Old Mrs. van Lowe's neighbours thought it a funny thing that, after dinner that evening, the whole family arrived, one after the other, rang the bell and went in, though it was not Sunday. Except on those "family-group" Sundays, there was never much of a run on Mrs. van Lowe's door. And they wondered what could be the matter; and, as it was very warm, an August day, they opened all the windows, kept looking across the street and even sent their maids to enquire of Mrs. van Lowe's maids. But the maids did not know anything: they only thought it must be something to do with the young mevrouw, the one in Paris—Mrs. Emilie, as they called her—who had gone off with her brother.
"It's very queer about the Van Lowes," said the neighbours, looking out of window at the old lady's front-door, at which somebody was ringing again for the hundredth time.
"There come the Van Saetzemas."
"And here are those fat Ruyvenaers."
"What's up?"
"Yes, what can be up?"
"The servants say it's something to do with Emilie."
"A nice thing for the Van Ravens!"
"They say that Bertha has become quite childish, don't they?"
"I don't know about that: she just sits staring in front of her. They never come now: they're living at Baarn."
"Here are the Van der Welckes."
"Like aunt, like niece."
"Now they're all there."
"All?"
"Yes, I've seen them all. Captain van Lowe and his wife, Paul, Dorine and Karel."
"And Ernst?"
"He hasn't come yet."
"But then he doesn't always come."
"I wonder what's up."
"Yes, I wonder."
"There must be some scandal with Emilie."
"And, when you think of what the Van Naghels used to be. . . . Such big people!"
"And now . . ."
"Absolute nobodies. . . ."
"Oh, I think they're rather nice people! . . ."
"Yes, but they're all a bit touched, you know."
"Well, suppose we go to Scheveningen? . . ."
"Yes, let's go to Scheveningen. We may hear there what's happened . . ."
"Yes . . . about Emilie, you know. . . ."
And Mrs. van Lowe's neighbours went off to Scheveningen, with the express object of hearing what had happened about Emilie. . . .
Old Mrs. van Lowe was sitting in the conservatory, with the windows open, and crying gently, like one who was too old to cry violently, whatever the sorrow might be. Uncle Herman, Aunt Lot, all the children had come in gradually, their faces blank with utter dismay; and they were moving like ghosts about the large, dark rooms, where no one had thought of having the gas lit.
"Herman!" the old lady cried, plaintively.
Uncle Ruyvenaer and Aunt Lot approached.
"Have you seen him, Herman?" asked the old lady, wringing her old, knotted hands.
"No-o, Marie. But I . . . I shall go to him to-morrow . . . with Dr. van der Ouwe."
"And who is with him now?"
"A male nurse, Mamma," said Gerrit. "We've seen to everything. He's quite calm, Mamma dear, he's quite calm. It won't be very bad. It's only temporary: it'll pass, the doctor said."
Cateau's bosom suddenly loomed through the open doorway of the conservatory:
"Oh, Mam-ma," she said, "how sad . . . about Ernst! Who would ever have im-a-gined . . . that Ernst would become . . . like this!"
And she bent over her mother-in-law and gave her a formal kiss, like the kiss of a stranger paying a visit of condolence.
"And how are you, Mamma?" asked Karel, as though there were nothing the matter. "I hope you're not suffering from the heat."
The old woman nodded dully, pressed his hand.
"All that I ask," said Adolphine, addressing her husband, Paul, Dorine and Adeline, "is that you will not talk about it. Don't talk about it to outsiders. The less it's talked about, the better pleased I shall be. . . . We have that Indian lack of reserve in our family, that habit of at once going and telling everybody everything. . . . If people ask, we can say that Ernst has had a nervous breakdown; yes, that's it: let's arrange to say that Ernst has had a nervous break-down. . . ."
She asked them to give her their word; and they promised, in order to keep her quiet.
"You'll see," she said, " this business with Ernst will mean that Van Saetzema will once more fail to get elected to the town council."
Paul looked at her in stupefaction, failing to grasp the logic of her remark. Then he said, calmly:
"Yes, you see funny things happen sometimes."
"Yes," said Adolphine, nodding her head to show how much she appreciated the fact that Paul understood her. "It's horrid for me: you'll see, Van Saetzema won't get in. . . ."
"I believe that Ernst . . . is the sanest of the lot of us!" thought Paul.
And, as he moved to a seat, he first looked to make sure that there were no bits of fluff on the chair.
But Constance had come in; and, when the old lady saw her, she half-rose, threw herself into her daughter's arms and began to sob more violently than she had done. It was strange how she had gradually come to look upon Constance once more as the nearest to her of her children, this daughter whom she had not seen for years and years, until at last Constance had returned to Holland and the family. As a mother, she had never had a favourite; yet she would often, for months at a time, feel drawn now more towards the one, then again towards the other. She was growing old, she was getting the broken look which a mother's face begins to wear as she sees sorrow coming into her children's lives: a sorrow which, in her case, arrived so late that by degrees the illusion had come to her that there would never be any sorrow. The sudden break-up of Bertha's house—that house which she was so fond of visiting, because she found in it the continuation of her own life, the reflection of her own past grandeur—had fallen on her as a painful blow: Van Naghel's sudden death; the sort of apathy into which Bertha had sunk; the divorce between Van Raven and Emilie after Emilie had refused to come back from abroad, preferring to stay in Paris with her brother Henri, who had been sent down from Leiden: a divorce obtained in the face of all the persuasion which Uncle van Naghel, the Queen's Commissary in Overijssel, had brought to bear upon them; Louise living with Otto and Frances, in order to help Frances, who was always ailing, with the children, so that Bertha was living alone with Marianne in her little villa at Baarn, now that Frans had taken his degree and gone to India, while Karel and Marietje were at boarding-school. The big household had broken up, in a few months, in a few days almost; and the old grandmother, whose dearest illusion it had always been to keep everything and everybody close together, had been seized with an innocent wonder that things could happen so, that things had happened so. . . . She no longer went about, finding a difficulty in walking; and, because Bertha had become so apathetic and had also ceased to go about, she had as it were lost Bertha and all who belonged to her. It had produced a void around her which nothing was able to fill, even though she saw Constance every day. A void, because with none of her other children did the old lady find the same atmosphere of rank and position which she had loved in the Van Naghels' ministerial household. She would often complain now, a thing which she never used to do: she would complain that Karel and Cateau were so selfish, so stiff and Dutch, that they were getting worse every year; she would complain that at Gerrit's the children were always so noisy, that Adeline was unable to manage them, that both Gerrit and Adeline were much too weak to bring up so many children—nine of them—with proper strictness; she would complain that Adolphine was growing more and more envious and discontented, because her husband did not make his way, because Carolientje was not married, because the three boys were so troublesome; she would complain of Dorine and Paul and had all sorts of little grievances against both of them. Then, on the Sunday evenings, when the children and grandchildren came to her, she felt the void which Van Naghel and Bertha had left behind them, missed the sound of a few aristocratic names, missed any reference to the Russian minister in her children's conversation; and, with a little half-bitter laugh, she would say to the Ruyvenaers that the family was no longer what it had been, called it a grandeur déchue and took a melancholy pleasure in the phrase, which she would repeat again and again, as though finding consolation in its gentle irony. And Constance had become the child towards whom she felt most drawn in these dreary days, because Constance devoted herself regularly to her old mother and also because she, Mamma, in her secret heart, loved to talk with Constance about Rome, about De Staffelaer even, about the Pallavicinis, the Odescalchis, whom Constance had known in the old days; because Constance, whatever might be said against her, was connected with the best Dutch families; because Constance had a title; because Addie was the only one of her grandchildren who bore a title, good family though the Van Naghels were. Oh, those grandchildren, whom she now saw so seldom! And, now that the terrible thing had befallen Ernst, the terrible thing which the children had at first wished to conceal from her, but which she had guessed nevertheless, because she had so long feared it, feared it indeed from the time when Ernst was a tiny child—oh, what frightful convulsions he used to have as a child!—now that the terrible thing had befallen Ernst, it was Constance in whose arms she was first able to sob out her grief, in whose arms she first felt how sorely she had been stricken in her declining days:
"Connie," she cried, her voice broken with sobs, "Connie darling, it's true! . . . Ernst . . . Ernst is mad!"
And the word which no one had yet uttered to her, though she had guessed what they meant, rang shrill through the fast-darkening room, in which every whisper was suddenly hushed in terror at the shrill sound of the old woman's high-pitched voice. Silence fell upon everything; and the word sent a shudder through the room. The children looked at one another, because Mamma had uttered the word which none of them had spoken, though they had thought it silently. The word which Mamma uttered so shrilly, almost screaming it at Constance, in the intolerable pain of her sorrow, struck them all with a sudden dismay, because, coming from Mamma's lips, it sounded like an open acknowledgment of what they all knew but did not wish to acknowledge except among one another, in great secrecy. They would merely say that Ernst was suffering from a nervous break-down, nothing more. A nervous break-down was such a comprehensive term! Anybody could go to a home for nervous patients for a rest-cure. But the word uttered by Mamma to Constance in shrill acknowledgment of the truth had cut through the dim room, where no one had even thought of lighting the gas. Adolphine, Cateau, Karel, Uncle Ruyvenaer, Floortje and Dijkerhof exchanged sudden glances, terrified, struck with dismay, because they would never have been willing to utter the word aloud, in open acknowledgment of the truth.
Aunt Lot's loud "Ah, kassian!"[1] now came from a corner of the dark room; and Toetie was so much upset that she suddenly burst into sobs. That was your Indian lack of self-restraint again, thought the Van Saetzemas and Cateau; and it did not seem to them decent to let yourself go like that, it made them feel that the business was a hopeless one. But the door opened and the two doctors entered, groping their way in the darkness: the old family-doctor, a retired army-surgeon, Van der Ouwe; and Reeuws, a young nerve-specialist. At their entrance, Toetie, abashed, ceased her sobbing. The doctors had come from the Nieuwe Uitleg, where they had left Ernst reading peacefully, with the male nurse, a stolid, powerful fellow, in an adjoining room. And, when the brothers and sisters crowded round the two doctors, the older began, quietly:
"Our poor Ernst can't stay where he is, all by himself. We must see and get him to Nunspeet, at Dr. van der Heuvel's: that will do him good . . . the country, change of environment, nice, quiet people, who will look after him. . . ."
"Nunspeet?" asked Adolphine. "That's not . . . ?"
"No," said the old doctor, decisively, understanding what she meant. "It's not."
And he did not speak the word, left it to be implied, the word that must not be uttered, the terrible word that denoted the house of shame, the family-disgrace.
"It's a nice, pleasant villa, where Dr. van der Heuvel minds a few nervous patients," he said, calmly and kindly, casting a glance round at the brothers and sisters; and his grey head nodded reassuringly to all of them.
They admired his tact; and they the more readily condemned Mamma's shrill word, which had cut through the darkness and made them shudder, they the more readily condemned Aunt Lot's exclamation and Toetie's outbreak of sobbing.
And, breathing again, they lit the gas, suddenly noticing that the room was pitch-dark now that the two doctors had gone to Mamma and were telling her quietly that it would be all right and that Ernst was just a little overstrained from being too much alone and poring too long over his dusty books.
- ↑ Malay: "Poor dear!"