"I dare say I shall be frightened to-night," said Gerdy. "If so, I'll wake you, Marietje, and creep into bed beside you."
"Very well, do.... And don't worry...."
"Good-night, then...."
"Good-night...."
"Good-night...."
Round the house the thaw wept; and in the night the sinewed grain of the ice broke and melted in weeping melancholy, with the added melancholy of the west wind blowing up heavy clouds, the west wind which came from very far and moaned softly along the walls and over the roof, rattling the tight-closed windows of the night....
Inside the house reigned the darkness of repose and the shadow of silence; and the inmates slept. Only Gerdy could not fall sleep: she lay thinking with wide-open eyes, as she listened vaguely to the wind blowing and the thaw pattering, thinking that she hated ... and loved ... that she hated Mathilde ... and loved ... him ... Johan....
CHAPTER XIV
"Yes," said Paul, as he followed Constance out of her own sitting-room, while she, with her key-basket over her arm, went down the stairs with Marietje and Gerdy, "yes, I'm not ashamed to confess it: I've come to see how the country suits me. The Hague is becoming so dirty that I can't stand it any longer. What a dirty place a town is! It's much cleaner in the country.... You're fortunate, you people. But I daresay I should have stayed on at the Hague—I'm not really a man for the country—if my landlady wasn't getting so old, if she wasn't always changing the servants, if those servants weren't so unspeakably slovenly and dirty.... She produced such specimens lately that I gave her notice.... I'd had those rooms fourteen years.... It'll be a great change for me.... But I couldn't stand it any longer. I had to see to everything myself; and I'm getting too old for that.... Yes, I still do my wash-hand-stand myself.... But look here, Constance, when it came to making my bed—because the servant's hands were dirty and my sheets one night smelt of onions—you know, that was really too much to expect. I'm no longer a young man: I'm forty-six. Yes, that's right, you young baggages, laugh at your old uncle! I'm forty-six, forty-six. Lord, what a lot of dirt I've seen in those years!... As the years go by, filth heaps itself around you like a mountain: there's no getting through it. Politics, people, servants, bedclothes, everything you eat, everything you touch, everything you do, say, think or feel: it's a beastly business, just one sickening mass of filth.... The only pure, unsullied thing that I have found in the world is music. Ah, what a pure thing music is!..."