Old People and the Things that Pass/Chapter XIV

CHAPTER XIV
IN the night express, the young wife sat thinking. Lot lay asleep, with a rug over him, in one corner of the carriage, but the little bride could not sleep, for an autumnal wind was howling along the train; and so she just sat silently, in the other corner, thinking. She had now given her life to another and hoped for happiness. She hoped that she had a vocation and that she would have devotion to bestow. That was happiness; there was nothing else; and Aunt Thérèse was right, even though she, Elly, conceived devotion, happiness and vocation so very differently. She wanted more than the feeling, the thought; she wanted, above all, action. Even as she had always given herself to action, though it was only tennis at first&mdash;and sculpture later and in the end the pouring out of her own sorrow in words and the sending of it to an editor, to a publisher&mdash;so she now longed to devote herself to action, or at least to active collaboration. She looked wistfully at Lot and felt that she loved him, however differently it might be from the way in which she had loved the first time. She loved him less for her own sake, as when she had been in love before, and loved him more for his sake, to rouse him to great things. It was all very vague, but there was ambition in it and ambition, springing from love, for his sake. What a pity that he should fritter away his talent in witty little articles and hastily-written essays. That was like his conversation, light and amusing, unconvinced and unconvincing; and he could do better than that, much better. Perhaps writing a novel was also not the great thing; perhaps the great thing was writing, but not a novel. What then? She sought and did not yet find, but knew for certain&mdash;or thought she knew&mdash;that she would find and that she would rouse Lot. ... Yes, they would be happy, they would continue happy.... Out there, in Italy, she would find it. She would find it in the past, in history, perhaps; in things that were past, in beautiful noble things that were dead, peacefully dead and still beautiful.... Then why did she feel so melancholy? Or was it only the melancholy which she had always felt, so vaguely, and which was as a malady underlying all her activity and which broke in the inflection of her quick, voluble voice: the melancholy because her youth, as a child without parents, brothers or sisters, had bloomed so quietly in the old man's big house. He had always been kind and full of fatherly care for her; but he was so old and she had felt the pressure of his old years. She had always had old people around her, for, as far back as she could remember anything, she remembered old Grandmamma Dercksz and Dr. Roelofsz: she knew them, old even then, from the time when she was a little child. Lot also, she thought&mdash;though the life of a man, who went about and travelled, was different from that of a girl, who stayed at home&mdash;Lot also had felt the pressure of all that old age around him; and that, no doubt, was the reason why his dread of growing old had developed into a sort of nervous obsession. Aunt Stefanie and the uncles at the Hague were old and their friends and acquaintances seemed to have died out and they moved about, without contemporaries, a little lonesomely in that town, along the streets where their houses were, to and fro, to and fro among one another.... It was so forlorn and so very lonely; and it engendered melancholy; and she had always felt that melancholy in her youth. ... She had never been able to keep her girlfriends. She no longer saw the girls of the tennisclub; her fellow-pupils at the Academy she just greeted with a hurried nod when she passed them in the street. After her unfortunate engagement, she had withdrawn herself more than ever, except that she was always with Lot, walking with him, talking to him; he also was lonely at the Hague, with no friends: he was better off for friends, he said, in Italy.... How strange, that eternal loneliness and sense of extinction around both of them! No friends or acquaintances around them, as around most people, as around most families. It was doubtless because of the oppression of those two very old people; but she could not analyse beyond that and she felt that something escaped her which she did not know, but which was nevertheless there and pressed upon her and kept other people away: something gloomy, now past, which remained hovering around the old man and the old woman and which enveloped the others&mdash;the old woman's children, the old man's only grandchild&mdash;in a sort of haze, something indescribable but so definitely palpable that she could almost have taken hold of it by putting out her hand....

It was all very vague and misty to think about, it was not even possible to think about it; it was a perception of something chill, that passed, nothing more, no more than that; but it sometimes prevented her breathing freely, taking pleasure in her youth, walking fast, speaking loud: when she did that, she had to force herself with an effort. And she knew that Lot felt the same: she had understood it from two or three very vague words and more from the spirit of those words than from their sound; and it had given her a great soul-sympathy for Lot. He was a strange fellow, she thought, looking at him as he slept. Outwardly and in his little external qualities and habits, he was a very young boy, a child sometimes, she thought, with round his childishness a mood of disillusionment that sometimes uttered itself quite wittily but did not ring sincere; beneath the exterior lay a disposition to softness, a considerable streak of selfishness and a neurotic preoccupation where he was himself concerned, tempered by something that was almost strength of character in dealing with his mother, for he was the only one who could get on with Mamma. With this temperament he possessed natural gifts which he did not value, though it was really necessary for him to work. He presented a medley of contradictions, of seriousness and childishness, of feeling and indifference, of manliness and of very feeble weakness, such as she had never seen in any man. He was vainer of his fair hair than of his talent, though he was vain of this too; and a compliment on his tie gave him more pleasure than a word of praise for his finest essay. And this child, this boy, this man she loved: she considered it strange when she herself thought of it, but she loved him and was happy only when he was with her.

He woke up, asked her why she was not sleeping and now took her head on his breast. Tired by the train and by her thoughts, she fell asleep; and he looked out at the grey dawn, which broke over the bleak and chilly fields after they had passed Lyons. He yearned for sea, for blue sky, for heat, for everything that was young and alive: the South of France, the Riviera and then Italy, with Elly. He had disposed of his life and he hoped for happiness, happiness in companionship of thought and being, because loneliness induces melancholy and makes us think the more intensely of our slow decay....

"She is very charming," he thought, as he looked down upon her where she slept on his breast; and he resisted the impulse to kiss her now that she had just fallen asleep. "She is very charming and she has a delicate artistic sense. I must tell her to start modelling again ... or to write something: she's good at both. That was a very fine little book of hers, even though it is so very subjective and a great deal too feminine. There is much that is good in life, even though life is nothing but a transition which can't signify much in a world that's rotten. There must be other lives and other worlds. A time must come when there will be no material suffering, at most a spiritual suffering. Then all our material anxieties will be gone.... And yet there is a great charm about this material life ... if we forget all wretchedness for a moment. A spell of charm comes to everybody: I believe that mine has come. If it would only remain like this; but it won't. Everything changes. .... Better not think about it, but work instead: better do some work, even while travelling. Elly would like it. At Florence, the Medicis; in Rome, the whole papacy.... I don't know which I shall select: it must be one of the two. But there's such a lot of it, such a lot of it.... Could I write a fine history of civilization, I wonder? ... I hate collecting notes: all those rubbishy odds and ends of paper.... If I can't see the whole thing before me, in one clear vision, it's no good. I can't study: I have to see, to feel, to admire or shudder. If I don't do that, I'm no good. An essay is what I'm best at. A word is a butterfly: you just catch it, lightly, by the wings ... and let it fly away again.... Serious books on history and art are like fat beetles, crawling along.... Tiens! That's not a bad conceit. I must use it one day in an article: the butterfly wafted on the air ... and the heavy beetle...."

They were approaching Marseilles; they would be at Nice by two o'clock in the afternoon.......