"Oh, Bertha.... I wish I could do something for you!"

"You have helped me as it is.... Thank you.... That's all that I can say...."

She lay back helplessly in her chair, staring dimly before her. Constance followed her glance. She saw that Van der Welcke had come, very late. He was sitting in the conservatory--where the boys had cleared away the cards after their game, as Grandmamma always expected them to do--sitting a little in the shadow, but still visible. He was bending over towards Marianne, who sat beside him, her face a white patch in the darkness: a frail little black figure making a faint blur in the dim conservatory, where the gas was now turned out. She seemed to be weeping silently, sat crushing her handkerchief. He appeared to be saying something, anxiously and tenderly, while he bent still nearer to her. Then, suddenly, he took her hand, pressed it impulsively. Marianne looked up in alarm. Her eyes met, at the far end of the long drawing-room, the eyes of Aunt Constance, the dull, staring eyes of her mother. She drew away her hand ... and her pale face flushed with a glow of shame....

Grandmamma stood in the middle of the drawing-room, a little sad at the gloom which the recent mourning had cast over her rooms. The children took their leave.

CHAPTER XXII

Constance began to love her loneliness more and more.

Her daily life was very uneventful: she could count the people with whom she came into contact. First her husband and her son: there was something gentler in her att.i.tude towards Van der Welcke, something almost motherly, which prevented her from getting angry with him, even though the inclination welled up within her. Addie was as usual, perhaps even a little more serious: this disquieted her. Then there was Brauws, who came regularly. He dined with them regularly, on a fixed day in the week, quite informally; and moreover he had become the friend of both Van der Welcke and Constance and even of Addie. Then there were Mamma, Gerrit and his little tribe and, now and again, Paul. And then there was Van Vreeswijck; and Marianne, of course; and latterly she had seen more of Bertha. For the rest she seemed to drift away from all the others, even from warm-hearted Aunt Lot. She kept in touch only with those with whom she was really in sympathy.

Still, though she had these few friends, she often had quite lonely afternoons. But they did not depress her; she gazed out at the rain, at the cloud-phantoms. And she dreamed ... along the path of light. She smiled at her dream. Even though she very much feared the absurdity of it for herself, she could not help it: a new youthfulness filled her with a gentle glow, a new tenderness, like the delicate bloom of a young girl's soul dreaming of the wonderful future.... And then she would come back to herself suddenly and smile at her sentimentality and summon up all her matronly common-sense; and she would think:

"Come, I oughtn't to be sitting like this!... Come, I oughtn't to be acting like this and thinking of everything and nothing!... Certainly, I like him very much; but why cannot I do that without these strange thoughts, without dreaming and picturing all manner of things and filling my head with romantic fancies ... as if I were a girl of eighteen or twenty?... Oh, those are the things which we do not speak about, the deep secret things which we never tell to anybody!... I should never have suspected them in myself ... or that they could be so exquisitely sweet to me. How strangely sweet, to dream myself back to youth in visions which, though they never really take shape, yet make a shining path to those cloudy skies, to imagine myself young again in those dreams!... If I never had these thoughts and dreams before, why do I have them now? Come, I oughtn't to be sitting like this and thinking like this!... I make up a host of pretty stories, sentimental little stories, and see myself, see us both, years ago, as quite young children, both of us. He played and I played ... almost the same game: he a boy, I a girl. It was as though he were seeking me. It was as though I, in my childish dreams, divined something of him, far, far away, as though there were a part of me that wanted to go to him, a part of him that wanted to come to me.... Stop, I am giving way again to those secret enthusiasms which lie deep down in my soul like strange, hidden streams, those vague, romantic ferments such as I imagined that young girls might have, but not I, a woman of my years, a woman with my past, the mother of a big son.... I will not do it any more, I will not.... It is morbid to be like this.... And yet ... and yet ... when the wind blows and the rain comes down, it is, it still is the dear secret that brings the tears to my eyes.... If I love him, quite silently, deep down within myself, why may I not just dream like that? The absurdity of it exists only for me: n.o.body, n.o.body knows of it. I have some one else hidden within me: a younger woman, a sister, a young sister-soul, a girl's soul almost. It is absurd, I know; but sometimes, sometimes it is so strong in me and I love him so well and feel, just like a girl, that he is the first man I have ever loved.... Oh, Henri! I can see now what that was: he was young; it was at first mere play-acting, just like a comedy; then it became pa.s.sion, very quickly, a mad impulse, an almost feverish impulse to hold him in my arms. That is all dead. Pa.s.sion is dead.... This is a dream, a young girl's dream. It is the beginning. It is absurd; and I am often ashamed of it, for my own sake. But I cannot resist it: it envelops me, just as the spring sunshine and the scent of the may and the cherry-blossom in the Woods envelop one with languorous sweetness. I cannot resist it, I can not resist it. My eyes go towards those clouds, my soul goes towards those clouds, my dreams go towards them ... and I love him, I love him.... I feel ashamed: sometimes I dare not look my son in the face.... I love him, I love him; and I feel ashamed: sometimes I dare not go across the street, as though people would notice it, by the light on my face.... But ah, no, that light does not shine from me, because I am old! It does from Marianne, poor child, but not from me ... oh, thank G.o.d for that!... I want to struggle against it, but it is stronger than I; and, when I think of him, I feel as if I were numbed here in my chair. When he comes into the room, I tremble, powerless to make a movement. Let me be ashamed of myself, argue with myself, struggle as I may, it is so, it is something real, as though I had never felt anything real in my life: it is a dream and it is also reality...."

She often strove against it, but the dream was always too strong for her, enveloping her as with a mult.i.tude of languorous spring scents. It imparted a strange tenderness to her, to her fresh, round face, the face of a woman in her prime, with the strange, soft, curly hair, which the years were changing without turning grey. If he came, she awoke from that dream, but felt herself blissfully languid and faint.

"I am not a girl," she thought, now that she heard herself speak; but her fixed idea, that she was old, quite old, retreated a little way into the background.

But, though she now no longer felt so old in her dream, after her dream she thought herself ignorant. Oh, how ignorant she was! And why had she never acquired an atom of knowledge in her wasted days, in her squandered, empty years. When she was talking to Brauws--and now that he came regularly, they often talked together, long and earnestly, in the friendly twilight--she thought:

"How ignorant I am!"

She had to make an effort sometimes to follow him in the simplest things that he said. She was obliged to confess to him that she had never learnt very much. But he said that that was a good thing, that it had kept her mind fresh. She shook her head in disclaimer; she confessed that she was ignorant and stupid. He protested; but she told him frankly that it sometimes tired her to follow him. And she was so honest with him that she herself was sometimes surprised at it. If ever their conversation became too hopelessly deep, she preferred to be silent rather than lie or even seek an evasion in words.... Ignorant, yes; and it distressed her to such an extent that, one afternoon, when Henri was out and Addie at school, she went to her son's room and opened his book-case. In addition to the ordinary school-manuals, it contained a few boys'-books; and she laughed at herself, her little tender, mocking laugh of gentle irony. But she found a couple of volumes on Universal History, a present from Van der Welcke to Addie, who was very fond of history; and she opened them where she stood. She turned the pages. She was afraid that some one might come in: the maid, perhaps, by accident. She sat down in the only easy-chair, impregnated with the smoke of the cigarettes which Van der Welcke smoked one after the other, silently, while Addie was preparing his lessons; and she turned the pages and read. She continued to suffer from that sense of her own absurdity. She felt like a schoolgirl dreaming ... and learning her lessons. She went on reading; and, when Truitje was looking for her all over the house and she heard her ask the cook where on earth mevrouw could be, she blushed violently, quickly put the books back on the shelves and left the room. She would have liked to take the books with her, but dared not; however, that evening at dinner she plucked up courage and said:

"Addie, Mr. Brauws was saying something about the French Revolution the other day; and I felt so stupid at being so ignorant on the subject. Have you any books about it?"

Yes, he had this book and that book, in fact he had always been attracted by that period and had collected as many books upon it as his scanty pocket-money permitted. He would bring them to her after dinner. And she acquired a sort of pa.s.sion for reading and learning. She indulged it almost hastily, feverishly, without any method, as though nervously anxious to make up for the deficiencies of her own education. And at the same time she was frightened lest other people--even Van der Welcke and Addie--should notice that fevered haste; and she devoured book after book with studied cunning, sometimes turning the pages over hurriedly, feverishly, then again reading more attentively, but never leaving the books about, always replacing them on her boy's shelves, or returning them to Brauws and Paul when they had been borrowed from them, or carefully putting away those which she had bought herself, so that her room apparently remained the same, without the confusion and untidiness of a lot of books. Her reading was a strange medley: a volume of Quack's Socialists, which Brauws lent her; Zola's novel, L'OEuvre; a pamphlet by Bakunin and an odd number of the Gids; a copy of The Imitation which had strayed among Van der Welcke's books; Gonse on j.a.panese Art; Tolstoi's novels and pamphlets. But it was a strange bold power of discrimination that at once taught her to pick and choose amid the chaos of all this literature, made her accept this and reject that: a psychological a.n.a.lysis; a new work on modern social evolution; an aesthetic rhapsody about a j.a.panese vase. She learnt quickly to look into them boldly and to take from them what was able as it were to develop her; and out of many of those books there flashed forth such entirely new revelations of hitherto unperceived truths that often, tired, dazed, astounded, she asked herself:

"Is there so much then? Is so much thought about, dreamt about, so much sought for, lived for? Do people have those visions then, those dreams? And does it all exist? And can it all be taken in by me, by my intelligence?"

And, as she thought, it seemed as if c.r.a.pe veils were being raised everywhere from before her and as if she, whose gaze had never wandered from her family and friends, now saw, suddenly, through the distant clouds, right into those cities, right into those civilizations, into the future, into the past, into so much of the present as still hovered closely around her own existence. She experienced shock after shock: she felt dimly that even the terrible French Revolution, though it did cost Marie-Antoinette her life, had its good side. Zola seemed to her so magnificent that she was almost frightened at her own enthusiasm and dared not put her feeling into words. And the n.o.ble dreams of those apostles of humanity, even though they anathematized the power of the State and money--all that she had unconsciously looked upon, all her life, as indispensable to civilized society--made her quiver first with alarm, then with compa.s.sion, then with terror, with despair, with exultation.... She did not utter her thoughts; only, in her conversations with Brauws, she felt that she was gradually better able to follow him, that she was more responsive, less vague in her replies.... If in all this, this new self-education, there was something hurried and superficial, the tremulous haste of an eager, nervous woman who fears that she is devoting herself too late to what is vitally necessary, there was at the same time something fresh and ingenuous, something youthful and unspoilt, like the enthusiasm of a woman still young who, after her girlish dreams, wants to grasp some part of the vivid, many-coloured, radiant life around her, who grasps with joyous open hands at the colours and the sunbeams and who, though she grasps wildly, nevertheless gathers fresh life in her illusion.... She gathered fresh life. The wind that blew outside seemed to blow through her soul; the rain that pelted seemed actually to wash her face; the continual gusts on every hand blew the mist from before her eyes, drew it aside like a curtain.... Her eyes sparkled; and, when the winter had done blowing and raining, when suddenly, without any transition, a breath of spring--the limpid blue of the sky, the tender green of the stirring earth--floated over and through the Woods, it was as though she yearned for movement. She managed, every afternoon that Addie was free, to take him away from Van der Welcke and to lure him out for a long walk, out of the town, over the dunes, ever so far. Addie, with his eyes bright with laughing surprise, thought it very jolly of her and would go with her, though he was no walker and preferred bicycling, athirst for speed. But, in his young, gallant boy's soul, he laughed softly, thought Mamma charming: grown years younger, grown into a young woman, suddenly, in her short skirt, her little cloth cape, with the sailor-hat on her curly hair and the colour in her cheeks, slim-waisted, quick-footed, her voice clear, her laugh sometimes ringing out suddenly. He thought of Papa and that she was now becoming as young as he; and Addie felt himself old beside her. He saw nothing of what was happening in his mother, even as n.o.body saw it, for she kept it to herself, was no different to the others, spoke no differently to the others, perhaps only just with a brighter laugh. What she read, what she learnt, what she felt, what she thought: all this was not perceptible to the others. It did not shine out from her; and her foot merely moved a shade quicker, her speech became a shade more spontaneous. But everything that blossomed and flamed up in her she kept to herself, in the vast silence of her broad but unshared vistas. To her husband she was gentler, to her son she was younger. Only now, in those walks, perhaps Addie was the one person in her life who noticed that, when Mamma happened to mention Mr. Brauws'

name, an unusual note sounded in her brighter, younger voice. A boy of his age does not a.n.a.lyse a subtle perception of this kind; only, without reasoning, without a.n.a.lysing, just instinctively, this boy of fourteen thought of his father, whom he worshipped with a strange, protecting adoration such as one gives to a brother or a friend--a younger brother, a younger friend--and felt a pang of jealousy on his behalf, jealousy of this man who did what Papa never did, talked with Mamma for hours three or four times a week, so often in fact that she was growing younger, that she had taken to reading, so as no longer to be ignorant, that she had developed a need for walking great distances. But the lad kept this jealousy locked up within himself, allowed none to perceive it. Perhaps he was just a trifle colder to him, to this man, the friend of the family, though Brauws was so fond of him, Addie, almost pa.s.sionately fond of him indeed: Addie knew that. This jealousy for his father, jealousy of that friend of the family, was very strong in him; and he felt himself to be the child of both his parents, felt within himself their double heritage of jealousy. The image of his father appeared constantly before him, appeared between the images of Brauws and of his mother. But he let her see nothing of it.

She gathered fresh life in those walks. When Addie was at school, she walked alone, no longer fearing the loneliness out of doors, she who had come to love her indoor loneliness and the still deeper loneliness of her soul. It was as though, after dreaming and educating herself--quickly, nervously, superficially and with youthful simplicity--in what great men had thought and written, she felt herself breathe again in the midst of nature. No longer from her arm-chair, through the windows, along the bend of the curtains did she see the great clouds, but she now saw them out of doors and overhead, blue, white, immense, irradiated by the sun in the vault of the boundless spring skies all vocal with birds, saw them as she stood on the dunes, with the wind all round her head, all round her hair and blowing through her skirts....

"I love him, I love him," a voice inside her sang softly and yet insistently, while the wind's strong pa.s.sion seemed to lift her up and waft her along.

But in the movement of her hands there was something as though she were resisting the wind, with a smile of gentle irony, of tender mockery. The wind blew past, as if grumbling, and she walked on, saw the sea. She seemed to look upon the sea for the first time. It was as though, in the strong wind, under the blue-white clouds, the sea streamed to her for the first time from the ethereal fount of the horizon and were now rushing towards her, roaring and frothing, like a triumph of mult.i.tudinous, white-crested horses. And the sky and the sea were as one great triumph of mighty, omnipotent nature. A nameless but overwhelming triumph seemed from out of those clouds to hold reins in thousands of fists, the reins of the mult.i.tudinous white-crested horses; and all that triumph of nature advanced towards her like a riot of youth. It was as though every atom of her former life, every memory flew away around her like sand, like dust, like straw. It all flew away; and the waves broke, the sea uplifted itself like an exulting menace, as though to carry her with it in the riotous rush of its triumphant crested steeds, over all that small life, over everything ... if she did not take care.

It was all big, wide, far-reaching, like a world. When she reached home, she was tired out, sobered by the tram-ride and the last bit of walking, past casual, shadowy people. Worn out, she fell asleep, woke shortly before dinner, welcomed Addie in a dream. Until sometimes she read her son's eyes, made an effort, plunged her face in a basin of water, tried to be, to appear as she had always been. And then, in the gla.s.s, she saw herself like that, to all appearance the same woman, with just something livelier in her eyes, her gait, her movements. But inside her everything was changed.

At home sometimes the past would still rise up before her, but different, quite different. She seemed to withdraw from her former personality and it was as though, far removed from the woman that she had once been, she was now for the first time able to judge her past from another point of view than her own. She saw suddenly what her father must have suffered, Mamma, the brothers even, the sisters. She realized for the first time the sacrifice which those old, pious people, Henri's parents, had made. She thought in dismay of the injury which she had done her first husband, De Staffelaer. She thought of them all, in dismay at herself, in compa.s.sion for them. And she felt sorry even for her husband and for what he had always querulously resented, his shattered career, which had const.i.tuted his grudge, his obsession, the excuse for his inertia: for Van der Welcke and even for that grudge she felt compa.s.sion. How young he was when she met him, when they had acted their comedy, their comedy which had become deadly earnest! And she had at once fettered him to herself, in ever-increasing antagonism! Then her eyes would rest on him with a more understanding glance, sometimes almost with a certain pity, as she looked into his eyes, his young blue boyish eyes, which Addie had inherited from him, but which in the father looked younger, more boyish than in the son. If, at the sound of his voice, the inclination to speak to him irritably welled up in her from the eternal antagonism between them, as from a gloomy spring deep down in her, she would restrain herself, control herself with that new sympathy and pity, answer gently, almost jokingly, and would let him have the last word. And, now that she herself was in love and felt herself live again, she had a sympathy that was almost motherly for his love, even though she herself was beginning to feel young again, and with it a strange tenderness for the two of them, Marianne and Henri. She did not think of the danger for him; she still had only, in her new world of romance, a sympathy for romance. He was her husband, but she felt none of a wife's jealousy. And for Marianne she felt the same strange compa.s.sion, as for a younger sister-in-love....

There came to her scarcely a fleeting thought of the immorality which the world, people, small people--the whirlers in the little circle, with their little prejudices and dogmas, their little creeds and philosophies--would see in such strange views from a married woman concerning herself and a friend, concerning her husband and the little niece with whom her husband was evidently in love. She was a small creature like all of them, she was a small soul, like all of them; but her soul at least was growing, growing upwards and outwards; she no longer felt depressed; and it seemed as if she were being borne on wings to the greater cloud-worlds yonder, to the far cities, where flashed the lightnings of the new revelations, the new realities....

Everything in her was changed....

CHAPTER XXIII

Max Brauws was a thinker as well as a man of action; and each of these two personalities insisted on having its period of domination. After his college days, he had wandered over Europe for years, vaguely seeking an object in life. Deep down in himself, notwithstanding all his restless activity, he remained a dreamer, as he had been in his childhood and boyhood. It seemed as if that which he had sought in his dreams when playing as a boy on the fir-clad hills and over the moors went on beckoning him, darkly and elusively, a mystic, nebulous veil on the dim horizons of the past; and, when he ran towards them, those far horizons, they receded more and more into the distance, fading little by little; and the veil was like a little cloud, melting into thin air.... He had wandered about for years, his soul oppressed by a load of knowledge, by the load of knowing all that men had thought, planned, believed, dreamed, worshipped, achieved. An almost mechanically accurate memory had arranged those loads in his brain in absolute order; and, if he had not been above all things driven by the unrest of his imagination, with its eternal dreaming and its eternal yearning to find what it sought, he would have become a quiet scholar, living in the country, far from cities, with a great library around him; for very often, when spent with weariness, he had a vision of an ideal repose. But the unrest and the yearning had always driven him on, driven him through the world; and they had both made him seek, for himself as well as for others, because, if he had found for others, he would also have found for himself. They, the unrest and the yearning, had driven him on towards the great centres of life, towards the black gloom of the English and German manufacturing-towns, towards the unhappy moujiks in Russia, towards the famine-stricken villages of Sicily, all in a heart-rending pa.s.sion to know, to have seen, penetrated and experienced all the misery of the world. And the capitals had risen up around him like gigantic Babels of fevered pride, acc.u.mulations of egotisms; the smoke of the manufacturing-towns had smeared along the horizon of his life the soot-black clouds through which he could not see and in which the days remained eternally defiled; the Russian snow-landscapes had spread out as eternal, untraversable steppes--steppes and steppes and steppes--of absolutely colourless despair; in Italy he had beheld an appalling contrast between the magnificence of the country--the glory of its scenery, the melancholy of its art--and the sorrows of the afflicted nation, which, as in a haze of gold, against a background of sublime ruins and shimmering blue, along rows of palaces full of n.o.ble treasures, uttered its cry of hunger, shook its threatening fist, because the old ground brought forth not another olive, not one, after the excesses of the past, exhausted by the birth-pangs of the untold glories of old....

His mind, schooled in book-lore, also read life itself, learnt to know it, fathomed it with a glance. He saw the world, saw its wickedness, its selfishness, saw especially its awful, monstrous hypocrisy. Like so many leering, grinning masks, with treacherous honeyed smiles, contradicting the furtive glances of the diabolical eyes, he saw the powers of the world above the world itself: a huge nightmare of compact distress, the greedy, covetous, grasping fingers hidden as though ready to clutch at the folds of the majestic purple, ready to strike like vultures' claws. And he saw--O terrible vision!--the world as a helpless, quivering ma.s.s lying for centuries under that eternal menace. He saw it everywhere. Then he wanted to free himself with a gigantic effort from the sphinx-like domination of his impotence, with its eternally unseeing eyes, its eternally silent lips, its undivining mind; and his movement was as that of one who lies crushed under granite, the granite of that omnipotent sphinx of impotence, who, with her eternal immovability, seemed to be saying nothing but this:

"I am unchangeable, eternally; against me everything is eternally dashing itself to pieces; against me your dreams scatter into mist. I alone am, but I am that which is unchangeable: human impotence, your own impotence. Lie still at my feet, do not move: I alone am."

That was the vision of his hopeless eyes. But desperation drove him on, wandering ever on and on to other lands, to other capitals, to other towns black with smoke: the smoke through which nothing shone, not a single gleam of hope. And for years it was the same: wandering, seeking, not finding; only seeing, knowing, realizing. But the more he saw, knew and realized, the more terrible it was to him that he could not find the very first word of the solution, the more terrible it became to him that only the sphinx remained, the immovable granite impotence; and her blank gaze seemed to utter her solitary revelation:

"I alone am. I am impotence; but I am immovable, I am omnipotent."

Then he had felt in himself the need to do still more, to be really a doer, a common workman, as they all were, everywhere, the poor and wretched. And he went to America, in order no longer to think, read, ponder, dream, see or know, but to do what they were all doing, the poor and wretched. And it was as he had succeeded in telling Constance at last, after so many hesitations: everything that was atavistic in him had prevented him from becoming a brother, a fellow-worker. But he was scarcely back in Europe before he felt the air around him full of n.o.ble aims, pa.s.sionate hopes; and Peace had shone before his eyes. He spoke; and his words were as the words of one inspired; and everybody went to hear him. He had spoken in Holland; he now went to Germany and spoke there. He wrote his book there: Peace. He went on doing and moving, until he was laid low not only with the fatigue of thinking and meditating, but also with the strain of constantly travelling hither and thither, of constantly appearing in overcrowded halls, of speaking in a clear, resonant voice to thousands of people. For a moment he said to himself that he was doing something, something even greater and better than his manual labour in America had been. For a moment he said to himself that he had found, if not everything, at least something, an atom of absolute good, and that he was imparting that atom to the world. But dull discouragement came and smote him, as well as physical strain, and left him saying to himself:

"They cheer and applaud, but nothing is changed. Everything remains as it is, as if I had never spoken."

His impatience demanded an immediate realization and the sight of the ideal flashing across the horizon. And then he lost all hope even for the future, for the brighter ages that were dawning. A mocking laugh, a sarcastic word in a report on his lectures was enough to shatter him for weeks. He hid himself like a leper, or allowed himself to be luxuriously lapped in the leafy melancholy of the German mountain-forests, or went, farther and higher, into the Alps, made reckless ascents, just himself and a guide, as though, along the pure world of the slippery glaciers, he hoped to find what he had sought in vain in the Old World and the New, in the world of all and of himself.

Then he remained for weeks lingering on in a lonely little village in Switzerland, high up among the eternal snows, as though he wished to purify himself of all the dust of his humanity. Merely through breathing the exquisite rareness of the air, especially at night, when in the higher heavens the stars shone nearer to him, twinkling out their living rays, it seemed as if the pure cold were cleansing him to his marrow, to his soul. He gazed back almost peacefully upon his life as a man of thought and action, thought and action being two things in which a man is able to indulge only if he be willing to live, for others and for himself. If anything of his thought, of his action remained drifting in those lower atmospheres of the suffering world, he was certain that this would be so little, so infinitesimally small, that he himself did not perceive it, like an atom of dust floating in the immensity of the future. Perhaps then the atom would prove to be a little grain and, as such, be built into the substance of the ideal. But, even if this were so, his thought and his action and their possible results seemed to him so small, so slight that he was filled with humility. And in this humility there was a pride in being humble; for did he not remember all the complacency, the dogmatism, the conviction, the a.s.surance, the self-consciousness, all the pedantry that battened down there?

Amid the serenity of the mountains, as he sent his gaze roaming over the frost-bound horizons, all within him became pure and crystal-clear, his soul a very prism. He saw its colours lying there plainly, shining, glittering, with none of the foulness of that lower world. And these weeks were weeks of the deepest and most health-giving rest that he had ever known.

He now felt very lonely. He was not the man to give himself up to the simple enjoyment of this healing rest. He loved best to feel the mult.i.tude around him, to fling out his strong arms wide towards humanity, feeling his most ardent and happiest glow when embracing humanity. But, after his discouragements, he seemed to have thrust it gently, though kindly, a little farther from him, had abandoned it, had sequestered himself, in order to recover from himself and from humanity in the ample, restful silence of utter solitude. He now felt very lonely. And a longing awoke in him, stirring but feebly as yet, for love to come towards him now, because hitherto love had always gone out from him, eager and pa.s.sionate; a longing to be sought himself, for once in his life; to see arms opened to him this time, waiting to embrace him, to press him to a loving heart.... A feeling of melancholy softened him, made him small and human, while the mountain-wind swept past on giant wings....

He looked back upon his life. That was one thing which it had never known: that concentration of all feeling on an individual. With him, any whole-hearted feeling had always been for the many. When he looked back, he saw spectres wandering through the past: the individual, the unit, just a faint blur here and there; he had never felt that all-devouring pa.s.sion for them, the individuals. And yet, as a child, as a boy, playing his dream-game amid woods, fields, heather and stream, for whom had his longing been? To find all of them, humanity, or the one individual soul? He did not know; but a dreamer he had always remained, for all his thinking and doing. And now, after the many had brought him sorrow, he began to dream, for the first time, of the one....

Of the one ... the one individual soul that would open wide arms to him and approach him with a loving embrace ... one individual soul.... Had his quest always been the self-deception of impotence and was it possible that now that quest had become a search for the one individual soul? Suddenly, through his longing, he remembered an evening: a table with flowers and candles; men talking amid the smoke of their cigars; the burly figure of a fair-haired officer; and some strange words which that officer had just uttered as though unconsciously, in the course of ordinary conversation: a vision calling up early years of childhood, childish play, a little girl, fair, with red flowers at her temples, dressed in white, running barefoot over great boulders in a river full of rocks, under the heavy foliage of the tropical trees, and beckoning, beckoning with her little hand to the two elder brothers who were playing with her, fascinated by their little sister....

There, in that room, through the smoke of the cigars, amid the hum of indifferent talk, in three or four sentences, no more, that big, fair-haired man had said it, said it just casually, with a softening of his rough, noisy voice:

"It was wonderful, the way she had of playing. She would run over the rocks and pluck the flowers. Lord, how adorable she looked, the little witch! And we boys used to run with her, run after her, as far as ever she pleased. She only had to beckon to us ... the d.a.m.ned, adorable little witch!"

And the oath sounded like a caress; and the whole thing was only a picture lasting two or three seconds, no more; and then they returned to the smell of coffee and liqueurs, the cigar-smoke, the noisy voice growing rough again, becoming coa.r.s.e and jovial as the burly, fair-haired soldier told some mess-room tale immediately afterwards, after that reminiscence. But in him, Brauws, the reminiscence had lingered, as though always visible: the picture shining in the tenderness with which the brother had spoken of his sister; and it seemed to him as though he himself had seen, but more vaguely and dimly, once in his life, on those Dutch horizons of his childhood, a blur like that of the little figure, the bright, fair-faced child, even the little red note of her flowers.... Oh, how vague it was, how visionary! You thought of it ... and it had gone, all of it, leaving hardly the memory of a perfume, nay, hardly the reflection of a memory! Really, it was nothing, nothing, too airy for thought and impossible to describe in words, however tenderly chosen. It was nothing: if he thought about it for more than the one second that the reflection flashed across him, it was gone, quite lost....

He was feeling very lonely now.... Oh, to think of the pa.s.sing years with their millions of meetings, so many men and women just brushing against one another, in that casual pa.s.sing, just looking into one another's eyes, with the indifferent look of non-recognition, and then pa.s.sing one another again, never seeing one another after!... And perhaps among them the one had pa.s.sed, her eyes looking indifferently into his eyes, a bit of her body or dress brushing against his body or dress ... and she was gone, gone, lost altogether forever. Was that how it had happened in his life? Or not? Was life sometimes merciful at the eleventh hour, giving the one, the individual soul, as a consolation, as a reward for that love for the many?

Now he felt quite lonely, he who was a dreamer as well as a thinker and a man of action. And an irresistible wish to be no longer lonely made him come down suddenly from that ring of glittering peaks. There was nothing waiting for him in Holland, nothing to draw him towards those low lands of his birth, into the swarm of utterly indifferent people, full of petty insignificance, save alone, perhaps, that it was there--in the same house where the vision had been conjured up--there that the soul was waiting, there that the one individual soul would bide his coming.

"It is only a fancy," he now thought. "A fancy ... at my age! No, if any such thing had to happen, it would have happened in the years of youth in which we have the right to feel, to dream, to seek ... to seek for the one. Now that so many years, silent, dead years, lie heaped up around her and around me ... and between us, now it becomes absurd to feel, to dream, to seek those sweet solaces which we feel, dream and seek only when we are very young, but not when we have lost even our right to the remembrance of our youth, the reflection of our childish memories...."