CHAPTER XVII
THERE was a cold wind, with whirling snowflakes,
and Aunt Stefanie de Laders had not at first
intended to go out: she had a cough and lately
had not been feeling at all the thing; she feared
that this winter would be her last. Not everybody
lived to be so old as Mamma or Mr. Takma;
and she, after all, was seventy-seven: wasn’t
that a fine age? But she did not want to die
yet, for she had always been very much afraid
of death, always carried a horrid vision of Hell
before her eyes: you could never know what awaited
you, however good and religious you might have
been, serving God properly. Now she, thank God,
had nothing to reproach herself with! Her life had
gone on calmly, day after day, without a husband,
or children, or mundane ties, but also without any
great sorrow. Twice she had suffered the loss of
a tom-cat to which she was attached; and she
thought it very sad when the birds in the cages
grew old and lost their feathers and sometimes
gripped on to their perches with their long claws,
for years together, until one fine morning she found
their little bodies stiff. She thought it sad that
the family had no religion—the De Laders had
always had religion—and she felt very sad when
Thérèse, in Paris, became a Catholic, for after all
papistry was idolatry, that she knew for certain;
and she also knew for certain that Calvin had had
the root of the matter in him. She had always been
able to save money and did not quite know how to
dispose of it: she had executed a number of different
wills, making bequests and then rescinding them;
she would leave a good deal to charitable institutions.
Her health for very long had been exceedingly
good. Short, sprightly and withered, she had
been very active, had for years run along the streets
like a lapwing. Her witch-face became brown and
tanned and wrinkled, small and wizened; and her
little figure, with the shrunk breasts, bore no
resemblance whatever to the even yet majestic old
age of old, old Mamma. The barren field of her
life, without emotion, love or passion, had grown
drier and drier around her carping egoism, without
arousing in her a sense of either melancholy or loss.
On the contrary, she had felt glad that she was
able to fear God, that she had had time to make
her own soul and that she had not heard the sins
of the body speak aloud, in between the murmured
reading of her pious books and the shrill twittering
of her birds. Lucky that she had never been hysterical,
like those Derckszes, she thought contentedly,
preferring with a certain filial reverence to put down
that hysteria rather to the Derckszes’ account than
to that of her old mother, though nevertheless she
shook her head over Mamma for thinking so little,
at her age, of Heaven and Hell and for continuing
to see old Takma, doubtless in memory of former
sinfulness. Anton was a dirty old blackguard and,
old as he was, had narrowly escaped most unpleasant
consequences, a month ago, for allowing himself to
take liberties with his laundress’ little girl; and Aunt,
who saw a great deal of Ina, knew that it was owing
to D’Herbourg’s influence and intervention—he
being the only one of the family who had any
connections—that the business had no ill results,
that it was more or less hushed up. But Aunt
Stefanie thought it so sinful and hysterical of Anton,
looked upon Anton as so irretrievably sold to Satan
that she would have preferred to have nothing more
to do with him … if it were not that he had
some money and that she feared lest he should
leave the money to sinful things and people …
whereas Ina could do with it so well. And she now,
in spite of the weather, thought of sending for a
cab and going out: then she could first pick up
Anton, as arranged, and take him with her to the
Van Welys, Lily and Frits, to see their godchildren,
Stefje and Antoinetje. There were two babies
now; and she and Anton had a godchild apiece. A
tenderness flowed through her selfish old-maid’s
heart at the thought of those children, who belonged
to her just a little—for she tyrannized over Anton’s
godchild too—and in whom, she reflected contentedly,
she had not the least sinful share. For she
considered the things of the flesh more or less sinful,
even when hallowed by matrimony.
The cab came; and Aunt Stefanie, in a very old
fur cloak, hoisted herself in, sprightlily, climbed up
the step and felt anything but well. Was it
coming at last? Was she about to fall ill and
die? Oh, if she could only be sure of going to
Heaven! So long as she was not sure of it, she
would rather go on living, rather grow as old as
Mother and Takma, rather live to be a hundred.
The cab was now pulling up in front of the ground-floor
rooms in which Anton lived; and she thought,
should she wait till he came out or should she get
out herself for a minute? She resolved upon the
latter course and, when the door was opened by
the landlady, she clambered down the step of the
cab again, refusing the driver’s assistance, and, with
a few snowflakes on her old-lady’s cape and old fur
cloak, went in to her brother, who was sitting beside
a closed stove, with his book and his pipe. A thick
haze of smoke filled the room, drifting heavily with
slow, horizontal cloud-lines.
“Well, Anton, you’re expecting me, aren’t you ?
It wouldn’t be the thing if you weren’t!” said Aunt
Stefanie, in a tone of reproach.
Trippingly and imperiously, she went up to him.
Her voice sounded shrill and her little witch-face
shook and shivered out of the worn fur collar of
her cloak, because she felt cold.
“Yes, all right,” said Anton Dercksz, but without
getting up. You’ll sit down first, won’t you,
Stefanie?”
“But the cab’s waiting, Anton; it means throwing
money away for nothing!”
“Well, that won’t ruin you. Is it really necessary
that we should go and look at those brats?”
“You must see your godchild, surely. That’s
only proper. And then we’re going on, with Ina
and Lily, to Daan and Floor, at their hotel.”
“Yes, I know, they arrived yesterday…. t
Look here, Stefanie, I can’t understand why you
don’t leave me here in peace. You always
want to boss people. I’m comfortable here,
reading….”
The warmth of the stove gave old Stefanie de
Laders a blissful feeling; she held her numbed feet—Anton
possessed no foot-stove—voluptuously to
the glow; but the smoke of the pipe made her cough.
“Yes, yes, you’re just sitting reading; I read too,
but I read better books than you…. Let me
see what you’re reading, Anton. What is it?
Latin?”
“Yes, it’s Latin.”
“I never knew that you read Latin.”
“You don’t know everything about me yet.”
“No, thank God!” cried Stefanie, indignantly.
“And what is that Latin book?” she asked, curiously
and inquisitorially.
“It’s sinful,” said Anton, teasingly.
“I thought as much. What’s it called?”
“It’s Suetonius: The Lives of the Caesars”
“So you’re absorbed in the lives of those brutes,
who tortured the early Christians!”
He grinned, with a broad grin. He sat there,
big and heavy; and the folds and dewlaps of his
full, yellow-red cheeks thrilled with pleasure at her
outburst; the ends of his grey-yellow moustache
stood straight up with merriment; and his eyes with
their yellow irises gazed pensively at his sister, who
had never been of the flesh. What hadn’t she
missed, thought Anton, in scoffing contempt, as he
sat bending forwards. His coarse-fisted hands lay
like clods on his thick knees; and the tops of his
Wellington boots showed round under the trouserlegs.
His waistcoat was undone; so were the two
top buttons of his trousers; and Stefanie could just
see his braces.
“You know more about history than I thought,”
he grinned.
She thought him repulsive and looked nervously
round the room, which contained a number of open
book-cases, with the curtains drawn back:
“Have you read all those books?” she asked.
“And read them over again. I do nothing else.”
Stefanie de Laders was coughing more and more.
Her feet were warm by this time. She was proof
against much, but she felt as if she would faint with
the smoke.
“Sha’n’t we go now, Anton?”
He was not in the least inclined to go. He was
greatly interested in Suetonius at the moment; and
she had disturbed him in his fantasy, which was
intense in him. But she had such a way of nagging
insistency; and he was really a weak man.
“I must just wash my hands.”
“Yes, do, for you reek of that pipe of yours.”
He grinned, got up and, without hurrying himself,
went to his bedroom. Nobody knew of his
solitary fantasies, which became more intense as he
grew older and more impotent in his sensuality;
nobody knew of the lust of his imagination nor
how, as he read Suetonius, he pictured how he had
once, in a century long past, been Tiberius, how he
had held the most furious orgies in gloomy solitude
at Capri and committed murder in voluptuousness
and sent the victims of his passions dashing into the
sea from the rocks and surrounded himself with
a bevy of children beautiful as Cupids. The hidden
forces of his intellect and imagination, which he had
always enjoyed secretly, with a certain shyness
towards the outside world, had caused him to read
and study deeply in his younger years; and he knew
more than any one talking to him would ever
have suspected. On his shelves, behind novels and
statute-books, he concealed works on the Kabbala
and Satanism, being especially attracted in his
morbid fancies by the strange mysteries of antiquity
and the middle ages and endowed with a powerful
gift of thinking himself back into former times, into
a former life, into historic souls to which he felt
himself related, in which he incarnated himself.
No one suspected it: people merely knew that he
had been a mediocre official, that he read, that he
smoked and that he had occasionally done shameful
things. For the rest, his secret was his own; and
that he often guessed at another’s secret was a thing
which not his mother nor Takma nor anybody would
ever have suspected….
The moment he had gone to his bedroom, Aunt
Stefanie rose, tripped to the bookshelves and let her
eyes move swiftly along the titles. What a lot of
books Anton had! Look at that whole shelf of
Latin books: was Anton as learned as that? And
behind them: what did he keep behind those Latin
books? Great albums and portfolios: what was
in them? Would she have time to look? She drew
one from behind the Latin books and, with quick,
bird-like glances at the bedroom, opened the album,
which had Pompeii on it…. What were those
strange prints and photographs? Taken from
statues, quite naked, from mural and ceiling frescoes;
and such queer subjects, thought Aunt
Stefanie. What was it all, what were those things
and people and bodies and attitudes? Were they
merely jokes which she did not understand? …
Nevertheless they were enough to make her turn
pale; and her wrinkled little witch-face grew longer
and longer in dismay, while her mouth opened wide.
She turned the pages of the album more and more
swiftly, so as to be sure and miss nothing, and then
went back to certain plates which struck her particularly.
The world, so new to her, of classical
perversion sped past her awe-struck eyes in undivined
sinfulness, represented by man and beast
and man-beast in contortions which her imagination,
untutored in sensuality, could never have suspected.
A devil’s sabbath hypnotized her from out of those
pages; and the book, weighing so heavy in her
trembling old fingers, burnt her; but she simply
could not slip it back into its hidden nook …
just because she had never known … and because
she was very inquisitive … and because
she had never suspected superlative sin….
Those were the portals of Hell; the people who had
acted so and thought so would burn in Hell-fire for
ever: she not, fortunately!
“What are you doing?”
Anton’s voice startled her; she gave a little
scream; the book slipped from her hands.
“Must you go prying about?” asked Anton,
roughly.
“Well, can’t I look at a book?” stammered Aunt
Stefanie. “I wasn’t doing anything improper!”
she said, defending herself.
He picked up the album and shoved it back
violently behind the Latin volumes. Then, becoming
indifferent, he grinned, with eyes like slits:
“And what have you seen?”
“Nothing, nothing,” stammered Stefanie. “You
just came in …. and startled me so. I saw
nothing, nothing…. Are you ready? Shall
we go?”
Buttoned up in his great-coat, he followed her
tripping little steps; he grinned at her scornfully:
how much she had missed! And, if she had seen
anything, how she must have been shocked!
“He is the devil!” she thought, in her fright.
“He is the devil! If it wasn’t for that sinful
money, which it would be such a pity for him not
to leave to Ina, I should drop him altogether, I
should never wish to see him again. For he is not
all the thing….”
Nguồn: Wikisource English — Old People and the Things that Pass/Chapter XVII. Văn bản được nhập và định dạng lại; CC BY-SA 4.0, có thể áp dụng điều khoản bổ sung của tác phẩm.