Ecstasy (4 page)

“Are you fond of reading?” asked Cecile.

“I do not read much: it’s too great a pleasure to me for that; nor do I read all that appears, I am too eclectic.”

“Do you know Emerson?”

“No …”

“I like his essays very much. They look so far into the future. They place one upon a delightfully exalted level.”

She suited her phrase with an expansive gesture, and her eyes lighted up.

Then she observed that he was following her attentively, with his respectfulness. And she recovered herself; she no longer wished to talk with him about Emerson.

“It is very fine indeed,” was all she said, in a most uninterested voice, to close the conversation. “May I give you some tea?”

“No, thank you, Mevrouw; I never take tea at this time.”

“Do you look upon it with so much scorn?” she asked, jestingly.

He was about to answer, when there was a ring at the bell, and she cried:

“Ah, here they are!”

Amélie entered, with Suzette and Anna. They were a little surprised to see Quaerts. He said he had wanted to call on Mrs Van Even. The conversation became general. Suzette was very merry, full of a dance fair, at which she was going to assist, in a Spanish costume.

“And you, Anna?”

“Oh, no, Auntie,” said Anna, shrinking together with fright. “Imagine me at a fancy fair? I should never sell anybody anything.”

“It is a gift,” said Amélie, with a far-away look.

Quaerts rose: he bowed with a single word to Cecile, when the door opened. Jules came in with books under his arm, on his road home from school.

“How do you do, Auntie? Hallo, Taco, are you going away just as I arrive?”

“You drive me away,” said Quaerts, laughing.

“Ah, Taco, do stay a little longer!” begged Jules, enraptured to see him, in despair that he had chosen this moment to leave.

“Jules, Jules!” cried Amélie, thinking it was the proper thing to do.

Jules pressed Quaerts, took his two hands, forced him, like the spoilt child that he was. Quaerts laughed the more. Jules in his excitement knocked some books from the table.

“Jules, be quiet!” cried Amélie.

Quaerts picked up the books, while Jules persisted in his bad behaviour. As Quaerts replaced the last book he hesitated; he held it in his hand, he looked at the gold lettering: “Emerson …”

Cecile watched him.

“If he thinks I am going to lend it to him he is mistaken,” she thought.

But Quaerts asked nothing: he had released himself from Jules and said goodbye. With a quip at Jules he left.

“Is this the first time he has been to see you?” asked Amélie.

“Yes,” replied Cecile. “A superfluous politeness, was it not?”

“Taco Quaerts is always very correct in matters of etiquette,” said Anna, defending him.

“But this visit was hardly a matter of etiquette,” Cecile said, laughing merrily. “Taco Quaerts seems to be quite infallible in your eyes.”

“He waltzes delightfully!” cried Suzette. “The other day at the Eekhof’s dance …”

Suzette chattered on; there was no restraining Suzette that afternoon; she seemed to hear already the rattling of her castanets.

Jules had a fit of crossness coming on, but he stood still at a window, with the boys.

“You don’t much care about Quaerts, do you, Auntie?” asked Anna.

“I do not find him very sympathetic,” said Cecile. “You know, I am easily influenced by my first impressions. I can’t help it, but I do not like those very healthy, strong people, who look so sturdy and manly, as if they walked straight through life, clearing away everything that stands in their way. It may be a morbid antipathy in me, but I can’t help it that I always dislike a
super-abundance of robustness. These strong people look upon others who are not so strong as themselves much as the Spartans used to look upon their deformed children.”

Jules could restrain himself no longer.

“If you think that Taco is no better than a Spartan you know nothing at all about him,” he said fiercely.

Cecile looked at him, but before Amélie could interpose he continued:

“Taco is the only person with whom I can talk about music, and who understands every word I say. And I don’t believe I could talk with a Spartan.”

“Jules, how rude you are!” cried Suzette.

“I don’t care!” he exclaimed furiously, rising suddenly, and stamping his foot. “I don’t care! I won’t hear Taco abused, and Aunt Cecile knows it, and only does it to tease me. I think it is very mean to tease a child, very mean …”

His mother and his sisters tried to calm him with their authority. But he seized his books.

“I don’t care! I won’t have it!”

He was gone in a moment, furious, slamming the door, which muttered at the shock. Amélie shook with nervousness.

“Oh, that boy!” she hissed out, shivering. “That Jules, that Jules …”

“It is nothing,” said Cecile, gently, excusing him. “He is excitable …”

She had grown a little paler, and glanced towards her boys, Dolf and Christie, who looked up in dismay, their mouths wide open with astonishment.

“Is Jules naughty, Mamma?” asked Christie.

She shook her head, smiling. She felt strangely weary, indefinably so. She did not know what it meant; but it seemed to her as if distant perspectives opened up before her eyes, fading away into the horizon, pale, in a great light. Nor did she know what this meant; but she was not angry with Jules, and it seemed to her as if he had not lost his temper with her, but with somebody else. A sense of the enigmatical deepness of life, the unknown of the soul’s mystery, like to a fair, bright endlessness, a faraway silvery light, shot through her in a still rapture.

Then she laughed.

“Jules,” she said, “is so nice when he gets excited.”

Anna and Suzette broke up the circle, and played with the boys, looking at their picture books. Cecile spoke only to her sister. Amélie’s nerves were still quivering.

“How can you defend those tricks of Jules?” she asked, in a relenting voice.

“I think it so noble of him to stand up for those he likes. Don’t you think so too?”

Amélie grew calmer. Why should she be disturbed if Cecile was not?

“Oh yes, yes …” she replied, “I don’t know. He has a good heart I believe, but he is so unmanageable. But,
who knows? … perhaps the fault is mine; if I understood better, if I had more tact …”

She grew confused; she sought for something more to say, found nothing, wandering like a stranger through her own thoughts. Then, suddenly, as if struck by a ray of certain knowledge she said …

“But Jules is not stupid. He has a good eye for all sorts of things, and for persons too. For my part, I believe you judge Taco Quaerts wrongly. He is a very interesting man, and a great deal more than a mere sportsman. I don’t know what it is, but there is something about him different from other people, I couldn’t say precisely what …

“I wish Jules got on better at school. He is not stupid, but he learns nothing. He has been two years now in the third class. The boy has no application. He makes me despair of him.”

She was silent again, and Cecile too remained silent.

“Ah,” said Amélie, “I daresay it is not his fault. Perhaps it is my fault. Perhaps he takes after me …”

She looked straight before her: sudden, irrepressible tears filled both her eyes, and fell into her lap.

“Amy, what is the matter?” asked Cecile, kindly.

But Amélie had risen, so that the girls, who were still playing with the children, might not see her tears. She could not restrain them, they streamed down, and she hurried away into the adjacent drawing room, a big room, where Cecile never sat.

“What is the matter, Amy?” repeated Cecile.

She threw her arms about her sister, made her sit down, pressed her head against her shoulder.

“How do I know what it is?” sobbed Amélie. “I do not know, I do not know … I am wretched because of that feeling in my head. After all, I am not mad, am I? Really, I don’t feel mad, or as if I were going mad! But I feel sometimes as if everything had gone wrong in my head, as if I couldn’t think. Everything runs through my brain. It is a terrible feeling!”

“Why don’t you see a doctor?” asked Cecile.

“No, no, he might tell me I was mad, and I am not. He might try to send me into an asylum. No, I won’t see a doctor. I have every reason to be happy otherwise, have I not? I have a kind husband and dear children; I have never had any great sorrow. And yet I sometimes feel deeply miserable, unreasonably miserable! It is always as if I wanted to reach some place and could not succeed. It is always as if I were hemmed in …”

She sobbed violently; a storm of tears rained down her face. Cecile’s eyes, too, were moist; she liked her sister, she felt for her. Amélie was only ten years her senior, and already she had something of an old woman about her, withered, mean, her hair growing grey at the temples, under her veil.

“Cecile, tell me, Cecile,” she said suddenly, through her sobs, “do you believe in God?”

“Of course, Amy.”

“I used to go to church, but it was no use … I don’t go any more … Oh, I am so unhappy! It is very ungrateful of me, I have so much to be grateful for … Do you know, sometimes I feel as if I would like to go at once to God, all at once!”

“Pray, Amy, do not excite yourself so.”

“Ah, I wish I were like you, so calm. Do you feel happy?”

Cecile nodded, smiling. Amélie sighed; she remained lying a moment with her head against her sister’s shoulder. Cecile kissed her, but suddenly Amélie started:

“Be careful,” she whispered, “the girls might come in here. They … they need not see that I have been crying.”

Rising, she arranged herself before the looking-glass, carefully dried her veil with her handkerchief, smoothed the string of her bonnet.

“There, now they won’t know,” she said. “Let us go in again. I am quite calm. You are a dear girl …”

They went into the little room.

“Come, girls, we must go home,” said Amélie, in a voice which was still unsettled.

“Have you been crying, Mamma?” asked Suzette immediately.

“Mamma was a little upset about Jules,” said Cecile quickly.

Cecile was alone; the children had gone upstairs to get ready for dinner. She tried to get back her distant perspectives, fading into the pale horizon; she tried to get back the silvery endlessness which had shot through her as a vision of light. But it confused her too much: a kaleidoscope of recent petty memories: the children, Quaerts, Emerson, Jules, Suzette, Amélie. How strange, how strange was life! … The outer life; the coming and going of people about us; the sounds of words which they utter in accents of strangeness; the endless changing of phenomena; the concatenation of those phenomena, one with the other; strange, too, the presence of a soul somewhere, like a god within us, never in its essence to be known, save by itself. Often, as now, it seemed to Cecile that all things, even the most commonplace, were strange, very strange; as if nothing in the world were absolutely commonplace; as if everything were strange together; the strange form and exterior expression of a deeper life, that lies hidden behind everything, even the meanest objects; as if everything displayed itself under an appearance, a transitory mask, while underneath lay the reality, the very truth. How strange, how strange was life … For it seemed to her as if she, under all the ordinariness of that afternoon tea-party, had seen something very extraordinary; she did not know what, she
could not express nor even think it; it seemed to her as if beneath the coming and going of those people there had glittered something: reality, ultimate truth beneath the appearance of their happening to come to take tea with her.

“What is it? What is it?” she asked. “Am I deluding myself, or is it so? I feel it so …”

It was very vague, and yet so very clear …

It seemed to her as if there was an apparition, a haze of light behind all that had happened there. Behind Amélie, and Jules, and Quaerts, and that book he had just held in his hand … Did those apparitions of light mean anything, or …

But she shook her head.

“I am dreaming, I am giving way to fancy,” she laughed within herself. “It was all very simple; I only make it complicated because I take pleasure in doing so.”

But as soon as she thought this, there was something that denied the thought absolutely; an intuition which should have made her guess the essence of the truth, but which did not succeed in doing so. For sure there was something, something behind all that, hiding away, lurking as the shadow lurks behind the thing …

Her thoughts still wandered over the company she had had, then halted finally at Taco Quaerts. She saw him sitting there again, bending slightly forward towards her, his hands locked together hanging between his knees, as he looked up to her. A barrier of aversion
had stood between them like an iron bar. She saw him sitting there again, though he was gone. That again was past; how quickly everything moved; how small was the speck of the present!

She rose, sat down at her writing-table, and wrote:

“Beneath me flows the sea of the past, above me drifts the ether of the future, and I stand midway upon the one speck of reality, so small that I must press my feet firmly together not to lose my hold. And from the speck of my present my sorrow looks down upon the sea, and my longing up to the sky.

“It is scarcely life to stand upon this ledge, so small that I hardly appreciate it, hardly feel it beneath my feet, and yet to me it is the one reality. I am not greatly occupied about it: my eyes only follow the rippling of those waves towards the distant haven, the gliding of those clouds towards the distant spheres: vague manifestations of endless mutability, translucent ephemeras, visible incorporeities. The present is the only thing that is, or rather that seems to be; but not the sea below nor the sky above; for the sea is but memory, and the air but an illusion. Yet memory and illusion are everything: they are the wide inheritance of the soul, which alone can escape from the speck of the moment to float away upon the sea towards the haven which forever retreats, to rock upon the clouds towards the spheres which retreat and retreat …”