‘What’s wrong? You’ve been crying…’
‘No. It’s nothing.’
Then: ‘They’re tears of joy.’ And she hugged her old friend as if they had a great happiness to share.
IV
Mevr. Daneele, too, was happy to see the developing idyll. At that point she had no idea what Hans’s feelings were. Previously her friend had told her of her concern, of her worries. But these dreams of life in a religious order are common among young men and women brought up by priests or nuns. Such a so-called vocation soon weakens. Would Hans persist in it? It was unlikely, even though he had so far given no sign at all of the beginnings of love for Wilhelmine. As for her, however, it did seem that she was smitten. Mothers have an instinct which alerts them to that kind of thing. There is a tie, a sacred tie from the womb, which is never completely severed. And when a child’s flesh suffers a shock, even the delightful shock of love, it sets off ripples of sensation, spreading in circles until they reach the mother’s sensitive flesh.
Mevr. Daneele sensed Wilhelmine’s burgeoning love, deduced it from little signs: blushes, preference for a particular book, for solitude, a romance she chose to play on the piano, tears for no reason. Hans had not declared his love. No matter. For the moment Mevr. Daneele asked nothing more. Her daughter was too young. Should one bind oneself for ever at seventeen? She would prefer to see her go out a little, move in society, if only for one winter.
Social events are rare in Bruges, but every year the Governor gives a grand ball attended by everybody who is anybody in the Province. The old aristocracy was there, decked out in antique lace and ancient jewels from the glorious days when a queen of France could complain, at the sight of all the splendour, that nothing but queens were to be found in Bruges. Wilhelmine would have preferred not to go, doubtless because of Hans, but Mevr. Daneele, who also came from an old family, was determined to present her daughter at the ball. She wanted her to look her charming best. They spent a long time discussing what she would wear. Pink would suit her well, since she had a dark complexion. But white was more a colour of innocence, of inauguration. Are not the orchards white in April, when the trees make their debut? A white gown was made for her, décolleté, revealing her shoulders, the back of her neck with its adorable little nest of dark curls, her bare arms, slightly thin but with short sleeves puffed out, wings about to open. The gown was entirely made of tulle, a drift of gossamer, ethereal—a cloud pinned up! The true attire for seventeen! A harmony of white! Around her neck a string of pearls; white satin slippers; a fan that looked like a lily with fluted frills.
It was a great moment when the evening of the ball arrived and Wilhelmine finally saw herself arrayed in all this finery. She was flowing, like the curtains veiling a cradle, fresh as a white azalea. When she looked at herself in the large Empire cheval glass in her bedroom, it blazed as if it had caught all the moonlight.
Mevr. Cadzand had asked Wilhelmine to drop in on her way. She wanted to see her in her first ball gown. She also wanted Hans to see her, since he had refused to go to the ball, still the stay-at-home avoiding society.
A carriage stopped in Blinde-Ezelstraat. A moment later Wilhelmine and her mother came into the dining-room of the old house where Mevr. Cadzand was usually to be found. She burst out in a cry of admiration: ‘Wilhelmine! You look ravishing! You did well to choose white. And what a lovely hairstyle. Who did it for you?’
Mevr. Cadzand wanted to know everything, see everything. She made the girl turn round so she could look at her from behind, from the side, then from the front again, examined the cut of the bodice and the splendid fullness of the skirt, which swirled round her, sweeping down to the floor in pleats.
‘Just a minute,’ said Mevr. Cadzand, ‘I almost forgot. I wanted to make my own little contribution to your beautiful outfit this evening.’ And she went to fetch a sprig of white lilac she had ordered from a florist.
‘They had to send to Nice for it, apparently …’
Wilhelmine took the pale spray from her. Delighted with it and very moved, she embraced Mevr. Cadzand and pinned the fragile flowers to her waist, where they merged with the fragile material.
‘Hans must see you like this!’
Mevr. Cadzand summoned the maids to fetch him and they in their turn went into raptures, especially Barbara, the old cook, who had been with them for twenty years and who was allowed certain familiarities. She put her hands together, admiring Wilhelmine as if she were a princess in the procession.
Steps were heard from the silent staircase. It was Hans coming down from his room. He entered.
‘Well then? Don’t you think she looks pretty?’ Mevr. Daneele asked.
Hans looked at Wilhelmine and seemed flustered, embarrassed. He said yes, mechanically, out of politeness. Then he withdrew into one of the darker corners of the room, without speaking. Mevr. Cadzand had started singing Wilhelmine’s praises again. She reattached the sprig of lilac, which had come loose, its white petals like flakes drifting off from the solid snow of the tulle.
Wilhelmine turned her eyes towards Hans, saddened by his silence. She felt less happy, less white, as if Hans, as he came in, had cast a great shadow over her bright gown, had put out one of the lamps as he came in.
Mevr. Daneele asked what time it was. ‘What? Ten o’clock already! We must go, right away.’
And they went, leaving Mevr. Cadzand in a sombre mood, disappointed with the scene which she had thought would help bring nearer the happy future she was striving to ensure. Wouldn’t Hans, having seen Wilhelmine so charming in her finery, see her as beautiful at last, start to fall in love with her? Perhaps the virginal white gown would turn his thoughts to that other white dress she would wear one day as she made her way to the altar. The association of ideas can suddenly reveal things within people which they had never imagined were there. But the white had not worked its spell, alas. On the contrary, Hans had shrunk back, doubtless put off at finding her frivolous, seeing her as worldly and vain.
There was even more to it. In reality, when he had entered the dining-room he had been shocked to see Wilhelmine dressed like that and to have been summoned to see her. For a young girl to take immodesty to that point—and with the connivance of the two mothers! Hans had never wanted to go to a ball. He could not imagine that women could be so shameless as to wear a low-cut dress that revealed so much of their bare flesh: their shoulders, the line of their back, their arms and, above all, that disturbing swelling of the chest, the mystery of which he had never dared imagine in thought, and which made him lower his eyes even at statues and pictures. That day he had almost caught a glimpse of the warm valley, the pair nestling there. Standing up, Wilhelmine seemed to be rising, naked, from all the tulle. A woman’s body, the trunk of the tree of temptation bearing the ripe fruit of the breasts with, doubtless, the eternal serpent hiding there, coiled round them.
Hans had shrunk back into the shadow, alarmed, as if faced with something that endangered his soul. For a long time the apparition stayed with him, haunting him with details of which he desperately tried to purge all trace from his mind…
V
One day Mevr. Daneele found Wilhelmine all in tears. She had thrown herself down on her bed and was crying, face down on her pillow, her hair falling loose in black rivulets.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing… Leave me alone… ’
An expression of mental suffering as well as of physical pain, of fear that someone might come too close to our sorrow, touch the sore, even to make it better. But a mother’s hands have healing powers, as if they had made the outgrown swaddling clothes into lint with which they dress their children’s wounds all life long.
Wilhelmine was sensitive, susceptible. Given the mothers’ stratagem of meetings and conversations with Hans, it was natural the girl’s feelings should be aroused by him. He had a noble countenance, and one so handsome that all the women turned to look at him. But Wilhelmine was hurt by his coldness. At the beginni
ng all she wanted was to be with him. She would blush, but it was good to blush when evening was approaching and, thanks to the shadows, it wasn’t noticeable. It gave her a feeling of warmth, as if she were being caressed by roses, as if she’d plunged her face into a bouquet. When he was there, she felt she was a different woman, she seemed to have found herself after she’d been lost, to have come home after a long voyage. And Hans’s voice, so deep and with a sound that went on and on! It was as if she could see it coming towards her, going down inside her, awakening things that moved inside her, stretched, then left, going back to him. It was a harmony, an exchange, the mingling of smoke from two neighbouring roofs. First love! One’s whole being in turmoil! The arousal of something unknown! A mysterious white rose that must be watered with tears springing up in one’s heart!
After Hans left with his mother, Wilhelmine would feel unsettled. The hours passed slowly. The silence in the house was wearisome. She tried to recapture the sound of Hans’s voice, to reconstruct his face, sad that its elusive contours kept slipping away. How frail is human memory, where solely the present appears and which does so little to remedy absence, only retaining as much of what one would like to see as remains in the depths of a mirror. She could just about recall his luminous hair, the sharp ridge of his nose, his general build; but the indefinable shade of his eyes, the line of his lips, ending in a little, slightly disdainful crease? Wilhelmine tried and tried, she had need of that dear face. She would very much have liked to have a portrait of him to help her…
But she didn’t dare ask him for one, she didn’t dare say anything to him. He was always so earnest and cold, talking to her as if with a stranger, or a younger sister to whom he had nothing to say. It must be because he’d known her too well as a child to be able to treat her as a grown-up now, as the young woman she’d become. It would never occur to him that he could love her other than as a childhood friend, that he could marry her.
Wilhelmine was in despair.
When she found her in tears, her mother didn’t doubt for a moment what had caused her sorrow. A girl’s tears—tears of love.
She induced her daughter to confide in her, then gently consoled her, counselled her. She told Wilhelmine the things she had been ignorant of until that point: Hans’s extreme devoutness, his old plans, his religious vocation, his desire to take holy orders, which Mevr. Cadzand had thwarted, getting him to promise to wait a while, to postpone it until he came of age. And that kind of resolution didn’t last, would fade away, provided one spent several years out in the world.
‘Yes, of course,’ Wilhelmine said. ‘When I was in the convent I wanted to be a nun as well.’
‘So don’t worry. Keep up your hopes. Mevr. Cadzand and I saw clearly how you felt and we’d both be delighted for you to marry Hans. He’s worthy of your love, so no more tears, Wilhelmine.’
She flung her arms around her mother in an ecstatic embrace, her eyes bright, dried of the tears her despair had brought to them.
‘Yes!… But what if he persists, still wants to be a priest?’
‘That’s up to you, Wilhelmine. Make him love you. You love him, that’s the main thing. See that he suspects, begins to realise… Men mostly fall in love when they know a woman loves them.’
VI
Mevr. Daneele described the scene of Wilhelmine’s sadness to Mevr. Cadzand. How touching! Two mothers colluding in the same goal, which would cure both their sick children. In truth their sickness, though seeming very different, was similar. One was suffering from faith, the other from love. But faith and love, are they not the two faces of the infinite? Both of them suffered from a combination of solitariness and fullness, of a need to extend and to exchange themselves. We have but one heart to accommodate all our loves—doubtless Hans prayed to God with words full of affection; Wilhelmine loved Hans with outbursts of adoration.
And the remedy was the same too. Each had to cure the other. But how could they be persuaded? The two mothers were uncertain and almost anxious, as they also were looking forward to this great event, the hoped-for marriage, to feel closer together, after so many years of constant affection, almost as if they belonged to the same family… They felt that on the day of the wedding they would become sisters.
Mevr. Daneele advised her old friend to talk to Hans about it, to probe, to see if she could find out. But she was unsure what tactics to adopt, her son must not suspect there was a scheme, a plan being followed. He would be less amenable to persuasion the more she seemed to be trying to influence him, to be encroaching on his future, to be reopening the question of his vocation which had been settled between them. No doubt things would sort themselves out, it was preferable to let them take their course. Young hearts understood each other instinctively, without having to spell things out. One day there would be something subtly different about the moment or her tone of voice, and Wilhelmine would do more with one word than the two mothers could do with all their stratagems and long speeches.
That was Mevr. Cadzand’s view, that they had to put all their hope in Wilhelmine, in her charm, in the mysterious, infectious power of love. In fact—and without confessing this to her friend—deep down inside she felt that all she could hope for was a miracle. She had been spying on her son and was well aware that his devotion was still intact, that he was already leading a monastic life, that he had found it hard to resign himself to putting off his plan and had only done so out of filial affection and to keep his promise. But he continued to live in the world as if he were in exile, ticking off his monotonous days, employing them in some research work that aroused no enthusiasm, entirely turned towards God, his melancholy features only softened by a modicum of content when they went to church, when the organ resounded, the services unfolded. The rest of the time he seemed to be waiting.
As for Wilhelmine, he responded to her with feelings of disquiet, unease, as if to someone who was too profane, especially since the evening when she had come in her ball gown.
Mevr. Cadzand realised all this, but still she hoped. Do we not continue to hope for what we long for right to the very end?
VII
A Sunday afternoon in winter. Mevr. Cadzand and Mevr. Daneele had agreed to go on an excursion to Damme. Despite his reclusive habits, Hans had to join them because his health was still poor and the doctor had repeated his prescription of walks and fresh air. It had frozen during the last few days, especially the previous night, which was why they had planned this walk along the canal leading to the little dead town. They knew how picturesque it was along the banks when everything was frozen: stalls selling punch and pancakes; children skipping round and round, chanting, ‘The fish are warm beneath the white floor of ice; we are warm running about on top’; and skaters come from nearby Holland, who stand out with their rolling rhythm, a poised swaying, a way of swinging their bodies, balancing on one leg, each in turn, like a boat rocking to and fro on a wave. For the Dutch skating is like dancing.
The two families, who had met at Mevr. Daneele’s, on Spiegelrei, set off along the line of canals leading to Damme Gate. The sun was shining brightly. The intense cold set their pulses racing and made them lively and merry. The two mothers chattered. Wilhelmine was in a talkative mood as well and Hans was interested to see what was going on in the streets.
The occasional skater had even ventured onto the canals within the town, frozen as they were in a thick layer of ice. It produced a strange effect: with a quai on either side of the frozen canal, it was like three parallel streets, a triptych with the solidified canal forming the slightly recessed central panel.
Here and there, alongside the walkers on the quai, were skaters slicing through the empty space. It was as if there were, in the middle, a higher life form, more agile, more aerial, endowed with an extra sense, still half human but already half angel, which, on the surface of the ice, was taking off, appeared to be flying.
The group had reached Damme Gate and the green, the olive green, of the melancholy embankments. They turned fo
r a last look at the town crisply outlined in the sun. Oh, the tone of the sunlight flooding Bruges on a frosty afternoon—the tone of candles on a virgin’s catafalque—the sunbeams over the winter town, the veneer of pale russet on the ice, like the patina on old paintings which here gave the air, the canals and the streets the colour and something of the atmosphere of a museum! Once they had left the town and were out in the open country, following the tree-lined canal, Wilhelmine took it into her head to go down onto the ice for a while. The two mothers had misgivings…
But Hans, in a decidedly lighter, almost merry mood, went along with it. He held her by the hand to help her down the grassy bank and, impelled by the slope, they ran down together. Wilhelmine was enjoying herself and was amazed at the ice, it was so different in places. Is it some chemistry of the air which affects it, taints it, mixing fleeting tones into the white—cloudy sheets of molten lead, veins of blue? Or was it caused by reflections retained by the water, skyscapes absorbed by it and showing through?
Further on and all of a sudden, the ice was quite dark. An ice-skate had passed over it.
‘Oh look, it’s like chalk on a slate!’ Wilhelmine said.
Hans smiled, enchanted by the appropriateness of the image, and complimented her on it.
Wilhelmine felt a little thrill inside. Hans was unrecognisable, he seemed less self-enclosed, less morose. It was the first time he’d talked to her like that. Was he starting to feel something for her?
She had been making an effort for so long now! On that day too she’d chosen her outfit just for him. She looked ravishing in her velvet hat and the dark furs mingling with her hair of the same colour. And her lips alongside the furs, very red from the cold, aroused thoughts of daring deeds, of the hunt and of blood, as if her mouth were a wound that went with the animal hair.
Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories Page 5