And he had seen something in Mamma as though she were craving for Hugh's kiss, though he sometimes treated her so roughly and cavalierly. Of course, this was also a motherly feeling on Mamma's part, but it was perhaps even more a need to have this lad, who was her son, caress her, caress her sweetly.... And were they to put her under any kind of restraint? Perhaps it would have to come! It would be perfectly horrid: that dear Mummy! But she was so silly sometimes! So stupid! Such a child, for such an old woman!... Oh, it was terrible, that growing old and older and yet remaining what you were! How little life taught you! How little it formed you! It left you as you were and merely wore off your sharp and attractive irregularities!... Poor Mamma, her life was made up of nothing but things that were past ... and especially things of love!... Aunt Stefanie spoke of hysteria; and a great streak of sensual passion had run through the family; but it did not come from the Derckszes, as Aunt Stefanie pretended: it came from Grandmamma herself. He had always heard that, like his mother, she too had been a woman of passion. People talked of all sorts of adventures which she had had in India, until she met Takma. There was a kind of curse on their family, a curse of unhappy marriages. Both of Grandmamma's marriages had turned out unhappily: General de Laders appeared to have been a brute, however much Aunt Stefanie might defend her father. With Grandpapa Dercksz, so people said, Grandmamma was exceedingly unhappy: the adventures dated back to that time. Grandpapa Dercksz was drowned by falling at night into the swollen river behind a pasangrahan in the Tegal mountains. Lot remembered how that had always been talked about, how the rumours had persisted for years. The story, which dated sixty years back, ran that Grandpapa Dercksz had shown kindness to a woman in the kampong and that he was stabbed by a Javanese out of jealousy. It was mere gossip: Dr. Roelofsz said that it was mere gossip.... A curse of unhappy marriages.... Uncle Anton had never been married; but in him the streak of passion developed into a broad vein of hysteria.... Uncle Harold, human but inscrutable, had been unhappy with his freule, who was too Dutch for an Indian planter.... Uncle Daan, in India—they were on their way to Holland at this moment—was to outward appearances not unhappy with a far too Indian wife, Aunt Floor: they were now old and staid and sedate, but there was a time when the fatal streak had run through both of them, developing in Aunt—a Dillenhof, belonging to Grandmamma's family—into the vein, the broad vein. Well, that was all past: they were old people now.... Aunt Thérèse van der Staff had become a Catholic, after an unhappy marriage; they said that Theo, her son, was not the son of her husband.... And his own poor mother, thrice married and thrice unhappily!
He had never looked at it like this before, throughout and down the generations, but, when he did, it was terrible: a sort of clinging to the social law—of marriage—which was suited to none of those temperaments. Why had they married? They were all old people now, but ... if they had been young now, with modern views, would they have married? Would they have married? Their blood, often heated to the point of hysteria, could never have endured that constraint. They had found the momentary counterparts of their passion, for not one of them—with the exception perhaps of Uncle Harold—had married for other than passionate reasons; but, as soon as the constraint of marriage oppressed them, they had felt their fate, the social law which they had always honoured, thoughtlessly and instinctively, and which did not suit them; they had felt their family curse of being married and unhappy.... And he himself, why was he getting married? He suddenly asked himself the question, seriously, as he had once asked his mother in jest. Why was he getting married? Was he a man for marriage? Did he not know himself only too well? Cynical towards himself, he saw himself as he was and was fully aware of his own egotism. He knew all his little vanities, of personal appearance, of a fine literary style.... He smiled: he was not a bad sort, there were worse than he; but, in Heaven's name, why was he getting married? Why had he proposed to Elly?... And yet he felt happy; and, now that he was seriously asking himself why he was getting married, he felt very seriously that he was fond of Elly, perhaps fonder than he himself knew. But—the thought was irrepressible—why get married? Would he escape the family curse? Wasn't Ottilie at Nice really right, Ottilie who refused to marry and who lived unbound with her Italian officer—she herself had written to tell him so—until they should cease to love each other? Was the streak continued in her or ... was she right and he wrong? Was she, his sister, a woman, stronger in her views of life than he, a man?... Why, why get married? Couldn't he say to Elly, who was so sensible, that he preferred to live unbound with her?... No, it was not feasible: there remained, however little it might count with them, the question of social consideration; there was her grandfather; there were people and things, conventions, difficulties. No, he could not put it to Elly; and yet she would have understood it all right.... So there was nothing for it but to get married in the ordinary way and to hope—because they loved each other so thoroughly and not only out of passion—that the curse would not force its fate upon them, the yoke of an unhappy marriage....
Those people, those uncles and aunts, had been unhappy, in their marriages. They were now growing old; those things of other days were now all passing.... They were passing.... Would they come to him, who was still young? Must they come around him, now that he was growing older? Oh, to grow older, to grow old! Oh, the terrible nightmare of growing old, of seeing the wintry-grey vistas opening before him! To be humbled in his conceit with his appearance did not mean so very much; to be humbled in his conceit with his literary gifts hurt more; but to be humbled in his whole physical and moral existence: that was the horror, the nightmare! Not humbled all at once, but slowly undergoing the decay of his young and vigorous body, the withering of his intelligence and his soul.... Oh, to grow as old as Grandmamma and as Grandpapa Takma: how awful! And those were people who had lived for their ninety years and more. An atom of emotion still seemed to be wafted between the two of them, an atom of memory. Who could tell? Perhaps they still talked ... about the past.... But to grow so old as that: ninety-seven! Oh, no, no, not so old as that: let him die before he decayed, before he withered! He felt himself turn cold with dread at the thought and he trembled, now that he realized so powerfully the possibility of growing as old as that: ninety-seven!... O God, O God, no, no!... Let him die young, let it be over, in his case, while he was still young! He was no pessimist, he loved life: life was beautiful, life was radiant; there were so many beautiful things in art, in Italy, in his own intellect: in his own soul even, at present, that emotion for Elly. But he loved young and vigorous life and did not want decay and withering. Oh, for vigour, vigour always, youth always! To die young, to die young! He implored it of That which he accepted as God, that Light, that Secret, which perhaps, however, would not listen from out of Its unfathomable depths of might to a prayer from him, so small, so selfish, so unmanly, so cowardly, so vain, so incredibly vain! Oh, did he not know himself? Did he pretend not to see himself as he was? Could he help seeing himself as he was?
He paced his room and did not hear the door open.
"And the fifty pounds is in the post!"
He started. His mother stood before him, looking like a little fury: her blue eyes blazed like those of a little demon and her mouth was wide open like a naughty child's.
"Oh!... Mamma!"
"Lot!... What's the matter with you?"
"With me?... Nothing...."
"Oh, my boy, my boy, what's the matter with you?"