Old People and the Things that Pass/Chapter XVII

CHAPTER XVII
THERE was a cold wind, with whirling snowflakes, and Aunt Stefanie de Laders had not at first intended to go out: she had a cough and lately had not been feeling at all the thing; she feared that this winter would be her last. Not everybody lived to be so old as Mamma or Mr. Takma; and she, after all, was seventy-seven: wasn't that a fine age? But she did not want to die yet, for she had always been very much afraid of death, always carried a horrid vision of Hell before her eyes: you could never know what awaited you, however good and religious you might have been, serving God properly. Now she, thank God, had nothing to reproach herself with! Her life had gone on calmly, day after day, without a husband, or children, or mundane ties, but also without any great sorrow. Twice she had suffered the loss of a tom-cat to which she was attached; and she thought it very sad when the birds in the cages grew old and lost their feathers and sometimes gripped on to their perches with their long claws, for years together, until one fine morning she found their little bodies stiff. She thought it sad that the family had no religion&mdash;the De Laders had always had religion&mdash;and she felt very sad when Thérèse, in Paris, became a Catholic, for after all papistry was idolatry, that she knew for certain; and she also knew for certain that Calvin had had the root of the matter in him. She had always been able to save money and did not quite know how to dispose of it: she had executed a number of different wills, making bequests and then rescinding them; she would leave a good deal to charitable institutions. Her health for very long had been exceedingly good. Short, sprightly and withered, she had been very active, had for years run along the streets like a lapwing. Her witch-face became brown and tanned and wrinkled, small and wizened; and her little figure, with the shrunk breasts, bore no resemblance whatever to the even yet majestic old age of old, old Mamma. The barren field of her life, without emotion, love or passion, had grown drier and drier around her carping egoism, without arousing in her a sense of either melancholy or loss. On the contrary, she had felt glad that she was able to fear God, that she had had time to make her own soul and that she had not heard the sins of the body speak aloud, in between the murmured reading of her pious books and the shrill twittering of her birds. Lucky that she had never been hysterical, like those Derckszes, she thought contentedly, preferring with a certain filial reverence to put down that hysteria rather to the Derckszes' account than to that of her old mother, though nevertheless she shook her head over Mamma for thinking so little, at her age, of Heaven and Hell and for continuing to see old Takma, doubtless in memory of former sinfulness. Anton was a dirty old blackguard and, old as he was, had narrowly escaped most unpleasant consequences, a month ago, for allowing himself to take liberties with his laundress' little girl; and Aunt, who saw a great deal of Ina, knew that it was owing to D'Herbourg's influence and intervention&mdash;he being the only one of the family who had any connections&mdash;that the business had no ill results, that it was more or less hushed up. But Aunt Stefanie thought it so sinful and hysterical of Anton, looked upon Anton as so irretrievably sold to Satan that she would have preferred to have nothing more to do with him ... if it were not that he had some money and that she feared lest he should leave the money to sinful things and people ... whereas Ina could do with it so well. And she now, in spite of the weather, thought of sending for a cab and going out: then she could first pick up Anton, as arranged, and take him with her to the Van Welys, Lily and Frits, to see their godchildren, Stefje and Antoinetje. There were two babies now; and she and Anton had a godchild apiece. A tenderness flowed through her selfish old-maid's heart at the thought of those children, who belonged to her just a little&mdash;for she tyrannized over Anton's godchild too&mdash;and in whom, she reflected contentedly, she had not the least sinful share. For she considered the things of the flesh more or less sinful, even when hallowed by matrimony.

The cab came; and Aunt Stefanie, in a very old fur cloak, hoisted herself in, sprightlily, climbed up the step and felt anything but well. Was it coming at last? Was she about to fall ill and die? Oh, if she could only be sure of going to Heaven! So long as she was not sure of it, she would rather go on living, rather grow as old as Mother and Takma, rather live to be a hundred. The cab was now pulling up in front of the ground-floor rooms in which Anton lived; and she thought, should she wait till he came out or should she get out herself for a minute? She resolved upon the latter course and, when the door was opened by the landlady, she clambered down the step of the cab again, refusing the driver's assistance, and, with a few snowflakes on her old-lady's cape and old fur cloak, went in to her brother, who was sitting beside a closed stove, with his book and his pipe. A thick haze of smoke filled the room, drifting heavily with slow, horizontal cloud-lines.

"Well, Anton, you're expecting me, aren't you ? It wouldn't be the thing if you weren't!" said Aunt Stefanie, in a tone of reproach.

Trippingly and imperiously, she went up to him. Her voice sounded shrill and her little witch-face shook and shivered out of the worn fur collar of her cloak, because she felt cold.

"Yes, all right," said Anton Dercksz, but without getting up. You'll sit down first, won't you, Stefanie?"

"But the cab's waiting, Anton; it means throwing money away for nothing!"

"Well, that won't ruin you. Is it really necessary that we should go and look at those brats?"

"You must see your godchild, surely. That's only proper. And then we're going on, with Ina and Lily, to Daan and Floor, at their hotel."

"Yes, I know, they arrived yesterday.... t Look here, Stefanie, I can't understand why you don't leave me here in peace. You always want to boss people. I'm comfortable here, reading...."

The warmth of the stove gave old Stefanie de Laders a blissful feeling; she held her numbed feet&mdash;Anton possessed no foot-stove&mdash;voluptuously to the glow; but the smoke of the pipe made her cough.

"Yes, yes, you're just sitting reading; I read too, but I read better books than you.... Let me see what you're reading, Anton. What is it? Latin?"

"Yes, it's Latin."

"I never knew that you read Latin."

"You don't know everything about me yet."

"No, thank God!" cried Stefanie, indignantly. "And what is that Latin book?" she asked, curiously and inquisitorially.

"It's sinful," said Anton, teasingly.

"I thought as much. What's it called?"

"It's Suetonius: The Lives of the Caesars"

"So you're absorbed in the lives of those brutes, who tortured the early Christians!"

He grinned, with a broad grin. He sat there, big and heavy; and the folds and dewlaps of his full, yellow-red cheeks thrilled with pleasure at her outburst; the ends of his grey-yellow moustache stood straight up with merriment; and his eyes with their yellow irises gazed pensively at his sister, who had never been of the flesh. What hadn't she missed, thought Anton, in scoffing contempt, as he sat bending forwards. His coarse-fisted hands lay like clods on his thick knees; and the tops of his Wellington boots showed round under the trouserlegs. His waistcoat was undone; so were the two top buttons of his trousers; and Stefanie could just see his braces.

"You know more about history than I thought," he grinned.

She thought him repulsive and looked nervously round the room, which contained a number of open book-cases, with the curtains drawn back:

"Have you read all those books?" she asked.

"And read them over again. I do nothing else."

Stefanie de Laders was coughing more and more. Her feet were warm by this time. She was proof against much, but she felt as if she would faint with the smoke.

"Sha'n't we go now, Anton?"

He was not in the least inclined to go. He was greatly interested in Suetonius at the moment; and she had disturbed him in his fantasy, which was intense in him. But she had such a way of nagging insistency; and he was really a weak man. "I must just wash my hands."

"Yes, do, for you reek of that pipe of yours." He grinned, got up and, without hurrying himself, went to his bedroom. Nobody knew of his solitary fantasies, which became more intense as he grew older and more impotent in his sensuality; nobody knew of the lust of his imagination nor how, as he read Suetonius, he pictured how he had once, in a century long past, been Tiberius, how he had held the most furious orgies in gloomy solitude at Capri and committed murder in voluptuousness and sent the victims of his passions dashing into the sea from the rocks and surrounded himself with a bevy of children beautiful as Cupids. The hidden forces of his intellect and imagination, which he had always enjoyed secretly, with a certain shyness towards the outside world, had caused him to read and study deeply in his younger years; and he knew more than any one talking to him would ever have suspected. On his shelves, behind novels and statute-books, he concealed works on the Kabbala and Satanism, being especially attracted in his morbid fancies by the strange mysteries of antiquity and the middle ages and endowed with a powerful gift of thinking himself back into former times, into a former life, into historic souls to which he felt himself related, in which he incarnated himself. No one suspected it: people merely knew that he had been a mediocre official, that he read, that he smoked and that he had occasionally done shameful things. For the rest, his secret was his own; and that he often guessed at another's secret was a thing which not his mother nor Takma nor anybody would ever have suspected....

The moment he had gone to his bedroom, Aunt Stefanie rose, tripped to the bookshelves and let her eyes move swiftly along the titles. What a lot of books Anton had! Look at that whole shelf of Latin books: was Anton as learned as that? And behind them: what did he keep behind those Latin books? Great albums and portfolios: what was in them? Would she have time to look? She drew one from behind the Latin books and, with quick, bird-like glances at the bedroom, opened the album, which had Pompeii on it.... What were those strange prints and photographs? Taken from statues, quite naked, from mural and ceiling frescoes; and such queer subjects, thought Aunt Stefanie. What was it all, what were those things and people and bodies and attitudes? Were they merely jokes which she did not understand? ... Nevertheless they were enough to make her turn pale; and her wrinkled little witch-face grew longer and longer in dismay, while her mouth opened wide. She turned the pages of the album more and more swiftly, so as to be sure and miss nothing, and then went back to certain plates which struck her particularly. The world, so new to her, of classical perversion sped past her awe-struck eyes in undivined sinfulness, represented by man and beast and man-beast in contortions which her imagination, untutored in sensuality, could never have suspected. A devil's sabbath hypnotized her from out of those pages; and the book, weighing so heavy in her trembling old fingers, burnt her; but she simply could not slip it back into its hidden nook ... just because she had never known ... and because she was very inquisitive ... and because she had never suspected superlative sin.... Those were the portals of Hell; the people who had acted so and thought so would burn in Hell-fire for ever: she not, fortunately!

"What are you doing?"

Anton's voice startled her; she gave a little scream; the book slipped from her hands.

"Must you go prying about?" asked Anton, roughly.

"Well, can't I look at a book?" stammered Aunt Stefanie. "I wasn't doing anything improper!" she said, defending herself.

He picked up the album and shoved it back violently behind the Latin volumes. Then, becoming indifferent, he grinned, with eyes like slits:

"And what have you seen?"

"Nothing, nothing," stammered Stefanie. "You just came in .... and startled me so. I saw nothing, nothing.... Are you ready? Shall we go?"

Buttoned up in his great-coat, he followed her tripping little steps; he grinned at her scornfully: how much she had missed! And, if she had seen anything, how she must have been shocked!

"He is the devil!" she thought, in her fright. "He is the devil! If it wasn't for that sinful money, which it would be such a pity for him not to leave to Ina, I should drop him altogether, I should never wish to see him again. For he is not all the thing...."