DR. ADRIAAN

By

LOUIS COUPERUS

TRANSLATED BY ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS

NEW YORK

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

1918

[Contents]

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

Dr. Adriaan is the fourth and last of the volumes forming The Books of the Small Souls. In it the reader renews his acquaintance with all the characters that survive from Small Souls, The Later Life and The Twilight of the Souls.

ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS.
Chelsea, 30 March, 1918.

CHAPTER I

The afternoon sky was full of thick, dark clouds, drifting ponderously grey over almost black violet: clouds so dark, heavy and thick that they seemed to creep laboriously upon the east wind, for all that it was blowing hard. In its breath the clouds now and again changed their watery outline, before their time came to pour down in heavy straight streaks of rain. The stiff pine-woods quivered, erect and anxious, along the road; and the tops of the trees lost themselves in a silver-grey air hardly lighter than the clouds and dissolving far and wide under all that massive grey-violet and purple-black which seemed so close and low. The road ran near and went winding past, lonely, deserted and sad. It was as though it came winding out of low horizons and went on towards low horizons, dipping humbly under very low skies, and only the pine-trees still stood up, pointed, proud and straight, when everything else was stooping. The modest villa-residence, the smaller poor dwellings here and there stooped under the heavy sky and the gusty wind; the shrubs dipped along the road-side; and the few people who went along—an old gentleman; a peasant-woman; two poor children carrying a basket and followed by a melancholy, big, rough-coated dog—seemed to hang their heads low under the solemn weight of the clouds and the fierce mastery of the wind, which had months ago blown the smile from the now humble, frowning, pensive landscape. The soul of that landscape appeared small and all forlorn in the watery mists of the dreary winter.

The wind came howling along, chill and cold, like an angry spite that was all mouth and breath; and Adeletje, hanging on her aunt's arm, huddled into herself, for the wind blew chill in her sleeves and on her back.

"Are you cold, dear?"

"No, Auntie," said Adeletje, softly, shivering.

Constance smiled and pressed Adeletje's arm close to her:

"Let's walk a little faster, dear. It'll warm you; and, besides, I'm afraid it's going to rain. It's quite a long way to the old lady's and back again.... I fear I've tired you."

"No, Auntie."

"You see, I didn't want to take the carriage. This way, we do the thing by ourselves; and otherwise everybody would know of it at once. And you must promise me not to talk about it."

"No, Auntie, I won't."

"Not to anybody. Otherwise there'll be all sorts of remarks; and it's no concern of other people's what we do."

"The poor old thing was very happy, Auntie. The beef-tea and the wine and chicken...."

"Poor little old woman...."

"And so well-mannered. And so discreet.... Auntie, will Addie be back soon?"

"He's sure to telegraph."

"It's very nice of him to take such pains for Alex. We all of us give Addie a lot of trouble.... When do you think he'll come back?"

"I don't know; to-morrow, or the next day...."

"Auntie, you've been very fidgety lately."

"My dear, I haven't."

"Yes, you have.... Tell me, has anything happened with Mathilde? Has there?"

"No, child.... But do keep your little mouth shut now. I'm frightened, the wind's so cold."

They walked on in silence, Adeletje accommodating her step by Aunt Constance' regular pace. Constance was a good walker; and Addie always said that, leading the outdoor life she did, Mama grew no older. They had now been living for ten years at Driebergen, in the big, old, gloomy house, which seemed to be lighted only by themselves, by their affection for one another, but which Constance had never brought herself to like, hard though she tried. Ten years! How often, oh, how often she saw them speed before her in retrospect!... Ten years: was it really ten years? How quickly they had passed! They had been full and busy years; and Constance was satisfied with the years that had fleeted by, only she was distressed that it all went so fast and that she would be old before.... But the wind was blowing too fiercely and Adeletje was hanging heavily on her arm—poor child, she was shivering: how cold she must be!—and Constance could not follow her thoughts.... Before ... before.... Well, if she died, there would be Addie.... Only.... No, she couldn't think now; and besides they would be home presently.... They would be home.... Home! The word seemed strange to her; and she did not think that right. And yet, struggle against the singular emotion as she would, she could not cure herself of thinking that big house gloomy and regretting the little villa in the Kerkhoflaan at the Hague, even though she had never known any great domestic happiness there.... Still ... still, one loves the thing that one has grown used to; and was it not funny that she had grown so fond of that little house, where she had lived four years, and been disconsolate when, after the old man's death, Van der Welcke and Addie too had insisted on moving to the big, sombre villa at Driebergen?... Fortunately, it was at once lighted by all of them, by their affection for one another; if she had not had the consoling brightness of mutual love, oh, it would have been impossible for her to go and live in that dark, gloomy, cavernous villa-house, among the eternally rustling trees, under the eternally louring skies! The house was dear to Van der Welcke and Addie because of a strange sympathy, a sense that their home was there and nowhere else. The father was born in the house and had played there as a child; and the son, strangely enough, cherished the exact same feeling of attraction towards it. Had they not almost forced her to move into the house: Van der Welcke crying for it like a child, first going there for a few days at a time and living there with nobody but the decrepit old charwoman who made his bed for him; then Addie following his father's example, fitting up a room for herself and making constant pretexts—that he must go and have a look among his papers, that he must run down for a book—seizing any excuse that offered?... Then they left her alone, in her house in the Kerkhoflaan. That had trees round it too and skies overhead. But it was strange: among those trees in the Hague Woods, under those clouds which came drifting from Scheveningen, she had felt at home, though their little villa was only a house hired on a five years' lease, taken at the time under Addie's deciding influence. He, quite a small boy then, had gone and seen the fat estate-agent.... Oh, how the years, how the years hurried past!... To think that it was all so long ago!... Strange, in that leasehold house she had felt at home, at the Hague, among her relations, under familiar skies and among familiar people and things, unyielding though both things and people had often proved. Whereas here, in this house, in this great cavernous, gloomy villa-residence—and she had lived in it since the old man's death fully ten years ago—she had always felt, though the house belonged to them as their inheritance, as their family-residence, a stranger, an intruder, one who had come there by accident ... along with her husband and her son. She could never shake off this feeling. It pursued her even to her own sitting-room, which, with its bits of furniture from the Kerkhoflaan, was almost exactly the same as her little drawing-room at the Hague.... Oh, how the wind blew and how Adeletje was shivering against her: if only the poor child did not fall ill from that long walk!... There came the first drops of rain, thick and big, like tears of despair.... She put up her umbrella and Adeletje pushed still closer, walked right up against her, under the same shelter, so as to feel safe and warm.... The lane now ran straight into the high road; and there, before you, lay the house.... It stood in its own big garden—nearly a park, with a pool at the back—like a square, melancholy block, dreary and massive; and she could not understand why Van der Welcke and Addie clung to it so. Or rather she did understand now; but she ... no, she did not care for the house. It never smiled to her, always frowned, as it stood there broad and severe, as though imperishable, behind the front-garden, with the dwarf rose-bushes and standard roses wound in straw, awaiting the spring days.... It looked down upon her with its front of six upper windows as with stern eyes, which suffered but never forgave her.... It was like the old man himself, who had died without forgiving.... Oh, she could never have lived there if she had not always remembered the old woman's forgiveness, that last hour of gentleness by her bedside, the reconciliation, in complete understanding and knowledge almost articulate, offered at the moment of departure for ever.... Then it seemed to her as if she heard the old woman's breaking voice speak softly to her and say:

"Forgive, even though he never forgives, for he will never forgive...."

And it seemed to her as if she heard that voice, rustling with soft encouragement, in the wind, in the trees, now that she was passing through the garden, while the implacable house looked down upon her with that everlasting cold frown. It was a strange feeling which always sent a shudder through her for just two or three seconds every time that she went past the roses in their straw wrappings to the great front door, the feeling which had sent a shudder through her the very first time when she alighted from their carriage ... after being disowned for years, as a disgrace, hidden away in a corner.... It was only for two or three seconds. The rain was now splashing down. She closed her umbrella as Truitje opened the door, with a glad laugh, that mevrouw had got home before it absolutely poured; and now she was in the long hall.... Oh, what a gloomy hall it was, with the oak doors on either side, the Delft jugs on the antique cabinet; the engravings and family-portraits; and then, at the far end, the one door gloomier than the others, that door which led ... simply to a small, inner staircase, for the servants, so that they should not constantly be using the main staircase.... But she had not known this until she moved in and, yielding to an impulse, ran to the sombre door which had always stared at her, from the far end of that typical Dutch interior, as an eternally-sealed mystery.... Pluckily, playing the mistress of the house who was looking into things, while her heart beat with terror, she had opened the door and seen the staircase, the little staircase winding up in the dark to the bedroom floor; and the old charwoman had told her that it was very handy for carrying up water, because there was no water laid on upstairs: a decided fault in the house.... Then she had shut the door again and known all about it: a little back-stair, for the maids, and nothing more.... But why had she never opened the door since, never touched the handle? No doubt because there was no need to, because she felt sure that the maids would scrub the small staircase as well as the big one on the days set aside for cleaning stairs and passages. Why should she have opened the gloomy door?... And she had never opened it since. Once and once only she had seen it open; old Mie had forgotten to shut it; and she had grumbled, had told Truitje that it looked slovenly to leave the door open like that.... She had then seen the little staircase winding up in the dark, its steps just marked with brown stripes against the black of the shadow.... But the door, when closed, stared at her. She had never told anyone; but the door stared at her ... like the front of the house. Yes, in the garden behind, the back-windows also stared at her as with eyes, but more gently, sadly and almost laughingly, with an encouraging and more winsome look amid the livelier green of the lime-trees which, in summer, surrounded her with their heavy fragrance.... Summer!... It was November now, with its incessant wind and rain, raging all around and against the house and rattling on the window-panes until they shivered.... It was a strange feeling ever and always, though it did last for only two or three seconds, but she could not feel at home there.... And yet during those ten years her life had sped and sped and sped.... It sped on without resting.... She was always busy....

She had sent Adeletje upstairs, to change her things at once, and opened the door of the drawing-room.... It felt a little chilly, she thought; and, while she saw her mother sitting quietly in the conservatory, peering out of doors from her usual seat, she went to the stove, moved the cinder-drawer to and fro to send the ashes to the bottom and make the fire glow up behind the mica doors....

"Aren't you cold out there, Mummie?"

The old woman looked round at the sound of her voice. Constance went into the conservatory and again asked:

"Aren't you cold, Mummie?"

The old woman heard her this time; and Constance stooped over her and kissed the waxen forehead.

"It's blowing," said the old woman.

"Yes, it's blowing like anything!" said Constance. "You don't feel cold?"

The old woman smiled, with her eyes in her daughter's.

"Won't you rather come and sit inside, Mamma?"

But the old woman only smiled and said:

"The trees are waving from side to side; and just now a branch fell ... right in front of the window."

"Yes. Harm'll have plenty of work to-morrow. There are branches lying all over the place."

"It's blowing," said the old woman.

Constance went in, took a shawl and put it over her mother's shoulders:

"You'll come in, won't you, Mamma, if you feel cold?"

And she went back to the drawing-room, intending to go upstairs.

But voices sounded from the hall and the door was opened. It was Gerdy and Guy:

"Are you in, Auntie?"

"Are you back at last?"

"Where have you been all the afternoon?"

"Have you been walking with Adele?"

"Come, Auntie," said Guy, "give an account of yourself!"

He was a well-set-up, fair-haired boy of nineteen, tall and broad, with a fair moustache; and she spoilt him because he was like his father. Really she spoilt them all, each for a different reason, but Guy could do anything that he pleased with her. He now caught her in his arms and asked once more:

"Now, Auntie, where have you been?"

And she blushed like a child. She did not mean to say where she had been, but she had not reckoned on his attacking her like this:

"Why, nowhere!" she said, defending herself. "I've been walking with Adele...."

"No!" said Guy, firmly. "You've been to the little old lady's."

"Oh, no!"

"Oh, yes!"

"Come, boy, let me be. I want to go up and change.... Where's Mamma?"

"Mamma's upstairs," said Gerdy. "Are you coming down soon again, Auntie? Shall I get tea ready? Shall I light the lamp? It's jolly, having tea in a storm like this."

"All right, dear, do."

"Will you come down soon?"

"Yes, yes, at once...."

She went upstairs, up the wide, winding oak staircase.... Why did she think, each time the wind blew, of that evening when she had gone up like that, across the passage, through the rooms, to the great, dark bedstead, in which the wan face of the dying woman showed palely on the pillow?... Then as now the heavy rain rattled against the windows and the tall cabinets in the dark passage creaked with those sudden sounds which old wood makes and which sometimes moaned and reverberated through the house. But one scarcely heard them now, because the house was no longer silent, because now there were always voices buzzing and young feet hurrying in the rooms and along the passages, thanks to all the new life that had entered the house.... Ten years, thought Constance, while she put on the light in her room, before dressing: was it really ten years?... Immediately after the death of her poor brother Gerrit—poor Adeline and the children had moved from their house to a cheap pension—came the death of old Mr. Van der Welcke, just as she, Van der Welcke and Addie, going through Gerrit's papers, had come upon this letter:

"Addie, I recommend my children to your care; my wife I recommend to yours, Constance."

It was the letter of a sick man, mentally and physically sick, who already saw death's wings beating before his eyes. And even in that shabby pension Addie had taken charge of the children, as though he were their own young father; but, when the old gentleman died and both Van der Welcke and Addie insisted on moving to Driebergen, then the boy had stepped forward boldly as the protector of those nine children, as the protector of that poor woman distraught and utterly crushed by the blow.... Even now, while hurriedly changing her dress, so as not to keep them waiting too long downstairs, Constance still heard her boy say, in his calm, confident voice:

"Papa ... Mamma ... we have a big house now, a very big house.... We are rich now ... and Aunt Adeline has nothing ... the children have only a couple of thousand guilders apiece.... They must all come to us now, mustn't they, all come and live with us at Driebergen, mustn't they, Papa ... and Mamma?"

He said nothing beyond those few simple words; and his confident voice was as quiet as though his proposal spoke for itself, as though it were quite commonplace....

"What is there to make a fuss about?" he had asked, with wide-open eyes, when she fell upon his neck with tears of emotion and kissed him, her heart swelling with happiness in her child....

She had just looked round anxiously at her husband, anxious what he would wish, what he would say to his son's words.... There were fewer scenes between them, it was true, much fewer; but still she had thought to herself, what would he say to this?... But he had only laughed, burst out laughing, with his young laugh like a great boy's ... laughed at all his son's great family: a wife and nine children whom Addie at sixteen was quietly taking unto himself, because his people had money now and a big house.... Since that time Van der Welcke had always chaffed the boy about his nine children. And Addie answered his father's chaff with that placid smile in his eyes and on his lips, as though he were thinking:

"Have your joke, Daddy. You're a good chap after all!..."

And Addie had interested himself in his nine children as calmly as if they were not the least trouble.... Then came the move to Driebergen, but Addie remained at the Hague, staying with Aunt Lot, for the two years that he still went to school. He came down each week-end, however: by the husband's train. Van der Welcke said, chaffingly, to join his wife and children; and he took a hand in everything: in the profitable investment and saving of their two thousand guilders apiece; in their schooling; in the choice of a governess for the girls: he saved Aunt Adeline all responsibility; his Saturday afternoons and Sundays were filled with all sorts of cares; he considered and discussed and decided.... Moreover, Granny, who was now lonely and fallen into her dotage, could no longer be left to live in her big house, with no one to look after her; and Constance had easily managed for old Mamma to accompany them to Driebergen. But the old woman had hardly noticed the change: she thought that she was still living in the Alexanderstraat sometimes, in the summer, she would be living at Buitenzorg, in the viceregal palace, and the children round her went about and talked vivaciously ... as she had always known them to do.... Emilie had refused to leave Constance; and, though she sometimes went to stay at Baarn, she really lived with them: Emilie, so grievously shattered in her young life, so unable to forget Henri's death that she was as a shadow of her former self, pale and silent, mostly pining in her room ... until from sheer loneliness she went to join the family-circle downstairs....

Ten years ... ten years had sped like this, sped like fleeting shadows of time; and yet how much had happened! The children growing up, blossoming into young girls and sturdy lads; Addie studying medicine at Amsterdam, walking the hospitals, until, after passing his examination, the young foster-father at last settled down among them all as a doctor, in the great house at Driebergen; and then that immense change in their lives: his marriage, his dreadfully premature marriage.... Oh, that marriage of her son's!... She had had to summon all her deeper wisdom and to clutch it with convulsive hands ... in order to approve ... to approve ... and not for a single moment to let herself be dragged along by all the prejudices of the old days, the prejudices of the narrow little circle which she had learnt to scorn in her later life, the life which had become permanent!... Now he was really a husband, now he was really a father.

"Aunt Constance ... do come!"

It was Gerdy's voice; and it fidgeted her. They were all very nice, certainly, but also they were all very restless; and she was really a woman for loneliness and dreams—had become so—and sometimes felt a need to be quite alone ... quite alone ... in her room; to lie on her sofa and think ... above all things, to think herself back into the years which had sped and sped and sped as fleeting shadows of time....

A tripping step came hastening up the stairs, followed by a tapping at the door:

"Auntie! Aunt Constance.... I've made tea; and, if you don't come, it'll be too strong...."

She would have liked to tell Gerdy that she did not care for that calling out all over the house and through the passages: it always jarred upon her, as though the clear, girlish voice profaned that brown indoor atmosphere of the sombre old house which was so full of the past ... as though the old people were still living there and might be shocked by all that youthful carelessness and presumption. But she never did tell her.

"Yes, darling, I'm coming."

She was ready now and turned out the gas. Gerdy ran downstairs again; and Constance found the lamps lit in the drawing-room and Gerdy very busy with the tea-pot and tea-cups. And Constance smiled, for there was a sort of homely peace, in this room, a peace almost of happiness, the lesser happiness which people sometimes find, for a brief moment. Marietje, the eldest of the girls, a motherly little soul from childhood, had coaxed Grandmamma into leaving the conservatory, which was really too cold, had installed her in the back drawing-room, where the old woman now sat, with her shawl round her, her toes on the foot-warmer, her hands trembling in her lap and her head nodding, as though she knew all sorts of things for certain.... Always she sat like that and scarcely spoke, only a few words, quietly living away the last few years of her life and already looking at the rest in panorama ... but quite unconscious of her surroundings.... In front of the fire, close together, sat Adeline and Emilie, both silent, but filled with the strange peace that reigned in both of them, because things around them were so youthful and so bright. For at this hour all the young people were gathered in the drawing-room, all Gerrit's children, except Constant, who was seventeen and at a boarding-school near Arnhem, to Gerdy's great regret, for she and he had always been together, two good little, fair-haired children. Marietje was twenty-two now, had not grown up pretty, was tall and lank, fair-haired, really an unattractive girl, though she had a certain lovableness from always caring for others, especially for Grandmamma: she had acquired this very early, as the eldest sister, because her mother had at once and as a matter of course entrusted her with the care of her little brothers and sisters. Adeletje too was plain and in addition ailing and anything but strong, with her narrow, shrunk chest; and Constance often wondered that the two elders had become like that, because she remembered them as the two pretty little fair-haired children that they used to be, frail, it is true, but rosy-cheeked, sweet little children. Alex also was there; and he too often surprised Constance, when she remembered the naughty rascal that he was, now a boy of twenty, pale and sallow, with frightened blue eyes, shy, reserved, with a trick of giving a sudden glance of terror which made her anxious, she did not know why. She recognized her brother Gerrit most in Guy, who was tall, fair and broad, as Gerrit had been, but who had always been unmanageable, with not one serious thought in his head; he was nineteen years old now and as undecided about his future as Alex himself.... That was Constance' great care and not only hers but Addie's as well; and Van der Welcke often chaffed his son, that it was not an unmixed joy to be the father of nine children. If Alex was gloomy now, with that strange look, sometimes of sudden fright, in his eyes, Guy was undoubtedly attractive, was genial, pleasant, cheerful, foolish, a great baby and the favourite nephew of Van der Welcke, with whom he went cycling, as Addie never had time now: Addie the serious man, the young doctor with an increasing practice. Guy called Van der Welcke Papa; they got on so well, almost too well together: Van der Welcke, who had remained a child for all his fifty-one years delighted in that tall, fair-haired adopted son of Addie's; and, jealous as he was of all the earnestness, the labour and care displayed by Addie, who had hardly a moment nowadays to give his father, he was glad to have found Guy, as though to show Addie:

"I've got another friend, you know, and I can do without you sometimes!"

After Guy came Gerdy, the beauty of the family, an exquisitely pretty girl of eighteen, who with Guy was the light and laughter of the house; next, Constant, away at boarding-school. The two younger boys, Jan and Piet, were fortunately doing well at their lessons, whereas little Klaasje, twelve years old, had remained very backward and might have been a child of eight, at one time dull and silent, at another wantonly gay, but so silly that she was not yet able to read.... Yes, she had all of them there, all Gerrit's children; she and Addie looked after them; and poor Adeline had come to take it as a matter of course and never decided anything for herself and consulted Constance and Addie about everything....

The wind outside roared and a violent rain beat down upon the windows, as though tapping at them with furious angry fingers. The drawn blinds, the closed curtains, the lighted lamps, Gerdy pouring out the tea with her pretty little ways: it all gave Constance, though she felt tired and would gladly have been alone for once, a caress of soft, homely satisfaction, a velvety sense of being in utter harmony with all around her, even though there was so much trouble, not only with the children, but also sometimes no little difficulty and misunderstanding with Mathilde, Addie's wife. Where was Mathilde now? Where were the two children? Gerdy, fussy and fidgety, pretending to be very busy, with a light clatter of her tea-things, had pushed an easy-chair nearer to the fireplace, where tongues of flames were darting. She now gave Constance her cup of tea, handed a plate of cakes; and Constance asked:

"Where's Mathilde?"

"Mathilde?... I don't know, but ... shall I go and look for her?"

"No, never mind. Where are the children?"

"In the nursery, I expect. Shall I send for them to come down?"

"No, dear, it doesn't matter...."

And Gerdy did not insist. With the wind and rain raging out of doors, it was still and peaceful inside; and, fidgety though Gerdy was, she felt that peaceful stillness and valued it, valued it as they all did. In her heart she hoped that Mathilde would not come down before dinner, because, whenever Mathilde did come down at tea-time, something happened, as though an imp were creeping in between Gerdy's nervous little fingers: she would break a cup or upset things; once indeed she had nearly set the house on fire, because she had tried to blow out the methylated spirit with a furious blast from her excitable little pouting lips.... It was very cosy now: if only Mathilde would remain upstairs a little longer.... And, while the wind and the rain raged outside, indoors there was but the sound of a few gentle phrases, uttered in the yellow circles of the lamps, which Gerdy had placed so that they shone with an intimate and pleasant cosiness.... Old Granny, over in her corner, sat quietly in her great arm-chair, which was like a throne; she did not move, did not speak, but was nevertheless in the picture, thought Gerdy: that waxen face of a very old lady, framed in the white hair; the woollen shawl over the shoulders; the motionless dark lines of the gown; and, in the lap, the fine detail of the fingers, quivering fingers, but for which she would have seemed devoid of all motion.... Near the fire, Constance was talking with Mamma and Emilie; and Gerdy did not know why, but something about those three, as they sat talking together, made her feel as if she could suddenly have cried for no reason, because of a touch of melancholy that just grazed against her, like a trouble dating back to former years and things that were long past.... Then Gerdy made an unnecessary clatter with her tea-cups and spoons and could not understand why she was so sensitive. Marie was doing some needlework and Alex was gloomily reading a book; but Guy was playing backgammon with Adeletje, making constant jokes in between: the dice were rattled in the boxes and dumped into the board; the men moved with a hard, wooden sound over the black and white points; the dice were rattled again and dumped down again.

"Five-three...."

"Double-six.... Double-four.... One more: two-three...."

And Klaasje had come and sat by Aunt Constance, almost creeping into her dress, with a very babyish picture-book in her hand. She pressed her fair-haired little head comfortably in Auntie's skirts, against Auntie's lap and had silently taken Auntie's arm and laid it round her neck. Herself unobserved, she noticed every single thing that happened: Guy and Adele's backgammon, Gerdy's fussing with the tea-things; and she listened to Auntie, Mamma and Emilie; but all the time it was as though she were outside that circle of homeliness, as though she were far away from it, as though she were hearing and seeing through a haze, unconsciously, in her slowly awakening little brains, the brains of a backward child. And, so as not to be too far away, she took Aunt Constance' hand, opened the palm with her fingers and pushed her little head under it: that made it seem as if she were much nearer....

Suddenly, the door opened; and everybody gave a little start, soon recovering, however: Mathilde had entered and only Grandmamma, yonder, more in the background in her dark corner, had remained motionless, with quivering fingers in her lap, white and waxen, trembling in the dark shadow of her dress.... But, near the fire, Constance, Adeline and Emilie were silent and remained sitting, stiffly, Adeline and Emilie without moving. Constance alone forced herself to look round at Mathilde; Alex read on, nervously hunching his shoulders; but Guy rattled his dice and Adeletje had a sudden flush on her cheek and turned pale.... And Gerdy was the most nervous of all: she suddenly ducked down in front of the fire and began poking it desperately.

"Do be careful, Gerdy!" said Adeline. "You'll set us on fire, the sparks are flying all over the place!"

Mathilde had sat down in the arm-chair next to Constance, which made little Klaasje feel a bit squeezed, in between Auntie and Mathilde, and Mathilde's shadow fell across the child's book and prevented her from seeing the pictures, causing such a sudden outburst of temper that, before anyone could stop her, she put out both arms convulsively, pushed with her hands against Mathilde's chair and cried:

"Go away!"

So much enmity was apparent in the child's voice that they all started again: only Grandmamma, in her corner, noticed nothing. But Constance recovered herself at once:

"For shame, Klaasje!" she said, in a chiding tone. "You mustn't do that, you know! What makes you so naughty?"

But the child pushed against the chair with such force that she pushed it aside, with Mathilde in it:

"Go away!" she repeated, pale in the face, with wide eyes starting from her head in hatred.

"Klaasje!" cried Constance. "Stop that at once!"

Her voice rang harsh and loud through the room. The child looked at her in alarm, understood merely that Auntie was angry and burst into loud sobs.

"Oh, very well, I'll go and sit somewhere else!" said Mathilde, pretending indifference.

She got up and sat beside Emilie.

"Haven't you been out?" asked Emilie, gently, for the sake of saying something.

"Out? In this horrible weather? Where would you have me go?" asked Mathilde, coldly. "No, I've had two hours' sleep. Gerdy, have you any tea left for me?"

"Yes, certainly," said Gerdy, in a forced voice.

She poked the fire once more, fiercely.

"But, Gerdy, mind what you're doing!" cried Adeline, terrified, for the sparks were flying out of the hearth.

Gerdy bobbed up from among her skirts and began clattering with her tea-tray. Klaasje had ceased crying, had stopped the moment that Mathilde had moved and was now looking up at Aunt Constance and trying to take her hand again.

"No," said Constance, "you're naughty."

"No-o!" whined the little girl, like a very small child. "I'm not naughty!"

"Yes, you are. It's not at all nice of you to push Mathilde away. You must never do that again, do you hear?"

"Oh, let the child be, Mamma!" said Mathilde, wearily.

The child looked up at Constance with such an unhappy expression in her face that Constance put her hand on her head again; and, at once forgetting everything, Klaasje now looked at her book and even hummed softly as she showed herself the pictures.

Gerdy was pouring out Mathilde's tea. There it was again: she had spilt the milk; the tea-tray was one white puddle! However, she mopped it up with a tea-cloth and now handed the cup to Mathilde.

Mathilde tasted it:

"Did you put any sugar in?"

"Yes, one lump."

"I never take sugar."

"Oh!... Shall I give you another cup?"

"No, thanks.... Your tea is weak."

Gerdy's tea was her pride, always:

"Tea gets bitter after standing three quarters of an hour," she said, aggressively, "or, if you pour water on it, it gets weak."

"Then I must always come three quarters of an hour late, for your tea is always either bitter or weak."

"Then make your own tea...."

But Gerdy saw Aunt Constance looking at her and said nothing more.

"Mamma," asked Mathilde, "do you know when Addie is coming back?"

"No, dear; to-morrow, I expect, or the next day."

"Haven't you had a card from him?"

"No, dear."

"Oh, I thought he would have written to you!... I might really have gone with him to Amsterdam."

"He had business to attend to...."

"Well, I shouldn't have hindered him in his business...."

She sat silent now and indifferent and looked at her watch, regretting that she had come down too early. She thought that it was six and that they would be having dinner at once. And it was not even half-past five yet.... Should she go upstairs again for a bit?... No, she was there now and she would stay.... She had slept too long that afternoon.... She felt heavy and angry.... What a place, what a place, Driebergen in November! Not a soul to talk to, except three or four antediluvian families.... When was she likely to see the Hague again? The children would be looked after all right: there were busybodies enough in the house for that!... And she remained sitting beside Emilie, without moving or speaking, weary, indifferent and heavy after her long sleep.... She knew it: as usual, her entrance had caused friction. That odious idiot child, pushing her chair away, with its "Go away!" She could have boxed its ears.... But she had controlled herself. Didn't she always control herself? Wasn't she always being insulted by her husband's relatives?... Why on earth had she married him? Couldn't she have married anybody at the Hague?... In her weary, heavy indifference, mingled with spiteful rancour, she felt herself a martyr.... Wasn't she a very handsome woman? Couldn't she have married anybody, though her father was a penniless naval officer, though there was no money on her mother's side either?... She was a handsome girl; and, from the time when she was quite young, her one thought had been to make a good match, first and foremost a good match, and to get away from the poverty and the vulgar crew that gathered in Papa and Mamma's house.... Oh, yes, she was very fond of her husband; but now it was all his fault: he ... he was neglecting her!... Wasn't she a martyr?

Deep down within herself, no doubt, she knew that she had not married him for himself alone, that she had certainly thought it heavenly, she, a Smeet, plain Mathilde Smeet, to marry Baron van der Welcke ... plenty of money ... a smart match ... even though the family no longer lived in the Hague....

Baroness van der Welcke.... On her cards: Baroness van der Welcke.... A coronet on her handkerchiefs, a coat-of-arms on her note-paper: oh, how delicious, how delicious!... What a joy at last to order the gowns in Brussels, to get out of the poverty of her parents' home, which reeked of rancid butter and spilt paraffin, to shake it from her, to plunge and drown it in the past, that poverty, as you drown a mangy dog in a pond....

Driebergen ... well, yes. But it wouldn't always be Driebergen. She would back herself to coax her husband out of that patriarchy, to coax him to the Hague, where he would be the young, fashionable doctor: a fine house, smart acquaintances, a box at the Opera, presentation at court, Baroness ... Baronne van der Welcke....

She had two children now, a boy and a girl. It was irresistible; and yet she knew that she must take care and not let the nurse have too much of it:

"Geertje, have you washed the jonker's hands?... Geertje, I want the freule to wear her white frock to-day?"[1]

For she had noticed that the others never used the words in speaking to Geertje or to the maids, never said jonker or freule, always just simply Constant and Henriette, or even Stan and Jet; and so, when the others were there, she copied them and said, "Stan" and "Jet"; but oh, the joy, as soon as they were gone, of once more blurting out the titles to Geertje, the warm rapture of feeling that she was not only a baroness but the mother of a freule and a jonker:

"Geertje, has Freule Henriette had her milk?... Geertje, let the jonker wear his new shoes to-day!..."

No, she simply could not keep from it; and yet she had sense enough to know and perception enough to feel that the others thought it a mark of bad breeding in her, to refer to her babies of one year old and two as freule and jonker.... That was the worst of it, that she had married not only her husband but his whole family into the bargain: his grandmamma, his parents and Aunt Adeline with her troops of children whom Addie—so silly of him, because he was so young—regarded as his own, for whom it was his duty to care.... That was the worst of it; and oh, if she had known everything, known what a martyr she would be in this house, where she never felt herself the mistress—a victim to the idiot child's rude ways, a victim to Gerdy, who gave her sugar in her tea—if she had known everything, she might have thought twice before marrying him at all!...

And yet she was wonderfully fond of Addie, might still be very happy with him, if he would only come back to her ... and not neglect her, over and over again, for all that crew of so-called adopted children with which he had burdened himself.... Oh, to get him out of it, out of that suffocating family-circle ... and then to the Hague: her husband a young, smart doctor, she at court; and then see all the old friends again ... and Papa and Mamma's relations ... and perhaps leave cards on them sweetly: Baronne van der Welcke!...

She was not all vanity: she had plenty of common sense besides and no small portion of clear and penetrating insight. She saw her own vanity, indeed, but preferred not to see it. She would rather look upon herself as a martyr than as vain and therefore saw herself in that light, deliberately thrusting aside her common sense; and then, sometimes, in an unhappy mood, she would weep over her own misfortunes. Her only consolation at such times was that she was handsome, a young, handsome woman, and healthy and the mother of two pretty little children: a jonker and a freule.

She now sat wearily, with very few words passing among them all; the dice in Adele and Guy's boxes rattled loudly and worked on Mathilde's nerves.

Gerdy could stand it no longer: she had run out into the hall and almost bumped against Van der Welcke, who was just going to the drawing-room.

"Hullo, kiddie!" he exclaimed.

"Oh, I beg your pardon, Uncle!"

"Where are you rushing off to?"

She laughed.

"Nowhere, Uncle. I don't know. I'm going to wash my hands. I upset the milk.... There's no tea left, Uncle."

"That's all right, kiddie, I don't want any tea.... Shall we be having dinner soon?"

"It's not six yet."

"Anything from Addie?"

"No, Uncle."

"Has ... has Mathilde come down?"

"Yes, Uncle."

"I see. Well, I think I'll go upstairs again for a bit."

"Oh, don't, Uncle!"

"I may as well."

"No, don't. Why should you? You're always putting her on us and clearing out yourself!"

"I? But I have nothing to do with her!"

"She's your daughter-in-law."

"I dare say, but I can't help that."

"Yes, you can."

"How do you mean? How can I help it?"

"Why, if you had stopped Addie at the time ... had forbidden it ... as his father."

"You young baggage! Do you imagine that I can forbid Addie anything? I've never been able to prevent his doing a thing. He's always done what he wanted to, from the time when he was a child."

"You can help it."

"Can I? Well, whether I can help it or not ... I'm going upstairs."

"No, Uncle, you're not to. You must come in. Do be nice. Come along for our sake. You're fond of us, aren't you? You love all Addie's adopted children, Uncle, don't you?"

"Yes, kiddie, I'm fond of you all, though I've lost Addie altogether through you."

"No, Uncle, not altogether."

"Well, what's the use of sharing him with the pack of you?"

"But you can afford to share him a little bit. Tell me: you are fond of us?"

"Of course I am, you're a dear, jolly lot. But Mathilde...."

"What about Mathilde, Uncle?"

He bent over her and bit each word separately into her ear:

"I—can't—stand—her.... I hate her as I have never hated anybody."

"But, Uncle, that's overdoing it," said Gerdy, lapsing into reasonableness.

"Overdoing it?"

"Yes, she's not so bad as all that. She can be very nice."

"You think her nice, do you? Well, she's like a spectre to me."

"No, no, you mustn't say that. And she's Addie's wife and the mother of his children."

"Look here, kiddie, don't be putting on such wise airs. They don't suit you."

"But she is the mother of his children and you're not to be so jealous."

"Am I jealous?"

"Yes, you're jealous ... of Mathilde and of us."

"Very likely. I never see Addie. If I hadn't got Guy...."

"Well, you've got Guy. And you've got Addie as well."

"No, I haven't.... Do you know when he's coming back?"

"No, I don't, Uncle. And now come along in."

She drew Van der Welcke into the room with her; and, as usual, he went up to the old woman seated silently in her corner, rubbing his hands, trying to speak a few words to her. She recognized him and smiled.... The wind outside raged with a deeper note.... The branches of the trees swished along the windows, the twigs tapped at them as with fingertips.... And amid the eeriness of it all Constance suddenly felt it very strange that they were all of them there, all strangers in the old, gloomy house, which had once belonged to Henri's stern parents. The old woman had forgiven her, but the old man had never forgiven. He had died, his heart filled with rancour. And now they were all there, all strangers, except the son, except the grandson; and he was not there at the moment.... They were all strangers: her mother, in her second childhood, imagining herself at the Hague and very often at Buitenzorg;[2] she herself and Gerrit's widow and their children; Emilie: all, all strangers, all with their manifold life and ceaseless bustle filling the once silent and serious house.... And Mathilde, a stranger.... And, so strange, even Mathilde and Addie's children, little Constant and Jetje, were two little strangers, though they bore the family name.... Why did she feel this? Perhaps because she still considered that the great gloomy house belonged to the old man. It was as though he lived there still, as though he still walked outside, in the garden. It was as though the great, gloomy house was still filled with his rancour towards her and hers.... Yes, she had been living here for ten years, but the old man still bore rancour because she was there and because so many of hers had come with her to the house in which they had no business, in which she herself was an intruder as were all who had intruded themselves along with her.... It was a feeling which had so often oppressed her, during those ten years, and which would always oppress her.... And she would not utter it to anybody, for Van der Welcke had given Addie free leave to bring the troop with him; and he himself loved the troop....

Oh, how the angles between her and her husband had been rubbed smooth with the years, whether they passed slow or fast!... How they had learnt to put up with each other!... They were growing old: she fifty-six, he a little younger; it was true, no affection had come between them, but so much softening of all that had once been sharp and unkind between them, so that they had been able to go on living, in this house, and together with their child performing the task that seemed to be laid upon them: looking after Gerrit's children!...

And Adeline took it as quite natural; but yet ... how grateful she was to them! How often she told them that she could never have brought up the children alone, that she would have had neither the strength for it nor the money!... Gerrit's death had broken her. She had always quietly done her little duties as a wife and mother, but Gerrit's death had broken her. She had remained among all her children as one who no longer knows. It was as if the simplicity of her life had become shrouded in a darkness wherein she wandered and sought, groping with outstretched hands. Ah, if Constance and Addie had not led her!...

And Constance in her turn was grateful to Van der Welcke, for was it not his house in which she lived with her nephews and nieces, was it not with his money, for a great part, that she brought up those children?... Oh, if the old man would only cease spreading that rancour around them, filling the whole great sombre house with it because they had intruded, because they were living there on his money, though that money now belonged to his heir! At every guilder that Constance spent on her swollen household, she felt the old man's rancour. And it made her thriftier than she had ever been at the time when she and Henri, though their needs were far from small, had had to live on a few thousand guilders a year. Though she now lived in this big house, though twelve and often fifteen of them sat down to table, she was comparatively thriftier in her whole mode of life than she had ever been in her little house with her husband and child.... It was the old man's money, a large fortune, and it was Henri's money now, of course, but it was first and foremost the old man's money!... The curtains in the drawing-room were sadly faded, but she would not buy new, though Van der Welcke himself had begged her at least to buy some for the front room. Her everyday table was very simple, simpler than she had ever been accustomed to. And this gave her the remorse that she was feeding Henri, now that he was growing older, more simply than she had in his younger days. And she urged him daily to buy a motor-car....

He was sensible, refused to do anything of the kind. Buying the "sewing-machine," well, yes, that was one big initial outlay ... but the most expensive part of it was the upkeep of it, the chauffeur, the excursions. He feared that, once he possessed the "machine," it would become a very costly joke.... And all those ten years, though he had often thought of a car, he had never bought the old sewing-machine. Then Constance felt so violently self-reproachful, at using Henri's money for her brother's children, that she discussed it with Addie. Those discussions about the motor had recurred regularly every year. Addie thought that Papa was right, that it was not the initial outlay that was so burdensome, but all the further expenses. Then again motor-cars were being so much improved yearly that, when once Papa had caught the fever, he would get rid of his sewing-machine yearly to buy a new and more modern one. No, it would be a very expensive story.... And Van der Welcke had never bought his sewing-machine, had barely, once in a way, hired one.... Constance felt a lasting self-reproach because of it....

They were rich now; and yet ... what was their fortune, with so many burdens! Burdens, moreover, which were not even the natural burdens of one's own children growing up! Burdens of Gerrit's children!... And so she economized more and more, wearing her gowns till they became shiny, till Addie said that Mamma was losing all her daintiness in her old age. He had always known his mother as a well-dressed woman and now she went about in blouses that shone like looking-glasses. He used to tease her; there was one which he always called the looking-glass blouse. Constance laughed gaily, said she no longer cared so much about clothes. Well off though she now was, she spent upon her dress not half of what she used to in the old days.... And Mathilde, who sprang from a poverty reeking of paraffin and rancid butter, Mathilde, who would have liked to be surrounded with luxury at every moment, Mathilde thought her mother-in-law above all things stingy, decided that stinginess was the outstanding feature of her character....

[1] Jonker is the title borne by the sons of Dutch noblemen until they come of age, when, as a rule, they bear the same title as their father; freule is the title of all the unmarried daughters.

[2] The governor-general's house near Batavia.

CHAPTER II

It was six o'clock. Constance and Marietje had taken Grandmamma upstairs, for she no longer had her meals with the rest, but went to bed very early in the evening. And they were now in the dining-room, sitting at the great dinner-table: a table, Constance considered, of strangers—her brother's children—gathered round her husband, who alone had any right to live there, in the old man's house, and to sit at his table.... And yet it seemed quite natural that Emilie should be sitting there, that Adeline should be sitting there with her four girls, Marietje, Adele, Gerdy and Klaasje, and her two big boys, Alex and Guy; it seemed quite natural that, after the soup, the parlour-maid should set the great piece of beef in front of Guy for Guy to carve: one of the few things that he did well, as Van der Welcke told him, without thinking, for there was some truth in the jibe. It was the same simple fare daily: soup, a joint, green potatoes, vegetables and a sweet, so that Van der Welcke sometimes said:

"But, Constance, how Dutch you have grown in your taste!"

"Well, if there's anything you fancy, you have only to say so!" she would answer, gently.

And yet she was afraid that he would name something, some game or poultry, that would be much too expensive for so large a table and such appetites as the children's: wasn't she spending more than enough as it was, with that good, simple homeliness and wasn't the butcher's bill absurdly high, month after month?

And Guy carved the beef in fine, heavy slices, falling neatly and smoothly one on top of the other, with a dexterity which he remembered learning when quite a small boy from his father, when he recollected very well indeed carving the meat in the little dining-room in the Bankastraat.... That was Guy's duty, to carve the meat neatly; and he would have gone on carving till it all lay in neat slices on the dish, if Constance had not warned him:

"That ought to do, Guy."

The boy was just handing the dish to the maid, for her to take round, when a carriage drove into the front garden.

"Listen!" said Constance.

"That must be Addie!" exclaimed Gerdy, joyously.

"It's Addie, it's Addie!" cried Klaasje.

"Yes, it must be Addie," said Van der Welcke.

There was a loud ring at the bell; and at the same time a key grated in the latch.

"It's Addie!" they now all cried, with cheerful, expectant faces, rejoicing that he was back.

And Gerdy, in her restless way, got up. Mathilde would have got up too, but, finding Gerdy before her, she remained sitting. Gerdy's clear voice rang in the hall:

"Addie, you're back, you're back! Oh, but how cold and windy it is!"

The maids, likewise glad, fussed about, three of them to one handbag. Gerdy had left the door open and the draught penetrated to the dinner-table. But Addie was now in the room; and all their radiant faces were raised to his. They had done without him for five days.? They had missed him for five days.

"Good-evening, everybody!"

He flung off his wet great-coat: Truitje[1] caught it and took it out of the room. He gave a nod here and there, but kissed nobody and shook hands with nobody. He looked tired; and his collar was limp with the rain.

"Won't you go and change first, Addie?" asked Constance, smiling with content, because he was there.

"No, Mamma, I'd rather not. I'm hungry. Give me a glass of wine."

They saw at once what was the matter. He was out of humour. All their radiant faces fell immediately; and they were silent. Guy, who was nearest to him, poured him out a glass of wine, without a word. Addie drank down the wine. His eyes glanced up wearily from under their lashes; his gestures were nervous and jerky. When Addie was out of humour, they were silent, subduing the sound of their voices and the light in their eyes. Nobody knew what to say. And it cost Constance an effort to ask:

"How were things in Amsterdam?"

"All right."

He answered coldly, as though begging her to ask no more questions about Amsterdam. Nobody else asked anything: he would be sure to tell what there was to tell later. They began to talk among one another in constrained tones. They were sorry that Addie was out of humour, but they did not take it amiss in him. He must be tired; he had had a busy time. Yes, he must be tired. It was not only his collar: his coat also hung limp from his shoulders; his grey-blue eyes were dull. Oh, how serious his eyes had become, now that he was a man of twenty-six! How serious his forehead was, with those two wrinkles, above the nose, which seemed to unite with the tawny eyebrows! In face and figure alike he was older than his years, almost too old, as though bowed down with premature cares. He stooped over his plate; and they were all struck by his air of weary exhaustion. What was it that had overstrained him so? He did not speak, but ate on in silence and drank rather more wine than was his wont. Alex looked at him for a long time, with a touch of anxious surprise. And at last, glancing, almost in alarm, at their faces, he suddenly perceived how forced and confused they all were in their attitudes, sitting and staring in front of them or into their plates—even his father, even his mother—and he understood that they sat and stared like that because he had not returned in a cheerful mood, after his five days' absence. He had a feeling of remorse, did violence to his fatigue and his ill-humour, steadied his nerves. He smiled—a tired smile—at his mother; asked his wife:

"How are the children, Mathilde?"

It was at once evident to them all, from his tone of addressing Mathilde, that he was making an effort and no longer wished to be out of humour and tired. They were thankful that he was making this obvious effort, because, with Addie gloomy, a gloom fell over all. Even Alex seemed to breathe again. And they could none of them bear it when Mathilde just answered, coolly:

"All right."

Nevertheless his endeavour succeeded. He now spoke to his father; and Van der Welcke answered with a jest. There was a laugh at last; Gerdy led the outburst, about nothing; the voices broke into a hum....

After dinner, Addie went upstairs; and, when he had changed his things, he found Mathilde in her own sitting-room. Constant and Jetje had gone to bed. Out of doors, the night seemed to be wilder and stormier than ever; and the house creaked, the windows rattled. Mathilde sat staring before her, her ears filled with the sounds of the night. Nevertheless she heard her husband come in; but she did not move.

"Tilly...."

There was now an undoubted tenderness in his voice, in his deep, earnest voice. She was certainly very fond of him, she thought, if only he did not neglect her. She just raised her head towards him, sideways. She was a handsome woman; and her young, healthy blood seemed to give her a complexion of milk and roses. Her features were not delicate, but they were pure; her eyes were gold-grey and large, clear and bright; her hair had a natural wave in it and was almost too heavily coiled. Beneath her black silk blouse her bust was heavy, with a low breast and a naturally wide waist too tightly laced. She had the full, spacious form of a young and healthy woman and lacked all the morbid distinction of finer breeding. Her eyes seemed to stare at a vision of physical delight; her lips seemed ready to salute that delight; the grip of her large hands was greedy and decisive. Her foot, in its substantial shoe, was large, too large for a woman of fashion. Nor was she that: she was rather a woman of health. She had no delicacy of wit: she had rather common sense; and the only morbid part of her intelligence was an irrepressible vanity. She had no delicate taste: she wore a simple black blouse and a black skirt, both from Brussels; and yet there was a coarse line and a heavy fold in both. The brilliant on her finger gleamed insolently, white and hard. It was very strange, but she saw this herself. Her mamma-in-law had given her that brilliant during her engagement, out of her own jewels, because she had once admired the ring on Constance's finger, where the stone seemed to throw out sparks of fire....

"Tilly...."

She smiled at him now, made him come and sit beside her. Twenty-six years of age, a young husband and father, he looked quite ten years older, had aged more particularly, she thought, during the three years of his marriage. Now, however, that he had washed and changed, now that he no longer looked tired and wet, now that he was laughing under his fair moustache, now that his grey-blue eyes were filled with laughing kindness, now his aging no longer struck her so much; and she knew him again and he was hers again, in this one moment when her husband and she were alone....

"Tell me," he said. "How have you been getting on ... these five days?"

She felt a kindly affection for him; and she loved this in him. She let her hand remain in his two hands; she allowed him to kiss her and returned his kiss. And she answered lazily, with a movement of her shoulders:

"How have I been getting on? Oh, as usual!..."

"You mean, all right?"

"Yes, quite all right."

"I believe, Tilly...."

"What?"

"That you're telling a fib. Your voice is very abrupt."

She shrugged her shoulders and gave her little laugh, which meant that she couldn't help it.

"You ought to talk candidly to me for once," he said.

"Yes," she answered; and her tone was more intimate. "We don't do that too often."

"I'm very busy sometimes."

"You're always busy. Why did you have to go to Amsterdam suddenly? I hardly know the reason."

"It was for Alex."

"And did you succeed?"

"Possibly."

"Oh, I'm not asking to know!" she said, at once, in a tone of piqued indifference which he appeared not to notice.

"I have been thinking things over, Tilly...."

"Thinking things over? When?"

"At Amsterdam."

"I thought you were so busy!"

"I used to think in my room, in the evenings. About you."

"About me?"

"Yes. Tell me, wouldn't you rather have your own house? You might feel happier if you had a home of your own."

She was silent.

"Well, what do you say?"

She shrugged her shoulders.

"Of course I would rather have a home of my own. I told you so at once ... when we married."

"Yes, but at that time...."

"Well?"

"I didn't see it so clearly ... that you would not be happy in this house."

"Oh ... happy? I don't know."

"You're not happy here."

"I would certainly rather have my own house ... at the Hague."

"At the Hague. Very well. But, if we move to the Hague, Tilly, we shall have to be very economical."

"Very economical?"

"Well, of course! I'm not making much yet."

"And you're always busy!"

"Yes...."

"You have patients here, at Driebergen, and all around."

"Yes," he said, with a laugh, "but they don't pay me."

"No."

"Why not?"

He shrugged his shoulders:

"Because they can't."

She shrugged her shoulders also:

"It's very noble of you, Addie.... But we have to live too."

"Yes. But don't we live?"

"If we moved to the Hague, though ...?"

"We should have to be very economical."

"You're well off."

"I'm not well off.... Tilly, you know I'm not. Papa has a pretty considerable fortune. But he has a good many calls...."

"Calls!... why, you're his only son!"

"He might give us an allowance ... until I was making more money.... But even then we should have to be economical ... and live in a very small house."

She clasped her large, white hands:

"I'm sick of economy," she said, coarsely, "sick and tired of poverty. I've never had anything in my life but poverty, decent, genteel poverty. I would rather be a beggar, simply; I'd rather be a poor girl in the street than go through decent, genteel poverty again."

"It wouldn't be so bad as all that."

"Not so bad, perhaps, but still a small house, with one servant, and seeing how far a pound of meat will go and watching every half-penny that the servant spends. No, thank you, it's not good enough."

"Then, Tilly...."

"What then?"

"Then I see no chance ... of moving to the Hague."

"Well," she said in her dull tone of piqued indifference, "then let's stay here."

"But you're not happy here."

"Oh, what does my happiness matter?"

"I should like to see you happy."

"Why, you no longer love me!"

"I do love you, Tilly, very much."

"No, you don't love me. How could you love me? Do you think I don't see it? You love all of them here, all your relations: you don't love me. You hardly love your children."

"Tilly!"

"No, you hardly love your own children."

"Tilly, you've no right to speak like that. Because I'm fond of Uncle Gerrit's children, is that any reason why I shouldn't be fond of you ... and of Stan and little Jet?"

She had risen, tremulously. She looked into his grave eyes, which gazed at her long and almost sorrowfully, from under his heavily-knitted, tawny eyebrows. She had intended to overwhelm him with reproaches; but on the contrary she threw herself on his breast, with her arms around his neck:

"Tell me that you love me!" she cried, with a great sob.

"I love you, Tilly, you know I love you."

He kissed her. But she heard it through his voice, she felt it through his kiss: he no longer loved her. All at once, suddenly, the certainty of it poured a coldness as of ice into her soul. She held him away from her for a moment, with her hand against his shoulders. She stared at him.... He also looked at her, with his sorrowful eyes, and he spoke, but she did not hear what.... Then she heard him say:

"Are you coming downstairs, Tilly? They will be wondering what's become of us!"

"No," she said, calmly. "I have a headache and I'm going to bed."

"Won't you come down?"

"No."

"Do, Tilly! Please come down with me. I shall be so glad if you will."

"I'd rather not," she said, softly and calmly. "I really have a headache ... and I'm going to bed."

She looked at him gravely, for one more moment, and he also looked at her, very gravely and very sorrowfully. But their souls did not come into contact. She kissed him first:

"Good-night," she said, softly.

He said nothing more, but he returned her kiss, very fondly. Then he left the room; and she heard his steps creaking softly on the stairs.

"Dear God," he thought, "how am I to find her! How am I to find her again!..."

[1] Gertrude, Gertie.

CHAPTER III

Addie remained in the drawing-room for only a second:

"I'll go and keep Papa company for a bit," he said.

And he went and looked up his father in his room, where Van der Welcke always smoked his three or four cigarettes after dinner, alone.

"Daddy, am I disturbing you?"

"Disturbing me, my dear fellow? Do you imagine that you ever disturb me? No, you never disturb me.... At least, I can count the times when you have disturbed me."

"But I've come to disturb you this time...."

"Well, that's a bit of luck."

"And have a talk with you."

"Good. That doesn't happen often."

Addie knitted his brows, which gave him an expression of sadness:

"Don't be satirical, Father. How can I help it?"

"I'm not being satirical, my dear boy. I accept the inevitable. I've been accepting it now for five days. After dinner I would come up here quietly and smoke my cigarettes in utter resignation. Of those five days, two have been windy and three have been stormy. And I sat here calmly and listened to it all."

"And ...?"

"And ... that's all. Life's an insipid business; and the older I grow the more insipid I find it. I don't philosophize about it very much. I never did, you know.... But I do sometimes think, nowadays, what a rotten thing life is, with all its changes. At least, I should have been glad to let it remain as it was...."

"How, Daddy?"

"As it used to be when you were a small boy. I have gradually come to lose you entirely ... and I have so little, apart from you."

"Oh, nonsense!"

"Yes, I have gradually come to lose you entirely.... In the old days, when you were a schoolboy ... then you belonged to me. Then came your time at college: that took a bit of you from me. Your eighteen months in the hospitals at Amsterdam: I never saw you. Your year, after that, in Vienna: I never saw you. I was lucky if I got a letter now and again. Then you came back, took your degree. And then ... then you went and got married."

"And we have always remained with you."

"And every year I lost a bit more of you. You no longer belong to me. There was a time when I used to share you with Mamma; and you remember that I used to find that pretty hard occasionally. But now I share you ... with all the world."

"Not with all the world, Daddy."

"Well, with half the world then. With your wife, with Aunt Adeline and your nine adopted children, with all your outside interests."

"Those are my patients."

"You have a great many of them ... for a young doctor. And...."

"Well, Daddy?"

"Nothing, old boy. I only wanted to give you a piece of advice; but who am I to advise you?"

"Why not, Daddy?"

"I don't count."

"Now then!"

"I never have counted. You used to manage me; and I just did what you told me to."

"Give me your advice now. Haven't we always been pals?"

"Yes, but you were the one with the head."

"There's not much head about me just now. Give me your advice, Daddy."

"You won't take it from me."

"Out with it, all the same!"

"Well, my boy, listen to me: keep something of your life for yourself."

"What do you mean?"

"You're giving it all away. I don't believe it can be done. I believe a man to stand as much in need of a healthy egoism as of bread and water."

"I should say that I was egoist enough."

"No, you're not. You keep nothing for yourself. You'll think it funny of me that I should talk to you like this; but, you see, the older I grow and the more cigarettes I smoke the more I notice that...."

"That what?"

"That both your parents have never—considering your character—taken your own happiness into account: Mamma no more than I."

"I don't agree with you."

"It is so, all the same. The years which you spent as a child between your two parents made you an altruist and made your altruism run away with you."

Addie smiled and gazed at his father.

"Well? What are you looking at me for?"

"I'm looking at you, Father ... because I'm amused to see you so utterly wide of the mark."

"Why?"

"I may have had a touch of altruism in me, but of late years...."

"What?"

"I have thought a great deal of myself. When I got married ... I was seeking my own happiness. I wanted to find happiness for myself in my wife and children, for my own self ... and hang the rest!"

"Ah, was that your idea? Well, it was a healthy idea too."

"A healthy idea, wasn't it? So you were wide of the mark, Daddy. I wanted a wife who belonged to me, children who belonged to me: all forming one great happiness for myself."

Van der Welcke wreathed himself in clouds of smoke.

"So you see, Daddy, the advice which you gave me I followed of my own accord."

"Yes, old boy, I see."

"That's so, isn't it?"

"Yes. Well, that's all right, then."

"I'm glad to have had a talk with you. But now I must talk not about myself but about something else."

"Of course. You can never talk for more than two seconds about yourself. However, you're right, I know now; and you had already followed my advice ... of your own accord. What else did you want to talk about?"

"Daddy, I've been to Amsterdam."

"For Alex. Well, is that settled ... about the Merchants' School?"

"Yes, he can go up for his examination. But afterwards...."

"Well?"

"I went to Haarlem. Near Haarlem."

"What took you there?"

"Someone sent for me."

"A patient?"

"A dying man."

"Who?"

Suddenly, from the look in Addie's face, Van der Welcke understood. He went very pale, rose from his chair and stared in consternation into his son's sad eyes:

"Addie!" he exclaimed, in a hoarse voice. "Addie, tell me what you mean! I had no idea ... that you knew anyone near Haarlem! I didn't know ... that you had a patient there!"

He seemed to be trying to deceive himself with his own words, for he already understood. And Addie knew by his father's eyes and his father's voice that he understood; and, speaking slowly, in a gentle voice, Addie explained, as though the name had already been mentioned between them:

"Six days ago ... I received a letter ... written in his own hand, a clear, firm hand.... The letter was quite short: here it is."

He felt for his pocket-book, took out the letter and handed it to his father. Van der Welcke read:

"Dear Sir,

"Though I have not the pleasure of your personal acquaintance, I should consider it a great privilege if I might see you and speak to you here at an early date. I hope that you will not refuse the request of a very old man, whose days are drawing to an end.

"Yours sincerely,

"De Staffelaer."

Addie rose, for his father was shaking all over; the letter was fluttering in his fingers.

"Daddy, pull yourself together."

"Addie, Addie, tell me, did you see him?"

"Yes, I saw him. I was with him twice."

"And ... and is he dying?"

"He's dead. He died this morning."

"He's dead?"

"Yes, Daddy, he's dead."

"Did you ... did you speak to him?"

"Yes ... I spoke to him. He was very clear in his head: a clear-headed old man, for all his ninety-two years. When I arrived, he pressed my hand very kindly and nicely, made me sit beside his chair. He was sitting up, in his chair. That's how he died, in his chair, passing away very peacefully. He told me that he had wanted to see me ... because I was the son ... of my mother.... He asked after Mamma and made me describe how you two had lived ... at Brussels. I told him about my childhood. I told him of my later life. He took a strange interest in everything ... and then ... then he asked after you, how you had been, how you were ... asked if I was attached to my parents ... asked after my prospects ... asked after my aims in life.... I was afraid of tiring him and tried to get up, but he put out his hand and made me sit down again: 'Go on, go on telling me things,' he said. I told him about the Hague, told him how we were now living at Driebergen. He knew that Uncle Gerrit's children were here. He seemed to have heard about us.... When I went away, he said, 'Doctor, may the old man give you something?' And he handed me three thousand guilders: 'You must have patients, Doctor, who can't afford things,' he said. 'You won't refuse it, will you?' I thought it right to accept the money. It was an obvious pleasure to him to give it me.... Next day—that was this morning, when I went again—he was much less lucid. He just mentioned Mamma; and, when he spoke of her, I could see that he imagined that she was still quite young. Still he understood that I was her son.... Then he gave me his hand and said, 'I am glad, Doctor, to have seen you.... Give my regards to your mother ... the old man's regards ... and to your father too.' Then I went away; and, when I called again in an hour to enquire, the butler told me ... that he was dead...."

Van der Welcke sat in his chair, motionless and bent, with his hands hanging between his knees. He stared in front of him and did not speak. The past, the times of bygone days rose tempestuously before his eyes. It was as though that which had once existed never perished, as though nothing could ever change in what had once begun.... Life slid on unbrokenly.... His eyes saw Rome, an old palace, a lofty room ... Constance fleeing down a back stair, himself standing like a thief in the presence of the old man ... the good old man, who had been like a father to him.... Now ... now the old man was dead.... And Addie had been at his death-bed! And Van der Welcke's son was bringing the dying man's message, his last message, his forgiveness!...

Van der Welcke stared and continued to stare, motionless; and a sob welled up in his breast. His eyes, which were like a child's with their ever youthful glance, filled with great tears. Nevertheless, he controlled himself, remained calm; and all that he said, quite calmly, was:

"Addie, does Mamma.... know?"

"No, Daddy.... I wanted to tell you first ... and to bring you ... the old man's message and...."

"Yes?"

"His forgiveness...."

Van der Welcke's head drooped lower still; and the great tears fell to the floor. Addie now rose and went up to his father:

"Daddy...."

"My boy ... my boy!"

"The old man sent you this message: 'Tell your father ... that I forgive him ... and tell your mother so ... too....'"

Addie flung his arm round his father's neck; and Van der Welcke now sobbed on his son's breast. He could restrain himself no longer. He gave one great, loud sob, clutching hold of his own son, like a child.... Had it not always been like that, the child the consoler of his father? The son now his mother's consoler?

The emotion lasted but a moment, because of the calmness of older years; but it was a moment full as the whole soul and the whole life of a small being. The older man felt all his soul, saw all his small life. Was that coming for him: forgiveness? Was it coming to him through his son? Because of his son, perhaps ... mysteriously, for some mysterious law and mystic reason?... He felt it ... as an enlightening surprise ... though he merely said, after a pause:

"I'm glad, Addie ... that you went. And now you must tell ... Mamma."

"I'll tell her this very evening, Father."

"This evening?"

"Yes, I can't wait any longer. Those last words ... are lying like a weight ... on my heart: I must hand them on...."

"To Mamma also...."

"To feel relieved...."

"Then go to her," said Van der Welcke, very calmly.

And he remained sitting in his chair. His fingers mechanically rolled a fresh cigarette. But in his eyes, which had always remained young, there was seen a faint inflexion, of surprise, as though for the first time they had looked into the deeper life. His son kissed him, gently, went away, closed the door. And Van der Welcke's fingers continued to fumble with a newly-rolled cigarette. He forgot to light it. He stared in front of him....

Outside the house the wind blew moaning along the walls and drew its tapping fingers along every window, as along a vast keyboard....

Forgiveness, the very possibility of it, whirled before his staring eyes....

CHAPTER IV

When Addie came downstairs he met Constance. A gas-jet was burning with a small flame in the brown dusk of the oak wainscoting. She was obviously tired:

"I am going to my room," she said.

"I was looking for you, Mummy."

"Come along with me then."

"Perhaps you're tired, perhaps you want to rest ... and sleep."

"I can rest as well when you are with me as when I am alone. Come."

She put out her hand, took his and drew him gently up the stairs. She turned up the gas in her sitting-room. She changed quickly into a tea-gown; and he thought that he would not speak to her that evening, because she really seemed very weary.... While she was busy in her dressing-room, he looked round him and felt the years of his boyhood. The room was so exact a copy of the little drawing-room in the Kerkhoflaan that the past always came back to him here. And it brought with it the strange melancholy of all things that had been and no longer were....

"Hark how it's blowing!" she said. "It reminds me...."

"Of what, Mamma?"

"Of an evening, more than ten years ago, at the Hague. It was after the death of Grandmamma van der Welcke. I had returned from here, from the room which is now Papa's bedroom. I had been to Grandmamma ... and it was stormy weather, like to-day, and, when I got home, I was fanciful and frightened: the wind seemed to me so gigantic and I ... I was so small.... Then you came home ... and I was so frightened ... I crept into your arms ... I looked into your eyes, Addie.... In those days, it was very strange, they changed colour, they turned grey.... Now they are sometimes quite dark-grey, but sometimes I see a gleam of blue in them. I used to feel so sorry ... that they changed colour.... Do you remember? It was not long before Uncle Gerrit died.... Oh, how frightened I felt ... for days and weeks before!..."

"And why are you thinking of those days, Mammy darling?"

"I don't know why. Perhaps only because it's blowing.... How small our country is by the sea!... It's always blowing, always blowing.... One would think that everything that happens is blown to us, across the sea, and comes down upon us, in heavy showers of rain...."

He smiled.

"Oh, my boy, sometimes I feel so terribly heavy-hearted, without knowing why!..."

"Is it the house?"

"The house? No, no, it's not the house."

"Don't you like the house even now?"

"Oh, yes ... I'm pretty used to the house!"

"Is it the wind, the rain?"

"Perhaps both.... But haven't I known them for years?"

"Then what is it that makes you heavy-hearted?"

"I don't know."

"Come here, to me...."

"Where, my boy?"

"On my knees, in my arms...."

She sat down on his knees and smiled, sadly:

"It's an age...."

"What?"

"Since I sat on your knee like this.... Do you remember? Do you remember? When you were quite a boy ... and I felt frightened ... I used to creep up to your little study and creep into your arms and look into your blue eyes.... I never do that now."

He clasped his arms round her:

"Then do it again. There, you're doing it now.... My lap's bigger now.... My eyes have changed colour...."

"Everything, everything has changed!"

"Has everything changed?"

"Yes ... I've lost you!"

"Mamma!"

"I have lost you.... Hush, dear, it was bound to come!... Does a son belong to his parents?... Does a son belong to his mother?... A son belongs to everybody and everything ... but not to his parents, not to his mother.... It is a cruel law, but it is a law...."

"You're regretting the past ... and there was not so much peace and quiet in the past, Mummie.... Do you remember, do you remember ... how you used to be ... you and poor Father?... Now everything is much calmer ... everything has smoothed down so ... because life has gone on."

"Yes, life has gone on.... I had you ... and I have lost you!...."

She was sobbing on his shoulder.

"Mamma!"

"Dear, it was bound to be! Didn't I consider ... that it would be so ... years and years ago?... When you were a little boy, I often used to think, 'I've got him now ... but one day I shall lose him irrevocably?' Now it has come. ... I must accept it with resignation...."

"But am I not living with you all? Have I ever been away ... except to college ... and sometimes on business?"

"Dear, it's not that. It's the losing each other, the losing each other ... out of each other's souls...."

"But it's not that."

"That's just what it is.... And it's bound to be so, dear.... Only, because I no longer feel any part of you in my soul, I no longer know anything about you.... I have known nothing about you for ages.... I see you going and coming—it's the patients, it's the children, occupying you ... in turns—but what do I know, what do I know about you?... It has become like that gradually ... and since ... since you got married, it has become irrevocable."

"Mamma...."

"I oughtn't to talk like this, dear. I mustn't. And I should be able to overcome this melancholy, if I knew ... that you were happy in yourself...."

"Why should you doubt it?"

"I don't know. There's something about you...."

"Mother," he said, "how strange it is that you and Father...."

"Well?"

"Have never really found each other! You so often think the same things."

"Did Papa also think ...?"

"Just now ... almost the same as you."

"We have learnt to bear with each other, darling."

"But you have never found each other," he said, faintly; and his voice broke.

She looked at him; she understood that he too had not found his wife. She saw it: he was not happy in himself. A sword seemed suddenly to cut through her soul; and she was filled with self-reproach as from a well. Was it not all her fault, that her son was not happy now?... Was it not the result of his childhood, the result of his up-bringing?... The melancholy that had come after the excessive earnestness of his first youth ... was it not her fault?

But she merely answered his words mechanically:

"No," she said, "we have never found each other."

He would have wished to tell her now ... about his journey, about the old man, who had died, over there, near Haarlem. But he could not; a feeling of discouragement prevented him. And they remained sitting without speaking, close together, with her hand in his. After his father, after his mother had both, so soon after each other, spoken to him of his own happiness ... now that feeling of discouragement prevented him, because he saw life enveloping in clouds of darkness at his feet ... black darkness out of an abyss ... so that he did not know whither the first steps would lead him.... Black darkness and emptiness ... because he no longer knew, no longer knew what it would be best to say and do.... He could no longer speak now of the old man who had died yonder, who had sent for him to tell him that he forgave the two of them—his father, his mother—who had once injured him: he could not do it. Whereas, at the time of his father's words, the black darkness had only whirled in front of him, now that his mother, so strangely, was saying the same to him ... it had suddenly become an abyss ... pitch-dark ... because he no longer knew anything.... He no longer possessed the instinctive knowledge by which he must tread his path, which, while still so very young, he thought that he knew how to tread in clear self-consciousness of a clear soul that felt its own vocation. Oh, how often of late years had he no longer known! He no longer knew what was right to do, because, whatever he had done of late years, the heaviness had sunk within him, as an insufficiency, giving him that feeling of discouragement.... He had felt that discouragement by the bedside of his needy patients.... He had felt that discouragement in between his cares for Uncle Gerrit's children.... He had felt that discouragement when he was with his wife, with his own children....

Oh, world of feeling born just of the emptiness of self-insufficiency, because self, alas, was never sufficient, because something was always lacking and he did not know what!... And, when this came over him, this night of sudden chaos, the word died on his lips, the movement on his fingers, the deed on his will.... Oh, world of darkness, which then suddenly spread like the expanse of clouds outside over all the clear sky of himself!... He knew he wanted what was right; and yet the insufficiency swelled up.... He know his powers of alleviation and consolation; and yet it was the night without a smile ... as now, when he sat with his hand in his mother's, with no words after their first, save that she shuddered and said:

"Hark ... hark how the wind is blowing!..."

He drew her to him, until her head sank on his shoulder, and they remained like that, in the night.

The gale outside was like a living immensity, a vast soul raging with world-suffering, thousand-voiced and thousand-winged, and under its raging agony, which filled all the air above the land, the house that contained the life of them all was small as some tiny casket....

And that night he was unable to tell her....

CHAPTER V

Now at last, after days, he was himself again! Alone, all alone, in the night, in his study, while everyone in the house slept, while only the night itself was awake: the night and the immense wind tormenting itself and struggling, raging and tearing round the house. Now at last he was alone and himself again, after Amsterdam and after Haarlem, after the troubles and comings and goings, the excitement—needy patients, visited by stealth; the Merchants' School; the old man, the old man especially!—and, tired as he was, yet he could not make up his mind for bed. In the study which was now getting dusky-brown to his eyes in the light of the lamp, he sat in the low leather chair; and his head wearily drooped on to his hand. Now that he had no more need for action, waves of indeterminate darkness surged and floated all around and within him, bearing on their crests the mood of self-insufficiency. No one else knew him as he now knew and felt himself: not his parents, not his wife, not one of Uncle Gerrit's children, not one of his needy patients, who only saw him composed and steady of nerve, a little sombre-eyed, but so four-square and firm, so calm and confident in his knowledge, always sure what would be good for all of them, who were ill and wretched.... No one knew him as he was now, weighed down with such despondency in his leather chair; and all who saw him four-square and firm, calm and confident in his knowledge, would never have believed that he knew nothing at all ... for himself. Oh, however much he might know for others, with that almost mystic knowledge which healed as though by a suggestive force deep down within himself, however much he might know what was good for their bodies and souls, for himself he knew nothing, least of all for his soul!... To them his young life seemed to move from one goal to another, always certain of itself through the windings of its course; yet that was all on the surface; and he knew nothing of himself!... His own disease was insufficiency; and of recent years he had felt it swelling within him fuller and fuller, eating into him deeper and deeper....

He saw himself again as a child—his first recollection—between his two parents, his father taking him from his mother's lap, his mother taking him from his father's arms; and amid the unconsciousness of his earliest childhood he had always felt the jarring and jealousy between them. Very soon his blood made him speak, that calm unfevered Dutch blood; and his unfevered Dutch nature could be seen in his serious eyes; from the first his Dutch seriousness and steadying composure had been able to find, if not always words, at least sounds of consoling reconciliation, of riper tenderness for that mother, who hugged him in her arms, for that father, whom he came to regard so soon as a bigger and older brother. And this when he was still a little fellow. It had been like that ever since he could remember; from the time when he was a child in the nursery, stroking Mother's tearful eyes and bringing a laugh to Father's pouting mouth; and, as he grew older and bigger, he remembered, it had always been like that: he knew himself to have been their comfort.... It was small wonder that, when still quite young, he had begun to think of the comfort that he was and had then known for certain that he was their comfort.... He knew it then, as child and boy—no longer in unconsciousness but in assured, unshakable knowledge—and then it had become his destiny. So very early it had dawned on his consciousness and afterwards glittered before his eyes:

"I must help them, I must be to him and to her what is dear to them and what comforts them."

So naturally had he taken that destiny upon his young shoulders that it never became too heavy for him; and there had grown up with him an inclination to comfort and alleviate those who were not quite so near to him. Quite naturally he had spread his wing over all Uncle Gerrit's children, to care for them, to bring them up. Quite naturally, he sought what he could find to alleviate and comfort, whom he could cure, whom he could care for ... and this farther still from him, not close to his home, but in outlying villages and distant towns.... Thus had his nature grown and thus did he act, naturally, in obedience to his nature.... But the conflict between his parents, coming immediately, in the first, unconscious years of childhood, had made his tender nerves tremble with an incessant thrill, like a stringed instrument that is never silent.... And under the calm, earnest glance, under the laugh of comfort or composure, under the sturdy breadth of his young and manly strength, the strings had always vibrated and never consented to betray themselves.... They had betrayed themselves once, once only, when his very earliest childish pain had given him a violent shock, in a despair too great to be borne.... But immediately afterwards he had known within himself that he must be strong to overcome the cruelties of life.... Since then the cruelties had blown against him, like piercing winds ... without causing the sensitive strings to vibrate visibly or audibly to others.... Oh, did he not remember that suffering of his childish soul when he fancied that all his childish love had been wasted, because his parents in despite of it were going to separate, each grasping at the happiness that had smiled to him!... no one had seen that suffering and vibration. After the first suffering, no one had seen anything. And it was as if the too-great sensitiveness of the ever-vibrant strings had hardened in the robust young years of manliness; the god had stood before him so sharply defined: yonder!... Yonder!...

He had felt young and robust; and that too-sensitive vibration had only developed his soul mystically, so that it should heal, wherever it directed its magic.... It had been very strange to him; but just with the medical studies, which should have made him a materialist, there had developed within him a conscious mysticism, enquiring into the essence of life, which the medical books failed to teach him. When he discussed it with his student friends, they answered with the scoff of growing positivism, the barren philosophy which clings to most men from their medical studies, because they ask only for the visible manifestations of the life which it is their business to tend and not for the invisible source, the holy well of life, whence everything flows in a radiance that grows gradually dim ... until the first radiance is no longer visible....

So it had happened with his student friends; and theirs had become the common materialistic doctor's career. His eyes had always been set on the essence of life, the source of the radiant spring.... And, with his increase in practical science and positive knowledge, the strange, mystic certainty had increased in him, the certainty that he was able to heal if he wished ... that he could heal through sheer force of will.... It was not a matter for discussion, it was in him, a great instinctive knowledge.... Oh, that glorious certainty, which had shone out before him so early, sending its rays abroad.... Since he had felt it, very early, so clear and certain in himself, he no longer spoke about it; at most there was a very rare word to his mother, an occasional word to his father; but for the rest he would not touch his secret power with words: they were breath to dim a mirror's lustre!

Oh, why had he not this knowledge for himself! Why, of late years, had he sunk deeper and deeper in the vagueness of that self-insufficiency! Why was the balance disturbed, why did he feel a consciousness of blame welling within him!

He now sat on wearily; and, though everyone in the house was in bed, though the blowing wind, gigantic and plaintive, moaned up over distant heaths and slid along the walls and windows with its sombre, swelling howl, he could not make up his mind to go to bed, as though he knew that, if he did, he would not sleep. And, as if to know for himself how the discouragement could have overmastered him, he dived back into his memories, saw himself a boy again, healthy, strong and composed, loving his Dutch horizons and Dutch skies, with the deep, growing conviction that he had within himself the secret power which he could pour forth to heal all who suffered in body or in nervous soul.... He saw once more the disappointment of his parents, especially Papa, and of Grandmamma, because he would not enter the diplomatic service, because he wanted to become a doctor.... But he had carried his wish, backed up by Mamma, who seemed to understand him.... His rapid power of study, which allowed him to attain in feverish haste the aim which he saw so close before his eyes: matriculating out of the fifth class at school; putting in a short time at Heidelberg before he went to Leiden: he was so very young, only seventeen; passing his first examination in a year, his second in eighteen months, taking three intermediate courses in the next five years, during which period he also acquired practical experience with a demonstrator at Vienna; and lastly taking his degree at the age of twenty-six. His parents rejoiced when, after those nine years at the university and abroad, he settled down with them at Driebergen, when they had him back in their house, where, despite the presence of all Uncle Gerrit's children, he had left a feeling of emptiness.... A short spell of the tenderness of living with them all again; and his love for mankind had developed so quickly, making him find his patients inevitably among the poorest of the rural population, or sometimes in the villages, or even at Utrecht or Amsterdam.... He never spoke about them, maintaining an earnest silence about the things which he did, even as he was silent about the secret force which he so certainly knew himself to possess.... Never had he spoken to anybody over that poor little girl, a child of twelve, the daughter of two wretched labourers, a cripple since the age of five, whom, with the veriest trifle of material assistance, but more particularly through his sure power of will, he had gradually helped to raise herself from her bed of straw, enabled to move herself about, until she could now walk on her frail and yielding little legs.... He might have been ashamed of a cure so incredible, for he had never talked about it, not even to his mother, not even to his father....

Oh, it lasted such a short time, the tenderness of that time when he lived with them all again, with his parents and the others!... When he reflected upon the strange double projection of his soul, when he was meeting the girl, who was now his wife, at the Hague: meeting her just now and again. A strange projection one of them? Perhaps not, after all; but, because of the stormy night wind, sombrely sending its howl over the sombre heaths, he was not able ... to read his own thoughts plainly.... Mathilde! The few meetings, at the Hague; then that feeling, when he chose her, of having been irresistibly compelled; and, combined with a vague wonder within himself, the pride also of introducing that good-looking and healthy young woman into his family.... He was proud that she did not belong to their class, especially on her mother's side, because it gave her an opportunity of triumphing over their arbitrary divisions; proud too that she was healthy, with her complexion of milk and roses, and above all did not suffer from "nerves," that all too common complaint among them all.... But they had not shared his pride; and after his marriage, some hint of antagonism seemed inevitably to arise between him and his father; his mother, too, for all the liberalism that had come to her late in life, remained antipathetic to this girl, whose gait and voice, whose movements and utterance all suggested a different environment from that to which Constance was accustomed; it was as if Aunt Adeline, Emilie, Uncle Gerrit's children, all their big household, had been unable to receive Mathilde in their midst without a certain supercilious mistrust.... They could none of them understand why he had married this woman.... And he had not failed to see how they always stirred themselves to be gentle and amiable towards her—because, when all was said and done, she was his wife—stirred themselves especially not to let her see that they all thought her not quite, really not quite.... Her footfall was heavy, her voice not high-pitched enough; in everything that she did or said they marked that sometimes infinitesimal difference which betrays a difference of station. He had not failed to see it, but his pride had lain low and had never allowed them to notice that he saw it, because he thought it so small of them, so small-souled, that they could not blind themselves to that infinitesimal difference between Mathilde and themselves, yes, because he considered even their assiduous amiability small-souled. They showed it her so graciously sometimes, priding themselves, all of them, willy-nilly, upon their greater native and acquired distinction, all thinking themselves finer and better and higher than his wife, whom nevertheless they did not wish to wound.... He saw this last even in his mother, in the boys, in Adeletje and in Gerdy—though Gerdy never succeeded—and he really preferred the undisguised aversion of little Klaasje, who clearly showed that she could not bear Mathilde....

And he now saw that, in marrying this woman, who was not quite of their class, he had wanted to display pride in particular against the arbitrariness of those whom he called his people—his parents, his family—he had wanted to show that there was no longer any distinction of class, especially no distinction in those minor shades of class. If they were going to think about distinctions, she had the distinction of health ... while his own people were all sick, in body and soul, not, it might be, suffering severely, but all affected or tainted with those "nerves" of their time.... Perhaps his pride had just contained a desire to place his wife, Mathilde, before them as an example:

"Look here now, here's a woman who is healthy and simple."

For that was how he looked upon her soul and body. Because he looked upon her thus, he had felt for her the love that had driven him towards her, his soul taking that direction of positivism and materialism which, after his student days, had at that moment mastered the mysticism of his soul.... For he had known then, those moments in which he—tired of his text-books or hardened in the operating-room—had felt the mysticism within him temporarily fading; and it was especially during those intervals of materialism that the young doctor had experienced Mathilde's attraction, the attraction of a healthy, pink-and-white woman who would give him healthy children. At such moments he saw the world, all mankind, renewed by careful selection; the vigorous life-force of the future bursting into luxuriant rose-blossoms which would overwhelm the sickly lilies of these days of "nerves...." When, afterwards, the secret forces spoke more loudly within him, then he would suddenly feel himself far removed from his wife, as though he had lost her; and especially in his dark, vague self-insufficiency he lost her entirely, feeling himself nerveless and without power even to return her kisses with any warmth, while his voice in speaking to her remained dull and his grey glance cold, whatever he said and however hard he tried to force himself back into his healthy, positive love for the healthy mother of his two children....

Then he would feel guilty towards her. And the inner conviction of his guilt increased. Was it her fault that he had been able only to give her one half of his soul, that he had it in his power to love her only with the positive half of his nature—however sincere it might be—while he gave her nothing of what worked and moved in him more profoundly and gloriously, the true web and woof of himself? Was it her fault and was he really entitled to take her, if he could not give her more than half of himself, while all that was higher—and he well knew what was higher in him—escaped her and always would escape her?... But often in his black insufficiency, even as now in his weary nocturnal mood, his consciousness of guilt, though it pained him, became suddenly too dreamy and unreal; and he now comforted himself tranquilly:

"She is a simple woman. She has never thought of other than simple and uncomplicated things, has never lived among them; and she will never miss this, all that I do not give her, she will never know the lack of it, because she is simple, because she is simple: a healthy, normal mother, the handsome, healthy mother of my two dear children...."

Then again, tired and undecided to go to bed, he was pricked by his consciousness of guilt, he thought of her unhappy in the house that was dear to him, and he knew that he was incapable to-day—and so often, so often!—of giving her that love, that positive half, that one half of himself.... Sinking and sinking in his self-insufficiency, he now listened to the wind howling round the house, the storm that had lasted for days, and he seemed to hear voices that came moaning up over the wide heath, as though the wind were alive, as though the storm were a soul, as though it concealed weeping souls, complaining souls, and were their one manifestation: souls blowing up again and again, souls which now, in the night, tapped with soul-fingers at the trembling panes.... Round about this house, in which his grand-parents had lived so long and in such loneliness, until now life had come to fill all the empty rooms, it suddenly seemed to him as though he heard something of their voices, moaning plaintively through the storm ... accusing him first and then pitying him: the old man's voice, the old woman's voice. But what they moaned he did not understand in the ever shriller howl upon howl that floated despairingly along the swishing trees ... until suddenly the window, fastened only by the latch, blew open with a fierce tug, the Venetian shutter flapped to and slung open again, banging against the wall of the house.... The wind entered and with one breath blew out the lamp. The room now dark, the night luridly visible outside, the window so desperately pulled open took on new outlines.... Adriaan, groping, knocking against the chairs, moved towards the window, seized the flapping, banging shutter, closed it, closed the window, firmly this time, turning the old latch that was stiff with rust.

The rain poured in torrents; the wind moaned and sobbed with sorrowfully entreating voices and tapped its fingers against the trembling panes.

That night he did not sleep, tired as he was. And he kept thinking:

"Am I at fault?"

CHAPTER VI

The old lady was sitting silently at the window—in the grey morning, which seemed spent and weary with the wind out of doors—and her thoughts were following a far course of their own in misty days of long ago. Klaasje came up to her. The child had two heavy books under her arm, bound volumes of The Graphic and L'Illustration, and walked bent under them; then she dropped them, clumsily.... Cross with the weight of the books, she beat them angrily, but the hard boards hurt her little hand; and so she decided to drag them to Granny, the naughty books which refused to come: she dragged them by the open bindings which had hurt her so; she tore them a bit, but that was their own fault, because they wouldn't be carried.... Satisfied with her revenge in tearing the books, she closed the bindings contentedly; the books lay at Granny's feet, against her foot-warmer; and now Klaasje dragged up a hassock too, pushed it against Granny's dress and, kneeling on the hassock, asked Granny, in a motherly fashion:

"Granny!... Granny!... Granny like to look at pictures?"

The old woman, with a vague, misty glance, slowly turned her head towards the child, whose fair hair fell loosely round the rather thin, sharp little face, from which the over-bright eyes shone strangely, hard and staring. The voice—"Granny look at pictures?"—rang strangely kind, but too childish for a big girl of twelve, with a maturing figure. It was too maternal towards the old woman:

"Granny!... Granny like to look at pictures?"

The old woman, vaguely, fancied herself at Buitenzorg, in a large white palace among mountains, which stood out against a blue sky, and coco-trees, which waved gently like ostrich-feathers; and she thought that her little daughter Gertrude was kneeling by her and wanting to look at the books with her. Her old mouth wore a little puckered smile; and she put out her hands for the book, which Klaasje held up clumsily. But the old woman was too weak to pull the heavy book on to her lap and it slipped obstinately down her dress to the floor, against the foot-warmer. Klaasje grew angry:

"Naughty books, naughty books!..."

She flew into a temper and struck the books again; but her little hand was hurt and she suddenly began to cry.

"Ssh!... Ssh!..." said Granny, soothingly.

She bent painfully in her big chair and laboriously pulled up the heavy, obstinate book; and Klaasje, with her eyes still wet, pushed up from below, till at last it lay in Grandmamma's lap. Then Klaasje sighed, after the final victory:

"Turn over," she said.

She turned over the heavy, clumsy binding and said:

"Klaasje will explain...."

But the black pictures, the dark portraits held no story for her; and, pointing her finger at the picture or the portrait, she could not make one up, could not find her tongue:

"Turn over, turn over," she repeated.

She was longing for colours, yellow, blue and red; but the pictures contained black, all black stripes and black patches, and she thought them ugly.

"Turn over, turn over, turn over," she kept repeating, excitedly yearning for them to become yellow, blue and red.

The old woman, with her puckered smile, patiently turned over the pictures. For her too they held no story, because they were black and sombre; and she was already seeing colours for herself, the dead-white and deep-blue, the bright, lacquered green of houses, sky and trees in Java. Here, under the sombre oppression of the skies, here, in the sombre pictures, the old woman and the child found nothing to charm them.

Then Klaasje became very angry and dragged the heavy book from Granny's lap and beat it, heedless of the pain, and scolded:

"Ugly books ... ugly, black books!"

"Ssh!... Ssh!" said the old woman soothingly, laying her veined hand on the girl's fair head.

"Build a tower!" said Klaasje, with a gurgle of laughter suddenly beholding a beautiful vision.

She sprang up quickly. On a table in a corner of the room she found a box of dominoes. She brought the box, beaming with delight, but the smooth lid slid out of the box and the dominoes rattled on the floor. Klaasje stamped her foot, but the beautiful vision still shone before her and hurriedly and passionately she scrabbled them into her little pinafore. Then she brought them to Granny, like a harvest, like so much booty, and rattled them down at her feet. With a great effort she again pushed one of the heavy books on to Granny's lap; and the old woman helped her, pulling while Klaasje pushed.

"Build tower!" cried the child.

Granny held the book, held it straight, while Klaasje placed two, three, four pieces on their narrow edges. Upon these she went on building the rickety black-and-white tower.

"A door and two windows," the child explained, lost in her game.

But the tower fell in with a crash.

"Granny mustn't move!" she whimpered.

Balancing the heavy book on Granny's knees, she went on building, hurriedly, so as to get very high.

"Granny mustn't move again.... Tower ... with a wall round it.... Higher ... the tower ... one more stone on the wall ... one more stone on the wall...."

But the wall and the tower came down with a crash.

"Naughty Granny!... Naughty Granny!"

"Ssh!" said the old woman, soothingly.

Addie had entered; and the child, dropping the book and the dominoes, crowed with delight and ran up to him. She called him uncle, not realizing that he was her cousin:

"Uncle Addie!" she cooed.

He opened his arms wide, lifted her a few inches from the floor:

"Look in Uncle Addie's pockets," he said.

"What have you got? What have you got?"

She fumbled in his pockets.

"No, that's Uncle's pocket-book.... No, that's his watch.... Here, look, what's this?"

He now helped her find the little parcel. She tugged hurriedly at the paper and string; and he opened the parcel for her. It was a little kaleidoscope.

"Look through it...."

"Lovely!" said the child, gleefully. "Lovely ... blue, red, yellow!..."

"Now shake it...."

She shook the kaleidoscope: the colours, from a square, changed their figure into a star.

"Green, blue, red!" the child cried.

"Now shake again...."

"Blue and yellow."

"There, what do you say to that?"

"Lovely!... Lovely!..."

She sat down on the floor, suddenly quiet and good, peered and shook the little cylinder, peered and shook it again. In the gaudy star she suddenly beheld a paradise:

"Green, yellow, blue."

Addie relieved Grandmamma of the book, put it down and began to arrange the dominoes in the box.

"It's been blowing," said the old woman, pointing through the window. "There are great branches lying in the garden."

CHAPTER VII

Then Adeline came in, looking for Addie. He was so tired yesterday that she had not cared to ask him the result of his visit to Amsterdam, but now, while he was still playing with Klaasje, she glanced at him with questioning eyes. She was still a young woman, no more than forty, for she had married Gerrit early and then borne him a child every year; but, despite her gentle, round, fair face, she was no longer young in appearance. Her lines had become matronly; and, especially after the great sorrow, after her husband's suicide, which had plunged her and the children into perpetual shadow like an indelible twilight, she had become so spiritless in all her simple energies that she came like a child to Constance or Addie about anything that concerned any one of them: mostly to Addie, whom she had taken to regarding as her inevitable protector. She looked up at him with respectful confidence; she always did literally what he told her to; it was he who controlled their whole little fortune, investing it as profitably as possible for the children; notwithstanding his youth, she turned to him in all that concerned her boys; and the boys themselves accepted it, inevitably, that their cousin, who was only six or seven years older than they, should look after their interests with paternal earnestness. But Adeline was well aware that Addie was very angry that Alex had had to leave Alkmaar. At first, things had gone fairly well in the secondary school at the Hague; after the third form—he was seventeen by this time—he had just succeeded in passing his matriculation; but, when he took two years over his first examination and failed in the second, Addie himself had considered that Alex had better look out for something different, however much his mother, with her mind full of Gerrit, would have liked to see her eldest son an officer....

By this time, he was nearly twenty; and it was so late for him to go to the Merchants' School at Amsterdam that Addie had decided first to obtain all the details for himself and therefore had gone to Amsterdam, to see the head-master.... That was why, this morning, Adeline came to talk to Addie, a little nervously, rather frightened of what he might say, because he had been exceedingly dissatisfied about Alex, discouraged, not knowing what to do with him next.... He would like to have a talk with Alex, he said; and Adeline, sad about her son and rather frightened of Addie, went to fetch Alex and brought him back with her. He was tall, slender, pale, fair-haired: he did not look strong, although he had resembled his father, especially as a child; every year his features seemed to become more and more fixed and his face became like a spectral mask of pallor, with the look in the eyes a little shy under the lashes, as with a timorous, bashful and at the same time deep inner concealment of invisible, silent things.... Now that his mother had come to fetch him from the room where he sat reading, he came in with her, evidently nervous about the coming talk with Addie. But Addie said:

"I ought really to be going out, Aunt.... Alex, can you go with me part of the way? Then we can talk things over as we walk. The roads are too wet for cycling."

Addie's eyes and voice set Adeline's mind at ease, as though he were telling her that it would be all right at the Merchants' School....

The cousins left the house together. The trees dripped with water; and the swift and angry wind chased the great clouds farther in one direction; but the sky remained grey and lowering. The far-stretching, straight country-roads vanished at last in a melancholy drab mist; and the two young men at first walked along without a word.

"Well, I went and enquired for you yesterday," said Addie, at last. "You can go in for your exam, Alex ... and you can go on working there for some time yet.... I hope things will go better this time, old chap.... You're nearly twenty now.... If they don't...."

He made a vague gesture; and Alex took his arm:

"It's awfully good of you, Addie, to take so much trouble about me. I too hope ... that things will go right ... this time...."

"Mamma would have liked to see you in the army."

"Still, I'm really not cut out for a soldier.... It's a pity I didn't think of it before I went to Alkmaar.... But, when I was there I felt it at once: there's nothing of the soldier about me."

"And in that way years were lost.... Well, I do hope that now, when you're at the Merchants' School, you won't suddenly discover ... that you're not cut out for a business-man ... that you're not fit for 'trade.'.... You can become a consul, you know."

"Yes ... perhaps...."

"It's a pity, Alex, that you don't know things for certain in your own mind ... that you have no settled ideas...."

"Yes ... that's just it!..."

"But you must become something, mustn't you? You have no money, you fellows; and, even if you had ... a man must be something ... in order to do any or get any happiness out of life ... for himself and those about him...."

"Yes, Addie...."

"Promise me now, old chap, to do your best.... You see, I'm playing the father to all of you, even though I'm only six years older than you are. I feel a sort of father to you ... and I should like to see you all happy ... and prosperous.... But you must help me, Alex. Show a little energy. If you hadn't thrown up the sponge at once at Alkmaar, you'd almost have had your commission by now...."

"Yes...."

"Like your father. Mamma would have liked that. But we won't talk about it any more and we'll hope that things will go better at Amsterdam...."

"Addie ... do you remember Papa well?"

"Of course I do."

"So do I.... I was eight years old, when he died.... I even remember...."

"What?"

"That evening ... though I didn't understand at the time ... why Mamma cried and screamed like that ... or why Aunt Constance and Uncle Henri were there.... It was not until later, oh, years later, that I understood!... But I saw.... I saw Papa lying ... with blood all round him; and that's a thing which always ... always ... hovers before my eyes. I'm always seeing it, Addie!... Tell me, Addie, do you know why Papa did it?... There was nothing, surely, to make him so unhappy as all that?"

"He was very ill."

"He thought himself incurable."

"Still, he was strong?"

"Physically."

"He was like Guy, wasn't he?"

"Yes, Guy is very like him, to look at.... He was tall, broad, fair-haired...."

"Yes, that's how I remember him. I was eight years old then."

"You were a jolly little tribe."

"And now we're nothing but a burden ... to you...."

"Nonsense, it's not as bad as that!"

"I hope things'll go better ... Addie ... at Amsterdam...."

"Why aren't you more talkative, Alex?... You haven't been for a long time."

"Haven't I?"

"You never talk, at home ... to the others. Only once in a way to me ... when we are alone. It was after Alkmaar that you became so silent. It wasn't surely because I was angry at the time?"

"Perhaps, partly...."

"Well?"

"I daren't tell you."

"Tell me, Alex, if there is anything I can do for you."

"You do so much as it is, Addie.... You do everything."

"But speak quite openly. Perhaps there is something more that I can do for you."

"No, what could there be?"

"Something's upsetting you."

"No...."

"You're unhappy."

"No...."

"You're so reserved."

"I ... never talk much."

"Try and trust me, Alex."

"I do trust you."

"Well, then, talk to me."

"But I ... I've nothing to tell you, Addie."

"I know, Alex, that you must have something to tell me...."

"No...."

"I know it, Alex."

"No, Addie, really.... I've nothing to tell you...."

The lad tried to release his arm from Addie's, but Addie held him tight:

"Walk a bit more with me."

"Where are you going?"

"I have a couple of patients to see.... Take me there, Alex ... and speak, speak openly...."

"I can't speak."

"Then try and find your words. I'll help you."

"Not to-day ... not to-day, Addie, out here, in the roads.... Perhaps another time ... indoors."

"Very well, then, another time, indoors. I'll keep you to your word. And now let's talk of nothing but the Merchants' School...."

And, with Alex still hanging on his arm, he told him about the head-master, the staff, the lessons there ... making a point of holding out hopes to Alex that everything would go easily and smoothly. Did Addie not know, did he not diagnose that the boy was so terribly afraid of life, of the days to come, because a twilight had always continued to press down upon him, the twilight of his father's suicide?... It had given the child a fit of shuddering in so far as he had realized it at the time; and things had suddenly grown dark, about his child-soul; and, when the power of thought had developed in him later, there had always remained the fear in that darkness, because the unconscious life went on daily ... and because his father—why, why?—had torn himself out of the unconscious life and committed suicide.... That—though Alex had not spoken—was how Addie diagnosed him, that was how he really diagnosed his state, with that strange look of penetration, with that strange vision.... And, when he looked into another in this way, he no longer thought of himself, his self-insufficiency fell away from him and he seemed to know on the other's behalf, to know surely and positively, to know with instinctive knowledge ... as he never knew things for himself....

While they walked on, arm in arm, he thought that the boy's heavy step was becoming more rhythmical and even, that his answers—now that they went on talking about Amsterdam and the master in whose house he would be—were becoming firmer, as though he were taking greater interest.... There was no note of doubt in Addie's voice: his voice made the two years' schooling at Amsterdam, the whole subsequent life as a busy, hard-working man, stand out clear in the mist that hung under the trees and over the roads, made it all take on bright colours as a life spreading open, with unclouded horizons of human destiny, as though all the unconscious life would run easily along ordered lines.... He himself had never known that fear of the days to come, because he had seen his goal before him in the future. Yet why, then, that morbid sense of insufficiency?...

He refused to think of it; and at once it passed from him like a ghost. Even after his sleepless night, he now felt the energy circulating strongly within him, felt the magic pouring out of him as vital warmth. He must make that boy by his side realize the life before him, he must take away his fear of the future. An unknown force inside him ordained that he should make the future shine with hope and promise for this boy, ordained that he should purge the days to come of their sombre terror.

And, when he had taken leave of Alex, because he did not wish him to know where his patients lived, the lad went back easier in his mind, with his fears pressing less heavily upon him, with the sullen sky growing gradually brighter ... however much he might have to think always of his father, however much he had to see his father's blood-stained corpse daily more and more clearly before his eyes....

CHAPTER VIII

The household took its everyday course of a morning: the everyday life, driven indoors by the merciless winter, the grey skies and blustering wind, rolled on softly and evenly in the rooms and passages of the big house. Not much came from outside, where the great trees in the garden dripped with chill rain; nothing to stir the big house, which stood there like a great lonely block on the villa-road, amid the sombre mystery of its wind-blown trees. For the occupants of the big, gloomy house had made as few acquaintances as possible among their neighbours, though in the spring and summer Gerdy would take her racket daily to the tennis-club.... In the winter, it was a quiet life indoors, varied only by a walk, or a visit to a sick or poor neighbour, a quiet life between the walls of the big rooms, with the wind tapping at the window-panes....

The old grandmother sat mostly in the conservatory and looked out into the garden, sagely nodding her silver-grey head. She no longer recognized all the children and as a rule thought herself back at Buitenzorg, in the midst of her own family; even when Klaasje sat playing at her feet, she would think that it was little Gertrude, Gertrude who had died, as a child, at Buitenzorg.... Constance, a zealous housewife, active despite her fifty-five years, moved about the house incessantly during the morning, with Marietje or Adeletje to help her. Twenty-two and twenty-one respectively, they were always with Constance: Marietje already full of unselfish consideration and Adeletje delicate, not speaking much, sitting with her needlework upstairs in their room; and, because of Alex' strange melancholy, it was only Guy and Gerdy that represented joyous, healthy youth in the house, that rich health and radiance which reminded Constance of their father, of her brother Gerrit, who had been so noisy, broad and strong until he fell ill, too ill to go on living....

Klaasje was very troublesome in the mornings, very restless, full of freaks and cranks, always bothering the others to play with her or at least to make a fuss over her; and Constance was so sorry that Klaasje could not be upstairs in the nursery with Jetje and Constant, but Mathilde would not have her there. And the poor, innocent child, twelve years old by now, was jealous of Constant and Jetje and hated Mathilde, as though, unconsciously, she felt in the children a childishness that was natural and as though she knew that, after all, she herself was much too big to play about like that and build houses with cards and dominoes....

Above the great sombre house, against the great sombre skies and inside the house itself there was always a strange melancholy of things that had been.... It floated through the passages and creaked in the furniture; it could be felt in the old grandmother's sitting at the conservatory-window, in the pale, unchangingly sad face of Adeline, who was so helpless; it appeared in the silent sorrow of Emilie, who was spiritless and never spoke much these days. In the sombre house they sat or moved in an atmosphere of bygone things which mingled with the atmosphere of the house itself, as though they were small, pale souls, broken by life and sheltering in the safe house, now that the winter seemed endless and the heavy clouds were so oppressive.... A cloud of recollection hung over the old woman, as she sat silently staring, as she played with Klaasje, who would never grow up; a last reflexion of sombre tragedy lingered around the simple mother of so many children, as though her husband's suicide still struck her with tragic wonder that life could strike so suddenly and fiercely and cruelly; it was as though a strange psychological secret slumbered in the sad eyes of Emilie, who was still a young woman; a secret which she would never speak....

Sombre was the house and sombre the everlasting wind that blew around it; full of strange voices, of things of long ago; and they did not brighten the house, those three sad, silent women, so different in age, so sombre in their equal melancholy. They did not brighten the morning which they spent there together, in the house on the long, rain-swept road; and it was Constance herself, followed quietly by Marietje or Adeletje, who woke the house, stairs and passages to life with her active footfall and the shrill rattle of her keys.... The sound of a piano came harshly from Mathilde's sitting-room upstairs; and it had only to be heard to make the other piano in the drawing-room downstairs cry out in pain under Gerdy's furious little fingers, until Constance was startled at so much noise and hurriedly whispered to Marietje:

"Do tell Gerdy not to play when Mathilde is playing upstairs!..."

Marietje would then rush to the drawing-room and rebuke Gerdy; and, because it was Aunt Constance' request, Gerdy's piano suddenly fell silenced, leaving Mathilde's runs and flourishes to triumph overhead.

The children drove out daily with their nurse in the governess-court, whatever the weather: it was Addie's principle and they throve on it; and their youthfulness, stammering its first words, was like a bright, rosy dawn of the future, as they went along the sombre stairs and dark passages and rooms, casting a sudden golden radiance in that atmosphere of the past, as though they were suddenly powdering through the brown of the shadows, as though they were sprinkling the sound of children's voices through the brown air, which had not caught a childish sound for so many years....

When Addie was out, visiting his patients, Van der Welcke remained in his room, reading and smoking, Uncle Jupiter, as Gerdy called him, because he usually sat enveloped in the blue clouds of his cigarette; and Guy did a little work, for his examination as a clerk in the postal service, except when he went to Utrecht, where he was receiving private tuition in geography. But when he was working at home, in his little room, up on the third floor, his young, healthy restlessness constantly made him get up and run downstairs, to borrow an atlas of Van der Welcke, hang round Uncle Henri for a bit, smoke a cigarette with him, then go back upstairs. He would look at his books and maps for three minutes and then jump up again, stretch himself, take up his dumb-bells, feeling stiff from the long sitting, and go downstairs once more.

Constance met him in the hall:

"Aren't you working, Guy?"

"Yes, I am, Auntie. Where are you off to?"

"To the store-cupboard."

He went with her and Marietje to the store-cupboard, conducted a raid among the almonds and raisins, talked a lot of nonsense and made Constance laugh, until she said:

"Come on, Guy ... run along upstairs."

But, because Adeletje looked after the flowers in the conservatory and he saw her carrying a watering-can, he assisted her and even sponged the leaves of an aralia, while Klaasje played at Grandmamma's feet, building houses with cards, which she loved for the shrill colours of the court-cards, and aces[1] and for the pretty figures of hearts and diamonds, clubs and spades. He built a house for her; he teased Gerdy, who was back at her piano, now that Mathilde had left off overhead, until Truitje came to lay the table for lunch and he raced up three flights of stairs, terrified, to work at all costs ... hang it all, yes, to work!... He sat with his hands to his ears, so as not to hear, and his eyes fixed on the maps; and, when the luncheon-bell rang, he deliberately waited a few minutes, pretended to himself to be annoyed because a morning passed so quickly and never came down to lunch less than five minutes late, making the excuse that he had been working so hard....

Now, in the winter, the short days passed in peaceful, sombre domesticity: in the afternoon, Constance went for a walk or to see a poor person, generally with Adeletje; paying or receiving a visit was quite an event, which happened only three or four times during the winter; only Gerdy sometimes entertained her tennis-club and gave the members tea, upstairs in the girls' sitting-room, as though striving for a little sociability from the outside.... And, in the yellow circle of light shed by the lamps, the evening drowsed on gently after dinner, with the wind whistling round the house, with Gerdy's bustle amid the chink of her tea-things, with Guy and Adeletje rattling the dice:

"Two and five...."

"Double six.... Once more.... Imperial.... Once more.... Three and five...."

And Mathilde sat with a book in her hands, her eyes expressing a weight of silent boredom, while the room seemed full of things of the past, and the voice of the wind outside and the mourning women—Granny, Adeline, Emilie—like three generations of dreaming melancholy depressed her until Addie came in, for a brief hour, before going upstairs again to his reading....

[1] The aces in Dutch packs of cards are set in brightly-coloured pictures, usually town-views.

CHAPTER IX

It was raining on the morning when Adolphine alighted at Zeist-Driebergen and hurried to the tram which was on the point of leaving. She looked very weary and lean, with bitter lines round her thin, spiteful lips and a reproach in her sharp eyes; and suddenly she reflected that she was sorry that she had not put on a better cloak.

"Conductor, will you stop at Baron van der Welcke's villa, please?"

"We don't pass the villa, ma'am, but it's quite close to the road."

"Then will you tell me where to get out?"

The conductor promised; and Adolphine suddenly became very uncertain of herself. All those years, all the years that Constance had been living at Driebergen, she had never been once to look them up: really out of anger, because they had stolen Mamma, because Mamma had gone to live with them. In all those years, she had never seen her mother, had seen Constance only once and again, at Baarn, after Bertha's death; at the Hague, casually, exchanging a few words with her when they met, by accident, at Aunt Lot's; and Addie also she had seen but very seldom. She was sorry for it now, it looked so strange, to arrive like this, all of a sudden; and then she had not announced her coming, because she disliked writing the letter.... If only Constance wasn't out, or away, or perhaps gone to Utrecht or Amsterdam for a day's shopping ... which was possible.... She was coming quite like a stranger; and her heart was thumping; and she was almost sorry now that she had taken this step. There were plenty of other doctors besides Addie, who was still such an inexperienced boy, and yet ... and yet ... In her unstrung condition, the tears came to her eyes and she felt overcome with her sorrow, with all the bitterness of the last few melancholy years. It was all very sad at home: Van Saetzema, retired on a pension and now ailing ... with cancer in the stomach; the boys—Jaap in the Indian Civil, Chris in the army, Piet a midshipman—never writing home, now that they no longer needed the paternal house; Caroline soured by not marrying; and the youngest, Marietje, so weak lately, so queer, that Adolphine did not know what to do with her! Added to all this, because, notwithstanding her economy, they had lived on too lavish a scale in her striving after Hague grandeur, they had run into debt and were now living in a small house, really vegetating, without seeing a spark of grandeur gleaming before their eyes. It was all over, there was nothing left for them: it was all loneliness and dying off ... relations and friends; there was no family circle left at the Hague and it seemed as though such family-circle as had survived was now united—how strange!—in Van der Welcke and Constance' house at Driebergen.... Adolphine had long cherished a wonderful jealousy at this, as though, after Van Naghel's death and Bertha's, it ought to be her house which the family, however greatly dispersed, would look upon as the family-house.... It was not that she was hospitable by nature, but her vanity was injured; and to satisfy this she would not have objected even to taking Mamma to live with her, however doting and tiresome Mamma might have become. But there had never been any question of that. No, Mamma had at once gone to Constance; and Adolphine could feel, by the way in which Paul, Dorine, the Ruyvenaers and even Karel and Cateau spoke, that they all, with varying degrees of affection, looked upon Van der Welcke's house at Driebergen as still remaining the family-centre! A nice state of affairs! Adolphine was angry now, because she never succeeded in anything, because she never had succeeded.... And now she had actually set out for Driebergen, with the very object of asking those two, Constance and Van der Welcke, to do her a favour, though she refused as yet to picture it so clearly as such....

She was very nervous when the conductor, at a halt, told her to get down, showed her a road, pointed to a house distantly visible between the bare, dripping trees. The great block loomed massive-grey through the black boughs; the outline of the long, straight roof stood out harsh and unwelcoming against the grey winter sky. It was only the fancy of overstrung nerves; but in the windows of the front, with their reflecting panes and blinds half down, Adolphine seemed to feel reserve, repellence, pride, grudge, refusal.... It all shot very quickly through her, made her hesitate to go on ... and yet, now that she had come so far, now that she was approaching the gate of the front-garden, she realized that it was too late, that she must go on, round the beds with the straw-wrapped roses; and she rang at the great gloomy front-door. She rang shyly, too softly; the bell did not sound; and she stood waiting under her dripping umbrella. Her heart was beating as she pulled a second time, rather harder, in spite of herself.... Truitje now opened the door and she recognized her as the maid, the same maid, for whom Constance had rung, years and years ago, in the Kerkhoflaan, to show her the door, after their last private interview. She was surprised to see the girl, looking older, but still recognizable; and, because her thoughts were carried back to so many years ago, the sight gave her such a sense of hesitation that she could hardly speak, especially as Truitje, equally surprised, was also staring her in the eyes. Adolphine felt that she was going to stammer, now that she had to open her lips; but there was no way out of it; the question must be put:

"Is ... is me-mevrouw ... is mevrouw at home?"

"Yes, ma'am ... mevrouw's at home."

Adolphine had entered trembling; and the maid closed the door behind her and took her wet umbrella from her. Standing on the mat, she saw the long hall before her, with the brown doors, the antique cabinet, the portraits and engravings. It gave her the impression of a very sober and serious Dutch house, but an impression, too, of reserve, repellence, pride, grudge and refusal.... And, with her eyes anxiously fixed on the open oak door at the end of the hall, she stammered once more almost imploringly, with an irresolution in her voice which she could not overcome:

"I'm not ... I'm not disturbing her?"

"Not at all, ma'am: pray come in."

Then the door of the drawing-room opened and Constance herself stood before her:

"Adolphine!"

There was surprise in her voice, if not gladness: surprise at finding Adolphine there, Adolphine whom she had never seen at Driebergen, whom she had never seen lately, for the matter of that, except once or twice, casually, at the Hague or Baarn ... when poor Bertha had died.

"Adolphine!"

"I've come to see how you are getting on, Constance ... you and ... and Mamma...."

Adolphine's voice wavered, jerkily, beseechingly, uncertain of itself; and it was so strange for Constance to see Adolphine, to hear her uttering such words, in so hesitating a voice, that she was put out for a moment and could not frame a phrase of welcome, could not even make a show of cordiality. But she saw that the door at the end of the hall stood ajar; and she said to Truitje, almost angrily:

"Truitje, why is that door open again? You know I want it shut."

"It opens sometimes with the draught, ma'am," replied the maid.

Truitje closed the door and went back to the kitchen; and the two sisters were left alone.

"Come in, Adolphine."

"I'm not disturbing you?"

"Of course not. I'm glad to see you again."

She forced a note of geniality into her voice.

"We haven't met for years," said Adolphine, in hesitating excuse.

"Not for ever so long. I go to the Hague so seldom. Here's Mamma."

The old woman was in the conservatory, gazing out of the window.

"Mamma!" said Adolphine, with emotion. "Mamma!"

She went nearer:

"Good-morning, Mamma...."

The old woman looked at her vacantly:

"It's windy," she said. "The garden is full of big branches...."

"Mamma," said Constance, "here's Adolphine come to see you."

The old woman did not recognize her daughter. She looked at Adolphine vacantly and indifferently. Then she said:

"It's not right for Gertrude to run about in the garden when it's so windy.... There are big branches falling from the trees."

"No, Mamma, I'll go and fetch her in."

"Gertrude?" asked Adolphine.

"She means our poor Klaasje," whispered Constance.

"But doesn't Mamma know me?"

"Not ... just now. She'll recognize you presently.... Mamma, don't you know Phine?"

"Phine?" repeated the old lady.

"Adolphine, Mamma. Look, she's come to give you a kiss."

"She's dead," said the old woman ...

"Mamma! Adolphine dead? Look, she's here!"

The old lady shook her head:

"She's dead," she said, unshakably. "She died ... years ago."

Adolphine turned her head away and began to sob.

"She'll recognize you presently," said Constance, gently, consoling her. "She's sure to know you presently. Adolphine, I'm so glad to see you."

But Adolphine was sobbing violently: "Mamma doesn't ... know me!"

"My dear, she hasn't seen you for so long. I know she'll recognize you later on.... You're staying to lunch, of course...."

"I ... should like to.... Constance, I've come to...."

"Yes?"

"To ask something.... But presently, not now ... I'm too much upset...."

"Let me help you off with your things."

"I'm dreadfully wet ... it's raining so...."

"You've chosen a bad day."

"I didn't want to wait any longer."

"Tell me, what is it, what can I do for you?"

"I can't tell you yet."

Gerdy peeped round the open door:

"Is that Aunt Adolphine?"

"Yes," said Constance.

Marietje and Adeletje followed:

"Is that ... Aunt Adolphine?"

They came in and shook hands.

"Is Klaasje out in the garden?" asked Constance.

"I saw her running about just now."

"You have a busy household ... Constance," said Adolphine, waveringly.

"Yes," said Constance, smiling, "and yet I should miss them if they weren't there. All my daughters ... and my boys."

The girls stood round her: Gerdy, looking very handsome; Adeletje, weak and pale; and Marietje, tall, lank and plain.

"And then you've got ... Emilie ... and Adeline," said Adolphine, counting them shyly.

"Yes," said Constance. "We all keep together now.... Children, Aunt Adolphine's staying to lunch."

Something in her words seemed to ask the girls to leave her alone with Adolphine. In the conservatory, the old woman sat gazing up at the clouds, which came sailing along big and grey, and she heard nothing, paid no attention.

"Adolphine," said Constance, when they were alone once more, "we have a moment before lunch. Come upstairs to my room, then we sha'n't be disturbed."

She put out her hand. Adolphine took it; and Constance led her sister almost mechanically through the passages and up the stairs.

"It's a gloomy house," said Adolphine, with a shiver at the sight of the oak doors.

"Yes, it is rather gloomy.... Fortunately, it's large; there's plenty of space."

"Really?" asked Adolphine, growing interested. "Have you many rooms?"

"Oh, a great many!... When the old man was alive, they were all empty. Now they are nearly all full."

"Nearly all?"

"Very nearly.... This is my own sitting-room."

They went in.

"It's the furniture from your drawing-room at the Hague," said Adolphine.

"Yes. I can imagine myself at the Hague here."

"Do you like the Hague?"

"I'd rather live there than here. But Henri and Addie are attached to the house: it's their family house."

"They are fine, big rooms," said Adolphine, in humble praise. "I'm living in a very small house now."

"Ah, but there are so few of you!"

"That's true."

"How's your husband?"

"He's not very grand ... Marietje neither."

"Isn't she well?"

"No. She's very full of nerves. I consulted Dr. Berens, to ease my mind."

"What does he say?"

"He ... he suggested that...."

"That what, Adolphine?"

"He said ... that Addie was beginning to make such a name ... as a nerve-specialist. He advised me to go to Addie ... and talk to him about Marietje. Perhaps one day, when he comes to the Hague, he might see Marietje.... Do you think he could be persuaded to, Constance?"

"Certainly, Adolphine. Of course he will, gladly."

"I hear such good accounts of him ... as a doctor."

"Yes, he is getting a very big practice."

"And making a lot of money...."

"Well, not so very much, I believe."

"Ah, perhaps he's right, as a young doctor, to be reasonable in his charges!... You see, Constance, that ... that's really why I came down."

"You were quite right, Adolphine. Addie will be home presently and then you can talk to him yourself.... Poor Marietje: I'm sorry she's so ill. How old is she now?"

"Twenty-six."

"I remember: she's a year younger than Addie."

"Who would have thought, Constance, that you would come and live here ... with Mamma ... and Adeline ... and the children?... But Mamma always liked you best. I should have been glad to have Mamma with me ... but it's better as it is; our house is so tiny.... Does Addie come to the Hague often? Would he be able to treat Marietje regularly?"

"He would go specially."

"He hypnotizes, doesn't he?"

"Very often, I believe."

"Do you like that?"

"Addie often gets very remarkable results."

"I don't very much fancy it. I shouldn't like him to hypnotize Marietje. But, if it's essential...."

The gong sounded.

"Is that for lunch?"

"Yes. Will you come?"

Van der Welcke and Addie were downstairs. They had just come in, but had heard from the girls that Aunt Adolphine was there; and Van der Welcke welcomed her conventionally. Oh, what fights they had had in the old days! But so many years had passed since those bygone times; and what did a pressure of the hand and a kind word cost? He had acquired a certain genial earnestness in his big house, filled with his wife's family. He would have missed them, all those big children ... even though Guy and Gerdy were the only cheerful ones.... But those two were the sunshine of the house; and the others still clung to him with sympathy: their gratitude created a sympathetic atmosphere round Uncle Henri....

At the long luncheon-table, Marietje cut the bread-and-butter. Granny did not sit at the table; and Mathilde came down very late. No one had told her that Aunt Adolphine was there and she stood amazed in the doorway before bringing herself to offer a non-committal greeting. She was aloof in her manner, thought Adolphine, middle-class, put on airs as she sat down. It was striking how her personality failed to blend with that of the others, as though she remained a stranger among them. In the grey winter morning, hovering sullenly along the dark walls of the dining-room, she was a fresh, handsome woman; her full face was the colour of milk and roses; her lines swelled with health. Gerdy, beside her, was nothing more than a pretty little smiling thing; Marietje and Adeletje were very plain: Marietje so lank and yellow; Adeletje looking quite old with her sickly face. Klaasje was very tiresome, ate uncouthly and sat beside Constance, who kept on gently reproving her and cut up her bread-and-butter for her as though she were a baby. Guy carved the cold beef. All of them were silently wondering what Aunt Adolphine had come down for and their conversation sounded constrained; but Van der Welcke talked nonsense calmly with Guy and Gerdy. Adolphine, to keep the pot boiling, talked about the Hague: Uncle and Aunt Ruyvenaer and the girls had returned to India ever so long ago and were not coming back to Holland, now that Uncle and Aunt were older and preferred to live in Java; Louise was living with Otto and Frances; Frances always had something or other the matter with her; and Louise looked after the house and Hugo and Ottelientje, who were now thirteen and fourteen. Then there were Karel and Cateau, Ernst, Dorine, Paul....

"We don't see much of one another nowadays," said Adolphine, sadly. "Ah, Mamma's Sunday evenings! They were very pleasant, say what you like. We didn't always agree, perhaps, but still...."

She started, became confused, pecked awkwardly at her food. She felt that the illusion of an united family—Mamma's great illusion in the old days—was quite dispelled; and, older, more melancholy and still bitter as she was, she felt sad about it, sad about something which possibly she had never valued but which she now missed. And she could not help feeling acute envy that Constance was living in so big a house and harbouring so many relations; and suddenly she asked, sharply:

"Your house is rather damp, isn't it, Van der Welcke?"

"Well, it's mostly on the ground-floor," said Van der Welcke, good-humouredly. "And we've had a lot of rain."

"One's feet get so chilly."

"Guy, give Auntie a footstool."

Guy fetched a stool; Adolphine let him push it under her feet.

"There are so many trees round the house," she said. "That's what makes it gloomy and chilly. You should have them thinned out.... It must be very lonely, living here."

"Don't you see the others regularly?" asked Constance, trying to change the subject.

"No. Karel and Cateau pay me a visit now and again. It's not much of a pleasure to anyone: it's never more than a visit!" said Adolphine, criticizing her brother and sister-in-law and forgetting that, in the old days, she herself never honoured Constance and Van der Welcke with more than a "visit." And she went on, "Paul one never sees; nor Dorine; and Ernst ... you know he has not been very well lately?"

Constance gave a start:

"No, I didn't know. I saw him only three weeks ago.... I wish he would come and live here, at Driebergen, say in a nice, bright room at a good boarding-house. I really think the country life would do him good and he probably feels rather lonely at the Hague.... But he wouldn't do it.... He's been living all these years in the same room and seems so much attached to that room that he simply can't leave it ... and yet he is never satisfied with the landlady and her brother. That brother is his constant bugbear.... And yet I thought that he was living quietly enough.... Is he still always calm, however self-absorbed he may be? You say he hasn't been well lately?"

"Well, he's not as bad as he was—how long ago is it?—ten or eleven years ago."

"Eleven years."

"He's not like that. But he looks very queer at times ... and...."

"I'll go to the Hague to-morrow and look him up," said Constance, with decision.

"My dear!" said Adolphine, in an aggrieved tone. "I assure you that he's nothing out of the way. Besides, we are there ... if anything should happen."

"He's living by himself too much. I've thought it for a long time. And I reproach myself...."

"I've seen Uncle Ernst once or twice lately, Mamma," said Addie, to calm her. "He was just as usual; no worse. I pressed him then to come and live at Driebergen. He refused ... but he was quite calm about it."

"He has not been calm the last few days," said Adolphine.

"I shall go to the Hague to-morrow," Constance repeated, tremulously.

"Would you like me to go?" asked Addie.

"Really, Constance," Adolphine resumed, in a superior tone of mock moderation, "you needn't get into such a fluster. If there should be anything wrong ... we're there ... and Karel ... and Dorine and Paul. You can leave Ernst to us quite safely. It's just as though we didn't count!"

"It's not that, Adolphine ... but...."

"But what?"

"You don't trouble about him ... and I feel remorseful that I myself, lately.... But I am very busy ... and...."

"Busy?" echoed Adolphine, in amazement. "Here, at Driebergen?"

The atmosphere of the room was filled with a sudden tremor of nerves becoming too highly strung; the girls looked anxiously at Aunt Constance. She felt, she realized that she was losing control of herself and made an effort to keep calm. But her eyes and lips trembled. She saw, however, the concern overcasting the features of all of them—except Mathilde—and she now mastered herself entirely, though the tremor remained, very deep down within her.

"Yes," she replied, in a gentler voice, "we are really rather busy here ... all sorts of things, you know. Of course, Adolphine, it is comforting to feel that you are all there ... at the Hague ... in case anything should happen to Ernst."

The tension was relaxed, the luncheon ended quietly; only Adolphine said:

"Is this home-made jelly?... Why do you have it made so sweet, Constance?"

In her secret heart she thought the sweet jelly delicious.

"Aunt Adolphine wants to talk to you, Addie," said Constance, when the meal was over.

Adolphine now felt very humble. Yes, she would like to talk to Addie; and she went out with him alone.

"She's come about Marietje," said Constance, when Adolphine and Addie had left the room.

"But why didn't she write," asked Van der Welcke, "instead of coming down?"

Suddenly the sound of Adolphine's sobbing reached their ears from the next room.

"Is Marietje really bad, Auntie?" asked the girls.

And they sat expectantly. The voices of Adolphine and Addie sounded one against the other from behind the folding-doors. They listened in spite of themselves.

"She must certainly change her present environment," said Addie.

Adolphine sobbed:

"That's what our doctor said ... and ... and Dr. Berens of the hospital," she hiccoughed through her tears.

Constance did not want to listen any more; but, though she had controlled herself just now, her nerves were still on edge. Pretending that she was waiting for Adolphine, she went through the drawing-room and sat down beside the old lady in the conservatory.

"Yes, yes," mumbled Mrs. van Lowe. "If it goes on raining like this ... we shall have floods again ... just as we did last year."

Before her staring eyes she saw the tropical floods of Java.

Half an hour later, Adolphine and Addie came to look for Constance. Adolphine was suffering under the influence of great emotion, with red eyes which she kept on wiping. Constance went up to her:

"Adolphine, dear," she said, "you must have confidence in Addie."

Motherly pride mingled with the pity in her voice.

"I have, Constance," said Adolphine. "Only...."

"Only what?"

"What am I to do with the child? Change of environment, our doctor said. So did Dr. Berens, of the hospital. And yet we're very nice to her.... Why this change of environment? And where's she to go to?... I haven't the money to ... to take her to the country for any length of time.... In this season too ... in the autumn!... What ... what am I to do with the child?"

"I was thinking...." said Addie.

He looked at his mother.

"Well?"

"If you and Papa approved ... I could observe and treat her best here."

Constance suddenly stiffened.

"I don't know, Addie," she said. "I don't know that Papa would agree to that."

How tactless it was of him to say this in Adolphine's presence! She regretted that she had not told Adolphine, before lunch, in her sitting-room, that the house was full, quite full. But he continued, quietly:

"I should like to ask Papa. Marietje could have Guy's room and Guy the little room next to it."

"That's too small for Guy. You must remember, he's got work to do."

He was conscious of the reluctance in her words. Nevertheless he said:

"Guy could do his work in my study. I am never there in the mornings."

"No, no," said Adolphine, joining in. "No, Addie, it wouldn't do. Your mother's busy enough as it is...."

"It's not that I'm so busy," said Constance, "but...."

"Well, Mamma?"

"Our weekly books, you know...."

He had never known his mother so hard or so cruel. And he now said:

"Of course, Mamma, if you think it can't be done ... I'll see what I can do for Aunt Adolphine ... somewhere in the neighbourhood. Perhaps Marietje could go and live in a family at Zeist."

"Do you think you know some one there?" asked Adolphine, mournfully.

But suddenly Constance felt very yielding. She became so yielding because Addie had said this; all her hardness and cruelty melted away in remorse at her last words; and she said:

"Addie ... go upstairs and ... and ask Papa...."

Adolphine looked up with wonder in her red eyes. She was struck that Constance was altering so suddenly in tone, from reluctance to assent; and she was also struck that Constance did not apparently wish to decide and that she was leaving the decision to Van der Welcke.

Addie went upstairs at once. The sisters remained silent and alone; the old lady was sitting in the conservatory.

"Oh, Constance!" said Adolphine. "Do you think that Van der Welcke ...?" She did not complete her question, but went on, "Yes, I suppose your weekly books are very expensive?"

"They are heavy," said Constance. "You understand it's...."

"What?"

"It's my husband's money ... spent on my relations."

"But Gerrit's children have something."

Constance shrugged her shoulders:

"You know exactly how much they have. A couple of thousand guilders apiece."

"Well, that's something."

"We keep it for them ... and don't touch it."

"Really?" said Adolphine, in surprise. "But then there's Mamma."

"Mamma?"

"Yes, you have her money too," said Adolphine, looking Constance in the eyes.

Constance returned the look: "My dear Adolphine," she said, gently, "as Mamma is not fit to attend to her affairs, her money is in the hands of our solicitor at the Hague; and he controls it for her."

"And the income ...?"

"It's invested. We get none of Mamma's money. Surely you knew that?"

"No, I didn't."

"The books can be seen at the solicitor's by any of the brothers and sisters."

"Why do you do that?"

"Because we don't want to touch Mamma's money."

"But why not? She's living with you!"

"We want to avoid unpleasantness with any of the brothers or sisters."

"But which of us would create any unpleasantness?" asked Adolphine, very humbly.

"By our way ... there's no question of any unpleasantness."

"Yes," said Adolphine. "Still, I thought...."

"That we received all the interest on Mamma's money?"

"Yes. The money's lying there quite useless."

"There will be all the more for her grandchildren later on."

"Yes," said Adolphine, greatly surprised, remembering her long conversations during those many years with Saetzema, Karel and Cateau ... because Van der Welcke and Constance at Driebergen were quietly taking Mamma's money for themselves. "I wonder the solicitor never told us!"

"I thought you knew all about it."

"No," said Adolphine, humbly, and did not add that the solicitor had once told Karel, but that they had all refused to believe it. "So Mamma ... is really living at your expense!"

Constance smiled:

"Her needs are so small ... poor Mamma!"

"But you keep a special maid for her?"

"Yes, that's the only thing."

"Still, it makes everything dearer, in food ... and taxes."[1]

"Yes," said Constance, calmly.

She heard Van der Welcke and Addie come down the stairs; they entered the room. And it was strange to see the father and son together: Van der Welcke with his irrepressibly young, bright face and his boyish eyes, though his hair was turning grey and he was becoming a little stout from his sedentary life; and Addie beside him, with his serious directness of mind, like a very elderly young man, his grey eyes filled with thought and care.

"Addie tells me Marietje's not at all well," said Van der Welcke, by way of preamble.

Adolphine gave a great sob that shook her whole body; she nodded and began to cry.

"Well," said Van der Welcke, who was always moved by tears, "if Addie would like to have her here ... to keep her under better observation, you know ... let her come, Adolphine, by all means. We'll find a bed for her somewhere. It's the family hospital, after all!..."

And, when Adolphine began to sob violently, he added, with a little pat on the shoulder:

"Come, cheer up and hope for the best.... Addie's sure to make her all right again."

[1] There is a tax on all servants in Holland.

CHAPTER X

Ernst was still living in his rooms in the Nieuwe Uitleg, surrounded by his collections, surrounded by his hobbies. A man of fifty now, he led a silent, solitary life amid his books, his china, his curiosities; and the landlady looked after him and cooked his meals, because he paid well, paid too much indeed. He saw little of the family because the others really lived as secluded as he did, Paul in his rooms, Dorine at her boarding-house, though she was never satisfied and was constantly changing her boarding-house; and no family-tie drew him to Van Saetzema's house or Karel's. In this way a separation and estrangement had grown up among all of them; the bond between them had perished, now that Mamma was no longer at the Hague to gather them all around her on Sunday evenings in her big house in the Alexander Straat; and Constance, of late years, had often pressed him to come and live at Driebergen. But he obstinately refused; and yet, on the rare occasions when he saw her at the Hague, he would take her hand and sit knee to knee with her, unbosoming himself of all his stored-up discontent with the rooms, the meals, the landlady, that brother of hers: the brother especially, whom he could never stand, the vulgar bounder, as he called him. Constance then felt him to be an aging, always lonely man, who never uttered his thoughts and who, because of this continual silence, bottled up within himself the thousands of words which he now poured forth to her all in one torrent with a timid look, as if he were afraid that the landlady and her brother were standing behind the door, listening. When Constance, at such times, tried to persuade him to move to Driebergen, he shook his head obstinately, as though some part of him had grown fast to that room of his, as though he could not tear himself out of it; and his eyes would glance at his books and his china, as though to say that it was impossible to remove all that. And, because he was calm and no trouble and quiet in his behaviour, she let him alone, because this was what he preferred: to live within himself, among his hobbies, solitary, shy and eccentric. Five years ago, it was true, he had been ill again, had talked to himself for days on end, had wandered about in the Wood. Paul wrote to Constance and she had come over; but Ernst had soon grown quiet again, afraid no doubt that he would have to go back to Nunspeet, afraid of a change of residence, afraid of keepers, of nurses, of the things which he had never been able to forgive any of them, not even Constance. That was years ago, five years ago; and lately Constance and Addie too had never seen Ernst other than calm and peaceful, though a good deal of strange and silent brooding seemed to lurk behind the silent cunning of his dark, staring eyes. But then, months and months would again pass without their seeing him, without their hearing of him; they were all accustomed to his strangeness; and the months would drag past without the threatened crisis coming. No, nothing came, even though the man was strange, though he did talk to himself, though he was full of bottled-up grievances; and, when they saw him again after a lapse of months, they were struck by a certain artistic method in his rooms with their beautiful warm colouring, struck by some new arrangement of the furniture, by some new purchase; and he, as though conscious that he was on trial, would talk almost normally, terrified lest they should drag him from his rooms, to which he was attached even though the landlady and her brother always stood spying behind the door....

Constance, feeling suddenly upset and filled with self-reproach at neglecting Ernst, went to the Hague with Addie the day after Adolphine's visit; and the two of them arrived unexpected in the Nieuwe Uitleg.

"Meneer is out," said the landlady.

"In this rain?" asked Constance.

"Yes, ma'am, he went out early this morning."

"How has he been lately?"

"Pretty well, ma'am. As usual. Meneer is always odd, you know, but he is not troublesome. He is fairly well."

"Not like ...?"

"Some years ago? No, ma'am. Meneer has been talking to himself rather more of late, but that's all. Will you wait for him?"

"Yes."

"He is sure to be back by twelve o'clock or so. He is very regular in his habits. Won't you come upstairs?"

Constance and Addie went upstairs and waited in Ernst's room.

"Poor fellow, poor fellow!" said Constance, with emotion.

She did not know what was the matter with her, but she felt full of self-reproach. Oh, were they not leaving him too much alone, sunk in his solitude? How she wished that she could coax him to go back with her to Driebergen and to live there, not far from them, in a little villa, with some people who were in the habit of looking after invalids! Oh, not in their own house, not in their own house! She would never have dared suggest that to Van der Welcke; nor had Addie ever proposed it. No, not at home, not at home, but somewhere near, so that she could see him at any moment and not worry herself with the idea of his suddenly having a nervous breakdown with no one by him to take his piteous soul-sickness to heart.

And, as she sat thinking, she looked around her and was struck by the manner in which the eerie lines of the old porcelain and new pottery curved against the sombre hangings and furniture. It was very strange, stranger than she had ever noticed. The setting enhanced the eeriness of it all. As the years passed, the vases had become more and more of a disease, blossoming in eerie lines and glowing glaze like some vicious orchid, high against the walls, rising to the ceiling, in a riot of exotic forms, like a vegetation reaching up, stretching up, stretching up necks and hands with the necks and handles of the vases, as though trying to rise higher and higher beyond the grasp of profane mortals.

"Why does Ernst put his vases so high up?" Constance wondered, as she looked round the room.

Suddenly he entered. The landlady below must have told him that his sister and his nephew, the young doctor, were upstairs, for the movement with which he turned the door-handle was abrupt, his glance as he stood and looked from the one to the other was laden with suspicion and his voice trembled violently as he asked:

"What are you here for?"

He stood before them an old, trembling man. His neglected clothes hung in old, slack folds about his angular limbs; his hair already almost entirely grey, hung long and lank around his lean, trembling features and dark, staring eyes, which looked with a martyred glance from the one to the other. And yet, however neglected and soul-sick this trembling man might be, who looked an old, old man though he was not more than fifty, a gleam of intelligence shone deep down in his suspicious glance; and his long, lean fingers were those of an artist: impotent to paint or model, in lime, colour, wood or sound, the fluttering, ever-present dream of a beauty only just divined.

They both strove to reassure him, said that they happened to be at the Hague and so had come to look him up; and, after the first shock, he really did not strike them as strange or more ill than usual. Suddenly even a ray of sympathy seemed to shoot through him and he sat down between them, took their hands and delivered himself of his complaint:

"Hush! They're always listening behind the door, the brutes!" he whispered, timidly. "The landlady and her brother! I can't call my soul my own; they're always spying.... When I'm undressing, when I go to bed, when I have my meals ... they're always spying. I can hear them grinning.... They're standing there now, to hear if we're talking about them.... And, when I open the door, they're gone in a moment ... so quickly, just like ghosts.... The other day, he lay under my bed all night. I'm getting used to it, I no longer mind.... But, properly speaking, I can't call my soul my own. Any one with less steady nerves than mine simply could not stand it, could never stand it...."

"But, Ernst, why don't you move?"

He knew the question well, he recognized the motive. He gave a kind and condescending little smile, because they did not know, because they were so coarse of fibre.

"I can't very well move," he said. "You see ... I have everything here ... everything here...."

His glance and his gestures became very vague, as though he did not wish to say more. And Addie saw how it was: Uncle Ernst still believed, had always, all those years, believed in the souls that swarmed around him, the souls that had been conjured like spirits out of books, curiosities and old vases. But he never spoke of the souls now, because he remembered only too well how stupid and wicked his people had been in the old days. After that attack twelve years ago, he had gone on believing in these brain-and soul-phantoms of his, but he had learnt to keep silent about them, to talk as the stupid people talked. Or by preference he did not talk at all.... But this very silence had caused his mistrust to develop into a mania that he was being persecuted, a mania that made him constantly look round, timidly.... He would open the door, look into the passage.... And Constance knew that, in the street, he was for ever looking round, attracting the attention of the passers-by with this frightened, suspicious trick of his.

Addie saw it: Ernst believed in the souls which lay crowding around him, which linked themselves with chains to his soul, which he dragged with him through the mud of the streets and the wretchedness of life, the souls that thronged in agony around him, until they weighed down his chest and stifled him so that he longed to run half-naked into the street to cool himself in rain and air, to gulp down the wind. And very deeply bedded in the sick soul Addie saw hypersensitiveness hiding as an adorable tenderness which, instead of turning to a disease, might have developed into the profoundest qualities of sympathetic feeling, not only to feel, but also to know and understand, because of the slumbering spark of intelligence, because of the knowledge so eagerly gleaned.... And now these were wasted gifts, morbid qualities, now it was all useless and sick and had become more sick and more useless as the sick years of shadow drearily dragged on their misty-melancholy introspection and increasing distrustfulness. It was all, all lost. And, in his pity at this fatal waste, at this tenderness which had soured almost into madness and was devoted to shadows while the poor world stood in such real need of tenderness and feeling, Addie remembered how once, years ago, he had felt conscious of a longing with a single word to cure the sick man: but which, which word? It was as though he knew that one word to be hovering in the air around him, while he was still too young and ignorant to catch it as he might have caught a butterfly with his hat! And now, now he knew for certain—after all those years of misty-melancholy introspection and increasing distrustfulness—that it was too late and that the man could not recover and that he would die as he had lived in the almost proud hallucination which brought around him for protection the numberless oppressed, persecuted and martyred souls, suffocating him in the cloud of their frail tortured and complaining bodies. And it was not only the souls: the living who sought him out were also included in his proud illusion; they also needed his support, because he alone was strong and all of them were weak.

It was too late for a cure; but still Addie longed, though he knew for certain that no cure could ever take place, to free that lost and impaired quality of noble feeling from everything that could shock or offend the silent, suffering man; and he swore to himself to get Uncle Ernst out of the Hague, out of these rooms, where he was taking root and at the same time being tortured. He happened that day to feel very restful, very calm, even though, deep down in the subsoil of his soul, black self-insufficiency lowered as usual. He would not know what to do for himself; for this sick man he did know what to do! For himself, he groped around in a dark labyrinth; for the man of stricken brain and soul he knew it all suddenly, with a bright ray of clearest perception, knew with a sacred, instinctive knowledge! And yet there was not a touch of joy, not a touch of ecstasy or fervour in his sombre, melancholy glance, in his deep, sombre voice, when, with his customary earnestness of words and manner, he said to his mother:

"Mamma, you must leave me alone with Uncle Ernst."

She looked at him. And, despite his quietness, his earnestness, his calm and sombreness, she knew her son too well not to feel, suddenly, that he knew.

"Very well," she said, "you stay with Uncle Ernst. I'll go round to Aunt Adolphine and see Marietje. When and where shall I see you? This evening, at the hotel?"

He shook his head:

"No," he said. "You had better go back by yourself to Driebergen, with Marietje. As for me...."

He paused, as though reflecting, passed his hand across his forehead:

"As for me, you'll see me to-morrow," he said, "or the next day...."

"At Driebergen? At home?"

"Yes."

"And ... your uncle?"

He made a sign with his eyelids; and she understood him, partly, and asked no more. She took leave of Ernst and moved to go; but Ernst kept her for a moment at the door:

"Constance...."

"What is it, Ernst?"

"If there's anything ... that I can do for you, you'll tell me, won't you? Tell me frankly.... It's very difficult for me, I know ... to look after all of you ... but, if I don't, nobody else will.... So tell me plainly if I can help you in any way...."

"There's nothing at the moment, Ernst...."

"But later on?..."

"Perhaps."

"Then I shall be very glad to help. You must ask me straight out."

"I will."

"Look here ... you must be careful...."

"Of what?"

"Of the brother.... The fellow's a scoundrel. Take care, don't speak too loud: he's standing behind the door. You see, he can't reach so high."

"What do you mean?"

"He can't reach up to my poor vases. He would have to take the steps ... and he won't do that in a hurry."

"What used he to do to the vases, Ernst?"

"Take them in his hands."

"I dare say he admired them."

"No, he used to break them ... on purpose. He ... he...."

"What, Ernst?"

"He used to throttle them. Hush! He used to wring their necks with his vile fingers."

Then he realized at length that he was saying too much and he gave a loud, kindly laugh:

"You don't believe that he used to throttle them. Well, at any rate, they're safer up there."

"At least, he can't break them."

"No. What's the matter with Addie? He's not looking well."

"Nothing. He's staying on to talk to you."

"Is there anything I can do for him?"

"Perhaps there is, Ernst. Have a talk with him."

"You people are a heavy burden on me...."

"I must go now, dear."

She kissed him good-bye.

"Be careful," he whispered.

Suddenly, he swung open the door:

"There!" he cried, triumphantly. "Did you see? The scoundrel slips away so quickly. Just like a ghost. No, more like a devil."

She gave a last glance at Addie; her eyelids flickered at him and she went away. Ernst closed the door very carefully.

"He simply can't go on living by himself," thought Constance, as she hurried to the Van Saetzemas'.

It was a very small house in a side-street at Duinoord; and she found Van Saetzema sick and ailing in a stuffy little sitting-room; she saw Caroline, too, bitter-eyed and bitter-mouthed, generally embittered by her dull existence as spinster of nearly thirty, with no prospect of marrying. Meanwhile, Adolphine kept her sister waiting. She had obviously run upstairs to put on a clean tea-gown. At the back of the little house, under the grey sky, which sent down a false, morning light through the heavy rain-clouds, the atmosphere seemed full of bitterness ... bitterness because they were ill and poor and disappointed; and all this dreariness was scantily and narrowly housed between the father, mother and daughter, in the little room where they kept getting in one another's way. A melancholy born of pity welled up in Constance; and she tried to talk cheerfully, while Van Saetzema coughed and complained, Caroline, bitter-mouthed and bitter-eyed, sat silent and Adolphine suddenly, with no attempt at preamble, observed to Constance:

"It's splendid air here, at Duinoord.... And the house is extraordinarily convenient...."

But her boasting voice choked as she completed her sentence more humbly:

"For the four of us."

"And where is Marietje?" asked Constance.

"Upstairs. She likes being upstairs, in her own little room...."

"How is she to-day?"

"Just the same."

"May I see her?"

Adolphine rose with some hesitation. But she took Constance upstairs and opened a door:

"Marietje, here's Aunt Constance."