Old People and the Things that Pass/Chapter X
CHAPTER X
[edit]THERE was a ring; and Ottilie whispered:
"Do you think that's Mr. Lot and Miss Elly?..."
"No," said Anna, looking out of the window, "it's Mr. Harold."
And she went to the front-door. Ottilie came out to her brother in the passage.
"How are you, Ottilie?" said Harold Dercksz. "Is there no one with Mamma?"
"No. I met Mr. Takma just outside the door. Look, he's fallen asleep. I'm waiting here till he wakes."
"Then I'll go up to Mamma meanwhile."
"You're looking poorly, Harold."
"Yes. I do not feel well. I'm in pain ..."
"Where?"
"Everywhere. Heart, liver: everything's wrong. ...So to-morrow is the great day, Ottilie?"
"Yes," said Ottilie, mournfully, "to-morrow. ... They're so unenterprising. No reception and no religious marriage."
"Lot asked me to lie one of his witnesses."
"Yes, you and Steyn, with Dr. Roelofsz and D'Herbourg for Elly.... Anton declined...."
"Yes, Anton doesn't care for that sort of thing."
He went upstairs slowly, knocked, opened the door. The companion was sitting with the old woman and reading something out of the paper in a monotonous voice. She rose from her chair:
"Here's Mr. Harold, mevrouw."
She left the room; and the son bent over his mother and gave her a very gentle kiss on the forehead. As it was dark, the lined porcelain of the old woman's face was hardly indicated in the crimson twilight of the curtains and the tall valance. She sat on the chair, in the cashmere folds of her wide dress, straight upright, as on a throne; and in her lap the frail fingers trembled like slender wands in the black mittens. A few words were exchanged between mother and son, he sitting on a chair beside her, for no one ever took the chair by the window, which was kept exclusively for Mr. Takma: words about health and weather and the wedding of Elly and Lot next day. Sometimes a look of pain came over Harold's parchment-coloured face; and his mouth was drawn as though with cramp. And, while he talked about Lot and about health and weather, he saw—as he always saw, when sitting here beside or opposite Mamma—the things that passed and dragged their ghostly veils over the path rustling with dead leaves: the things that passed so slowly, years and years to every yard, until it seemed as though they never would be past and as though he would always continue to see them, ever drawing out their pageant along the age-long path. While he talked about health and weather and Lot, he saw—as he always saw, when sitting beside or opposite Mamma—the one thing, the one terrible Thing, the Thing begotten in that night of clattering rain in the lonely pasangrahan at Tegal; and he heard the hushed voices: Baboe's whispering voice; Takma's nervous-angry voice of terror; his mother's voice of sobbing despair; himself a mere child of thirteen. He knew; he had seen, he had heard. He was the only one who had heard, who had seen. All his life long—and he was an old, sick man now—he had seen the Thing slowly passing like that; and the others had heard nothing, seen nothing, known nothing.... Had they really not known, not seen, not heard? He often asked himself the question. Roelofsz must surely have seen the wound. And Roelofsz had never mentioned a wound; on the contrary, he had denied it... Rumours had gone about, vague rumours, of a woman in the kampong, of a stab with a kris, of a trail of blood: how many rumours were there not going about! His father was drowned in the river, one sultry night, when he had gone into the garden for air and been caught in the pelting rain.... The Thing, the terrible Thing was passing, was a step farther, looked round at him with staring eyes. Why did they all live to be so old and why did the Thing pass so slowly? ... He knew: he had known more ... because of rumours which he had heard; because of what he had guessed instinctively in later years, when he was no longer a child: his father hearing a sound ... a sound of voices in his wife's room.... Takma's voice, the intimate friend of the house.... His suspicions: was he right? Was it Takma? Yes, it was Takma. ... Takma in his wife's room.... His rage, his jealousy; his eyes that saw red; his hand seeking for a weapon.... No weapon but the kris, the handsome ornamental kris, a present which Papa received only yesterday from the Regent.... He steals to his wife's room.... There ... there ... he hears their voices.... They are laughing, they are laughing under their breath. ... He flings himself against the door; the bamboo bolt gives way; he rushes in.... Two men face to face because of a woman.... Their contest, their passion, as in primeval days.... Takma has snatched the kris from Harold's father. ... No longer human beings, no longer men, but male animals fighting over a female.... No other thoughts in their red brains and before their red gaze but their passion and their jealousy and their wrath.... His father mortally wounded! ... But Harold Dercksz does not see his mother in all this: he does not see her, he does not know how she behaves, how she behaved during the struggle between these two animal men.... He does not see how the female behaved: that never rose up before his intuition, however often he may have stared after the Thing that passed, however often, for years and years, again and again he may have sat beside his mother, talking about health and weather. And to-day it is much stronger than his whole being; and he asks the very old woman:
"Was your companion reading the paper to you?"
"Yes."
"Does she read nicely?"
"Yes. She sometimes finds it difficult to know what to choose."
"Politics don't interest you?"
"The war does: it's terrible, all that loss of human life."
"It's murder ... on a large scale...."
"Yes, it's murder...."
"Does she read you the serial story?"
"No, no; I don't care for serials."
"No more do I."
"We are too old for that."
"Yes, we old people have our own serial stories...."
"Yes.... A quiet life's the best...."
"Then you have nothing to reproach yourself with...."
He sees the slender, wand-like fingers tremble. Has she anything to reproach herself with, more than her infidelity to the man who was her husband? He has never seen it for himself; and yet the Thing has always and always dragged its ghostly veils rustling over dead leaves......
"Hasn't she been reading about that murder?"
"What murder?"
"In England, the woman who ..."
"No, no, she never reads me that sort of thing...."
Her words are almost an entreaty.... How old she is, how old she is! ... The toothless mouth trembles and mumbles, the fingers shake violently. He is full of pity, he, the son, who knows and who suspects what he does not know, because he knows the soul of that mother, her soul now dulled and blunted in waiting for the body's death, but her soul also once a soul of passion, of temper, an amorous Creole soul, capable at one moment of forgetting all the world and life itself for a single instant of rapture ... or perhaps of hate! He knows that she hated his father, after first adoring him; that she hated him because her own passion expired before him in a heap of ashes.... This had all been made clear to him, gradually, year after year, when he was no longer a child but grew into a man and was a man and understood and looked back and reflected and pieced together what he had understood and looked back upon.... He suspects, because he knows her soul. But how blunted that soul is now; and how old she is, how old she is! A pity softens his own soul, old, old, too, and full of melancholy for all the things of life gone by ... for his mother ... and for himself, an old man now.... How old she is, how old she is! ... Hush, oh, hush: let her grow just a little older; and then it will be over and the Thing will have passed! The last fold of its spectral veil will have vanished; the last leaf on that endless, endless path will have rustled; and, though once a rumour, vaguely, with a dismal moaning, hovered through those trees, it never grew into a voice and an accusation and, from among those trees, no one ever stepped forward with threatening hand that stayed the Thing, the sombre, ghostly Thing, dragging itself along its long road, for years and years and years....