CHAPTER VI
“OOF!” said Lot, outside, putting two fingers in his
ears, which had been deafened by the birds. “No
more uncles and cousins for the present, Elly: I’m
not going to Uncle Harold and the D’Herbourgs
after this! A grandmamma, a future grandpapa, an
uncle, an aunt and a very old family-doctor: that’s
enough antediluvianism for one day! I can’t do
with any more old people to-day, not even Uncle
Harold, who is far from being the most repellent.
So many old people, all in one day: it’s too oppressive,
it’s stifling! … Let’s walk a bit, if you’re
not tired. It’s fine, the wind’ll refresh us, it won’t
rain…. Come into the dunes with me. Here’s
the steam-tram coming: we’ll take it as far as the
Witte Brug and then go into the dunes. Come
along!”
They went by tram to the Witte Brug and were
soon in the dunes, where they went and sat in the
sand, with a strong sea-breeze blowing over their
heads.
“I hope I shall never grow old,” said Lot.
“Elly, don’t you think it terrible to grow old, older
everyday? …”
“Your pet aversion, Lot?” asked Elly.
She smiled. He looked at her seriously, almost
pale in the face, but, because he saw her smiling,
he managed to speak lightly:
“Worse than that. It’s my nightmare. To see
more and more wrinkles every day in your skin,
more streaks of grey in your hair; to feel your
memory going; to feel the edge of your emotions
growing blunt; to feel an extra crease in your
stomach which spoils the fit of your waistcoat; to
feel your powers waning and your back bending
under all the weight of the past which you drag
along with you … without being able to do a
thing to prevent it! … When your suit gets
old, you buy a new one: I’m speaking from the
capitalist’s point of view. But your body and soul
you get once for all and you have to take them with
you to the grave. If you economize with either of
them, then you haven’t lived, whereas, if you
squander them, you have to pay for it…. And
then that past, which you tow and trail along!
Every day adds its inexorable quota. We are just
mules, dragging along till we can go no farther and
till we drop dead with the effort…. Oh, Elly,
it’s terrible! Think of those old people of to-day !
Think of Grandpapa Takma and Grandmamma! I
look upon them as something to shudder at….
There they sit, nearly every day, ninety-three and
ninety-seven, each looking out of a window. What
do they talk about? Not much, I expect: their little
ailments, the weather; people as old as that don’t
talk, they are numbed. They don’t remember
things. Their past is heavy with years and crushes
them, gives them only a semblance of life, of the
aftermath of life: they’ve had their life…
Was it interesting or not? You know, I think it
must have been interesting for those old people,
else they wouldn’t trouble to meet now. They must
have lived through a good deal together.”
“They say that Grandpapa …”
“Yes, that he was Grandmamma’s lover….:
Those old people: to believe that, when you see them
now! … To realize love … passion …
in those old people! … They must have lived
through a lot together. I don’t know, but it has
always seemed to me, when I see them together, as
if there were something being wafted between them,
something strange, to and fro: something of a
tragedy which has become unravelled and of which
the last threads, now almost loose, are hovering
between the two of them…. And yet their
souls must be numbed: I cannot believe that they
talk much; but they look at each other or out of
the window: the loose threads hover, but still bind
their lives together…. Who knows, perhaps it
was interesting, in which case it might be something
for a novel….”
“Have you no idea, at the moment?”
“No, it’s years since I had an idea for a novel.
And I don’t think that I shall write any more. You
see, Elly, I’m getting … too old to write
for very young people; and who else reads
novels?”
“But you don’t write only for the public; you have
your own ideal of art!”
“It’s such a barren notion, that principle. All
very fine when you’re quite young: then it’s delightful
to swagger a bit with that ideal of art; you go
in for it then as another goes in for sport or a
cultivated palate…. Art really isn’t everything.
It’s a very beautiful thing, but, properly speaking,
it oughtn’t to be an aim in life. Artists combine a
great deal of pretentiousness with what is really a
small aim.”
“But, Lot, the influence they exercise …”
“With a book, a painting, an opera? Even to
the people who care about it, it’s only an insignificant
pleasure. Don’t go thinking that artists wield
great influence. All our arts are little ivory towers,
with little doors for the initiate. They influence life
hardly at all. All those silly definitions of art, of
Art with a capital A, which your modern authors
give you art is this, art is that are just one series
of exaggerated sentences. Art is an entertainment;
and a painter is an entertainer; so is a composer;
so is a novelist.”
“Oh, no, Lot!”
“I assure you it is so. You’re still so precious
in your conception of art, Elly, but it’ll wear away,
dear. It’s an affectation. Artists are entertainers,
of themselves and others. They have always been
so, from the days of the first troubadours, in the
finest sense of the word. Make the sense of it as
fine as you please, but entertainers they remain. An
artist is no demigod, as we picture him when we are
twenty-three, like you, Elly. An entertainer is what
he is; he entertains himself and others; usually he
is vain, petty, envious, jealous, ungenerous to his
fellow-entertainers, puffed up with his principles and
his art, that noble aim in life; just as petty and
jealous as any one else in any other profession.
Then why shouldn’t I speak of authors as entertainers?
They entertain themselves with their own
sorrows and emotions; and with a melancholy sonnet
or a more or less nebulous novel they entertain the
young people who read them. For people over
thirty, who are not in the trade, no longer read
novels or poems. I myself am too old to write for
young people. When I write now, I have the bourgeois
ambition to be read by my contemporaries, by
men getting on for forty. What interests them is
actual life, seen psychologically, but expressed in concrete
truths and not reflected in a mirage and poetized
and dramatized through fictitious personages.
That’s why I’m a journalist and why I enjoy it.
I like to grip my reader at once and to let him
go again at once, because neither he nor I have
any time to spare. Life goes on. But to-morrow I
grip him again; and then again I don’t want to
charm him any longer than I grip him. In our
ephemeral lives, this, journalism, is the ephemeral
and the true art, for I want the form of it to be
frail but chaste…. I don’t say that I have got
so far myself; but that is my artistic ideal….”
“Then will you never write any more novels?”
“Who can say what he will or will not do again?
Say it … and you do something different all
the same. Who knows what I shall be saying or
doing in a year’s time? If I knew Grandmamma’s
inner life, I should perhaps write a novel. It is
almost history; and, even as I take an interest in
the story of our own time, in the anticipation of
our future, so history has a great charm for me,
even though history depresses humanity and human
beings and though our own old folk depress me.
Grandmamma’s life is almost history: emotions and
events of another period….”
“Lot, I wish you would begin to work seriously.”
“I shall start working as soon as we are in Italy.
The best thing, Elly, is not to think of setting up
house yet. Not with Mamma and also not by ourselves.
Let us go on wandering. When we are
very old it will be time enough to roost permanently.
What draws me to Italy is her tremendous past. I
try to reach antiquity through the Renascence, but
I have never got so far and in the Forum I still
think too much of Raphael and Leonardo.”
“So first to Paris … and then Nice …”
“And on to Italy if you like. In Paris we shall
look up another aunt.”
“Aunt Thérèse?”
“Yes. That’s the one who is more Catholic
than the Pope. And at Nice Ottilie…. Elly,
you know that Ottilie lives with an Italian, she’s not
married: will you be willing to see her all the
same?”
“I should think so,” said Elly, with a gentle smile.
“I am very anxious to see Ottilie again…. The
last time was when I heard her sing at Brussels.”
“She has a heavenly voice …”
“And she’s a very beautiful woman.”
“Yes, she is like Papa, she is tall, she doesn’t take
after Mamma a bit…. She could never get on
with Mamma. And of course she spent more of
her time with Papa…. She’s no longer young,
she’s two years older than I…. It’s two years
since I saw her…. What will she be like? I
wonder if she is still with her Italian…. Do
you know how she met him? By accident, in the
train. They travelled in the same compartment
from Florence to Milan. He was an officer. They
talked to each other … and they’ve been together
ever since. He resigned his commission, so as to go
with her wherever she was singing…. At least,
I believe they are still together…. ‘Sinful and
hysterical,’ Aunt Stefanie would say! … Who
knows? Perhaps Ottilie met a great happiness
… and did not hesitate to seize it….
Ah, most people hesitate … and grope
about!
“We’re different from Ottilie, Lot, and yet we
don’t grope … or hesitate….”
“Elly, are you quite sure that you love me?”
She bent over him where he lay, stretched out in
the sand, leaning on his two elbows. She felt her
love inside her very intensely, as a glowing need to
live for him, to eliminate herself entirely for his
sake, to stimulate him to work, but to great, very
great work…. That was the way in which her
love had blossomed up, after her grief….
Under the wide sky, in which the clouds drifted like
a great fleet of ships with white, bellying sails, a
doubt rose in her mind for perhaps one moment,
very vaguely and unconsciously, whether he would
need her as she herself intended to give herself.
… But this vague, unconscious feeling was
dissipated in the breeze that blew over her temples;
and her almost motherly love was so intense and
glowing that she bent over him and kissed him and
said, quite convinced and certain of herself, though
not so certain of life and the future:
“Yes, Lot, I am sure of it.”
Whatever doubt he may have entertained was
scattered in smiles from his soul after this tender
and simple affirmation that she loved him, as he felt,
for himself alone, in a gentle, wondering bliss that
already seemed to see happiness approaching….
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