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+Project Gutenberg's Ecstasy: A Study of Happiness, by Louis Couperus
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Ecstasy: A Study of Happiness
+       A Novel
+
+Author: Louis Couperus
+
+Translator: Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
+
+Release Date: October 16, 2011 [EBook #37770]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ECSTASY: A STUDY OF HAPPINESS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jeroen Hellingman and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net/ for Project
+Gutenberg (This file was produced from images generously
+made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                ECSTASY:
+                          A STUDY OF HAPPINESS
+                                A Novel
+
+
+
+                                   By
+                             LOUIS COUPERUS
+
+                  Author of "Small Souls," "Old People
+                    and the Things that Pass," etc.
+
+                             Translated by
+                      Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
+
+
+
+                                New York
+                         Dodd, Mead and Company
+                                  1919
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
+
+
+This delicate story is Louis Couperus' third novel. It appeared in the
+original Dutch some twenty-seven years ago and has not hitherto been
+published in America. At the time when it was written, the author was
+a leading member of what was then known as the "sensitivist" school
+of Dutch novelists; and the reader will not be slow in discovering
+that the story possesses an elusive charm of its own, a charm marking
+a different tendency from that of the later books.
+
+
+    Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
+
+    Chelsea, 2 June, 1919
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ECSTASY: A STUDY OF HAPPINESS
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+1
+
+Dolf Van Attema, in the course of an after-dinner stroll, had called on
+his wife's sister, Cecile van Even, on the Scheveningen Road. He was
+waiting in her little boudoir, pacing up and down, among the rosewood
+chairs and the vieux rose moire ottomans, over and over again, with
+three or four long steps, measuring the width of the tiny room. On
+an onyx pedestal, at the head of a sofa, burned an onyx lamp, glowing
+sweetly within its lace shade, a great six-petalled flower of light.
+
+Mevrouw was still with the children, putting them to bed, the maid had
+told him; so he would not be able to see his godson, little Dolf, that
+evening. He was sorry. He would have liked to go upstairs and romp with
+Dolf where he lay in his little bed; but he remembered Cecile's request
+and his promise on an earlier occasion, when a romp of this sort with
+his uncle had kept the boy awake for hours. So Dolf van Attema waited,
+smiling at his own obedience, measuring the little boudoir with his
+steps, the steps of a firmly-built man, short, broad and thick-set,
+no longer in his first youth, showing symptoms of baldness under his
+short brown hair, with small blue-grey eyes, kindly and pleasant of
+glance, and a mouth which was firm and determined, in spite of the
+smile, in the midst of the ruddy growth of his crisp Teutonic beard.
+
+A log smouldered on the little hearth of nickel and gilt; and two
+little flames flickered discreetly: a fire of peaceful intimacy in
+that twilight atmosphere of lace-shielded lamplight. Intimacy and
+discreetness shed over the whole little room an aroma as of violets;
+a suggestion of the scent of violets nestled, too, in the soft tints of
+the draperies and furniture--rosewood and rose moire--and hung about
+the corners of the little rosewood writing-table, with its silver
+appointments and its photographs under smooth glass frames. Above
+the writing-table hung a small white Venetian mirror. The gentle
+air of modest refinement, the subdued and almost prudish tenderness
+which floated about the little hearth, the writing-table and the
+sofa, gliding between the quiet folds of the faded hangings, had
+something soothing, something to quiet the nerves, so that Dolf
+presently ceased his work of measurement, sat down, looked around
+him and finally remained staring at the portrait of Cecile's husband,
+the minister of State, dead eighteen months back.
+
+After that he had not long to wait before Cecile came in. She advanced
+towards him smiling, as he rose from his seat, pressed his hand,
+excused herself that the children had detained her. She always put them
+to sleep herself, her two boys, Dolf and Christie, and then they said
+their prayers, one beside the other in their little beds. The scene
+came back to Dolf as she spoke of the children; he had often seen it.
+
+Christie was not well, she said; he was so listless; she hoped it
+might not turn out to be measles.
+
+
+
+
+2
+
+There was motherliness in her voice, but she did not seem a mother as
+she reclined, girlishly slight, on the sofa, with behind her the soft
+glow of the lace flower of light on its stem of onyx. She was still
+in the black of her mourning. Here and there the light at her back
+touched her flaxen hair with a frail golden halo; the loose crape
+tea-gown accentuated the maidenly slimness of her figure, with the
+gently curving lines of her long neck and somewhat narrow shoulders;
+her arms hung with a certain weariness as her hands lay in her lap;
+gently curving, too, were the lines of her girlish youth of bust and
+slender waist, slender as a vase is slender, so that she seemed a
+still expectant flower of maidenhood, scarcely more than adolescent,
+not nearly old enough to be the mother of her children, her two boys
+of six and seven.
+
+Her features were lost in the shadow--the lamplight touching her
+hair with gold--and Dolf could not at first see into her eyes; but
+presently, as he grew accustomed to the shade, these shone softly
+out from the dusk of her features. She spoke in her low-toned voice,
+a little faint and soft, like a subdued whisper; she spoke again of
+Christie, of his god-child Dolf and then asked for news of Amelie,
+her sister.
+
+"We are all well, thank you," he replied. "You may well ask how we are:
+we hardly ever see you."
+
+"I go out so little," she said, as an excuse.
+
+"That is just where you make a mistake: you do not get half enough
+air, not half enough society. Amelie was saying so only at dinner
+to-day; and that's why I've looked in to ask you to come round to us
+to-morrow evening."
+
+"Is it a party?"
+
+"No; nobody."
+
+"Very well, I will come. I shall be very pleased."
+
+"Yes, but why do you never come of your own accord?"
+
+"I can't summon up the energy."
+
+"Then how do you spend your evenings?"
+
+"I read, I write, or I do nothing at all. The last is really the most
+delightful: I only feel myself alive when I am doing nothing."
+
+He shook his head:
+
+"You're a funny girl. You really don't deserve that we should like
+you as much as we do."
+
+"How?" she asked, archly.
+
+"Of course, it makes no difference to you. You can get on just as
+well without us."
+
+"You mustn't say that; it's not true. Your affection means a great
+deal to me, but it takes so much to induce me to go out. When I am
+once in my chair, I sit thinking, or not thinking; and then I find
+it difficult to stir."
+
+"What a horribly lazy mode of life!"
+
+"Well, there it is!... You like me so much: can't you forgive me my
+laziness? Especially when I have promised you to come round to-morrow."
+
+He was captivated:
+
+"Very well," he said, laughing. "Of course you are free to live as
+you choose. We like you just the same, in spite of your neglect of us."
+
+She laughed, reproached him with using ugly words and rose slowly to
+pour him out a cup of tea. He felt a caressing softness creep over
+him, as if he would have liked to stay there a long time, talking and
+sipping tea in that violet-scented atmosphere of subdued refinement:
+he, the man of action, the politician, member of the Second Chamber,
+every hour of whose day was filled up with committees here and
+committees there.
+
+"You were saying that you read and wrote a good deal: what do you
+write?" he asked.
+
+"Letters."
+
+"Nothing but letters?"
+
+"I love writing letters. I write to my brother and sister in India."
+
+"But that is not the only thing?"
+
+"Oh, no!"
+
+"What else do you write then?"
+
+"You're growing a bit indiscreet, you know."
+
+"Nonsense!" he laughed back, as if he were quite within his
+right. "What is it? Literature?"
+
+"Of course not! My diary."
+
+He laughed loudly and gaily:
+
+"You keep a diary! What do you want with a diary? Your days are all
+exactly alike!"
+
+"Indeed they are not."
+
+He shrugged his shoulders, quite non-plussed. She had always been a
+riddle to him. She knew this and loved to mystify him:
+
+"Sometimes my days are very nice and sometimes very horrid."
+
+"Really?" he said, smiling, looking at her out of his kind little eyes.
+
+But still he did not understand.
+
+"And so sometimes I have a great deal to write in my diary," she
+continued.
+
+"Let me see some of it."
+
+"By all means ... after I'm dead."
+
+A mock shiver ran through his broad shoulders:
+
+"Brr! How gloomy!"
+
+"Dead! What is there gloomy about that?" she asked, almost merrily.
+
+But he rose to go:
+
+"You frighten me," he said, jestingly. "I must be going home; I have
+a lot to do still. So we see you to-morrow?"
+
+"Thanks, yes: to-morrow."
+
+He took her hand; and she struck a little silver gong, for him to
+be let out. He stood looking at her a moment longer, with a smile in
+his beard:
+
+"Yes, you're a funny girl, and yet ... and yet we all like you!" he
+repeated, as if he wished to excuse himself in his own eyes for
+this affection.
+
+And he stooped and kissed her on the forehead: he was so much older
+than she.
+
+"I am very glad that you all like me," she said. "Till to-morrow,
+then. Good-bye."
+
+
+
+
+3
+
+He went; and she was alone. The words of their conversation seemed
+still to be floating in the silence, like vanishing atoms. Then the
+silence became complete; and Cecile sat motionless, leaning back in
+the three little cushions of the sofa, black in her crape against the
+light of the lamp, her eyes gazing out before her. All around her a
+vague dream descended as of little clouds, in which faces shone for
+an instant, from which low voices issued without logical sequence of
+words, an aimless confusion of recollection. It was the dreaming of
+one on whose brain lay no obsession either of happiness or of grief,
+the dreaming of a mind filled with peaceful light: a wide, still,
+grey Nirvana, in which all the trouble of thinking flows away and
+the thoughts merely wander back over former impressions, taking them
+here and there, without selecting. For Cecile's future appeared to
+her as a monotonous sweetness of unruffled peace, in which Dolf and
+Christie grew up into jolly boys, young undergraduates, men, while she
+herself remained nothing but the mother, for in the unconsciousness
+of her spiritual life she did not know herself entirely. She did not
+know that she was more wife than mother, however fond she might be
+of her children. Swathed in the clouds of her dreaming, she did not
+feel that there was something missing, by reason of her widowhood;
+she did not feel loneliness, nor a need of some one beside her, nor
+regret that yielding air alone flowed about her, in which her arms
+might shape themselves and grope in vain for something to embrace. The
+capacity for these needs was there, but so deep hidden in her soul's
+unconsciousness that she did not know of its existence nor suspect
+that one day it might assert itself and rise up slowly, up and up,
+an apparition of more evident melancholy. For such melancholy as was
+in her dreaming seemed to her to belong to the past, to the memory of
+the dear husband whom she had lost, and never, never, to the present,
+to an unrealized sense of her loneliness.
+
+Whoever had told her now that something was wanting in her life
+would have roused her indignation; she herself imagined that she had
+everything that she wanted; and she valued highly the calm happiness of
+the innocent egoism in which she and her children breathed, a happiness
+which she thought complete. When she dreamed, as now, about nothing
+in particular--little dream-clouds fleeing across the field of her
+imagination, with other cloudlets in their wake--sometimes great tears
+would well into her eyes and trickle slowly down her cheek; but to
+her these were only tears of an unspeakably vague melancholy, a light
+load upon her heart, barely oppressive and there for some reason which
+she did not know, for she had ceased to mourn the loss of her husband.
+
+In this manner she could pass whole evenings, simply sitting dreaming,
+never wearying of herself, nor reflecting how the people outside
+hurried and tired themselves, aimlessly, without being happy, whereas
+she was happy, happy in the cloudland of her dreams.
+
+The hours sped and her hand was too slack to reach for the book upon
+the table beside her; slackness at last permeated her so thoroughly
+that one o'clock arrived and she could not yet decide to get up and
+go to her bed.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+1
+
+Next evening, when Cecile entered the Van Attemas' drawing-room,
+slowly with languorous steps, in the sinuous black of her crape,
+Dolf at once came to her and took her hand:
+
+"I hope you won't be annoyed. Quaerts called; and Dina had told the
+servants that we were at home. I'm sorry...."
+
+"It doesn't matter!" she whispered.
+
+Nevertheless, she was a little irritated, in her sensitiveness, at
+unexpectedly meeting this stranger, whom she did not remember ever to
+have seen at Dolf's and who now rose from where he had been sitting
+with Dolf's great-aunt, old Mrs. Hoze, Amelie and the two daughters,
+Anna and Suzette. Cecile kissed the old lady and greeted the rest
+of the circle in turn, welcomed with a smile by all of them. Dolf
+introduced:
+
+"My friend Taco Quaerts.... Mrs. van Even, my sister-in-law."
+
+They sat a little scattered round the great fire on the open hearth,
+the piano close to them in the corner, its draped back turned to them,
+and Jules, the youngest boy, sitting behind it, playing a romance by
+Rubinstein and so absorbed that he had not heard his aunt come in.
+
+"Jules!..." Dolf called out.
+
+"Leave him alone," said Cecile.
+
+The boy did not reply and went on playing. Cecile, across the piano,
+saw his tangled hair and his eyes abstracted in the music. A feebleness
+of melancholy slowly rose within her, like a burden, like a burden that
+climbed up her breast and stifled her breathing. From time to time,
+forte notes falling suddenly from Jules' fingers gave her little
+shocks in her throat; and a strange feeling of uncertainty seemed
+winding her about as with vague meshes: a feeling not new to her,
+one in which she seemed no longer to possess herself, to be lost and
+wandering in search of herself, in which she did not know what she
+was thinking, nor what at this very moment she might say. Something
+melted in her brain, like a momentary weakness. Her head sank a
+little; and, without hearing distinctly, it seemed to her that once
+before she had heard this romance played so, exactly so, as Jules was
+now playing it, very, very long ago, in some former existence ages
+agone, in just the same circumstances, in this very circle of people,
+before this very fire.... The tongues of flame shot up with the same
+flickerings as from the logs of ages back; and Suzette blinked with
+the same expression which she had worn then on that former occasion....
+
+Why was it that Cecile should be sitting here again now, in the midst
+of them all? Why was it necessary, to sit like this round a fire,
+listening to music? How strange it was and what strange things there
+were in this world!... Still, it was pleasant to be in this cosy
+company, so agreeably quiet, without many words, the music behind
+the piano dying away plaintively, until it suddenly stopped.
+
+Mrs. Hoze's voice had a ring of sympathy as she murmured in Cecile's
+ear:
+
+"So we are getting you back, dear? You are coming out of your shell
+again?"
+
+Cecile pressed her hand, with a little laugh:
+
+"But I never hid myself from you! I have always been in to you!"
+
+"Yes, but we had to come to you. You always stayed at home, didn't
+you?"
+
+"You're not angry with me, are you?"
+
+"No, darling, of course not; you have had such a great sorrow."
+
+"Oh, I have still: I seem to have lost everything!"
+
+How was it that she suddenly realized this? She never had that sense of
+loss in her own home, among the clouds of her day-dreams, but outside,
+among other people, she immediately felt that she had lost everything,
+everything....
+
+"But you have your children."
+
+"Yes."
+
+She answered faintly, wearily, with a sense of loneliness, of terrible
+loneliness, like one floating aimlessly in space, borne upon thinnest
+air, in which her yearning arms groped in vain.
+
+Mrs. Hoze stood up. Dolf came to take her into the other room,
+for whist.
+
+"You too, Cecile?" he asked.
+
+"No, you know I never touch a card!"
+
+He did not press her; there were Quaerts and the girls to make up.
+
+"What are you doing there, Jules?" he asked, glancing across the piano.
+
+The boy had remained sitting there, forgotten. He now rose and
+appeared, tall, grown out of his strength, with strange eyes.
+
+"What were you doing?"
+
+"I ... I was looking for something ... a piece of music."
+
+"Don't sit moping like that, my boy!" growled Dolf, kindly, with his
+deep voice. "What's become of those cards again, Amelie?"
+
+"I don't know," said his wife, looking about vaguely. "Where are the
+cards, Anna?"
+
+"Aren't they in the box with the counters?"
+
+"No," Dolf grumbled. "Nothing is ever where it ought to be."
+
+Anna got up, looked, found the cards in the drawer of a buhl
+cabinet. Amelie also had risen, stood arranging the music on the
+piano. She was for ever ordering things in her rooms and immediately
+forgetting where she had put them, tidying with her fingers and
+perfectly absent in her mind.
+
+"Anna, come and draw a card too. You can play in the next rubber,"
+cried Dolf, from the other room.
+
+The two sisters remained alone, with Jules.
+
+The boy had sat down on a stool at Cecile's feet:
+
+"Mamma, do leave my music alone."
+
+Amelie sat down beside Cecile:
+
+"Is Christie better?"
+
+"He is a little livelier to-day."
+
+"I'm glad. Have you never met Quaerts before?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Really? He comes here so often."
+
+Cecile looked through the open folding-doors at the card-table. Two
+candles stood upon it. Mrs. Hoze's pink face was lit up clearly, with
+its smooth and stately features; her hair gleamed silver-grey. Quaerts
+sat opposite her: Cecile noticed the round, vanishing silhouette of his
+head, the hair cut very close, thick and black above the glittering
+white streak of his collar. His arms made little movements as he
+threw down a card or gathered up a trick. His person had something
+about it of great power, something energetic and robust, something
+of every-day life, which Cecile disliked.
+
+"Are the girls fond of cards?"
+
+"Suzette is, Anna not so very: she's not so brisk."
+
+Cecile saw that Anna sat behind her father, looking on with eyes
+which did not understand.
+
+"Do you take them out much nowadays?" Cecile asked next.
+
+"Yes, I have to. Suzette likes going out, but not Anna. Suzette will
+be a pretty girl, don't you think?"
+
+"Suzette's an awful flirt!" said Jules. "At our last dinner-party...."
+
+He stopped suddenly:
+
+"No, I won't tell you. It's not right to tell tales, is it, Auntie?"
+
+Cecile smiled:
+
+"No, of course it's not."
+
+"I want always to do what's right."
+
+"That is very good."
+
+"No, no!" he said deprecatingly. "Everything seems to me so bad,
+do you know. Why is everything so bad, Auntie?"
+
+"But there is much that is good too, Jules."
+
+He shook his head:
+
+"No, no!" he repeated. "Everything is bad. Everything is very
+bad. Everything is selfishness. Just mention something that's not
+selfish!"
+
+"Parents' love for their children."
+
+But Jules shook his head again:
+
+"Parents' love is ordinary selfishness. Children are a part of their
+parents, who only love themselves when they love their children."
+
+"Jules!" cried Amelie. "Your remarks are always much too decided. You
+know I don't like it: you are much too young to talk like that. One
+would think you knew everything!"
+
+The boy was silent.
+
+"And I always say that we never know anything. We never know anything,
+don't you agree, Cecile? I, at least, never know anything, never...."
+
+She looked round the room absently. Her fingers smoothed the fringe
+of her chair, tidying. Cecile put her arm softly round Jules' neck.
+
+
+
+
+2
+
+It was Quaerts' turn to sit out from the card-table; and, though Dolf
+pressed him to go on playing, he rose:
+
+"I want to go and talk to Mrs. van Even," Cecile heard him say.
+
+She saw him come towards the big drawing-room, where she was still
+sitting with Amelie--Jules still at her feet--engaged in desultory
+talk, for Amelie could never maintain a conversation, always wandering
+and losing the threads. She did not know why, but Cecile suddenly
+assumed a most serious expression, as though she were discussing very
+important matters with her sister; and yet all that she said was:
+
+"Jules ought really to take lessons in harmony, when he composes
+so nicely...."
+
+Quaerts had approached; he sat down beside them, with a scarcely
+perceptible shyness in his manner, a gentle hesitation in the brusque
+force of his movements.
+
+But Jules fired up:
+
+"No, Auntie, I want to be taught as little as possible! I don't want
+to be learning names and principles and classifications. I couldn't
+do it. I only compose like this, like this...." And he suited his
+phrase with a vague movement of his fingers.
+
+"Jules can hardly read, it's a shame!" said Amelie.
+
+"And he plays so nicely," said Cecile.
+
+"Yes, Auntie, I remember things, I pick them out on the piano. Oh,
+it's not really clever: it just comes out of myself, you know!"
+
+"But that's so splendid!"
+
+"No, no! You have to know the names and principles and
+classifications. You want that in everything. I shall never learn
+technique; I'm no good."
+
+He closed his eyes for a moment; a look of sadness flitted across
+his restless face.
+
+"You know a piano is so ... so big, a great piece of furniture, isn't
+it? But a violin, oh, how delightful! You hold it to you like this,
+against your neck, almost against your heart; it is almost part of you;
+and you stroke it, like this, you could almost kiss it! You feel the
+soul of the violin quivering inside its body. And then you only have
+just a string or two, two or three strings which sing everything. Oh,
+a violin, a violin!"
+
+"Jules...." Amelie began.
+
+"And, oh, Auntie, a harp! A harp, like this, between your legs, a harp
+which you embrace with both your arms: a harp is exactly like an angel,
+with long golden hair.... Ah, I've never yet played on a harp!"
+
+"Jules, leave off!" cried Amelie, sharply. "You drive me silly with
+that nonsense! I wonder you're not ashamed, before Mr. Quaerts."
+
+Jules looked up in surprise:
+
+"Before Taco? Do you think I've anything to be ashamed of, Taco?"
+
+"Of course not, my boy."
+
+The sound of his voice was like a caress. Cecile looked at him,
+astonished; she would have expected him to make fun of Jules. She
+did not understand him, but she disliked him exceedingly, so healthy
+and strong, with his energetic face and his fine, expressive mouth,
+so different from Amelie and Jules and herself.
+
+"Of course not, my boy."
+
+Jules glanced at his mother with a slight look of disdain, as if to
+say that he knew better:
+
+"You see! Taco's a good fellow."
+
+He turned his footstool round towards Quaerts and laid his head
+against his knee.
+
+"Jules!"
+
+"Pray let him be, mevrouw."
+
+"Every one spoils that boy...."
+
+"Except yourself," said Jules.
+
+"I! I!" cried Amelie, indignantly. "I spoil you out and out! I wish I
+knew how not to give way to you! I wish I could send you to Kampen or
+Deli! [1] That would make a man of you! But I can't do it by myself;
+and your father spoils you too.... I can't think what's going to
+become of you!"
+
+"What is going to become of you, Jules?" asked Quaerts.
+
+"I don't know. I mustn't go to college, I am too weak a doll to do
+much work."
+
+"Would you like to go to Deli some day?"
+
+"Yes, with you.... Not alone; oh, to be alone, always alone! You will
+see: I shall always be alone; and it is so terrible to be alone!"
+
+"But, Jules, you are not alone now!" said Cecile, reproachfully.
+
+"Oh, yes, yes, in myself I am alone, always alone...."
+
+He pressed himself against Quaerts' knee.
+
+"Jules, don't talk so stupidly," cried Amelie, nervously.
+
+"Yes, yes!" cried Jules, with a sudden half sob. "I will hold my
+tongue! But don't talk about me any more; oh, I beg you, don't talk
+about me!"
+
+He locked his hands and implored them, with dread in his face. They
+all stared at him, but he buried his face in Quaerts' knees, as though
+deadly frightened of something....
+
+
+
+
+3
+
+Anna had played execrably, to Suzette's despair: she could not even
+remember the winning trumps!
+
+Dolf called out to his wife:
+
+"Amelie, do come in for a rubber; that is, if Quaerts doesn't want
+to. You can't give your daughter many points, but still you're not
+quite so bad!"
+
+"I would rather stay and talk to Mrs. van Even," said Quaerts.
+
+"Go and play without minding me, if you prefer, Mr. Quaerts," said
+Cecile, in the cold voice which she adopted towards people whom
+she disliked.
+
+Amelie dragged herself away with an unhappy face. She did not play
+a brilliant game either; and Suzette always lost her temper when she
+made mistakes.
+
+"I have so long been hoping to make your acquaintance, mevrouw,
+that I should not like to miss this opportunity," Quaerts replied.
+
+She looked at him: it troubled her that she could not understand
+him. She knew him to be something of a Lothario. There were stories in
+which the name of a married woman was coupled with his. Did he wish
+to try his blandishments on her? She had no particular hankering for
+this sort of pastime; she had never cared for flirtations.
+
+"Why?" she asked, calmly, immediately regretting the word; for her
+question sounded like coquetry and she intended anything but that.
+
+"Why?" he echoed.
+
+He looked at her in slight surprise as he sat near her, with Jules
+on the ground between them, against his knee, his eyes closed.
+
+"Because ... because," he stammered, "because you are my friend's
+sister, I suppose, and I had never met you here...."
+
+She made no answer: in her seclusion she had forgotten how to talk
+and she did not take the least trouble about it.
+
+"I used often to see you at the theatre," said Quaerts, "when Mr. van
+Even was still alive."
+
+"At the opera," she said.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Really? I didn't know you then."
+
+"No."
+
+"I have not been out in the evening for a long time, because of
+my mourning."
+
+"And I always choose the evening to come to Dolf's."
+
+"So that explains why we have never met."
+
+They were silent for a moment. It seemed to him that she spoke
+very coldly.
+
+"I should love to go to the opera!" murmured Jules, without opening
+his eyes. "Or no, after all, I think I would rather not."
+
+"Dolf told me that you read a great deal," Quaerts continued. "Do
+you keep in touch with modern literature?"
+
+"A little. I don't read so very much."
+
+"No?"
+
+"Oh, no! I have two children; that leaves me very little time for
+reading. Besides, it has no particular fascination for me: life is
+much more romantic than any novel."
+
+"So you are a philosopher?"
+
+"I? Oh, no, I assure you, Mr. Quaerts! I am the most commonplace
+woman in the world."
+
+She spoke with her wicked little laugh and her cold voice: the voice
+and the laugh which she employed when she feared lest she should be
+wounded in her secret sensitiveness and when therefore she hid deep
+within herself, offering to the outside world something very different
+from what she really was. Jules had opened his eyes and sat looking
+at her; and his steady glance troubled her.
+
+"You live in a charming house, on the Scheveningen Road."
+
+"Yes."
+
+She realized suddenly that her coldness amounted to rudeness; and
+she did not wish this, even though she did dislike him. She threw
+herself back negligently; she asked at random, quite without concern,
+merely for the sake of conversation:
+
+"Have you many relations in The Hague?"
+
+"No; my father and mother live at Velp and the rest of my family at
+Arnhem chiefly. I never fix myself anywhere; I can't stay long in
+one place. I have spent a good many years in Brussels."
+
+"You have no occupation, I believe?"
+
+"No. As a boy, my one desire was to enter the navy, but I was rejected
+on account of my eyes."
+
+Involuntarily she looked into his eyes: small, deep-set eyes, the
+colour of which she could not determine. She thought they looked sly
+and cunning.
+
+"I have always regretted it," he continued. "I am a man of action. I am
+always longing for action. I console myself as best I can with sport."
+
+"Sport?" she repeated, coldly.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"Quaerts is a Nimrod and a Centaur and a Hercules rolled into one,
+aren't you, Quaerts?" said Jules.
+
+"Ah, so you're 'naming' me!" said Quaerts, with a laugh. "Where do
+you really 'class' me?"
+
+"Among the very few people that I really like!" the boy answered,
+ardently and without hesitation. "Taco, when are you going to teach
+me to ride?"
+
+"Whenever you like, my son."
+
+"Yes, but you must fix the day for us to go to the riding-school. I
+won't fix a day; I hate fixing days."
+
+"Well, shall we say to-morrow? To-morrow will be Wednesday."
+
+"Very well."
+
+Cecile noticed that Jules was still staring at her. She looked at
+him back. How was it possible that the boy could like this man! How
+was it possible that it irritated her and not him, all that health,
+that strength, that power of muscle and rage of sport! She could
+make nothing of it; she understood neither Quaerts nor Jules; and
+she herself drifted away again into that mood of half-consciousness,
+in which she did not know what she thought nor what at that very
+moment she might say, in which she seemed to be lost and wandering
+in search of herself.
+
+She rose, tall, slender and frail in her crape, like a queen who
+mourns, with little touches of gold in her flaxen hair, where a small
+jet aigrette glittered like a black mirror.
+
+"I'm going to see who's winning," she said and moved to the card-table
+in the other room.
+
+She stood behind Mrs. Hoze, appeared to be interested in the game; but
+across the light of the candles she peered at Quaerts and Jules. She
+saw them talking together, softly, confidentially, Jules with his
+arm on Quaerts' knee. She saw Jules looking up, as if in adoration,
+into the face of this man; and then the boy suddenly threw his arms
+around his friend in a wild embrace, while the other pushed him away
+with a patient gesture.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+1
+
+Next evening, Cecile revelled even more than usual in the luxury of
+being able to stay at home.
+
+It was after dinner; she was sitting on the sofa in her little
+boudoir with Dolf and Christie, an arm thrown round each of them,
+sitting between them, so young, like an elder sister. In her low
+voice she was telling them:
+
+"Judah came near to him, and said, O my Lord, let me abide a bondman
+instead of the lad. For our father, who is such an old man, said to
+us, when we left with Benjamin, My son Joseph I have already lost;
+surely he is torn in pieces by the wild beasts. And if ye take this
+also from me and mischief befall him, ye shall bring down my grey hairs
+with sorrow to the grave. Then (Judah said) I said to our father that I
+would be surety for the lad and that I should bear the blame if I did
+not bring Benjamin home again. And therefore I pray thee, O my lord,
+let me abide a bondman, and let the lad go up with his brethren. For
+how shall I go up to my father if the lad be not with me?..."
+
+"And Joseph, mamma, what did Joseph say?" asked Christie.
+
+He had nestled closely against his mother, this poor little
+slender fellow of six, with his fine golden hair and his eyes of
+pale forget-me-not blue; and his little fingers hooked themselves
+nervously into Cecile's gown, rumpling the crape.
+
+"Then Joseph could not refrain himself before all them that stood
+by him and he caused every man to leave him. And Joseph made himself
+known unto his brethren. And he wept aloud and said, I am Joseph."
+
+But Cecile could not continue the story, for Christie had thrown
+himself on her neck in a frenzy of despair and she heard him sobbing
+against her.
+
+"Christie! Darling!"
+
+She was greatly distressed; she had grown interested in her own
+recital and had not noticed Christie's excitement; and now he was
+sobbing against her in such violent grief that she could find no word
+to quiet him, to comfort him, to tell him that it ended happily.
+
+"But, Christie, don't cry, don't cry! It ends happily."
+
+"And Benjamin, what about Benjamin?"
+
+"Benjamin returned to his father; and Jacob went down into Egypt to
+live with Joseph."
+
+The child raised his wet face from her shoulder and looked at her
+deliberately:
+
+"Was it really like that? Or are you only making it up?"
+
+"No, really, darling. Don't, don't cry any more...."
+
+Christie grew calmer, but he was evidently disappointed. He was not
+satisfied with the end of the story; and yet it was very pretty like
+that, much prettier than if Joseph had been angry and put Benjamin
+in prison.
+
+"What a baby, Christie, to go crying like that!" said Dolf. "Why,
+it's only a story."
+
+Cecile did not reply that the story had really happened, because
+it was in the Bible. She had suddenly become very sad, in doubt
+of herself. She fondly dried the child's sad eyes with her
+pocket-handkerchief:
+
+"And now, children, bed! It's late!" she said, faintly.
+
+She put them to bed, a ceremony which lasted a long time; a ceremony
+with an elaborate ritual of undressing, washing, saying of prayers,
+tucking in and kissing.
+
+
+
+
+2
+
+When, an hour later, she was sitting downstairs again alone, she
+realized for the first time how sad she felt.
+
+Ah, no, she did not know! Amelie was quite right: one never knew
+anything, never! She had been so happy that day; she had found herself
+again, deep in the recesses of her secret self, in the essence of
+her soul; all day she had seen her dreams hovering about her as an
+apotheosis; all day she had felt within her that consuming love of her
+children. She had told them stories out of the Bible after dinner;
+and suddenly, when Christie began to cry, a doubt had arisen within
+her. Was she really good to her little boys? Did she not, in her
+love, in the tenderness of her affection for them, spoil and weaken
+them? Would she not end by utterly unfitting them for practical life,
+with which she did not come into contact, but in which the children,
+when they grew up, would have to move? It flashed through her mind:
+parting, boarding-schools, her children estranged from her, coming home
+big, rough boys, smoking and swearing, with cynicism on their lips and
+in their hearts: lips which would no longer kiss her, hearts in which
+she would no longer have a place. She pictured them already with the
+swagger of their seventeen or eighteen years, tramping across her rooms
+in their cadet's and midshipman's uniforms, with broad shoulders and a
+hard laugh, flicking the ash from their cigars upon the carpet.... Why
+did Quaerts' image suddenly rise up in the midst of this cruelty? Was
+it chance or a logical consequence? She could not analyse it; she
+could not explain the presence of this man, rising up through her
+grief in his atmosphere of antipathy. But she felt sad, sad, sad, as
+she had not felt sad since Van Even's death; not vaguely melancholy,
+as she so often felt, but sad, undoubtedly sorrowful at the thought
+of what must come.... Oh! to have to part with her children! And then,
+to be alone.... Loneliness, everlasting loneliness! Loneliness within
+herself: that feeling of which Jules had such a dread! Withdrawn
+from the world which had no charm for her, sinking away alone into
+emptiness! She was thirty, she was old, an old woman. Her house would
+be empty, her heart empty! Dreams, clouds of dreaming, which fly away,
+which lift like smoke, revealing only emptiness. Emptiness, emptiness,
+emptiness! The word each time fell hollowly, with hammer strokes,
+upon her breast. Emptiness, emptiness!...
+
+"Why am I like this?" she asked herself. "What ails me? What has
+altered?"
+
+Never had she felt that word emptiness throb within her in this way:
+that very afternoon she had been gently happy, as usual. And now! She
+saw nothing before her: no future, no life, nothing but one great
+darkness. Estranged from her children, alone within herself....
+
+She rose with a little moan of pain and walked across the boudoir. The
+discreet twilight troubled her, oppressed her. She turned the key of
+the lace-covered lamp: a golden gleam crept over the rose folds of
+the silk curtains like glistening water. A strange coolness wafted
+away something of that scent of violets which hung about everything. A
+fire burned on the hearth, but she felt cold.
+
+She stopped beside the low table; she took up a visiting-card, with
+one corner turned down, and read:
+
+"T. H. Quaerts."
+
+There was a five-balled coronet above the name.
+
+"Quaerts!"
+
+How short it sounded! A name like the smack of a hard hand. There
+was something bad, something cruel in the name:
+
+"Quaerts, Quaerts!..."
+
+She threw down the bit of pasteboard, was angry with herself. She
+felt cold and not herself, just as she had felt at the Van Attemas'
+last evening:
+
+"I will not go out again. Never again, never!" she said, almost
+aloud. "I am so contented in my own house, so contented with my life,
+so beautifully happy.... That card! Why should he leave a card? What
+do I want with his card?..."
+
+She sat down at her writing-table and opened her blotting-book. She
+thought of finishing a half-written letter to India; but she was in
+quite a different mood from when she had begun it. So she took from
+a drawer a thick manuscript-book, her diary. She wrote the date,
+then reflected a moment, tapping her teeth nervously with the silver
+penholder....
+
+But then, with a little ill-tempered gesture, she threw down the pen,
+pushed the book aside and, letting her head fall into her hands on
+the blotting-book, sobbed aloud.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+1
+
+Cecile was astonished at her unusually long fit of abstraction, that
+it should continue for days before she returned to her usual condition
+of serenity, the delightful abode from which she had involuntarily
+wandered. But she compelled herself, with gentle compulsion, to recover
+the treasures of her loneliness; and she ended by recovering them. She
+argued with herself that it would be some years before she would
+have to part from Dolf and Christie: there was time enough to grow
+accustomed to the idea of separation. Besides, nothing had altered
+either about her or within her; and so she let the days glide slowly
+over her, like gently flowing water.
+
+In this way, gently flowing by, a fortnight had elapsed since the
+evening which she spent at Dolf's. It was a Saturday afternoon; she
+had been working with the children--she still taught them herself--and
+she had walked out with them; and now she was sitting in her favourite
+room waiting for the Van Attemas, who came to tea every Saturday at
+half-past four. She rang for the servant, who lighted the blue flame
+of methylated spirit. Dolf and Christie were with her; they sat upon
+the floor on footstools, cutting the pages of a children's magazine
+to which Cecile subscribed for them. They were sitting quietly,
+looking very good and well-bred, like children who grow up in soft
+surroundings, in the midst of too much refinement, too pale, with hair
+too long and too fair, Christie especially, whose little temples were
+veined as if with azure blood. Cecile stepped by them as she went
+to glance over the tea-table; and the look which she cast upon them
+wrapped the children in a warm embrace of devotion. She was in her
+calmly happy mood: it was so pleasant to think that she would soon
+see the Van Attemas come in. She liked these hours of the afternoon,
+when her silver tea-kettle hissed over the blue flame. An exquisite
+intimacy filled the room; she had in her long, shapely feminine fingers
+that special power of witchery, that gentle art of handling by which
+everything over which they merely glided acquired a look of herself,
+an indefinable something, of tint, of position, of light, which the
+things had not until the touch of those fingers came across them.
+
+There was a ring. She thought it rather early for the Van Attemas,
+but she rarely saw any one else in her seclusion from the outer world;
+therefore it must be they. In a second or two, however, Greta entered,
+with a card: was mevrouw at home and could the gentleman see her?
+
+Cecile recognized the card from a distance: she had seen one like it
+lately. Nevertheless she took it up, glanced at it discontentedly,
+with drawn eyebrows.
+
+What an idea, she reflected. Why did he do it? What did it mean?
+
+But she thought it unnecessary to be impolite and refuse to see
+him. After all, he was a friend of Dolf's. But such persistence....
+
+"Show meneer in," she said, calmly.
+
+Greta went; and it seemed to Cecile as though something trembled in
+the intimacy which filled the room, as if the objects over which
+her fingers had just passed took on another aspect, a look of
+shuddering. But Dolf and Christie had not changed; they were still
+sitting looking at the pictures, with occasional remarks falling
+softly from their lips.
+
+
+
+
+2
+
+The door opened and Quaerts entered the room. As he bowed to Cecile,
+he had his air of shyness in still greater measure than before. To
+her this air was incomprehensible in him, who seemed so strong,
+so determined.
+
+"I hope you will not think me indiscreet, mevrouw, in taking the
+liberty to come and call on you."
+
+"On the contrary, Mr. Quaerts," she said, coldly. "Pray sit down."
+
+He took a chair and placed his tall hat on the floor beside him:
+
+"I am not disturbing you, mevrouw?"
+
+"Not in the least; I am expecting Mrs. van Attema and her
+daughters. You were so kind as to leave a card on me; but, as I dare
+say you know, I see nobody."
+
+"I knew that, mevrouw. Perhaps it is to that very reason that you
+owe the indiscretion of my visit."
+
+She looked at him coldly, politely, smilingly. There was a feeling
+of irritation in her. She felt inclined to ask him bluntly what he
+wanted with her.
+
+"How so?" she asked, with her mannerly smile, which converted her
+face into a mask.
+
+"I was afraid that I might not see you for a very long time; and I
+should consider it a great privilege to be allowed to know you better."
+
+His tone was in the highest degree respectful. She raised her eyebrows,
+as if she did not understand; but the accent of his voice was so
+very courteous that she could not even find a cold word with which
+to answer him.
+
+"Are these your two children?" he asked, with a glance towards Dolf
+and Christie.
+
+"Yes," she replied. "Get up, boys, and shake hands with meneer."
+
+The children approached timidly and put out their little hands. He
+smiled, looked at them penetratingly with his small, deep-set eyes
+and drew them to him:
+
+"Am I mistaken, or is the little one very like you?"
+
+"They both resemble their father," she replied.
+
+It seemed to her she had set a protecting shield around herself,
+from which the children were excluded, within which she found it
+impossible to draw them. It troubled her that he was holding them so
+tight, that he looked at them as he did.
+
+But he released them; and they went back to their little stools,
+gentle, quiet, well-behaved.
+
+"Yet they both have something of you," he insisted.
+
+"Possibly," she said.
+
+"Mevrouw," he resumed, as if he had something important to say to her,
+"I wish to ask you a direct question: tell me honestly, quite honestly,
+do you think me indiscreet?"
+
+"For calling to see me? No, I assure you, Mr. Quaerts. It is very
+kind of you. Only ... if I may be candid ..."
+
+She gave a little laugh.
+
+"Of course," he said.
+
+"Then I will confess that I fear you will find little in my house to
+amuse you. I never see people...."
+
+"I have not called on you for the sake of the people I might meet at
+your house."
+
+She bowed, smiling, as if he had paid her a compliment:
+
+"Of course I am very pleased to see you. You are a great friend of
+Dolf's, are you not?"
+
+She tried each time to say something different from what she actually
+did say, to speak more coldly, more aggressively; but she had too
+much breeding and could not bring herself to do it.
+
+"Yes," he replied, "Dolf and I have known each other ever so long. We
+have always been great friends, though we are quite unlike."
+
+"I'm very fond of him; he's always very kind to us."
+
+She saw him look at the low table and smile. A few reviews were
+scattered on it, a book or two. On the top of these lay a little
+volume of Emerson's essays, with a paper-cutter marking the page.
+
+"You told me you were not a great reader!" he said, mischievously. "I
+should think ..."
+
+And he pointed to the books.
+
+"Oh," said she, carelessly, with a slight shrug of her shoulders,
+"a little...."
+
+She thought him very tiresome: why should he remark that she had
+hidden herself from him? Why, indeed, had she hidden herself from him?
+
+"Emerson!" he read, bending forward a little. "Forgive me," he added
+quickly. "I have no right to spy upon your pursuits. But the print
+is so large; I read it from here."
+
+"You are far-sighted?" she asked, laughing.
+
+"Yes."
+
+His courtesy, a certain respectfulness, as if he would not venture
+to touch the tips of her fingers, placed her more at her ease. She
+still disliked him, but there was no harm in his knowing what she read.
+
+"Are you fond of reading?" asked Cecile.
+
+"I do not read much: it is too great a delight for that; nor do I
+read everything that appears. I am too hard to please."
+
+"Do you know Emerson?"
+
+"No...."
+
+"I like his essays very much. They are written with such a wide
+outlook. They place one on such a deliciously exalted level...."
+
+She suited her phrase with an expansive gesture; and her eyes
+lighted up.
+
+Then she observed that he was following her attentively, with his
+respectfulness. And she recovered herself; she no longer wanted to
+talk to him about Emerson.
+
+"It is very fine indeed," was all she said, to close the conversation,
+in the most commonplace voice that she was able to assume. "May I
+give you some tea?"
+
+"No, thank you, mevrouw; I never take tea at this time."
+
+"Do you look upon it with so much scorn?" she asked, jestingly.
+
+He was about to answer, when there was a ring at the bell; and
+she cried:
+
+"Ah, here they are!"
+
+Amelie entered, with Suzette and Anna. They were a little surprised
+to see Quaerts. He said he had wanted to call on Mrs. van Even. The
+conversation became general. Suzette was very merry, full of a
+fancy-fair, at which she was going to assist, in a Spanish costume.
+
+"And you, Anna?"
+
+"Oh, no, Auntie!" said Anna, shrinking together with fright. "Imagine
+me at a fancy-fair! I should never sell anybody anything."
+
+"Ah, it's a gift!" said Amelie, with a far-away look.
+
+Quaerts rose: he was bowing with a single word to Cecile, when the
+door opened. Jules came in, with some books under his arm, on his
+way home from school.
+
+"How do you do, Auntie? Hallo, Taco, are you going just as I arrive?"
+
+"You drive me away," said Quaerts, laughing.
+
+"Oh, Taco, do stay a little longer!" begged Jules, enraptured to see
+him and lamenting that he had chosen just this moment to leave.
+
+"Jules, Jules!" cried Amelie, thinking it was the proper thing to do.
+
+Jules pressed Quaerts, took his two hands, forced him, like a spoilt
+child. Quaerts only laughed. Jules in his excitement knocked a book
+or two off the table.
+
+"Jules, be quiet, do!" cried Amelie.
+
+Quaerts picked up the books, while Jules persisted in his bad
+behaviour. As Quaerts replaced the last book, he hesitated a moment;
+he held it in his hand, looked at the gold lettering: "Emerson."
+
+Cecile watched him:
+
+"If he thinks I'm going to lend it him, he's mistaken," she thought.
+
+But Quaerts asked nothing: he had released himself from Jules and
+said good-bye. With a quip at Jules he left.
+
+
+
+
+3
+
+"Is this the first time he has been to see you?" asked Amelie.
+
+"Yes," replied Cecile. "An uncalled-for civility, don't you think?"
+
+"Taco Quaerts is always very correct in matters of etiquette," said
+Anna, defending him.
+
+"Still, this visit was hardly a matter of etiquette," said Cecile,
+laughing merrily. "But Taco Quaerts seems to be quite infallible in
+the eyes of all of you."
+
+"He waltzes divinely!" cried Suzette. "The other day, at the Eekhofs'
+dance...."
+
+Suzette chattered on; there was no restraining Suzette that afternoon;
+she seemed already to hear the castanets rattling in her little brain.
+
+Jules had a peevish fit on him, but he remained quietly at a window,
+with the boys.
+
+"You don't much care about Quaerts, do you, Auntie?" asked Anna.
+
+"I don't find him attractive," said Cecile. "You know, I am easily
+influenced by my first impressions. I can't help it, but I don't like
+those very healthy, robust people, who look so strong and manly, as if
+they walked straight through life, clearing away everything that stands
+in their way. It may be morbid of me, but I can't help it; I always
+dislike any excessive display of health and physical force. Those
+strong people look upon others who are not so strong as themselves
+much as the Spartans used to look upon their deformed children."
+
+Jules could control himself no longer:
+
+"If you think that Taco is no better than a Spartan, you know nothing
+at all about him," he said, fiercely.
+
+Cecile looked at him, but, before Amelie could interpose, he continued:
+
+"Taco is the only person with whom I can talk about music and who
+understands every word I say. And I don't believe I could talk with
+a Spartan."
+
+"Jules, how rude you are!" cried Suzette.
+
+"I don't care!" he exclaimed, furiously, rising suddenly and stamping
+his foot. "I don't care! I won't hear Taco abused; and Aunt Cecile
+knows it and only does it to tease me. And I think it very mean to
+tease a boy, very mean...."
+
+His mother and sisters tried to bring him to reason with their
+authority. But he caught up his books:
+
+"I don't care! I won't have it!"
+
+He was gone in a moment, furious, slamming the door, which groaned
+with the shock. Amelie was trembling in every nerve:
+
+Oh, that boy!" she hissed out, shivering. "That Jules, that Jules!..."
+
+"It's nothing," said Cecile, gently, excusing him. "He is just a
+little excitable...."
+
+She had turned rather paler and glanced at her boys, Dolf and Christie,
+who had looked up in dismay, their mouths wide open with astonishment.
+
+"Is Jules naughty, mamma?" asked Christie.
+
+She shook her head, smiling. She felt a strange, an unspeakably strange
+weariness. She did not know what it meant; but it seemed to her as if
+very distant vistas were opening before her eyes and fading into the
+horizon, pale, in a great light. Nor did she know what this meant;
+but she was not angry with Jules and it seemed to her as if he had
+lost his temper, not with her, but with somebody else. A sense of the
+enigmatical depth of life, the soul's unconscious mystery, like to
+a fair, bright endlessness, a far-away silvery light, shot through
+her in silent rapture.
+
+Then she laughed:
+
+"Jules is so nice," she said, "when he gets excited."
+
+Anna and Suzette, upset at the incident, played with the boys, looking
+over their picture-books. Cecile spoke only to her sister. But Amelie's
+nerves were still quivering.
+
+"How can you defend those ways of Jules'?" she asked, in a choking
+voice.
+
+"I think it nice of him to stand up for people he likes. Don't you
+think so too?"
+
+Amelie grew calmer. Why should she be put out if Cecile was not?
+
+"I dare say," she replied. "I don't know. He has a good heart I
+believe, but he is so unmanageable. But, who knows, perhaps it's my
+fault: if I understood things better, if I had more tact...."
+
+She grew confused; she sought for something more to say and found
+nothing, wandering like a stranger through her own thoughts. Then,
+suddenly, as if struck by a ray of certain knowledge, she said:
+
+"But Jules is not stupid. He has a good eye for all sorts of things
+and for persons too. Personally, I think you judge Taco Quaerts
+wrongly. He is a very interesting man and a great deal more than a
+mere sportsman. I don't know what it is, but there's something about
+him different from other people, I can't say exactly what...."
+
+She was silent, seeking, groping.
+
+"I wish Jules got on better at school. As I say, he is not stupid, but
+he learns nothing. He has been two years now in the third class. The
+boy has no application. He makes me despair of him."
+
+She was silent again; and Cecile also did not speak.
+
+"Ah," said Amelie, "I dare say it is not his fault! Very likely it
+is my fault. Perhaps he takes after me...."
+
+She looked straight before her: sudden, irrepressible tears filled
+her eyes and fell into her lap.
+
+"Amy, what's the matter?" asked Cecile, kindly.
+
+But Amelie had risen, so that the girls, who were still playing
+with the children, might not see her tears. She could not restrain
+them, they streamed down and she hurried away into the adjoining
+drawing-room, a big room in which Cecile never sat.
+
+"What's the matter, Amy?" Cecile repeated.
+
+She had followed Amelie out and now threw her arms about her, made
+her sit down, pressed Amelie's head against her shoulder.
+
+"How do I know what it is?" Amelie sobbed. "I don't know, I don't
+know.... I am wretched because of that feeling in my head. It is more
+than I can bear sometimes. After all, I am not mad, am I? Really,
+I don't feel mad, or as if I were going mad! But I feel sometimes
+as if everything had gone wrong in my head, as if I couldn't
+think. Everything runs through my brain. It's a terrible feeling!"
+
+"Why don't you see a doctor?" asked Cecile.
+
+"No, no, he might tell me I was mad; and I'm not. He might try to
+send me to an asylum. No, I won't see a doctor. I have every reason
+to be happy otherwise, have I not? I have a kind husband and dear
+children; I have never had any great sorrow. And yet I sometimes
+feel profoundly miserable, desperately miserable! It is always as if
+I wanted to reach some place and could not succeed. It is always as
+if I were hemmed in...."
+
+She sobbed violently; a storm of tears rained down her face. Cecile's
+eyes, too, were moist; she liked her sister, she felt sorry for
+her. Amelie was only ten years older than she; and already she had
+something of an old woman about her, something withered and shrunken,
+with her hair growing grey at the temples, under her veil.
+
+"Cecile, tell me, Cecile," she said, suddenly, through her sobs,
+"do you believe in God?"
+
+"Why, of course I do, Amy!"
+
+"I used to go to church sometimes, but it was no use.... And I've
+stopped going.... Oh, I am so unhappy! It is very ungrateful of me. I
+have so much to be grateful for.... Do you know, sometimes I feel as
+if I should like to go to God at once, all at once, just like that!"
+
+"Come, Amy, don't excite yourself so."
+
+"Ah, I wish I were like you, so calm! Do you feel happy?"
+
+Cecile smiled and nodded. Amelie sighed; she remained lying for a
+moment with her head against her sister's shoulder. Cecile kissed her,
+but suddenly Amelie started:
+
+"Be careful," she whispered, "the girls might come in. There
+... there's no need for them to see that I've been crying."
+
+Rising, she arranged her hat before the looking-glass, carefully
+dried her veil with her handkerchief:
+
+"There, now they won't know," she said. "Let's go in again. I am
+quite calm. You're a dear thing...."
+
+They went back to the boudoir:
+
+"Come, girls, it's time to go home," said Amelie, in a voice which
+was still a little unsettled.
+
+"Have you been crying, Mamma?" Suzette at once asked.
+
+"Mamma was a bit upset about Jules," said Cecile, quickly.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Cecile was alone; the children had gone upstairs to tidy themselves
+for dinner. She tried to get back her distant vistas, fading into
+the pale horizon; she tried to recover the silvery endlessness which
+had shot through her as a vision of light. But instead her brain was
+all awhirl with a kaleidoscope of very recent petty memories: the
+children, Quaerts, Emerson, Jules, Suzette, Amelie. How strange, how
+strange life was!... The outer life; the coming and going of people
+about us; the sounds of words which they utter in strange accents;
+the endless interchange of phenomena; the concatenation of those
+phenomena, one with the other; strange, too, the presence of a soul
+somewhere inside us, like a god within us, never to be known in our own
+essence. Often, as indeed now, it seemed to Cecile that all things,
+even the most commonplace things, were strange, very strange, as if
+nothing in the world were absolutely commonplace, as if everything
+were strange: the strange form and outward expression of a deeper
+life that lies hidden behind everything, even the meanest objects;
+as if everything displayed itself under an appearance, a mask of
+pretence, while the reality, the very truth, lay underneath. How
+strange, how strange life was!... For it seemed to her as if she,
+under that very usual afternoon tea, had seen something very unusual;
+she did not know what, she could not express it nor even think it
+thoroughly; it seemed to her as if beneath the coming and going of
+those people something had glittered: a reality, an ultimate truth
+under the appearance of that casual afternoon tea.
+
+"What is it? What is it?" she wondered. "Am I deluding myself, or is
+it so? I feel that it is so...."
+
+It was all very vague and yet so very clear.... It seemed to her
+as though there were a vision, a haze of light behind all that had
+happened there, behind Amelie and Jules and Quaerts and the book
+which he had picked up from the floor and held in his hand for a
+moment.... Did that vision, that haze of light mean anything, or....
+
+But she shook her head:
+
+"I am dreaming, I am giving way to fancy," she laughed, within
+herself. "It was all very simple; I only make it complex because it
+amuses me to do so."
+
+But she had no sooner thought this than she felt something which
+denied the thought absolutely, an intuition which should have made
+her guess the essence of the truth, but did not quite succeed. Surely
+there was something, something behind it all, hiding away, lurking
+as the shadow lurked behind the thing; and the shadow appeared to
+her as a vision and haze of light....
+
+Her thoughts still wandered over all those people and finally halted
+at Taco Quaerts. She saw him sitting there again, bending slightly
+forward in her direction, his hands folded and hanging between his
+knees, as he looked up to her. A barrier of aversion had stood between
+them like an iron bar. She saw him sitting there again, though he was
+gone. That again was past: how quickly everything moved; how small
+was the speck of the present!
+
+She rose, sat down at her writing-table and wrote:
+
+
+"Beneath me flows the sea of the past; above me drifts the ether
+of the future; and I stand midway upon the one speck of reality,
+so small that I must press my feet firmly together lest I lose my
+hold. And from the speck of the present my sorrow looks down upon
+the sea and my longing up to the sky.
+
+"It is scarcely life to stand upon this speck, so small that I hardly
+appreciate it, hardly feel it beneath my feet; and yet to me it is the
+one reality. I am not greatly occupied about it: my eyes only follow
+the rippling of those waves towards distant horizons, the gliding of
+those clouds towards distant spheres, vague manifestations of endless
+change, translucent ephemeras, visible incorporeities. The present
+is the only thing that is, or rather that seems to be. The speck is,
+or at least appears to be, but not the sea below nor the sky above,
+for the sea is but a memory and the air but an illusion. Yet memory
+and illusion are everything: they are the wide inheritance of the
+soul, which alone can escape from the speck of the moment to float
+upon the sea towards the horizons which retreat, to drift upon the
+clouds towards the spheres which retreat and retreat...."
+
+
+Then she reflected. How was it that she had written all this and
+why? How had she come to write it? She went back upon her thoughts:
+the present, the speck of the present, which was so small.... Quaerts,
+Quaerts' very attitude, rising up before her just now. Was he in any
+way concerned with her writing down those sentences? The past a sorrow;
+the future an illusion.... Why, why illusion?
+
+"And Jules, who likes him," she thought. "And Amelie, who spoke of him
+... but she knows nothing.... What is there in him, what lurks behind
+him: his visionary image? Why did he come here? Why do I dislike him
+so? Do I dislike him? I cannot see into his eyes...."
+
+She would have liked to do this once; she would have liked to make
+sure that she disliked him or that she did not: one or the other. She
+was curious to see him once more, to know what she would think and
+feel about him then....
+
+She had risen from her writing-table and now lay at full length on
+the sofa, with her arms folded behind her head. She no longer knew
+what she dreamt, but she felt peacefully happy. She heard Dolf and
+Christie come down the stairs. They came in, it was dinner-time.
+
+"Jules was really naughty just now, wasn't he, Mummy?" Christie asked
+again, with a grave face.
+
+She drew the frail little fellow gently to her, took him tightly in
+her arms and fondly kissed his moist, pale-raspberry lips:
+
+"No, really not, darling!" she said. "He wasn't naughty, really...."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+1
+
+Cecile passed through the long hall, which was almost a gallery:
+footmen stood on either side of the hangings; a hum of voices came
+from behind. The train of her dress rustled against the leaves of
+a palm; and the sound gave a sudden jar to the strung cords of her
+sensitiveness. She was a little nervous; her eyelids quivered slightly
+and her mouth had a very earnest fold.
+
+She walked in; there was much light, but soft light, the light
+of candles only. Two officers stepped aside for her as she stood
+hesitating. Her eyes glanced round in search of Mrs. Hoze; she saw
+her standing among two or three of her guests, with her grey hair, her
+kindly and yet haughty face, rosy and smooth, almost without a wrinkle.
+
+Mrs. Hoze came towards her:
+
+"I can't tell you how charming I think it of you not to have played me
+false!" she said, pressing Cecile's hand with effusive and hospitable
+urbanity.
+
+She introduced people to Cecile here and there; Cecile heard names
+the sound of which at once escaped her.
+
+"General, allow me ... Mrs. van Even," Mrs. Hoze whispered and left
+her, to speak to some one else.
+
+Cecile drew a deep breath, pressed her hand to the edge of her bodice,
+as though to arrange something that had slipped from its place,
+answered the general cursorily. She was very pale; and her eyelids
+quivered more and more. She ventured to throw a glance round the room.
+
+She stood next to the general, forcing herself to listen, so as not to
+give answers that would sound strikingly foolish. She was very tall,
+slender, and straight, with her shoulders, white as sunlit marble,
+blossoming out of a sombre vase of black: fine, black, trailing
+tulle, sprinkled all over with small jet spangles; glittering black
+on dull transparent black. A girdle with tassels of jet, hanging low,
+was wound about her waist. So she stood, blonde: blonde and black;
+a little sombre amid the warmth and light of other toilettes; and,
+for unique relief, two diamonds in her ears, like dewdrops.
+
+Her thin suede-covered fingers trembled as she manipulated her fan,
+a black tulle transparency, on which the same jet spangles glittered
+with black lustre. Her breath came short behind the strokes of
+the diaphanous fan as she talked with the general, a spare, bald,
+distinguished-looking man, not in uniform, but wearing his decorations.
+
+Mrs. Hoze's guests walked about, greeting one another here and there,
+with a continuous hum of voices. Cecile saw Taco Quaerts come up to
+her; he bowed before her; she bowed coldly in return, not offering
+him her hand. He lingered by her for a moment, spoke a word or two
+and then passed on, greeting other acquaintances.
+
+Mrs. Hoze had taken the arm of an old gentleman; a procession formed
+slowly. The servants threw back the doors; a table glittered beyond,
+half-visible. The general offered Cecile his arm, as she stood looking
+behind her with a listless turn of her neck. She closed her eyelids
+for a second, to prevent their quivering. Her brows contracted with
+a sense of disappointment; but smilingly she laid the tips of her
+fingers on the general's arm and with her closed fan smoothed away
+a crease from the tulle of her train.
+
+
+
+
+2
+
+When Cecile was seated she found Quaerts sitting on her right. Then
+her disappointment vanished, the disappointment which she had felt
+at not being taken in to dinner by him; but her look remained cold,
+as usual. And yet she had what she wished; the expectation with which
+she had come to this dinner was fulfilled. Mrs. Hoze had seen Cecile
+at the Van Attemas' and had gladly undertaken to restore the young
+widow to society. Cecile knew that Quaerts was a frequent visitor
+at Mrs. Hoze's; she had heard from Amelie that he was invited to
+the dinner; and she had accepted. That Mrs. Hoze, remembering that
+Cecile had met Quaerts before, had placed him next to her was easy
+to understand.
+
+Cecile was very inquisitive about herself. How would she feel? At
+least interested: she could not disguise that from herself. She was
+certainly interested in him, remembering what Jules had said, what
+Amelie had said. She already felt that behind the mere sportsman there
+lurked another, whom she longed to know. Why should she? What concern
+was it of hers? She could not tell; but, in any case, as a matter of
+curiosity, as a puzzle, it awoke her interest. And, at the same time,
+she remained on her guard, for she did not think that his visit to
+her was strictly in order; and there were stories in which the name
+of that married woman was coupled with his.
+
+She succeeded in freeing herself from her conversation with the
+general, who seemed to feel called upon to entertain her, and it was
+she who spoke first to Quaerts:
+
+"Have you begun to give Jules his riding-lessons?" she asked, with
+a smile.
+
+He looked at her, evidently a little surprised at her voice and her
+smile, which were both new to him. He returned a bare answer:
+
+"Yes, mevrouw, we were at the riding-school yesterday...."
+
+She at once thought him clumsy, to let the conversation drop like that;
+but he enquired with that slight shyness which became a charm in him
+who was so manly:
+
+"So you are going out again, mevrouw?"
+
+She thought--she had indeed thought so before--that his questions
+were sometimes questions which people do not ask. This was one of
+the strange things about him.
+
+"Yes," she replied, simply, not knowing what else to say.
+
+"Forgive me," he said, seeing that his words had embarrassed her a
+little. "I asked, because ..."
+
+"Because?" she echoed, with wide-open eyes.
+
+He took courage and explained:
+
+"When Dolf spoke of you, he used always to say that you lived so
+quietly.... And I could never picture you to myself returning to
+society, mixing with many people; I had formed an idea of you; and
+it now seems that this idea was a mistaken one."
+
+"An idea?" she asked. "What idea?"
+
+"Perhaps you will be angry when I tell you. Perhaps, even as it is,
+you are none too well pleased with me!" he replied, jestingly.
+
+"I have not the slightest reason to be either pleased or displeased
+with you," she jested in return. "But tell me, what was your idea?"
+
+"Then you are interested in it?"
+
+"If you will answer candidly, yes. But you must be candid!" and she
+threatened him with her finger.
+
+"Well," he began, "I thought of you as a very cultured woman, as a
+very interesting woman--I still think all that--and ... as a woman who
+cared nothing for the world beyond her own sphere; and this ... this
+I can no longer think. And I feel almost inclined to say, at the risk
+of your looking on me as very strange, that I am sorry no longer to
+be able to think of you in that way. I would almost rather not have
+met you here...."
+
+He laughed, to soften what might sound strange in his words. She looked
+at him, her eyelashes flickering with amazement, her lips half-opened;
+and suddenly it struck her that she was looking into his eyes for
+the first time. She looked into his eyes and saw that they were a
+dark, very dark grey around the black depth of the pupil. There was
+something in his eyes, she could not say what, but something magnetic,
+as though she could never again take away her own from them.
+
+"How strange you can be sometimes!" she said mechanically: the words
+came intuitively.
+
+"Oh, please don't be angry!" he almost implored her. "I was so glad
+when you spoke kindly to me. You were a little distant to me when I
+saw you last; and I should be so sorry if I put you out. Perhaps I am
+strange, but how could I possibly be commonplace with you? How could I
+possibly, even if you were to take offence?... Have you taken offence?"
+
+"I ought to, but I suppose I must forgive you, if only for your
+candour!" she said, laughing. "Otherwise your remarks were anything
+but gallant."
+
+"And yet I did not mean it ungallantly."
+
+"Oh, no doubt!" she jested.
+
+She remembered that she was at a big dinner-party. The guests ranged
+before and around her; the footmen waiting behind; the light of the
+candles gleaming on the silver and touching the glass with all the
+hues of the rainbow; on the table prone mirrors, like sheets of water
+surrounded by flowers, little lakes amidst moss-roses and lilies of the
+valley. She sat silent a moment, still smiling, looking at her hand,
+a pretty hand, like a white precious thing upon the tulle of her gown:
+one of the fingers bore several rings, scintillating sparks of blue
+and white.
+
+The general turned to her again; they exchanged a few words; the
+general was delighted that Mrs. van Even's right-hand neighbour was
+keeping her entertained and enabling him to get on quietly with his
+dinner. Quaerts turned to the lady on his right.
+
+Both of them were glad when they were able to resume their
+conversation:
+
+"What were we talking about just now?" she asked.
+
+"I know!" he replied, mischievously.
+
+"The general interrupted us."
+
+"You were not angry with me!" he jested.
+
+"Oh, of course," she replied, laughing softly, "it was about your
+idea of me, was it not? Why could you no longer picture me returning
+to society?"
+
+"I thought that you had become a person apart."
+
+"But why?"
+
+"From what Dolf said, from what I myself thought, when I saw you."
+
+"And why are you now sorry that I am not 'a person apart,' as you
+call it?" she asked, still laughing.
+
+"From vanity; because I made a mistake. And yet perhaps I have not
+made a mistake...."
+
+They looked at each other; and both of them, although each thought it
+in a different way, now thought the same thing, namely, that they must
+be careful with their words, because they were speaking of something
+very delicate and tender, something as frail as a soap-bubble, which
+could easily break if they spoke of it too loudly; the mere breath
+of their words might be sufficient. Yet she ventured to ask:
+
+"And why ... do you believe ... that perhaps ... you are not mistaken?"
+
+"I don't quite know. Perhaps because I wish it so. Perhaps, too,
+because it is so true as to leave no room for doubt. Oh, yes, I am
+almost sure that I judged rightly! Do you know why? Because otherwise
+I should have hidden myself and been commonplace;  and I find this
+impossible with you. I have given you more of myself in this short
+moment than I have given people whom I have known for years in the
+course of all those years. Therefore surely you must be a person
+apart."
+
+"What do you mean by 'a person apart'?"
+
+He smiled, he opened his eyes; she looked into them again, deeply.
+
+"You understand, surely!" he said.
+
+Fear for the delicate thing that might break came between them
+again. They understood each other as with a freemasonry of feeling. Her
+eyes were magnetically held upon his.
+
+"You are very strange!" she again said, automatically.
+
+"No," he said, calmly, shaking his head, with his eyes in hers. "I
+am certain that I am not strange to you, even though you may think
+so for the moment."
+
+She was silent.
+
+"I am so glad to be able to talk to you like this!" he whispered. "It
+makes me very happy. And see, no one knows anything of it. We are
+at a big dinner; the people next to us can even catch our words;
+and yet there is not one among them who understands us or grasps the
+subject of our conversation. Do you know the reason?"
+
+"No," she murmured.
+
+"I will tell you; at least, I think it is like this. Perhaps you
+know better, for you must know things better than I, you are so much
+subtler. I personally believe that each person has a circle about
+him, an atmosphere, and that he meets other people who have circles
+or atmospheres about them, sympathetic or antipathetic to his own."
+
+"This is pure mysticism!" she said.
+
+"No," he replied, "it is quite simple. When the two circles are
+antipathetic, each repels the other; but, when they are sympathetic,
+they glide and overlap in smaller or larger curves of sympathy. In
+some cases the circles almost coincide, but they always remain
+separate.... Do you really think this so very mystical?"
+
+"One might call it the mysticism of sentiment. But ... I have thought
+something of the sort myself...."
+
+"Yes, yes, I can understand that," he continued, calmly, as if he
+expected it. "I believe that those around us would not be able to
+understand us, because we two alone have sympathetic circles. But
+my atmosphere is of a much grosser texture than yours, which is
+very delicate."
+
+She was silent again, remembering her former aversion to him: did
+she still feel it?
+
+"What do you think of my theory?" he asked.
+
+She looked up; her white fingers trembled in the tulle of her gown. She
+made a poor effort to smile:
+
+"I think you go too far!" she stammered.
+
+"You think I rush into hyperbole?"
+
+She would have liked to say yes, but could not:
+
+"No," she said; "not that."
+
+"Do I bore you?..."
+
+She looked at him, looked deep into his eyes. She shook her head,
+by way of saying no. She would have liked to say that he was
+too unconventional just now; but she could not find the words. A
+faintness oppressed her whole being. The table, the people, the whole
+dinner-party appeared to her as through a haze of light. When she
+recovered herself again, she perceived that a pretty woman opposite had
+been staring at her and was now looking away, out of politeness. She
+did not know how or why this interested her, but she asked Quaerts:
+
+"Who is the lady over there, in pale blue, with the dark hair?"
+
+She saw that he started.
+
+"That is young Mrs. Hijdrecht!" he said, calmly, a little distantly.
+
+She too was perturbed; she turned pale; her fan flapped nervously to
+and fro in her fingers.
+
+He had named the woman whom rumour said to be his mistress.
+
+
+
+
+3
+
+It seemed to Cecile as though that delicate, frail thing, that
+soap-bubble, had burst. She wondered if he had spoken to that
+dark-haired woman also of circles of sympathy. So soon as she was able,
+Cecile observed Mrs. Hijdrecht. She had a warm, dull-gold complexion,
+dark, glowing eyes, a mouth as of fresh blood. Her dress was cut
+very low; her throat and the slope of her breast showed insolently
+handsome, brutally luscious. A row of diamonds encompassed her neck
+with a narrow line of white flame.
+
+Cecile felt ill at ease. She felt as if she were playing with fire. She
+looked away from the young woman and turned to Quaerts, in obedience
+to some magnetic force. She saw a cloud of melancholy stealing over
+the upper half of his face, over his forehead and his eyes, which
+betrayed a slight look of age. And she heard him say:
+
+"Now what do you care about that lady's name? We were just in the
+middle of such a charming conversation...."
+
+She too felt sad now, sad because of the soap-bubble that had
+burst. She did not know why, but she felt pity for him, a sudden,
+deep, intense pity.
+
+"We can resume our conversation," she said, softly.
+
+"Ah no, don't let us take it up where we left it!" he rejoined,
+with feigned airiness. "I was becoming tedious."
+
+He spoke of other things. She answered little; and their conversation
+languished. They each occupied themselves with their neighbours. The
+dinner came to an end. Mrs. Hoze rose, took the arm of the gentleman
+beside her. The general escorted Cecile to the drawing-room, in the
+slow procession of the others.
+
+
+
+
+4
+
+The ladies remained alone; the men went to the smoking-room with
+young Hoze. Cecile saw Mrs. Hoze come towards her. She asked her
+if she had not been bored at dinner; they sat down together, in a
+confidential tete-a-tete.
+
+Cecile made the necessary effort to reply to Mrs. Hoze; but she would
+have liked to go somewhere and weep quietly, because everything passed
+so quickly, because the speck of the present was so small. Gone was
+the sweet charm of their conversation during dinner about sympathy,
+a fragile intimacy amid the worldly show about them. Gone was that
+moment, never, never to return: life sped over it with its constant
+flow, as with a torrent of all-obliterating water. Oh, the sorrow
+of it, to think how quickly, like an intangible perfume, everything
+speeds away, everything that is dear to us!...
+
+Mrs. Hoze left her; Suzette van Attema came to talk to Cecile. She
+was dressed in pink; and she glittered in all her aspect as if
+gold-dust had poured all over her, upon her movements, her eyes,
+her words. She spoke volubly to Cecile, telling interminable tales,
+to which Cecile did not always listen. Suddenly, through Suzette's
+prattle, Cecile heard the voices of two women whispering behind her;
+she only caught a word here and there:
+
+"Emilie Hijdrecht, you know...."
+
+"Only gossip, I think; Mrs. Hoze does not seem to heed it...."
+
+"Ah, but I know it as a fact!"
+
+The voices were lost in the hum of the others. Cecile just caught a
+sound like Quaerts' name. Then Suzette asked, suddenly:
+
+"Do you know young Mrs. Hijdrecht, Auntie?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Over there, with the diamonds. You know, they talk about her and
+Quaerts. Mamma doesn't believe it. At any rate, he's a great flirt. You
+sat next to him, didn't you?"
+
+Cecile suffered severely in her innermost sensitiveness. She shrank
+into herself entirely, doing all that she could to appear different
+from what she was. Suzette saw nothing of her discomfiture.
+
+The men returned. Cecile looked to see whether Quaerts would speak
+to Mrs. Hijdrecht. But he wholly ignored her presence and even,
+when he saw Suzette sitting with Cecile, came over to them to pay a
+compliment to Suzette, to whom he had not yet spoken.
+
+It was a relief to Cecile when she was able to go. She was yearning to
+be alone, to recover herself, to return from her abstraction. In her
+brougham she scarcely dared breathe, fearful of something, she could
+not say what. When she reached home she felt a stifling heaviness
+which seemed to paralyse her; and she dragged herself languidly up
+the stairs to her dressing-room.
+
+And yet, on the stairs, there fell over her, as from the roof of
+her house, a haze of protecting safety. Slowly she went up, her hand,
+holding a long glove, pressing the velvet banister of the stairway. She
+felt as if she were about to swoon:
+
+"But, Heaven help me ... I am fond of him, I love him, I love him!" she
+whispered between her trembling lips, in sudden amazement.
+
+It was as in a rhythm of astonishment that she wearily mounted the
+stairs, higher and higher, in a silent surprise of sudden light.
+
+"But I am fond of him, I love him, I love him!"
+
+It sounded like a melody through her weariness.
+
+She reached her dressing-room, where Greta had lighted the gas; she
+dragged herself inside. The door of the nursery stood half open; she
+went in, threw back the curtain of Christie's little bed, dropped on
+her knees and looked at the child. The boy partly awoke, still in the
+warmth of a deep sleep; he crept a little from between the sheets,
+laughed, threw his arms about Cecile's bare neck:
+
+"Mummy dear!"
+
+She pressed him tightly in the embrace of her slender, white arms;
+she kissed his raspberry mouth, his drowsed eyes. And meantime the
+refrain sang on in her heart, right across the weariness which seemed
+to break her by the bedside of her child:
+
+"But I am fond of him, I love him, I love him, I love him...!"
+
+
+
+
+5
+
+The mystery! Suddenly, on the staircase, it had beamed open before
+her in her soul, like a great flower of light, a mystic rose with
+glistening petals, into whose golden heart she now looked for the
+first time. The analysis to which she was so much inclined was no
+longer possible: this was the riddle of love, the eternal riddle,
+which had beamed open within her, transfixing with its rays the very
+width of her soul, in the midst of which it had burst forth like a
+sun in a universe; it was too late to ask the reason why; it was too
+late to ponder and dream upon it; it could only be accepted as the
+inexplicable phenomenon of the soul; it was a creation of sentiment,
+of which the god who created it would be as impossible to find in
+the inner essence of his reality as the God who had created the
+world out of chaos. It was light breaking forth from darkness; it
+was heaven disclosed above the earth. And it existed: it was reality
+and not a fairy-tale! For it was wholly and entirely within her,
+a sudden, incontestable, everlasting truth, a felt fact, so real in
+its ethereal incorporeity that it seemed to her as if, until that
+moment, she had never known, never thought, never felt. It was the
+beginning, the opening out of herself, the dawn of her soul's life,
+the joyful miracle, the miraculous inception of love, love focussed
+in the midst of her soul.
+
+She passed the following days in self-contemplation, wandering
+through her dreams as through a new country, rich with great light,
+where distant landscapes paled into a wan radiance, like fantastic
+meteors in the night, quivering in incandescence on the horizon. It
+seemed to her as though she, a pious and glad pilgrim, were making
+her way along paradisaical oases towards those distant scenes,
+there to find even more, the goal.... Only a little while ago, the
+prospect before her had been narrow and forlorn--her children gone
+from her, her loneliness wrapping her about like a night--and now,
+now she saw stretching in front of her a long road, a wide horizon,
+glittering with light, nothing but light....
+
+That was, all that was! It was no fine poets' fancy; it existed,
+it gleamed in her heart like a sacred jewel, like a mystic rose
+with stamina of light! A freshness as of dew fell over her, over
+her whole life: over the life of her senses; over the life of
+outward appearances; over the life of her soul; over the life of the
+indwelling truth. The world was new, fresh with young dew, the very
+Eden of Genesis; and her soul was a soul of newness, born anew in a
+metempsychosis of greater perfection, of closer approach to the goal,
+that distant goal, far away yonder, hidden like a god in the sanctuary
+of its ecstasy of light, as in the radiance of its own being.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+1
+
+Cecile did not go out for a few days; she saw nobody. One morning
+she received a note; it ran:
+
+
+"Mevrouw,
+
+"I do not know if you were offended by my mystical utterances. I cannot
+recall distinctly what I said, but I remember that you told me that I
+was going too far. I trust that you did not take my indiscretion amiss.
+
+"It would be a great pleasure to me to come to see you. May I hope
+that you will permit me to call on you this afternoon?
+
+
+"With most respectful regards,
+
+"Quaerts."
+
+
+As the bearer was waiting for a reply, she wrote back in answer:
+
+
+"Dear Sir,
+
+"I shall be very pleased to see you this afternoon.
+
+"Cecile van Even."
+
+
+When she was alone, she read his note over and over again; she looked
+at the paper with a smile, looked at the handwriting:
+
+"How strange," she thought. "This note ... and everything that
+happens. How strange everything is, everything, everything!"
+
+She remained dreaming a long time, with the note in her hand. Then
+she carefully folded it up, rose, walked up and down the room,
+sought with her dainty fingers in a bowl full of visiting-cards,
+taking out two which she looked at for some time. "Quaerts." The name
+sounded differently from before.... How strange it all was! Finally
+she locked away the note and the two cards in a little empty drawer
+of her writing-table.
+
+She stayed at home and sent the children out with the nurse. She
+hoped that no one else would call, neither Mrs. Hoze nor the Van
+Attemas. And, staring before her, she reflected for a long, long
+while. There was so much that she did not understand: properly
+speaking, she understood nothing. So far as she was concerned, she
+had fallen in love with him: there was no analysing that; it must
+simply be accepted. But he, what did he feel, what were his emotions?
+
+Her earlier aversion? Sport: he was fond of sport she
+remembered.... His visit, which was an impertinence: he seemed now
+to be wishing to atone for it, not to repeat his call without her
+permission....  His mystical conversation at the dinner-party.... And
+Mrs. Hijdrecht....
+
+"How strange he is!" she reflected. "I do not understand him; but I
+love him, I cannot help it. Love, love: how strange that it should
+exist! I never realized that it existed! I am no longer myself; I am
+becoming some one else!... What does he want to see me for?... And
+how singular: I have been married, I have two children! How singular
+that I should have two children! I feel as if I had none. And yet I
+am so fond of my little boys! But the other thing is so beautiful,
+so bright, so transparent, as if that alone were truth. Perhaps love
+is the only truth.... It is as if everything in and about me were
+turning to crystal!"
+
+She looked around her, surprised and troubled that her surroundings
+should have remained the same: the rosewood furniture, the folds of the
+curtains, the withered landscape of the Scheveningen Road outside. But
+it was snowing, silently and softly, with great snow-flakes falling
+heavily, as though they meant to purify the world. The snow was fresh
+and new, but yet the snow was not real nature to her, who always
+saw her distant landscape, like a fata morgana, quivering in pure
+incandescence of light.
+
+
+
+
+2
+
+He came at four o'clock. She saw him for the first time since the
+self-revelation which had flashed upon her astounded senses. And
+when he came she felt the singularly rapturous feeling that in her
+eyes he was a demigod, that he perfected himself in her imagination,
+that everything in him was good. Now that he sat there before her,
+she saw him for the first time and she saw that he was physically
+beautiful. The strength of his body was exalted into the strength of
+a young god, broad and yet slender, sinewed as with the marble sinews
+of a statue; and all this seemed so strange beneath the modernity of
+his morning coat.
+
+She saw his face completely for the first time. The cut of it was
+Roman, the head that of a Roman emperor, with its sensual profile,
+its small, full mouth, living red under the brown gold of his curly
+moustache. The forehead was low, the hair cut very close, like an
+enveloping black casque; and over that forehead, with its single
+furrow, hovered sadness, like a mist of age, strangely contradicting
+the wanton youthfulness of his mouth and chin. And then his eyes,
+which she already knew, his eyes of mystery, small and deep-set,
+with the depth of their pupils, which seemed now to veil themselves
+and then again to look out.
+
+But the strangest thing was that from all his beauty, from all his
+being, from all his attitude, as he sat there with his hands folded
+between his knees, a magnetism emanated, dominating her, drawing
+her irresistibly towards him, as though she had suddenly, from the
+first moment of her self-revelation, become his, to serve him in all
+things. She felt this magnetism attracting her so violently that every
+power in her melted into listlessness and weakness. A weakness as if
+he might take her and carry her away, anywhere, wherever he pleased;
+a weakness as if she no longer possessed her own thoughts, as if she
+had become nothing, apart from him.
+
+She felt this intensely; and then, then came the very strangest thing
+of all, as he continued to sit there, at a respectful distance, his
+eyes looking up to her in reverence, his voice falling in reverential
+accents. This was the very strangest thing of all that she saw him
+beneath her, while she felt him above her; that she wished to be his
+inferior and that he seemed to consider her higher than himself. She
+did not know how she suddenly came to realize this so intensely, but
+she did realize it; and it was the first pain that her love gave her.
+
+"It is very kind of you not to be angry with me," he began.
+
+There was often something caressing in his voice; it was not clear
+and was even now and then a little broken, but this just gave it a
+certain charm of quality.
+
+"Why?" she asked.
+
+"In the first place, I did wrong to pay you that visit. In the second
+place, I was ill-mannered at Mrs. Hoze's dinner."
+
+"A whole catalogue of sins!" she laughed.
+
+"Surely!" he continued. "And you are very good to bear me no malice."
+
+"Perhaps that is because I always hear so much good about you at
+Dolf's."
+
+"Have you never noticed anything odd in Dolf?" he asked.
+
+"No. What do you mean?"
+
+"Has it never struck you that he has more of an eye for the great
+aggregate of political problems as a whole than for the details of
+his own surroundings?"
+
+She looked at him, with a smile of surprise:
+
+"Yes," she said. "You are quite right. You know him well."
+
+"Oh, we have known one another from boyhood! It is curious: he never
+sees the things that lie close to his hand; he does not penetrate
+them. He is intellectually far-sighted."
+
+"Yes," she assented.
+
+"He does not know his wife, nor his daughters, nor Jules. He does
+not see what they have in them. He identifies each of them by means
+of an image which he fixes in his mind; and he forms these images
+out of two prominent characteristics, which are generally a little
+opposed. Mrs. van Attema appears to him a woman with a heart of gold,
+but not very practical: so much for her; Jules, a musical genius,
+but an untractable boy: that settles him!"
+
+"Yes, he does not go very deeply into character," she said. "For
+there is a great deal more in Amelie...."
+
+"And he is quite wrong about Jules," said Quaerts. "Jules is thoroughly
+tractable and anything but a genius. Jules is nothing more than an
+exceedingly receptive boy, with a little rudimentary talent. And you
+... he misconceives you too!"
+
+"Me?"
+
+"Entirely! Do you know what he thinks of you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"He thinks you--let me begin by telling you this--very, very lovable
+and a dear little mother to your boys. But he thinks also that you
+are incapable of growing very fond of any one; he looks upon you as
+a woman without passion and melancholy for no reason, except that
+you are bored. He thinks you bore yourself!"
+
+She looked at him in utter dismay and saw him laughing mischievously.
+
+"I am never bored!" she said, joining in his laughter, with full
+conviction.
+
+"No, of course you're not!" he replied.
+
+"How can you know?" she asked.
+
+"I feel it!" he answered. "And, what is more, I know that the basis
+of your character is not melancholy, not dark, but, on the contrary,
+very light."
+
+"I am not so sure of that myself," she scarcely murmured, slackly,
+with that weakness within her, but happy that he should estimate
+her so exactly. "And do you too," she continued, airily, "think me
+incapable of loving any one very much?"
+
+"Now that is a matter of which I am not competent to judge," he said,
+with such frankness that his whole countenance suddenly grew younger
+and the crease disappeared from his forehead. "How can I tell?"
+
+"You seem to know a great deal about me otherwise," she laughed.
+
+"I have seen you so often."
+
+"Barely four times!"
+
+"That is very often."
+
+She laughed brightly:
+
+"Is this a compliment?"
+
+"It is meant for one," he replied. "You do not know how much it means
+to me to see you."
+
+It meant much to him to see her! And she felt herself so small,
+so weak; and him so great, so perfect. With what decision he spoke,
+how certain he seemed of it all! It almost saddened her that it meant
+so much to him to see her once in a while. He placed her too high;
+she did not wish to be placed so high.
+
+And that delicate, fragile something hung between them again, as it
+had hung between them at the dinner. Then it had been broken by one
+ill-chosen word. Oh, that it might not be broken now!
+
+"And now let us talk about yourself!" she said, affecting an airy
+vivacity. "Do you know that you are taking all sorts of pains to
+fathom me and that I know nothing whatever about you? That's not fair."
+
+"If you knew how much I have given you already! I give myself to you
+entirely; from others I always conceal myself."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because I am afraid of the others!"
+
+"You ... afraid?"
+
+"Yes. You think that I do not look as if I could feel afraid? I have
+something...."
+
+He hesitated.
+
+"Well?" she asked.
+
+"I have something that is very dear to me and about which I am very
+much afraid lest any should touch it."
+
+"And that is...?"
+
+"My soul. I am not afraid of your touching it, for you would not hurt
+it. On the contrary, I know that it is very safe with you."
+
+She would have liked once more, mechanically, to reproach him with
+his strangeness: she could not. But he guessed her thoughts:
+
+"You think me a very odd person, do you not? But how can I be otherwise
+with you?"
+
+She felt her love expanding within her heart, widening it to its full
+capacity within her. Her love was as a domain in which he wandered.
+
+"I do not understand you yet; I do not know you yet!" she said,
+softly. "I do not see you yet...."
+
+"Would you be in any way interested to know me, to see me?"
+
+"Surely."
+
+"Let me tell you then; I should like to do so; it would be a great
+joy to me."
+
+"I am listening to you most attentively."
+
+"One question first: you cannot endure people who go in for sport?"
+
+"On the contrary, I like to see the display and development of
+strength, so long as it is not too near me. Just as I like to hear
+a storm, when I am safely within doors. And I can even find pleasure
+in watching acrobats."
+
+He laughed quietly:
+
+"Nevertheless you held my particular predilection in great aversion?"
+
+"Why should you think that?"
+
+"I felt it."
+
+"You feel everything," she said, almost in alarm. "You are a dangerous
+person."
+
+"So many think that. Shall I tell you why I believe that you took a
+special aversion in my case?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Because you did not understand it in me, even though you may have
+observed that physical exercise is one of my hobbies."
+
+"I do not understand you at all."
+
+"I think you are right.... But don't let me talk about myself like
+this: I would rather talk of you."
+
+"And I of you. So be nice to me for the first time in our acquaintance
+and speak ... of yourself."
+
+He bowed, with a smile:
+
+"You will not think me tiresome?"
+
+"Not at all. You were telling me of yourself. You were speaking of
+your love of exercise...."
+
+"Ah, yes!... Can you understand that there are in me two distinct
+individuals?"
+
+"Two distinct...."
+
+"Yes. My soul, which I regard as my real self; and then ... there
+remains the other."
+
+"And what is that other?"
+
+"Something ugly, something common, something grossly primitive. In
+one word, the brute."
+
+She shrugged her shoulders lightly:
+
+"How dark you paint yourself. The same thing is more or less true
+of everybody."
+
+"Yes, but it troubles me more than I can tell you. I suffer; that
+brute within me hurts my soul, hurts it even more than the whole
+world hurts it. Now do you know why I feel such a sense of security
+when I am with you? It is because I do not feel the brute that is in
+me.... Let me go on a little longer, let me confess; it does me good
+to tell you all this. You thought I had only seen you four times? But
+I used to see you so often formerly, in the theatre, in the street,
+everywhere. It was always rather strange to me when I saw you in the
+midst of accidental surroundings. And always, when I looked at you,
+I felt as if I were being lifted to something more beautiful. I cannot
+express myself more clearly. There is something in your face, in your
+eyes, in your movements, I don't know what, but something better than
+in other people, something that addressed itself, most eloquently,
+to my soul only. All this is so subtle and so strange; I can hardly
+put it more plainly. But you are no doubt once more thinking that I
+am going too far, are you not? Or that I am raving?"
+
+"Certainly, I should never have thought you such an idealist, such
+a sensitivist," said Cecile, softly.
+
+"Have I leave to speak to you like this?"
+
+"Why not?" she asked, to escape the necessity of replying.
+
+"You might perhaps fear that I should compromise you...."
+
+"I do not fear that for an instant!" she replied, haughtily, as in
+utter contempt of the world.
+
+They were silent for a moment. That delicate, fragile thing, which
+might so easily break, still hung between them, thin, like a gossamer,
+lightly joining them together. An atmosphere of embarrassment hovered
+about them. They felt that the words which had passed between them
+were full of significance. Cecile waited for him to continue; but,
+as he was silent, she boldly took up the conversation:
+
+"On the contrary, I value it highly that you have spoken to me like
+this. You are right: you have indeed given me much of yourself. I want
+to assure you that whatever you have given me will be quite safe with
+me. I believe that I understand you better now that I see you better."
+
+"I want very much to ask you something," he said, "but I dare not."
+
+She smiled, to encourage him.
+
+"No, really I dare not," he repeated.
+
+"Shall I guess?" Cecile asked, jestingly.
+
+"Yes; what do you think it is?"
+
+She glanced round the room until her eye rested on the little table
+covered with books.
+
+"The loan of Emerson's essays?" she hazarded.
+
+But Quaerts shook his head and laughed:
+
+"No, thank you," he said. "I bought the volume long ago. No, no,
+it is a much greater favour than the loan of a book."
+
+"Be brave then and ask it," Cecile went on, still jestingly.
+
+"I dare not," he said again. "I should not know how to put my request
+into words."
+
+She looked at him earnestly, into his eyes, which gazed steadily upon
+her; and then she said:
+
+"I know what you want to ask me, but I will not say it. You must do
+that: so seek your words."
+
+"If you know, will you then permit me to say it?"
+
+"Yes, for, if it is what I think, it is nothing that you are not
+entitled to ask."
+
+"And yet it would be a great favour.... But let me warn you beforehand
+that I look upon myself as some one of a much lower order than you."
+
+A shadow passed across her face, her mouth had a little contraction
+of pain and she pressed him, a little unnerved:
+
+"I beg you, ask. Just ask me simply."
+
+"It is a wish, then, that sympathy might be sealed between you and
+me. Would you allow me to come to you when I am unhappy? I always feel
+so happy in your presence, so soothed, so different from the state
+of ordinary life, for with you I live only my better, my real self:
+you know what I mean."
+
+Everything within her again melted into weakness and slackness; he was
+placing her upon too high a pedestal; she was happy, because of what
+he asked her, but sad, that he felt himself so much lower than she.
+
+"Very well," she said, nevertheless, with a clear voice. "It shall
+be as you wish. Let us seal a bond of sympathy."
+
+And she gave him her hand, her beautiful, long, white hand, where on
+one white finger gleamed the sparks of jewels, white and blue. For
+a second, very reverently, he pressed her finger-tips between his own:
+
+"Thank you," he said, in a hushed voice, a voice that was a little
+broken.
+
+"Are you often unhappy?" asked Cecile.
+
+"Always," he replied, almost humbly and as though embarrassed at
+having to confess it. "I don't know why, but it has always been
+so. And yet from my childhood I have enjoyed much that people call
+happiness. But yet, yet ... I suffer through myself. It is I who do
+myself the most hurt. And after that the world ... and I have always
+to hide myself. To the world, to people generally I only show the
+individual who rides and fences and hunts, who goes into society and
+is very dangerous to young married women...."
+
+He laughed with his bad, low laugh, looking aslant into her eyes;
+she remained calmly gazing at him.
+
+"Beyond that I give them nothing. I hate them; I have nothing in
+common with them, thank God!"
+
+"You are too proud," said Cecile. "Each of those people has his own
+sorrow, just as you have: the one suffers a little more subtly, the
+other a little more coarsely; but they all suffer. And in that they
+all resemble yourself."
+
+"Each taken by himself, perhaps. But that is not how I take them:
+I take them in the lump and therefore I hate them. Don't you?"
+
+"No," she said calmly. "I don't believe that I am capable of hating."
+
+"You are very strong within yourself. You suffice unto yourself."
+
+"No, no, not that, really not; but you ... you are unjust towards
+the world."
+
+"Possibly; but why does it always give me pain? Alone with you,
+I forget that it exists, the outside world. Do you understand
+now why I was so sorry to see you at Mrs. Hoze's? You seemed to
+me to have lowered yourself. And it was because ... because of
+that special quality which I saw in you that I did not seek your
+acquaintance earlier. The acquaintance was fatally bound to come;
+and so I waited...."
+
+Fate? What would it bring her? thought Cecile. But she could not pursue
+the thought: she seemed to herself to be dreaming of beautiful and
+subtle things which did not exist for other people, which only floated
+between them two. And those beautiful things were already there:
+it was no longer necessary to look upon them as illusions; it was as
+if she had overtaken the future! For one brief moment only did this
+happiness endure; then again she felt pain, because of his reverence.
+
+
+
+
+3
+
+He was gone and she was alone, waiting for the children. She neglected
+to ring for the lamp to be lighted; and the twilight of the late
+afternoon darkened into the room. She sat motionless, looking out
+before her at the leafless trees.
+
+"Why should I not be happy?" she thought. "He is happy with me;
+he is himself with me only; he cannot be so among other people. Why
+then can I not be happy?"
+
+She felt pain; her soul suffered and it seemed to her as if her
+soul were suffering for the first time, perhaps because now, for the
+first time, her soul had not been itself but another. It seemed to
+her as if another woman and not she had spoken to him, to Quaerts,
+just now. An exalted woman, a woman of illusions; the woman, in fact,
+whom he saw in her and not the woman that she was, a humble woman,
+a woman of love. Ah, she had had to restrain herself not to ask him:
+
+"Why do you speak to me like that? Why do you raise up your beautiful
+thoughts to me? Why do you not rather let them drip down upon me? For
+see, I do not stand so high as you think; and see, I am at your feet
+and my eyes seek you above me."
+
+Ought she to have told him that he was deceiving himself? Ought she
+to have asked him:
+
+"Why do I lower myself when I mix with other people? What do you see
+in me after all? Behold, I am only a woman, a woman of weakness and
+dreams; and I have come to love you, I don't know why."
+
+Ought she to have opened his eyes and said to him:
+
+"Look upon your own soul in a mirror; look upon yourself and see how
+you are a god walking the earth, a god who knows everything because
+he feels it, who feels everything because he knows it...."
+
+Everything?... No, not everything; for he deceived himself, this god,
+and thought to find an equal in her, who was but his creature.
+
+Ought she to have declared all this, at the cost of her modesty and
+his happiness? For his happiness--she felt perfectly assured--lay in
+seeing her in the way in which he saw her.
+
+"With me he is happy!" she thought. "And sympathy is sealed between
+us.... It was not friendship, nor did he speak of love; he called it
+simply sympathy.... With me he feels only his real self and not that
+other ... the brute that is within him!... The brute!..."
+
+Then there came drifting over her a gloom as of gathering clouds;
+and she shuddered at something that suddenly rolled through her: a
+broad stream of blackness, as though its waters were filled with mud,
+which bubbled up in troubled rings, growing larger and larger. And
+she took fear before this stream and tried not to see it; but it
+swallowed up all her landscapes--so bright before, with their luminous
+horizons--now with a sky of ink smeared above, like a foul night.
+
+"How loftily he thinks, how noble his thoughts are!" Cecile still
+forced herself to imagine, in spite of it all....
+
+But the magic was gone: her admiration of his lofty thoughts tumbled
+away into an abyss; then suddenly, by a lightning flash through the
+night of that inky sky, she saw clearly that this loftiness of thought
+was a supreme sorrow to her in him.
+
+It was quite dark in the room. Cecile, afraid of the lightning which
+revealed her to herself, had thrown herself back upon the cushions of
+the couch. She hid her face in her hands, pressing her eyes, as though
+she wished, after this moment of self-revelation, to be blind for ever.
+
+But demoniacally it raged through her, a hurricane of hell, a storm
+of passion, which blew out of the darkness of the landscape, lashing
+the tossed waves of the stream towards the inky sky.
+
+"Oh!" she moaned. "I am unworthy of him ... unworthy!..."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+1
+
+Quaerts lived on the Plein, above a tailor, where he occupied two
+small rooms furnished in the most ordinary style. He could have had
+much better lodgings if he chose, but he was indifferent to comfort:
+he never gave it a thought in his own place; when he came across
+it elsewhere, it did not attract him. But it distressed Jules that
+Quaerts should live in this fashion; and the boy had long wanted to
+improve the sitting-room. He was now busy hanging some trophies on
+an armour-rack, standing on a pair of steps, humming a tune which he
+remembered from some opera. But Quaerts paid no heed to what Jules
+was doing: he lay without moving on the sofa, at full length, in his
+pyjamas, unshorn, with his eyes fixed upon the Renascence decorations
+of the Law Courts, tracing a background of architecture behind the
+leafless trees of the Plein.
+
+"Look, Taco, will this do?" asked Jules, after hanging an Algerian
+sabre between two Malay creeses and draping the folds of a Javanese
+sarong between.
+
+"Yes, beautifully," replied Quaerts.
+
+But he did not look at the rack of arms and continued gazing at the Law
+Courts. He lay back motionless. There was no thought in him, nothing
+but listless dissatisfaction with himself and consequent sadness. For
+three weeks he had led a life of debauch, to deaden consciousness,
+or perhaps he did not know precisely what: something that was in
+him, something that was beautiful but tedious, in ordinary life. He
+had begun by shooting over a friend's land in North Brabant. It
+lasted a week; there were eight of them; sport in the open air,
+followed by sporting dinners, with not only a great deal of wine,
+certainly the best, but still more geneva, also of the finest, like
+a liqueur. Ragging-excursions on horseback in the neighbourhood;
+follies at a farm--the peasant-woman carried round in a barrel and
+locked up in the cow-house--mischievous exploits, worthy only of
+unruly boys and savages and ending in a summons before a magistrate,
+with a fine and damages. Wound up to a pitch of excitement with too
+much sport, too much oxygen and too much drink, five of the pack,
+including Quaerts, had gone on to Brussels, where one of them had
+a mistress. There they stayed nearly a fortnight, leading a life of
+continual excess, with endless champagne and larking: a wild joy of
+living, which, natural enough at first, had in the end to be screwed up
+and screwed up higher still, to make it last a couple of days longer;
+the last nights spent weariedly over ecarte, with none but the fixed
+idea of winning, the exhaustion of all their violence already pulsing
+through their bodies, like a nervous relaxation, and their eyes gazing
+without expression at the cards.
+
+During that time Quaerts had only once thought of Cecile; and he
+had not followed up the thought. She had no doubt arisen three or
+four times in his brain, as a vague image, white and transparent, an
+apparition which had vanished again immediately, leaving no trace of
+its passage. All this time too he had not written to her; and it had
+only once struck him that a silence of three weeks, after their last
+conversation, must seem strange to her. There it had remained. He was
+back now; he had lain three days long at home on his bed, on his sofa,
+tired, feverish, dissatisfied, disgusted with everything, everything;
+then, one morning, remembering that it was Wednesday, he had thought
+of Jules and his riding-lesson.
+
+He sent for Jules, but, too lazy to shave or dress, he remained lying
+where he was. And he still lay there, realizing nothing. There before
+him were the Law Courts, with the Privy Council adjoining. At the
+side he could see the Witte [2] and William the Silent standing on
+his pedestal in the middle of the Plein: that was all exceedingly
+interesting. And Jules was hanging up trophies: also interesting. And
+the most interesting of all was the stupid life he had been
+leading. What a tense effort to lull his boredom! Had he really amused
+himself during that time? No; he had made a pretence of being amused:
+the episode of the peasant-woman and the ecarte had excited him; the
+sport was bad, the wine good, but he had drunk too much of it. And
+then the filthy champagne of that wench, at Brussels!...
+
+Well, what then? He had absolute need of it, of a life like that,
+of sport and wild enjoyment; it served to balance the other thing in
+him, which became impossible in everyday life.
+
+But why could he not preserve some sort of mean in both? He was
+perfectly well-equipped for ordinary life; and with that he possessed
+something in addition, something that was very beautiful in his soul:
+why could he not remain balanced between those two inner spheres? Why
+was he always tossed from one to the other, as a thing that belonged
+to neither? How fine he could have made his life with just the least
+tact, the least self-restraint! How he might have lived in a healthy
+delight of purified animal existence, tempered by a higher joyousness
+of soul! But tact, self-restraint: he had none of all this; he lived
+according to his impulses, always in extremes; he was incapable of
+half-measures. And in this lay his pride as well as his regret: his
+pride that he felt this or that thing "wholly," that he was unable
+to compromise with his emotions; and his regret that he could not
+compromise and bring into harmony the elements which for ever waged
+war within him.
+
+When he had met Cecile and had seen her again and yet once again,
+he had felt himself carried wholly to the one extreme, the summit
+of exaltation, of pure crystal sympathy, in which the circle of
+his atmosphere--as he had said--glided in sympathy over hers, in
+a caress of pure chastity and spirituality, as two stars, spinning
+closer together, might mingle their atmospheres for a moment, like
+breaths. What smiling happiness had not been within his reach, as it
+were a grace from Heaven!
+
+Then, then he had felt himself toppling down, as if he had rocked
+over the balancing-point; and he had longed for earthly pleasures,
+for great simplicity of emotion, for primitive enjoyment of life,
+for flesh and blood. He now remembered how, two days after his last
+conversation with Cecile, he had seen Emilie Hijdrecht, here, in these
+very rooms, where at length, stung by his neglect, she had ventured
+to come to him one evening, heedless of all caution. With a line of
+cruelty round his mouth he recalled how she had wept at his knees, how
+in her jealousy she had complained against Cecile, how he had ordered
+her to be silent and forbidden her to pronounce Cecile's name. Then,
+their mad embrace, an embrace of cruelty: cruelty on her part against
+the man whom time after time she lost when she thought him secured
+for good, whom she could not understand and to whom she clung with
+all the violence of her brutal passion, a purely animal passion of
+primitive times; cruelty on his part against the woman he despised,
+while in his passion he almost stifled her in his embrace.
+
+
+
+
+2
+
+Yes, what then? How was he to find the mean between the two poles of
+his nature? He shrugged his shoulders. He knew that he could never
+find it. He lacked some quality, or a certain power, necessary to find
+it. He could do nothing but allow himself to swing to and fro. Very
+well then: he would let himself swing; there was no help for it. For
+now, in the lassitude following his outburst of savagery, he began
+to experience again a violent longing, like one who, after a long
+evening passed in a ball-room heavy with the foul air of gaslight and
+the stifling closeness and mustiness of human breath, craves a high
+heaven and width of atmosphere: a violent longing for Cecile. And
+he smiled, glad that he knew her, that he was able to go to her,
+that it was now his privilege to enter into the chaste sanctuary of
+her environment, as into a temple; he smiled, glad that he felt his
+longing and proud of it, exalting himself above other men. Already he
+tasted the pleasure of confessing to her honestly how he had lived
+during the last three weeks; and already he heard her voice, though
+he could not distinguish the words....
+
+Jules climbed down the steps. He was disappointed that Quaerts had not
+followed his arranging of the weapons upon the rack and his draping
+of the stuffs around them. But he had quietly continued his work and,
+now that it was finished, he climbed down and came and sat on the
+floor quietly, with his head against the foot of the couch on which
+his friend lay thinking. Jules said never a word; he looked straight
+before him, a little sulkily, knowing that Quaerts was looking at him.
+
+"Jules," said Quaerts.
+
+But Jules did not answer, still staring.
+
+"Tell me, Jules, what makes you like me so much?"
+
+"How should I know?" answered Jules, with thin lips.
+
+"Don't you know?"
+
+"No. How can you know why you are fond of any one?"
+
+"You oughtn't to be so fond of me, Jules. It's not good."
+
+"Very well, I will be less so in the future."
+
+Jules rose suddenly and took his hat. He put out his hand; but Quaerts
+held him back with a laugh:
+
+"You see, scarcely any one is fond of me, except ... you and your
+father. Now I know why your father likes me, but not why you do."
+
+"You want to know everything."
+
+"Is that so very wrong?"
+
+"Certainly. You'll never be satisfied. Mamma always says that no one
+knows anything."
+
+"And you?"
+
+"I?... Nothing...."
+
+"How do you mean, nothing?"
+
+"I know nothing at all.... Let me go."
+
+"Are you cross, Jules?"
+
+"No, but I have an engagement."
+
+"Can't you wait till I'm dressed? Then we can go together. I am going
+to Aunt Cecile's."
+
+Jules objected:
+
+"All right, provided you hurry."
+
+Quaerts got up. He now saw the arrangement of the weapons, which he
+had entirely forgotten:
+
+"You've done it very nicely, Jules," he said, in an admiring
+tone. "Thank you very much."
+
+Jules did not answer; and Quaerts went through into his
+dressing-room. The lad sat down on the sofa, bolt upright, looking out
+at the Law Courts, across the bare trees. His eyes filled with great
+round tears, which ran down his cheeks. Sitting stiff and motionless,
+he wept.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+1
+
+Cecile had passed those three weeks in a state of ignorance which had
+filled her with pain. She had, it is true, heard through Dolf that
+Quaerts was away shooting, but beyond that nothing. A thrill of joy
+electrified her when the door behind the screen opened and she saw
+him enter the room. He was standing in front of her before she could
+recover herself; and, as she was trembling, she did not rise, but,
+still sitting, reached out her hand to him, her fingers quivering
+imperceptibly.
+
+"I have been out of town," he began.
+
+"So I heard."
+
+"Have you been well all this time?"
+
+"Quite well, thank you."
+
+He noticed that she was somewhat pale, that she had a light blue shadow
+under her eyes and that there was lassitude in all her movements. But
+he came to the conclusion that there was nothing extraordinary in
+this, or that perhaps she merely looked pale in the creamy whiteness
+of her soft, white dress, like silky wool, even as her figure became
+yet slighter in the constraint of the scarf about her waist, with
+its long white fringe falling to her feet. She was sitting alone with
+Christie, the child upon his footstool with his head in her lap and
+a picture-book on his knees.
+
+"You two are a perfect Madonna and Child," said Quaerts.
+
+"Little Dolf has gone out to walk with his god-father," she said,
+looking fondly upon her child and motioning to him gently.
+
+At this bidding the boy stood up and shyly approached Quaerts,
+offering him a hand. Quaerts lifted him up and set him on his knee:
+
+"How light he is!"
+
+"He is not strong," said Cecile.
+
+"You coddle him too much."
+
+ She laughed:
+
+"Pedagogue!" she laughed. "How do I coddle him?"
+
+"I always find him nestling against your skirts. He must come with
+me one of these days: I should make him do some gymnastics."
+
+"Jules horse-riding and Christie gymnastics!" she exclaimed.
+
+"Yes ... sport, in fact!" he answered, with a meaning look of fun.
+
+She glanced back at him; and sympathy smiled from the depths of her
+gold-grey eyes. He felt thoroughly happy and, with the child still
+upon his knees, said:
+
+"I have come to confess to you ... Madonna!"
+
+Then, as though startled, he put the child away from him.
+
+"To confess?"
+
+"Yes.... There, Christie, go back to Mamma; I mustn't keep you by me
+any longer."
+
+"Very well," said Christie, with great, wondering eyes, and caught
+hold of the cord of Quaerts' eyeglass.
+
+"The Child would forgive too easily," said Quaerts.
+
+"And I, have I anything to forgive you?" she asked.
+
+"I shall be only too happy if you will see it in that light."
+
+"Then begin your confession."
+
+"But the Child ..." he hesitated.
+
+Cecile stood up; she took the child, kissed him and sat him on a stool
+by the window with his picture-book. Then she came back to the sofa:
+
+"He will not hear...."
+
+And Quaerts began the story, choosing his words: he spoke of the
+shooting, of the ragging-parties and the peasant-woman and of
+Brussels. She listened attentively, with dread in her eyes at the
+violence of such a life, the echo of which reverberated in his words,
+even though the echo was softened by his reverence.
+
+"And is all this a sin calling for absolution?" she asked, when he
+had finished.
+
+"Is it not?"
+
+"I am no Madonna, but ... a woman with fairly emancipated views. If
+you were happy in what you did, it was no sin, for happiness is
+good.... Were you happy, I ask you? For in that case what you did
+was ... good."
+
+"Happy?" he asked.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"No.... Therefore I have sinned, sinned against myself, have I
+not? Forgive me ... Madonna."
+
+She was troubled at the sound of his voice, which, gently broken,
+wrapped her about as with a spell; she was troubled to see him sitting
+there, filling with his body, his personality, his existence a place
+in her room, beside her. In a single second she lived through hours,
+feeling her calm love lying heavy within her, like a sweet weight;
+feeling a longing to throw her arms about him and tell him that she
+worshipped him; feeling also an intense sorrow at what he had admitted,
+that once again he had been unhappy. Hardly able to control herself
+in her compassion, she rose, moved towards him and laid her hand upon
+his shoulder:
+
+"Tell me, do you mean all this? Is it all true? Is it true that you
+have been living as you say and yet have not been happy?"
+
+"Perfectly true, on my soul."
+
+"Then why did you do it?"
+
+"I couldn't help it."
+
+"You were unable to force yourself to be more moderate?"
+
+"Absolutely."
+
+"Then I should like to teach you."
+
+"And I should not like to learn, from you. For it is and always will
+be my best happiness to be immoderate also where you are concerned,
+immoderate in the life of my real self, my soul, just as I have now
+been immoderate in the life of my apparent self."
+
+Her eyes grew dim; she shook her head, her hand still upon his
+shoulder:
+
+"That is not right," she said, in deep distress.
+
+"It is a joy ... for both those beings. I have to be like that,
+I have to be immoderate: they both demand it."
+
+"But that is not right," she insisted. "Pure enjoyment ..."
+
+"The lowest, but also the highest...."
+
+A shiver passed through her, a deadly fear for him.
+
+"No, no," she persisted. "Don't think that. Don't do it. Neither the
+one nor the other. Really, it is all wrong. Pure joy, unbridled joy,
+even the highest, is not good. In that way you force your life. When
+you speak so, I am afraid for your sake. Try to recover moderation. You
+have so many possibilities of being happy."
+
+"Oh, yes!..."
+
+"Yes, but what I mean is that you must not be fanatical. And ... and
+also, for the love of God, don't run quite so madly after pleasure."
+
+He looked up at her; he saw her beseeching him with her eyes, with
+the expression of her face, with her whole attitude, as she stood
+bending slightly forward. He saw her beseeching him, even as he
+heard her; and then he knew that she loved him. A feeling of bright
+rapture came upon him, as though something high were descending upon
+him to guide him. He did not stir--he felt her hand thrilling at his
+shoulder--afraid lest with the smallest movement he should drive that
+rapture away. It did not occur to him for a moment to speak a word
+of tenderness to her or to take her in his arms and press her to him:
+she was so profoundly transfigured in his eyes that any such profane
+desire remained far removed from him. And yet he felt at that moment
+that he loved her, but as he had never yet loved any one before,
+so completely and exclusively, with the noblest elements that lie
+hidden away in the soul, often unknown even to itself. He felt that
+he loved her with new-born feelings of frank youth and fresh vigour
+and pure unselfishness. And it seemed to him that it was all a dream
+of something which did not exist, a dream lightly woven about him,
+a web of sunbeams.
+
+"Madonna!" he whispered. "Forgive me...."
+
+"Promise then...."
+
+"Willingly, but I shall not be able to keep my promise. I am weak...."
+
+"No."
+
+"Ah, I am! But I give you my promise; and I promise also to try my
+utmost to keep it. Will you forgive me now?"
+
+She nodded to him; her smile fell on him like a ray of sunlight. Then
+she went to the child, took it in her arms and brought it to Quaerts:
+
+"Put your arms round his neck, Christie, and give him a kiss."
+
+He took the child from her; it threw its little arms about his neck
+and kissed him on the forehead.
+
+"The Madonna forgives me ... and the Child!" he whispered.
+
+
+
+
+2
+
+They stayed long talking to each other; and no one came to disturb
+them. The child had gone back to sit by the window. Twilight began to
+strew pale ashes in the room. He saw Cecile sitting there, sweetly
+white; the kindly melody of her half-breathed words came rippling
+towards him. They talked of many things: of Emerson; of Van Eeden's
+new poem in the Nieuwe Gids; of their respective views of life. He
+accepted a cup of tea, only for the pleasure of seeing her move with
+the yielding lines of her graciousness, standing before the tea-table
+in the corner. In her white dress, she had something about her of
+marble grown lissom with inspiration and warm life. He sat motionless,
+listening reverently, swathed in a still rapture of delight. It was a
+mood which defied analysis, without a visible origin, springing from
+their sympathetic fellowship as a flower springs from an invisible seed
+after a drop of rain and a kiss of the sunshine. She too was happy;
+she no longer felt the pain which his reverence had caused her. True,
+she was a little sad by reason of what he had told her, but she was
+happy for the sake of this speck of the present. Nor did she any longer
+see that dark stream, that inky sky, that night landscape: everything
+that she now saw was bright and calm. And happiness breathed about
+her, a tangible happiness, like a living caress. Sometimes they ceased
+speaking and both of them looked towards the child, as it sat reading;
+or Christie would ask them something and they would answer. Then they
+smiled one to the other, because the child was so good and did not
+disturb them.
+
+"If only this could continue for ever," he ventured to say, though
+still fearing lest a word might break the crystalline transparency of
+their happiness. "If you could only see into me now, how all in me is
+peace. I don't know why, but that is how I feel. Perhaps because of
+your forgiveness. Really the Catholic religion is delightful, with its
+absolution. What a comfort that must be for people of weak character!"
+
+"But I cannot think your character weak. And it is not. You tell me
+that you sometimes know how to place yourself above ordinary life,
+whence you can look down upon its grief as on a comedy which makes
+one laugh sadly for a minute, but which is not true. I too believe
+that life, as we see it, is no more than a symbol of a truer life,
+concealed beneath it, which we do not see. But I cannot rise beyond
+the symbol, while you can. Therefore you are very strong and feel
+yourself very great."
+
+"How strange, when I just think myself weak and you great and
+powerful. You dare to be what you are, in all your harmony; and I am
+always hiding and am afraid of people individually, though sometimes I
+am able to rise above life in the mass. But these are riddles which it
+is vain for me to attempt to solve; and, though I have not the power
+to solve them, at this moment I feel nothing but happiness. Surely
+I may say that once aloud, may I not, quite aloud?"
+
+She smiled to him in the bliss which she felt of making him happy.
+
+It is the first time I have felt happiness in this way," he
+continued. "Indeed it is the first time I have felt it at all...."
+
+"Then don't analyse it."
+
+"There is no need. It is standing before me in all its simplicity. Do
+you know why I am happy?"
+
+"Don't analyse, don't analyse," she repeated in alarm.
+
+"No," he said, "but may I tell you, without analysing?"
+
+"No, don't," she stammered, "because ... because I know...."
+
+She besought him, very pale, with folded, trembling hands. The child
+looked at them; it had closed its book, and come to sit down on its
+stool by its mother, with a look of gay sagacity in its pale-blue eyes.
+
+"Then I obey you," said Quaerts, with some difficulty.
+
+And they were both silent, their eyes expanded as with the lustre of
+a vision. It seemed to be gently beaming about them through the pale
+ashen twilight.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+This evening Cecile had written a great deal into her diary; and she
+now paced up and down in her room, with locked hands hanging before
+her and her head slightly bowed and a fixed look in her eyes. There
+was anxiety about her mouth. Before her was the vision, as she had
+conceived it. He loved her with his soul alone, not as a woman who
+is pretty and good, but with a higher love than that, with the finest
+nervous fibres of his being--his real being--with the supreme emotion
+of the very essence of his soul. Thus she felt that he loved her and
+in no other way, with contemplation, with adoration. Thus she felt it
+actually, through a sympathetic power of divination by which each of
+them was able to guess what actually passed within the other. And this
+was his happiness--his first, as he said--thus to love her and in no
+other way. Oh, she well understood him! She understood his illusion,
+which he saw in her; and she now knew that, if she really wished to
+love him for his sake and not for her own, she must needs appear to
+be nothing else to him, she must preserve his illusion of a woman
+not of flesh, one who desired none of the earthly things that other
+women did, one who should be soul alone, a sister soul to his. But,
+while she saw before her this vision of her love, calm and radiant,
+she saw also the struggle which awaited her, the struggle with herself,
+with her own distress: distress because he thought of her so highly
+and named her Madonna, the while she longed only to be lowly and his
+slave. She would have to seem the woman he saw in her, for the sake of
+his happiness, and the part would be a heavy one for her to support,
+for she loved him, ah, with such simplicity, with all her woman's
+heart, wishing to give herself to him entirely, as only once in her
+life a woman gives herself, whatever the sacrifice might cost her,
+the sacrifice made in ignorance of herself and perhaps afterwards
+to be made in bitterness and sorrow! The outward appearance of her
+conduct and her inward consciousness of herself: the conflict of
+these would fall heavily upon her, but she thought upon the struggle
+with a smile, with joy beaming through her heart, for this bitterness
+would be endured for him, deliberately for him and for him alone. Oh,
+the luxury to suffer for one whom she loved as she loved him; to
+be tortured with inner longing, that he might not come to her with
+the embrace of his arms and the kiss of his mouth; and to feel that
+the torture was for the sake of his happiness, his! To feel that she
+loved him enough to go to him with open arms and beg for the alms of
+his caresses; but also to feel that she loved him more than that and
+more highly and that--not from pride or bashfulness, which are really
+egoism, but solely from sacrifice of herself to his happiness--she
+never would, never could, be a suppliant before him!
+
+To suffer, to suffer for him! To wear a sword through her soul for
+him! To be a martyr for her god, for whom there was no happiness
+on earth save through her martyrdom! And she had passed her life,
+had spent long, long years, without feeling until this day that such
+luxury could exist, not as a fantasy in rhymes, but as a reality in her
+heart. She had been a young girl and had read the poets and what they
+rhyme of love; and she had thought she understood it all, with a subtle
+comprehension and yet without ever having had the least acquaintance
+with emotion itself. She had been a young woman, had been married,
+had borne children. Her married life flashed through her mind in a
+lightning-flicker of memory; and she stopped still before the portrait
+of her dead husband, standing there on its easel, draped in sombre
+plush. The mask it wore was of ambition: an austere, refined face,
+with features sharp, as if engraved in fine steel; coldly-intelligent
+eyes with a fixed portrait look; thin, clean-shaven lips, closed firmly
+like a lock. Her husband! And she still lived in the same house where
+she had lived with him, where she had had to receive her many guests
+when he was Foreign Minister. Her receptions and dinners flickered up
+in her mind, so many scenes of worldliness; and she clearly recalled
+her husband's eye taking in everything with a quick glance of approval
+or disapproval: the arrangement of her rooms, her dress, the ordering
+of her parties. Her marriage had not been unhappy; her husband was a
+little cold and unexpansive, wrapped wholly in his ambition; but he
+was attached to her after his fashion and even tenderly; she too had
+been fond of him; she thought at the time that she was marrying him
+for love: her dependent womanliness loved the male, the master. Of a
+delicate constitution, probably undermined by excessive brain-work,
+he had died after a short illness. Cecile remembered her sorrow, her
+loneliness with the two children, as to whom he had already feared
+that she would spoil them. And her loneliness had been sweet to her,
+among the clouds of her dreaming....
+
+This portrait--a handsome life-size photograph; a carbon impression
+dark with a Rembrandt shadow--why had she never had it copied in
+oils, as she had at first intended? The intention had faded away
+within her; for months she had not given it a thought; now suddenly
+it recurred to her.... And she felt no self-reproach or remorse. She
+would not have the painting made now. The portrait was well enough
+as it was. She thought of the dead man without sorrow. She had never
+had cause to complain of him; he had never had anything with which to
+reproach her. And now she was free; she became conscious of the fact
+with a great exultation. Free, to feel what she would! Her freedom
+arched above her as a blue firmament in which new love ascended
+with a dove's immaculate flight. Freedom, air, light! She turned
+from the portrait with a smile of rapture; she thrust her arms above
+her head as if she would measure her freedom, the width of the air,
+as if she would go to meet the light. Love, she was in love! There
+was nothing but love; nothing but the harmony of their souls, the
+harmony of her handmaiden's soul with the soul of her god, an exile
+upon earth. Oh, what a mercy that this harmony could exist between
+him so exalted and her so lowly! But he must not see her lowliness;
+she must remain the Madonna, remain the Madonna for his sake, in the
+martyrdom due to his reverence, in the dizziness of the high place,
+the heavenly throne to which he raised her, beside himself. She felt
+this dizziness shuddering about her like rings of light. And she flung
+herself on her sofa and locked her fingers; her eyelids quivered;
+then she remained staring before her, towards some very distant point.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+Jules had been away from school for a day or two with a bad headache,
+which had made him look very pale and given him an air of sadness;
+but he was a little better now and, feeling bored in his own room, he
+went downstairs to the empty drawing-room and sat at the piano. Papa
+was at work in his study, but it would not interfere with Papa if
+he played. Dolf spoilt him, seeing in his son something that was
+wanting in himself and therefore attracted him, even as possibly it
+had formerly attracted him in his wife also: Jules could do no wrong
+in his eyes; and, if the boy had only been willing, Dolf would have
+spared no expense to give him a careful musical education. But Jules
+violently opposed himself to anything resembling lessons and besides
+maintained that it was not worth while. He had no ambition; his vanity
+was not tickled by his father's hopes of him or his appreciation of
+his playing: he played only for himself, to express himself in the
+vague language of musical sounds. At this moment he felt alone and
+abandoned in the great house, though he knew that Papa was at work
+two rooms off and that when he pleased he could take refuge on Papa's
+great couch; at this moment he had within himself an almost physical
+feeling of dread at his loneliness, which caused something to reel
+about him, an immense sense of utter desolation.
+
+He was fourteen years old, but he felt himself neither child nor
+boy: a certain feebleness, an almost feminine need of dependency,
+of devotion to some one who would be everything to him had already,
+in his earliest childhood, struck at his virility; and he shivered
+in his dread of this inner loneliness, as if he were afraid of
+himself. He suffered greatly from vague moods in which that strange
+something oppressed and stifled him; then, not knowing where to hide
+his inner being, he would go to play, so that he might lose himself in
+the great sound-soul of music. His thin, nervous fingers would grope
+hesitatingly over the keys; he himself would suffer from the false
+chords which he struck in his search; then he would let himself go,
+find a single, very short motive, of plaintive, minor melancholy, and
+caress that motive in his joy at possessing it, at having found it,
+caress it until it returned each moment as a monotony of sorrow. He
+would think the motive so beautiful that he could not part with it;
+those four or five notes expressed so well everything that he felt that
+he would play them over and over again, until Suzette burst into the
+room and made him stop, saying that otherwise she would be driven mad.
+
+Thus he sat playing now. And it was pitiful at first: he hardly
+recognized the notes; cacophonous discords wailed and cut into his poor
+brain, still smarting from the headache. He moaned as if he were in
+pain afresh; but his fingers were hypnotized, they could not desist,
+they still sought on; and the notes became purer: a short phrase
+released itself with a cry, a cry which returned continually on the
+same note, suddenly high after the dull bass of the prelude. And
+this note came as a surprise to Jules; that fair cry of sorrow
+frightened him; and he was glad to have found it, glad to have so
+sweet a sorrow. Then he was no longer himself; he played on until
+he felt that it was not he who was playing but another, within him,
+who compelled him; he found the full, pure chords as by intuition;
+through the sobbing of the sounds ran the same musical figure,
+higher and higher, with silver feet of purity, following the curve
+of crystal rainbows lightly spanned on high; reaching the topmost
+point of the arch it struck a cry, this time in very drunkenness,
+out into the major, throwing up wide arms in gladness to heavens of
+intangible blue. Then it was like souls of men, which first live and
+suffer and utter their complaint and then die, to glitter in forms of
+light whose long wings spring from their pure shoulders in sheets of
+silver radiance; they trip one behind the other over the rainbows,
+over the bridges of glass, blue and rose and yellow; and there come
+more and more, kindreds and nations of souls; they hurry their silver
+feet, they press across the rainbow, they laugh and sing and push one
+another; in their jostling their wings clash together, scattering
+silver down. Now they stand all on the top of the arc and look up,
+with the great wondering of their laughing child-eyes; and they dare
+not, they dare not; but others press on behind them, innumerous,
+more and more and yet more; they crowd upwards to the topmost height,
+their wings straight in the air, close together. And now, now they
+must; they may hesitate no longer. One of them, taking deep breaths,
+spreads his flight and with one shock springs out of the thick throng
+into the ether. Soon many follow, one after another, till their shapes
+swoon in the blue; all is gleam about them. Now, far below, thin as a
+thin thread, the rainbow arches itself, but they do not look at it;
+rays fall towards them: these are souls, which they embrace; they
+go with them in locked embraces. And then the light: light beaming
+over all; all things liquid in everlasting light; nothing but light:
+the sounds sing the light, the sounds are the light, there is nothing
+now but the light everlasting....
+
+"Jules!"
+
+He looked up vacantly.
+
+"Jules! Jules!"
+
+He smiled now, as if awakened from a dream-sleep; he rose, went to
+her, to Cecile. She stood in the doorway; she had remained standing
+there while he played; it had seemed to her that he was playing a
+part of herself.
+
+"What were you playing, Jules?" she asked.
+
+He was quite awake now and distressed, fearing that he must have made
+a terrible noise in the house....
+
+"I don't know, Auntie," he said.
+
+She hugged him, suddenly, violently, in gratitude.... To him she owed
+it, the great mystery, since the day when he had broken out in anger
+against her....
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+1
+
+
+"Oh, for that which cannot be told, because words are so few, always
+the same combinations of a few letters and sounds; oh, for that which
+cannot be thought of in the narrow limits of comprehension; that
+which at best can only be groped for with the antennae of the soul;
+essence of the essences of the ultimate elements of our being!..."
+
+
+
+She wrote no more, she knew no more: why write that she had no words
+and yet seek them?
+
+She was waiting for him and she now looked out of the open window
+to see if he was coming. She remained there for a long time; then
+she felt that he would come immediately and so he did: she saw him
+approaching along the Scheveningen Road; he pushed open the iron gate
+of the villa and smiled to her as he raised his hat.
+
+"Wait!" she cried. "Stay where you are!"
+
+She ran down the steps, into the garden, where he stood. She came
+towards him, beaming with happiness and so lovely, so delicately frail;
+her blonde head so seemly in the fresh green of May; her figure like
+a young girl's in the palest grey gown, with black velvet ribbon and
+here and there a touch of silver lace.
+
+"I am so glad that you have come! You have not been to see me for so
+long!" she said, giving him her hand.
+
+He did not answer at once; he merely smiled.
+
+"Let us sit in the garden, behind: the weather is so lovely."
+
+"Let us," he said.
+
+They walked into the garden, by the mesh of the garden-paths, the
+jasmine-vines starring white as they passed. In an adjoining villa
+a piano was playing; the sounds came to them of Rubinstein's Romance.
+
+"Listen!" said Cecile, starting. "What is that?"
+
+"What?" he asked.
+
+"What they are playing."
+
+"Something of Rubinstein's, I believe," he said.
+
+"Rubinstein?..." she repeated, vaguely. "Yes...."
+
+And she relapsed into the wealth of memories of ... what? Once before,
+in this way, she had walked along these same paths, past jasmine-vines
+like these, long, ever so long ago; she had walked with him, with
+him.... Why? Could the past repeat itself, after centuries?...
+
+"It is three weeks since you have been to see me," she said, simply,
+recovering herself.
+
+"Forgive me," he replied.
+
+"What was the reason?"
+
+He hesitated throughout his being, seeking an excuse:
+
+"I don't know," he answered, softly. "You will forgive me, will you
+not? One day it was this, another day that. And then ... I don't
+know. Many reasons together. It is not good that I should see you
+often. Not good for you, nor for me."
+
+"Let us begin with the second. Why is it not good for you?"
+
+"No, let us begin with the first, with what concerns you. People ..."
+
+"People?"
+
+"People are talking about us. I am looked upon as an irretrievable
+rake. I will not have your name linked profanely with mine."
+
+"And is it?"
+
+"Yes...."
+
+She smiled:
+
+"I don't mind."
+
+"But you must mind; if not for your own sake ..."
+
+He stopped. She knew he was thinking of her boys; she shrugged her
+shoulders.
+
+"And now, why is it not good for you?"
+
+"A man must not be happy too often."
+
+"What a sophism! Why not?"
+
+"I don't know; but I feel I am right. It spoils him; it is too much
+for him."
+
+"Are you happy here, then?"
+
+He smiled and gently nodded yes.
+
+They were silent for very long. They were now sitting at the end
+of the garden, on a seat which stood in a semicircle of flowering
+rhododendrons: the great purple-satin blossoms shut them in with a
+tall hedge of closely-clustered bouquets, rising from the paths and
+overtopping their heads; standard roses flung their incense before
+them. They sat still, happy in each other, happy in the sympathy of
+their atmospheres mingling together; yet in their happiness there
+was the invincible melancholy which is an integral part of all life,
+even in happiness.
+
+"I don't know how I am to tell you," he said. "But suppose that I were
+to see you every day, every moment that I thought of you.... That would
+not do. For then I should become so refined, so subtle, that for pure
+happiness I should not be able to live; my other being would receive
+nothing and would suffer like a beast that is left to starve. I am
+bad, I am selfish, to be able to speak like this, but I must tell
+you the truth, that you may not think too well of me. And so I only
+seek your company as something very beautiful which I allow myself
+to enjoy just once in a way."
+
+She was silent.
+
+"Sometimes ... sometimes, too, I imagine that in doing this I am not
+behaving well to you, that in some way or other I offend or hurt
+you. Then I sit brooding about it, until I begin to think that it
+would be best to take leave of you for ever."
+
+She was still silent; motionless she sat, with her hands lying slackly
+in her lap, her head slightly bowed, a smile about her mouth.
+
+"Speak to me," he begged.
+
+"You do not offend me, nor hurt me," she said. "Come to me whenever
+you feel the need. Do always as you think best; and I shall think
+that best too: you must not doubt that."
+
+"I should so much like to know in what way you like me?"
+
+"In what way? Surely, as a Madonna does a sinner who repents and
+gives her his soul," she said, archly. "Am I not a Madonna?"
+
+"Are you content to be so?"
+
+"Can you be so ignorant about women as not to know how every one of
+us has a longing to solace and relieve, in fact, to play at being
+a Madonna?"
+
+"Do not speak like that," he said, with pain in his voice.
+
+"I am speaking seriously...."
+
+He looked at her; a doubt rose within him, but she smiled to him;
+a calm glory was about her; she sat amidst the bouquets of the
+rhododendrons as in the blossoming tenderness of one great mystic
+flower. The wound of his doubt was soothed with balsam. He surrendered
+himself wholly to his happiness; an atmosphere wafted about him of the
+sweet calm of life, an atmosphere in which life becomes dispassionate
+and restful and smiling, like the air which is rare about the gods. It
+began to grow dark; a violet dusk fell from the sky like crape falling
+upon crape; quietly the stars lighted up. The shadows in the garden,
+between the shrubs among which they sat, flowed into one another; the
+piano in the next villa had stopped. And happiness drew a veil between
+his soul and the outside world: the garden with its design of plots
+and paths; the villa with curtains at its windows and its iron gate;
+the road behind, with the rattle of carriages and trams. All this
+withdrew itself far back; all ordinary life retreated far from him;
+vanishing behind the veil, it died away. It was no dream nor conceit:
+reality to him was the happiness that had come while the world died
+away; the happiness that was rare, invisible, intangible, coming from
+the love which alone is sympathy, calm and without passion, the love
+which exists purely of itself, without further thought either of
+taking anything or even of giving anything, the love of the gods,
+which is the soul of love itself. High he felt himself: the equal
+of the illusion which he had of her, which she wished to be for his
+sake, of which he also was now absolutely certain. For he could not
+know that what had given him happiness--his illusion--so perfect,
+so crystal-clear, might cause her some sort of grief; he could not
+at this moment penetrate without sin into the truth of the law which
+insists on equilibrium, which takes away from one what it offers to
+another, which gives happiness and grief together; he could not know
+that, if happiness was with him, with her there was anguish, anguish
+in that she had to make a pretence and deceive him for his own sake,
+anguish in that she wanted what was earthly, that she craved for what
+was earthly, that she yearned for earthly pleasures!... And still less
+could he know that, notwithstanding all this, there was nevertheless
+voluptuousness in her anguish: that to suffer through him, to suffer
+for him made of her anguish all voluptuousness.
+
+
+
+
+2
+
+It was dark and late; and they were still sitting there.
+
+"Shall we go for a walk?" she asked.
+
+He hesitated, with a smile; but she repeated her suggestion:
+
+"Why not, if you care to?"
+
+And he could no longer refuse.
+
+They rose and went along by the back of the house; and Cecile
+said to the maid, whom she saw sitting with her needle-work by the
+kitchen-door:
+
+"Greta, fetch me my little black hat, my black-lace shawl and a pair
+of gloves."
+
+The servant rose and went into the house. Cecile noticed how a trifle
+of shyness was emphasized in Quaerts' hesitation, now that they stood
+loitering, waiting among the flower-beds. She smiled, plucked a rose
+and placed it in her waist-band.
+
+"Have the boys gone to bed?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," she replied, still smiling, "long ago."
+
+The servant returned; Cecile put on the little black hat, threw the
+lace about her neck, but refused the gloves which Greta offered her:
+
+"No, not these; get me a pair of grey ones...."
+
+The servant went into the house again; and as Cecile looked at Quaerts
+her gaiety increased. She gave a little laugh:
+
+"What is the matter?" she asked, mischievously, knowing perfectly
+well what it was.
+
+"Nothing, nothing!" he said, vaguely, and waited patiently until
+Greta returned.
+
+Then they went through the garden-gate into the Woods. They walked
+slowly, without speaking; Cecile played with her long gloves, not
+putting them on.
+
+"Really ..." he began, hesitating.
+
+"Come, what is it?"
+
+"You know; I told you the other day: it's not right...."
+
+"What isn't?"
+
+"What we are doing now. You risk too much."
+
+"Too much, with you?"
+
+"If any one were to see us...."
+
+"And what then?"
+
+He shook his head:
+
+"You are wilful; you know quite well."
+
+She clinched her eyes; her mouth grew serious; she pretended to be
+a little angry:
+
+"Listen, you mustn't be anxious if I'm not. I am doing no harm. Our
+walks are not secret: Greta at least knows about them. And, besides,
+I am free to do as I please."
+
+"It's my fault: the first time we went for a walk in the evening,
+it was at my request...."
+
+"Then do penance and be good; come now, without scruple, at my
+request," she said, with mock emphasis.
+
+He yielded, feeling far too happy to wish to make any sacrifice to
+a convention which at that moment did not exist.
+
+They walked on silently. Cecile's sensations always came to her in
+shocks of surprise. So it had been when Jules had grown suddenly angry
+with her; so also, midway on the stair, after that conversation at
+dinner of circles of sympathy. And now, precisely in the same way, with
+the shock of sudden revelation, came this new sensation, that after
+all she was not suffering so seriously as she had at first thought;
+that her agony, being a voluptuousness, could not be a martyrdom;
+that she was happy, that happiness had come about her in the fine
+air of his atmosphere, because they were together, together.... Oh,
+why wish for anything more, above all for things less pure? Did he
+not love her and was not his love already a fact and was not his love
+earthly enough for her, now that it was a fact? Did he not love her
+with a tenderness which feared for anything that might trouble her
+in the world, through her ignoring that world and wandering about
+with him alone in the dark? Did he not love her with tenderness, but
+also with the lustre of his soul's divinity, calling her Madonna and
+by this title--unconsciously, perhaps, in his simplicity--making her
+the equal of all that was divine in him? Did he not love her? Heavens
+above, did he not love her? Well, what did she want more? No, no,
+she wanted nothing more: she was happy, she shared happiness with
+him; he gave it to her just as she gave it to him; it was a sphere
+that moved with them wherever they went, seeking their way along the
+darkling paths of the Woods, she leaning on his arm, he leading her,
+for she could see nothing in the dark, which yet was not dark, but
+pure light of their happiness. And so it was as if it were not evening,
+but day, noonday, noonday in the night, hour of light in the dusk!
+
+
+
+
+3
+
+And the darkness was light; the night dawned with light which beamed
+on every side. Calmly it beamed, the light, like one solitary planet,
+beaming with the soft radiance of purity, bright in a heaven of
+still, white, silver light, a heaven where they walked along milky
+ways of light and music; it beamed and sounded beneath their feet;
+it welled in seas of ether high above their heads and beamed and
+sounded there, high and clear. And they were alone in their heaven,
+in their infinite heaven, which was as space, endless beneath them
+and above and around them, with endless spaces of light and music,
+of light that was music. Their heaven lay eternal on every side
+with blissful vistas of white radiance, fading away in lustre and
+vanishing landscapes, like oases of flowers and plants beside waters
+of light, still and clear and hushed with peace. For its peace was the
+ether in which all desire is dissolved and becomes transparent and
+crystal; and their life was a limpid existence in unruffled peace;
+they walked on, in heavenly sympathy of fellowship, close together,
+hemmed in one narrow circle, a circle of radiance which embraced them
+both. Barely was there a recollection in them of the world which had
+died out in the glitter of their heaven; there was naught in them but
+the ecstasy of their love, which had become their soul, as if they
+no longer had any soul, as if they were only love; and, when they
+looked about them and into the light, they saw that their heaven,
+in which their happiness was the light, was nothing but their love,
+and they saw that the landscapes--the flowers and plants by waters
+of light--were nothing but their love and that the endless space,
+the eternities of light and space, of spaces full of light and music,
+stretching on every hand, beneath them and above and around them,
+that all this was nothing but their love, which had grown into heaven
+and happiness.
+
+And now they came into the very midst, to the very sun-centre, the very
+goal which Cecile had once foreseen, concealed in the distance, in the
+irradiance of innate divinity. Up to the very goal they stepped; and
+on every side it shot its endless rays into each and every eternity,
+as if their love were becoming the centre of the universe...
+
+
+
+
+4
+
+But they sat on a bench, in the dark, not knowing that it was dark,
+for their eyes were full of the light. They sat against each other,
+silently at first, till, remembering that he had a voice and could
+still speak words, he said:
+
+"I have never lived through such a moment as this. I forget where
+we are and who we are and that we are human. We were, were we not? I
+seem to remember that we once were?"
+
+"Yes, but we are that no longer," she said, smiling; and her eyes,
+grown big, looked into the darkness that was light.
+
+"Once we were human, suffering and desiring, in a world where certainly
+much was beautiful, but where much also was ugly."
+
+"Why speak of that now?" she asked; and her voice sounded to herself
+as coming from very far and low beneath her.
+
+"I seemed to remember it."
+
+"I wanted to forget it."
+
+"Then I will do so too. But may I not thank you in human speech for
+lifting me above humanity?"
+
+"Have I done so?"
+
+"Yes. May I thank you for it ... on my knees?"
+
+He knelt down and reverently took her hands. He could just distinguish
+the outline of her figure, seated motionless and still upon the
+bench; above them was a pearl-grey twilight of stars, between the
+black boughs. She felt her hands in his and then his mouth, his kiss,
+upon her hand. Very gently, she released herself; and then, with a
+great soul of modesty, full of desireless happiness, very gently she
+bent her arms about his neck, took his head against her and kissed
+him on the forehead:
+
+"And I, I thank you too!" she whispered, rapturously.
+
+He was still; and she held him fast in her embrace.
+
+"I thank you," she said, "for teaching me this and how to be happy as
+we are and no otherwise. You see, when I still lived and was human,
+when I was a woman, I thought that I had lived before I met you, for I
+had had a husband and I had children of whom I was very fond. But from
+you I first learnt to live, to live without egoism and without desire;
+I learnt that from you this evening or ... this day, which is it? You
+have given me life and happiness and everything. And I thank you,
+I thank you! You see, you are so great and so strong and so clear
+and you have borne me towards your own happiness, which should also
+be mine, but it was so far above me that, without you, I should never
+have attained it! For there was a barrier for me which did not exist
+for you. You see, when I was still human"--and she laughed, clasping
+him more tightly--"I had a sister; and she too felt that there was
+a barrier between her happiness and herself; and she felt that she
+could not surmount this barrier and was so unhappy because of it that
+she feared lest she should go mad. But I, I do not know: I dreamed,
+I thought, I hoped, I waited, oh, I waited; and then you came; and you
+made me understand at once that you could be no man, no husband for me,
+but that you could be more for me: my angel, O my deliverer, who would
+take me in his arms and bear me over the barrier into his own heaven,
+where he himself was god, and make me his Madonna! Oh, I thank you,
+I thank you! I do not know how to thank you; I can only say that I
+love you, that I adore you, that I lay myself at your feet. Remain
+as you are and let me adore you, while you kneel where you are. I may
+adore you, may I not, while you yourself are kneeling? You see, I too
+must confess, as you used to do," she continued, for now she could
+not but confess. "I have not always been straightforward with you;
+I have sometimes pretended to be the Madonna, knowing all the time
+that I was but an ordinary woman, a woman who frankly loved you. But
+I deceived you for your own happiness, did I not? You wished me so,
+you were happy when I was so and no otherwise. And now, now too you
+must forgive me, because now I need no longer pretend, because that is
+past and has died away, because I myself have died away from myself,
+because now I am no longer a woman, no longer human for myself, but
+only what you wish me to be: a Madonna and your creature, an atom of
+your own essence and divinity. So will you forgive me the past? May
+I thank you for my happiness, for my heaven, my light, O my master,
+for my joy, my great, my immeasurable joy?"
+
+He rose and sat beside her, taking her gently in his arms:
+
+"Are you happy?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," she said, laying her head on his shoulder in a giddiness of
+light. "And you?"
+
+"Yes," he answered; and he asked again, "And do you desire ... nothing
+more?"
+
+"No, nothing!" she stammered. "I want nothing but this, nothing but
+what is mine, oh, nothing, nothing more!"
+
+"Swear it to me ... by something sacred!"
+
+"I swear it to you ... by yourself!" she declared.
+
+He pressed her head to his shoulder again. He smiled; and she did
+not see that there was sadness in his laugh, for she was blinded
+with light.
+
+
+
+
+5
+
+They were long silent, sitting there. She remembered having said
+many things, she no longer knew what. About her she saw that it was
+dark, with only that pearl-grey twilight of stars above their heads,
+between the black boughs. She felt that she was lying with her head
+on his shoulder; she heard his breath. A sort of chill crept down
+her shoulders, notwithstanding the warmth of his embrace; she drew
+the lace closer about her throat and felt that the bench on which
+they sat was moist with dew.
+
+"I thank you, I love you so, you make me so happy," she repeated.
+
+He was silent; he pressed her to him very gently, with sheer
+tenderness. Her last words still sounded in her ears after she had
+spoken them. Then she was bound to acknowledge to herself that they
+had not been spontaneous, like all that she had told him before, as
+he knelt before her with his head at her breast. She had spoken them
+to break the silence: formerly that silence had never troubled her;
+why should it now?
+
+"Come!" he said gently; and even yet she did not hear the sadness of
+his voice, in this single word.
+
+They rose and walked on. It came to him that it was late, that they
+must return by the same path; beyond that, his thoughts were sorrowful
+with many things which he could not have expressed; a poor twilight
+had come about him, after the blinding light of their heaven of but
+now. And he had to be cautious: it was very dark here; and he could
+only just see the path, lying very pale and undecided at their feet;
+they brushed against the trunks of the trees as they passed.
+
+"I can see nothing," said Cecile, laughing. "Can you see the way?"
+
+"Rely upon me: I can see quite well in the dark," he replied. "I have
+eyes like a lynx...."
+
+Step by step they went on and she felt a sweet joy in being guided
+by him; she clung close to his arm, saying laughingly that she was
+afraid and that she would be terrified if he were suddenly to leave
+hold of her.
+
+"And suppose I were suddenly to run away and leave you alone?" said
+Quaerts, jestingly.
+
+She laughed; she besought him with a laugh not to do so. Then she
+was silent, angry with herself for laughing; a burden of sadness
+bore her down because of her jesting and laughter. She felt as if
+she were unworthy of that into which, in radiant light, she had just
+been received.
+
+And he too was filled with sadness: the sadness of having to lead
+her through the dark, by invisible paths, past rows of invisible
+tree-trunks which might graze and wound her; of having to lead her
+through a dark wood, through a black sea, through an ink-dark sphere,
+when they were returning from a heaven where all had been light and
+all happiness, without sadness or darkness.
+
+And so they were silent in that sadness, until they reached the
+highroad, the old Scheveningen Road.
+
+They approached the villa. A tram went by; two or three people passed
+on foot; it was a fine evening. He brought her home and waited until
+the door opened to his ring. The door remained unopened; meantime he
+pressed her hand tightly and hurt her a little, involuntarily. Greta
+must have fallen asleep, she thought:
+
+"Ring again, would you?"
+
+He rang again, louder this time; after a moment, the door opened. She
+gave him her hand once more, with a smile.
+
+"Good-night, mevrouw," he said, taking her fingers respectfully and
+raising his hat.
+
+Now, now she could hear the sound of his voice, with its note of
+sadness....
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+1
+
+Then she knew, next day, when she sat alone, wrapped in reflection,
+that the sphere of happiness, the highest and brightest, may not be
+trod; that it may only beam upon us as a sun; and that we may not
+enter into it, into the sacred sun-centre. They had done that....
+
+Listless she sat, with her children by her side, Christie looking pale
+and languid. Yes, she spoiled them; but how could she change herself?
+
+Weeks passed; and Cecile heard nothing from Quaerts. It was always
+so: after he had been with her, weeks would drag by without her ever
+seeing him. For he was much too happy with her, it was more than he
+could bear. He looked upon her society as a rare pleasure to be very
+jealously indulged. And she, she loved him simply, with the innermost
+essence of her soul, loved him frankly, as a woman loves a man.... She
+always wanted him, every day, every hour, at every pulse of her life.
+
+Then she met him by chance, at Scheveningen, where she had gone
+one evening with Amelie and Suzette. Then once again at a reception
+at Mrs. Hoze's. He seemed shy with her; and a certain pride in her
+kept her from asking him to call. Yes, something was changed in what
+had been woven between them. But she suffered sorely, suffered also
+because of that foolish pride, because she had not humbly begged him
+to come to her. Was he not her god? Whatever he did was good.
+
+So she did not see him for weeks and weeks. Life went on: each day
+she had her little occupations, in her household, with her children;
+Mrs. Hoze reproached her for her withdrawal from society and she
+began to think more about her friends, to please Mrs. Hoze, who had
+asked this of her. There were flashes in her memory; in those flashes
+she saw the dinner-party, their conversations and walks, all her love
+for him, all his reverence for her whom he called Madonna; their last
+evening of light and ecstasy. Then she smiled; and the smile itself
+beamed over her anguish, her anguish in that she no longer saw him,
+in that she felt proud and cherished a little inward bitterness. Yet
+all things must be well, as he wished them to be.
+
+Oh, the evenings, the summer evenings, cooling after the warm days,
+the evenings when she sat alone, staring out from her room, where
+the onyx lamp burnt with a subdued flame, staring out of the open
+windows at the trams which, with their tinkling bells, came and went to
+Scheveningen, full, full of people! Waiting, the endless long waiting,
+evening after evening in solitude, after the children had gone to
+bed! Waiting, when she simply sat still, staring fixedly before
+her, looking at the trams, the tedious, everlasting trams! Where
+was her modulated joy of dreaming happiness? And where, where was
+her radiant happiness? Where was her struggle within herself between
+what she was and what he saw in her? This struggle no longer existed,
+this struggle also had been overcome; she no longer felt the force
+of passion; she only longed to see him come as he had always come,
+as he no longer came. Why did he not come? Happiness palled; people
+were talking about them.... It was not right that they should see
+much of each other--he had said so the evening before that highest
+happiness--not good for him and not good for her.
+
+So she sat and thought; and great silent tears fell from her eyes,
+for she knew that, though he remained away partly for his own sake,
+it was above all for hers that he did not come. What had she not
+said to him that evening on the bench in the Woods, when her arms
+were about his neck! Oh, she should have been silent, she felt it
+now! She should not have uttered her rapture, but have enjoyed it
+secretly within herself; she should have let him utter himself: she
+herself should have remained his Madonna. But she had been too full,
+too happy; and in that over-brimming happiness she had been unable
+to be other than true and clear as a bright mirror.
+
+He had glanced into her and read her entirely: she knew that, she
+was certain of it.
+
+He knew now in what manner she loved him; she herself had revealed it
+to him. But, at the same time, she had made known to him that this
+was all past, that she was now what he wished her to be. And this
+had been true then, clear at that time and true.... But now? Does
+ecstasy endure only for one moment and did he know it? Did he know
+that her soul's flight had reached its limit and must now descend
+again to a commoner sphere? Did he know that she loved him again now,
+quite ordinarily, with all her being, wholly and entirely, no longer
+as widely as the heavens, only as widely as her arms could reach out
+and embrace? And could he not return this love, this so petty love
+of hers, and was that why he did not come to her?
+
+
+
+
+2
+
+Then she received his letter:
+
+"Forgive me if I put off from day to day coming to see you; forgive
+me if even to-day I cannot decide to come and if I write to you
+instead. Forgive me if I even venture to ask you whether it may
+not be necessary that we see each other no more. If I hurt you and
+offend you, if I--which may God forbid--cause you pain, forgive me,
+forgive me! Perhaps I procrastinated a little from indecision, but
+much more because I considered that I had no other choice.
+
+"There has been between our two lives, between our two souls, a
+rare moment of happiness which was a special boon, a special grace
+of heaven. Do you not think so too? Oh, if only I had the words to
+tell you how grateful I am in my innermost soul for that happiness! If
+later I ever look back upon my life, I shall always see that happiness
+gleaming in between the ugliness and the blackness, like a star of
+light. We received it as such, as a gift of light. And I venture to
+ask you if that gift is not a thing for you and me to keep sacred?
+
+"Can we do that if I continue to see you? You, yes, I have no doubt
+of you: you will be strong to keep it sacred, our sacred happiness,
+especially because you have already had your struggle, as you confided
+to me on that sacred evening. But I, can I too be strong, especially
+now that I know that you have been through the struggle? I doubt
+myself, I doubt my own force; I am afraid of myself. There is cruelty
+in me, a love of destruction, something of a savage. As a boy I took
+pleasure in destroying beautiful things, in breaking and soiling
+them. The other day, Jules brought me some roses to my room; in the
+evening, as I sat alone, thinking of you and of our happiness--yes, at
+that very moment--my fingers began to fumble with a rose whose petals
+were loose; and, when I saw that one rose dispetalled, there came a
+cruel frenzy within me to tear and destroy them all; and I rumpled
+every one of them. I only give you a small instance, because I do
+not wish to give you larger instances, from vanity, lest you should
+know how bad I am. I am afraid of myself. If I saw you again and
+again and yet again, what should I begin to feel and think and wish,
+unconsciously? Which would be the stronger, my soul or the beast that
+is in me? Forgive me for laying bare my dread before you and do not
+despise me for it. Up to the present I have not attempted a struggle,
+in the sacred world of our happiness. I saw you, I saw you often before
+I knew you; I guessed you as you were; I was permitted to speak to you;
+it was given me to love you with my soul alone: I beseech you, let it
+remain so. Let me continue to keep my happiness like this, to keep it
+sacred, a thousand times sacred. I think it worth while to have lived,
+now that I have known that: happiness, the highest. And I am afraid of
+the struggle which would probably come and pollute that sacred thing.
+
+"Will you believe me when I swear to you that I have reflected deeply
+on all this? Will you believe me when I swear to you that I suffer at
+the thought of never being permitted to see you again? And, above all,
+will you forgive me when I swear to you that I am acting in this way
+because I think that I am doing right? Oh, I am grateful to you and
+I love you as a soul of light alone, of nothing but light!
+
+"Perhaps I am wrong to send you this letter. I do not know. Perhaps
+presently I will tear up what I have written...."
+
+Yet he had sent her the letter.
+
+There was great bitterness within her. She had struggled once,
+had conquered herself and, in a sacred moment, had confessed both
+struggle and conquest; she knew that fate had compelled her to do so;
+she now knew what she would lose through her confession. For a short
+moment, a single evening perhaps, she had been worthy of her god and
+his equal. Now she was so no longer; for this reason also she felt
+bitter. And she felt bitterest of all because the thought dared to
+rise within her:
+
+"A god! Is he a god? Is a god afraid of the struggle?"
+
+Then her threefold bitterness changed to despair, black despair, a
+night which her eyes sought to penetrate in order to see something
+where they saw nothing, nothing; and she moaned low and wrung her
+hands, sinking into a heap before the window and staring at the trams
+which, with the tinkling of their bells, ran pitilessly to and fro.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+She shut herself up; she saw little of her children; she told her
+friends that she was ill. She was at home to no visitors. She guessed
+intuitively that people in their circles were speaking of Quaerts and
+herself. Life hung dull about her in a closely-woven web of tiresome,
+tedious meshes; and she remained motionless in her corner, to avoid
+entangling herself in those meshes. Once Jules forced his way to her;
+he went upstairs, in spite of Greta's protests; he sought her in the
+little boudoir and, not finding her, went resolutely to her bedroom. He
+knocked without receiving a reply, but entered nevertheless. The room
+was half in darkness, for she kept the blinds lowered; in the shadow
+of the canopy which rose above the bedstead, with its hangings of
+old-blue brocade, Cecile lay sleeping. Her tea-gown was open over
+her breast; the train trailed from the bed and lay creased over the
+carpet; her hair spread loosely over the pillows; one of her hands
+was clutching nervously at the tulle bed-curtains.
+
+"Auntie!" cried Jules. "Auntie!"
+
+He shook her by the arm; and she woke heavily, with heavy, blue-girt
+eyes. She did not recognize him at first and thought that he was
+little Dolf.
+
+"It's me, Auntie; Jules...."
+
+She knew him now, asked how he came there, what was the matter and
+if he did not know that she was ill?
+
+"I knew, but I wanted to speak to you. I came to speak to you about
+... him...."
+
+"Him?"
+
+"About Taco. He asked me to tell you. He couldn't write to you, he
+said. He is going on a long journey with his friend from Brussels;
+he will be away a long time and he would like ... he would like to
+take leave of you."
+
+"To take leave?"
+
+"Yes; and he told me to ask you if he might see you once more?"
+
+She had half-raised herself and was looking at Jules with a vacant
+air. In an instant the memory ran through her brain of the long look
+which Jules had directed on her so strangely when she saw Quaerts
+for the first time and spoke to him coolly and distantly:
+
+"Have you many relations in The Hague?... You have no occupation,
+I believe?... Sport?... Oh!..."
+
+Then came the memory of Jules playing the piano, of Rubinstein's
+Romance, of the ecstasy of his fantasia: the glittering rainbows and
+the souls turning to angels.
+
+"To take leave?" she repeated.
+
+Jules nodded:
+
+"Yes, Auntie, he is going away for ever so long."
+
+He could have shed tears himself and there were tears in his voice,
+but he would not give way and his eyes merely grew moist.
+
+"He told me to ask you," he repeated, with difficulty.
+
+"If he can come and take leave?"
+
+"Yes, Auntie."
+
+She made no reply, but lay staring before her. An emptiness began
+to stretch before her, in endless vistas. It was a shadowy image of
+their evening of rapture, but no light beamed out of the shadow.
+
+"Emptiness!" she muttered through her closed lips.
+
+"What, Auntie?"
+
+She would have liked to ask Jules whether he was still, as formerly,
+afraid of the emptiness within himself; but a gentleness of pity, a
+soft feeling, a sweetening of the bitterness which filled her being,
+stayed her.
+
+"To take leave?" she repeated, with a smile of melancholy; and the
+big tears fell heavily, drop by drop, upon her fingers wrung together.
+
+"Yes, Auntie...."
+
+He could no longer restrain himself: a single sob convulsed his throat,
+but he gave a cough to conceal it. Cecile threw her arm round his neck:
+
+"You are very fond of ... Taco, are you not?" she asked; and it struck
+her that this was the first time that she had pronounced the name,
+for she had never called Quaerts by it: she had never called him by
+any name.
+
+He did not answer at first, but nestled in her arm, in her embrace,
+and began to cry:
+
+"Yes, I can't tell you how fond I am of him," he said.
+
+"I know," she said; and she thought of the rainbows and the angels:
+he had played as out of her own soul.
+
+"May he come?" asked Jules, loyally remembering his instructions.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"He asks if he might come this evening?"
+
+"Very well."
+
+"Auntie, he is going away, because of ... because of ..."
+
+"Because of what, Jules?"
+
+"Because of you: because you don't like him and will not marry
+him! Mamma says so...."
+
+She made no reply; she lay sobbing, with her head against Jules' head.
+
+"Is it true, Auntie? No, it is not true, is it?..."
+
+"No."
+
+"Why then?"
+
+She raised herself suddenly, conquering herself, and looked at him
+fixedly:
+
+"He is going away because he must, Jules. I cannot tell you why. But
+what he does is right. All that he does is right."
+
+The boy looked at her, motionless, with large wet eyes, full of
+astonishment:
+
+"Is right?" he repeated.
+
+"Yes. He is better than any one of us. If you go on loving him, Jules,
+it will bring you happiness, even if ... if you never see him again."
+
+"Do you think so?" he asked. "Does he bring happiness? Even in that
+case?..."
+
+"Even in that case."
+
+She listened to her own words as she spoke: it was to her as if another
+were speaking, another who consoled not only Jules but herself as
+well and who would perhaps give her the strength to take leave of
+Taco in the manner which would be best, without despair.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+1
+
+"So you are going on a long journey?" she asked.
+
+He sat facing her, motionless, with anguish on his face. Outwardly
+she was very calm, only there was a sadness in her look and in her
+voice. In her white dress, with the girdle falling before her feet,
+she lay back among the three pillows of the rose-moire sofa; the tips
+of her little slippers were buried in the white sheepskin rug. On the
+table before her lay a great bouquet of loose roses, pink, white and
+yellow, bound together with a broad riband. He had brought them for
+her and she had not yet placed them. There was a great calm about her;
+the exquisite atmosphere of the boudoir seemed unchanged.
+
+"Tell me, am I not paining you severely?" he asked, with the anguish
+in his eyes, the eyes which she now knew so well.
+
+She smiled:
+
+"No," she said. "I will be honest with you. I have suffered, but I
+suffer no longer. I have struggled with myself for the second time
+and I have conquered myself. Will you believe me?"
+
+"If you knew the remorse that I feel...."
+
+She rose and went to him:
+
+"What for?" she asked, in a clear voice. "Because you read me and
+gave me happiness?"
+
+"Did I?"
+
+"Have you forgotten?"
+
+"No," he said, "but I thought...."
+
+"What?"
+
+"I don't know; I thought that you would ... would suffer so ... and
+I ... I cursed myself!..."
+
+She shook her head gently, with smiling disapproval:
+
+"For shame!" she said. "Do not blaspheme!..."
+
+"Can you forgive me?"
+
+"I have nothing to forgive. Listen to me. Swear to me that you believe
+me, that you believe that you have given me happiness and that I am
+not suffering."
+
+"I ... I swear."
+
+"I trust that you are not swearing this merely to satisfy my wish."
+
+"You have been the highest thing in my life," he said, gently.
+
+A rapture shot through her soul.
+
+"Tell me only...." she began.
+
+"What?"
+
+"Tell me if you believe that I, I, I ... shall always remain the
+highest thing in your life."
+
+She stood before him, tall, in her clinging white. She seemed to shed
+radiance; never had he seen her so beautiful.
+
+"I am certain of that," he said. "Certain, oh, certain!... My God,
+how can I convey the certainty of it to you?"
+
+"But I believe you, I believe you!" she exclaimed.
+
+She laughed a laugh of rapture. In her soul a sun seemed to be shooting
+forth rays on every side. She placed her arm tenderly about his neck
+and kissed his forehead with a chaste caress.
+
+For one moment he seemed to forget everything. He too rose, took her
+in his arms, almost savagely, and clasped her suddenly to him, as if
+he were about to crush her against his breast. She just caught sight
+of his sad eyes; then she saw nothing more, blinded by the kisses
+of his mouth, which scorched her whole face as though with sparks of
+fire. With the sun-rapture of her soul was mingled a bliss of earth,
+a yielding to the violence of his embrace. But the thought flashed
+across her of what she would lose if she yielded. She released herself,
+put him away and said:
+
+"And now ... go."
+
+He felt stunned; he understood that he had no choice:
+
+"Yes, yes, I am going," he said. "I may write to you, may I not?"
+
+She nodded yes, with her smile:
+
+"Write to me, I shall write to you too," she said. "Let me always
+hear from you...."
+
+"Then these are not to be the last words between us? This ... this
+... is not the end?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Thank you. Good-bye, mevrouw, good-bye ... Cecile. Ah, if you knew
+what this moment costs me!"
+
+"It must be. It cannot be otherwise. Go, go. You must go. Do go...."
+
+She gave him her hand again, for the last time. A moment later he
+was gone.
+
+
+
+
+2
+
+She looked about her strangely, with bewildered eyes, with hands
+locked together:
+
+"Go, go...." she repeated, like one raving.
+
+Then she noticed the roses. With something like a faint scream she
+sank down before the little table and buried her face in his gift,
+until the thorns wounded her face. The pain--two drops of blood which
+fell from her forehead--brought her back to her senses. Standing
+before the Venetian mirror hanging over her writing-table, she wiped
+away the red spots with her handkerchief.
+
+"Happiness!" she stammered to herself. "His happiness! The highest
+thing in his life! So he knew happiness, though short it was. But now
+... now he suffers, now he will suffer again, as he did before. The
+remembrance of happiness cannot do everything. Ah, if it could only
+do that, then everything would be well, everything!... I wish for
+nothing more, I have had my life, my own life, my own happiness; I
+now have my children; I now belong to them. To him I must no longer
+be anything...."
+
+She turned away from the mirror and sat down on the settee, as though
+tired with a great space traversed, and she closed her eyes, as though
+blinded with too great a light. She folded her hands together, like
+one in prayer; her face beamed in its fatigue, from smile to smile.
+
+"Happiness!" she repeated, faltering between her smiles. "The highest
+thing in his life! O my God, happiness! I thank Thee, O God, I thank
+Thee!..."
+
+
+                                THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+NOTES
+
+
+[1] Two military staff-colleges in Holland and Java respectively.
+
+[2] The leading club at The Hague.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Ecstasy: A Study of Happiness, by Louis Couperus
+
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