Small Souls/Chapter XXXVII
Constance, when she was alone, burst into a fit of nervous sobbing. . . . Oh, that past, that wretched past, which always clung to her, which there was no shaking off! She thought life unjust and the family and everybody. She was not a wicked woman: there was only one mistake to be charged against her, the mistake of her heedless youth; and were the consequences to last for ever?. . . After all, what she now wished was so little, so very little, that she could not understand why it remained so unattainable. She merely asked to live quietly at the Hague, in her own country, and to be loved a little by all her relations, for whom she felt that strange, powerful feeling, that family-affection. That was all; she asked for nothing more. She demanded nothing more of life than to be allowed to grow old like that, with a little forgiveness and forbearance around her, and then to see her boy grow up into a man, while she, for the boy’s sake, would endure her life, as best she could, by the side of her husband. That was all, that was all. That was the only thing that she, with her small soul, asked of life; and she asked nothing more; and it was as though all sorts of secret enmities around her grudged it to her. Whereas she wished for nothing but peace and quietness, enmity seemed to eddy around her. Why did people hate her so? And why could they not make somebody else or something else the subject of their talk, of their spiteful, malevolent talk, if they really found it impossible to do without talking?
She continued greatly dispirited for days, went out very little, seeing only her mother, to whose house she went regularly. Paul was abroad; and Adeline was expecting her confinement. Mrs. van Lowe noticed nothing of what was troubling Constance; and, when, on Sunday, the members of the family all met again, the old woman was radiant in the illusion of their great attachment to one another. The children always kept her in ignorance of their disputes, kept her, out of love and respect, in her dear illusion. Adolphine never spoke cattishly of Bertha, in Mamma’s presence; was amiable to Constance. The old lady knew nothing of the quarrel between Addie and Jaap, nothing of the explanation which Van der Welcke had demanded from the Van Saetzemas.
When her husband and Addie returned, Constance spoke casually of her conversation with Adolphine. But, for the rest, she remained very silent and solitary and only saw Mamma and, just once, Adeline, the quiet little mother, expecting her eighth child. And once she went with her mother to call on the old aunts in their little villa near Scheveningen; and then it was:
“How are you, Dorine?”
“What do you say?” “Marie asks how you are, Rine. She is so deaf, Marie.”
“Oh, I’m all right. . . . Who’s that?”
And Aunt Dorine pointed to Constance, always failing to recognize her, with the stubbornness of second childhood.
“That’s Constance,” said Mrs. Van Lowe.
“That’s Gertrude!” Auntie Tine would say next. “Isn’t it, Marie? That’s Gertrude!”
“No, Christine, Gertrude died as a child at Buitenzorg.”
But Auntie Tine was yelling in Auntie Rine’s ear:
“That’s Marie’s daughter!”
“Marie’s daughter?”
“Yes, Gertrude, Gertru-u-ude!”
Constance smiled:
“Never mind, Mamma,” she whispered.
And Mamma said good-bye:
“Well, good-bye, Dorine and Christine.”
“What d’you say?”
“Good-bye, Dorine and Christine; we must go.”
“They’ve got to go!” yelled Auntie Tine in Auntie Rine’s ear.”
“Oh, have they got to go? Where are they going?”
“Home!”
“Oh, home? Oh, don’t they live here? . . . Well, good-bye, Marie; thanks for your visit. Good-bye, Gertrude! You are Gertrude, aren’t you?”
“Ye-e-es!” Auntie Tine assured her, in a shrill, long-drawn-out yell. “She’s Ger-trude, Marie’s daugh-ter.”
“Well, then, good-bye, Gertrude.”
“Never mind, Mamma, let them think I’m Gertrude,” said Constance, softly, indulgently, while Mrs. van Lowe became a little irritable, not understanding how very old people could cling so stubbornly to an opinion and a little sad at the thought of Gertrude, who was dead.
And so the weeks passed and the months, very quietly, lonely and monotonously: the dreary months of the unseasonable cold, wet autumn, with heavy storms whipping the trees in the Kerkhoflaan, the wind incessantly howling round the house, the rain clattering down. Constance hardly ever went out, shut herself up indoors, as though her soul had received a hurt, as though she would rather henceforward remain safe in her dear rooms. She was very silent, she looked pale, she often sat thinking, pondering—she hardly knew what—sunk in her melancholy, staring at the fury of the storm outside. She did not often have scenes with Van der Welcke now, as though a brooding sadness had numbed her nerves. At half-past four, she would go to the window and watch longingly for her son, would cheer up a little when she saw him, when he talked nicely and pleasantly, her boy who was becoming more of a man daily. But she did not see very much of him now that he went to the grammar-school and had a lot of work to do in the evenings, which, studious by nature, he did conscientiously. Van Vreeswijck came to dinner once every two or three weeks, generally alone, or perhaps, as Paul was still abroad, she would ask Marianne van Naghel, of whom she was very fond. It would be one of those cosy, daintily-arranged little dinners which she knew so well how to give; and that was the extent of her social doings.
Thus she lived in herself and in her house. The rooms in which she sat always reflected herself, a woman of elegant and refined taste, even though she was not exactly artistic; and those rooms displayed in particular the inhabited, sociable, homelike appearance that comes from the presence of a woman who is much indoors and finds solace in her home. And round about her the lines and colours of her furniture and flowers, her knicknacks and fancy-work all made an atmosphere of soft fragrance peculiarly her own, with something very personal, something delicate and intimate: a soft dreaminess as of really very small, simple femininity, without one really artistic object anywhere, without a single water-colour or drawing or fashionable novel; and yet with nothing in colour or form or line that could offend the eye of an artist: on the contrary, everything blending into a perfect harmony of small material things with inner personal things that likewise had no greatness. . . .
One day, when Truitje brought her some circulars, letters and bills from the letter-box, Constance’ eye fell upon a newspaper in a wrapper; and she opened it. She read the title of the little sheet: the Dwarskijker;[1] and, as she seldom received much by post, she thought that it must have been sent as an advertisement. Suddenly, however, she remembered: the Dwarskijker was an odious little weekly paper edited by a disreputable individual who pried into all the secrets of the great Hague families; who had often been tried for blackmail, but always managed to escape; and who as constantly resumed his vile trade, because the families whom he attacked paid hush-money, whether his attacks were based on truth or calumny. Constance was about to tear up the paper indignantly, when her eye caught the name of Van Aghel, a parody obviously meant for Van Naghel, and she could not help reading on. She then read a nasty little article against her brother-in-law, the colonial secretary, an article crammed with personal attacks on Van Naghel, describing him as a great nonentity, who had made money at the bar in India by means of a shady Chinese practice and had been shoved on in his career by a still greater and more pompous nonentity, his father-in-law, the ex-Governor-general “Van Leeuwen.” The article next attacked Van Naghel’s brother, the Queen’s Commissary in Overijssel, and, in conclusion, it promised, in a subsequent issue of the Dwarskijker to give a glimpse into the immorality of the other relations of this bourgeois who had battened on the Chinese and who had rendered no real service to India. And the writer aimed very pointedly at Mrs. van Naghel’s sister, another woman moving in those exalted circles whose end would soon be nigh in the better order of things at hand: she was described as the “ex-ambassadress;” and he wound up with the alluring promise to give, next week, full details of those old stories, which were always interesting because they afforded the reader a peep into the depravity of aristocratic society.
Constance, as she read on, felt her heart beating, the blood rushing to her cheeks; her hands trembled, her knees shook, she felt as though she were about to faint. She was growing accustomed to oral slander; but these written, printed articles, which everybody could read, came as a shock to her; and, with eyes starting from their sockets, she read the thing over and over again. She was filled with helpless despair at the thought that such things were being published about her and hers, that next week more things would be printed about her in that libellous paper. She was at her wits’ end what to do, when, vaguely rolling her terrified eyes, she caught sight, among the bills and circulars, of another paper, which said:
“NOTICE ! ! !
“Why not become a subscriber to the
“DWARSKIJKER?
“Terms of subscription:
“50 guilders quarterly, post-free.”The notice was printed in the cynical capitals of blackmail; and she at once understood; she understood what that subscription of two hundred guilders a year to a scurrilous rag meant! But she also understood that, even if she sent the fifty guilders or the two hundred guilders that moment, it would be no safeguard against further defamation or extortion; and she did not know what to do. . . .
She at first thought of concealing the paper from Van der Welcke; but she was so upset all day that, after dinner, when Addie had gone upstairs, she showed it to her husband. He grew furious at once, giving way to his naturally irritable temper, which he usually kept under control so as not to have too violent scenes with his wife. He swore, clenched his fists, walked up and down the room in impotent rage, longing to break something or to go out and revile the Hague, its streets and its people. To him also the printed libel—especially because it was printed, for every one to read—was a terrible disgrace, which he felt that he would have done anything to avoid. It also occurred to him to go to the office of the Dwarskijker and horsewhip the editor. And, without really knowing why or how, he allowed himself to utter that unpremeditated, illogical phrase, the phrase of a naughty child which does not stop to think when its temper is roused:
“It’s all your fault!”
“My fault!” she echoed, vehemently. “And why, in Heaven’s name? Why is it my fault?”
“It’s your fault! You would come and live here, with that morbid craving of yours for your family. In Brussels, nobody knew us and nobody talked about us; and our life if not happy, was at least quiet. Here there’s always something, always something! It’s no life at all, our life here!”
“And you, weren’t you longing to come back? Was I the only one who longed?” she cried, hurt by his unreasonableness.
But he did not hear her; and all his pent-up bitterness burst forth:
“I walk about the streets here every day, feeling as if every one were looking at me and pointing at me! When I go to the Witte or the Plaats, among all the men I used to know, I feel out of place, I feel like an interloper whom they don’t want to own. It’s your fault, it’s your fault!”
“Indeed!”
“Why were you absolutely bent on coming back to Holland?”
“And you?”
“I?”
“Yes, you, you! Didn’t you sometimes long for your parents, for Holland! Didn’t you yourself say that it would be good for our boy?”
“For our boy!” he shouted, refusing to listen, in his impotent, seething rage. “For our boy!”
And he laughed more bitterly, more scornfully than she had ever heard him before:
“For our boy! A lot I can do for him here! However hard he may work, whatever tact he may show, even though he enters the career which I had to abandon, he will always, always be reminded of the scandal of his parents! For our boy! Let him become a farmer, if he must be a Dutchman in Holland, hidden somewhere from all our family, our friends and our acquaintances! And it’s all, all your fault!”
“You are unreasonable!” she cried, wincing under his insults. “If we have anything to reproach ourselves with, then it falls upon both of us; and you have not the right to let me, me, a woman, bear the burden of our misery alone!”
“That misery would at least not have been discussed, mocked at, criticized, ridiculed, traduced,” he shouted, raging and stamping, “if you had not insisted on coming back to Holland!”
“Was I the only one to wish it?”
“Very well,” he admitted, losing all his self-control, “I did too. But we were both fools, to return to this rotten country and these rotten people!”
“I don’t need them. I only longed for my family.”
“For your family! The Saetzemas, with whom we have quarrelled already, to whom we never speak except at Mamma’s; the Van Naghels, who are no use to us: is that how you want to live, for your boy, in Holland, here, buried away in your Kerkhoflaan, in your house, in your rooms, with no one but Vreeswijck, who sometimes does us the honour to come and dine with us? Whom do we know? Who comes to see us? Who cares a jot about us?”
“I only wanted the affection of my family!”
“And for the sake of that affection, do you want to go on living here like this, buried away, when you want your boy to pursue his career later on? Ha, ha, he’ll go far, like that! Do you imagine that he’ll succeed simply through examinations? No, influence is what he wants: that’s more important than any number of examinations. And you want him to enter the service under those conditions, while his father and mother sit cursing their luck here, in the Kerkhoflaan? Well then, let him become a farmer: the future is with the proletariat in any case. Very well, it’s the fault of both of us, the silly, stupid fault of both of us. But, if it’s my fault, it’s your fault too. Have you ever done anything to get on? I, at least in my own mind, reckoned on the Van Naghels; I thought to myself: My brother-in-law has no end of connections, we shall go to his house; I don’t care about it for my own sake, but it will be a good thing, later, for the boy. . . .”
“Oh? And have you no connections? Have your parents no relations? All your old friends at the Plaats: which of them comes to see us? Which of them, except Vreeswijck, has had the ordinary civility to call on your wife? Not one of them, not one!” she almost screamed. “Not that I want them here, any more than you want to dine at Van Naghel’s; but, if you attach so much importance to connections, for the sake of our son, you could have done something else than cycle all over the Hague and Scheveningen, you could have pointed out to your friends that, as they condescend to know you in the sacred mysteries of that Plaats of yours, the least they could do would be to look you up at home and not to go on ignoring your wife, as though she were still your mistress . . .!”
“It’ll always, always be like that!” he cried, raging impotently, almost to the point of tears. “We can never alter it, if we live to be sixty, if we live to be eighty!”
“Very well,” she said, as though with a sudden intuition to join issue with her husband’s unreasonableness. “You wish it for your son’s sake! I’ll do it! I shall speak to Bertha and I shall be the first to speak. I shall tell her what I want of her, as a sister. But I shall also expect you to have your son’s interests at heart among your own acquaintances; and I shall expect to be presented in the winter. I never thought of it myself; but people have done nothing but talk about it from the moment that we came here; and now I mean to do it. What is the objection? That we shall rub shoulders with De Staffelaer’s family! I don’t care whom I rub shoulders with. My intention was simply to live here, amid the affection of my family; but, if that is to be denied me, if such wretched libels as this are to be published, if you reproach me with not thinking of my son’s future, then I shall alter my line of conduct and talk to Bertha. You, on your side, talk to your friends at the Plaats and, if you have any pride about you, refuse to have anything more to do with them unless they accept your wife and yourself as belonging to their set. I will stand it no longer! I wished for nothing more than peace and affection, than to grow old here beside my mother and my brothers and sisters; but, if there must be a scandal, notwithstanding those simple wishes, well then a scandal there shall be, so that people can say, with truth, ‘Mrs. van der Welcke is pushing herself into the circles to which she always used to belong.’”
“I can’t do it!” he said, weakly. “I can’t possibly do what you want. After putting up with the tolerance and condescension of my former friends, I can’t go to them now and explain that my wife and I want to call on them and their wives and expect them to call on us in return.”
“Then I’ll do without you!” she said. “I’m not on speaking terms with Adolphine, but I don’t need that jumble-set of hers. I believe that Bertha still has some sisterly affection left for me; and I shall talk to her and she will have to help me. But you will never be able to reproach me again with not thinking of my child’s future. And, if you’re too weak to show your friends what you expect of them, then I, later, when our son meets with difficulties in his career, shall have the right to reproach you as you are reproaching me now. . . .”
“Reproach! I’m not thinking of reproaches!” he broke in, angrily, illogically, unreasonably. “I’m only thinking of that rotten paper, that rotten paper. . . .”
He looked at it in despairing irritation:
“I’ll go to the fellow, I’ll slash him across the face, I’ll slash him across the face!” She laughed, scornfully:
“Shall you do that for the sake of your son’s future?”
He controlled himself, clenched his fists, rushed from the room with tears in his eyes, flung himself in his chair upstairs, smoked cigarette upon cigarette, walked up and down in impotent rage. . . .
That evening, Gerrit and Paul came round. They also knew about the Dwarskijker: they said that a copy had been dropped into Van Naghel’s letterbox too. And Gerrit, getting furious, because Van der Welcke was still furious, said:
“If you want to break the fellow’s jaw, Van der Welcke, I’m your man!”
Paul wearily closed his eyes and expressed disapproval with every bored feature of his face:
“My dear Gerrit, don’t come playing the bold swashbuckler, thinking you can chop the world to pieces with your silly old sword. And you, Van der Welcke, for Heaven’s sake, keep calm, if you don’t want to make things worse than they are!”
“But what are we to do?” asked Constance, impatiently.
“Nothing at all,” said Paul, philosophically.
- ↑ The Inspector.