CHAPTER XIV
IN the night express, the young wife sat thinking.
Lot lay asleep, with a rug over him, in one corner
of the carriage, but the little bride could not sleep,
for an autumnal wind was howling along the train;
and so she just sat silently, in the other corner, thinking.
She had now given her life to another and
hoped for happiness. She hoped that she had a
vocation and that she would have devotion to
bestow. That was happiness; there was nothing
else; and Aunt Thérèse was right, even though she,
Elly, conceived devotion, happiness and vocation so
very differently. She wanted more than the feeling,
the thought; she wanted, above all, action. Even as
she had always given herself to action, though it
was only tennis at first—and sculpture later and in
the end the pouring out of her own sorrow in words
and the sending of it to an editor, to a publisher—so
she now longed to devote herself to action, or
at least to active collaboration. She looked wistfully
at Lot and felt that she loved him, however
differently it might be from the way in which she
had loved the first time. She loved him less for
her own sake, as when she had been in love before,
and loved him more for his sake, to rouse him to
great things. It was all very vague, but there was
ambition in it and ambition, springing from love,
for his sake. What a pity that he should fritter
away his talent in witty little articles and hastily-written
essays. That was like his conversation,
light and amusing, unconvinced and unconvincing;
and he could do better than that, much better.
Perhaps writing a novel was also not the great
thing; perhaps the great thing was writing, but not
a novel. What then? She sought and did not yet
find, but knew for certain—or thought she knew—that
she would find and that she would rouse Lot.
… Yes, they would be happy, they would continue
happy…. Out there, in Italy, she would
find it. She would find it in the past, in history,
perhaps; in things that were past, in beautiful noble
things that were dead, peacefully dead and still
beautiful…. Then why did she feel so melancholy?
Or was it only the melancholy which she
had always felt, so vaguely, and which was as a
malady underlying all her activity and which broke
in the inflection of her quick, voluble voice: the
melancholy because her youth, as a child without
parents, brothers or sisters, had bloomed so quietly
in the old man’s big house. He had always been
kind and full of fatherly care for her; but he was
so old and she had felt the pressure of his old
years. She had always had old people around her,
for, as far back as she could remember anything,
she remembered old Grandmamma Dercksz and
Dr. Roelofsz: she knew them, old even then, from
the time when she was a little child. Lot also, she
thought—though the life of a man, who went about
and travelled, was different from that of a girl, who
stayed at home—Lot also had felt the pressure of
all that old age around him; and that, no doubt,
was the reason why his dread of growing old had
developed into a sort of nervous obsession. Aunt
Stefanie and the uncles at the Hague were old and
their friends and acquaintances seemed to have died
out and they moved about, without contemporaries,
a little lonesomely in that town, along the streets
where their houses were, to and fro, to and fro
among one another…. It was so forlorn and
so very lonely; and it engendered melancholy; and
she had always felt that melancholy in her youth.
… She had never been able to keep her girlfriends.
She no longer saw the girls of the tennisclub;
her fellow-pupils at the Academy she just
greeted with a hurried nod when she passed them
in the street. After her unfortunate engagement,
she had withdrawn herself more than ever, except
that she was always with Lot, walking with him,
talking to him; he also was lonely at the Hague,
with no friends: he was better off for friends, he
said, in Italy…. How strange, that eternal
loneliness and sense of extinction around both of
them! No friends or acquaintances around them,
as around most people, as around most families.
It was doubtless because of the oppression of those
two very old people; but she could not analyse
beyond that and she felt that something escaped her
which she did not know, but which was nevertheless
there and pressed upon her and kept other
people away: something gloomy, now past, which
remained hovering around the old man and the
old woman and which enveloped the others—the
old woman’s children, the old man’s only grandchild—in
a sort of haze, something indescribable but
so definitely palpable that she could almost have
taken hold of it by putting out her hand….
It was all very vague and misty to think about,
it was not even possible to think about it; it was
a perception of something chill, that passed, nothing
more, no more than that; but it sometimes prevented
her breathing freely, taking pleasure in her
youth, walking fast, speaking loud: when she did
that, she had to force herself with an effort. And
she knew that Lot felt the same: she had understood
it from two or three very vague words and
more from the spirit of those words than from
their sound; and it had given her a great soul-sympathy
for Lot. He was a strange fellow, she
thought, looking at him as he slept. Outwardly and
in his little external qualities and habits, he was a
very young boy, a child sometimes, she thought,
with round his childishness a mood of disillusionment
that sometimes uttered itself quite wittily but
did not ring sincere; beneath the exterior lay a disposition
to softness, a considerable streak of selfishness
and a neurotic preoccupation where he was
himself concerned, tempered by something that was
almost strength of character in dealing with his
mother, for he was the only one who could get on
with Mamma. With this temperament he possessed
natural gifts which he did not value, though it was
really necessary for him to work. He presented
a medley of contradictions, of seriousness and childishness,
of feeling and indifference, of manliness and
of very feeble weakness, such as she had never seen
in any man. He was vainer of his fair hair than of
his talent, though he was vain of this too; and a
compliment on his tie gave him more pleasure than
a word of praise for his finest essay. And this
child, this boy, this man she loved: she considered
it strange when she herself thought of it, but she
loved him and was happy only when he was with
her.
He woke up, asked her why she was not sleeping
and now took her head on his breast. Tired by
the train and by her thoughts, she fell asleep; and
he looked out at the grey dawn, which broke over
the bleak and chilly fields after they had passed
Lyons. He yearned for sea, for blue sky, for heat,
for everything that was young and alive: the South
of France, the Riviera and then Italy, with Elly.
He had disposed of his life and he hoped for happiness,
happiness in companionship of thought and
being, because loneliness induces melancholy and
makes us think the more intensely of our slow
decay….
“She is very charming,” he thought, as he looked
down upon her where she slept on his breast; and
he resisted the impulse to kiss her now that she
had just fallen asleep. “She is very charming and
she has a delicate artistic sense. I must tell her
to start modelling again … or to write something:
she’s good at both. That was a very fine
little book of hers, even though it is so very subjective
and a great deal too feminine. There is
much that is good in life, even though life is nothing
but a transition which can’t signify much in a world
that’s rotten. There must be other lives and other
worlds. A time must come when there will be no
material suffering, at most a spiritual suffering.
Then all our material anxieties will be gone….
And yet there is a great charm about this material
life … if we forget all wretchedness for a
moment. A spell of charm comes to everybody: I
believe that mine has come. If it would only
remain like this; but it won’t. Everything changes.
…. Better not think about it, but work instead:
better do some work, even while travelling.
Elly would like it. At Florence, the Medicis; in
Rome, the whole papacy…. I don’t know which
I shall select: it must be one of the two. But there’s
such a lot of it, such a lot of it…. Could I
write a fine history of civilization, I wonder? …
I hate collecting notes: all those rubbishy odds and
ends of paper…. If I can’t see the whole thing
before me, in one clear vision, it’s no good. I can’t
study: I have to see, to feel, to admire or shudder.
If I don’t do that, I’m no good. An essay is what
I’m best at. A word is a butterfly: you just catch it,
lightly, by the wings … and let it fly away
again…. Serious books on history and art are
like fat beetles, crawling along…. Tiens!
That’s not a bad conceit. I must use it one day in
an article: the butterfly wafted on the air …
and the heavy beetle….”
They were approaching Marseilles; they would
be at Nice by two o’clock in the afternoon…….
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