The household took its everyday course of a morning: the everyday life, driven indoors by the merciless winter, the grey skies and blustering wind, rolled on softly and evenly in the rooms and passages of the big house. Not much came from outside, where the great trees in the garden dripped with chill rain; nothing to stir the big house, which stood there like a great lonely block on the villa-road, amid the sombre mystery of its wind-blown trees. For the occupants of the big, gloomy house had made as few acquaintances as possible among their neighbours, though in the spring and summer Gerdy would take her racket daily to the tennis-club. . . . In the winter, it was a quiet life indoors, varied only by a walk, or a visit to a sick or poor neighbour, a quiet life between the walls of the big rooms, with the wind tapping at the windowpanes. . . .
The old grandmother sat mostly in the conservatory and looked out into the garden, sagely nodding her silver-grey head. She no longer recognized all the children and as a rule thought herself back at Buitenzorg, in the midst of her own family; even when Klaasje sat playing at her feet, she would think that it was little Gertrude, Gertrude who had died, as a child, at Buitenzorg. . . . Constance, a zealous housewife, active despite her fifty-five years, moved about the house incessantly during the morning, with Marietje or Adeletje to help her. Twenty-two and twenty-one respectively, they were always with Constance: Marietje already full of unselfish consideration and Adeletje delicate, not speaking much, sitting with her needlework upstairs in their room; and, because of Alex' strange melancholy, it was only Guy and Gerdy that represented joyous, healthy youth in the house, that rich health and radiance which reminded Constance of their father, of her brother Gerrit, who had been so noisy, broad and strong until he fell ill, too ill to go on living. . . .
Klaasje was very troublesome in the mornings, very restless, full of freaks and cranks, always bothering the others to play with her or at least to make a fuss over her; and Constance was so sorry that Klaasje could not be upstairs in the nursery with Jetje and Constant, but Mathilde would not have her there. And the poor, innocent child, twelve years old by now, was jealous of Constant and Jetje and hated Mathilde, as though, unconsciously, she felt in the children a childishness that was natural and as though she knew that, after all, she herself was much too big to play about like that and build houses with cards and dominoes. . . .
Above the great sombre house, against the great sombre skies and inside the house itself there was always a strange melancholy of things that had been. . . . It floated through the passages and creaked in the furniture; it could be felt in the old grandmother's sitting at the conservatory-window, in the pale, unchangingly sad face of Adeline, who was so helpless; it appeared in the silent sorrow of Emilie, who was spiritless and never spoke much these days. In the sombre house they sat or moved in an atmosphere of bygone things which mingled with the atmosphere of the house itself, as though they were small, pale souls, broken by life and sheltering in the safe house, now that the winter seemed endless and the heavy clouds were so oppressive. . . . A cloud of recollection hung over the old woman, as she sat silently staring, as she played with Klaasje, who would never grow up; a last reflexion of sombre tragedy lingered around the simple mother of so many children, as though her husband's suicide still struck her with tragic wonder that life could strike so suddenly and fiercely and cruelly; it was as though a strange psychological secret slumbered in the sad eyes of Emilie, who was still a young woman; a secret which she would never speak. . . .
Sombre was the house and sombre the everlasting wind that blew around it; full of strange voices, of things of long ago; and they did not brighten the house, those three sad, silent women, so different in age, so sombre in their equal melancholy. They did not brighten the morning which they spent there together, in the house on the long, rain-swept road; and it was Constance herself, followed quietly by Marietje or Adeletje, who woke the house, stairs and passages to life with her active footfall and the shrill rattle of her keys. . . . The sound of a piano came harshly from Mathilde's sitting-room upstairs; and it had only to be heard to make the other piano in the drawing-room downstairs cry out in pain under Gerdy's furious little fingers, until Constance was startled at so much noise and hurriedly whispered to Marietje:
"Do tell Gerdy not to play when Mathilde is playing upstairs! . . ."
Marietje would then rush to the drawing-room and rebuke Gerdy; and, because it was Aunt Constance' request, Gerdy's piano suddenly fell silenced, leaving Mathilde's runs and flourishes to triumph overhead.
The children drove out daily with their nurse in the governess-court, whatever the weather: it was Addie's principle and they throve on it; and their youthfulness, stammering its first words, was like a bright, rosy dawn of the future, as they went along the sombre stairs and dark passages and rooms, casting a sudden golden radiance in that atmosphere of the past, as though they were suddenly powdering through the brown of the shadows, as though they were sprinkling the sound of children's voices through the brown air, which had not caught a childish sound for so many years. . . .
When Addie was out, visiting his patients, Van der Welcke remained in his room, reading and smoking, Uncle Jupiter, as Gerdy called him, because he usually sat enveloped in the blue clouds of his cigarette; and Guy did a little work, for his examination as a clerk in the postal service, except when he went to Utrecht, where he was receiving private tuition in geography. But when he was working at home, in his little room, up on the third floor, his young, healthy restlessness constantly made him get up and run downstairs, to borrow an atlas of Van der Welcke, hang round Uncle Henri for a bit, smoke a cigarette with him, then go back upstairs. He would look at his books and maps for three minutes and then jump up again, stretch himself, take up his dumb-bells, feeling stiff from the long sitting, and go downstairs once more.
Constance met him in the hall:
"Aren't you working, Guy?"
"Yes, I am, Auntie. Where are you off to?"
"To the store-cupboard."
He went with her and Marietje to the store-cupboard, conducted a raid among the almonds and raisins, talked a lot of nonsense and made Constance laugh, until she said:
"Come on, Guy . . . run along upstairs."
But, because Adeletje looked after the flowers in the conservatory and he saw her carrying a watering-can, he assisted her and even sponged the leaves of an aralia, while Klaasje played at Grandmamma's feet, building houses with cards, which she loved for the shrill colours of the court-cards, and aces[1] and for the pretty figures of hearts and diamonds, clubs and spades. He built a house for her; he teased Gerdy, who was back at her piano, now that Mathilde had left off overhead, until Truitje came to lay the table for lunch and he raced up three flights of stairs, terrified, to work at all costs . . . hang it all, yes, to work! . . . He sat with his hands to his ears, so as not to hear, and his eyes fixed on the maps; and, when the luncheon-bell rang, he deliberately waited a few minutes, pretended to himself to be annoyed because a morning passed so quickly and never came down to lunch less than five minutes late, making the excuse that he had been working so hard. . . .
Now, in the winter, the short days passed in peaceful, sombre domesticity: in the afternoon, Constance went for a walk or to see a poor person, generally with Adeletje; paying or receiving a visit was quite an event, which happened only three or four times during the winter; only Gerdy sometimes entertained her tennis-club and gave the members tea, upstairs in the girls' sitting-room, as though striving for a little sociability from the outside. . . . And, in the yellow circle of light shed by the lamps, the evening drowsed on gently after dinner, with the wind whistling round the house, with Gerdy's bustle amid the chink of her tea-things, with Guy and Adeletje rattling the dice:
"Two and five. . . ."
"Double six. . . . Once more. . . . Imperial. . . . Once more. . . . Three and five. . . ."
And Mathilde sat with a book in her hands, her eyes expressing a weight of silent boredom, while the room seemed full of things of the past, and the voice of the wind outside and the mourning women—Granny, Adeline, Emilie—like three generations of dreaming melancholy depressed her until Addie came in, for a brief hour, before going upstairs again to his reading. . . .
- ↑ The aces in Dutch packs of cards are set in brightly-coloured pictures, usually town-views.