So she accepted, moist-eyed, and pressed a light kiss on his brow. He was unaware that she had always loved him, unaware of how much she, too, had suffered during his courtship of Eline. He had yet to perceive the depth of her love for him, he saw only the depth of her pity, but that alone was like a soothing balm to his soul.
Through the dense, spreading bushes glimmered the villa, and seated between the columns on the porch, in the light shining from inside, was an animated gathering, for Paul and Freddie had invited more friends to their abode: Georges and Lili with their two small children, and Etienne, boisterous and youthful as ever.
Otto and Marie made their way back slowly, lingering along the flowerbeds. All around were rose bushes in full bloom, suffusing the freshness of evening with their sultry fragrance. Beyond, on the porch, Etienne appeared to be teasing poor Lili, for they could hear her cries of indignation followed by peals of laughter from the others.
Marie hung back, as though embarrassed by the joy welling up inside her; then she stooped to shake the stems of a few overblown roses and watch their petals flutter down to the ground.
‘Come,’ he murmured. ‘Let’s go and surprise them with our good news.’
And as he led her by the hand he felt he could breathe again; he had a new sense of energy, even of rebirth, for the consoling passage of time had not only effaced his sorrow, it seemed to have rekindled his lust for life.
AFTER WORD BY PAUL BINDING
Almost halfway through Eline Vere we find its eponymous heroine in a state of conscious happiness. Eline, whose life has hitherto centred round the entertainments of high society in The Hague, is staying at De Horze in Gelderland, the country property of the family into which she has agreed to marry. The more she sees of her betrothed, Otto van Erlevoort, the more she appreciates his kindly, virtuous character. Herself highly strung and only too frequently dissatisfied, she has found deep contentment in surrendering to the slow rhythms of the rural summer. These have enabled her to get on with members of the large Van Erlevoort family so well that they are now obviously fond of her — even Otto’s sister Frédérique, who has never much cared for her. Eline is quite aware that she has significantly changed:
During moments of solitary reflection on her new selfhood, tears welled up in her eyes in gratitude for all the goodness that she had received, and her only wish was that time would not fly, but stand still instead, so that the present would last for ever. Beyond that she desired nothing, and a sense of infinite rest and blissful, blue tranquility emanated from her being.
Yet the God to whom she prays for this stasis does not answer her prayer, for time by its very nature cannot stand still. And moving and even sympathetic though we may find Eline’s thoughts here, we can also detect in them signs of the pernicious weakness that will destroy her. Her hopes are unrealistic, and fear plays too great a part in them; indeed, they amount to a desperate desire to have subtracted from existence anything demanding or painful. They are also self-centred; in this respect Eline’s ‘new selfhood’ differs little, if at all, from her former one. Does her fiancé have his rightful part in these wishes of hers for the future to be cancelled?
When Eline returns from De Horze to her sister and brother-in-law’s house in The Hague, she finds that her older cousin, Vincent, is in temporary residence. Vincent has led a rackety life, which has taken its toll on him both physically and financially (he endlessly cadges money). Eline’s sister Betsy — practical, conventional, insensitive — loathes him, but on Eline he exerts a curious fascination, particularly as the Gelderland days recede, and the all-too-familiar tedium of her life in The Hague engulfs her anew. Vincent reminds Eline of the father she so loved and revered, a failed artist who could never find the energy to complete one of his ambitious canvases. Indeed, for all his dabbling in doubtful commercial enterprises, Vincent, with his collection of bric-a-brac, could himself be called a failed artist, and this is how he sees himself. A man more unlike Otto van Erlevoort than this seedy, yet somehow magnetic, individual could scarcely be imagined, and in fact we readers know that Otto, unlike the other more impressionable young men in his social circle, actually despises him: ‘But Otto, with unselfconscious confidence in his own health and strength, looked down on Vincent for the poisonous charm he emanated to gullible associates.’ But Eline, much to her sister’s irritation, takes to having long, lazy, philosophical conversations with him:
‘So you believe that everything is preordained, and that when I think I am doing something out of my own free will I am really only doing it because. .?’
‘You only think it’s your free will, but your will is nothing other than the outcome of hundreds and thousands of previous so-called occurrences. Yes indeed, that is what I believe.’
[. .]
‘You believe, for instance, that if I marry Otto all I’m doing is following a preordained path?’
But only seconds after she asks him this, Vincent, in poor condition anyway, faints. The effect on Eline of both his remarks and his swoon is astonishing, and yet, on reflection — for this is a novel of great subtlety in its psychological and social observation — perhaps we should not be so very astonished. Eline now begins to wonder that ‘her love for Otto might not be enough after all’; for an instant she has seen behind her imaginings of her married life-to-come an alarming ‘ghost’. Vincent’s faint draws her, emotionally, romantically, towards him — though there is no evidence of any deeper feeling for her on his part than cousinly affection and gratitude. (Indeed, perhaps if there had been, she would not be so drawn.) Couperus, born in 1863, was twelve years the senior of Carl-Gustav Jung (1875–1961) yet Eline Vere (1889) strikingly anticipates key Jungian ideas, present also in his subsequent fiction. Vincent, sick, seedy, idle, is the shadow to Otto in Eline’s psyche, and indeed embodies important features of her own self. Hence her fleeting but frightening vision of the ‘ghost’, which is this shadow’s projection. Eline’s consequent casting-off of the Otto she still loves — causing her genuine anguish in which, for all her egotism, concern for the rejected young man is a strong component — is, in truth, an unconsciously motivated attempt to assert her personality in all its complexity on behalf of its unending quest, its driving need for wholeness. It may also be seen, of course, as a revolt against that very pre-ordination — societal and/or circumstantial — that her cousin was proclaiming before he passed out.
But there is more still to be discovered in Eline’s action. Her moods, her nervousness, her preposterous fantasies which spiral away from those who have inspired them, her bouts of illness (or indefinable un-wellness) may exasperate us readers almost as much as they do her elder sister, Betsy. But when we stand back and view them collectively, do they not reveal her unwitting, instinctive recognition of what is dead or dull in her society, of what may be pleasing, even admirable on the agreeable, convention-hallowed surface but which never addresses what runs deeper? In hoping for a suspension of time’s movement, Eline at twenty-three may have been entertaining the dreams of a silly adolescent, but is she not, in the very fervour of her wishes, also fighting herself and her own frightening powers of understanding? Hasn’t she all along had an appreciation of life’s darker side — whereas the less complicated Otto, at any rate up to this point, has not? Eline’s problems derive from her not knowing how to cope with her troubling appreciation, receiving no guidance here from the largely stultifying codes by which her more adjusted friends and relations live.