Chapter XXII
Constance began to love her loneliness more and more.
Her daily life was very uneventful: she could count the people with whom she came into contact. First her husband and her son: there was something gentler in her attitude towards Van der Welcke, something almost motherly, which prevented her from getting angry with him, even though the inclination welled up within her. Addie was as usual, perhaps even a little more serious: this disquieted her. Then there was Brauws, who came regularly. He dined with them regularly, on a fixed day in the week, quite informally; and moreover he had become the friend of both Van der Welcke and Constance and even of Addie. Then there were Mamma, Gerrit and his little tribe and, now and again, Paul. And then there was Van Vreeswijck; and Marianne, of course; and latterly she had seen more of Bertha. For the rest she seemed to drift away from all the others, even from warm-hearted Aunt Lot. She kept in touch only with those with whom she was really in sympathy.
Still, though she had these few friends, she often had quite lonely afternoons. But they did not depress her; she gazed out at the rain, at the cloud-phantoms. And she dreamed ... along the path of light. She smiled at her dream. Even though she very much feared the absurdity of it for herself, she could not help it: a new youthfulness filled her with a gentle glow, a new tenderness, like the delicate bloom of a young girl’s soul dreaming of the wonderful future.... And then she would come back to herself suddenly and smile at her sentimentality and summon up all her matronly common-sense; and she would think:
“Come, I oughtn’t to be sitting like this!... Come, I oughtn’t to be acting like this and thinking of everything and nothing!... Certainly, I like him very much; but why cannot I do that without these strange thoughts, without dreaming and picturing all manner of things and filling my head with romantic fancies ... as if I were a girl of eighteen or twenty?... Oh, those are the things which we do not speak about, the deep secret things which we never tell to anybody!... I should never have suspected them in myself ... or that they could be so exquisitely sweet to me. How strangely sweet, to dream myself back to youth in visions which, though they never really take shape, yet make a shining path to those cloudy skies, to imagine myself young again in those dreams!... If I never had these thoughts and dreams before, why do I have them now? Come, I oughtn’t to be sitting like this and thinking like this!... I make up a host of pretty stories, sentimental little stories, and see myself, see us both, years ago, as quite young children, both of us. He played and I played ... almost the same game: he a boy, I a girl. It was as though he were seeking me. It was as though I, in my childish dreams, divined something of him, far, far away, as though there were a part of me that wanted to go to him, a part of him that wanted to come to me.... Stop, I am giving way again to those secret enthusiasms which lie deep down in my soul like strange, hidden streams, those vague, romantic ferments such as I imagined that young girls might have, but not I, a woman of my years, a woman with my past, the mother of a big son.... I will not do it any more, I will not.... It is morbid to be like this.... And yet ... and yet ... when the wind blows and the rain comes down, it is, it still is the dear secret that brings the tears to my eyes.... If I love him, quite silently, deep down within myself, why may I not just dream like that? The absurdity of it exists only for me: nobody, nobody knows of it. I have some one else hidden within me: a younger woman, a sister, a young sister-soul, a girl’s soul almost. It is absurd, I know; but sometimes, sometimes it is so strong in me and I love him so well and feel, just like a girl, that he is the first man I have ever loved.... Oh, Henri! I can see now what that was: he was young; it was at first mere play-acting, just like a comedy; then it became passion, very quickly, a mad impulse, an almost feverish impulse to hold him in my arms. That is all dead. Passion is dead.... This is a dream, a young girl’s dream. It is the beginning. It is absurd; and I am often ashamed of it, for my own sake. But I cannot resist it: it envelops me, just as the spring sunshine and the scent of the may and the cherry-blossom in the Woods envelop one with languorous sweetness. I cannot resist it, I can not resist it. My eyes go towards those clouds, my soul goes towards those clouds, my dreams go towards them ... and I love him, I love him.... I feel ashamed: sometimes I dare not look my son in the face.... I love him, I love him; and I feel ashamed: sometimes I dare not go across the street, as though people would notice it, by the light on my face.... But ah, no, that light does not shine from me, because I am old! It does from Marianne, poor child, but not from me ... oh, thank God for that!... I want to struggle against it, but it is stronger than I; and, when I think of him, I feel as if I were numbed here in my chair. When he comes into the room, I tremble, powerless to make a movement. Let me be ashamed of myself, argue with myself, struggle as I may, it is so, it is something real, as though I had never felt anything real in my life: it is a dream and it is also reality....”
She often strove against it, but the dream was always too strong for her, enveloping her as with a multitude of languorous spring scents. It imparted a strange tenderness to her, to her fresh, round face, the face of a woman in her prime, with the strange, soft, curly hair, which the years were changing without turning grey. If he came, she awoke from that dream, but felt herself blissfully languid and faint.
“I am not a girl,” she thought, now that she heard herself speak; but her fixed idea, that she was old, quite old, retreated a little way into the background.
But, though she now no longer felt so old in her dream, after her dream she thought herself ignorant. Oh, how ignorant she was! And why had she never acquired an atom of knowledge in her wasted days, in her squandered, empty years. When she was talking to Brauws—and now that he came regularly, they often talked together, long and earnestly, in the friendly twilight—she thought:
“How ignorant I am!”