Part 1 (1/2)

The Twilight of the Souls.

by Louis Couperus.

CHAPTER I

When Gerrit woke that morning, his head felt misty and tired, as though weighed down by a mountain landscape, by a whole stack of mist-mountains that bore heavily upon his brain. His eyes remained closed; and, though he was waking, his nightmare still seemed to cast an after-shadow: a nightmare that he was being crushed by great rocky avalanches, which he felt pressing deep down inside his head, though he was conscious that the red daylight was already dawning through his closed eyelids. He lay there, big and burly, sprawling in his bed, beside Adeline's empty bed: he felt that her bed was empty, that there was no one in the room. The curtains had been drawn back, but the blinds were still down. And, though he was awake, his eyelids remained closed and through them he saw only the red of the daylight as through two pink sh.e.l.ls: it seemed as if he would never be able to lift those two leaden lids from his eyes.

This after-weariness flowed slowly through his great, burly body. He felt physically rotten and did not quite know why. The day before, he had merely dined with some brother-officers at the restaurant of the Scheveningen Kurhaus: a farewell dinner to one of their number who was being transferred to Venlo; and the dinner had been a long one; there was a good deal of champagne drunk afterwards; and they had gone on gaily to make a night of it. One or two of the married ones had refused, good-naturedly, but had come along all the same, so as not to spoil sport; Gerrit had come too, in his genial way. At last, he had decided that that was about enough and that the road which the others were taking was not his road: he was one of your sensible, moderate people, who never went to extremes; he was very fond of his little wife; indeed, he already felt some compunction at the idea of perhaps waking her at that time of night, when he went into the bedroom, after undressing. As a matter of fact, she did wake; but he had at once rea.s.sured her with his gruff, good-natured voice and she had gone to sleep again. He had stayed awake a long time, lying there with wide-open eyes angry at not being able to sleep, at having forgotten how to take a gla.s.s of wine with the rest. At last, in the small hours, when it was quite light, he had slowly dozed off into a misty dreamland; and gradually the mists had turned into solid landscapes, had become a stack of heavy mountains, which pressed heavily upon his brain until they crumbled down in rocky avalanches.

Now, at last, he shook off the strange heaviness, took his bath; and, when he saw himself naked--that expanse of clean, white skin, the great body built on heavy, sinewy lines, a good-looking, fair-haired chap still, despite his eight-and-forty years--he wondered that he sometimes had those queer moody fits, like a lady's lap-dog. And now, as he squeezed the streaming water over himself out of the great sponge, he tried to pooh-pooh those moody fits, shrugged his shoulders at them, muttering to himself as he kept on squeezing the sponge, squeezing out the water until it splashed and spattered all around him. He had the sensation of was.h.i.+ng the inertia from him; he drew a deep breath, flung out his chest, felt his strength returning and, still naked, took his dumb-bells and worked away with them, proud of a pair of biceps that were like two rolling cannon-b.a.l.l.s. His eyes recovered their usual jovial expression, which also played around his fair moustache with a roguish sparkle, as of inward mockery; the wrinkles vanished from his forehead, which was gradually acquiring a loftier arch as the crop of fair hair on his head diminished; and the blood seemed to be flowing normally through his big body, after the bath and the five minutes'

exercise, for his cheeks, now shaved, became tinged with an almost pink flush. And he simply could not make up his mind to dress: he looked at himself, at his big, strong, clean body, which he kneaded yet once more, as proud of his muscles as a woman of her graceful figure.

Then he quickly put on his uniform and went downstairs to breakfast. The children surrounded him instantly; and he at once felt himself the father, full of a father's affection, pa.s.sionately fond as he was of his children. He was only just in time to see Alex and Guy go off with their satchels: the school was close by and they went by themselves, two st.u.r.dy little fellows of nine and seven; but the other children, all except the eldest, Marietje, who was also at school, were eating their bread-and-b.u.t.ter at the round table, while Adeline sat in front of her tea-tray. And Gerrit, in the little dining-room, at the round table, felt himself become normal again, quite normal, because of his wife and his children.

The dining-room was small and very simply furnished, containing only what was strictly necessary. Adeline, now thirty-two, looked older: a plump little mother, with not much to say for herself, full of little cares for her little brood; and Gerrit, noisy and clamorous, filling the whole little room with the gay thunder of his drill-sergeant's voice, was full of incessant jokes and fun. There were half-a-dozen younger ones round the table: two girls, Adeletje and Gerdy; three boys: Constant, Jan and Piet; and the latest baby, a girl, Klaasje. Gerrit had given the youngest three their names, in his annoyance at the high-sounding names of the others: Alexander, Guy, Geraldine, christened after Adeline's family, while Marie and Constant were called after Mamma and Papa van Lowe.

”Look here, not so many of those grand names,” Gerrit had said, when Jan was coming.

And, after Klaasje[1]--a name which the whole family considered hideous--Gerrit said:

”If we have another, it shall be called after me, Gerrit,[2] whether it's a boy or a girl.”

”Gertrude, surely, if it's a girl?” Adeline had suggested.

”No,” said Gerrit, ”she shall be Gerrit all the same.”

Gerrit's manias were Mamma van Lowe's despair; but so far there had been no question of a grand-daughter Gerrit.

Gerrit had no favourites. His long arms swung round as many children as he could get hold of and he drew them on his knees, between his knees, almost under his feet; and by some miraculous chance he had never broken an arm or leg of any of them, so that Adeline and the children themselves were never afraid and only Mamma van Lowe, when she witnessed Gerrit's embraces, went through a thousand terrors. 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. Or else she would throw her arms round his neck and stay like that, quietly looking at the others, because she had taken possession of Papa.

This time too she left her chair, crept under the table, climbed on Gerrit's knees and ate out of his plate, although Adeline tried to prevent her. Gerrit ate his breakfast, with Gerdy on his lap; and the childish voices twittered all around him, like the voices of so many little birds. And this twittering produced a brightness in his heart, so that he began to smile and then to poke fun at Klaasje, the baby in her baby-chair, sitting beside him rather stupidly. Klaasje, who did not talk much yet, was still a little backward and just fretted and whimpered.

Latterly, he had felt a strange pitying tenderness when he looked at his children, as though surprised at all this dainty, flaxen life which he had created, he who had always said:

”Children are what you want; without children you have no life; without children nothing remains of you; children carry you on.”

He had married, fairly late, a very young wife; and that had been the reason of his marriage, the root-idea: to beget children, as many children as possible, because it seemed to him a dismal thought that nothing of him should survive. And now, when he looked around him, now that Marietje, Adeletje and Alex were twelve and ten and nine, he sometimes had, deep down in his heart, a strange feeling of wonder and pity, even of sadness, as though the thought had suddenly come to him:

”Where do they all come from and why are they all round me?”

A strange, wondering astonishment, as though at the riddle of childbirth, the secret of human life, which suddenly became impenetrable to him, the father and husband. Then he would give a furtive glance to see if he could discover that same wondering astonishment in Adeline; but no, she quietly went her way, the gentle, fair-haired little mother, the domesticated little wife, very simple in soul and limited in mind, who had quietly, as a duty, borne her husband her fair-haired children and was bringing them up as she thought was right. No, he noticed nothing in her and he was the more surprised, because, after all, she was the mother and therefore ought really to have felt that strange thrill of wonder even more than he did.

”And all these are my children,” he thought.

And, while he boisterously tickled Gerdy and pretended to eat up Klaasje's bread-and-b.u.t.ter, like the great tease that he was, he thought:

”Now these are all my children and Adeline's children.”