“You think me a very odd person, do you not? But how can I be otherwise with you?”
She felt her love expanding within her heart, widening it to its full capacity within her. Her love was as a domain, in which he wandered.
“I do not understand you yet; I do not know you yet!” she said softly. “I do not see you yet …”
“Would you be in any way interested to know me, to see me?”
“Surely.”
“Let me tell you then; I should like to do so, it would be a great joy to me.”
“I am listening to you most attentively.”
“One question beforehand: You cannot endure an athlete?”
“On the contrary, I do not mind the display and development of strength so long as it is not too near to me. Just as I like to hear a storm, when I am safely within doors. And I can look at acrobats with great pleasure.”
He laughed quietly.
“Nevertheless you held my particular predilection in great aversion?”
“Why should you think that?”
“I felt it.”
“You feel everything,” she said, almost in alarm. “You are a dangerous person.”
“So many think that. Shall I tell you why you took a special aversion in my case?”
“Yes.”
“Because you did not understand it in me; even though you may perhaps have observed that physical exercise is one of my strong passions.”
“I do not understand you at all.”
“I think you are right … But do not let me talk so much of myself; I prefer to talk of you.”
“And I of you. So be gallant to me for the first time in our acquaintance, and speak … of yourself.”
He bowed, with a smile.
“You will not think me tiresome?”
“Not at all. You were telling me of yourself. You were speaking of your love of exercise …”
“Ah! Yes … Can you understand that there are in me two distinct individuals?”
“Two distinct …”
“Yes. My soul, my real self; and then … there remains the other.”
“And what is that other?”
“Something ugly, something common, something grossly primitive. In one word, the brute.”
She shrugged her shoulders lightly.
“How dark you paint yourself. The same thing is more or less true of everybody.”
“Yes, but it troubles me more than I can tell you. I suffer; the lower hurts my soul, the higher, more than the whole world hurts it. Now do you know why I feel such a sense of security when I am with you? It is because I do not feel the brute that is in me … Let me go on a little longer, let me shrive myself; it does me good to tell you this. You thought I had only seen you four times? But I saw you often formerly, in the theatre, in the street, everywhere. There was always something strange for me when I saw you in the midst of accidental surroundings. And always, when I looked at you, I felt as if I were lifted to something more beautiful. I cannot express myself more clearly. There is something in your face, in your eyes, in your movements, I do not know what, but something better than in other people, something that addressed itself, most eloquendy, to my soul only. All this is so subtle and so strange … But you are no doubt thinking again that I am going too far, are you not? Or that I am raving?”
“Certainly, I never should have thought you such an idealist, such a sensitivist,” said Cecile softly.
“Have I leave to speak to you like this?”
“Why not?” she asked, to escape the necessity of replying directly.
“You might possibly fear lest I should compromise you …”
“I do not fear that for an instant!” she replied, haughtily, as in utter contempt of the world.
They were silent for a moment. That delicate, fragile thing, that might so easily break, still hung between them, thin, like a gossamer between them, lightly joining them together. An atmosphere of embarrassment hovered about them. They felt that the words which had passed between them were full of significance. Cecile waited for him to continue; but as he was silent she boldly took up the conversation:
“On the contrary, I value it highly that you have spoken to me like this. You were right; you have indeed given me much of yourself. I wish to assure you of my sympathy. I believe I understand you better now that I see you better.”
“I want very much to ask you something,” he said, “but I dare not.”
She smiled to encourage him.
“No, really I dare not,” he repeated.
“Shall I guess?” Cecile asked, jestingly.
“Yes; what do you think it is?”
She glanced round the room until her eye rested on the little table covered with books.
“The loan of Emerson’s Essays?” she hazarded.
But Quaerts shook his head and laughed.
“No, thank you,” he said. “I have bought the volume long ago. No, no; it is a much greater favour than the loan of a book.”
“Be bold then, and ask it,” Cecile went on jestingly.
“I dare not,” he said again. “I should not know how to put my request into words.”
She looked at him earnestly, into his eyes gazing steadily upon her, and then she said:
“I know what you want to ask me, but I will not say it. You must do that: so seek your words.”
“If you know, will you permit me then to say it?”
“Yes, for if my surmise is correct, it is nothing that you may not ask.”
“And yet it would be a great favour … But let me warn you beforehand that I look upon myself as someone of a much lower order than you.”
A shadow passed across her face, her mouth had a little contraction of pain, and she pressed him, a little unnerved:
“I beg you, ask. Just ask me simply.”
“It is a wish, then, that sympathy were sealed between you and me. Would you allow me to come to you when I am unhappy? I always feel so happy in your presence, so soothed, so different from the state of ordinary life, for with you I live only my better, my true self – you know what I mean.”
Everything melted again within her into weakness and heaviness; he placed her upon too high a pedestal; she was happy, because of what he asked her, but sad that he felt himself less than she.
“Very well,” she said, nevertheless, with a clear voice. “It is as you wish.”
And she gave him her hand, her beautiful, long, white hand, where on one white finger gleamed the sparks of jewels, white and blue. A moment, very reverently, he pressed her finger-tips between his own.
“Thank you,” he said in a hushed voice, a voice that was a little broken.
“Are you often unhappy?” asked Cecile.
“Always …” he replied, almost humbly, and as though embarrassed at having to confess it. “I do not know what it means, only that it has always been so. And yet from my childhood I have enjoyed much that people call happiness. But yet, yet … I suffer through myself. It is I who do myself the most hurt. And after that the world … and I must always hide myself. To the world I only show the individual who rides and fences and hunts, who goes into society and is dangerous for young married women …”
He laughed with his bad, low laugh, looking aslant into her eyes; she remained calmly gazing at him.
“Beyond that I give them nothing. I hate them; I have nothing in common with them, thank God!”
“You are too proud,” said Cecile. “Each of those people has his own sorrow, just as you have; the one suffers a little more coarsely; but they all suffer. And in that they all resemble yourself.”
“Each taken by himself, perhaps! But that is not how I take them; I take them in the lump, and I hate them. Do not you?”
“No,” she said calmly. “I do not believe I am capable of hating.”
“You are strong within yourself. You are sufficient to yourself.”
“No, no, not that, really not; but you … you are unjust towards the world.”
“Possibly: why does it always give me pain? Alone with you I forget that it exists, the outside world. Do you understand now why I was so sorry to see you at Mrs Hoze’s? You seemed to me to have lowered yourself. And it was because … because of this peculiarity I saw in you that I did not seek your acquaintance earlier. This acquaintance was fatally bound to come, and so I waited …”
Fate, what would it bring her? thought Cecile. But she could not think deeply; she seemed to herself to be dreaming of beautiful and subtle things which did not exist for other people, which only floated between them two.
There was no longer need to look upon them as illusions, it was as if she had overtaken the future! One short moment only did this endure as happiness; then again she felt pain, on account of his reverence.
VI
He was gone and she was alone, waiting for the children. She neglected to ring for the lamp to be lighted, and the twilight of the late afternoon darkened in the room. She sat motionless, and looked out before her at the withered trees.
“Why should I not be happy?” she thought. “He is happy with me; he is himself with me only; he cannot be so among other people. Why then can I not be happy?”
She felt pain; her soul suffered, it seemed to her for the first time. This, perhaps, was because now for the first time her soul had not been itself but another. It seemed to her that another woman must have spoken to him, to Quaerts, just now.
An exalted woman: a woman of illusions – the woman, in fact, he saw in her, and not the woman she was: lowly, a woman of love. Ah, she had had to restrain herself not to ask him: “Why do you speak to me like that? Why do you raise up your beautiful thoughts to me? Why do you not rather let them drip down upon me? For see, I do not stand so high as you think; and see, I am at your feet, and my eyes seek you above me.”
Should she have told him that she deceived him? Should she have asked him: “How is it that I lower myself when I mix with other people? What then do you see in me? I am only a woman, a woman of feebleness and dreams. I have come to love you, I do not know why.”
Should she have opened his eyes and said to him: “Look upon your own soul in a mirror; look upon yourself and see how you are a god walking upon the earth: a god who knows everything because he feels it, feels it because he knows it …” Everything? … No … not everything; for he deceived himself, this god, and thought to find an equal in her, who was but his creature. Should she have declared all this, at the cost of her modesty and his happiness? For this happiness – she felt perfectly assured – lay in seeing her in the way that he saw her.
“With me he is happy!” she thought. “And sympathy is sealed between us … It was not friendship, nor did he speak of love; he called it simply sympathy … With me he feels only his real self, and not that other … the brute that is in him … the brute …”
Then there came drifting over her a gloom as of gathering clouds, and she shuddered before that which suddenly rolled through her: a broad stream of blackness, as though its waters were filled with mud, which bubbled up in troubled rings, growing larger and larger. She took fear before this stream, and tried not to see it; but it sullied all her landscapes – so bright before, with their horizons of light – now with a sky of ink smeared above, like filthy night.
“How high he thinks, how noble his thoughts are!” Cecile still forced herself to imagine, in spite of …
But the magic was gone: her admiration of his lofty thoughts tumbled away into an abyss; then suddenly, by a lightning flash through the night of that inken sky, she saw clearly that his exalted intellect was a supreme sorrow to her.
It had become quite dark in the room. Cecile, afraid of the lightning which revealed her to herself, fell back upon the cushions of the settee.
She hid her face in her hands, pressing her eyes, as though she wished, after this moment of self-revelation, to be blind for ever.
But demoniacally it raged through her, a hurricane of hell, a storm of passion, which blew up out of the darkness of the landscape, lashing up the tossed waves of the foul stream towards the sky of ink.
“Oh!” she moaned. “I am unworthy of him … unworthy …”
CHAPTER III
I
Quaerts lived on the Plein, above a tailor, where he occupied two small rooms, furnished in the most ordinary style. He might have lived far better, but he was indifferent to comfort; he never gave it a thought in his own place; when he came across it elswhere it did not attract him. But it troubled Jules that Quaerts should live in this fashion, and the boy had long wished to embellish his rooms. He was busy at this moment hanging some trophies on an armourrack, standing on a pair of steps, humming a tune he remembered from an opera. Quaerts gave no heed to what Jules was doing; he lay immobile on the sofa, at full length, in his flannels, unshorn, his eyes fixed upon the florid decoration of the Palace of Justice, tracing a background of architecture behind the withered trees of the Plein.
“Look, Taco, will this do?” asked Jules, after hanging an Algerian sabre between two creeses, and draping the folds of a Javanese sarong between.
“Beautifully,” answered Quaerts. But he did not look at the trophies, and continued gazing at the Palace. He lay motionless. There was no thought in him; only listless dissatisfaction with himself, and consequent sadness. For three weeks he had led a life of debauch, to deaden consciousness, or perhaps he did not know precisely what: something that was in him, something that was fine, but tiresome in ordinary life. He had begun with shooting, in North Brabant, over a friend’s land. It lasted a week; there were eight of them; sport in the open air, followed by sporting dinners, with not only a great deal of wine, certainly the best, but still more genever, also very fine, like a liqueur. Turbulent excursions on horseback in the neighbourhood; madnesses perpetrated at a farm – the peasant-woman carried round in a barrel, and locked up in the cowhouse – mischievous exploits worthy only of unruly boys and savages; at the end of it all, in a police-court, a summons, with a fine and damages. Wound up to a pitch of excitement with too much sport, too much oxygen, and too much wine, five of the pack, among whom was Quaerts, had gone on to Brussels. There they had stayed almost a fortnight, leading a life of continual excess – champagne and larking; a wild joy of living, which, naturally enough at first, has in the end to be screwed up and screwed up higher still, to make it last a couple of days longer; the last nights spent weariedly over écarté, with none but the fixed idea of winning, the exhaustion of all their violence already pulsing through their bodies, like nervous relaxation, their eyes gazing without expression upon the cards of the game.
During that time Quaerts had only once thought of Cecile; and he had not followed up the thought. She had no doubt arisen three or four times in his brain, a vague image, white and transparent; an apparition which had vanished again immediately, leaving no trace of its passage. All this time too he had not written to her, and it had only once struck him that a silence of three weeks, after their last conversation, must at least seem strange to her. There it had remained. He was back now; he had lain three days long at home on his bed, on his sofa, tired, feverish, dissatisfied, disgusted with everything, everything; then one morning, remembering that it was Wednesday, he had thought of Jules and his riding-lesson.
He sent for Jules, but too lazy to shave or dress, he remained lying where he was. And he still lay there, realising nothing. There before him was the Palace. Next to it the Privy Council. At the side he could see the White Club, and William the Silent standing on his pedestal in the middle of the Plein: that was all exceedingly interesting. And Jules was hanging up trophies: also interesting. And the most interesting of all was the stupid life he had been leading. What tension to give the lie to his ennui! Had he really amused himself during that time? No; he had made a pretence of being amused: the peasant-woman episode and the écarté; the sport had been bad; the wine good, but he had drunk too much of it. And then that particularly filthy champagne … at Brussels … And what then
? He had absolute need of it, of a life like that, of sport and wild enjoyment; it served to balance the other thing that was in him, that was tiresome for him in ordinary life.
But why was it not possible to preserve some mean, in one as well as in the other? He was well equipped for ordinary life, and with that he possessed something in addition; why could he not remain balanced between those two spheres of disposition? Why was he always tossed from one to the other, as a thing belonging to neither? How fine he could have made his life with only the least tact, the least self-restraint! How he might have lived in a healthy joy of purified animal existence, tempered by a higher joyousness of soul! But tact, self-restraint – he had none of these; he lived according to his impulses, always in extremes; he was incapable of half indulgences. And in this lay his pride as well as his regret; his pride that he felt “wholly” whatever he felt, that he was unable to make terms with his emotions; and his regret, that he could not make terms and bring into harmony the elements which warred forever within him.
When he had met Cecile, and had seen her again, and yet once more, he had felt himself carried wholly to the one extremity, the summit of exaltation, of pure crystal sympathy, in which the circle of his atmosphere – as he had said – glided over hers, a caress of pure chastity and spirituality, as two stars, spinning closer together, might mingle their atmospheres for a moment, like breaths. What smiling happiness had been within his reach, as a grace from Heaven!
Then, then, he had felt himself toppling down, as if he had rocked over the balancing-point; and he had longed for the earthly, for great simplicity of emotion, for primitive enjoyment of life, for flesh and blood. He remembered now how, two days after his last conversation with Cecile, he had seen Emilie Hijdrecht, here in his rooms, where at length, stung by his neglect, she had ventured to come to see him one evening, heedless of all caution. With a line of cruelty round his mouth he recalled how she had wept at his knees, how in her jealousy she had complained against Cecile, how he had bidden her be silent, and not pronounce Cecile’s name. Then, their mad embrace, an embrace of cruelty: cruelty on her part against the man whom time after time she lost when she thought him secured for good and all, whom she could not understand, to whom she clung with all the violence of her brutal passion, a purely animal passion of primitive times; cruelty on his part against the woman he despised, while in his passion he almost stifled her in his embrace.
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