Part 26 (1/2)
”Yes, because you think yourself a bit of a Solo prince.... That's your Patjaram nonsense.... As for me, I hate India, I loathe Labuw.a.n.gi. I want to get away. I want to go to Paris.... Will you come too?”
”No. I should never want to go....”
”Not even when you reflect that there are hundreds of women in Europe whom you have never loved?”
He looked at her: something in her words, in her voice, made him glance up; a crazy hysteria, which had never struck him in the old days, when she had always been the silently pa.s.sionate mistress, with half-closed eyes, who always wanted to forget everything at once and to become conventional again. Something in her repelled him. He loved the soft, pliant surrender of her caresses, the smiling indolence which she used to display, but not these half-mad eyes and this purple mouth, which seemed ready to bite. She seemed to feel this, for she suddenly pushed him from her and said, brusquely:
”You bore me.... I know all there is to know in you.... Go away....”
But this he would not do. He did not care for futile rendez-vous and he now embraced her and solicited her....
”No,” she said, curtly. ”You bore me. Every one bores me here. Everything bores me.”
He, on his knees, put his hands about her waist and drew her to him. She, smiling a little, became slightly more yielding, rumpling his hair nervously with her hand. A carriage pulled up in front of the house.
”Hark!” she said.
”It's Mrs. van Does.”
”How soon she's back!”
”I expect she's sold nothing.”
”Then it'll cost you a ten-guilder note.”
”I dare say.”
”Do you pay her much ... for allowing us to meet here?”
”Oh, what does it matter?”
”Listen,” she said again, more attentively.
”That's not Mrs. van Does.”
”No.”
”It's a man's footstep.... It wasn't a dog-cart either: it was much too noisy.”
”I expect it's nothing,” said she. ”Some one who has mistaken the house. n.o.body ever comes here.”
”The man's going round,” he said, listening.
They both listened for a moment. And then, suddenly, after two or three strides through the cramped little garden and along the little back-verandah, his figure, Van Oudijck's, appeared outside the closed gla.s.s door, visible through the curtain. And he had pulled it open before Leonie and Addie could change their position, so that Van Oudijck saw them both, her sitting on the couch and him kneeling before her, while her hand still lay, as though forgotten, on his hair.
”Leonie!” roared her husband.
Her blood under the shock of the surprise broke into stormy waves and seethed through her veins and, in one second, she saw the whole future: his anger, the trial, the divorce, her alimony, all in one whirling vision. But, as though by the compulsion of her nervous will, the tide of blood within her at once subsided and grew calm; and she remained quietly sitting there, her terror showing for but a moment longer in her eyes, until she could turn them hard as steel upon Van Oudijck. And, by pressing her finger softly on Addie's head, she suggested to him also to remain in the same att.i.tude, to remain kneeling at her feet, and she said, as though self-hypnotized, listening in astonishment to her own slightly husky voice:
”Otto ... Adrien de Luce is asking me to put in a word with you for him.... He is asking ... for Doddie's hand....”