XXXV
Uncle Daniel and Aunt Eliza showed no surprise whatever when, a few days after St Clare and Vincent had taken their departure, Eline announced her intention to return to The Hague. They knew her to be capricious by nature, wanting first this and then that, never satisfied. But this was no caprice. The idea had been growing in her mind ever since that evening when St Clare had asked her so bluntly ‘How do you come to be here?’, and she had felt as though a curtain had been swept aside, revealing to her with devastating clarity that she did not indeed belong in her uncle’s Brussels apartment, and even less so among the coterie he and his wife associated themselves with. And it was out of her feelings for St Clare — respect, friendship and possibly even love — that she had resolved to leave Brussels.
She wrote to Henk, asking him to rent two rooms for her in a ladies’ boarding house, or else in one of the new chic hotels. She received a prompt reply from him, as well as notes from Betsy and old Madame van Raat, all protesting that she should not take rooms but make her home with them instead. Betsy wrote saying that it was time to forgive and forget what had passed between them, and imploring Eline not to be so eccentric as to go and live on her own when there was plenty of room for her at Nassauplein. Old Madame van Raat extended a similarly urgent and affectionate invitation. But Eline declined their offers with effusive thanks, and was not to be dissuaded from her pursuit.
So Henk gave up with a forlorn shrug and went with Betsy to pick out a handsome two-room apartment in a spacious boarding house on Bezuidenhout. Thereupon Eline returned to The Hague.
She recalled how tired she had been from all her travels when she arrived in The Hague the previous summer to make her stay with old Madame van Raat. She compared the fatigue she had felt then with her present state of exhaustion, which seemed to have robbed her even of the capacity to shed tears. For St Clare’s sake she had mustered the last remnants of her strength to show herself the way she had once been: attractive and engaging, if not radiant. And now that St Clare had gone, she realised that although she had tried to be candid and guileless with him, she had found herself putting on an act yet again, to avoid letting him see her as utterly brokenspirited — at death’s door even. Now that it was no longer necessary to work herself up to a pitch she was falling apart, and besides, the emotional upheaval of that final confession had left her feeling so drained that she felt sure she would never get well again, mentally or physically.
Her cough was very bad, and she sought treatment from Dr Reijer once more. But she did not mention the morphine drops prescribed by her physician in Brussels, mindful as she was of Reijer’s earlier refusal to supply her with a sleeping draught. It was February, bitterly cold, and she kept to her rooms.
Rising from her bed in the morning she was overcome by the same sense of purposelessness as when she was staying with Madame van Raat, and rather than get dressed she would slip on her peignoir and recline on a couch, savouring the restful feeling that nothing was demanded of her, that there was no earthly reason for her to get dressed, and there was nothing to stop her remaining as she was, in her slippers, with her hair undone, for as long as she chose. She had been found thus, undressed, dishevelled and vacantly staring out of the window by various callers, including Madame van Raat, Betsy, Madame Verstraeten, and Marie and Lili. She did not read, she did nothing at all, and hours went by during which even her thoughts came to a standstill. At times she would abruptly throw herself on the floor and lie there pressing her face to the carpet with her eyes tightly closed, until a knock at the door — the maid bringing her lunch tray — made her scramble to her feet in sudden fright. She barely touched her food, and a grim little smile, half satiric and half crazed, etched itself on her features.
The evenings inflicted hours of agony on Eline. Her mind would be in a frenzy of agitation, as though electrified by the dread of a sleepless night. A vertiginous glare flooded her brain, her ears were filled with an incessant hum. A maelstrom of remembrances whirled by, and visions rose up before her. She started in fear at a shadow looming on the wall or the glint of a pin on the floor. But she took her drops, and was muffled at last by a leaden mantle of sleep.
. .
For long moments she stood staring in the glass at her faded beauty. Tears would rise to her eyes, whose brightness seemed to have been snuffed out for ever, and her mind drifted to her past. She was filled with yearning for those former days, having lost sight of what they had entailed, for she was finding it increasingly difficult to think clearly. It was as if there were certain limits to what she might think about, which she might not venture beyond. However, the sluggishness of her powers of reason lessened her melancholy, which, had she been of clear mind, would have mounted to a dangerous crisis. Instead, she now spent hour upon hour racked with doubt as to what she could possibly do with her useless body and her useless existence, dragging herself from one spasm of coughing to the next in the prison of her rooms. She shed bitter tears over her unfulfilled desires and lay writhing on the floor, her arms outstretched towards a phantom lover, for both in her dreams and in the daytime ramblings of her mind she had begun to confound Otto with St Clare, unconsciously attributing the utterances and ideas of the one to the other, so that she no longer knew which of the two she had ever truly loved, or still loved. When, during such fits of equivocation, she tried to battle through to a resolution, she came up against those thought-confining limits again, and became so enraged by her powerlessness that she thumped her head with her fists, as though trying to discipline her wayward brain by force.
‘What is the matter with me?’ she asked herself in despair. ‘Why can I remember nothing of hundreds of things that have happened, except that I know that they happened? Oh, the dullness in my head! I’d rather be in terrible pain than suffer this dullness! I must be going mad. .’
A shudder ran down her spine like a cold snake. Suppose she did go mad, what would they do with her? It did not bear thinking about, and yet, even as she struggled to banish the spectre of encroaching insanity, she had a sense of crossing a forbidden limit. Because if that was what she was doing then she must be. . losing her mind!
At such moments she would cover her eyes and her ears with her hands to block out all sight and sound, as though the first impression she might now receive would push her over the brink into madness. So terrified was she of this happening that she did not breathe a word to Reijer about the befuddlement in her brain.
During her prolonged spells of inactivity she became enslaved by strange fantasies and delusions, often rising to a bizarre strain of ecstasy, from which she would suddenly start awake in shock. Reclining on her couch, nervously toying with the tassels on the cushions or twisting a strand of her long, tousled hair, she mused on the theatrical illusions she had cherished in the old days of her duets with Paul, when she thought she loved Fabrice. Then she became an actress, she was on stage, she could see the audience, she smiled and bowed, it rained flowers. .
She rose to her feet in a daze, and began to hum some recitative, or a few phrases from an Italian aria as she drifted about the room, throwing up her hands in despair, reaching out beseechingly to a fleeing lover, falling down on her knees and begging for mercy even as she was being forcibly dragged away. . Diverse roles floated into her mind: Marguerite, Juliette, Lucie, Isabelle, Mireille, and in her transport of excitement she became all these heroines, acting out their most tragic moments in swift succession, only to wake abruptly from her delirium to find herself all alone in her room, making strange gesticulations.