setting up as a milliner and working for her living. The modelling too was most charming: after the first few lessons, she was modelling from the life; and her head of A Beggar Boy was accepted for exhibition. Then Elly had fallen in love and was very much in love; her engagement lasted three months; then it was broken off; and Elly, who did nothing by halves, for all her varying interests, had suffered a great deal and faded and pined and been dangerously ill, until one day she recovered, with a feeling of melancholy as her only remembrance.
She was then twenty-three and had taken to writing. Under a pseudonym, she published her own engagement in the form of a short story: it was not a bad short story. Her new hobby brought her gradually into contact with Charles Pauws, who also wrote, mostly for the newspapers: articles, causeries. Elly was of opinion that she had soon reached her literary limits. After this short story, which had blossomed in her and blossomed out of her heart, she would never write anything more. She was twenty-three, she was old. She had lived her life, with different vicissitudes. Still there was something, there was Charles. Soft, weak, passably witty, with his mother's attractive eyes, with his fair hair carefully brushed, with his too pale blue ties, he was not the man of her dreams; and she still felt, sometimes very grievously, the sadness of her sorrow. But she was fond of him, she was very fond of him and she considered that he was wasting his talent on trivial work, on journalism, which he did with remarkable ease—after all, it was an art in itself, Charles would retort—whereas his two novels were so good; and he had attempted no serious work for the last ten years. And in this girl, with her thoroughness—within limits—there arose, on the now somewhat romantic ground of her melancholy and her sorrow, the mission to rouse Lot to work, to produce real work, fine work. She must work no longer for herself but for another, for Lot, who possessed so many good qualities, but did not cultivate them earnestly. She saw more and more of him; she had him to tea; they talked, talked at great length; Lot, though not physically in love with her, thought it really pleasant to be with Elly, allowed himself to be stimulated, began a novel, stuck in the middle. She created in his mind the suggestion that he wanted her. And he proposed to her. She was very happy and he too, though they were not passionately in love. They were attracted by the prospect of being together, talking together, living, working, travelling together, in the smiling sympathy of their two souls: his a rather small, vain, cynical, artistic soul, with above all much kindly indulgence for others and a tinge of laughing bitterness and one great dread, which utterly swayed his soul, the dread of growing old; hers, at this moment, full of the serious thought of remaining true to her mission and giving her life a noble object by wrapping it up in another's.
Elly, that morning, was singing while the wind sent the early autumn leaves driving in a shower of golden sunlight along the window-panes. She was busy altering a winter hat, with a talent which she had not quite lost, when Cousin—Aunt—Adèle entered the room:
"Grandpapa has had a bad night; I kept on hearing him moving."
"Yes, then he's troubled with buzzings which are just like voices," said Elly. "Grandpapa is always hearing those voices, you know. Dr. Thielens looks upon them as a premonitory symptom of total deafness. Poor Grandad! I'll go to him at once … I must just finish my hat first: I want to wear it to-day. We are going to old Mrs. Dercksz and to Aunt Stefanie. … Auntie, I am so happy. Lot is so nice. And he is so clever. I am certain that we shall be very happy. I want to travel a great deal. Lot loves travelling. … There is some talk of our living with Steyn and Ottilie. I don't know what to say. I would rather we were by ourselves. Still, I don't know. I'm very fond of Mamma; and she's Lot's mother after all. But I like harmony around me; and Steyn and she quarrel. I call him Steyn, simply. Meneer is too stiff; and I can't call him Papa. Besides, Lot calls him Steyn too. It's difficult, that sort of household. Steyn himself would think it odd if I called him Papa. … Do you like the hat like this? I'll alter yours to-morrow. Look, it's an absolutely new hat! … I'll go to Grandpapa now. Poor Grandad, so he's had a bad night? … "
She left the door open. Aunt Adèle looked round: the room was lumbered with hat-trimmings. The Beggar Boy smiled in a corner; the medals were studded round the racket, on its pink ribbon; the writing-table was tesselated with squares of note-paper.
"What a litter!" said Aunt Adèle.
She dared not touch the papers, though she would have liked to tidy them: she could not bear to see such a heap of scattered papers and she had to restrain her itching fingers. But she cleared up the hat-trimmings, quickly, and put them away in cardboard boxes. Then she went downstairs, where the maids were turning out the dining-room. Elly, flitting up the stairs, heard the blows beating on an arm-chair, felt them almost on her own back, ran still quicker up the stairs, to the next floor, where Grandpapa's room was. She stopped outside his door, recovered her breath, knocked, opened the door and went in with a calm step:
"How are you this morning, Grandad?"
The old gentleman sat at a knee-hole table, looking in a drawer; he locked it quietly when Elly entered. She went up and kissed him:
"I hear you did not sleep well?"
"No, child, I don't think I slept at all. But Grandad can do without sleep."
Grandpapa Takma was ninety-three: married late in life and his son married late made it possible for him to have a granddaughter of Elly's age. He looked younger, however, much younger, perhaps because he tactfully mingled a seeming indifference to his outward appearance with a really studied care. A thin garland of grey hair still fringed the ivory skull; the clean-shaven face was like a stained parchment, but the mouth, because of the artificial teeth, had retained its young and laughing outline and the eyes were a clear brown, bright and even keen behind his spectacles. His figure was small, slender and slight as a young man's; and a very short jacket hung over his slightly-arched and emaciated back: it was open in front and hung in folds behind. The hands, too large in proportion to the man's short stature, but delicately veined and neatly kept, trembled incessantly; and there was a jerk in the muscles of the neck that twitched the head at intervals. His tone was cheerful and lively, a little too genial not to be forced; and the words came slowly and well-weighed, however simple the things which they expressed. When he sat, he sat upright, on an ordinary chair, never huddled together, as though he were always on his guard; when he walked, he walked briskly, with very short steps of his stiff legs, so as not to betray their rheumatism. He had been an Indian civil servant, ending as a member of the Indian Council, and had been pensioned years ago; his conversation showed that he kept pace with politics, kept pace with colonial matters: he laughed at them, with mild irony. In his intercourse with others, who were always his juniors—for he had no contemporaries save old Mrs. Dercksz, née Dillenhof, who was ninety-seven, and Dr. Roelofsz, eighty-eight—in his intercourse he was kindly and condescending, realizing that the world must seem other to people even of sixty and seventy than it did to him; but the geniality was too great, was sometimes too exuberant not to be assumed and not to make people feel that he never thought as he spoke. He gave the impression of being a diplomatist who, himself always on his guard, was sounding another to find out what he knew. Sometimes, in his bright eyes, a spark shone behind the spectacles, as though he had suddenly been struck by something, a very acute perception; and the jerk of the neck would throw his head on one side, as though he suddenly heard something. His mouth would then distort itself into a laugh and he would hurriedly agree with whomever he was addressing.
What was most striking in him was that quick, tremulous lucidity in so very old a man. It was as though some strange capacity had sharpened his senses so that they remained sound and serviceable, for he still read a great deal, with glasses; he was sharp of hearing; he was particular in the matter of wine, with an unimpaired sense of smell; he could find things in the dark. Only, sometimes, in the midst of a conversation, it was as though an invincible drowsiness overcame him; and his eyes would suddenly stare glassily in front of him and he would fall asleep. They left him alone and had the civility not to let him know it; and, five minutes later, he would wake up, go on talking, oblivious of that momentary unconsciousness. The inward shock
