Small Souls Part 53

"Wha-at?" cried Adolphine, in a terrified voice.

Constance gave a nervous laugh:

"I tell you, from all my lovers."

"Oh, don't say things like that, even in fun! I thought it was imitation lace."

"Yes, but you don't know much about lace, do you?" said Constance, very calmly. "Or about diamonds? And you have not the least notion how to dress yourself, have you? I sometimes think you look very dowdy, Adolphine. It may be Dutch and substantial, but I consider it dowdy.

And, on the other hand, you oughtn't to buy such rubbishy, shabby-genteel things as you do. And you haven't much notion of arranging your house, either, have you? If you were capable of understanding my taste, I wouldn't mind helping you to alter your drawing-room. But you would have to begin by getting rid of those horrible antimaca.s.sars and those china monkeys and dogs. Do; I wish you would. And choose a quieter carpet.... Don't you find those dinners very trying, Adolphine? I should say that Bertha is more at home in that sort of thing, isn't she?... And so the Erkenbouts go to your dinners, do they? I should have thought that Bruis, of the _Fonograaf_, was more in your set. But I was forgetting: you haven't a set, really; you have a bit of everything, an omnium gatherum.... Curious, isn't it, that none of our friends of the old days--our little Court set, let me call it--ever come to you nowadays? What's the reason?... Of course, you have to make your house attractive, if you want to keep your acquaintances.... I suppose you don't care really about seeing people.

It's such hard work for you.... You're more the good mother of your children, though I consider your girls, at least Floortje and Caroline, rather loud; and, as for your boys, you seem quite unable to teach them any sort of manners.... Well, if I can be of any use to you, if you want to alter that drawing-room of yours, you have only to say so and we will fix a day...."

Adolphine had listened gasping, unable to believe her ears. Had Constance gone mad? She stood up, shaking all over, while Constance, with apparent composure, continued to fold her laces:

"You're a deceitful creature!" she hissed, furious, so deeply wounded in every detail of her vanity that she could no longer control herself.

"Why?" asked Constance, calmly. "Perhaps I was, for months, with a view to winning your affection; and that was why I spent myself in praises admiring Floortje's trousseau. But now that I know that you love me so well, now that we have had a good, sisterly talk, now that we have given each other our advice and our opinion, I see no further need for being deceitful and I too prefer to express my sisterly feelings with the frankest sincerity."

"Do you mean to say you didn't like Floortje's trousseau?" asked Adolphine, raging.

But Constance mastered her quivering nerves:

"Adolphine," she said, coldly, "please let us end this conversation. It can't matter to you in the least whether I, your despised sister, like or dislike anything in or about you. Spiteful, hateful words have been spoken between us; and we have seen into each other's souls. You never had any affection for me, nor any indulgence nor mercy, whereas I believed that you had and tried to find a sister in you. I failed; and that is all. There is nothing more. We will end this conversation, if you please; and, if you don't mind, when we meet at Mamma's or elsewhere, let us act as though there had been nothing said between us.

That is all I ask of you."

She rang. The parlour-maid appeared. Adolphine stood staring at Constance; and her lips began to swell with the venom of the words which she felt rising to her lips.

"It's to let Mrs. van Saetzema out, Truitje," said Constance, quietly.

CHAPTER x.x.xVII

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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sed 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, home-like 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 fas.h.i.+onable 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 t.i.tle of the little sheet: the _Dwarskijker;_[22] and, as she seldom received much by post, she thought that it must have been sent as an advertis.e.m.e.nt. 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 nonent.i.ty, 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 nonent.i.ty, 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-amba.s.sadress;" 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.