The Twilight of the Souls Part 3

He was ready now, took his umbrella and followed Gerrit down the stairs.

Gerrit opened the door.

"What beastly weather!" growled Paul, furiously, in the pa.s.sage.

He drew his umbrella carefully out of its case, while Gerrit was already outside, with his blue military coat flapping round his shoulders, because he had not put his arms through the sleeves.

"What a filthy mess!" raved Paul. "This d.a.m.ned, rotten mud!" he cursed, pale with rage.

He had folded up the umbrella-case and slipped it into his pocket and was now opening his umbrella: he seemed to fear that it would get wet.

"Come on!" he said, seething with inward rage.

And, taking a desperate resolve, he stepped aside, fiercely slammed the front-door and carefully placed his feet upon the pavement:

"We'll wait for the tram," he said.

He glared at the rain from under his umbrella:

"What a dirty sky!" he grumbled, while Gerrit paced up and down, only half-listening to what Paul said. "What a d.a.m.ned dirty sky! Dirty rain, filthy streets, mud, nothing but mud. The whole world is mud. Properly speaking, everything is mud. Heavens, will the world ever be clean and the people in it clean: towns with clean streets, people with clean bodies? At present, they're mud, nothing but mud: their streets, their bodies and their filthy souls!..."

The tram came and they had to get in; and Paul, in his heart of hearts, regretted this for, as long as he had stood muttering under his umbrella, he could still yield to his desire to go on raving, even though Gerrit was not listening. They got out in the Dennenweg; but by this time he had lost the thread of his argument and moreover he had to be careful not to step in the puddles:

"Don't walk so fast!" he said, crossly, to Gerrit. "And mind where you walk: it's all splashing around me."

They were now in the Nieuwe Uitleg. That ancient quarter was quite dark, soaked in the everlasting rain that fell perpendicularly between the trees, like curtains of violet beads, and clattered into the ca.n.a.l.

"Do you think he's really mad?" asked Gerrit, nervously, as he rang the bell.

Paul shrugged his shoulders and looked down at his trousers and boots.

He was satisfied with himself; he had walked very carefully: he had hardly a single splash. A fat landlady opened the door:

"Ah!... I'm glad you've come, gentlemen.... Meneer is quite calm now....

And have you been to a doctor?"

"A doctor?" said Gerrit, startled.

"A doctor," thought Paul. "Just so: we've been practical, as usual."

But he didn't say it.

They went upstairs. They found Ernst in his dressing-gown; his black hair, which he wore long, lay in tangled ma.s.ses over his forehead. He did not get up; he gazed at his two brothers with a look of intense melancholy. He was now a man of forty-three, but seemed older, his hair turning grey, his appearance neglected, as though his shoulders had sunk in, as though something were broken in his spinal system. He did not appear very much surprised at seeing the two of them; only his sad eyes wandered from one to the other, scrutinizing them suspiciously.

And all at once the two brothers did not know what to say. Gerrit filled the room with his restless movements and nearly knocked down a couple of Delft jars with the skirts of his wet great-coat.

Paul was the first to speak:

"Aren't you well, Ernst?"

"I'm quite well."

"Then what is it?"

"What do you mean?"

"What was the matter with you last night?"

"Nothing. I was suffocating."

"Are you better now?"

"Yes."

He seemed to be speaking mechanically, under the influence of the last glimmer of intelligence, for his voice sounded uncertain and unreal, as though he were not quite conscious of what he was saying.

"Come, old chap," said Gerrit, with good-natured bluntness, laying his hand on Ernst's shoulder.

As he did so, Ernst's expression changed; his eyes lost their look of intense melancholy and became hard, staring hard and black from their sockets, like two black marbles. He had turned his head in a stiff quarter-circle towards Gerrit; and the hard gleam of those black marbles bored into Gerrit's blue Norse eyes with such strange fierceness that Gerrit started. And, under his brother's big hand, which still lay on his shoulder, Ernst's limp body seemed to be turned to stone, to become rigid, hard as a rock. He stiffened his lips, his arms, his legs and feet and remained like that, motionless, evidently suffering physical and moral torture, shrinking under the pressure of Gerrit's hand, without knowing how to get rid of that pressure. He remained motionless, stark; every muscle was tense, every nerve quivered; Ernst seemed to shrink and harden under Gerrit's touch just as a caterpillar shrinks and becomes hard when it feels itself touched. As soon as Gerrit removed his hand, the tension relaxed and Ernst's body huddled together again, as though something had given way in the spinal system.

"Ernst," said Paul, "wouldn't you do well to get some sleep?"

"No," he said, "I won't go to bed again. There are three of them under the bed."

"Three what?"

"Three. They're chained up."

"Chained up? Who's chained up?"

"Three. Three souls."

"Three souls?"

"Yes. The room's full of them. They are all fastened to my soul. They are all riveted to my soul. With chains. Sometimes they break loose. But I was dragging two of them with me for ever so long yesterday, in the street, over the cobble-stones. They were in pain, they were crying. I can hear them now in my ears, crying, crying.... There are three under the bed. They're asleep. When I go to bed, they wake up and rattle their chains. Let them sleep. They are tired, they are unhappy. As long as they're asleep, they don't know about it.... I ... I can't sleep. I haven't slept for weeks. They only sleep when I'm awake. They're fastened to me.... Don't you hear them? The room is full of them. They belong to every age and period. I've gathered them around me, collected them from every age and period. They were hiding in the jars, in the old books, in the old charts. I have some belonging to the fourteenth century. They used to hide in the family-papers. The first moment I saw them, they rose up, the poor souls ... with all their sins upon them, all their past. They are suffering ... they are in purgatory. They chained themselves on to me, because they know that I shall be kind to them ... and now they refuse to leave me. I drag them with me wherever I go, wherever I stand, wherever I sit. Their chains pull at my body. They hurt me sometimes, but they can't help it.... Last night ... last night, the room was so full of souls that there was a cloud of them all round me; and I was suffocating. I wanted to go out, but the landlady and her brother prevented me. They are a miserable pair: they would have let me die of suffocation. They are a pair of brutes too: they tread on the poor souls. Do you hear ... on the stairs? Do you hear their feet? They are treading on the souls...."

Paul's face was white; and he said, nervously trying to change the subject:

"Have you seen Dorine this morning, Ernst?"

Ernst looked at his brother suspiciously:

"No," he said, "I have not seen her."

"She was here, wasn't she?"

"No, I haven't seen her," he said, suspiciously; and his eyes wandered round, as though he were looking for something in the room.

The two brothers followed his gaze mechanically. Everything about the large, comfortable sitting-room suggested the man of taste and culture, of quiet and introspective temperament, but acutely sensitive to line and form. The sombreness of the ceiling, wall-paper and carpet stood out against the yet greater sombreness of old oak and old books; and a very strange note of blue and other colours was struck in the midst of it all by the pottery, which was not all old, but included some examples of more recent art. The modern harmonies of line and the very latest discoveries in earthenware suddenly appeared with their weird flourishes in vases, jars, pots, like enamelled flowers, from modern conservatories, that had sprung up in the shadows of some old, dark forest. On the book-shelves too, the brown leather bindings of the ancient folios were relieved by the direct contact of the yellow wrappers of the latest French literature or the _art-nouveau_ covers of the most modern Dutch novels. This lonely, silent man, who walked shyly through the streets, gliding along the walls of the houses; who had no friends, no acquaintances; who only on Sunday evenings--because he dared not stay away, from a last remnant of respect for maternal authority--consented to suffer martyrdom among the a.s.sembled members of his family, even to the extent of taking a hand at bridge: this man seemed, hidden from every one of them, to lead a rich, abundant life, a secret, inner life, a life not of one age but of many. Because he never spoke, they looked upon him as a crank; but he had lived his years abundantly. Had he filled his silent, uncompanioned loneliness too full with the ghosts of literature, history and art? Had the ghosts loomed up and come to life around him, in that dark and gloomy room, where the old and modern porcelain and earthenware glowed and rioted around him with the haunting brilliancy of their colours and glazes, of their tortured, gorgeous curves and outlines?