Louis Couperus

“ Was it not there that hope smiled upon him, upon all of them, upon poor Mamma: upon poor Mamma who, at that very moment, was sunning her lonely old age in the light of that golden dawn? . . . Had he not done wisely? But why, if he had done wisely, must he doubt sometimes and be astonished and even anxious about all that young, radiant life which he had begotten and which shed forth a warmth and light in which he now felt his strange soul happily basking, warmer and lighter than the sunlight in which he was riding? Why should he doubt and be astonished and even anxious? ”

“ What was the use of lighting lamps: was the twilight not deeper and gloomier day by day, whether it were morning or evening? Did not the pale gold of the dawn shimmer more and more vaguely through the dense mist of twilight?... A dull, apathetic, feeble man.... Had he kept his secret all his life, concealed the real condition of his body and his soul, to become like that? And yet was he not Ernst's brother? Had he not always been Ernst's brother ... though it had always seemed otherwise? Were they not of the same blood and had not they, the brothers, the same soul, the same darkened soul? ”

“ During the days and weeks that followed, he went about with heavy, heavy melancholy in his heavy soul. Nobody noticed anything in him: at the barracks he blustered as usual; at home he romped with the children; he went with Adeline to take tea at Constance' and laughed at the tirades of Paul, who was daily becoming more and more of an elderly gentleman. Nobody noticed anything in him; and he himself thought it very strange that the eyes of the world never penetrated to the shuddering soul deep down within him, as though sickening in his great body, with its sham strength. ”

“ Who can tell me for certain that I am mistaken, Mamma, and that I have not that absolute conviction deep down in my soul? It is a wonderful thing to have an absolute conviction like that about yourself. I would almost say that to be certain about other people ... is not so wonderful as to be certain about yourself.... But still ... but still.... I feel that this is my vocation. Who can deny the existence of what I feel so very plainly within me, even though I am sometimes amazed at my own consciousness of it?... ”

“ The twilight was gathering around them all, sombre and menacing; and he felt its chilling influence even now as he rode along on that warm summer's day: the twilight was deepening around Dorine and around Paul, growing darker and darker with their growing loneliness, the loneliness of a lonely man and a lonely woman who had not sought or had not found the warm light for their later years, the still young but yet later years of the small soul that just exists and, consciously or unconsciously, is for ever asking itself the reason of its small existence. ”

“ And, as for poor Ernst, had the twilight not deepened around poor Ernst, his gloomy solitude growing ever darker, until he had fallen ill, ill in his soul and in his senses?... And, now that all those circles were shifting so far away from one another and becoming ever wider, what consolation would there be for Mamma, around whom loneliness and darkness were closing, closing just around her, poor Mamma, to whom the family circle meant so much, who had always wanted to remain the centre of the love and warmth of all her children?... ”

“ And, in this singular dreaming and waking and suffering and walking, he knew things which nobody had told him, knew them for certain: knew that a woman had drowned herself last night in Paris, in the lake in the Bois; knew that Van der Welcke and Constance had gone to fetch her body and were now bringing it back to him in a rushing express-train, but a train that came rushing through the sky on whirling aerial rails, cutting through the contortions of a huge snake-thing which wriggled round the clouds and filled the whole sky. ”

“ And to the children the joy of life seemed to be embodied in their father, a joy which they soon came to picture instinctively as a tall man, an hussar, with a loud voice and any number of jokes, a pair of high riding-boots and a clanking sword.
Gerdy was a tiny child of seven, who loved being petted; and, as soon as she saw Gerrit, she hung on to him, nestled on his knees, rubbed her head against the braid of his uniform, tugged at his moustache, dug her little fists into his eyes. ”

“ True, they are no longer alive ... but they feel, all the same. Those are the souls. They never leave me in peace. And then to look after all of you, who are alive, as well ... it's beyond me; sometimes it's beyond me.... There's Mamma, poor woman. The whole world is at her heels; and, if I didn't see to it, they would hide her away and bury her.... Then I have to look after Papa and you and Uncle Gerrit and Uncle Paul and all the rest of them. I have all of you to look after. You never see anything and you know nothing, you live in a dream, you walk blindly ... ”

“ Black-grey were those everlasting clouds; and it seemed as if they cast the shadow of their menace from the first hour of the day; and so short were the days that it was as though it were eternal night and as though the sun had lost itself very far away, circled from the small human world, circled very far behind the immeasurable world of the clouds and the endless firmaments. And, lashing, ever lashing, the whips of the rain beat down, wielded by the angry winds. Gloom and menace hung over the shuddering town and over the shuddering souls of the people. ”

“ You say I'm not serious?" cried Paul, grinning scornfully and working himself into a real temper. "Do you think I'm not serious?"
"Well, if you're serious, then I say that you're simply diseased."
"Diseased?"
"Yes, diseased: just as much as Ernst is diseased. That tidiness of yours is a mania; that way of looking upon the world as a dustbin is a disease. You were always a humbug, but at least you used to be good company, you used to be a brilliant talker; and nowadays, for some time past, you show yourself nowhere, you shut yourself up, you're becoming impossible and a bore...." ”

“ Oh, how dark and gloomy were the shadows of the twilight and how heavy was the fate that hung over their small souls, hung over them like a leaden sky, an immensity of leaden skies! . . .
He, yes, he would get better. It might take months yet; and then he would resume his service as a dull, decrepit old man, diseased through and through, from his childhood, under the semblance of muscular strength, until one serious illness was enough to break him and make him dull and old for all the rest of his life. ”

“ She saw—though no one knew it—Emilie and Henri toiling in Paris, struggling with life, which came towards them hideous and horrible, bringing with it poverty, which they had never known. She saw it so clearly that she almost felt like speaking of it.... But, because they would not have believed her, she remained silent, enduring all that gloomy life even as the town endured the black skies and the lashing of the rain....
And yonder, far away, too far for her, she saw a woman, old like herself, dying. She saw her dying and by her bedside she saw Constance and she saw Addie. ”

“ The old woman raised her hand almost angrily, imposing silence upon him:
"Diplomacy is the finest profession in the world," she said, sharply. "There's nothing above it. . . . It's just those new ideas, dear, which Granny can't keep up with and which make her so sad, because she doesn't understand them. . . ."
"Granny, I can't bear to see you crying like this."
He sat down beside her, took her hand, looked into her eyes. She mistook his gentleness:
"Won't you think it over, Addie?" she asked, softly and coaxingly.
"No, Granny," he said, in a calm, decided tone. "I can't do that." ”

“ And, while he boisterously tickled Gerdy and pretended to eat up Klaasje's bread-and-butter, like the great tease that he was, he thought:
"Now these are all my children and Adeline's children."
And he was filled with wonder as he saw them around him, the pretty, flaxen-haired children: the wonder of an artist at his work, wonder such as a sculptor might feel on contemplating his statue, or a writer reading his book, or a composer listening to his melodies, a simple, wondering astonishment that he should have made all that, a wondering astonishment at his own power and strength. ”

“ Constance went home through a dismal, heavy rain, hurrying along under the shelter of her umbrella, from which the drops fell in a steady cataract. She could not shake off the gloomy anxiety that haunted her in these days, through which flashed strange premonitions and presentiments; and, since she had been to Driebergen, in response to the old woman's dying summons, she could no longer free herself from this haunting dread, as though it were all a magic web in which she was caught. Oh, what could be threatening, now that the old woman yonder was dead? ”

“ He laughed till all the children, the nine of them, were laughing, for his laughter had tempted the three little ones—Jan, the tyrant, and his two small vassals—from the stairs, where they were playing. He laughed till Adeline, the dear quiet little mother, also got a painful fit of giggling, which made her choke silently in herself. And he could not stop; his laughter roared out and filled the house: even a street-boy, out of doors, flattened his nose against the window in an attempt to peer in and discover who was laughing like that inside. ”

“ And, after that revelation, it was no longer a dream, but a reality, as tangible as it could hope to be . . . for such a poor small soul. . . . What came, Marianne, was not so very much; but the small soul does not want much: an atom, a grain of absolute truth and reality; a tiny grain, but all-sufficing. . . . For small souls do not need much. . . . Just an atom, a grain. And of that grain, Marianne, it even communicated a part . . . to others. My child, that is the whole secret: to share your grain, to give, though it be but of your superfluity, to others. ”

“ Sick: was his soul sick? No, perhaps not: it was only shrinking into itself under the heavy, heavy melancholy. Sham strength: was his body weak? No, not his muscles ... but the worm was crawling about in his spine, the centipede was eating up his marrow.... And nobody in the wide world saw anything—of the centipede, of the worm, of all the horror of his life—even as nobody had seen anything of what had come about during the last few weeks between himself and his past: the last flare up of youth, Pauline.... Nobody saw anything. Life itself seemed blind. ”

“ Still, perhaps the rumble of the trains did keep Mamma and Marianne from going to sleep. For what a life it was, in this little villa at Baarn! Neither Mamma nor Marianne knew anybody; and they saw nobody. They had no carriage; and how can one live in the country without keeping a carriage? Even if it was only a dog-cart, or a governess-car, with a pony; but you must have something. . . . It was a rotten way of living. A brilliant idea of Uncle Adolf's, wasn't it, to insist that she should come and bury herself here for a whole mortal month and bore herself to death with Mamma and Marianne! ”

“ And from his own hands he glanced once more towards his Uncle Ernst's and seemed to read in them a soul highly susceptible to art and of extreme sensitiveness; a soul ready to assimilate the contents of books; a soul evolved out of loneliness, out of lonely life and lonely knowledge and, above all, out of lonely, very lonely feeling; a soul so lonely and shrinking that it had fallen ill of that loneliness and appeared to see and hear actually the thousand reflexions of all that it had read in books, seen in art and felt in its lonely hypersensitiveness. ”

“ And, in his turgid brain full of clouds, full of those idle thoughts, an immense, world-wide melancholy descended, a leaden twilight. The twilight descended from the sky outside and it descended from his own brain. . . . Then everything became chilly around him and within him; and, above all, memory was lost. Since the beast no longer held him in its clutching dragon's claws, since the thousand-legged crawling thing had devoured all his marrow with voluptuous licks, since it had perhaps sucked up his very blood: since then it had left him like an empty house, with soft muscles and flabby flesh ”