1

Dolf Van Attema, in the course of an after-dinner stroll, had called on his wife’s sister, Cecile van Even, on the Scheveningen Road. He was waiting in her little boudoir, pacing up and down, among the rosewood chairs and the vieux rose moiré ottomans, over and over again, with three or four long steps, measuring the width of the tiny room. On an onyx pedestal, at the head of a sofa, burned an onyx lamp, glowing sweetly within its lace shade, a great six-petalled flower of light.

Mevrouw was still with the children, [2]putting them to bed, the maid had told him; so he would not be able to see his godson, little Dolf, that evening. He was sorry. He would have liked to go upstairs and romp with Dolf where he lay in his little bed; but he remembered Cecile’s request and his promise on an earlier occasion, when a romp of this sort with his uncle had kept the boy awake for hours. So Dolf van Attema waited, smiling at his own obedience, measuring the little boudoir with his steps, the steps of a firmly-built man, short, broad and thick-set, no longer in his first youth, showing symptoms of baldness under his short brown hair, with small blue-grey eyes, kindly and pleasant of glance, and a mouth which was firm and determined, in spite of the smile, in the midst of the ruddy growth of his crisp Teutonic beard.

A log smouldered on the little hearth of nickel and gilt; and two little flames flickered [3]discreetly: a fire of peaceful intimacy in that twilight atmosphere of lace-shielded lamplight. Intimacy and discreetness shed over the whole little room an aroma as of violets; a suggestion of the scent of violets nestled, too, in the soft tints of the draperies and furniture—rosewood and rose moiré—and hung about the corners of the little rosewood writing-table, with its silver appointments and its photographs under smooth glass frames. Above the writing-table hung a small white Venetian mirror. The gentle air of modest refinement, the subdued and almost prudish tenderness which floated about the little hearth, the writing-table and the sofa, gliding between the quiet folds of the faded hangings, had something soothing, something to quiet the nerves, so that Dolf presently ceased his work of measurement, sat down, looked around him and finally remained staring [4]at the portrait of Cecile’s husband, the minister of State, dead eighteen months back.

After that he had not long to wait before Cecile came in. She advanced towards him smiling, as he rose from his seat, pressed his hand, excused herself that the children had detained her. She always put them to sleep herself, her two boys, Dolf and Christie, and then they said their prayers, one beside the other in their little beds. The scene came back to Dolf as she spoke of the children; he had often seen it.

Christie was not well, she said; he was so listless; she hoped it might not turn out to be measles.
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2

There was motherliness in her voice, but she did not seem a mother as she reclined, girlishly slight, on the sofa, with behind [5]her the soft glow of the lace flower of light on its stem of onyx. She was still in the black of her mourning. Here and there the light at her back touched her flaxen hair with a frail golden halo; the loose crape tea-gown accentuated the maidenly slimness of her figure, with the gently curving lines of her long neck and somewhat narrow shoulders; her arms hung with a certain weariness as her hands lay in her lap; gently curving, too, were the lines of her girlish youth of bust and slender waist, slender as a vase is slender, so that she seemed a still expectant flower of maidenhood, scarcely more than adolescent, not nearly old enough to be the mother of her children, her two boys of six and seven.

Her features were lost in the shadow—the lamplight touching her hair with gold—and Dolf could not at first see into her eyes; but presently, as he grew accustomed [6]to the shade, these shone softly out from the dusk of her features. She spoke in her low-toned voice, a little faint and soft, like a subdued whisper; she spoke again of Christie, of his god-child Dolf and then asked for news of Amélie, her sister.

“We are all well, thank you,” he replied. “You may well ask how we are: we hardly ever see you.”

“I go out so little,” she said, as an excuse.

“That is just where you make a mistake: you do not get half enough air, not half enough society. Amélie was saying so only at dinner to-day; and that’s why I’ve looked in to ask you to come round to us to-morrow evening.”

“Is it a party?”

“No; nobody.”

“Very well, I will come. I shall be very pleased.” [7]

“Yes, but why do you never come of your own accord?”

“I can’t summon up the energy.”

“Then how do you spend your evenings?”

“I read, I write, or I do nothing at all. The last is really the most delightful: I only feel myself alive when I am doing nothing.”

He shook his head:

“You’re a funny girl. You really don’t deserve that we should like you as much as we do.”

“How?” she asked, archly.

“Of course, it makes no difference to you. You can get on just as well without us.”

“You mustn’t say that; it’s not true. Your affection means a great deal to me, but it takes so much to induce me to go out. When I am once in my chair, I sit thinking, or not thinking; and then I find it difficult to stir.” [8]

“What a horribly lazy mode of life!”

“Well, there it is!... You like me so much: can’t you forgive me my laziness? Especially when I have promised you to come round to-morrow.”

He was captivated:

“Very well,” he said, laughing. “Of course you are free to live as you choose. We like you just the same, in spite of your neglect of us.”

She laughed, reproached him with using ugly words and rose slowly to pour him out a cup of tea. He felt a caressing softness creep over him, as if he would have liked to stay there a long time, talking and sipping tea in that violet-scented atmosphere of subdued refinement: he, the man of action, the politician, member of the Second Chamber, every hour of whose day was filled up with committees here and committees there.

“You were saying that you read and [9]wrote a good deal: what do you write?” he asked.

“Letters.”

“Nothing but letters?”

“I love writing letters. I write to my brother and sister in India.”

“But that is not the only thing?”

“Oh, no!”

“What else do you write then?”

“You’re growing a bit indiscreet, you know.”

“Nonsense!” he laughed back, as if he were quite within his right. “What is it? Literature?”

“Of course not! My diary.”

He laughed loudly and gaily:

“You keep a diary! What do you want with a diary? Your days are all exactly alike!”

“Indeed they are not.”

He shrugged his shoulders, quite non-plussed. She had always been a riddle to [10]him. She knew this and loved to mystify him:

“Sometimes my days are very nice and sometimes very horrid.”

“Really?” he said, smiling, looking at her out of his kind little eyes.

But still he did not understand.

“And so sometimes I have a great deal to write in my diary,” she continued.

“Let me see some of it.”

“By all means ... after I’m dead.”

A mock shiver ran through his broad shoulders:

“Brr! How gloomy!”

“Dead! What is there gloomy about that?” she asked, almost merrily.

But he rose to go:

“You frighten me,” he said, jestingly. “I must be going home; I have a lot to do still. So we see you to-morrow?”

“Thanks, yes: to-morrow.”

He took her hand; and she struck a little [11]silver gong, for him to be let out. He stood looking at her a moment longer, with a smile in his beard:

“Yes, you’re a funny girl, and yet ... and yet we all like you!” he repeated, as if he wished to excuse himself in his own eyes for this affection.

And he stooped and kissed her on the forehead: he was so much older than she.

“I am very glad that you all like me,” she said. “Till to-morrow, then. Good-bye.”
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3

He went; and she was alone. The words of their conversation seemed still to be floating in the silence, like vanishing atoms. Then the silence became complete; and Cecile sat motionless, leaning back in the three little cushions of the sofa, black in her crape against the light of the lamp, her eyes gazing out before her. All [12]around her a vague dream descended as of little clouds, in which faces shone for an instant, from which low voices issued without logical sequence of words, an aimless confusion of recollection. It was the dreaming of one on whose brain lay no obsession either of happiness or of grief, the dreaming of a mind filled with peaceful light: a wide, still, grey Nirvana, in which all the trouble of thinking flows away and the thoughts merely wander back over former impressions, taking them here and there, without selecting. For Cecile’s future appeared to her as a monotonous sweetness of unruffled peace, in which Dolf and Christie grew up into jolly boys, young undergraduates, men, while she herself remained nothing but the mother, for in the unconsciousness of her spiritual life she did not know herself entirely. She did not know that she was more wife than mother, however fond she [13]might be of her children. Swathed in the clouds of her dreaming, she did not feel that there was something missing, by reason of her widowhood; she did not feel loneliness, nor a need of some one beside her, nor regret that yielding air alone flowed about her, in which her arms might shape themselves and grope in vain for something to embrace. The capacity for these needs was there, but so deep hidden in her soul’s unconsciousness that she did not know of its existence nor suspect that one day it might assert itself and rise up slowly, up and up, an apparition of more evident melancholy. For such melancholy as was in her dreaming seemed to her to belong to the past, to the memory of the dear husband whom she had lost, and never, never, to the present, to an unrealized sense of her loneliness.

Whoever had told her now that something was wanting in her life would have roused her indignation; she herself imagined that she had everything that she wanted; and she valued highly the calm happiness of the innocent egoism in which she and her children breathed, a happiness which she thought complete. When she dreamed, as now, about nothing in particular—little dream-clouds fleeing across the field of her imagination, with other cloudlets in their wake—sometimes great tears would well into her eyes and trickle slowly down her cheek; but to her these were only tears of an unspeakably vague melancholy, a light load upon her heart, barely oppressive and there for some reason which she did not know, for she had ceased to mourn the loss of her husband.

In this manner she could pass whole evenings, simply sitting dreaming, never wearying of herself, nor reflecting how the people outside hurried and tired themselves, aimlessly, without being happy, whereas she was happy, happy in the cloudland of her dreams.

The hours sped and her hand was too slack to reach for the book upon the table beside her; slackness at last permeated her so thoroughly that one o’clock arrived and she could not yet decide to get up and go to her bed.