The Later Life

by Louis Couperus

Constance remained alone the whole evening.

She had opened both her bedroom-windows wide; and she looked out over the road into the sultry night. She had undressed and put on a white wrapper; and she remained sitting, in the dark room, at the open window.

For a moment, she thought that Van der Welcke would come to her, to tell her his decision; but he did not come.... He seemed to be staying with Addie in the dining-room.... Then she heard him go to his own room....

In the silence, in the still, sultry darkness, which seemed to enter the room almost heavily, her restlessness, the doubt which she had felt rising in herself, during those few words with Addie, melted away. Sitting at the open window, she let herself be borne along by the silent, insidious magic of the late summer hour, as though something stronger than herself were overpowering her and compelling her to surrender herself, without further thinking or doubting, to a host of almost disquieting raptures, which came crowding in upon her....

Above the darkling masses of the Woods hung the sullen menace of heavy rain; and, just once or twice, there was a gleam of lightning yonder, in the direction of the sea, which she divined in the distance flashing with sudden illuminations, with noiseless reflections, and then vanishing in the low-hanging clouds of the night.

She lay back in her chair, at first oppressed by her doubt and by the heat, but gradually, gradually—her eyes fixed on the electric gleams far in the distance—all her doubts melted away, the enchantment penetrated yet deeper and the storm-charged sultriness seemed a languorous ecstasy in which her breast heaved gently, her lips opened and her eyes closed, only to open again, wider than before, and stare at the lightning that flashed and vanished, flashed and vanished, with intervals full of mystery....

No, she doubted no longer: all would be well, all would be well.... She could not make a mistake in this new life, this later life, this mature life, which she had lived, so to speak, in a few months, giving herself up entirely to sincerity and honesty and to the crowning love, the only really true and lofty love. Her love, that late love, had been her life, right from those girlish dreams of a few months past down to the moment of inward avowal; and what in another woman would have lasted years, in the slow falling of the days, which, like beads on a long string, fell one by one through the fingers of silent fate, the unrelenting teller of the beads, she had lived in a few months: after her dreaming had come her thinking; after her thinking, her wish to know; after her wish to know, her plunge into books and nature, until dreaming, thinking, knowledge and, above all, love supreme and triumphant had mingled to form a new existence and she had been reborn as it were out of herself.

She had dreamed and thought and questioned it all hastily and feverishly, as though afraid of being late, of feeling her senses numbed, her soul withered by the grey years, before she had lived ... before she had lived. Hastily, but in all sincerity; and her late awakening had been deep and intense, a mystery to herself and an impenetrable secret to all, for no one knew that she dreamed and thought and questioned knowledge and nature; no one knew that nowadays she looked on a tree, a cloud, a book, a picture with different eyes than in the past, when she had neither eyes nor understanding for tree or cloud, for book or picture, nor found beauty in any; no one saw that something cosmic and eternal flashed before her in that one swift glance of tardy recognition and knowledge; no one knew that she, the aristocrat, felt that keen pity for her day and generation, had learnt to feel it from him, through him. All of it, all of it, all her later life: no one knew it save herself alone.... And gradually, too, in those intimate conversations, they had come to know something of each other, had learnt—guessing first and then knowing—that they had found each other, late in life—she him, he her—as though at last, at last, after that vague instinctive seeking and trying to find each other in their childhood days, Heaven had been merciful! How vague it had been, that shadowy intuition, hardly to be uttered and vanishing as soon as uttered: on his side, that distant veil of mist, that cloud, on the horizon of the moors; on hers, that perpetual longing to go farther, to flit from boulder to boulder down the hurrying stream, as it rushed past under the dense canopy of those tropical trees: a pair of children knowing nothing of each other and all unconscious until years later that they were both seeking ... both seeking! Oh, that strange dream-quest, that nameless desire, which, when one breathed it, vanished, was no longer a quest! At a touch, it became intangible; as soon as one grasped it, it slipped away, became something different, something different.... But, unbreathed, untouched, ungrasped, just dreamed and dimly felt in those far-off childhood days, it was that: the mystic, wonderful reality, which was the only reality.... To both of them, in those days, it had been too gossamer-frail, too intangible and too incomprehensible to last beyond their childhood, that seed of reality working in the womb of time: vanity and frivolity had claimed her for their own, study and reflection had claimed him; and each had wandered farther and farther from that half-divined other, no longer even seeking the other....

The years had heaped themselves up between them, between her at the Hague, in Rome, in Brussels, and him in America, when she was an elegant young society-woman, he the workmen’s friend and brother, their comrade who yearned to know and understand them. While she had danced and flirted in the ball-rooms of Rome, he had laboured in the docks, gone down the black shafts of the coal-mines. And all this which had really happened seemed unreal to her, a dream, a remote nightmare, by the side of that childish romance, those fairy visions of yesterday! And yet it had all happened, it had all happened. They had never been allowed to meet each other, not even when they had been brought near each other—on the Riviera, in Brussels—as by an unconscious power! They had not been allowed to meet until now, late, very late, too late.... Oh, is it ever given too late, that blessed boon, to live at last, to find at last?

And they had both made mistakes. She had made her mistakes: her brief passion for Henri, the sudden kindling of the senses of a frivolous, bored and idle woman; then the marriage: mistake upon mistake, nothing but waste, waste, waste of her precious life. And he had made mistakes too: he had dreamed of being the brother of those men, a fellow-worker and comrade, and he had not become their brother. Oh, if they had once been allowed to know and find each other, in the years when they were both young, what a harmony their life together might have been: no jarring note in themselves or in each other, but perfect harmony in all things, attuned to the note of their day and generation; he by her side to understand and love her and support her when the sadness of it all oppressed her! Oh, to have lived, when still young, with him, in his heart, in his arms; and then to have loved, to have understood, to have done, with him and for his sake, all that can still be done for one’s day and generation by those who themselves are strong and radiant in love and happiness and harmony!...