That's a different thing. Then some one else is speaking inside me. When I myself am speaking, in everyday life, I find words difficult."

"Then don't make the least effort, but tell me ... gradually."

"What did Addie think? I should like to know."

"He was disappointed, but he did not say much."

"He's a serious boy, isn't he? Tell me about him."

She felt no more fear and talked about Addie. Brauws laughed, gently and kindly, at the pride that kept shining from her:

"I was a serious child too," he said.

And she understood that he was making an effort, in order to talk about himself.

"I was a strange child. Behind our house was a pine-forest, with hills in it; and behind that a little stream. I used to wander all day long in those woods, over the hills and beside the stream. They would miss me at home and look for me and find me there. But gradually they stopped being frightened, because they understood that I was only playing. I used to play by myself: a lonely, serious child. It's true I played at highwaymen and pirates; and yet my games were very serious, not like a child's ... I still feel a thrill when I think of that strange childhood of mine.... I used to play there in those woods and beside that stream, in Holland; but sometimes I imagined that I was playing at pirates and highwaymen in America, or in the tropics. And in my childish imagination the whole Dutch landscape changed. It became a roaring river, with great boulders, from which the water fell foaming, and very dense, tropical foliage, such as I had seen in pictures; and great flowers, red and white, grew in the enormous trees. Then my fancy changed and I was no longer a pirate or robber, but became ... an oriental prince. I don't know why I, a pure-bred Dutch boy, should have had that strange vision of the east, of something tropical, there, on those pine-covered hills and beside that little stream.... It was always like that afterwards: the tropical landscape, the spreading cocoa-trees, the broad plantain-leaves and the huge flowers, white and red ... and then I often thought, 'Now I will find her.' Whom I wanted to find I didn't know; but I would run down the hills and roam beside the little river and seek and seek ... and my seeking for 'her' became strange and fantastic: I, an oriental, was seeking for a fairy, or a princess, I forget which. It seemed to me as if she were running there ahead of me, very white and fragile: a little child, as I was a child; a girl, as I was a boy; in white and decked with the flowers, white and red ... And my seeking for the princess, for the fairy, for the little white, fragile girl became so intense that I sometimes thought I had found her, found her in my imagination; and then I would speak to her, as in a dream.... Until ... until I woke from my waking dream and remembered that I had been wandering away from home for hours, that my mother would be anxious, that I was not fit to be seen, that I looked like a dirty street-boy, that I had only been dreaming, that there were no white or red flowers around me ... and then I would cry, boy of thirteen though I was, pa.s.sionately, as if I should go mad.... And I have never told all this to any one, but I am telling it to you, because I want to ask you: Addie is not like that, is he? When you come to think of it, how children differ, at that age!"

She sat on her chair, very pale, and could not speak.

"My parents did not know that I was like that; and I told n.o.body about my fancies. I went to school, in the meantime, and was just the usual sort of schoolboy. I was cruel to animals, a vulgar little rascal, in the meantime; and it was only in those free hours that I wandered and dreamt. And, when I now look at your boy, who is like a little man, I sometimes think, how is it possible that he is like this and that I was like that, at the same age?"

She made an effort to smile.

"So you see," he said, "gradually perhaps I shall be able to tell you something about my life ... at least, if it interests you...."

It seemed as if his first confession had in fact given him a greater facility, for of his own accord he now went on talking: how, when he grew a year or two older, he had shaken those fancies from him as so much child's-play and devoted himself seriously to every kind of study, until he went to the university, where he not only read law, but really took up all the other faculties in between, while at the same time he felt attracted by every branch of knowledge:

"I was a ready learner and a quick reader; I remembered everything; and I had a sort of fever to know everything in the world, to know all there was to know and learn. That I afterwards went and travelled goes almost without saying. And then...."

It was at this moment that Van der Welcke entered. He was at first surprised, almost annoyed to see Brauws; but his warm friendship gained the upper hand:

"Hullo, anarchist!" he said. "Is that you?"

But it was very late; Addie came in; it was close upon dinner-time. Brauws said good-bye and promised to come again and fetch Van der Welcke in a "machine;" and that made up for everything to Van der Welcke.

CHAPTER XII

It was a howling winter night of storm and rain. Addie was doing his lessons after dinner; and Van der Welcke had gone to sit by him with a book "because there was such a draught in his room." Constance was all alone. And she loved the loneliness of it just then. She had taken up a book, a piece of needlework; but first one and then the other had slipped from her hands. And, in the soft light of the lace-shaded lamps, she lay back in her chair and listened to the melancholy storm outside, which seemed to be rushing past the house like some monstrous animal. She was in a mood of vague excitement, of mingled nervousness and depression; and, in her loneliness, she let this strange feeling take possession of her and gave herself up to the quite new luxury of thinking about herself, wondering dimly:

"Does that sort of thing really exist?"

She found no answer to her question; she heard only the storm raging outside, the hiss of its lash round the groaning trees; and those mournful voices of the night did not include the mystic voice which alone could have supplied the answer.

"Does that sort of thing really exist?" she asked herself again.

And, in that vague emotion, she was conscious of a sense of fear, of a rising anxiety, an increasing terror. When, after a lull, the storm burst into sudden fury again, she started violently, as she had started when Brauws' hand rang the bell....

With each shriller howl of the raging storm she started; and each fresh alarm left her so nervous and so strangely despondent that she could not understand herself....

"Does that sort of thing really exist then?" she asked herself for the third time.

And the question seemed each time to echo through her soul like a refrain. She could never have thought, suspected or imagined that such things really existed. She did not remember ever reading about them or ever talking to anybody about them. It had never been her nature to attach much importance to the strange coincidences of life, because they had never harmonized in her life with those of other lives; at least, she did not know about them, did not remember them.... For a moment, it flashed through her mind that she had walked as the blind walk, all her life, in a pitch-dark night ... and that to-day suddenly a light had shone out before her and a ruddy glow had filtered through her closed eyelids.

"No," she thought, "in those things I have always been very much of a woman; and I have never thought about them. If by chance I ever heard about them, they did not attract me. Then why do they strike me so forcibly now? And why do I feel so strange?..."

The wind suddenly cried aloud, like the martyred soul of some monster; and she started, but forced herself to concentrate her thoughts:

"He can't know," she thought. "What can he know, to make him speak deliberately ... of those childish years? No, he can't know; and I felt that he did not know, that he was only speaking in order to compare himself with Addie to Addie's mother, in a burst of confidence. He is a man of impulses, I think.... No, there was nothing at the back of his words ... and he knows nothing, nothing of my own early years.... We are almost the same age: he is four years older than Henri. When he was a child, I was a child. When he was dreaming, I was dreaming. Does that sort of thing really exist? Or is it my fancy, some unconscious vein of poetry inside me, that is making me imagine all this?... Hush, hush ... it is becoming absurd! It is all very pretty and charming in children: they can have their day-dreams; and a young man and a young girl might perhaps give a thought to them afterwards, in a romantic moment; but, at my age, it all becomes absurd, utterly absurd.... And of course it's not there: it's nothing but a chance coincidence. I won't think about it any more.... And yet ... I have never felt before as I do now. Oh, that feeling as if I had always been straying, blindly, with my eyes shut, in a dark night! Have I never had that feeling before, that feeling as if nothing had really existed, as if I had never lived yet, as if I wanted to live once, just once, in my life?... But no, it can never be like that, it can't happen like that. No, that sort of thing does not exist. It is just our imagination when we are feeling restless and dissatisfied ... or when we are tired and feel that we have no energy ... or whatever it is that makes us more easily affected by all those strange things which we never suspected.... Why did I not at once laugh and say that, as a child, as a little girl, I myself...? No, no, I simply couldn't say it; and it is better that I didn't say it.... Now I am getting frightened at my own silliness. It is all very well for young people, for a boy and a girl, to have these fancies and even talk of them, in a romantic moment, but at my age it is simply ridiculous.... It is so long ago, so long ago; and, with all those years in between, it would be ridiculous to refer to poetic dreams and fancies which can only be spoken of when one is very young.... I sha'n't speak of them ... and I shall never tell him. Wouldn't it be ... utterly ridiculous?... Yet it does seem ... it does seem to me that, after those years--when, as Gerrit said, I was a dear little child, playing in the river at Buitenzorg, making up stories about fairies and poetries, [3] decked with flowers, red and white--that, after those years, I lost something of myself, something romantic that was in me then, something living that was in me then, and that, since then, I have never lived, never lived a single moment, as if all sorts of vain and worldly things had blinded me.... Oh, what thoughts are these and why do I have them? I won't think them; and yet ... and yet, after those wonderful, fairy years, it was all over ... all over.... What do I remember of the years after? Dances, b.a.l.l.s, society, vanity and artificiality.... Yes, it was all over by then.... And now surely that childish spark hasn't revived, surely my soul isn't trying, isn't wanting to live again? No, no, it can't do that: the years are lying all around it, the silent, dead years of vanity, of blundering, of longing, of death in life.... And besides, if my soul did want to live again, it would be too late now, for everything; and it doesn't want to either.... It's only because of those strange coincidences, it's only because he spoke like that ... and because his voice it attractive ... and because I am sitting here alone ... and because the storm is blowing so terribly, as though it wanted to open the windows and come inside.... No, hush, hush ... I won't give way to those thoughts again, never again ... and, even if that sort of thing does really exist, it is only for those who are young and who see life with the glamour of youth ... and not for me, not for me. ... Oh, I couldn't have told him about myself when I was a child, for it would have appeared to me as if, by telling him, I was behaving like ... a woman offering herself!... But hush, hush: all this is absurd ... for me ... now; and I will stop thinking of it.... But how lonely I am, sitting here ... and how the wind howls, how the wind howls!... The lamps are flickering; and it's just as if hands were rattling the shutters, trying hard to open them.... Oh, I wish those lamps wouldn't flicker so!... And I feel as if the windows were going to burst open and the curtains fly up in the air.... I'm frightened.... Hark to the trees cracking and the branches falling.... Hear me, O G.o.d, hear me! I'm frightened, I'm frightened.... Is this then the first night that I see something of myself, as if I were suddenly looking back, on a dark path that lies behind me, a dark path on which all the pageant of vanity has grown dim? For it does seem as if, right at the end of the road, I saw, as in a vision, the sun; trees with great leaves and blossoms red and white; and a little fairy child, in white, with flowers in her hair, standing on a boulder, in a river, beckoning mysteriously to her brothers, who do not understand. O my G.o.d, does that sort of thing really, really exist ... or is it only because I never, never heard the wind blow like this before?..."

These thoughts, these doubts, these wonderings flashed through her; and, because she had never heard herself thinking and doubting and wondering so swiftly, she grew still more frightened in her loneliness, while the storm howled more furiously outside. And the silent lamps flickered so violently in her drawing-room--in a sort of pa.s.sionate draught--that she suddenly rushed staggering to the door. She went up the stairs; and it was as though the storm would break the little villa to pieces with one blow of its angry wing....

She went to Addie's room; her hand was on the door-handle; she turned it. She saw her boy working at his table and Van der Welcke smoking in the easy-chair. She gave a start, because he was there, and she looked deathly pale, with terrified, quivering eyes.

"Mamma!"

"My boy, I'm frightened; listen to the storm!..."

"Yes, did you ever see such weather?" asked Van der Welcke, through the clouds of his cigarette.

"Are you frightened, Mamma?"