“Engaged!”
And she shrieked the words with a shrill outburst of uncontrollable mirth at the comedy of life and took Mrs. van Does, who stood with the eyes starting out of her head, and spun her round and kicked the bundle out of the babu’s hands, so that a parcel of embroidered bedspreads and table-slips fell to the ground and a little jam-pot full of glittering crystals rolled away and broke.
“Oh dear!... My brilliants!”
One more kick of frolicsome wantonness; and the table-slips flew to left and right and the diamonds lay glittering scattered among the legs of the tables and chairs. Addie, his eyes still filled with terror, crawled about on his hands and feet, raking them together.
Mrs. van Does repeated:
Chapter Thirty-One
Doddie was rapt into the seventh heaven of delight when Van Oudijck told her that Addie had asked her hand in marriage; and, when she heard that mamma had been her advocate, she embraced Léonie boisterously, with the emotional spontaneity of her temperament, once more surrendering to the attraction which Léonie had exercised upon her for years. Doddie now at once forgot everything that had annoyed her in the excessive intimacy between mamma and Addie, when he used to hang over her chair and whisper to her. She had never believed what now and again she had heard, because Addie had always assured her that it was not true. And she was ever so happy that she was going to live with Addie, he and she together, at Patjaram. For Patjaram was her ideal of what a home should be. The big house, full of sons and daughters and children and animals, on all of whom the same kindness and cordiality and boredom were lavished, while behind those sons and daughters shone the halo of their Solo descent: the big house built on to the sugar factory was to her the ideal residence; and she felt akin with all its little traditions: the spices, crushed and ground by a babu squatting behind her chair, while she sat at lunch, represented to her the supreme indulgence of the palate; the races at Ngadjiwa, attended by the leisurely dawdling procession of all those women, with the babus behind them, carrying the handkerchief, the scent-bottle, the opera-glasses, were her non plus ultra of elegance; she loved the old dowager raden-aju; and she had given herself to Addie, entirely, without reserve, from the first moment of seeing him, when she was a little girl of thirteen and he a boy of eighteen. It was because of him that she had resisted with all her energy whenever papa proposed to send her to Europe, to boarding-school in Brussels; because of him she had never cared for any place except Labuwangi, Ngadjiwa or Patjaram; because of him she was prepared to live and die at Patjaram.
It was because of him that she had felt all her little jealousies, when her girl-friends told her that he was in love with this one or carrying on with that one; because of him she would always know those jealousies great and small, her whole life long. He would be her life, Patjaram her world, sugar her interest, because it was Addie’s interest. Because of him she would long for many children, very many children, who would be really brown: not white, like papa and mamma and Theo, but brown, because her own mother was brown; and she herself was a delicate brown, while Addie was a beautiful bronze colour, a Moorish brown; and, after the example set at Patjaram, her children, her numerous children, would be brought up in the shadow of the factory, in an atmosphere of sugar, with a view to their planting the fields, when they grew up, and milling the sugar-cane and restoring the fortunes of the family to their former brilliancy. And she was as happy as a girl in love could imagine herself to be, seeing her ideal, Addie and Patjaram, so closely attainable and not for a second realizing how her happiness had come about, through the word which Léonie, almost unconsciously, had uttered, as though by autosuggestion, at the supreme moment. Oh, now she need no longer seek the dark corners, the dark rice-fields with Addie; now she was constantly kissing him in broad daylight, leaning radiantly against him, feeling his warm, virile body, which was hers and would soon be hers entirely; now her eyes yearned up to him, for all to see, for she no longer had the maidenly power of hiding her feelings from others; now he was hers, hers, hers!