"Then what is left?"
"A great sense of peace, dear. It will all be for the very best, I think. Do as you think, go to what calls you."
She leant against him, laid her head on his shoulder. He kissed her. A kindly, health-giving stream seemed to be flowing through her.
"He knows already, he is certain about himself," she thought, looking up at the understanding stars. "He knows his own mind ... definitely, definitely. O God, let him always know his own mind!"
CHAPTER IX
Old Mrs. van Lowe had taken a furnished villa at Nunspeet for a few weeks and gone to stay there with Adeline and her flaxen-haired little tribe. She wanted to be near Ernst; and the doctors had not objected to her going to Nunspeet and even seeing him once or twice: there was no question of an isolation-cure; on the contrary, the patient had always been too lonely; and something in the way of kindly sympathy, which would counteract his shyness, might even have a salutary effect.
Gerrit ran down once or twice from the Hague. But there was hardly room for him in the villa, which was full up with the children's little beds; and also he was secretly hurt that Ernst had taken a dislike to him. And, when he was back at the Hague, alone in his house, he pondered over it all, over the difference and the resemblance between them: Ernst belonging to the dark Van Lowes, Papa's blood; he, like Constance and Paul, to the fair ones, Mamma's blood, though they all had black or at least very dark-brown eyes, with that rather hard, beady glance. But what struck him as very singular was that he more or less understood why Ernst had become as he was: a little odd, he called it, nothing more; whereas Ernst saw nothing in Gerrit, saw nothing but a nature entirely antipathetic to his own: no doubt his deceptive muscular strength, which was antipathetic to the morbid sensitiveness of the shy, lonely, studious brother.... But did any one see him, Gerrit, really as he was? And had it not always been so, from the time when he was a child, a boy, a young man? It gave him a melancholy sense of security, in these days; that he was living by himself, living a life taken up exclusively with his military duties, captain for the week, out very early, in the stables from six to seven seeing to the grooming of the horses, the cleaning of their boxes, thinking even more of the horses than of the men and caring more, hussar that he was, for a fresh, clean-smelling stable, with a litter of fresh, clean-smelling straw for the animals, than for the details of the troopers' mess. When the horses had been fed and watered came the ride with his squadron: drilling, target-practice or field-duty; then back again, handing in his report, finishing any business in the squadron-office. This took up the whole morning; and in the exercise of those minor duties which he loved he had hardly time for thinking; and the officers for the week saw him as they had always seen him: the big, strong, yellow-haired Goth, brisk in his movements, flicking his whip against his riding-boots, broad-chested in his red-frogged uniform, his voice loud and domineering, with a note of kindliness under the bluster, his step quick and firm, giving an impression of energy.... That was all that officers and men saw of him; and he, for the time, was what he appeared, even to himself.... But then he would go home and bolt his sandwich, alone, and would ride his second charger, before going back to barracks in the evening, to supervise the foddering of the horses again. And it was during this afternoon interval that he was accustomed to pick out lonely roads, where he would meet none of his brother-officers; it was then, in that afternoon interval, when loneliness was all around him, that he saw himself and knew himself to be different from what he seemed to his acquaintances, different even to himself.... He saw himself again as a child in Java, a small boy playing with his sister Constance, on the great boulders in the river behind the palace at Buitenzorg. He could see her still in her white baadje,[4] with the red flowers at her temples. The thought of it gave him a curious sentimental pang, which made him melancholy, he did not know why. Then he saw himself grown a few years older and in love, perpetually in love, with the earnest amorousness of East-Indian schoolboys for girls of their own age, little nonnas[5] who learn so rapidly that they are women and that they attract the boys who ripen so rapidly into men under the burning sun. He, Gerrit, had always been in love, sometimes in romantic fashion, like the fairy princes in the stories which his little sister Constance used to tell him, but more often in rougher style, longing to satisfy his greedy mouth and greedy hands, the gluttonous senses of his lusty, growing body, the body of a schoolboy and of a young man in one.... Oh, he still laughed at those recollections. He could see the school distinctly and, at play-time, the boys slyly looking through the reeds by the ditch-side at the schoolgirls' little carts; the young nonnas, in their white baadjes, peeping through the curtains of the rickshaw; the boys throwing them a kiss with quivering fingers, the girls throwing back the kiss to their boyish lovers in the reeds. And the assignations in the great, dark gardens; the burning and glowing in the childish breast: oh, he remembered it all!... And he saw, as he went on his lonely ride—although he now laughed the laugh of his mature years—he saw before his eyes all the girls with whom he had been in love, as a schoolboy, at Buitenzorg....
There was one delicate, fair-skinned girl, very pale and very pretty. She soon acquired the purple, laughing lips of the child who, by the time that she is thirteen, becomes a full-grown woman, with a ripe bust and riotous black curls.... And he also remembered a coffee-plantation in the hills, with a young married woman of barely twenty, who had taken him, a lad of fifteen, in her arms and had not released him until the boy had become a man. She had taught him the secret that was seething in his blood, throbbing in his veins, the secret that flushed his cheeks and took away his breath the moment he approached anything in the shape of a woman: the secret which the boy knew by hearsay but not by experience. And, ever since she taught it him, there had been in him, like a healthy hysteria or vigorous sensuality, a great lustiness of his adolescent body; a surplus of strength which he must needs dissipate: he never came near a woman now but he at once swiftly appraised her arms, her swinging gait, her bust, the look in her eyes, the laugh on her lips; if he passed her in the street, a quick glance printed her whole figure like a photograph on his sensual imagination until the next woman whom he met effaced it with her own, later print.
And, when he came to Holland as a young man and entered as a cadet at Breda, the need for lust had developed into an overpowering obsession, as it were an unquenchable thirsting of those new-found senses which were fermenting in the young male body. Afterwards, as a young officer, he had known one quick sensual passion after the other, taking each laughing enjoyment with all the carelessness of a youthful conqueror. His strong constitution and open-air life had enabled him to triumph like that with impunity, for years on end; but even at that time he had often suffered from sudden fits of depression, a secret, silent hopelessness, when everything seemed to be going black before him with needless, useless, menacing gloom. None of his fellow-officers saw it; none of his brothers or sisters. If he put in an appearance on one of those days, he was the same blunt, jovial soldier, the fair-haired, burly giant, rough and noisy, with the mock fierceness in his voice and the love of women in his brown, questing eyes, that went up and down, doing their appraising in a moment. But, secretly, there was within him so great a discontent with himself, that, as soon as he was alone, he would think: