Ecstasy (3 page)

The next evening Cecile revelled even more than usual in the luxury of being able to stay at home. It was after dinner; she sat on the
chaise-longue
in her little boudoir with Dolf and Christie, an arm thrown round each of them, sitting between them, so young, like an elder sister. In her low voice she was telling them:

“Judah came up to him, and said, Oh my lord, let me stay as a bondsman instead of Benjamin. For our father, who is such an old man, said to us when we went away with Benjamin: My son Joseph I have already lost; surely he has been torn in pieces by the wild beasts. And if you take this one also from me, and any harm befall him, I shall become grey with sorrow, and die. Then (Judah said) I said to our father that I would be responsible for his safety, and that I should be very naughty if we did not bring Benjamin home again. And therefore I pray you, Oh my lord, let me be your bondsman, and let the lad go back with his brethren. For how can I go back to my father if the lad be not with me …”

“And Joseph, Mamma, what did Joseph say?” asked Christie. He nestled closely against his mother, this poor slender little fellow of six, with his fine golden hair, and his eyes of pale forget-me-not blue, his little fingers hooking themselves nervously into Cecile’s gown, rumpling the crêpe.

“Then Joseph could no longer restrain himself, and ordered his servants to leave him; then he burst into tears, crying, Do you not know me? I am Joseph.”

But Cecile could not continue, for Christie had thrown himself on her neck in a frenzy of despair, and she heard him sobbing against her.

“Christie! My darling!”

She was greatly distressed; she had grown interested in her own recital and had not noticed Christie’s excitement, and now he was sobbing against her in such violent grief that she could find no word to quiet him, to comfort him, to tell him that it ended happily.

“But, Christie, don’t cry, don’t cry! It ends happily.”

“And Benjamin, what about Benjamin?”

“Benjamin returned to his father, and Jacob came down to Egypt to live with Joseph.”

“Was it really like that? Or are you making it up?”

“No, really my darling. Don’t, don’t cry any more.”

Christie grew calmer, but he was evidently disappointed. He was not satisfied with the end of the story; and yet it was very pretty like that, much prettier than if Joseph had been angry, and put Benjamin in prison.

“What a baby to cry!” said Dolf. “It was only a story.”

Cecile did not reply that the story had really happened, because it was in the Bible. She had suddenly become very sad, in doubt of herself. She fondly dried the child’s eyes with her pocket-handkerchief.

“And now, children, bed. It’s late!” she said, faintly.

She put them to bed, a ceremony which lasted a long time; a ceremony with an elaborate ritual of undressing, washing, saying of prayers, tucking-in, and kissing. When after an hour she was sitting downstairs again alone, she first realised how sad she felt.

Ah no, she did not know! Amélie was quite right: one never knew anything, never! She had been so happy that day; she had found herself again, deep in the recesses of her most secret self, in the essence of her soul; all day she had seen her dreams hovering about her as an apotheosis; all day she had felt within her the consuming love of her children. She had told them stories out of the Bible after dinner, and suddenly, when Christie began to cry, a doubt had arisen within her. Was she really good to her little boys? Did she not, in her love, in the tenderness of her affection for them spoil and weaken them? Would she not end by utterly unfitting them for a practical life, with which she did not come into contact, but in which the children, when they grew up, would have to move? It flashed through her mind: parting, boarding-schools, her children estranged from her, coming home big, rough boys, smoking and swearing, cynicism on their lips and in their hearts; lips which would no longer kiss her, hearts in which she would no longer have a place. She pictured them already with the swagger of their seventeen or eighteen years, tramping across her rooms in their cadet’s and midshipman’s uniforms, with broad shoulders and a hard laugh, flicking the ash from their
cigars upon the carpet. Why did Quaerts’ image suddenly rise up in the midst of this cruelty? Was it chance or a consequence? She could not analyse it; she could not explain the presence of this man, rising up through her grief in the atmosphere of her antipathy. But she felt sad, sad, sad, as she had not felt sad since Van Even’s death; not vaguely melancholy, as she so often felt, but sad, undoubtedly sorrowful at the thought of what must come. Oh! to have to part with her children! And then, to be alone … Loneliness, everlasting loneliness! Loneliness within herself; that feeling of which Jules had such dread; withdrawn from the world which had no charm for her, sunk away alone into all emptiness! She was thirty, she was old, an old woman. Her house would be empty, her heart empty! Dreams, clouds of dreaming, which fly away, which rise like smoke, revealing only emptiness. Emptiness, emptiness, emptiness! The word each time fell hollowly, with hammer strokes, upon her breast. Emptiness, emptiness …

“Why am I like this?” she asked herself. “What ails me? What has altered?”

Never had she felt that word emptiness throb within her in this way: that very afternoon she had been gently happy, as ordinarily. And now! She saw nothing before her, no future, no life, nothing but broad darkness. Estranged from her children, alone within herself …

She rose up with a half moan of pain, and walked across the boudoir. The discreet half-light troubled her,
oppressed her. She turned the key of the lace-covered lamp; a golden gleam crept over the rose folds of the silk curtains like glistening water. A fire burned on the hearth, but she felt cold.

She stood by the little table; she took up a card, with one corner turned down, and read: “T. H. Quaerts.” A coronet with five balls was engraved above the name. “Quaerts!” How short it sounded! A name like the smack of a hard hand. There was something bad, something cruel in the name: “Quaerts, Quaerts …”

She threw down the bit of card, angry with herself. She felt cold, and not herself, just as she had felt at the Van Attemas’ the evening before.

“I will not go out again. Never again, never!” she said, almost aloud. “I am so contented in my own house, so contented with my life, so beautifully happy … That card! Why should he leave a card? What do I want with his card? …”

She sat down at her writing-table and opened her blotting-book. She wished to finish a half-written letter to India but she was in quite a different mood from when she had begun it. So she took from a drawer a thick book, her diary. She wrote the date, then reflected a moment, tapping her teeth nervously with the silver penholder.

But then, with a little ill-tempered gesture, she threw down the pen, pushed the book aside, and, letting her head fall into her hands, sobbed aloud.

Cecile was astonished at this unusually long fit of abstraction, that it should continue for days before she could again enter into her usual condition of serenity, the delightful abode from which, without wishing it, she had wandered. But she compelled herself, with gentle compulsion, to recover the treasures of her loneliness. She argued with herself that it would be some years before she would have to part from Dolf and Christie: there was time enough to grow accustomed to the idea of separation. Besides, nothing had altered either about her, or within her, and so she let the days glide slowly over her, like gently flowing water.

In this way, gently flowing by, a fortnight had elapsed since the evening she spent at Dolf’s. It was a Saturday afternoon; she had been working with the children – she still taught them herself – and she had walked out with them; and now she sat again in her favourite room awaiting the Van Attemas, who came every Saturday at half-past four to afternoon tea. She rang for the servant, who lighted the blue flame of methylated spirit. Dolf and Christie were with her; they sat upon the floor on footstools, cutting the pages of a children’s magazine to which Cecile subscribed for them. They were sitting quietly and well-bred, like children who grow up in a feeble surrounding, in the midst of too much
refinement, too pale, with hair too long and too blonde, Christie especially, whose little temples were veined as if with lilac blood. Cecile stepped by them as she went to glance over the tea-table, and the look she cast upon them wrapped the children in a warm embrace of devotion. She was in her calmly happy mood; it was so pleasant that she would soon see the Van Attemas coming in. She liked these hours in the afternoon when her silver tea-kettle hissed over the blue flame. An exquisite intimacy filled the room; she had in her long, shapely feminine fingers that special power of witchery, that gentle art of handling by which everything, over which they merely glided, acquired a look of herself; an indefinable something, of tint, of position, of light, which the things had not until the touch of those fingers came across them.

There came a ring. She thought it rather early for the Van Attemas, but she rarely saw anyone else in her seclusion from the outer world – therefore it must be they. A few moments, however, and Greta came in, with a card. Was Mevrouw at home, and could the gentleman see her?

Cecile recognised the card from a distance: she had seen one like it quite recently. Yet she took it up, glanced at it discontentedly, with drawn eyebrows.

What an idea! Why did he do it? What did it mean? But she thought it unnecessary to be impolite and refuse to see him. After all he was a friend of Dolf’s.

“Show Meneer up,” she said.

Greta went, and it seemed to Cecile as though something trembled in the intimacy which filled the room; as if the objects over which her fingers had just passed took another aspect, a look of fright. But Dolf and Christie had not changed; they were still sitting looking at the pictures, with occasional remarks falling softly from their lips. The door opened, and Quaerts entered the room. He had in still greater measure than before his air of shyness as he bowed to Cecile. To her this air was incomprehensible in him, who seemed so strong, so determined.

“I hope you will not think me indiscreet, Mevrouw, taking the liberty to visit you.”

“On the contrary, Mr Quaerts,” she said coldly. “Pray sit down.”

He sat down and placed his hat on the floor. “I am not disturbing you, Mevrouw?”

“Not in the least; I am expecting Mrs Van Attema and her daughters. You were so polite as to leave a card on me; but you know, I see nobody.”

“I know it, Mevrouw. Perhaps it is to that knowledge the indiscretion of my visit is due.”

She looked at him coldly, politely, smilingly. There was a feeling of irritation in her. She felt a desire to ask him frankly why he had come.

“How is that?” she asked, her mannerly smile converting her face into a veritable mask.

“I feared I should not see you for a long time, and I should consider it a great privilege to be allowed to know you more intimately.”

His tone was in the highest degree respectful. She raised her eyebrows, as if she did not understand, but the accent of his voice was so very courteous that she could not find a cold word with which to answer him.

“Are those your two children?” he asked, with a glance towards Dolf and Christie.

“Yes,” she replied. “Get up, boys, and shake hands with Meneer.”

The children approached timidly, and put out their little hands. He smiled, looked at them penetratingly with his small, deep-set eyes, and drew them to him.

“Am I mistaken, or is not the little one very like you?”

“They both resemble their father,” she replied.

It seemed to her she had set a shield of mistrust about herself, from which the children were excluded, within which she found it impossible to draw them. It troubled her that he held them, that he looked at them as he did.

But he set them free, and they went back to their little stools, gentle, quiet, well-behaved.

“Yet they both have something of you,” he insisted.

“Possibly,” she said.

“Mevrouw,” he resumed, as if he had something important to say to her, “I wish to ask you a direct question: tell me honestly, quite honestly, do you think me indiscreet?”

“Because you pay me a visit? No, I assure you, Mr Quaerts. It is very polite of you. Only if I may be candid.”

She gave a little laugh.

“Of course,” he said.

“Then I will confess to you that I fear you will find little in my house to amuse you, I see nobody …”

“I have not called on you for the sake of the people I might meet at your house.”

She bowed, smiling as if he had paid her a special compliment.

“Of course I am very pleased to see you. You are a great friend of Dolf’s, are you not?”

She tried continually to speak differently to him, more coldly, defiantly; but he was too courteous, and she could not do it.

“Yes,” he replied, “Dolf and I have known each other a long time. We have always been great friends, though we are so entirely different.”

“I like him very much; he is always very kind to us.”

She saw him look smilingly at the little table. Some reviews were scattered about it, and a book or two; among these a little volume of Emerson’s essays.

“You told me you did not read much,” he said, mischievously.

“I should think …”

And he pointed to the books.

“Oh,” said she, carelessly, with a slight shrug of her shoulders, “a little …”

She thought him tiresome; why should he remark that she had hidden herself from him? Why, indeed,
had
she hidden herself from him?

“Emerson,” he read, bending forward a little. “Forgive me,” he added quickly. “I have no right to spy upon your pursuits. But the print is so large; I read it from here.”

“You are far-sighted?” she asked, laughing.

“Yes.”

His politeness, a certain respectfulness, as if he would not venture to touch the tips of her fingers, placed her more at her ease. She still felt antipathy towards him, but there was no harm in his knowing what she read.