The Later Life

by Louis Couperus

“They cheer and applaud, but nothing is changed. Everything remains as it is, as if I had never spoken.”

His impatience demanded an immediate realization and the sight of the ideal flashing across the horizon. And then he lost all hope even for the future, for the brighter ages that were dawning. A mocking laugh, a sarcastic word in a report on his lectures was enough to shatter him for weeks. He hid himself like a leper, or allowed himself to be luxuriously lapped in the leafy melancholy of the German mountain-forests, or went, farther and higher, into the Alps, made reckless ascents, just himself and a guide, as though, along the pure world of the slippery glaciers, he hoped to find what he had sought in vain in the Old World and the New, in the world of all and of himself.

Then he remained for weeks lingering on in a lonely little village in Switzerland, high up among the eternal snows, as though he wished to purify himself of all the dust of his humanity. Merely through breathing the exquisite rareness of the air, especially at night, when in the higher heavens the stars shone nearer to him, twinkling out their living rays, it seemed as if the pure cold were cleansing him to his marrow, to his soul. He gazed back almost peacefully upon his life as a man of thought and action, thought and action being two things in which a man is able to indulge only if he be willing to live, for others and for himself. If anything of his thought, of his action remained drifting in those lower atmospheres of the suffering world, he was certain that this would be so little, so infinitesimally small, that he himself did not perceive it, like an atom of dust floating in the immensity of the future. Perhaps then the atom would prove to be a little grain and, as such, be built into the substance of the ideal. But, even if this were so, his thought and his action and their possible results seemed to him so small, so slight that he was filled with humility. And in this humility there was a pride in being humble; for did he not remember all the complacency, the dogmatism, the conviction, the assurance, the self-consciousness, all the pedantry that battened down there?

Amid the serenity of the mountains, as he sent his gaze roaming over the frost-bound horizons, all within him became pure and crystal-clear, his soul a very prism. He saw its colours lying there plainly, shining, glittering, with none of the foulness of that lower world. And these weeks were weeks of the deepest and most health-giving rest that he had ever known.

He now felt very lonely. He was not the man to give himself up to the simple enjoyment of this healing rest. He loved best to feel the multitude around him, to fling out his strong arms wide towards humanity, feeling his most ardent and happiest glow when embracing humanity. But, after his discouragements, he seemed to have thrust it gently, though kindly, a little farther from him, had abandoned it, had sequestered himself, in order to recover from himself and from humanity in the ample, restful silence of utter solitude. He now felt very lonely. And a longing awoke in him, stirring but feebly as yet, for love to come towards him now, because hitherto love had always gone out from him, eager and passionate; a longing to be sought himself, for once in his life; to see arms opened to him this time, waiting to embrace him, to press him to a loving heart.... A feeling of melancholy softened him, made him small and human, while the mountain-wind swept past on giant wings....

He looked back upon his life. That was one thing which it had never known: that concentration of all feeling on an individual. With him, any whole-hearted feeling had always been for the many. When he looked back, he saw spectres wandering through the past: the individual, the unit, just a faint blur here and there; he had never felt that all-devouring passion for them, the individuals. And yet, as a child, as a boy, playing his dream-game amid woods, fields, heather and stream, for whom had his longing been? To find all of them, humanity, or the one individual soul? He did not know; but a dreamer he had always remained, for all his thinking and doing. And now, after the many had brought him sorrow, he began to dream, for the first time, of the one....

Of the one ... the one individual soul that would open wide arms to him and approach him with a loving embrace ... one individual soul.... Had his quest always been the self-deception of impotence and was it possible that now that quest had become a search for the one individual soul? Suddenly, through his longing, he remembered an evening: a table with flowers and candles; men talking amid the smoke of their cigars; the burly figure of a fair-haired officer; and some strange words which that officer had just uttered as though unconsciously, in the course of ordinary conversation: a vision calling up early years of childhood, childish play, a little girl, fair, with red flowers at her temples, dressed in white, running barefoot over great boulders in a river full of rocks, under the heavy foliage of the tropical trees, and beckoning, beckoning with her little hand to the two elder brothers who were playing with her, fascinated by their little sister....

There, in that room, through the smoke of the cigars, amid the hum of indifferent talk, in three or four sentences, no more, that big, fair-haired man had said it, said it just casually, with a softening of his rough, noisy voice:

“It was wonderful, the way she had of playing. She would run over the rocks and pluck the flowers. Lord, how adorable she looked, the little witch! And we boys used to run with her, run after her, as far as ever she pleased. She only had to beckon to us ... the damned, adorable little witch!”

And the oath sounded like a caress; and the whole thing was only a picture lasting two or three seconds, no more; and then they returned to the smell of coffee and liqueurs, the cigar-smoke, the noisy voice growing rough again, becoming coarse and jovial as the burly, fair-haired soldier told some mess-room tale immediately afterwards, after that reminiscence. But in him, Brauws, the reminiscence had lingered, as though always visible: the picture shining in the tenderness with which the brother had spoken of his sister; and it seemed to him as though he himself had seen, but more vaguely and dimly, once in his life, on those Dutch horizons of his childhood, a blur like that of the little figure, the bright, fair-faced child, even the little red note of her flowers.... Oh, how vague it was, how visionary! You thought of it ... and it had gone, all of it, leaving hardly the memory of a perfume, nay, hardly the reflection of a memory! Really, it was nothing, nothing, too airy for thought and impossible to describe in words, however tenderly chosen. It was nothing: if he thought about it for more than the one second that the reflection flashed across him, it was gone, quite lost....