The Later Life

by Louis Couperus

There came to her scarcely a fleeting thought of the immorality which the world, people, small people—the whirlers in the little circle, with their little prejudices and dogmas, their little creeds and philosophies—would see in such strange views from a married woman concerning herself and a friend, concerning her husband and the little niece with whom her husband was evidently in love. She was a small creature like all of them, she was a small soul, like all of them; but her soul at least was growing, growing upwards and outwards; she no longer felt depressed; and it seemed as if she were being borne on wings to the greater cloud-worlds yonder, to the far cities, where flashed the lightnings of the new revelations, the new realities....

Everything in her was changed....

Chapter XXIII

Max Brauws was a thinker as well as a man of action; and each of these two personalities insisted on having its period of domination. After his college days, he had wandered over Europe for years, vaguely seeking an object in life. Deep down in himself, notwithstanding all his restless activity, he remained a dreamer, as he had been in his childhood and boyhood. It seemed as if that which he had sought in his dreams when playing as a boy on the fir-clad hills and over the moors went on beckoning him, darkly and elusively, a mystic, nebulous veil on the dim horizons of the past; and, when he ran towards them, those far horizons, they receded more and more into the distance, fading little by little; and the veil was like a little cloud, melting into thin air.... He had wandered about for years, his soul oppressed by a load of knowledge, by the load of knowing all that men had thought, planned, believed, dreamed, worshipped, achieved. An almost mechanically accurate memory had arranged those loads in his brain in absolute order; and, if he had not been above all things driven by the unrest of his imagination, with its eternal dreaming and its eternal yearning to find what it sought, he would have become a quiet scholar, living in the country, far from cities, with a great library around him; for very often, when spent with weariness, he had a vision of an ideal repose. But the unrest and the yearning had always driven him on, driven him through the world; and they had both made him seek, for himself as well as for others, because, if he had found for others, he would also have found for himself. They, the unrest and the yearning, had driven him on towards the great centres of life, towards the black gloom of the English and German manufacturing-towns, towards the unhappy moujiks in Russia, towards the famine-stricken villages of Sicily, all in a heart-rending passion to know, to have seen, penetrated and experienced all the misery of the world. And the capitals had risen up around him like gigantic Babels of fevered pride, accumulations of egotisms; the smoke of the manufacturing-towns had smeared along the horizon of his life the soot-black clouds through which he could not see and in which the days remained eternally defiled; the Russian snow-landscapes had spread out as eternal, untraversable steppes—steppes and steppes and steppes—of absolutely colourless despair; in Italy he had beheld an appalling contrast between the magnificence of the country—the glory of its scenery, the melancholy of its art—and the sorrows of the afflicted nation, which, as in a haze of gold, against a background of sublime ruins and shimmering blue, along rows of palaces full of noble treasures, uttered its cry of hunger, shook its threatening fist, because the old ground brought forth not another olive, not one, after the excesses of the past, exhausted by the birth-pangs of the untold glories of old....

His mind, schooled in book-lore, also read life itself, learnt to know it, fathomed it with a glance. He saw the world, saw its wickedness, its selfishness, saw especially its awful, monstrous hypocrisy. Like so many leering, grinning masks, with treacherous honeyed smiles, contradicting the furtive glances of the diabolical eyes, he saw the powers of the world above the world itself: a huge nightmare of compact distress, the greedy, covetous, grasping fingers hidden as though ready to clutch at the folds of the majestic purple, ready to strike like vultures’ claws. And he saw—O terrible vision!—the world as a helpless, quivering mass lying for centuries under that eternal menace. He saw it everywhere. Then he wanted to free himself with a gigantic effort from the sphinx-like domination of his impotence, with its eternally unseeing eyes, its eternally silent lips, its undivining mind; and his movement was as that of one who lies crushed under granite, the granite of that omnipotent sphinx of impotence, who, with her eternal immovability, seemed to be saying nothing but this:

“I am unchangeable, eternally; against me everything is eternally dashing itself to pieces; against me your dreams scatter into mist. I alone am, but I am that which is unchangeable: human impotence, your own impotence. Lie still at my feet, do not move: I alone am.”

That was the vision of his hopeless eyes. But desperation drove him on, wandering ever on and on to other lands, to other capitals, to other towns black with smoke: the smoke through which nothing shone, not a single gleam of hope. And for years it was the same: wandering, seeking, not finding; only seeing, knowing, realizing. But the more he saw, knew and realized, the more terrible it was to him that he could not find the very first word of the solution, the more terrible it became to him that only the sphinx remained, the immovable granite impotence; and her blank gaze seemed to utter her solitary revelation:

“I alone am. I am impotence; but I am immovable, I am omnipotent.”

Then he had felt in himself the need to do still more, to be really a doer, a common workman, as they all were, everywhere, the poor and wretched. And he went to America, in order no longer to think, read, ponder, dream, see or know, but to do what they were all doing, the poor and wretched. And it was as he had succeeded in telling Constance at last, after so many hesitations: everything that was atavistic in him had prevented him from becoming a brother, a fellow-worker. But he was scarcely back in Europe before he felt the air around him full of noble aims, passionate hopes; and Peace had shone before his eyes. He spoke; and his words were as the words of one inspired; and everybody went to hear him. He had spoken in Holland; he now went to Germany and spoke there. He wrote his book there: Peace. He went on doing and moving, until he was laid low not only with the fatigue of thinking and meditating, but also with the strain of constantly travelling hither and thither, of constantly appearing in overcrowded halls, of speaking in a clear, resonant voice to thousands of people. For a moment he said to himself that he was doing something, something even greater and better than his manual labour in America had been. For a moment he said to himself that he had found, if not everything, at least something, an atom of absolute good, and that he was imparting that atom to the world. But dull discouragement came and smote him, as well as physical strain, and left him saying to himself: