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.
VIII
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.