The Twilight of the Souls Part 24

There was nothing around him but the everyday circ.u.mstances of an after-dinner chat in Constance' drawing-room, in the soft, cosy light of the lace-shaded lamps, while the wind outside blew from a great distance and howled moaning round the little house.... In his easy-chair, with the gla.s.s of grog mixed by Constance at his side, he was just a big, burly, light-haired fellow in his mufti; and his movements were brisk, his parade-voice sounded loud.... His wife was sitting there, gentle and placid, the quiet, resigned little mother; the children were asleep at home. Oh, his children, how he loved them!... Certainly, all of that existed, it was no phantasm, it was most certainly the truth; but behind that truth lay hidden another truth; and that was why it seemed a phantasm, his outward life as an officer, a husband, a father, while the real truth was what he always kept to himself: his strange gloom; the great worm that gnawed at him; his hot, racing blood; his sentimental and melancholy soul; that wriggling horror in his marrow; that recrudescence of sensuality in his blood.... The quiet, kindly words fell softly round the room, like small, sweet things between a brother and a sister who still have sympathy and affection for each other amid the inevitable slow moving apart of the family-spheres; but he--though he talked, though he was lively, though he cracked joke--he saw Pauline before him, as he had held her in his arms the day before.... Heavens, he couldn't help it: why was he built like that? A handsome woman, standing before his eyes, drove him crazy! Well, for years, all the years of his marriage, he had remained sober and sedate, but he had gradually begun to feel that this sedateness did not really suit him. It was no good his thinking it rotten; it was no good his telling himself that he was a husband and a father--the father of such jolly children too--and that he oughtn't to think of those things, that all that sort of thing belonged to his youth, to which he had said good-bye. It had been all very well to say it. But a thousand memories had gone curling into the air before his eyes, like swarming spirals; and, when he met Pauline again--by accident?--he had made an appointment with her for the next evening, in her room, cursing himself as he did so and swearing at her, with a torrent of rough words.... No, n.o.body had kissed him like that for years! Besides, he was sentimental. Didn't he himself know, d.a.m.n it, what a sentimental a.s.s he was? Didn't he know that sometimes, when he read a book or saw a play, when Mamma told him her troubles, as she had now got into the habit of doing, when he saw Dorine and felt sorry for her: didn't he himself know, d.a.m.n it, that he was a sentimental a.s.s and that he must pull himself together and not let the tears come to his eyes.... And Pauline, whether she did or did not know how sentimental he was: he couldn't see as far as that--not only kissed him as no one else did and knew how to drive him crazy, but she also worked upon his sentimentality. Was she making a fool of him, or did she mean all she said? He had never been able to trust those eyes of hers: they always retained a glint of mockery; but, when she said to him, "Men ... men are all beasts, every one of them, Gerrit ... except you....

You're not ... you're so nice and gentle ... however rough you may be,"

then she had him by his sentimental side and he did not know how to shake her off....

"I tell you, Gerrit, that's why I was so glad to see you again ... oh, I _was_ so glad, Gerrit!"

He had cursed her, asked why she didn't go after a young, rich fellow rather than him, who was neither young nor rich; but her golden eyes had gleamed and she had merely repeated:

"Oh, men are all beasts, Gerrit ... beasts, beasts ... every one of them!"

And--perhaps that was the stupidest thing of all--he had believed her, believed that he was the only one whom she did not think a beast; and, when a woman got hold of him by his crazy side and his sentimental side as well, then he did not find it easy to wrench himself away: oh, he knew himself well enough for that!

Not one of them knew it, you see, while he sat talking so quietly with them, while he sipped his grog with enjoyment, his legs stretched out wide in front of him, and while he heard the raging wind outside come howling up from the distance.... And now Paul came in, rubbing his hands: he had driven up in a cab, declaring that he was too old to walk from the Houtstraat to the Kerkhoflaan in that weather and through such dirty streets. Why didn't he take the tram? Thank you for nothing: was there ever such a filthy conveyance as a tram, in wind and rain too? And a volley of sparkling witticisms flashed out for a moment: tirades against his dirty country, where it was always, always raining; against people, against the whole world, all dirty alike.... When he sat down, he looked round, with a glance that had become a second habit, to see that there were no bits of fluff on his chair. And he at once ceased talking, the battery of his words exhausted, sat still, not thinking it worth while to talk, because n.o.body appreciated what he said. Gerrit heard Constance chide him, in her gentle voice, in a sisterly but serious fashion, because he was growing so elderly, shutting himself up, giving way to his mania for cleanliness and for thinking everything dirty. He answered with a couple of whimsical sallies....

Then Constance said that she had asked Dorine also, but that Dorine did not seem to be coming; and that Aunt Ruyvenaer was too tired, because she was fixing up the new small house with the girls. And Gerrit felt--now that Mamma was getting old, very old--how Constance was trying to keep the elements of the family together in her place. Not in such a wide and comprehensive manner as Mamma used to do--and still did--but with some measure of sympathy. Ah, she wouldn't succeed, thought Gerrit!

The circles were not moving closer together: each was just himself; he was no different from the rest. Was he not thinking of Pauline? Had he not his silent secret? Had not each of them perhaps his silent secret, while they sat talking together with such apparent sympathy?...

Addie came in, after finishing his school-work upstairs; and Gerrit noticed the conciliatory smile with which he at once went up to his father, who had been sulking of late because his boy had made a choice of which he altogether disapproved. But for weeks and weeks he had seemed unable to resist the conciliatory smile; and Gerrit had noticed that it was Van der Welcke himself who suffered most from his sulking, which went on because he did not know how to manage a gradual change of att.i.tude, while the boy's calm smile meant:

"Daddie will have to give in, for what I want is only reasonable...."

And Gerrit enjoyed looking at Addie, hoping that his own boys would grow up like that; but Paul, as soon as he saw his nephew, flashed forth into chaff, a chaff which had a speculative interest underlying it and which the boy took quietly, looking at Paul with his serious, blue eyes, which gazed so steadily out of his fresh, boyish face.

"Well, learned professor _in ovo_, my dear doctor _in spe_, how are the patients? Are they keeping you busy just now? Has mankind increased in vitality and primordial vigour since you entered the therapeutic arena?

O great healer, on whom are you going to try your powers first, aesculapius? On members of your family, I suppose? Are you going to make us live for ever, Addie? Well, you needn't trouble about me.... Can't you manage to make the human body work a little more cleanly in future?

That's the thing before which we're expected to kneel in admiration: the Creator's masterpiece, the human body; and what is dirtier than the human body? A nasty house of flesh, with our poor small soul pining away inside it.... Addie, when you grow very clever later on, just remove all that: entrails, intestines, the whole bag of tricks; and put in its place a little silver machine which a fellow can polish at least ... if there must be a machine of some sort!"

The boy never got annoyed, but stood in front of his uncle and put his hand on Paul's shoulder and looked at him and said:

"Why aren't you always so lively, Uncle?"

"Lively? Do you think me lively? He thinks I'm lively, while I sit here cursing human filthiness! Is that your diagnosis, professor? Well, you're quite out of it, my boy! You'll never get your ten guilders for that! Lively? Heavens, boy, I'm far from that!... As long as life remains as dirty as it is, I shall be as melancholy as melancholy can be.... Cure me, if you like, but first clean the Augean stable....

There's just one little clean spot left in our soul; but all the rest is dirty!... Tell me now: whom will you start on? Couldn't you cure Uncle Gerrit? Give him a better appet.i.te? Sounder sleep? A healthier complexion? Teach him to buck up that big carcase of his a bit?... Just see how wasted he looks!..."

There was something in Paul's chaff that grated on Gerrit very unpleasantly; but he laughed, as though he thought it the best joke he had ever heard, that Paul should be wishing him a better appet.i.te and sounder sleep. Was Paul getting at him? Did Paul see through his sham strength? And would Addie do so, later?... No, n.o.body saw through it: the centipede rooted in him unseen by them all....

And he got up, to mix himself another grog; but he mixed it so that it was hardly more than hot water and lemon.

CHAPTER XIV

He had never quite understood her, not even in the old days. In the old days, as a young officer, he had seen in her a fine girl, a delicious girl, of whom he had been madly enamoured. He had never understood her eyes, never understood her soul; but formerly he had not thought so very much about those eyes and that soul, because in those days he didn't know much about himself either, did not know what he knew now. In those days, he only now and then had a vague glimpse of his own latent sentimentality: to-day, he knew that sentimentality to be there most positively, as a blue background to his soul. And he was so much afraid of that sentimentality, so much afraid lest he should miss the truth, the naked, mocking reality of that courtesan's soul, so much afraid lest he should make it out to be finer than it really was, kinder above all and gentler and more tender, that he could never speak to her without abusing her or swearing at her, his voice as rough as if he were roaring at one of his hussars.

"I mustn't let myself be put upon by her ... or by myself either," he constantly reflected.

And he kept on his guard. Add to that a vague resentment, at not having been able to keep away from her, at having gone to see her in her room; a vague resentment at the thought of his home, of his children, of all that he went back to when he left her room. The way you got used to anything, he would reflect! Now, when he had been to her, he would put his latchkey calmly into his front-door, without feeling his heart beating with nervousness, would undress calmly, would walk into the room where Adeline lay in bed! The way you got used to everything and by degrees came to do things which at first you thought rotten! You did it because you couldn't very well help it ... and also because your ideas about things, day by day, as you did it, slumbered away into a feeling that you weren't responsible, that it was no use resisting what had got such a hold of you.... Nevertheless, when he was with her, he always felt that resentment keenly: it did not slumber away.... At Pauline's, he had a keen apprehension of being still more imposed upon, of seeing kindness and charming tenderness in that girl, whereas of course she was nothing but a courtesan who meant to get money out of him. And then, in her small, shabby room, he would roar at her and ask:

"Look here, why can't you leave me alone?"

Her golden eyes gleamed; and he read a secret mockery in them. No, mark you, he'd take jolly good care that his sentimentality didn't make him see her as a chocolate-box picture! You only had to look at her eyes!

"But, Gerrit," she said, nestling at his feet, "I never ran after you! I met you by accident, really by accident, I a.s.sure you. Don't you remember? Yes, once when I was driving: that was the first time; then near the Alexander Barracks...."

"But what were you doing near the barracks, d.a.m.n it?"

She looked at him coaxingly, stroked him caressingly:

"Oh, well ... I thought...!"

"There, you see!... You thought...!"

"Yes, you won't believe me.... Even towards the end ... in Paris, Gerrit...."

"Well?"

"I used to think of you sometimes."

"Oh, rot, you're lying!... Do you think I believe you?"

"No, you don't believe me, but, Gerrit.... I a.s.sure you ... men are beasts ... and you...."

"Oh, yes, you tell everybody that: do you imagine I don't see through it?"

Then she laughed merrily; and he laughed too.

"I'm laughing," she said, "because you're pretending to be so cynical.

... Tell me, Gerrit, why do you pretend to be so cynical?"

"I?"

"Yes, you: why do you do it? You're putting it on, aren't you, on purpose?"

"Purpose be blowed!... If you think I'm going to be taken in by all your pretty speeches!... If you come to me with pretty speeches, it's because you want money and I've ... I've told you, I haven't any...."

"But, Gerrit, I don't ask you for money ... and I'm not getting any from you either...."

He flushed, a deep glow overspreading his red, sunburnt face and the white neck on which the tight collar of his uniform had left a plainly-visible line. What she said was quite true: she asked for no money and he gave her no money. He had none to give her.

"Now let me tell you," she said, nestling still closer against his knees. "You see, in Paris, towards the end, I got the blues badly....

You understand, Gerrit, don't you, one has enough of the life sometimes ... and a fit like that isn't very cheerful?"

"Oh, rot!" he said, gruffly. "And you, who are always laughing!"

"I'm always laughing?"

"Yes, you, with those eyes of yours, those eyes which are always laughing."