“How high he thinks, how noble his thoughts are!” Cecile still forced herself to imagine, in spite of …
But the magic was gone: her admiration of his lofty thoughts tumbled away into an abyss; then suddenly, by a lightning flash through the night of that inken sky, she saw clearly that his exalted intellect was a supreme sorrow to her.
It had become quite dark in the room. Cecile, afraid of the lightning which revealed her to herself, fell back upon the cushions of the settee.
She hid her face in her hands, pressing her eyes, as though she wished, after this moment of self-revelation, to be blind for ever.
But demoniacally it raged through her, a hurricane of hell, a storm of passion, which blew up out of the darkness of the landscape, lashing up the tossed waves of the foul stream towards the sky of ink.
“Oh!” she moaned. “I am unworthy of him … unworthy …”
CHAPTER III
Quaerts lived on the Plein, above a tailor, where he occupied two small rooms, furnished in the most ordinary style. He might have lived far better, but he was indifferent to comfort; he never gave it a thought in his own place; when he came across it elswhere it did not attract him. But it troubled Jules that Quaerts should live in this fashion, and the boy had long wished to embellish his rooms. He was busy at this moment hanging some trophies on an armourrack, standing on a pair of steps, humming a tune he remembered from an opera. Quaerts gave no heed to what Jules was doing; he lay immobile on the sofa, at full length, in his flannels, unshorn, his eyes fixed upon the florid decoration of the Palace of Justice, tracing a background of architecture behind the withered trees of the Plein.
“Look, Taco, will this do?” asked Jules, after hanging an Algerian sabre between two creeses, and draping the folds of a Javanese sarong between.
“Beautifully,” answered Quaerts. But he did not look at the trophies, and continued gazing at the Palace. He lay motionless. There was no thought in him; only listless dissatisfaction with himself, and consequent sadness. For three weeks he had led a life of debauch, to deaden consciousness, or perhaps he did not know precisely what: something that was in him, something that was fine, but tiresome in ordinary life. He had begun with shooting, in North Brabant, over a friend’s land. It lasted a week; there were eight of them; sport in the open air, followed by sporting dinners, with not only a great deal of wine, certainly the best, but still more genever, also very fine, like a liqueur. Turbulent excursions on horseback in the neighbourhood; madnesses perpetrated at a farm – the peasant-woman carried round in a barrel, and locked up in the cowhouse – mischievous exploits worthy only of unruly boys and savages; at the end of it all, in a police-court, a summons, with a fine and damages. Wound up to a pitch of excitement with too much sport, too much oxygen, and too much wine, five of the pack, among whom was Quaerts, had gone on to Brussels. There they had stayed almost a fortnight, leading a life of continual excess – champagne and larking; a wild joy of living, which, naturally enough at first, has in the end to be screwed up and screwed up higher still, to make it last a couple of days longer; the last nights spent weariedly over écarté, with none but the fixed idea of winning, the exhaustion of all their violence already pulsing through their bodies, like nervous relaxation, their eyes gazing without expression upon the cards of the game.
During that time Quaerts had only once thought of Cecile; and he had not followed up the thought. She had no doubt arisen three or four times in his brain, a vague image, white and transparent; an apparition which had vanished again immediately, leaving no trace of its passage. All this time too he had not written to her, and it had only once struck him that a silence of three weeks, after their last conversation, must at least seem strange to her. There it had remained. He was back now; he had lain three days long at home on his bed, on his sofa, tired, feverish, dissatisfied, disgusted with everything, everything; then one morning, remembering that it was Wednesday, he had thought of Jules and his riding-lesson.
He sent for Jules, but too lazy to shave or dress, he remained lying where he was. And he still lay there, realising nothing. There before him was the Palace. Next to it the Privy Council. At the side he could see the White Club, and William the Silent standing on his pedestal in the middle of the Plein: that was all exceedingly interesting. And Jules was hanging up trophies: also interesting. And the most interesting of all was the stupid life he had been leading. What tension to give the lie to his ennui! Had he really amused himself during that time? No; he had made a pretence of being amused: the peasant-woman episode and the écarté; the sport had been bad; the wine good, but he had drunk too much of it. And then that particularly filthy champagne … at Brussels … And what then? He had absolute need of it, of a life like that, of sport and wild enjoyment; it served to balance the other thing that was in him, that was tiresome for him in ordinary life.
But why was it not possible to preserve some mean, in one as well as in the other? He was well equipped for ordinary life, and with that he possessed something in addition; why could he not remain balanced between those two spheres of disposition? Why was he always tossed from one to the other, as a thing belonging to neither? How fine he could have made his life with only the least tact, the least self-restraint! How he might have lived in a healthy joy of purified animal existence, tempered by a higher joyousness of soul! But tact, self-restraint – he had none of these; he lived according to his impulses, always in extremes; he was incapable of half indulgences. And in this lay his pride as well as his regret; his pride that he felt “wholly” whatever he felt, that he was unable to make terms with his emotions; and his regret, that he could not make terms and bring into harmony the elements which warred forever within him.
When he had met Cecile, and had seen her again, and yet once more, he had felt himself carried wholly to the one extremity, the summit of exaltation, of pure crystal sympathy, in which the circle of his atmosphere – as he had said – glided over hers, a caress of pure chastity and spirituality, as two stars, spinning closer together, might mingle their atmospheres for a moment, like breaths. What smiling happiness had been within his reach, as a grace from Heaven!
Then, then, he had felt himself toppling down, as if he had rocked over the balancing-point; and he had longed for the earthly, for great simplicity of emotion, for primitive enjoyment of life, for flesh and blood. He remembered now how, two days after his last conversation with Cecile, he had seen Emilie Hijdrecht, here in his rooms, where at length, stung by his neglect, she had ventured to come to see him one evening, heedless of all caution. With a line of cruelty round his mouth he recalled how she had wept at his knees, how in her jealousy she had complained against Cecile, how he had bidden her be silent, and not pronounce Cecile’s name. Then, their mad embrace, an embrace of cruelty: cruelty on her part against the man whom time after time she lost when she thought him secured for good and all, whom she could not understand, to whom she clung with all the violence of her brutal passion, a purely animal passion of primitive times; cruelty on his part against the woman he despised, while in his passion he almost stifled her in his embrace.
II
And what then? How to find the mean between the two poles of his nature. He shrugged his shoulders. He knew he could never find it. He lacked some quality, or a certain power, necessary to find it. He could do nothing but allow himself to swing to and fro. Very well then: he would let himself swing. There was nothing else to do. For now, in the lassitude following his outburst of savagery, he began to experience again an ardent longing, like someone who, after a long evening passed in a ball-room, heavy with foul air of gaslight and a stifling crush and oppression of human breath, craves a high heaven and width of atmosphere; a passionate longing towards Cecile. And he smiled, glad that he knew her, that he was able to go to her, that it was his privilege to enter into the chaste enclosure of her sanctity, as into a temple; he smiled, glad that he felt this longing, and proud, exalting himself above all other men. Already he tasted the pleasure of confessing to her how he had lived during the last three weeks; and already he heard her voice, although he could not distinguish the words …