Georges Eekhoud

“ But she, being aware that Kehlmark's despair had precedence, was greater even than her own, took up none but a maternal attitude.
"Tell me, Blandine," said he, "to whom have I ever done harm? To thee? But without meaning it; I was not at all the man thou had'st dreamed of, or at least, the sort thou would'st have wished. I cannot help it. The first to suffer was I myself through thy suffering. Thou weep'st in listening to me; thou art right, Blandine, if thou shed'st these tears at the thought of my calvary, of my long Passion. Thy pity does me honour and does me good. ”

“ Night has fallen. Nobody pays any further attention to Blandine. Every servant girl is provided for. But Blandine will have to wait at least three summers before an honest youth would think of her. Her turn will come! That may be what is meant by a certain anticipated homage in the shape of tender glances, or light touches of the body, which some of the gay sparks bestow upon her, as they press slightly against her with their thighs in passing. The child sees no more in the looks, feels no more in the touches than a somewhat rough sympathy, that is all! ”

“ A woman to-day, controlling the economy of a lordly domain, she looks back upon herself as a young girl, a little milkmaid, standing in the shadow of the beech which commanded the vast plain of Campine. Blandine hears again the frogs croaking in the ponds and ditches, and her heart delights, as long ago, in the scent of burning newly-clipped wood, that the breeze carries leagues away from those localities. ”

“ Out of respect for certain prejudices still remaining, Madame de Kehlmark would not go so far as to recommend marriage to those whom she called her two children, but all the same, she would not in any way have dissuaded them from it. When she was alone with Blandine she expressed her apprehensions for the young Count's future: "This big boy, full of illusions, will need a veritable angel, to serve him as a guide, and to conduct him through life; someone who, without snatching him roughly from his chimeras, will lead him gently by the hand into paths of reality." ”

“ I have gathered their story from these haunted landscapes on evenings like this, especially those bits of heather where melancholy used to reign even more gloomily than elsewhere, where plain and horizon distilled the essences of their heavy sadness and shady sleep. Certain details of the landscape contract, as thou wilt have noticed in keeping thy sheep, a poignant and almost prophetic significance. Nature seems to suffer from remorse. The clouds stop and accumulate in a funeral procession over a pool predestined to be the scene of a death by drowning, a crime, or a suicide. ”

“ These transmutations of servants every year serve as pretext for a festival, which Blandine remembers with a sort of voluptuous, soothing melancholy. At Smaragdis, the odour of the elders and syringas was sufficient to call up again before her the circumstances and the actors in these rustic festivities.
A warm sun excites the sweet fragrance of the hedges and thickets. The quail, squatting amid the corn, whines a love-call. No one is any longer working in the freshly-laboured plains. ”

“ The young man began by choosing for him two of his favourite sheep as nurses. Stephen shot up and became a chubby child, rosy and pretty as an angel. Gerard continued to keep for him the best milk of his sheep, the sweetest fruits, and the eggs of ringdoves and pheasants. He adored him as no other human being ever adored another, his poor wild heart having never been able to expend the treasures of affection which it had accumulated. Stephen chirped like a bird; he was as fair as the other was dark; and the little fellow ordered about the big, wild boy. ”

“ Why did he recollect, before the spasm, the accordion music in the twilight, across the lilac-flowers in bloom and the youthful villagers putting on their blue smocks over their faded working clothes? Was it because these country lads might have come from his mistress's village? He gloried to be in touch through her with an entire rustic humanity; it was the strength, the savour, the rough and carnal gesture, the fleshly passion redolent of the soil, which he loved in Blandine on this nuptial evening. ”

“ Henry and Blandine were standing at her bedside, deceived by the calmness of the dying woman, and unable to believe in the imminence of her end. It would appear that the nearness of death confers on the sufferers the gift of second-sight and of prophecy. Did the Dowager of Kehlmark have a glimpse of the scabrous future in store for her grandson? Did she fear to ask Blandine to associate her destiny irrevocably with Henry's? At all events, she never gave expression to her supreme desire. ”

“ Yes, I know that right enough, my poor Blandine. I also love thee and trust thee entirely. That is why I am surprised to see thee agree so well with the envious and malicious ... I have nothing to reproach myself with, be sure of that. The same protection which my grandmother accorded thee I further bestow to-day on this young peasant. And is it thou who would'st make a crime of the good I wish to do to this despised and disinherited child? Ah Blandine, I no longer recognise thee in such a rôle. Guidon is an admirably gifted boy and of quite an exceptional nature. ”

“ This conviction minister Bomberg himself still tenaciously held.
But now, Henry had returned to the sentiment of his dignity, his autonomy, and his conscience. With Guidon and Blandine he felt himself strong enough to create a religion of absolute love, as well homogenic as heterogenic. He lived in a state of exaltation, like a prophet on the point of setting out on an imperative and dangerous mission. ”

“ Harassed by Landrillon, she had ended by giving herself up to him. She had offered her poor body as a holocaust to save the soul of him whom she regarded as sacreligious and criminal. As a Christian woman she doubtless prayed for him to snatch his soul from perdition, and all her heart rose towards the ungrateful man at the very moment when she immolated herself in the arms of the odious blackmailer.
The sacrifice was renewed at each fresh exigency of the rascal. Blandine breathed again. Landrillon would not attempt anything against the Count's reputation. She hoped also for a miracle. ”

“ All at once, while it seems to the belated young girl that the crickets accentuate their irritating music, Blandine is hustled, clasped, and overturned on to a hillock by a human figure, which runs out from behind a broombush. The assailant pulls up her petticoats, forages between her soft, adolescent limbs, handles and strokes her flesh, sighing and panting meanwhile, energetically but not brutally, and finishes by taking entire possession of her.
"Ariaan!" The name, which she would have cried out on recognising the King of the Winnowers, remains stuck in her throat, checked by fright. ”

“ As for the intellectual pleasures which Kehlmark enjoyed, Landrillon held them as so many frivolities.
The Count permitted a great deal of latitude to this rascal. He smiled as Landrillon rattled off his doughty deeds as a frequenter of low lodging-houses and an explorer of garrets. But, where Landrillon showed himself particularly incomparable was in his out-breaks as a woman-hater, in his paradoxical and disparaging tirades against a sex, which all the same, if he was to be believed, had never been sparing in its favors to him. ”

“ Would he have already "unharnessed," and he a young man still?"
"Landrillon!" protested Blandine, "pray refrain from such reflections. It is not for you to judge the Count. What he does is well done, do you hear?"
"Beg pardon, Mademoiselle, I'll keep quiet, perfectly quiet! But all the same, he's very mysterious, our master! He leads a strange kind of life. Always with his peasants, and especially with this little wheedler. We count for no more in his eyes than his horses and dogs. Really, I admire your indulgence for his larkings. You know better than I that he has entirely thrown you over. ”

“ Around her the tepid air pricks and stimulates their heated bodies. The atmosphere of desire in which they have passed so many hours becomes intensified. Soon Blandine will be unable to recollect the last drinks and sarabands in which she took part. But what enervates her is much more the fermentation of hardy youth a-bustling around her than the scent of roses and the sweet beer. Half-somnambulant, well-nigh swooning from pure felicity, she takes her place with the others in the "Roseland" for the journey homewards, and the chorus ever-more repeated contributes to her half-sleepy condition. ”

“ I am solely moved by zeal for my religion, proper morals, and the triumph of goodness."
"In order to succeed, my Reverend Sir," Landrillon resumed a cunning look, "we must discover in the Count of Kehlmark a transgression which would offend a terrible, and in some sort ineradicable, prejudice in our social and Christian order; you understand what I mean, an abomination which would cry not only for vengeance to heaven but even to the less hardened sinners."
"Yes, but who will furnish us the proof of a crime of this nature?" sighed Bomberg. ”

“ Why name the sacrifices of Blandine, beautiful name covering a more beautiful soul, save to emphasize the martyrdom she endured? Blandine, true type of thousands of other brave girls and women living to-day in this strange God's world; Blandine, the losing heroine, who made a living sacrifice of her woman's body to save a mans name from shame. ”

“ One would think there was a sort of moral urtica in the air. These miasmas of bestial folly spread even to our retreat. It is better to face them under the wide-open sky. Besides, as we depart to-morrow, this will be my last walk in Smaragdis, a farewell to my native isle, where it is true, I have suffered much, but only to love and enjoy the more deeply and recognise myself in thee."
Kehlmark endeavoured in vain to turn him aside from this excursion. Guidon seemed drawn out of doors by a magnetic force which mysteriously summoned him. ”

“ Workmen, peasants, torn from their villages, soldiers in barracks, ardently longing after their villages far away, sharp-pointed steeples which rend your heart with homesickness:—this association of fugitive ideas in Kehlmark's mind turned into one dominant idea of the peasant, from whence stood out all at once, as though symbolic, the image of Blandine, not at all the Blandine of the present day, but the little peasant girl, such as she seemed retrospectively to him, the poet enamoured of strength and simple nature. ”

“ After a short silence: "And you will come to see us at 'Les Pèlerins', Count," asked Claudie, a little disturbed in her matrimonial speculations by the almost fervent tone of Kehlmark's last words.
"Yes, Count, you would do us great honour by such a visit," added the Burgomaster: "Without boasting, "Les Pèlerins" has not its equal in the whole kingdom. We have none but cattle of the choicest kind, prize specimens, the cows and horses no less than the pigs and sheep." ”

“ More than once, Henry's friends, the shrimp fishermen and the vagabonds of the Klaarvatsch beach, offered to bring the minister to reason; especially five of them, who were permanently employed at the chateau and formed a sort of bodyguard to Kehlmark. Grandsons of old-time wreckers, casual dikemen, plunderers of jetsam—the painter often made them pose and amused himself with their wrestling and their knife-play deadened-edged, or perhaps, he would confess them, enjoying with Guidon their rough language and the coarse-mouthed stories of their prowesses. ”

“ Let us say nothing of his coming to the château, but I fear, Henry, that you really display too publicly an outrageous attachment to this little peasant before his equals outside."
"Blandine!" said Kehlmark, pushing away his papers, throwing aside his pen and standing up, confounded at the audacity of this introduction.
"Oh, pardon me, Monsieur Henry," she resumed, "I know well that your actions do not concern them. But all the same, people are so talkative! Always seeing this young peasant hanging at your heels sets their fancies and their evil tongues to work." ”

“ The intellectual peer of the famous men whose names we have just mentioned, George Eekhoud well deserves the celebrity he has won. He is the author of numerous worlds that are justly honoured by the cultivated and the discerning in all French-speaking lands, for the simple and perfectly comprehensible reason that they are works of art, wrought with infinite patience and chiselled with admirable dexterity. That is equivalent to asserting that George Eekhoud is no penny-a-liner throwing off, with feverish haste, a conglomeration of ill-digested conceptions couched in rag-and bobtail terms. ”

“ Claudie monopolised the visitor and he seemed to have no attention but for her, no look except for what she pointed out to him. Encouraged by her example, he stroked the shining backs of the cows; she made him taste the foaming milk with which the sturdy milkmaids were filling brown earthenware jars. In a neighbouring apartment other amazons were churning butter. The insipid savour disgusted Henry, who preferred to breathe the strong-smelling atmosphere of the stable, where his horse was engaged in chewing fresh clover, in company with the robust palfreys of the farm. ”

“ He begins to bray, feels ill, when a pig is killed at the fair, or when the butcher marks with red chalk the backs of those sheep that are to be converted into mutton! Guidon is a girl spoiled. My real boy is our Claudie. Ah! she's the sort of girl to get through work for you!"
"It is a pity; he has in spite of that a very intelligent air," remarked the Dykgrave, with as much indifference as possible. "And he plays the bugle admirably too! Why don't you make him seriously a musician?"
"Oh, yes! Now, you're joking, Count. He is incapable of sticking to anything profitable. ”

“ For several evenings the plaintive strains of brass-bellied instruments calling "all lights out" in an artillery barracks situated away down at the further extremity of the faubourg, had come, wafted along on the warm breeze to Kehlmark's ears, mingled with the music of the lilies that agitated their fragrant-tipped thyrses.
There was also building a-going on in the neighbourhood: the principal construction is on the morrow to receive its roof, and throughout the day the young patrician has heard the silvery music made by the masons as they strike the bricks with their trowels. ”

“ No doubt Henry in his own mind exaggerated their teasing humour towards the young Govaertz, for, as he walked with Claudie, he seemed strangely drawn in the direction of their noisy groups. His approach quietened them and cut short the "ragging" which they were about to inflict upon their victim. Yet, a sort of bashfulness, or fear of men's opinion, prevented Kehlmark from interfering directly in favour of his protégé; he turned away and even refrained from speaking to him, but in romping with Claudie he raised his voice, and Guidon artlessly imagined that the Count wished him to hear. ”

“ Having packed his belongings, Landrillon, white with rage and breathing out vengeance, rejoined Blandine, flattering himself with the idea that he would be able to get back his own out of her and terrorise her for both.
"It's getting serious. They declare war against me now! Look out for yourself!" he came and said to her.
"You can do just as you please," replied Blandine, henceforth as calm and self-possessed as Kehlmark. "We shall be surprised at nothing from you!" ”

“ The minister, who had cudgelled his brains to find a means of overthrowing and ruining the Dykgrave, had never contemplated, even in imagination, a weapon so maleficent as that which Landrillon counted one day upon using. Ah, the terrible explosion! If that mine one day burst the worst scoundrels would be obliged to abandon the unworthy favourite! Not a decent man on the island would again hold out his hand to the reprobate! ”