Small Souls Part 31

"Pretty well, my boy."

"I shall go back to Leiden to-morrow, Mamma."

"Oh?"

"Yes; and I shall probably not be home for some time. I mean to work hard...."

"That's right."

"There's really nothing else to do but work. It's so slow here, Auntie, now that Emilie's gone. Otto's all right, with Louise. She missed him badly, while he was in India. Funny brothers and sisters, aren't we? So exaggerated.... Well, Mamma, I'll say good-bye: I shall start the first thing in the morning."

He said good-bye and went away pulling himself together, putting a good face on his grief. Bertha began to weep softly.

A maid knocked at the door:

"Master van der Welcke, mevrouw."

"Addie's come to fetch me."

"Ask Master van der Welcke to come upstairs," said Bertha.

The boy came in. He remained near the door; in the half-dark room, he stood small but erect, like a little man:

"I have come to fetch you, Mamma."

The two sisters looked at him, smiling. Bertha had it on her lips to say that it was not right for Addie to go about the streets alone, but she said nothing when the boy went up to his mother. He looked capable of protecting her and himself against anything, though he was only thirteen: against the dark night and against life that bore down so heavily upon their small souls.

And a melancholy jealousy welled up in Bertha, while Constance was kissing her good-bye:

"Don't be too bitter, Constance," she whispered, "and cherish, cherish that boy of yours...."

CHAPTER XX

Constance, after this talk with Bertha, for days felt easier in her mind, as though filled with an indefinable contentment that bid fair to soothe and heal. Yes, she hoped that, gradually, she would win them all back like that, all her near ones, whom she had lost for years. She saw Mamma daily; and in these regular meetings between mother and child there was the sweetness of finding each other after long years of almost uninterrupted separation, a sweetness touched with a melancholy that held no bitterness, a mingling of glad tears and smiles over the happiness of it all. Also, Constance had now found Bertha again; and, though they did not see each other until Mamma's Sunday-evening, still there was more sisterly confidence between them, while Marianne grew to like running in at the Kerkhoflaan and would stay to dinner or go cycling with Van der Welcke and Addie. In this way, light bonds were established. As for Karel and Cateau, Constance was sorry, for in Karel she still remembered the brother with whom she used to play on the boulders in the river at Buitenzorg; but she had felt at once that she must not expect much from Karel, now that he and his wife had become mutual images of placid egotism, wrapped in their well-fed, middle-cla.s.s life, in the sheltered comfort of their warm, shut house. No, Karel, she felt, she had lost, though they were conventionally civil to each other.

With Gerrit it was pleasanter. Gerrit and Adeline would come now and then to take tea in the evening, after the children had gone to bed.

Only it was a pity that Gerrit always insisted on crabbing and poking fun at the Van Naghels and their friends. This, Constance thought, was not very tactful towards Van der Welcke, because, though he and she did not go into society, it so happened that Van der Welcke had a good many old friends, at the club, who belonged to the aristocratic set. Gerrit was a boisterous, lively fellow, fair-haired, handsome, broad-shouldered and vigorous in his hussar's uniform; but his boisterousness was sometimes, she thought, rather overdone; and she suspected that Van der Welcke did not like Gerrit, thought him a little vulgar. And so she was always on the alert to take up the cudgels for Gerrit against her husband; and Van der Welcke said nothing about Gerrit and was even amiable and talkative when Gerrit and Adeline were there. Adeline was a dear little woman, a fair-haired, little doll-mother, with her seven children, like a family of flaxen-haired dolls: the oldest a girl turned eight, the youngest a baby of a year or so; and Gerrit was always making jokes about not leaving off yet; and indeed Adeline was expecting another in the autumn. So Constance got on well with Gerrit and Adeline, but still she felt out of touch with this brother too, even though Gerrit had such a charming way of bringing back the memory of their early days, when they used to play in the river at Buitenzorg. Yes, she was an interesting child then, Gerrit always said: there was something so nice about her; she was full of imagination; and it was curious to hear this great, heavy hussar going into ecstasies over that little sister of the old days: a frail, fair-haired little girl, in her white _baadje;_ she used to walk on her pretty little bare feet over the boulders and invent all sorts of fables and fairy-tales, which her elder brothers were not quite capable of understanding and yet had to play at, good-humouredly, for the two brothers were very fond of their little sister. Yes, Gerrit always said, he had not understood until afterwards how much poetry there was in Constance in the days when she dreamed those stories, those fables, in which she often played a fairy, or a _poetri_ out of the Javanese legends: at such times, she would wreathe her hair with a garland of broad leaves; she would look like Ophelia, in the water, decked with tropical blossoms; and the brothers must needs follow the tiny bare feet and the fancies of their little sister, who looked marvellously charming as she ran over the great rocks, ran through the foaming water, ran in crystal green shadows, which quivered over the river, under the heavy awning of the foliage. Yes, that had left a great impression on Gerrit; and he often talked about it:

"Constance, do you remember? What a nice little girl you were then, though you were a little queer!..."

Until Constance would laugh and ask if she was no longer nice now that she no longer ran about barefoot in a white _baadje_ with purple _kembang-spatoe_[20] on her temples. Then Gerrit shook his head and said, yes, she was very nice still, but ... but.... And, diving back into his recollections, he said that, two years later, she suddenly changed, became grown-up and a prig and would dance with no one but the secretary-general.... And then Constance cried with laughter, because Gerrit could never forget that secretary-general. Yes, she would only dance with the biggest big-wigs: she was a ma.s.s of vanity, a real daughter of the _Toean Besar_.[21] And it was as though Gerrit were bent upon getting back that little younger sister who used to make up fairy-tales in the river behind the Palace at Buitenzorg, notwithstanding that he was now a big, heavy, powerful fellow and a captain of hussars. Then Constance would look at him, handsome, broad, fair-haired, vigorous, enjoying his drink or his good cigar, and she reflected that she did not know Gerrit and did not understand Gerrit: very vaguely she felt something in him escape her, felt it so vaguely that it was hardly a thought, but merely a haze pa.s.sing over her bewilderment. Adeline sat very quietly in the midst of it, smiling pleasantly at those reminiscences, at those games of the old days:

"Yes, it's extraordinary, the way children play by themselves!" she said, simply; and then she would tell prettily of the games of her own fair-haired brood.

But Gerrit would shake his head: no, that was romping, what his boys did, but the other thing was playing, real playing. Until Constance laughingly asked him to talk of something else than her bare feet. And then the conversation took a more ordinary turn; and it was as if both Gerrit and Constance felt that, although they liked each other, they had not yet found each other. And in this there was a very gentle melancholy that could hardly be formulated.

Constance did not see much of Ernst. She and Van der Welcke and Addie had once lunched with him at his rooms and he had been a most amiable host: he showed her the old family-papers, which, after Papa's death, he had asked leave to keep, because he took most interest in them and they would be in good hands. He would leave them to Gerrit's eldest son: Gerrit was the only one of the four brothers who, so far, had provided heirs. He showed her his old china and called her attention to the different marks that were signs of its value. Next, he spread out an old piece of brocade, embroidered with seed-pearls, and said very seriously that it was a stomacher from a dress of Queen Elizabeth's. When Constance laughed and ventured to express a doubt, he became rather grave and almost angry, but graciously changed the conversation, as one does, a little condescendingly, with people who have said something stupid, who have not the same culture as ourselves.

When they sat down to lunch in his room with its beautiful old colouring, the table was so carefully laid, the flowers so tastefully arranged, with all the grace of a woman's hand, and the lunch was so exquisite and dainty that Constance, amazed, had paid him a compliment.

He half-filled an antique gla.s.s with champagne and drank to welcome her to Holland. There was about him, about his surroundings, about his manner, something refined and something timid, something feminine and something shy, something lovable and yet something reserved, as though he were afraid of wounding himself or another. He had obviously devised this reception in order to give pleasure to Constance. The conversation flagged: Ernst never completed his sentences; and his eyes were always wandering round the room.... After lunch, he was a little more communicative and he then asked her if she had ever thought on the grace and symbolism of a vase. She listened with interest, while she saw something in Van der Welcke's glance as though he thought that Ernst was mad; and Addie listened very seriously, full of tense and silent astonishment. A vase, Ernst said, was like a soul--and he took in his hand a slender Satsuma vase of ivory-tinted porcelain, with the elegant arabesques waving delicately as a woman's hair--it was like a soul. For Ernst there were sad and merry vases, proud and humble vases; there were lovelorn vases and vases of pa.s.sion; there were vases of desire; and there were dead vases, which only came to life again when he put a flower in them. He said all this very seriously, without a smile and also without the rhapsody of an artist or a poet: he talked almost laconically about his vases, as though any other view would have been quite impossible.... Constance had not seen him since that day, because he was the only one who did not come regularly to Mamma's Sunday-evenings. And she retained an impression of that afternoon spent with her brother Ernst as of something exotic and strangely symbolical, something, it was true, which she had liked and found pleasant and refined, but which, all the same, lacked the familiar cordiality of a brother and sister meeting again after a separation of years.

As regards Adolphine and her children, Constance, after a first sense of recoil, had, almost unconsciously, laid down rules for her feelings, though perhaps she did not see those rules so very clearly outlined in her mind. But, unconsciously, she positively refused to dislike Adolphine and, on the contrary, was positively determined to think everything about Adolphine pleasant and attractive: her husband, her house, her children and her ideas. If any one, even Mamma, said the least thing about Adolphine, she at once espoused her cause, violently.

Through circ.u.mstances, such as the arranging of her own house and Emilie's wedding, she had not, as yet, been often to the Van Saetzemas'; but she promised herself not to neglect this in future and, with the greatest tact, to advise Adolphine in all sorts of matters. It operated strangely in Constance: the feeling of recoil, which, after all, was there; an absolute determination to act against this feeling of recoil; and, combined with these two, a silent wish, a gentle resolve to improve Adolphine in one way and another. She insisted that Addie should ask Adolphine's boys to lunch one Sunday; and, though her nerves were racked and she driven almost mad by their rude manners and coa.r.s.e voices, she had controlled herself and deliberately played the kind auntie. Addie, sacrificing himself for Mamma's sake, had gone out walking with his cousins, but had taken the first opportunity of giving the young louts the slip. Knowing his mother's idiosyncrasies, he did not say much when he returned and even declared that they were not half bad fellows. When his father, however, asked him if he understood why Mamma encouraged those unmannerly cubs, Addie stoically replied, because they were cousins: one of Mamma's ideas; family-affection. Constance, meanwhile, was so tired of the three young Van Saetzemas that she did not venture to repeat the experiment.

Constance thought Dorine uncertain. Dorine was very pleasant, sometimes, to go shopping with, or would go shopping herself for Constance--it was she who asked, not Constance--and then, at other times, Dorine would be cold and nervously irritable. This was because Dorine had a positive mania for doing all sorts of things for other people, but, at the same time, was always craving for appreciation and never thought that she was sufficiently appreciated by any member of the family for whose benefit she ran about. But the mania was too strong for her; and she went on running about, for Mamma, for Bertha, for Constance, for Adolphine, and was always grumbling to herself that she was not appreciated. Yes, she would like to see their faces if she, Dorine, said, one day, that she was tired! What would they say, she wondered, if she ventured to suggest that one sometimes gets wet in the rain? Thus she always grumbled to herself, fitful, dissatisfied, discontented and yet never able to make a comfortable corner for herself, in the boarding-house where she lived, always tearing along the streets from one sister to the other. It was as though she had a mania that drove her ever onwards. She was miserable if a day came when she had no errands to run; and she would go to Adolphine and say:

"Look here, if you'd like me to go to Iserief's and ask about those pillow cases for Floortje, you've only got to say so; I'm going that way anyhow."

And then, when she went that way, she muttered to herself:

"At it again! Of course, there's only Dorine to inquire about Floortje's pillow-cases! Why can't the girl go herself? Or why don't they send the maid?"

Paul was the one whom Constance saw most often of all the brothers and sisters. He had begun by finding in her a fairly sympathetic listener for his endless unbosomings and philosophizings; then Van der Welcke liked him best and they sometimes had a cigarette together in the smoking-room; he was the most of a brother to them of the four: just an ordinary brother. He would arrive in the morning and run straight up to Constance' room, while she was still dressing, and declare that of course he could come in, though she was in her petticoat. When not too long-winded, he had an interesting way of talking which Van der Welcke appreciated. He always looked at Addie with the eye of a philosopher; and Addie liked him, found him great fun, with his exquisite trousers and wonderful neckties. Constance was fond of him; and it was in Paul that she had really for the first time met a brother again: in Paul, who had come least within her ken in the old days, when she was a girl of twenty and he a child of thirteen.

[20] Tropical flowers.

[21] The great house, _i.e._, the Viceregal Palace at Buitenzorg.

CHAPTER XXI

"So you're thinking of being presented at Court next winter?" said Van Vreeswijck, who had been a chum of Henri's at Leiden and who was now a chamberlain-extraordinary to the Queen Regent, as he and Van der Welcke were leaving the Plaats together.

Van der Welcke looked up:

"I wasn't thinking of it for a second."

"Really? I heard that you meant to, or rather that it was your wife's intention."

"I haven't exchanged a single word on the subject with my wife."

Van Vreeswijck took Van der Welcke's arm: "Really? Well, to tell you the truth, I could not quite understand it."

"Why not?" asked Van der Welcke, promptly taking offence.

"Look here, old fellow: I can speak to you frankly, can't I, as an old friend? But, if you're touchy ... then we'll avoid intimate matters."

"Not at all: what were you going to say?"

"Nothing that you won't see for yourself, if you think for a moment.

But, if the whole question of getting presented at Court doesn't exist with you and your wife, then don't let me bring it up at all."