Louis Couperus: Ecstasy

Dolf Van Attema, for an after-dinner walk, had taken the opportunity of calling on his wife’s sister, Cecile Van Even, in the Scheveningen Road. He was waiting in her little boudoir, walking to and fro among the rosewood furniture and the old moiré settees, over and over again, with three or four long steps, measuring the width of the tiny room. On an onyx pedestal, at the head of a chaise-longue , burned an onyx lamp, glowing sweetly within its lace shade, a great six-petalled flower of light.

Mevrouw was still with the children, putting them to bed, the maid had told him; so he could not see his godson, little Dolf, that evening. He was sorry. He would have liked to go upstairs and romp with Dolf as he lay in his little bed; but he remembered Cecile’s request, and his promise of an earlier occasion, when a romp of this sort with his uncle had kept the boy lying awake for hours.

So he waited, smiling at his obedience, measuring the little boudoir with his steps – the steps of a firmly-built man, broad and squat, no longer in his first youth, showing symptoms of baldness under his short, brown hair, with small blue-grey eyes, kindly and pleasant of glance, and a mouth which was firm and determined, in spite of the smile in the midst of the ruddy growth of his short Teutonic beard.

A log smouldered on the little hearth of nickel and gilt, and two little flames flickered discreetly – a fire of peaceful intimacy in that twilight atmosphere of lace-shielded lamplight. Intimacy and discreetness shed over the whole little room an aroma as of violets; a suggestion of the scent of violets nestled, too, in the soft tints of the draperies and furniture – rosewood and rose moiré – and hung about the corners of the little rosewood writing-table, with its silver appointments, and photographs under smooth glass frames. Above the writing-table hung a small white Venetian mirror. The gentle air of modest refinement, the subdued, almost prudish, tenderness floating about the little hearth, the writing-table, and the chaise-longue, gliding between the quiet folds of the fading hangings, had something soothing, something to quiet the nerves; so that Dolf presently ceased his work of measurement, sat down, looked around him, and finally remained staring at the portrait of Cecile’s husband, the Minister of State, dead eighteen months back.

After that he had not to wait long before Cecile came in. She advanced towards him, smiling as he rose from his seat, pressed his hand, excused herself that the children had detained her. She always put them to sleep herself, her two boys, Dolf and Christie, and then they said their prayers, one beside the other in their little beds. The scene came back to Dolf as she spoke of the children; he had often seen it.

Christie was not well, he was so listless; she hoped it might not turn out to be measles.

There was motherliness in her voice, but she did not seem a mother as she reclined, girlishly slight, on the chaise-longue, the soft glow behind her of the lamp on its stem of onyx. She was still in the black of her mourning. Here and there the light behind her touched her flaxen hair with a frail golden halo; the loose gown of crêpe she wore accentuated the girlish slenderness of her figure with the gently curving lines of her long neck and somewhat narrow shoulders; her arms hung with a certain weariness as her hands lay in her lap; gently curving, too, were the lines of her girlish youth of bust and slender waist, slender as a vase is slender; so that she seemed a still expectant flower of maidenhood, scarcely more than adolescent, not nearly old enough to be the mother of her children, her two boys of six and seven.

Her features were lost in the shadow – the lamplight touching her hair with gold – and Dolf could not at first see into her eyes; but presently, as he grew accustomed to the shadow, these shone softly out from the dusk of her features. She spoke in her low-toned voice, a little faint and soft, like a subdued whisper; she spoke again of Christie, of his godchild Dolf, and then asked news of Amélie, her sister.

“We are all well thank you! You may well ask how we are, we hardly ever see you.”

“I so seldom go out,” she said as an excuse.

“That is just where you make a mistake; you do not get enough air, enough society. Amélie was only saying so at dinner today, and so I came round to ask you to join us tomorrow evening.”

“Is it a party?”

“No; nobody.”

“Very well, I will come. I shall be very pleased.”

“Yes, but why do you never come of your own accord?”

“I can’t summon up the energy.”

“How do you spend your evenings?”

“I read, I write, or I do nothing at all. The last is really the most delightful; I only feel myself alive when I do nothing.”

He shook his head and replied: “You are a funny girl. You really don’t deserve that we should like you as much as we do.”

“How?” she asked, archly.

“Of course it makes no difference to you, you are just as well without us!”

“You mustn’t say that; it’s not true. Your sympathy is very necessary to me, but it takes so much to get me to go out. When I am once in my chair I sit thinking, or not thinking, and I find it difficult to stir.”

“What a horribly lazy life!”

“There it is! … You like me so much: can’t you forgive me my laziness, especially when I have promised you to come round tomorrow.”

“Very well,” he said, laughing, “of course you are free to live as you choose. We like you just the same, in spite of your neglect.”

She laughed, reproached him for using ugly words, and rose slowly to pour out a cup of tea for him. He felt a caressive softness creeping over him, as if he would have liked to stay there a long time, talking and sipping tea in that violet-scented atmosphere of subdued refinement; he, the man of action, the politician, member of the Second Chamber, every hour of whose day was filled up with committees here and committees there.

“You were saying that you read and wrote a good deal: what do you write?” he asked.

“Letters.”

“Nothing but letters?”

“I like writing letters. I corresponded with my brother and sister in India.”

“But, that is not the only thing?”

“Oh, no.”

“What else do you write then?”

“You are growing indiscreet, are you not?”

“What nonsense!” he laughed back, as if he were quite within his right. “What is it? Literature?”

“No. My diary.”

He laughed loudly and joyously. “You keep a diary! What do you want with a diary? Your days are all exactly alike.”

“Indeed they are not.”

He shrugged his shoulders quite nonplussed; she had always been a riddle to him. She knew this, and loved to mystify him.

“Sometimes my days are very nice, and sometimes very horrid.”

“Really!” he said, smiling, looking at her out of his kind little eyes; but he did not understand.

“And so sometimes I have a great deal to write in my diary,” she continued.

“Let me see some of it.”

“When I am dead.”

A mock shiver ran through his broad shoulders.

“Brrr! how gloomy!”

“Dead! What is there gloomy about that?” she asked, almost gaily; but he rose to go.

“You frighten me,” he said jestingly. “I must be returning home; I have a great deal of work to do still. So we’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Thanks, yes, tomorrow.”

He took her hand, and she struck a little silver gong for him to be let out. He stood looking at her a moment, with a smile in his beard.

“Yes, you are a funny girl, and yet we all like you!” he repeated, as if he wished to excuse himself in his own eyes for this sympathy. He bent down and kissed her on the forehead: he was so much older than she.