Note 1 — Chapter XII

“He can’t know,” she thought. “What can he know, to make him speak deliberately ... of those childish years? No, he can’t know; and I felt that he did not know, that he was only speaking in order to compare himself with Addie to Addie’s mother, in a burst of confidence. He is a man of impulses, I think.... No, there was nothing at the back of his words ... and he knows nothing, nothing of my own early years.... We are almost the same age: he is four years older than Henri. When he was a child, I was a child. When he was dreaming, I was dreaming. Does that sort of thing really exist? Or is it my fancy, some unconscious vein of poetry inside me, that is making me imagine all this?... Hush, hush ... it is becoming absurd! It is all very pretty and charming in children: they can have their day-dreams; and a young man and a young girl might perhaps give a thought to them afterwards, in a romantic moment; but, at my age, it all becomes absurd, utterly absurd.... And of course it’s not there: it’s nothing but a chance coincidence. I won’t think about it any more.... And yet ... I have never felt before as I do now. Oh, that feeling as if I had always been straying, blindly, with my eyes shut, in a dark night! Have I never had that feeling before, that feeling as if nothing had really existed, as if I had never lived yet, as if I wanted to live once, just once, in my life?... But no, it can never be like that, it can’t happen like that. No, that sort of thing does not exist. It is just our imagination when we are feeling restless and dissatisfied ... or when we are tired and feel that we have no energy ... or whatever it is that makes us more easily affected by all those strange things which we never suspected.... Why did I not at once laugh and say that, as a child, as a little girl, I myself...? No, no, I simply couldn’t say it; and it is better that I didn’t say it.... Now I am getting frightened at my own silliness. It is all very well for young people, for a boy and a girl, to have these fancies and even talk of them, in a romantic moment, but at my age it is simply ridiculous.... It is so long ago, so long ago; and, with all those years in between, it would be ridiculous to refer to poetic dreams and fancies which can only be spoken of when one is very young.... I sha’n’t speak of them ... and I shall never tell him. Wouldn’t it be ... utterly ridiculous?... Yet it does seem ... it does seem to me that, after those years—when, as Gerrit said, I was a dear little child, playing in the river at Buitenzorg, making up stories about fairies and poetries,1 decked with flowers, red and white—that, after those years, I lost something of myself, something romantic that was in me then, something living that was in me then, and that, since then, I have never lived, never lived a single moment, as if all sorts of vain and worldly things had blinded me.... Oh, what thoughts are these and why do I have them? I won’t think them; and yet ... and yet, after those wonderful, fairy years, it was all over ... all over.... What do I remember of the years after? Dances, balls, society, vanity and artificiality.... Yes, it was all over by then.... And now surely that childish spark hasn’t revived, surely my soul isn’t trying, isn’t wanting to live again? No, no, it can’t do that: the years are lying all around it, the silent, dead years of vanity, of blundering, of longing, of death in life.... And besides, if my soul did want to live again, it would be too late now, for everything; and it doesn’t want to either.... It’s only because of those strange coincidences, it’s only because he spoke like that ... and because his voice it attractive ... and because I am sitting here alone ... and because the storm is blowing so terribly, as though it wanted to open the windows and come inside.... No, hush, hush ... I won’t give way to those thoughts again, never again ... and, even if that sort of thing does really exist, it is only for those who are young and who see life with the glamour of youth ... and not for me, not for me. ... Oh, I couldn’t have told him about myself when I was a child, for it would have appeared to me as if, by telling him, I was behaving like ... a woman offering herself!... But hush, hush: all this is absurd ... for me ... now; and I will stop thinking of it.... But how lonely I am, sitting here ... and how the wind howls, how the wind howls!... The lamps are flickering; and it’s just as if hands were rattling the shutters, trying hard to open them.... Oh, I wish those lamps wouldn’t flicker so!... And I feel as if the windows were going to burst open and the curtains fly up in the air.... I’m frightened.... Hark to the trees cracking and the branches falling.... Hear me, O God, hear me! I’m frightened, I’m frightened.... Is this then the first night that I see something of myself, as if I were suddenly looking back, on a dark path that lies behind me, a dark path on which all the pageant of vanity has grown dim? For it does seem as if, right at the end of the road, I saw, as in a vision, the sun; trees with great leaves and blossoms red and white; and a little fairy child, in white, with flowers in her hair, standing on a boulder, in a river, beckoning mysteriously to her brothers, who do not understand. O my God, does that sort of thing really, really exist ... or is it only because I never, never heard the wind blow like this before?...”