Classic Audiobook Collection - The Twilight of the Souls by Louis Couperus ~ Full Audiobook [drama]

Episode Date: January 20, 2025

The Twilight of the Souls by Louis Couperus audiobook. Genre: drama In fin-de-siecle The Hague, the once-formidable Van Lowe clan is coming apart at the seams. The Twilight of the Souls, the third novel in Louis Couperus' four-book cycle The Books of the Small Souls, returns to a family that has drifted from its old rituals of Sunday gatherings and shared certainties. Constance Van der Welcke tries to build a quieter, steadier life with her husband Henri, yet the family atmosphere remains charged with unspoken resentments, fading status, and spiritual fatigue. The focus shifts to Constance's brothers: Gerrit, outwardly hearty and practical but privately weighed down by dread and responsibility, and the fragile, brilliant Ernst, whose worsening mental crisis threatens to expose everything the family has tried to keep respectable and controlled. Meanwhile, younger relatives test the limits of duty and desire, fleeing into a more dazzling European life even as scandal and disappointment follow close behind. With psychological precision and lush, melancholy detail, Couperus traces how love, pride, and obligation can tighten into a trap, and how a family's inherited patterns can feel like destiny when the light begins to fail. For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 00 (00:01:13) Chapter 01 (00:58:18) Chapter 02 (01:14:31) Chapter 03 (01:32:46) Chapter 04 (02:09:14) Chapter 05 (02:32:47) Chapter 06 (02:48:02) Chapter 07 (03:01:06) Chapter 08 (03:15:28) Chapter 09 (03:58:27) Chapter 10 (04:20:04) Chapter 11 (04:39:34) Chapter 12 (04:53:42) Chapter 13 (05:06:06) Chapter 14 (05:17:05) Chapter 15 (05:41:23) Chapter 16 (05:51:04) Chapter 17 (06:08:47) Chapter 18 (06:26:36) Chapter 19 (06:53:04) Chapter 20 (07:07:35) Chapter 21 (07:41:33) Chapter 22 (07:53:01) Chapter 23 (08:04:29) Chapter 24 (08:12:54) Chapter 25 (08:24:07) Chapter 26 (08:45:44) Chapter 27 (08:55:10) Chapter 28 (09:05:49) Chapter 29 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Translator's note to the Twilight of the Souls by Lu I Cooperus, translated by Alexander Teshire Damatos. This is the third of the novels known as the Book of the Small Souls, and is by some considered the greatest of the series. Be this as it may, and I confess that personally I like small souls the best, it is, beyond dispute, one of the most masterly and striking stories that this generation has produced. It can be read separately and independently, but will be enjoyed more fully by those who are familiar with small souls in the later life. The series will conclude with the next volume, which, in the English version, will be entitled Dr. Adrian.

Alexander Teshire de Matos, Harrogate, 10th of August, 1917. End of translator's note. Chapter 1 of The Twilight of the Souls. by Louis Cupertus. This Librivox recording is in the public domain. When Gerrit woke that morning, his head felt misty and tired, as though weighed down by a mountain landscape,

by a whole stack of mist mountains, that bore heavily upon his brain. His eyes remained closed, and though he was waking, his nightmare still seemed to cast an aftershadow, a nightmare that he was being crushed by great rocky avalanches, which he felt pressing deep down inside his head,

though he was conscious that the red daylight was already dawning through his closed eyelids. He lay there, big and burly, sprawling in his bed beside Adeline's empty bed. He felt that her bed was empty, there was no one in the room. The curtains had been drawn back, but the blinds were still down, and, though he was awake, his eyelids remained closed, and through them he saw only,

the red of the daylight, as through two pink shells. It seemed as if he would never be able to lift those two leaden lids from his eyes. This after-weariness flowed slowly through his great burly body. He felt physically rotten and did not quite know why. The day before, he had merely dined with some brother officers at the restaurant of the Schaveningen Kourhaus, a farewell dinner to one of their number who was being transferred to Venlo. And the dinner, the dinner. had been a long one. There was a good deal of champagne drunk afterwards, and they had gone on gaily to make a night of it. One or two of the married ones had refused good-naturedly, but had come along all the same, so as not to spoil sport. Gerrit had come too in his genial way. At last he had

decided that that was about enough, and that the road which the others were taking was not his road. He was one of your sensible, moderate people, who never went to extreme. He was very fond of his little wife. Indeed, he already felt some compunction at the idea of perhaps waking her at that time of night when he went into the bedroom after undressing. As a matter of fact, she did wake, but he had at once reassured her with his gruff, good-natured voice, and she had gone to sleep again. He had stayed awake a long time, lying there with wide-open eyes, angry at not being able to sleep at having forgotten how to take a glass of wine with the rest.

At last, in the small hours when it was quite light, he had slowly dozed off into a misty dreamland, and gradually the mists had turned into solid landscapes, had become a stack of heavy mountains, which pressed heavily upon his brain until they crumbled down in rocky avalanches. Now at last he shook off the strange heaviness, took his bath, and, when he saw himself naked, that expanse of clean white skin,

the great body built on heavy sinewy lines, a good-looking fair-haired chap still, despite his eight-and-forty years, he wondered that he sometimes had those queer moody fits, like a lady's lap-dog. And now, as he squeezed the streaming water over himself out of the great sponge, he tried to poo-poo those moody fits, shrugged his shoulders at them, muttering to himself as he kept on squeezing the sponge, squeezing out the water until it splashed and spattered all around him. He had the sensation of washing the inertia from him. He drew a deep breath, flung out his chest,

felt his strength returning, and, still naked, took his dumbbells and worked away with them, proud of a pair of biceps that were like two rolling cannonballs. His eyes recovered their usual joe, expression, which also played around his fair moustache with a roguish sparkle as of inward mockery. The wrinkles vanished from his forehead, which was gradually acquiring a loftier arch, as the crop of fair hair on his head diminished, and the blood seemed to be flowing normally through his big body after the bath and the five minutes exercise, for his cheeks, now shaved,

became tinged with an almost pink flush, and he simply could not make up his mind to dress, He looked at himself at his big, strong, clean body, which he needed yet once more, as proud of his muscles as a woman of her graceful figure. Then he quickly put on his uniform and went downstairs to breakfast. The children surrounded him instantly, and he at once felt himself the father, full of a father's affection, passionately fond as he was of his children.

He was only just in time to see Alex and Guy go off, with their satchels. The school was close by, and they went by themselves, two sturdy little fellows of nine and seven. But the other children, all except the eldest Maritia, who was also at school, were eating their bread and butter at the round table, while Adeline sat in front of her tea tray. And Gerrit in the little dining room, at the round table, felt himself become normal again, quite normal because of his wife and his children. The dining room was small and very simply furnished, containing only what was strictly necessary.

Adeline, now 32, looked older, a plump little mother with not much to say for herself, full of little cares for her little brood, and he had it, noisy and clamorous, filling the whole little room with the gay thunder of his drill sergeant's voice, was full of incessant jokes and fun. There were half a dozen younger ones around the table, two girls, had Aleccia and Kherdi, three boys, Constant Jan and Pete, and the latest baby, a girl, Klaasja.

Gerrits had given the youngest three their names in his annoyance at the high-sounding names of the others, Alexander, Guy, Geraldine, christened after Adeline's family, while Marie and Constance were called after Mama and Papa Van Lua. "'Look here, not so many of those grand names,' "'Heritz had said when Yan was coming, "'and, after Klaasher, a name which the whole family considered hideous, "'Kherit said, "'If we have another, it shall be called after me,

"'Kedit, whether it's a boy or a girl.' "'Gertrude, surely if it's a girl,' Adeline had suggested. "'No,' said Gerrit. "'She shall be Gedid, all the same.' "'Heret's manias were Mama Van Lerl. Loa's despair, but so far there had been no question of a granddaughter, Gerrit. Gerrit had no favourites. His long arms swung round as many children as he could get hold of, and he drew them on his knees, between his knees, almost under his feet. And by some miraculous

chance, he had never broken an arm or leg of any of them, so that Adeline and the children themselves were never afraid, and only Mama Van Loa, when she witnessed Gerritz embracing. went through a thousand terrors. And to the children, the joy of life seemed to be embodied in their father, a joy which they soon came to picture instinctively as a tall man and huzzar with a loud voice and any number of jokes, a pair of high riding boots and a clanking sword. Kherdi was a tiny child of seven who loved being petted, and as soon as she saw Kedit, she hung on to him, nestled on his knees, rubbed her head against the braid of his union, tugged at his mustache, dug her little fists into his eyes,

or else she would throw her arms round his neck and stay like that, quietly looking at the others because she had taken possession of papa. This time too she left her chair, crept under the table, climbed on Geritz's knees, and ate out of his plate, although Adeline tried to prevent her. Gerrit ate his breakfast, with Gerdi on his lap, and the childish voices twittered all around him, like the voices of so many little birds, and this twittering produced a brightness in his heart,

so that he began to smile, and then to poke fun at Clasher, the baby in her baby chair, sitting beside him rather stupidly. Clashar, who did not talk much yet, was still a little backward, and just fretted and whimpered. Latterly, he had felt a strange pitying tenderness

when he looked at his children, as though surprised at all this dainty flaxen life which he had created, he who had always said, "'Children are what you want. Without children, you have no life. Without children, nothing remains of you. Children carry you on.' He had married fairly late, a very young wife, and that had been the reason of his marriage, the root idea,

to beget children, as many children as possible, because it seemed to him a dismal thought that nothing of him should survive. And now, when he looked around him, now that Maritia and Aletia and Alex were twelve and ten and nine, he sometimes had deep down in his heart, a strange feeling of wonder and pity, even of sadness, as though the thought had suddenly come to him, Where do they all come from, and why are they all round me? A strange wondering astonishment, as though it's the riddle of childbirth, the secret of human life, which suddenly became impenetrable to him, the father and husband.

Then he would give a furtive glance to see if he could discover that same wondering astonishment in Adeline. But no, she quietly went her way, the gentle, fair-haired little mother, the domesticated little wife, very simple in soul and limited in mind, who had quietly, as a duty, born her husband, her fair-haired children, and was bringing them up as she thought was right. "'No, he noticed nothing in her, "'and he was the more surprised "'because, after all, she was the mother, "'and therefore ought really to have felt

"'that strange thrill of wonder "'even more than he did. "'And all these are my children,' he thought. "'And, while he boisterously tickled Gerdi "'and pretended to eat up clashes's bread and butter, "'like the great tease that he was, he thought, "'now these are all my children "'and Adeline's children,

and he was filled with wonder as he saw them around him, the pretty flaxen-haired children, the wonder of an artist at his work, wonder such a sculptor might feel on contemplating his statue, or a writer reading his book, or a composer listening to his melodies. A simple wondering astonishment that he should have made all that, a wondering astonishment at his own power and strength.

And then, in the midst of his astonishment, he suddenly grew frightened, frightened at having heedless begotten so much life, simply because he had been depressed by the thought that, if he had no children, nothing of him would survive after his death. Yes, they would survive him now, his children, his flaxen-haired little tribe, his nine. Life would scatter them, the little brothers and sisters, who were now all there together like little birds in the nest of the parental house, sheltered by father and mother.

And what would they be like? What would their life be? What's their sorrow? What's their joy? When he himself their father was old or dead. He was afraid. A terror shot through him strangely enough at that breakfast table

where he sat eating with herdy out of one plate and teasing little Yan with his jokes which made the boy crow aloud. And the strangest thing to him was that no one should suspect what he was thinking, that it was hidden from them all, from Adeline, from his mother, his brothers and sisters, because in appearance he was a great, robust fellow, a sort of goth, a civilised

barbarian with his flaxen head and his white sinewy body, devoted to sport and racing, revelling in his work as an officer, outwardly almost commonplace, with his solid healthy normality. louder voice, a little vulgar in his jests, even exaggerating his noisiness and vulgarity out of a sort of bravado, an instinctive desire to hide his real self. Yes, that was it. He hid himself. He was invisible. Nobody saw him, nobody knew him, not his wife, nor his family, nor his friends. Nobody knew him in those strange fits of giddiness and faintness, which suddenly seemed to empty his brain, as though all the blood were flowing out of it. Nobody knew the secret of his temperateness, the hidden weakness that

would not even allow him to take two glasses of champagne, without that horrible congestion at his temples, which made him feel as if his head were bursting. Nobody, not even the wife at his side, knew of that heavy, oppressive nightmare, which came to him when, After lying awake for hours, he dozed off, that nightmare of piled up mountains and rocky avalanches, weighing upon his brain. Nobody knew of his fears and anxieties about his children, while outwardly he was a gay, jovial father, a healthy brute, as some of his brother officers had called him. Sometimes he had silently thought of the designation and smiled at it, because he knew himself to be neither a brute nor healthy.

Gradually, almost mechanically, he had gone on showing that unreal side, posing successfully as the strong man, with cast iron muscles and a simple cast iron conception of life, to be a good husband, a good father and a good officer, while inwardly he was gnawed by a queer monster that devoured his marrow. He sometimes pictured it as a worm with legs, a great fat worm, you know, a beastly crawling thing, which rooted with its legs in his carcass, which lived in his back and slowly ate him up, year by year, the damned rotten thing. Of course it wasn't a worm. He knew that. He knew it wasn't a worm, a worm with legs, but it was just like it, you know, just like a worm, a centipede,

rooting away in his back. Then he felt himself all over, proud not with sanding of his sound limbs, his well-trained supple muscles, his youthful appearance, though he was no longer so very young. And then it seemed to him incomprehensible that it could be as it was, that that confounded centipede could keep worrying through those limbs at those muscles, right into the marrow of his strong body. Nothing on earth would ever have induced him to see a doctor about it. He took walking exercise, horse exercise, rode at the head of his squadron, and the brazen blare of the trumpets,

the dull thud of the horse's hooves, the sight of his hussars, his lads, would make him really happy, would make him forgets the confounded centipede for a morning. As he sat his horse with head erect, twisting his fair moustache above his curved lip, a burly straight-backed figure, he would say to himself,

"'Come, get rid of all those tom-fool ideas, "'and be a man, do you hear? "'Not a nervy, hypercondriical girl?' "'You and your centipede. "'Rot! I just had a peg yesterday, "'and that, damn it is what I mustn't do. "'No peg at all, not one, "'perhaps not even any wine at all,

"'and then not more than one cigar after dinner. "'But you see, giving up drinking, giving up smoking, "'that's the difficulty.' "'Cheredit had just finished his breakfast, "'and was putting little hurdy down when there was a violent ring at the front doorbell. Adeline gave a start. The children shouted and laughed.

Tingling! Tingling! Tingling! cried little Pete, mimicking the sound with his mug against his plate. Hush, said Adeline turning pale. She had seen Doreen through the window, walking up and down outside the door excitedly, waiting for it to be opened. Hush, it's Auntie Doreen! I do hope that.

there's nothing wrong at grandmamma's. But now the maid had opened the door, and Doreen rushed into the room excitedly, perspiring under her straw hat, with a face as red as fire. She was in a furious temper, and it was impossible at first to make out what she said. Just think, just think! She could not get her words out. The passion of rage seething inside her made her incapable of speaking. Moreover, she was out of her. of breath because she had been walking very fast. Her hair, which was beginning early to turn grey, stuck out in rat tails from under her sailor hat, which bobbed up and down on her head. Her clothes looked even more carelessly flung on than usual, and her eyes blinked with a look of

angry malevolence, a look of spite and discontent, gleaming through tears of annoyance. Just think, just think. Come, sissy, calm yourself. and tell us what's the matter, said Gerrit, admonishing her in a good-natured paternal, jovial fashion. Well then, just think, that horrible creature came to Mama first thing this morning and made a scene. What horrible creature? Why, are you all deaf? I'm telling you, I began by telling you. Miss Felders, the creature who keeps the rooms where Ernst lives, came and made a frightful scene and upset Mama. awfully, and Mama sent for me. Why me? Why always me? What can I do? I'm not a man? Why not Carol? Why not you?

Dear, no. Mama, of course, sent for me. Of I went to Mama's, found Mama quite ill. That horrible creature there. Then I went off with Miss Felders. First to Carol's. But Carol was absolutely indifferent. A selfish pig. A selfish pig. That's what Carol is. Miss Felder's had to go home. Then I went off to Erst, and when I had seen him I came on to you. Gerrit, you're a man. You know about things. You know what to do. I'm a woman, and I do not know what's to be done. Her voice was now a wail, and she burst into tears. But, Sissy, I don't yet know what's happened, said Gerrit quietly. Why, Ernst, I'm telling you, Ernst, I'm telling you.

What about him? He's mad. He's mad? Yes, he's mad. He wanted to go out into the street last night. He's mad. Adeline had rung for the nurse who took the children away. He's mad, Gerrit repeated, passing his hand over his forehead.

He's mad, Doreen repeated. He's mad. He's mad. Oh, well, said Helit, in a vague conciliatory tone. Erst is always queer. But now he's mad, I tell you, Doreen screamed in a shrill voice. If you don't believe me, go and see him. Don't you see?

Something's got to be done. I, I don't know what. I'm a woman, do you hear, and I'm utterly unnerved myself. Why didn't Mama send for you at once? Why me? "'Why me?' "'And Carol, Carol, is a dinkum-poop. "'Caryl at once said that he had a cold,

"'and that he couldn't go out. "'Caryl, Carol's a ninkum-poop. "'A cold, indeed, a cold when your brother's gone mad all of a sudden.' "'But when you say mad, is he really mad?' asked Gerritz, doubtfully. "'Well, go and see him for yourself,' said Doreen, "'fixing her irritated gaze full on Gerritz.' "'You go and see him for yourself, and when you've seen him as I've seen him, "'then you won't ask me if he's mad.'

"'All right,' said Gerrit. "'I'll go at once. "'I must look in at barracks first, and then—' "'Oh, you must look in at barracks first,' said Doreen angrily. "'Of course, you must look in at barracks first, "'and then, if you have a moment to spare—' "'I can go from here,' said Gerrit, dejectedly. "'Are you coming?'

"'I,' screamed Doreen, "'do you think I'm going back with you? "'No, thank you. "'I've told Mama, I've told you, "'and now I'm going home to bed, "'for, if I'm not careful "'and go trotting about wherever you send me, "'I shall go off my head myself.

"'I, I'm going to bed.' "'She rose, walked round the table, "'sat down again, "'and suddenly her voice changed. "'Tears of pity came into her eyes. And she wailed, "'Poor Mama, she's quite ill. What an idea of that horrible creatures

"'to go running straight to Mama. "'Why frighten her like that? "'Why not first have told one of us? "'I'll just go round to Constance, "'and to Adolphine, then they can console Mama a bit. "'You call in its paws on your way. "'He may be able to help you "'if there's anything to be done.

"'But after that, I'm going home to bed. "'Yes,' said Gerrit. "'I'll go now.' And then at once he began to hesitate. "'Ought he not to go to barracks first. Should he go first to Paul or straight to Ernst?' He went into the passage, strapped on his sword, put on his cap. Doreen followed him out.

"'So you're going to him. Well, when you've seen him, you won't ask me again if he's mad.' And she made a rush for the front door. "'Doreen.' "'No, thank you,' she said excitedly. "'I'm going to Constance, to Adolphine, "'and then, then, I shall go home to bed.' She had opened the door, and in another moment she was gone.

Gerrit saw Adeline weeping, ringing her hands in terror. "'Oh, Gerrit! "'Come, come, I don't expect it so very bad. "'Einster's always been queer. "'I shall go to Mama, Gerrit.' "'Yes, darling, but don't make her nervous. "'Tell her that I'm on my way to Ernst, "'and that I don't believe he's so bad as all that.'

"'Goreen always exaggerates, "'and she hasn't told us what Ernst is like. "'There, goodbye, darling, and don't cry. "'Eirst has always been queer.' "'He flung his greatcoat over his shoulders, "'for the weather was like November, cold and wet. "'Outside the pelting rain beat against his face, and he saw Doreen ahead of him

wobbling down the street under her umbrella with that angry straddling walk of hers. She turned out of the banker-strath on the left, into the Kerkhov-Larn, on her way to Constance. He took the tram, and in spite of the rain, stood on the platform with his military great-coat flapping round his burly figure

because he was stifling, as with a painful congestion, and felt his veins, surfeited with blood, hammering at his temples. That confounded champagne last night, he thought, I don't feel clear in my head. I'd better go to Paul first.

Yes, I'd better go to Paul first. Or shall I go straight to Ernst? He did not know what to decide, and yet he had to make up his mind while his tram was going along the den of Eich, for Ernst lived in the newer outleich. But because he did not know, he remained on the tram on the platform, with his back bent under the pelting rain,

and it was not until he reached the Houtstrat, that he jumped down, his sword clanking between his legs. Paul lived in rooms above a hosier's shop. Gerrit found his brother still in bed. Erz is mad, he said at once. He's always been that, replied Paul, yawning. Yes, but it appears that he's absolutely. mad now, said Gerrit.

He felt so seedy and heavy-witted that he could hardly speak, his swollen tongue lulled between his teeth. However, he told Paul about Doreen's visit. We must go on to Ernst, Paul, and see how much there is in it.

Paul was listening now. Yes, he drawled, but I must dress myself first. You see, the curious thing about this world is that whatever happens, we have first to dress ourselves. I was dressed, laughed Gerrit. Oh, really? said Paul amiably.

Well, that was lucky. There was a note of sarcasm in his tone which escaped Gerrit in his dull condition. Paul, stretching himself, decided to get up, and for a moment he remained standing in front of Gerrit in his pink pajamas. Do you think Ernst is really mad? he asked. "'Babs is not so bad as that,'

"'Kherit ventured. "'Everybody is a little mad,' said Paul. "'Oh, I say,' said Gerrit, in an offended voice. "'No, not you,' said Paul genially. "'Not you or I, but everybody else has a tile loose. "'I'm going to have my bath. "'Don't be long.' "'All right.'

Paul disappeared in his little bathroom, "'and Gerrit, who was suffocating, flung open the windows, so that the bedroom suddenly became filled with the patter of summer rain, and Gerrit looked around him. He had hardly ever been here at Paul's, and he was now struck by the exquisite tidiness of the rooms. Paul had a bedroom, a sitting-room, and a dressing-room in which he had installed his tub. What a tidy beggar he is! thought Gerrit, and looked around him. The bedroom was small and contained nothing but a brass-a-brossed. bedstead, a walnut looking-glass wardrobe, a walnut table and two chairs. There was not a single

object lying about. The pillows on the bed showed just the faintest impress of Paul's head. The bedclothes he had thrown well back when he got up, very neatly, as though to avoid creasing them. Gerrit heard the ripple of water in the dressing-room. It was as if Paul was squeezing out the sponge with exquisite precaution, so as not to splash a single drop outside his tub. The bath lasted a long time, then all was silence. Can't you hurry a bit? cried Gerrit impatiently. All right, Paul called back in placid tones. What are you up to? I don't hear you moving. I'm doing my feet.

My dear fellow, can't you get on a bit faster? Or shall I go on? "'No, no, I wouldn't miss going with you, "'but I must get dressed first, wasn't I? "'But can't you make haste about it? "'Very well, I'll hurry.' "'There came a few sharp ticking sounds "'as of scissors and nail files "'that were being put down on the ringing marble.

"'Heret breathed again, "'but, when everything became silent once more, "'Heritz after an interval, cried, "'Paul, yes. "'Will you soon be ready now?' "'Yes, yes, but don't be impatient. I'm shaving. You wouldn't have me cut myself.' "'No, of course not. But we must look sharp. You don't know what sort of state Ernst may be in.' Paul did not answer, and Gerrit heard nothing more, except the swish of the rain. He heaved a deep sigh, moved about restlessly, stretching out his long legs.

After some minutes, which seemed hours to Gerrit, Paul opened the door, but closed it again at once. "'Herrit, will you please shut the window?' he cried angrily. Gerrit fastened the window. The rain no longer patted into the room. Paul now came in. He was in a sleeveless flannel vest and knitted silk drawers. A pair of striped socks clung tightly to his ankles. His feet were in slippers. "'Good Lord, my dear chap, have you only got as far as that?' asked Khalit irritably. Paul looked at him a little superciliously. "'No doubt you've fling yourself into your uniform in three minutes, but I can't do that.

Since one has to dress oneself, and can't just shake one's feathers like a bird, I at least want to dress myself with care, for otherwise I feel disgusting. But do remember, if Ernst. Ernst won't go any madder than he is because I dress myself properly and keep you waiting a quarter of an hour longer. I can't dress any quicker. Because you don't choose to. Because I don't choose to, retorted Paul, pale with indignation.

Because I don't choose to, because I can't. I can't do it. Do you want me to go as I am in my drawers? Very well. "'Then send for a cab. I'll go like this, just as I am. "'But if you want me to dress myself, you must have a little patience.' "'Oh, all right,' Gerrit sighed wearily. "'Wof, get on with your dressing!'

Paul opened a door of his wardrobe. "'Heret saw his shirts, lying very neatly arranged, "'colored shirts and white shirts. "'Paul stood, hesitating for a moment, "'looked out of the window at the rain, and at last selected from the coloured stack a shirt with black stripes. He put the stack straight and hunted for his studs in his jewel case. How much longer will you be? asked Gerrit.

Ten minutes, said Paul, lying angrily, though he was inwardly delighted to make Gerrits lose his temper. He found a set of neelho's studs and links that went well with the black striped shirt and deliberately and neatly put them into the front and cuffs. Gerrit rose impatiently and walked up and down the room. Through the open partition door he saw the bathroom and was surprised to find everything tidied up with not a drop of water anywhere.

Do you do your wash-hand stand yourself? asked Gerrit in amazement. Of course, said Paul, who was now getting into his shirt. "'Did you think I left that to the servant? "'Never. "'She has nothing to do but empty my slot-pail. "'I do my tub, my basin, my soap-trays, everything myself. "'I have separate cloths for everything. "'There they are, hanging on a rail.

"'The world is dirty enough as it is, however tidy one may be.' "'In that case,' said Gerrit, astounded. "'You haven't been so long after all.' "'It's method,' replied. Paul airily, though secretly flattered by Gerrit's remark, When you have method, nothing takes long. And basking in Gerrit's praise, he rang while pulling on his trousers, and told the maid to bring his breakfast.

I'll only take a hurried bite, he said amiably, just bending the points of his stand-up collar at the tips. Then he picked out a tie in a large Japanese box. By Jove, what a number of ties. you have. Yes, I have a lot of them, said Paul proudly. They might only luxury. And in fact, when the maid pushed back the folding doors, revealing the sitting room which Paul, loathing other people's furniture, had furnished himself, in addition to his other two rooms, Kedit was struck with the plainness of it. Comfortable, but exceedingly simple.

I adore pretty things, said Paul, just as much as Ahmad Ernst. but I can't afford them. I haven't the money. Why, you have the same income that he has? Yes, but he doesn't dress. To dress yourself well is expensive. Paul's dressing was now finished, and he had turned up the bottoms of his trousers very high, showing nearly the whole of his well-cut, buttoned boots.

He merely drank a cup of tea, ate a piece of dry bread. But as so greasy, he said, when you've just brushed your teeth, and he went back to his bathroom to rinse his mouth once more. He was ready now, took his umbrella, and followed Gerrits down the stairs. Gerrit opened the door. What beastly weather! growled Paul furiously in the passage.

He drew his umbrella carefully out of its case, while Gerritz was already outside with his blue military coat flapping round his shoulders because he had not put his arms through the sleeves. "'What a filthy mess!' raved Paul. "'This damned rotten mud!' he cursed, pale with rage. He had folded up an umbrella case and slipped it into his pocket

and was now opening his umbrella. He seemed to fear that it would get wet. "'Come on,' he said, seething with inward rage. And taking a desperate resolve, he stepped aside, fiercely slammed the front door and carefully placed his feet upon the pavement. We will wait for the tram, he said. He glared at the rain from under his umbrella. What a dirty sky! he grumbled while Gerritz paced up and down,

only half listening to what Paul said. What a damn dirty sky? Dirty rain, filthy streets, mud, nothing but mud. The whole world is mud. Properly speaking, everything is mud. Heavens, will the world ever be clean, and people in it clean. Towns with clean streets, people with clean bodies. At present their mud, nothing but mud, their streets, their bodies and their filthy souls.

The tram came, and they had to get in, and Paul, in his heart of hearts, regretted this, for, as long as he had stood muttering under his umbrella, he could still yield to his desire to go unraving, even though he had been, Cherit was not listening. They got out in the Deneuve, but by this time he had lost the thread of his argument, and moreover, he had to be careful not to step in the puddles. "'Don't walk so fast,' he said crossly to Gerrit.

"'It'd mind where you walk. It's all splashing around me.' They were now in the Nouvehout-Laych. That ancient quarter was quite dark, soaked in the everlasting rain that fell perpendicularly between the tree, trees, like curtains of violet beads and clattered into the canal. Do you think he's really mad? asked Gerrit, nervously, as he rang the bell. Paul shrugged his shoulders and looked down as his trousers and boots. He was satisfied with himself.

He had walked very carefully. He had hardly a single splash. A fat's landlady opened the door. Oh, I'm glad you've come, gentlemen. been here is quite calm now, and have you been to a doctor? A doctor, said Heelette startled. A doctor, thought Paul. Just so, we've been practical as usual, but he didn't say it.

They went upstairs, they found Ernst in his dressing gown. His black hair which he wore long, lay entangled masses over his forehead. He did not get up. He gazed at his two brothers with a look of intense men, melancholy. He was now a man of 43, but seemed older, his hair turning grey, his appearance neglected, as though his shoulders had sunk in, as though something were broken in his spinal system. He did not appear very much surprised at seeing the two of them, only his sad eyes wandered from one to the other, scrutinising them suspiciously, and all at once the two brothers did not know what to say.

"'Hedit filled the room with his restless movements "'and nearly knocked down a couple of Delph jars "'with the skirts of his wet greatcoat. "'Paul was the first to speak. "'Aren't you well, Ernst? "'I'm quite well. "'Then what is it? "'What do you mean?

"'What was the matter with you last night? "'Nothing. I was suffocating. "'Are you better now?' "'Yes.' "'He seemed to be speaking mechanically under the influence of the last glimmer of intelligence, for his voice sounded uncertain and unreal, as though he were not quite conscious of what he was saying.

Come, old chap, said Gerrit, with good-natured bluntness, laying his hand on Ernst shoulder. As he did so, Ernst's expression changed. His eyes lost their look of intense melancholy, and it became hard, staring hard and black from their sockets like two black marbles. He had turned his head in a stiff quarter-circle towards Gerrit, and the hard gleam of those black marbles bored into Gerrit's blue Norse eyes, with such strange fierceness that Gerrit started, and under his brother's big hand,

which still lay on his shoulder, and slim body seemed to be turned to stone, to become rigid, hard as a rock. He stiffened his lips, his arms, his legs, and fingers. He stiffened his legs and feet, and remained like that, motionless, evidently suffering physical and moral torture, shrinking under the pressure of Gerrit's hand, without knowing how to get rid of that pressure. He remained motionless, stark, every muscle was tense, every nerve quivered. Ernst seems to shrink and harden under Gerrit's touch, just as a caterpillar shrinks and becomes hard when it feels itself touched. As soon as Gerritz removed his hand, he said, as Gerritz removed his hand.

The tension relaxed, and Ernst's body huddled together again, as though something had given way in the spinal system. Ernst, said Paul, wouldn't you do well to get some sleep? No, he said, I won't go to bed again. There are three of them under the bed. Three what? Three, they're chained up. Chained up? Who's chained up? Three, three souls. Three souls? Yes, the room's full of them. They are all fastened to my soul. They are all riveted to my soul.

With chains. Sometimes they break loose, but I was dragging two of them with me for ever so long yesterday in the street, over the cobblestones. They were in pain. They were crying. I can hear them now in my ears,

crying, crying. There are three under the bed. They're asleep. When I go to bed, they wake up and rattle their chains. Let them sleep. They are tired. They are unhappy. As long as they're asleep, they don't know about it. I, I can't sleep. I haven't slept for weeks. They only sleep when I'm awake. They are fastened to me. Don't you hear them? The room is full of them. They belong to every age and period. I've gathered them around me, collected them from every age and period. They were hiding in the jars, in the old books, in the old charts. I have some belonging to the 14th century. They used to hide in the family papers.

The first moment I saw them, they rose up, the poor souls, with all their sins upon them, all their past. They are suffering. They are in purgatory. They chained themselves onto me because they know that I shall be kind to them, and now they refused to leave me.

I drag them with me wherever I go, wherever I stand, wherever I sit. The chains pull at my body. They hurt me. me sometimes, but they can't help it. Last night, last night, the room was so full of souls that there was a cloud of them all round me, and I was suffocating. I wanted to go out, but the landlady and her brother prevented me. They are a miserable pair. They would have let me die of suffocation.

They are a pair of brutes, too. They tread on the poor souls. Do you hear, on the stairs, do you hear their feet? They are treading on the souls. Paul's face was white, and he said, nervously, trying to change the subject, "'Have you seen Doreen this morning, Ernst?' Ernst looked at his brother suspiciously. "'No,' he said. "'I have not seen her. "'She was here, wasn't she?'

"'No, I haven't seen her,' he said suspiciously, and his eyes wandered round as though he were looking for something in the room. The two brothers followed his gaze mechanically. everything about the large comfortable sitting room suggested the man of taste and culture of quiet and introspective temperament but acutely sensitive to line and form the sombreness of the ceiling,

wallpaper and carpet stood out against the yet greater somberness of old oak and old books and a very strange note of blue and other colours was struck in the midst of it all by the pottery which was not all old but included some examples of more recent art. The modern harmonies of line and the very latest discoveries in earthenware suddenly appeared

with their weird flourishes in vases, jars, pots, like enameled flowers, from modern conservatories that had sprung up in the shadows of some old dark forest. On the bookshelves too, the brown leather bindings of the ancient folios were relieved by the direct contact of the yellow wrappers of the latest French literature, or the Art Nouveau covers of the most modern Dutch novels. This lonely, silent man who walked shyly through the streets, gliding along the walls of the houses, who had no friends, no acquaintances, who only on Sunday evenings, because he dared not stay away from a last remnant of respect for maternal authority, consented to suffer martyrdom among the assembled members of his family, even to the extent of taking a hand at

bridge. This man seemed, hidden from every one of them, to lead a rich, abundance life, a secret inner life, a life not of one age but of many. Because he never spoke, they looked upon him as a crank, but he had lived his years abundancy. Had he filled his silent, uncompanioned loneliness too full with the ghosts of literature, history and art? had the ghosts loomed up and come to life around him in that dark and gloomy room where the old and modern porcelain and earthenware glowed and rioted around him with the haunting brilliancy of their colours and glazes of their tortured gorgeous curves and outlines.

The two brothers, who had come because they thought their brother mad, looked round the room, and to both of them the room also seemed mad. So the captain of hussars, whose earlier depression, had passed off, who suddenly felt himself becoming healthy and normal again as he listened to his eccentric brother's ravings. The room became a demented room because it's lacked a trophy of arms, riding-whips, prints of horses and dogs, and the oligraph of a naked woman bending backwards and laughing. To the other brother, the room also seemed demented because here the vase was no longer an ornament, because the vase had become a morbid thing, like a many-combed,

coloured weed, growing in rank profusion among the dark shadows of the curtains and the oak bookcases. To Paul, the room seemed demented because there was dust on the books, and because the basket full of torn paper had not been emptied. But to both of them, the man Ernst himself seemed more demented than the room. The man Ernst, their brother, an eccentric fellow, whom for years they had been compelled to think queer, because he was different from any of them. When he confessed to them that his room was full of souls, souls that hovered round him like a cloud, until he was on the point of suffocating, souls that chained themselves to him, and rattled their chains, they thought that he was raving, that he was stammering insane words, it was the

view of both of them, the view of normal, healthy men, outwardly sane in their senses, in their gestures, expression and language, because their gestures, expression and language did not clash with those of the people about them, whatever they might sometimes feel deep down in themselves. But to the man himself, to Ernst, his own view was the normal, the very ordinary view, and he thought his two brothers, Geritz and Paul, queer and eccentric, because he was able, in his furtive way to see that neither of them noticed anything of the innumerable souls, though these writhed so pitifully and thronged so closely around him as though he were in purgatory. To him there was nothing mad or insane in his room, in his words, or in any part of him.

He looked upon them as mad, he looked upon himself as sensible. When last night, he tried to go out in his nightshirt, because the souls pressed upon him, until he felt as if he were suffocating in the throng, he had simply wanted air, nothing but air, had wanted to breathe without the discomfort of clothes, coat or waistcoat, upon his chest. And he had thought it's quite natural that he should go downstairs with a candle and try to open the door with his key. Then the fat landlady and her lout of a brother had heard him, and had come upon him, making a great to do with their silly hands and their loud voices.

and the two, the fat's landlady and her lout of a brother, had stood there shouting and gesticulating like a pair of lunatics, while he had already loosened the chain from the front door, and felt the draught doing him so much good because it blew upon his bare flesh under his flapping shirt. Then Ernst had become angry, because the fat's landlady and her lout of a brother did not listen to what he said.

He had a soft voice. which could not cope with the rough, loud, vulgar voices of people without feeling, of people without soul, knowledge or understanding. He had become angry because the brother, the coarse brute, had locked the door again, dragged him away, hauled him up the stairs, and he had struck the brother. But the brother, who was stronger than he was, had hit him, hit him on the chest, which had been bursting before, and at that had become still worse. because all the souls had thronged against him in terror,

beseeching him to protect them. And roughly, rudely, like the unfeeling brutes that they were, the fat's landlady and her lout of a brother had dragged him upstairs between them, and as they dragged him they had trodden not only on his bare feet, but also on the poor souls. Their vulgar slippers, their clumsy caddish feet, had trodden on the poor, poor, tender souls.

trodden on them in the passage and along the stairs, and he heard them panting and sobbing, so loudly, so loudly in their mortal anguish that he could not understand why the whole town had not come running up, in sheer alarm, to see the poor souls and help them. Oh, how they had moaned and gnashed their teeth! Oh, how they had sobbed and lamented, most terribly! And nobody had come, nobody would hear.

They had refused to hear, those townsfolk. No rescue had arrived, and the two brutes, that fat's landlady, and that wretched cad of a fellow, her brother, had hauled him along, up the stairs into his room, had flung him in, locked to the door behind him, and barricaded the door on the outside. And in the passage, caught in the front door, on the landing, caught in the door of his room, lay the poor panting, sobbing souls. They lay trodden and trampled,

as if a rough crowd had danced upon those tender Gossamer beings, on their frail bodies, and he had spent the whole night, sitting on a chair in the corner of his room, shivering in his night-shirt, in the dark, listening to the lamentations of the souls, hearing them wring their hands, hearing them pray for his pity,

for his commiseration. for they knew that he loved them, that he would not hurt them, the poor souls. He understood, yes, he understood, that those two brutes, the woman and her brother, thought that he was mad. But he had only wanted to breathe the cool night air, to feel the cool night air blowing over his hot limbs, which were all aglow, because in bed the souls pressed so close upon him, though he tried to push them softly from him.

It wasn't mad, surely, to want a breath of fresh air, to want to feel the cool air blowing over oneself. That was all he wanted, and in the morning, yes, he had seen her at the door, opening it very carefully. He had seen the face of his sister Doreen that morning, seen her, grimacing and laughing and cackling with a devilish grin, glad she too, at the sight of the frail bodies of the poor souls, lying trampled on the stairs and in the passage.

But he had been clever. He had remained sitting in his shirt in the corner of his room and pretended not to see her, had taken no notice of her devilish grin, so as to not satisfy her evil pleasure. Then at last, the poor souls that still lived had settled down. He had lulled their fears with gentle words of consolation. Then they had fallen asleep around him,

and he had been able to get up softly without rattling their chains and wash his face, put on his trousers, his socks, his dressing-gown. What were his brothers doing now? He knew, he knew, no doubt they were also thinking, like the landlady and a beast of a brother that he was mad, mad, bereft of his senses. But it was they who had lost their senses. They had no eyes, not to see the slumbering soul. that filled the house. They had no ears, not to hear the plaint of the souls last night

ringing through the universe. They, they were mad. They knew nothing and felt nothing. They lived like brute beasts, and he hated them both, that big, burly officer and the other, that fine gentleman with his smooth face, and his mustache like a cat's whiskers, which he couldn't stand, which he simply could not stand. somehow he had to tell them about the poor souls but now that he saw that they were mad he would never mention the souls to them again otherwise they would be sure to want to beat him too and pull him about and tread on the poor souls as those two horrible brutes had done so he remained sitting quietly waiting for them to go and leave him to himself in the peaceful solitude to which he was accustomed for he was tired now and sitting straight up in his chair, he closed his eyes, partly to shut out the sight of his brother's faces.

Around him lay the souls, countless numbers of them, but they were still and silent, slumbering around him like children, though their faces were wrung with all the grief and pain that they had been made to suffer the night before. Gerrit and Paul had stood up, were pretending to look at the vases, talking in whispers. "'He's pretty calm,' said Gerrit.

"'Yes, but what he said was utter nonsense. "'We must go to a doctor.' "'Yes, we must go to Dr. van der Auer first, "'perhaps to Dr. Ruse afterwards, "'or any other nerve specialist whom Van der Auer recommends. "'What do you think of him? "'Is he absolutely mad?' "'Yes, mad.

"'He never used to talk in that incoherent way. "'Up to now he was only queer, dreamy, eccentric, thou he is absolutely. Mad, Gerrit completed in a low voice. Look, he shut his eyes. He seems calm. Yes, he's calm enough. Shall we go?

Yes, let's go. They went up to Ernst. Ernst, Ernst, Ernst. He slowly raised his heavy eyelids. We're off, Ernst, old chap, said Gerrit. Ernst nodded his head. we shall be back soon. But Ernst closed his eyes again,

yearning for them to go, driving them out of the room with his longing. They went, he heard them shut the door softly, carefully, then he nodded his head with satisfaction. They were not so bad, they had not weak the souls. He heard them whispering on the landing with those two beasts, the landlady and her brother. He got up, crept to the door, tried to listen, but he could not make out what they said.

Then he laughed contemptuously, because he thought to them stupid, devoid of eyes, ears, heart or feeling. Richard Brutes, infernal brutes, he muttered fiercely, clenching his fists. A mortal weariness stole over him. He went to his bedroom, let down the blinds and got into bed, feeling that he would sleep. All around him lay the souls. The whole room was full of them. Translator's note. Clasher, Nicolette. Gerard. End of Chapter 1. Chapter 2 of The Twilight of the Souls by Louis Cupertos. This Librivox recording is in the public domain. Old Mrs. Van Lowe's neighbours thought it's a funny thing that have to be.

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 Loa'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 inquire of Mrs. Van Loa's maids. the maids did not know anything. They only thought it must be something to do with the young mafrau, the one in Paris, Mrs. Emily, as they called her, who had gone off with her brother. "'It's very queer about the van Loers,' 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 vancathsumers. And here are those fat roiveners. What's up?' Yes, what can be up? The servants say it's something to do with Emily. A nice thing for the Van Ravans. 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 barn. Here are the van der Velkas. Like aunt, like niece. Now they were all there. All? Yes, I've seen them all. Captain Van Lua and his wife.

Paul, Doreen and Carol, 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 Emily. And when you think of what the van derogels 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 Schaevening. Yes, let's go to Schaeveningen, we may hear there what's happened. Yes, about Emily, you know. And Mrs. Van Loa's neighbours went off to Schaeveningen,

with the express object of hearing what had happened about Emily. Old Mrs. Van Loa 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, Ancelot, 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 gaslit. Herman, the old lady cried plaintively. Uncle Roivner and Ancelot approached. Have you seen him, Herman? asked the old lady, ringing her old knotted hands. "'No, Marie, but I, I shall go to him tomorrow, with Dr. Van the Hour.' "'And who is with him now?' "'A male nurse, Mama,' said Gerrit.

"'We've seen to everything. He's quite calm, Amadier. 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, Mama!' she said. "'How sad about Ernst! "'Who would ever have imagined "'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, Mama?' asked Carol, "'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, Doreen and Adeline, "'is that you will not talk about it. Don't talk about it, outside us.

The less it's talked about, the better pleased I shall be. We have that Indian lack of reserve in our family, the habits 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 breakdown. 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 Ereds will mean that Van Satima 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, Usi, 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 Satima 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 Luke 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 breakup 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 Archel's sudden death, the sort of apathy into which Bertha had sunk, the divorce between Van Ravan and Emily, after Emily had refused to come back from abroad,

preferring to stay in Paris with her brother Henry, who had been sent down from Leiden. A divorce obtained in the face of all the persuasion which Uncle van Narchel, the Queen's commissary in Overeyssal, had brought to bear upon them. Louise, living with Otto and Francis, in order to help Francis,

who was always ailing with the children, so that Bertha was living alone with Marianne in her little villa at Barn, now that France had taken his degree and gone to India, while Carol and Maricho 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 Narchel's ministerial household. She would often complain now, a thing which she never used to do. She would complain that Carol and Cato were so selfish, so stiff and Dutch, that they were getting worse every year. She would complain that at Cheritz, the children were always so noisy, that Adeline was

unable to manage them, that both Geritz 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 Carolincha was not married, because the three boys were so troublesome. She would complain of Doreen 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 Nakhel 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 Rovner's that the family was no longer what it had been, called it a grandeur de chou, 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, Mama, in her secret heart, loved to talk with Constance about Rome, about Estafala even, about the Palavicini, 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 Addy was the only one of her grandchildren who bore a title, good family though the van Narchals were. Oh, those grandchildren whom she now saw so seldom! And now the terrible thing had befallen Ernst, the terrible thing which the children had its 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 arm she was first able to sob out her grief, in whose arm 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. "'Eirst 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 Mama had uttered the word which none of them had spoken, though they had thought it silently.

The word which Mama 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 Mama's lips, it sounded like an open acknowledgement 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 breakdown, nothing more.

A nervous breakdown was such a comprehensive term. Anyone could go to a home for nervous patience, for a rest cure. But the word uttered by Mamarta Constance in shrill acknowledgement of the truth had cut through the dim room where no one had even thought of lighting the gas. Adolphine, Cato, Carol, Uncle Roivina, flaucher and Dykohoff exchanged sudden glances, terrified,

struck with dismay because they would never have been willing to utter the word aloud in open acknowledgement of the truth. Aunt Lott's loud, Ah, Cassian! Now came from a corner of the dark, room, and Tutti was so much upset that she suddenly burst into sobs.

That was your Indian lack of self-restraint again, thought the Van Satas and Cato. 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 Auer and Ruse, a young nerve specialist. At their entrance, Tutti abashed, ceased her sobbing. The doctors had come from the newer Outleich, 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, He is all by himself. We must see and get him to Noonspeat, a Doctor van der Hevels. That will do him good.

The country, change of environment, nice, quiet people who will look after him. Noonspeat, 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 to him. 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 Mama's shrill word, which had cut through the darkness and made them shudder. They the more readily condemned Aunt Lott's exclamation, and Toot'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 Mama

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 pouring too long over his dusty books. Translator's note, Cassian, Malay, poor dear. End of chapter two. Chapter 3 of the Twilight of the Souls by Louis Cupertus. This Librivox recording is in the public domain.

Constance went to the newer Outleich next morning. The landlady, shaking her head, let her in. Dr. van der Auer met her in the passage. "'I thank you for coming, ma'frau. It won't do for Ernst to remain here any longer. I should like to take him down to Noonspate with one of you, as soon as possible to-morrow. But it won't be an easy matter, poor fellow.'

"'I'll do my best,' said Constance doubtfully. "'Then I'll leave you alone with him. You won't be nervous. No, you're not nervous. He's quiet, poor fellow.' "'Don't be afraid. I shall be near.' Constance went upstairs with her heart thumping in her breast. She tapped softly at the door and received no answer.

"'Earned,' she called, and her voice was not very steady. "'Earned, but there was no reply. She slowly opened the door. The door handle grated into her very soul, and before entering she asked once more, "'Earnst, may I come in?' He still did not answer, and she walked into the room. She had made up her mind to smile at once,

to come up to him with a smile so that the expression of her face might put her poor brother at his ease, and so she smiled as she entered, looking for him with kindly eyes, as though there were nothing at all out of the common. But her smile seemed to freeze on her lips when she saw him sitting huddled in a corner of the room, in a flannel shirt and an old pair of trousers,

with his long hair hanging unkempt. Nevertheless, she controlled herself and said, in as natural a tone as she could command, "'Good morning, Ernst, I've come to see how you are.' He looked at her suspiciously from his corner and asked, "'Why? Because I heard that you were not well, so I thought I would see how you were getting on. I'm not ill, he said in a low voice.

Why are you sitting in that corner, Ernst? Are you comfortable there? Sh, he said. They're asleep. Don't speak too loud. No, but I may talk quietly, may entice, can you get up from your chair, but there's no room there to sit beside you.

Come, dear, won't you get up? And she smiled and held out, both her hands to him. He smiled back and said, "'Sh, don't wake them. No, no, but do get up.' He gave way at last, and grasping her hands warily, allowed her to pull him up, out of his corner, and once more said earnestly, "'You must promise me not to wake them. All my visitors wake them, the brutes. The doctor woke them too. Now, Ernst, we let them.

sleep. There, it's nice of you to have got up. Shall we sit down here? Yes, why have you come? You never come to see me. There was, in his words, an unconscious reproach that startled her. It was quite true. She never came to see him. Since that first time, 18 months ago, when he had asked her to his rooms on her return to Holland, the day when she had lunched here with him, when he had toasted her with two fingers of champagne out of a quaint old glass, she had never once been back. She reproached herself for it now. She, who did feel all that affection for her family,

why had she left that brother to himself, as all the others did, just because he was queer? If she had overcome that vague feeling of distaste, almost of repugnance, if she had felt for him always, as she suddenly felt for him now. Perhaps he would not have been so self-centered. Perhaps he would have retained his sanity.

No, Ernst, she confessed, I never came to see you. It wasn't night of me, was it? No, it wasn't night of you, he said, for I'm very fond of you, Constance. Her heart began to fail her. Her breath came in gasps, her eyes filled with tears.

She put her arm over his shoulder, shoulder and without restraining her emotion, she cried, "'Did we all leave you so much alone, Ernst?' "'No,' he said quietly. "'I am never alone. There are all of them around me. Always. There are some of every century.

Sometimes they are magnificently dressed and sing with exquisite voices.' But latterly, mournfully shaking his head, latterly, they have not been like that. They are all grey like ghosts. They no longer sing their beautiful tunes. They weep and wail and gnash their teeth. They used to come out into the middle of the room and laugh and sing and glitter. But now, oh, Constance, I don't know what they suffer,

but they suffer something terrible, a purgatory. They crowd round me. They suffocates me till I can't draw my breath. Hush, there they are. waking again. No, Ernst, no, Ernst, they're asleep. He turned to her with a knowing laugh. Yes, he whispered, you are kind, you love them, you are sorry for them, who lets them sleep, you don't wake them. And they sat quietly together for a moment without speaking, she with her arm round his shoulder. What a lot of pretty things you have, Ernst, she said,

looking round the room. "'Yes,' he said. "'I collected them, gradually, very gradually. "'There was one in every piece.' "'Earns,' she said gently, "'perhaps it would be a good thing "'if you went to the country this summer. "'At once he seemed to stiffen and shrink

"'under her touch, "'as though all his limbs were becoming tense and stark. "'I won't leave here,' he said. "'Earnst, it would be aft be so good for you. Do you know Noonspeat? She felt him go rigid, and he looked at her angrily and harshly. The doctor wants to get me to Noon Spate, he answered craftily. He laughed scornfully. I know all about it. You people think I'm mad, but I'm not mad, he went on haughtily. You people are stupid, stupid and mad is what you are. You see nothing and hear nothing. You

with your dull brute senses, and then you just think, because someone else sees and hears and feels, that he's mad, whereas it's you yourselves who are mad. I shall stay here. I won't go to Noon spate. But suddenly he grew alarmed and asked, I say, Constance, you won't force me, surely, you won't beat me, that beastly cad down below, that fellow, that cad, he hits me, and woke them and trod on them. He stood treading on them, the great fool, the blockhead. Tell me, Constance, you will leave me here, won't you? No, Ernst, no one wants to force you,

but it would be a good thing if you went to nunspate. But why? I'm all right here. You would be among kind people, who will be fond of you. No one has ever been fond of me, he said. Ernst, she cried with a son. sob. No one has ever been fond of me, he repeated bluntly. Not Mama, not any of you, not one. If I had not had all of them, oh, if I had not had all of them, my darlings, my darlings, oh, what can be the matter with them? Now they're waking up, now they're awake. Oh, listen to them

moaning. Oh dear, listen to them screaming, they're screaming, they're yelling. Is it's purgatory? Oh dear, how they're crowding round me. They're stifling me. They're stifling me. Oh, dear, it's more than I can bear. He rushed to the open window, and she was afraid that he wanted to throw himself out, so that she caught him round the body with both her arms.

The old doctor came in. He shuts the window. I can do nothing, she murmured to the old man in despair. Yes, you can, said the doctor, "'Yes, you can, ma'frau.' "'You are all of you. "'My enemies,' said Ernst. "'My enemies and theirs!'

And he went and sat in his corner, huddled up with his arms round his knees. "'Go away,' he said, addressing both of them. "'I'm going, Ernst,' said the old doctor, "'but Constance may as well stay.' He sometimes called her by her Christian name the old doctor who had brought them into the world in India, and to Constance it was touching to hear that name from under his grey moustache.

It's called up those old old days. Constance can stay? Very well, said Ernst. The doctor left them alone. The nurse would be on his guard. Ernst, said Constance, suppose we went together to Nunspate. Why?

Why? he asked vehemently. I'm all right here, and we can't take them with us there, he whispered more gently. Shh, you're waking them. It will be quieter for them, perhaps, if you leave them here, dear,

she said, kneeling on the floor beside him, feeling for his hand with her eyes full of tears. No, no, that woman's brother down there, that's cad. But Ernst, she said more firmly, with her eyes on his. Dear Ernst, do let me tell you, they don't exist.

They exist only in your imagination. You must really get rid of the idea. Then you will be well again, quite well. Ernst, dear Ernst, they don't exist. Do look round you. There's nothing to see but the room, your furniture, your books, your vases. There's nothing else except our two selves.

Oh, Ernst, do try to see it, there's nothing. That you feel as if you were suffocating comes from always being so much alone, never going out, never walking. At noon spate we will walk, on the heath, over the dunes, and then you will get quite well again, Ernst. For, honestly, you are ill, there's nothing here, nothing. Look for yourself, there's only you and I, and your furniture and books.

He quietly let her talk. An ironical smile curled round his lips, and at last he gave her a glance of pitying contempt, gave a little shrug of his shoulders. Then he softly stroked her hand, patted it gently in a fatherly manner. You are kind and nice, Constance, but, shaking his head,

you have no sense, I believe you mean what you mean what you're, say, but that's just it. You're narrow, you're limited, you don't see, you don't hear, putting his hand to his eyes and ears, what I see, what I hear with my eyes and my ears. But, Ernst, you must surely understand that those are all illusions. The doctor says that they are hallucinations. He continued to smile, looked at her with his contemptuous pity, looked hard out of his black van Loa eyes. They are hallucinations, Ernst.

And you? No, I'm not. And the room, the books, the vases? No, they are not. They are all around you. They exist. Well, and why not all of them, the souls? They don't exist, Ernst.

They are hallucinations. He just closed his eyelids, smiled, shrugged his shoulders to convey that he was utterly at a loss to understand such exceedingly limited perceptions. Then he said, gently and kindly, No, Constance dear, you're not clever, if you mean all you say. I believe you do mean it, but that's just it. You live like a blind person.

You don't see, you don't hear. That's the way all of you live and exist in a dream, with closed eyes and deaf ears. ears. None of you see, hear or understand anything. You know nothing. You are as unfeeling as stones. You can't help it, Constance, but it's a pity, for you are so nice. There might have been something to be made of you if you had learnt to see and hear and feel. It's too late now, Constance. You are stupid now, like all the rest. But I'm sorry, for you are very nice. Your hand is soft. your voice is soft, and you did your best not to tread on my poor darlings,

and not to drag them away on their chains, which are riveted so fast to my heart that they hurt me sometimes here. He put his hand to his heart. Awareness came over her brain, as though she were exhausting herself in the effort to speak and to give understanding to an intelligence and a soul which remained very far away, miles away, and which her words could only reach through a dense cloud of darkness. And suddenly that sense of weariness and impotence became crueler and harder within her. It was as though she were talking to a stone, to a wall.

She felt her own words beating back against her forehead, like tennis balls striking the wall. But Ernst, she tried once more, won't you come to nanspate with me, to please me, to walk on the heath with me. You would be giving me such immense pleasure, it would be good for me. And all of them, here, around me. He pointed round the room cautiously, we will leave them to sleep here. And that cad downstairs?

He shan't interfere with them, I promise you, we'll lock up the room, ernst, and they shall sleep peacefully. She humoured him, not knowing if she was doing right, but feeling too tired to convince him. You promise, he asked suddenly, you promise that they shall sleep peacefully. Yes, that the cat downstairs won't wake them and tread on them. Yes, yes.

You promise that. Yes, we lock up the room, very quietly. Yes. and nobody at all will come in. No. You promise that. Yes. Will you swear it? Yes, Ernst. All right then. Will you come? She cried, rejoicing, and unable to believe her ears. Yes, because you would so much like to go for walks on the heath. you're nice. He spoke gently, pityingly, and his contempt was not as great as it had been,

for he looked upon her as a nice but stupid child that needed his help and his protection. She smiled at him in return, stood up where she had been kneeling beside him, put out her hands to him, inviting him to get up from his corner also. He let her pull him up. He was a heavy weight.

She drew him out of his corner like a lump of lead. Then we start to Murrow Ernst. He nodded, yes, good-naturedly. She was very nice, and she was longing for those walks, and she was so weak, so stupid, she knew nothing, saw, heard and felt nothing, absolutely nothing. He must help her and guide her and support her.

And shall we pack a trunk now while I'm here? He did not understand that a trunk was necessary. He looked at her blankly, but he wanted to please her and said, All right, but don't make a noise. The doctor returned. He's coming, she whispered, we're going to pack his trunk. The doctor pressed her hand, Ernst looked down upon them both, smiling,

as upon poor unfortunate people who cannot help being so stupt. so slow of understanding, so limited in their knowledge, so dull of perception. And while Constance and the doctor opened the clothespress in his bedroom, he warned them quietly but with dignity. "'Shh, be careful, you know. Don't let the door of the wardrobe creak. Don't wake them.' End of Chapter 3.

Chapter 4 of The Twilight of the Souls by Louis Kuperus. This Librivox recording is in the public domain. It was a sultry summer morning, and old Mrs. Van Lua sat at the conservatory window, crying very quietly. She had been crying incessantly now for two long days. After her first sob in Constance's arms, she had sobbed no more, but since then her tears had flowed continually, salt-stinging tears that burned her wrinkled cheeks.

She sat with her hands folded in her lap, and from time to time she nodded her head up and down, while she stared at the leafy garden, over which the stormy sky hung dark and heavy as led. Now and then she cleared her throat, now and then heaved a deep sigh, and her handkerchief was soaked with the tears that kept on flowing, quietly out of her smarting eyes.

Constant fretting had drawn down the corners of her mouth into too long, sad wrinkles. Oh, yes, it was very hard. Trouble. Always trouble. Her life had been full of trouble. Trouble when Lewis and Gertrude had died at Boutenzoch. Poor children. What had they not suffered from fever and cholera?

Money troubles. An expensive household to be kept up on limited means. Trouble again. Trouble. Terrible trouble. with dear Constance, and the heavy trouble of her husband's illness and death. He had never recovered from Constance's disgrace. More trouble over Van Archel's death, the great change in a bertha, and the breakup of the whole household.

And now there was this last sore trouble with her son, her poor son, who had gone mad. Oh, if it had only happened a little earlier when she was a little bit, younger. She could have borne it, as she had borne the rest, could have accepted it as her natural share, a mother's share of trouble. But she was so old now, and it seemed to her that the supreme trouble was drawing near, a trouble which was coming very late in her life, too late for her to bear it with strength and patience, now that she was growing older and feebler daily. And her only wish had been to see her big family happy together, that great family of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, amongst which she had always rejoiced to live,

thankful as she had been for that great blessing. It was as though a presentiment were coming to her from very far, from very far out of those heavy lowering skies, a presentiment which her nerves, sharpened by age, suddenly not only felt but saw coming like a menace, as old people will suddenly see the truth, very clearly, the future, a waning lamp, which suddenly flickers up brightly before dying out in the darkness, a bright flicker which suddenly reveals the shadows in the room, and in which the portraits grin with faces that seem to speak, before the lamp dies out, before every ever,

everything is swallowed up in the black darkness. Oh, the awful presentiment which suddenly approached like a spectre out of the leaden clouds, that filled the whole vista before her eyes with grey terrors. The presentiment that this trouble, the greatest of all, was going to strike her most, now in her old old age, when she no longer had the strength to endure it, when she would sink under the weight of it. "'Oh, God, why should it now? Why now? Fall with such pitiless, crushing weights? Why now? Was it not enough that one of her children had gone mad? Surely the most terrible thing that can happen?

Was that not enough? What more could be threatening looming before her, now that she was growing so feeble? See, did not her old hands tremble at the mere thought, was not her whole helpless body shaking, were not the tears flowing until they smarted in the furrows of her wrinkles, and until her handkerchief was just a wet rag? What more could there be coming? Oh, God, no more, no more, she prayed automatically, believing in her feeble despair, in the great infinite omnipotence which is so very, very far removed from us, and which she had always worshipped decency once a week in church, formerly, when she still went

out. Oh, God, no more, no more! It was greater the infinite omnipotence than what they worshipped in church. It filled everything far and wide to the utmost limits of her thought, and it terrified and dismayed her. She saw its threatening from afar, and why, why now? Oh, why had it not all come earlier when she would have had more fortitude,

when she would have borne everything as her natural share, a mother's share of trouble? She would have been so glad just now to grow old peacefully among her wide circle of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but alas, there was so much. so much to bear, and perhaps there was still more coming. Oh, God, no more, no more, she implored,

was it not enough that one of her children had gone mad, surely the most terrible thing that can happen? She moaned in spirit, then felt a little eased, as the rain began to patter heavily on the expectant leaves, and the lightning flashed, and the thunder rolled, and the sky was rent asunder. But the tears kept flowing in spite of her relief that the rain had come at last, and because of the thunder which filled her fast-aging ears,

she did not hear the door open softly, did not hear someone come through the drawing-room and approach the conservatory, did not at once see the slender little figure that stood quietly before her, solicitous not to intrude upon the grief of her, of the weeping old woman. Granny, the younger woman said gently. The old woman looked up in surprise, blinked her eyes, tried to see through the flowing tears,

did not recognize the one who called her granny. Eh, she said plaintively, who is it? And the girl did not answer at once, because it had given her a shock to see those silent tears flowing down the cheeks of that lonely old woman. She remained standing quietly, a pretty, almost fragile little figure, like a Dresden China doll, but a very up-to-date doll, like a sketch by one of the ultra-modern French draughtsmen with the pointed little face below the elaborately waved hair under the very large hats.

A hat which, in the shape of its crown and the sweep of its feathers, represented the very latest extreme of fashion and consequently attracted immediate attention. attention in Holland, in these dignified rooms, while the light tailor-made costume Luke too dressy for a summer morning at the Hague, and a touch in every accessory, the sunshade, the Chulboa, proclaimed that the young woman was no longer of the Hague and of Holland, short though the time was since she had run away. The old woman, still sensitive in all social matters, remained looking at Emily a little suspiciously, failing to recognise her, and at one once noticing, just by those touches, the large hat, the chule boa, the exaggeration that displeased her.

"'But who is it?' she repeated, wiping her eyes to see better. And now, the pretty little doll knelt down beside her and said, "'Don't you know me, Granny? It's I, Emily.' "'Oh, my child!' cried the old woman, brightening up, glad, delighted. "'Is it you, Emily? And Granny, who didn't know you again. But then, you've got such a big hat on, child. And Edward, how is he, and where is he? But Granny! Under the arm which she had at once put round Emily,

the old woman felt a shudder pass through the dainty little doll, who had knelt down beside her so impulsively and affectionately. But she did not understand. Well, where is Edward? Why, Granny, cried Emily, you know that we're divorced. The old woman now shuddered in her turn and closed her eyes and sat rigid.

What was this? Was she becoming old like her old sisters, Christine and Doreen, who always muddled up all the children, who never knew anything correctly about their big family? What was this? Was she getting confused? It was this the first time that she had utterly forgotten things.

or had it happened before that she had doted like an old, old woman. She opened her eyes sadly, and the tears ran down her cheeks. Ah, Emilyche, my child, my child, don't be cross with Granny. She's growing old, dear. She had forgotten it for a moment. Yes, yes, she had forgotten all about it. Of course, child, you got a divorce. Oh, it's very sad.

You oughtn't to have done it so soon. You should have gone on being patient. You see, child, a divorce in a family, is always a very sad thing. You know, there was Aunt Constance. Well, she had a lot of trouble. You had plenty of trouble, too. He used to strike you. Yes, Granny knows, but you ought not to have let the world know about it. You were quite right not to let him strike you, but you should have shown him by remaining gentle and dignified that he was doing wrong. No man strikes a woman, my child, if she preserves her dignity. But you used to lose your temper, child, and stamp your foot, and call him names and invite scenes. Yes, yes, Granny knows all about

it. Granny remembers everything. Mama used to say it was all right, but Granny needs to say it was all right, but Granny knew, Granny saw that it was far from right. If you had not lost your dignity, child, he would never have dared to strike you, and who knows, you might gradually have made him gentler, have made him respect you, and you might still have had a very tolerable life.

You see, dear, there's always something in marriage. It's not as young girls imagine when they are in love, there are always difficulties. You have to get used to each other to fall into each other's ways. Do you think that Grandmama never had any differences with Grandpapa? Oh, there were ever so many, and later on even, after years of marriage.

How often didn't Grandmama and Grandpapa differ about poor Aunt Constance? And Mama and Papa do you think they always agreed? temper, temper, Emily, is a thing we all have in our family, but one has to keep it under. A woman must preserve her dignity towards her husband. What a pity, what a pity it was. Beth Child, and where are you living now? Not with Mama at Barn, I know.

I'm living in Paris, Granny, with Henry. What do you say? In Paris? Are you living in Paris? with Henry. Well, you see, Henry too. Yes, Granny isn't quite in her dotage yet, leaving Lydon like that. For shame, why not have finished his college course and gone to India, and what do you do there in Paris? It's very nice for the two of you to be together, but it's not natural, Emileche. Yes, I remember now, they told me,

you were living in Paris. I had heard it before. But that's no sort of life. To go running through the bit of money which your poor father left you. In Paris, what will people say? But shame. No, Grandmama isn't pleased with you. Instead of remaining quietly with your husband,

instead of Henry's quietly finishing his time at the university, what does it all mean what you and he have done? The old woman rejected Emily's caresses. No, child, don't kiss me. Granny is vexed. She doesn't want to be kissed. The family isn't what it was. It's a grandeur des chou, child, a regular grandeur des chou. The Van Lois were something once. There was never much money, but we didn't care about the money, and we always managed. But the family used to count in India, at the Hague. Which of you will ever have a lot? career like your grandpapa's. Like your papas. No, we shall never see another Governor-General in the family,

nor yet a cabinet minister. It's a grandeur des chou, a grandeur de chou. Ah, child, Granny has too much trouble to bear, too much trouble in her old age. Your papa's death was a great blow to Granny. Mama has changed so much since. Changed, so much. So much. "'And Granny never sees Mama now, never. "'Otto and Francis once in a way, and dear Louise, "'but the rest of you are all scattered. "'You are all independent of one another. "'Oh, it is so nice to keep together,

"'one big family together. "'Why need Mama have gone to barn? "'There's nothing but rich tradespeople there, "'not our class at all. "'And now, have you heard, dear, "'poor uncle Earl. Yes, child, it's quite true. Isn't it sad, poor fellow, and hasn't Granny really too much to bear in her old age? Dear Aunt Constance is taking him to Nunspe today. Ah, where should we have been without Aunt Constance?

Ady now is a great consolation to Granny. He is a dear, clever boy, and he works hard, and he will enter the diplomatic service. He is the hope. of the family. Yes, yes, I know. France is doing well, but Henry, Emlitschre, has done the wrong thing, going to Paris, with you. No, child, don't kiss Granny, she's vexed. And Carol isn't behaving at all well, so Uncle van Arnachal says. They don't always tell Granny, but Granny hears, when they think she's deaf and whisper things to one another. Ah, child, It would be better if Granny died. She's getting too old, dear. She's getting too old.

She could have borne all this trouble once, but she can't do it now, Emilecha. She can't bear it now. And the old woman sobbed quietly. The tears flowed without ceasing. She now let Emilecha embrace her passionately, and she listened to all the caressing words with which her granddaughter overwhelmed her.

Constance entered, and Mama knew her at once. Connie, Connie, have you taken him there? Have you come back? Constance, surprised at seeing Emily, first kissed her, and then said, Yes, Mama, I've taken Ernst down with Dr. Van der Waugh and Dr. Ruse. He was quite quiet. We had reserved a coupe compartment, and he travelled down with us very nicely. He did not speak, and he held my hand the whole time. He pities me. I don't know why.

Mama, don't cry. He's really quiet, and he is very comfortable there. He has a pleasant room with a bright outlook. Dr. van der Hervel and his wife are kind, homely people. He will not be by himself. He has his meals with the other patients. It's hard on him to have to do without his books and curios. He misses his books particularly, but the doctor does not want him to read, and he must walk. But walk, Connie, walk, alone. How can he walk? All alone on that enormous heath. He'll lose his way.

He's not responsible. He'll step into a ditch and be drowned. No, Mama, we shall look after him. How do you mean, child? It will soon be Addie's holidays. Addy and I are going to nuns. Monspate, and we shall be with Ernst. Oh, how kind of you, Connie, but I shall miss you. I shall come and see you regularly, Mama. Nunspate is not far. Oh, child, child, what should I do without you? Thank God dear that you return to us at last.

And what will your husband do without his boy? He will come down occasionally, and he is going away for a holiday with Van Fraysvike. I only came back to tell you that Earth is all right. I'm going back to Noonspeat this afternoon, and from there I shall look Bertha up at Barn. I'm going to Mama's too, said Emily softly. When they saw that the old woman was tired, Constance and Emily rose. We must go, Mama.

Yes, child, but don't leave me too long alone. When shall I see you again? In three days. So long? The others will come and see you, Aunt Lott, Doreen, Adolphine. Yes, but I am too much alone. I can't understand it. I never used to be alone.

I don't like being alone. I'm not accustomed to it, but do all of you do. Suppose you took Doreen to live with you, Mama. No, no, no, not to live with me, not to live with me. everyone should be free, but they might come and see me sometimes. I never see Adeline's children now. Why, Mama, I know they were here two days ago. No, no, it's longer.

It's longer than that. I never see your boy either. I'll send him this afternoon. Yes, do. Why are we all so separated now? It's never used to be like that. Never. Well, goodbye, dear.

will you send Addie? Will you come yourself soon? You must wait a day or two. Yes, very well. Stay with poor Ernst. You are doing a good work. And tell Adeline too that she is neglecting me,

that I never see the children now. Never. They both kissed the old woman. When their mother and grandmother was alone, she nodded her head up and down, looked out at the rain, and the tears ran down her. cheeks, without stopping, without stopping. Emily had a cab waiting. I'll drive you home, Auntie.

They stepped in. It's a month since we saw you, child. Yes, Auntie, I've come straight from Paris. I'm going to see Mama at Barn. And then, I shall go back to Paris. I'm living there now. I intended to come and see you too, Auntie. Come in then, dear, and stay to lunch. I should like to, auntie. They got out at the villa in the Kirkhoflan. Emily dismissed the fly. Indoors, she removed her hat, took off the tulle-boa, lost something of her exaggerated smartness. We have an hour left before lunch, Emily, said Constance. Come up to my bedroom. I want to talk to you. They went upstairs. Constance shut the door. Tell me, Emily, how are you living in? in Paris. With Henry, auntie. With Henry. But why, Emily, why keep your brother from his work?

I don't, auntie. He doesn't want to do that sort of work. He wants to be free, and so do I. Free, in what way? We don't feel ourselves suited to Dutch life. But why not? I don't know. an exotic drop of blood in our veins, perhaps. Try to understand, Auntie. You have lived abroad a long time yourself. Holland is so narrow, and I, I have suffered too much in Holland. Dear, I suffered, away from my country, and I longed for my country when I had not seen it for years.

You will understand all the same. Auntie, do understand. I can't possibly live in Holland again, nor Henry either. How do you live there? Tell me. We are both living on the money we had left us. I know how much that is. There were heavy debts.

You did not receive much, not enough to dress as you addressed. Emily, if you care for me at all, tell me everything, frankly, I am not inquisitive, but I am fond of you, fond of all of you, and I take an interest in all of you. You can't live on the money you can. into from your father. I work, auntie. In Paris, what at? What do you do? I paint. I paint fans and screens. You know, I have a bit of a gift that way. I paint them with a good deal of chic.

People in Holland wouldn't care for the way I do them, but in Paris I sell them for 20 francs, 50 francs. My screens fetch 100 francs. I turn them out in half an hour. They have some something about them. I don't know what. Sheik, I suppose, that's all, but I sell them. They're quite nice. I see nothing against that child. I've been very lucky with them, Auntie. I've brought a screen with me for Granny, one for you too, and a fan for Aunt's lot. Their presence, I knock them off in a moment. It's not art exactly, but chic rather, actual chic. And her delicate little fingers outlined a delicate gesture of sheer 20th century artisticity. Constance had to laugh in spite of herself.

And Henry, asked Constance. Emily suddenly turned a very red. What do you mean? What does Henry do? He does nothing? No, he does something, but don't ask me to tell you. Why can't you tell me? You wouldn't understand.

Henry is making money, a lot of money. What's that? I can't tell you, Artie. It's not my secret, you see. It's his. Is it a secret? Yes, it's a secret. Then I won't ask.

It's a secret to the others. Perhaps not to you. She was burning to let it out. I don't ask you to tell me, Emily. I'll tell you, if you promise me not to tell anybody else, not a soul. Henry is a clown. Emily, no. Yes, he's a clown. No, no. Emily gave a loud, shrill laugh. You see, you refuse to believe it. I should have done better not to tell you. You can't understand it. If you saw him as a clown, you would. He is splendid. He is unique.

He is not a vulgar clown, not a dama august. He is simply magnificent. He has turned the art of the clown into something really artistic, something all his own. He makes the audience laugh and cry as he pleases. He invents his own scenes, designs his own dresses, or else I design them for him. He has a way of making up.

He has discovered the melancholy side of the clown. He is sublime. in that. He has one turn in the circus with quite 50 butterflies flitting on wires all round him. He tries to catch them and can't. And when he does that turn, the people begin by laughing and end by crying. You see, it's symbolical. Really, you ought to go to Paris to see him. He is so good, so artistic. He does a lot of exercises to keep himself supple. He looks much better than when he racketing about at Leiden. He's very good-looking and he knows it. He never makes up ugly. A modern sculptor wants to make a statue of him, very fanciful, you know, something art nouveau,

in that part with the butterflies all round him. He is always being asked to sit to artists. You would never have thought of him, auntie. Here he was just the ordinary undergraduate, racketing about, blowing his money. I was always fond of. him. The moment he got to Paris he understood that he must do something, show what he was made of, strike out a line for himself. And it came to him with a flash. He would be a clown, but a very, very fine clown, something quite new, not one of your vulgar clowns. He makes heaps of money, I don't know how much, and that's how we live, auntie, free and independence of everything at everybody. Auntie, you look shocked.

but you mustn't blame us. Here I was unhappy, so was he. There, we are happy, happy together. I am fond of him and he of me. I don't know what it is, but we can't live without each other. In Paris, the people think that we are lovers. They won't believe that we are brother and sister. And there you are.

We're happy, and we don't care what horrible things they say about us in Holland. Do you think I've come back to Holland for any other reason than to see grandmother, you, Mama, Otto. I longed to see you. I have no feeling for the others. I am sorry for Uncle Ernst, but I want to lead a free life, independent of Holland, of the family,

and I had to make it independent of my husband, whom I married a mistake, who beat me and ill-treated me. We want to live, auntie, and not merely exist. But Constance did not know what to say, and shut her eyes as if she had been struck in the face. She turned pale. They wanted to live, not merely to exist.

Was it for her to blame them, for her, who herself very late, when she was quite old, too late and too old, had felt the need to live and not merely to exist? But, had they really found their life in what they now considered their life? Did she not know now that the real life is not for oneself but for others? Did she not know it, even though she had never reached the radiant cities of the new life, which had shone far off on those unattainable horizons? Had she not guessed that it was there,

and had she herself not seemed very small, when she had had to leave out of her reckoning the man who had become so dear to her that she was able to forget everything for his sake, even her son, a comfort of her existence, if not of her life. Was not she herself small, and had she the right to condemn, merely because she was older, and therefore saw the purest truths gleam out at times, out of some shimmering mist of self-deception?

No, she did not condemn, but that did not prevent her from being shocked. She could understand now, and yet the rooted predestead. was there. She was willing to accept their new, fresh, free happiness in a life without conventional bonds, and yet those bonds bound herself, despite her new powers of understanding. She understood, and yet she felt a shudder at those who did not tread the beaten path, the smooth track of their decent respectability, did not a vague suggestion of tragedy show dimly at the far ends of the new roads? Could they possibly persevere, and what would be the result of so unconventional a view of life? Was anything but convention possible for people such as all of them? Were they not born for it,

trained for it? She herself had found new roads that led up to cities of light, but she had not trodden those roads. These were these new roads leading up to cities of light, or was it merely wantonness, youthful levity, turning aside from the smooth tracks, the beaten paths. Emily, she said, if what you tell me is true, don't tell anyone else, don't talk about it. If grandmamma heard, it would hurt her so much, and Mama too. No, Auntie, I won't. Besides, it is a great secret, a secret from the family, from all our friends. I have mentioned it to nobody but you. and I shall mention it to nobody.

But come, auntie, it's not so bad as all that. You look quite upset. We have different ideas from our parents. We can't help it. Who's to blame? When I think, dear, of your house as it used to be. And now Henry is a clown, and I paint fans for my living. She gave a loud, shrill, almost triumphant's laugh,

followed by a laugh that sounded sadder. "'Poor Grandmama,' she said. "'Poor Grandmother, she called our family a grandeur des chou, "'and she is right, from her point of view. "'I am very sorry for her. "'I found her sitting there, so melancholy, so forlorn, "'and the tears were running down her cheeks. "'Auntie, you're a darling.

"'I feel that you are better than I, "'but I can't live here. "'Your trouble made you want to come back. "'Mine made me want to get away. You felt that there were bonds that drew you here. I felt on the contrary that I must throw off every bond. My life began with a mistake. So did mine.

Is it always like that? Often. Don't we know ourselves then, when we begin to live? No, every truth comes to us later, much later. Then you don't think that I know my truth. No, Emily, you are not pleased. with me. Pleased,

child, it is not for me to judge you. All I say is, take care. Don't play with your life. Don't waste it. Our life is a very serious thing.

And you treat it us? As what, auntie? An artistic caprice. How well you have put it, auntie. I never thought of that. Never said it. An artistic caprice. Henry, too,

an Art Nouveau caprice. Why not? Oh, no. No, Emily, take care. Auntie, we are so small. We don't make any difference. What do people like us matter? Women like us.

Girls such as I was. Nothing, nothing. Why make tragedies of our lives? Why not rather make them into something fanciful, something fanciful and artistic? And she made a painter's gesture with her forefinger and thumb. When we are dead, it is finished. What do we matter?

that we should be so tragic. That is all very well for heroes and heroines, but not for us. I will not have my life a tragedy. I started with a mistake. Since then, I have conquered my life and given it a definite aim. Do try and see, Auntie. I see, Emily, would you forget? What?

The bonds. Which I unloose. Which you cannot unloose. Yes, I can. No. Yes, no. You'll see later when you're older. I shan't grow old, Auntie. Oh, child, what do you know? What do you know? How can you tell what you will become? How tragic your life may easily become if you don't think of it more seriously, more seriously. She rose. An irresistible impulse made her embrace the girl passionately. Emily gave a start. What do you think of it? What do you think of? of auntie, what do you mean? But what was the use of saying anything now of her presentiment, when presentiments always deceive? Constance said nothing more. She did not know indeed what more

to say. She merely stared in front of her, strangely, vaguely, and what had shone for a moment was gone, and she looked deep into Emily's eyes and saw there only a vision. Paris, a circus, a clown, butterflies, quite fifty or more. The front door downstairs was opened. There were sounds of footsteps and voices. Ordinary life was beginning again. There are Uncle and Addy, said Constance. Emily, I'm going to Noonspeat this afternoon.

I'm going to Otto and Francis after lunch. Let us meet at the station, and I'll go to Nunspate with you. I want to see Uncle Ernst, and then we'll be. go to barn together. Very well, dear, but will you do one thing to please me? Yes, auntie. Dress a little more simply.

Remember that we're in Holland. Emily gave a shrill laugh. Yes, Auntie, I'll go and buy myself a sailor hat. All my hats are too exciting for the Hague. The butcher boys were shouting after me. Hat, hat!

At noon spades and barn, I know the whole village would turn out to look at me. End of Chapter 4. Chapter 5 of the Twilight of the Souls by Louis Cupertus. This Librivox recording is in the public domain. Maricia sat in Marianne's room, staring out at the road. The road, white with dust and sunlight, gleamed through the green of the trees, described a curve and wound round the creeper-clad station which stood in the shade close by. A train came thundering in, making all the walls of the little villa shake, each time that a train rumbled past. Whether it stopped or steamed through almost without slackening speed, it shook the little villa.

Marcia was bored. She was home for the holidays from her Brussels boarding school, spending a few weeks at Barn with Mama and Marianne, and she was bored. She would rather have stayed at school. Of course, Madame was a beast, but Brussels at any rate was better fun than Barn, even for a schoolgirl. She wondered how she would be able to stand a month of it. She had even reckoned on an invitation from Uncle and Aunt Van Narchel to their beautiful country place in Overissel, where she would have cycled and played tennis with her boy cousins. But Uncle had not said a word about it.

Uncle wanted her to put in her month with Mama at Barn. Lord, how could Mama go and live here in such a house? It would come tumbling down on her head one day with that everlasting rumble of the trains. She simply could not get away from the rumble of the trains. Marianne said that Mama did not mind it and that she herself had become so used to the noise that once, when there was an accident at Hilversum

and the something PM train did not arrive at Barn, she had woke up because of the unwanted silo. Well, that was a bit stiff, thought Maricha. Still, perhaps the rumble of the trains did keep Mama and Marianne from going to sleep, for what a life it was in this little villa at Barn. Neither Mama nor Marianne knew anybody, and they saw nobody. They had no carriage, and how can one live in the country without keeping a carriage, even if it was only a dog cart or a governess car with a pony? But you must have something. It was a rotten way of living. A brilliant idea of Uncle Adolf's, wasn't it, to insist that she should come and bury herself here for a whole mortal month, and bore herself to death with Mama and Marianne.

Carol hadn't come, the brute. Oh no, he had gone to uncles. Marcia knew why, because Uncle wanted to keep an eye on him, so she didn't even see her brother. Oh, how dull it all was. silly little walks to the Buchenkorm, to Suss-Dyke. Once in a while there'd be the excitement of seeing the Queen drive past,

but that was over in a flush, whoosh, and then there was nothing more to see. Well, if she had been the Queen, she would never have come and spent the summer at Suss-Dyke, a month. She would never live through it. She counted the days. She simply longed to go back to Brussels. Madame had a young nephew who used to make love to her in great secrecy, even leaving notes under her napkin. It was risky, but it was great fun. He wrote so thrillingly.

Ah, when you compared the life that awaited her when she came home for good in 18 months, with what Emily and Marianne had had, parties at court, dances at the casino with all the smartest people in the Hague, the grand dinners at home. Her sisters had had all that. Pretty frocks, too. And she, what would she have? Nothing at all.

She'd just go to Barn, for you might be sure that uncle and aunt would never, never ask her to stay with them. And at the Hague, who was going to invite her to the Hague? The whole winter at Barn, good heavens. No, she must absolutely get herself invited to the Hague once she had left school.

Granny had a big house. But Granny didn't like people staying with her. And Adolfine, bah, such a crew, she wouldn't go there if she could. Uncle Geditz, no, he had too many children. She wouldn't care about that, and they hadn't a spare room either. Uncle Carol was no use thinking about. No, there was only Aunt Constance, who never saw anybody, and Uncle and Aunt Royvener, who had no smart friends,

nothing but East Indian people. it was an awful nuisance, but she saw no prospect of an invitation. But one thing she did promise herself, to get married as soon as she could, and to make a good match while she was about it, someone with lots of money. A nice thing, she called it. Papa and Mama brought you up in luxury, and the moment you began to grow up, they let you eat your heart out at barn. She was decent looking, thank goodness,

and her figure was going to be all right, and then she would marry a lot of money. You had to be practical, that was the great thing. There were a few rich men left. But she, she would show some sense and not behave like Emily, who had got married by mistake or by accident, so it seemed, and accepted Edouard, just as you accept a partner for a waltz. Nor like Marianne either, who had fallen in love with her uncle. No, mark her words.

She promised herself that much. Since she had been brought up in luxury, now that the luxury was gone, she would see that she married money, for money was everything. She wasn't going to trouble about a title or a name. If a rich bounder came and proposed, he'd do, but a fine house, fine clothes,

and a carriage, and jewelry, all that she must have, and all that she meant to have, but without it life wasn't worth living. To go on, and vegetating at barn, with that incessant rumbling of the trains, which made the walls of the villa shake, as if the whole house were going to tumble down on her head.

Never. She had made up her mind to that. Never. Marianne came into the room, which was her own boudoir, with a conservatory leading into the garden. It was the pleasantest room in the house. The only others on the ground floor were a small drawing-room and a gloomy dining-room. Maricha, lost in thought, was staring out at the sunny, dusty white road. Shall we go out for a walk, Marisha? asked Marianne. Book and comb, asked Marisha languidly.

No, farther than that? Sue stike. No, farther still, through the overbosch, and across the moor if you like. No, thank you. It's too hot, and there's too much dust and glare. Can't we hire the pony cart? then I'll drive you. That's mounts up, you know, Maricha. We can't take it every morning.

Every morning, growled Maricha. Listen to you. Every morning. Well then, let's stay and look out of the window. Why don't you play the piano or do some painting? Thank you for nothing. I can do that at school. I have no accomplishments.

Then take a book and read. Oh, rot. The books that amuse me I'm not allowed to read. and the books I'm allowed to read don't amuse me. It's one of the drawbacks of my awkward age. Why haven't you joined a tennis club? Yes, I'm sorry I didn't. I'll see this I do next year.

Next year! That's a long way off. You ought to have thought of it before. You knew that you were expecting your sister and that there wouldn't be much for her to do here, but you can't think of anything here. You can't take your eyes off that horrible white road. It hurts your eyes too.

My poor child, how can you stand this place? After the Hague. Don't you long for the Hague? Not a bit. But what do you do here all the winter? Nothing, Maricha. Oh, I know. You've grown pious.

You go in for good works, sewing for the poor. There are two poor families for whom I make things sometimes. There, what did I tell you? I knew it. Well, give us some knighties in heaven's name. Oh no, Marisha, never mind about that. Yes, yes, yes, hand over your nighties and let's sew them. Marianne had sat down at her work basket,

and Marisha, out of sheer boredom, also took up a knighty, but she did no sewing. Just imagine, if we wore this kind of thing, Marianne, it would tear my skin. Oh, Lord, there's another train. What a row! What an awful row! Aren't you afraid the house will fall in? "'No, do you like that noise?' "'Yes, one gets used to it.

"'You could sleep to it, eh? "'Yes, it's a lull's one.' "'Marie chaired with laughter. "'Oh, Marian, how sentimental you have become,' "'as Aunt Kato would say.' "'And to herself,' she thought, "'No, I'm not like that, you know. "'You won't catch me falling in love with my uncle for nothing.

"'I mean to marry money. lots of money. But she said nothing, just stared out at the sunny, dusty road. A few people came along from the station. There's the rank and fashion of barn, sneered Marietcher. The great sights of the day,

three tradesmen and a hunchbacked shop girl. Uncle Paul would say three and a half atoms of human wretchedness. Another tradesman and another shop girl. Two ladies. Look, as I live, two ladies. Goodness me, it's Aunt Constance and Emily.

Nonsense. Yes, yes, it's Aunt Constance and Emily. Hurrah! And Maricha, in sheer wild ecstasy at the unexpected distraction, threw the nighty right up to the ceiling, where it's caught in the chandelier, and rushed through the garden down the road.

She flung one leg up in the air with delight. Auntie! "'Emily,' Marianne heard her yelling, quite beside herself. Maricha embraced her aunt and her sister madly at the gate of the villa, conducted them indoors, thanked them personally for the surprise which they were giving her, for the welcome distraction which their arrival provided. "'And Uncle Ernst?' asked Marianne.

"'Poor Uncle Ernst, we had a letter from Francis.' Constance told her how he was getting on at Nunspate, that he was still rather restless because he would look all over the house for fettered souls that moaned and implored him to help them. "'Will the delusion never leave him?' asked Marianne, with tears in her eyes.

"'Ante, will he never get better? The doctor has every hope that it will not be permanent.' Marcia had taken possession of Emily. "'And so, you're living in Paris, with Henry. What do you do there, the two of you? Come, let's hear.

"'Aren't you going to ask me to stay? "'Haven't you a spare room? "'Look out. "'I shall come tearing in from Brussels suddenly. "'Just imagine if I did.' "'But by this time they had passed through the dining room "'into the drawing-room, where they found Bertha. "'She was sitting at the window.

"'She looked up. "'Here's Aunt Constance, Mama, and Emily.' "'Berver merely stood up, kissed her sister and her daughter, "'and at once dropped into her chair again. she scarcely seemed surprised at seeing them so unexpectedly. She barely asked after Mama, after Ernst, after Henry. She seemed rooted to her seat at that window, through which she gazed at the shadows of the trees.

She had grown thin, her eyes stared blankly and miserably in front of her, and in her black dress she gave an impression of weary, listless resignation. She spoke scarcely more than a word or two, as if it were quite natural that Constance and Emily should be sitting there. Henry sends you his best love, Mama, said Emily. Bertha gave a faint smile, just blinked her eyes as though to say, yes, it was very nice of Henry, but she asked no questions.

I have just come from Ernst, Bertha, said Constance. I took him to Noonspate with the doctor. I went down again yesterday to see him, "'and, once I had started, I thought I would come and look you up.' "'It's nice of you,' said Bertha, vaguely, taking Constance's hand. "'Is Ernst very bad? We had a letter from Francis. The doctor is very hopeful.' "'Yes,' said Bertha, as if it went without saying, "'He's sure to get over it.' And she seemed tired from talking so much, and said nothing more.

Presently, Marianne, when she was alone with Constance, said, You'll stay to lunch, of course, auntie. Yes, dear, if I may. Are you staying for the night? At the hotel? I'm sorry that we haven't a spare room. Emily can sleep here, then I'll sleep on the sofa. I must just go and see about lunch.

Don't put yourself out for me, dear. No, auntie, but I must see what there is. You know, with just the three of us, we live very simply. She flushed, and Constance realized that they had to be careful and that they could not keep the same generous table as in the old days. They exchanged a sad smile. Suddenly, Marianne flung herself into Constance's arms. My darling, how are you yourself?

Quite well, auntie. You don't look at all well, my child, how thin you've grown and how drawn your little face looks, and your poor cheeks. Why, they've got to nothing. Aren't you happy here, dear? Oh, yes, Auntie. No, but tell me, honestly, are you happy at Barn? Yes, Auntie, I am. Do you regret the Hague? Regret? No. Still, just a little. No, no. Her eyes were full of tears. She began to sob on Constance's shoulder. "'Forgive me, auntie. I oughtn't a breakdown like this. "'My darling, tell me all about it.

"'No, auntie, it's nothing really. "'I feel so ashamed. "'But, as you know, I always let myself go with you "'because I feel that you do love me, a little, "'and that you are not angry with me, "'and that you forgive me. "'I have nothing to forgive, Marianne. "'Yes, you have, yes you have, auntie.

"'Oh, forgive me, forgive me. "'Tell me you forgive me. me. How do you spend your time here, dear? Quietly, aren't he? But I'm quite satisfied. I try to be of some little use to Mama and others. I have some poor people whom I look after, but I can't do much. I haven't much. In the old days, you know, Mama used to do a lot of good, in between all her rush and worry, and I try to do a little now, but it is hard work, and rather thankless work. However, that's all that's left, but to live a little for others and do a little for others. But sometimes, sometimes I find it too much for me.

Poor Marianne! Yes, sometimes it's too much for me. I am so young still, and I feel as if I had done with everything for good and all. No, dear, no, if only you knew. You're a child still, Marianne, and life, real life will come later. It will never come for me, auntie, auntie. Oh, forgive me. I feel ashamed of myself. I don't want to talk like this. But with you, just with you, because you're fond of me, I can't restrain myself. Oh, tell me that you forgive me. Say it, say it. My child, if it does you any good to hear me say so, though I have nothing to forgive. Very well, I forgive you.

Oh, thank you, thank you, Auntie. You are good and kind. You understand. Yes, dear, I understand, but the real thing will come later. No, nothing will ever come, nothing can come. Can't it? No, how could it? If you had the strength and courage not to give in, Marian, there would be happiness for you in days to come. But I have neither courage, Auntie, nor strength. What am I? Nothing. There is a great big river which rushes and flows, carrying everything, everything with it like a deluge. And then there is a tiny twig, a leaf. That's what I am, auntie. How can I hope to? You're talking in parables, my child. Shall I do the same? Do, auntie. Come and sit here beside me. Put your head on my shoulder. There, and now listen to my parable. There was once a soul, a very small soul like yours, Marianne, a very small soul it was, quite an insignificant little soul. It knew nothing about anything. It seemed to be walking blindly, walking in a dream, a child's dream, light and airy and fragile. There was water and there

were flowers, and there was a faraway light towards which it moved. As the soul went on, the flowers and the trees disappeared, and in their stead, a palace, and every sort of pomp and vanity gleamed in front of the small soul. But all that glitter was just as much a dream as the water and the flowers, and the small soul made its second mistake. It walked blindly in that dream of pomp and vanity, and thought that it saw all that radiance. It gave itself away, Marianne, gave everything it had to anyone who might make it shine still more brilliantly, gave away everything it's possessed, for nothing, for an illusion, and it already felt unhappy, thinking,

there is nothing more coming, I've had everything now, thought that, even before its fate arrived. It saw its fate arrive, and could still have avoided it, but did not, remained blind, blind to everything. Its fate swept it along, and it thought Marianne, that everything was over, over for good and all, that it would wither like a flower, like a twig, like a leaf, and that the river would carry it along with it.

And then, Marian, then, something else came, after it had been swept along by fate. There came a great revelation, a vision of rapture, an ecstasy of glory, and the small soul saw that it was that, but its fate forbade it to accept that great happiness, that vision of ecstasy. And once again it thought, now, now, I have really had everything. After that, nothing more can possibly come. And yet, something did come. And, after that revelation, it was no longer a dream but a reality, as tangible as it could hope to be for such a poor

small soul. What came, Marianne, was not so very much, but the small soul does not want much, an atom, a grain of absolute truth and reality, a tiny grain but all sufficing. For small souls do not need much, just an atom, a grain. And of that grain, Marian, it even communicated a part to others. My child, that is the whole secret, to share your grain, to give, though it be but of your superfluity, to others. But, Marian, you will have to wait for that grain. It will only come later, and before you can possess it, you must first go through everything.

You must pass through all that unreality, that vain dreaming. And, Auntie, have you the grain? Oh, child, the grain is so small, so small, so tiny, so we, such a very little grain. But what are we ourselves? And we, being what we are, is not that little tiny grain enough. For happiness? Some day, later, much later, after long, long years. Happiness? Happiness? Yes, the happiness of knowing, of understanding, the happiness of resignation,

the happiness of accepting one's own smallness, and of not being angry and bitter because of all the mistakes, and of being grateful for what is beautiful and clear and true. Greatful! For the great dream, and the happiness of saturday. satisfying hunger and thirst, with that one solitary little grain, and of no longer yearning for the great's great dream, but yet remaining grateful. Yes, grateful that the dream has been vouchsafed to us, that its radiance ever smiled upon us. But, auntie, suppose it was no dream, but the very bread of life. My child, who can tell you now what is the only bread of life? Now, you are only hungry for your dream, and, later, much later, have I hungered then, after nothing?

Perhaps? After nothing? Oh no. Who can tell? Auntie, is every one of life's parables so cruel in its worldly wisdom? Do they all teach that the great dream is nothing, and the little grain which comes so late, everything? I fear so, child. Oh, I. I. I'm a little, "'Auntie, it's all words, soft, gentle words. I understand you. It is your own story, your parable, but until now, mine is nothing but the river and the leaf. And later, perhaps, there will come, the tiny treasure, the grain.' Then they were silent, and Constance thought, "'Every soul must first go through that, must have its dream, not until very late,

as it find the grain for itself. What another communicates to it never satisfies its hunger, as does its own grain, the grain it has found for itself. End of Chapter 5. Chapter 6 of the Twilight of the Souls by Louis Couperos. This Librivox recording is in the public domain.

Adi was nearly 16. He did not grow much in stature. He promised to have the same. build as his father, for there was something sturdy and yet delicate, something robust and yet gentle about him, strength and refinement combined. He continued to look older than he was, as though he could never quite catch himself up. His face, carved in firm and yet delicate lines, were an air of calm serenity that did not belong to his years. His cheeks were covered with a golden down. Indeed, his mother would have liked him to start shaving, which however he was not willing

to do yet, and so the vague strip of golden velvet above his upper lip had become a decided moustache. His hair, with its soft, short, brown curls, was exactly like his father's, and his eyes also were his father's eyes, but they had grown still more serious, if possible, calm and tender, with a smiling sadness in their depths. And, above all, Adi's eyes were of a clear and troubled blue, with none of the boyishness which shone in van der Velkers. Addies were northern eyes, as his mother said. Dutch eyes, she called them,

as distinguished from the Creole eyes of all her family, the Van Loers. Addy, how Dutch you are, his mother would say, meaning thereby that they all the Van Loers. were specimens of the languid less robust East Indian type, and that his father also had become more or less undutch through his long residence abroad. Addy, how Dutch you are, for a boy born on the Riviera, brought up in Brussels, who had never been in Holland before his 13th year,

how is it possible that you should be the most Dutch of us all? You have nothing of the cosmopolitan about you. His mother used to tease him like this, especially when she looked into his eyes, his clear, calm, Dutch eyes, as into two blue mirrors, with a smile in them like a reflection, and beneath that smile a vague shadow of sadness. And then he would give a sober nod of assent, laughing quietly, as though to say that she was right, that he felt quite Dutch, and neither a languid East Indian nor a mongrel cosmopolitan, He was a Dutch boy above all things,

but here, in the subtle village of Noonspeat, he felt even more Dutch than at the Hague, especially as he looked out of his window at the hotel and saw the glittering white dunes, undulating towards those vast skies, saw the piled-up clouds, the immensities of grey-blue rolling clouds, drifting by in their puissant majesty,

all the glory of a small land, grandeur and might and majesty towering above the small lowlands which bowed humbly beneath their awfulness. Those clouds, those Dutch clouds, Adye loved them, those awful powers thrown high above the gently undulating lands, and Mama, who teased him so, loved them too, her Dutch clouds, so vast, so vast, as though they were islands and fields, larger than the fields, larger than the fields, fields and islands of Holland itself. It was early, six o'clock, and he looked out of his window into the pearly morning, and with a characteristic gesture of enthusiasm, flung out his arms towards the clouds. Then he laughed at himself, hoped that no one had seen him from the road.

No, the peasants going to their work did not look up at his window, and now he dressed himself quickly, ran downstairs, breakfasted hurriedly on bread and butter and a glass of milk, and went along the high road and down a shorter road to Dr. Van Herval's villa. The house stood some way back in a large garden, quiet and shady, and as the house stood high, it looked out over the undulating, sparkling dunes, past the dark green masses of fir trees on the moor, which shimmered purple in the early morning sunshine, towards low horizons, of just a streak of green, broken only by the needlepoint of a steeple,

just a narrow strip beneath the awful majesties of the vast clouds, which drifted calmly by, one after the other, on and on, unceasingly, ever vast and majestic. The doctor came out to meet Addy. Here I am, doctor. That's right, Van Velker. You're in good time.

Would you mind going for a walk with your uncle presently? Not at all. For I can't manage to come today. There's no reason why you should, Doctor. It's the first time you'll have been out alone with him. When will your mother be back? This afternoon. Of course, I could send the keeper with you,

but it's better that your uncle should not see more of him than's necessary. Don't worry, Doctor. It'll be all right. Don't go too far, you know. No, close by, on the June's. "'I can rely on you?' "'Yes, doctor, absolutely. "'Here he comes.' "'Earnsd came shuffling into the garden from the veranda.

"'He knew Addy and smiled. "'Where's Mama?' he asked. "'She'll be back this afternoon, Uncle. "'Are you coming for a walk with me?' "'No, I'm going to wait for Mama,' said Ernst, "'in a suspicious voice, with a glance at the doctor. Nevertheless, Addy succeeded in coaxing him outside, down the road, and then Ernst took Addy by the arm and said,

Do you know what's so rotten? That fellow's hidden Mama? No, Uncle, really he hasn't. Yes, he has, my boy. The fellow has buried her somewhere in the dunes. Shall we go and look for her? Uncle, I'm quite ready to go for a walk, but Mama is not hidden or buried. She's gone to barn to see Aunt Bertha, and she'll be here this afternoon.

Ernst shook his head and grinned contemptuously. You people are always so obstinate. Do you mean to say you don't hear, Mama? Can't you hear her moaning? She's been moaning all night. That fellow's buried her, I tell you. I don't believe it, Uncle, but at any rate, we can go for a walk. Yes, we'll look for her.

They went through a pine wood. It was cool and dark as a church. Ernst kept poking the ground with his stick, kept listening to the ground. She's farther on, he said. In the dunes. Her voice comes from farther away. Did you hear it? No, uncle. Ernst shrugged his shoulders. You people are so dull-witted. You have no senses, and no souls, he said roughly. and he immediately added, as though afraid that he had given pain, as though anxious to make atonement without delay, Mama is kind. You too. You're a good boy. I may make something of you yet. They walked along, up and down the dunes, Ernst continually stopping, and Addy continually forcing him to go on.

At last, Ernst went down on his knees and dug a big hole with his two hands. It's here, he said. I can hear Mama's voice sighing. Oh God, oh God, how she's moaning. She'll be suffocated. She'll be suffocated. Her mouth, her throat, her eyes are full of sand. What cruel wretches people are. What harm has poor Mama done them? The wretches. The savages. It's here. It's here. Yes, wait a bit, Constance. Wait a bit. I'm digging you out. I'm digging you out. He dug away with his stick and his hands, dug away till the sand flew all around him, making his clothes white with dust. Addy has stretched himself on the ground and was letting him have his way, looking on quietly with his serene blue eyes, which seemed to study each of Ernst's movements. He said nothing more, finding no words with which to dispel the hallucination. At that moment, all words were vain. The hallucination was so vivid that Ernst actually saw Constance through the sand, saw her lying four or five yards beneath the

surface, stuck fast in the sand, with its myriad grains pressing so tightly round her that she could not move, and that when, through her sighing and moaning, she was compelled to open her mouth, the sand at once trickled into it. He saw her body, as in a black garment, glued tightly to her limbs, stiff and motionless in that tomb of sand, in that winding sheet, which pressed closer and closer to her

until the pressure threatened to choke her, especially now that her mouth was full of sand. Ernst could just see her black eyes faintly gleaming through a screen of sand. Sand trickled into her ear, and the sand, though there was no room for it below, kept trickling faster and faster till it became an eddy of trickling sand. The trickling grains of sand were now gyrating madly around Constance like a great cyclone, and Ernst dug and dug with furious hands.

He dared not use his stick for fear of hurting Constance. He dug like an animal with frantic hands, he dug away, dug out a regular pit, and the sand. sand became wetter and wetter. He was now flinging out great lumps of sand. Then, as he dug, he saw the dark body sinking, forever sinking a yard lower. He could not reach his sister. The body sank and sank, and he reflected that, however deep he might dig his pit, he would never reach Constance. Addy, he cried. Addy, help me, can't you? help me. Addy, lying at full length with his chin on his hand, looked quietly at his uncle, with all the serenity of his searching blue eyes. Suddenly Ernst stopped his digging,

quickly turned his head halfway towards Addy, and his restless eyes looked into Addy's eyes. Then Addy shook his head gently, as if in denial, as if to explain to Ernst without words, as it was not as Ernst thought that there was not a body under the sand. They looked at each other like that for a few minutes. Ernst lay on his knees by the pit, his fingers still cramped with the effort of digging. Suddenly his feverish energy seemed to subside, he shivered and cried, Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. then he bent over the pit and looked down.

He saw nothing now. The body was not there. There was nothing but the hard, impenetrable subsoil. Then he listened with his head on one side for the plaintive voice. There was no voice. There was nothing but the great subterranean silence. There was nothing now, no body, no voice. He looked around.

Around him laid the sound. which he had flung up, those senseless heaps of sand. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, he cried. Addy looked at him very quietly, and Ernst shuddered under the blue serenity of that compassionate studying glance. Then, with a jerk which shook his whole frame, the tension relaxed, and his body seemed to go slack. But he still scraped some sand together, and carefully filled up the pit to a certain depth, so that the wet sand was powdered over with dry white sand.

Finally, he stretched himself at full length, with his legs straight out and his arms under his head. He was very tired, especially in his head. He could not have spoken a word. Heaving a deep sigh, he lay staring up at the tremendous clouds. They drifted past like something on, unearthly in their immensity, drifted very, very slowly, before his upturned gaze. Then he closed his eyes, as if he were becoming frightened, as if it were all too big for him,

too tremendous, too unearthly, and at the thought of his smallness, he was oppressed with melancholy, a darkness that clouded his soul. He could not help it, under his closed eyes the slow tears forced themselves. A sob shook him, and he lay weeping, still stretched at full length, still with his eyes closed. A big tear trickled down his cheek. Addy never took his eyes off him. Now he rose, came nearer and gently stroked Ernst's long black hair, and Ernst just raised his eyelids and saw Addy stooping over him, blue eyes looking into black eyes. Then he closed his own again, breathed heavily, let Addy stroke his hair. The big tears trickled slowly.

There was no need, thought Addy, to speak to the tired man. The hallucination had gone. It must have left him utterly fagged out. Round both of them, man and boy, hung the haze of the summer morning. A steady droning filled the sultry air. Overhead, clouds drifted endlessly, everlastingly, cloud after cloud, drifting on and on. End of Chapter 6 Chapter 7 of the Twilight of the Souls by Lu Ikuperos.

This Librivox recording is in the public domain. It had gone very, very still. The tired man had dozed off. It seemed as though his nerve-taught limbs had relaxed and lay loose. and slack. The thin legs in the wide-creased trousers, the chest sunk under the rumpled-coloured shirt, the narrow shoulders,

the lean arms in the old coat with its tired creases. And the features of his face had also fallen in now that the nerves were at last resting. They had fallen in like an old man's, queer wrinkles furrowed the forehead and etched lines under the eyes and round the nose and mouth. The short, scanty beard formed a stubble around the long chin,

and their hair too was thin and stubby, a little thin behind the ears. Addy looked at the hands of the sleeping man, long, thin fingers in which a nervous tremor still lingered, a very slight tremor, as though quivers were passing under the skin, over the veins. The boy looked curiously at the hands, for he was always interested in hands,

judging people more by their hands than by anything else. He did not exactly know why, and certainly could not analyze it, and he could see those long, thin hands, not only reaching out vaguely and ineffectually after art, but also laying hold of books with a more confident grasp, turning them page by page. He saw, too, a tremor of pity in the tapering fingertips, which seemed not to dare to touch things.

And those fingertips struck him particularly because of the short nails, which nevertheless showed breeding with their almond shape and the little crescent moon at the quick. Only the nails were bitten short, as though in fits of nervousness. Then, mechanically, as he always did when studying people's hands, he looked at his own. His father's hands, but still boys' hands, though they were already becoming manlier, short and broad, white and strong, hands that would take a close, steady grip of things. He no longer bit the nails,

but would cut them swiftly with a penknife whenever they bothered him. And from his own hands he glanced once more towards his uncle Ernst, and seemed to read in them, a soul highly susceptible to art and of extreme sensitiveness. A soul ready to assimilate the contents of books,

a soul evolved out of loneliness, out of lonely life and lonely knowledge, and above all, out of lonely, very lonely feeling. A soul so lonely and shrinking that it had fallen ill of that loneliness and appeared to see and hear actually the thousand reflections of all that it had read in books, seen in art, and felt in its lonely hypersensitiveness. The tired man slept on, and Addie stretched himself at still fuller length, while around him the white dunes rippled away in the summer haze

under those wide unearthly skies. He felt well, and not unhappy, though there was just a streak of sadness running through his reverie, sadness because people and things were what they were. It was a pleasant, benevolent sort of secret reverie, and through it all there was the desire to grasp things, to hold them, as with the close, steady grip of his own hands. That close, steady grip, firm but tender, with which he meant to grasp everything in this wavering uncertain life, earnestly and charitably, and above all with a great longing for absolutely understanding, for divine knowledge, for the sake both of others and of himself. And because he had made up his mind, he ceased dreaming and began to

reflect, thinking over how he was going to tell his parents what he knew so well in his own heart. He had loved them with such earnest love from early childhood, that he understood them very well, both of them, knew them as thoroughly as it is possible for one being to know another. His father had always remained young, despite what he called the ruin of his life, despite that other thing which had brought great sorrow to him recently. His mother had grown older but more serious, and lately, when she talked to him, Adi, had expressed views on all sorts of subjects which he used to think, rather, or was it because he himself was growing older and understood more

and fathomed more of the depths of this deep life? Had Mama always been like this? Were his childish memories at fault, and had she always been the serious woman that she now was? No, that was important. he thought, but nevertheless this was more an intuitive feeling than a definite ability to assert it positively and unhesitatingly. And now he reflected, he had admitted it to himself, that, for as far as his love was greater for one than for the other, it was greater for his father, however much he would have liked it to be equally great for both.

Still, he would not speak to his father this time, he would speak to his mother. She would understand him more quickly than Papa, and what he had to tell her would hurt Papa more than it would Mama. He would speak to Mama first. True, it appeared to him difficult to speak of this matter at all, and to destroy in them a thought, an expectation, a hope which they had always cherished, but yet his idea had sprung up with such force from his innermost consciousness, that he felt he could not do otherwise. He would have to speak and tell them what he had resolved to do with his life, whose impenetrable future he saw unfolding before him,

clearer every day as though wide doors were being opened, till he saw what things would be like, and where he would go to, a long, long way ahead. He would tell her that afternoon would tell his mother first, and as he made up his mind to do this, he felt that in this case it would be a vocation, that the voice was a distinct. one, as though it were calling to him and beckoning him through the wide doors that had opened.

The voice that called to him so distinctly he would answer. But Ernst was stirring and now woke from his sleep. Do you feel rested, Uncle? Ernst sadly nodded yes. Well then, shall we walk a bit? Else the doctor won't be pleased, Uncle. They rose and walked on in silence, up and down, down and up the rippling, tunes. Ernst was very gloomy and at last said,

You see, it's beyond my powers to help all of you, all of you. There are so many of you, you see, as I can't possibly take care of every one of you, however much I should like to. Then again, you mustn't forget that there are thousands swarming round me as it is. True, they are no longer alive, but they feel all the same. Those are the souls. They never leave me in peace. And then, to look after all of you, who are alive as well. It's beyond me. Sometimes it's beyond me. There's Mama, poor woman. The whole world is at her heels. And, if I didn't see to it, they would hide her away and bury her. Then I have to look after Papa, and you, and Uncle Credits and Uncle Paul, and all the rest of them. I have all of you to look after.

You never see anything, and you know nothing. You live in a dream, you walk blindly, to your ruin, all of you. Who would look after you if I wasn't there? Who would look after you if I died tomorrow? If I worried about it, instead of quietly doing my duty, it would send me mad to think of it. And you never stay by me. You keep on running about with the wretches at your heel.

heels, waiting to hide you away and bury you. Why, they had hold of Uncle Gerrits in the other day, in chains, under my room. I heard him all through the night, and I couldn't release him, until, until... He had lost the thread of his thoughts, passed his hand over his hair, and said mournfully, Addy, my dear boy, you mustn't come and see me any more. Uncle is in a bad house. It's a bad place, that doctor's house. Terrible things happen there at night. You're too young, Addy, to come to such a bad house.

Promise me that you won't come again. Uncle, the doctor's is not a bad house. Of course, you would know better than I. You're young, and you don't know and don't see things. There are scandalous goings on at night. Scandalous things in every room in that. house. I shall tell Mama to take you away. I can't look after all of you. Uncle, you should stop thinking of such things and enjoy your walk and the air and the woods and the dunes and the clouds.

Yes, that's what you say. Stop thinking and enjoy and enjoy. Yes, enjoy nature around you. Nature! His restless black eyes encountered Addie's clear glance. And suddenly he stopped and said, Tell me, do they leave them alone in my rooms on the newer outlay? Uncle, there's nothing there, and all your books and China are well taken care of. Is there nothing there? No, uncle, not what you think. And in the doctor's house.

There's nothing there either, uncle. Here, round about us. There's nothing, uncle. Then what I hear, isn't it? hallucination, uncle. What I see? That too. Why do you say that? Because it's the truth, uncle. How do you know what is the truth? Through my senses, uncle, through my reason. Are they healthy? Are they infallible? Perhaps not infallible, but healthy, and yours are ailing. Are mine ailing? Yes, uncle. My senses. Yes, and your reason too. You know. You know. You know. You. You know. I'm ailing. You know. I'm ailing. I'm not. My sense. You know. My senses.

Yes, and your reason too. You know that. Yes, I know it for certain. It was as though the sick man for one moment doubted himself, while he kept his eyes fixed on the boy's steady blue eyes and read a strange lucidity in them. But something inside him made him unable or unwilling to overstep a certain boundary, which was like a line of suffering in his sick mind, a grievous horizon, an horizon which was too near, which he could not look at from a distance, but which had neither light nor darkness behind it, but only missed. "'And what about this?' he asked, pointing with his stick to the dune on which they stood. "'What, uncle? This, this, underneath us, this moaning and sighing and imploring for help.'

He threw himself flat on the sand. He dug furiously. Yes, he shouted. Wait, wait a moment, I'm coming, I'm coming. And rooting with his hands like an animal, he sensed the sand flying around him. Oh, thought Addie, if he would only make one more effort suddenly to see, to hear, to feel that he was dreaming, that he was dreaming. Oh, to have him get well.

to see him get well all at once, so that one knew it by the brightness in his eyes and the untroubled look on his face. Then he put his hand on Ernst's shoulder. The sick man stood up, walked along. Come on, he said, beckoning to Addie. End of Chapter 7. Chapter 8 of the Twilight of the Souls by Louis Cupertos.

This Librivox recording is in the last. the public domain. That evening, in the lane in front of the little hotel, Addy walked arm in arm with his mother. The deepening shadows gathered round them, pierced by the bright light of the lamp outside the house. Mommy, I want to talk to you. They were strolling slowly up and down, and the pressure of his hand urged her gently forward, through the deepening shadows, out of the fierce glow of the lamp and farther along the road, whence under the starry skies, the meadows receded to remote distances towards the last streak of light on the horizon. What about, my boy? How old he was for his years, and how serious. She felt his hand,

lying heavy on her arm, like a man's hand. She heard his voice in her ear, full of deep resonance, sounding a little more caressing than usual. He was still a boy, a schoolboy, but that was in years. In his soul, she realised him to be a man, her big son, and though this made her feel very old, it also made her feel calm and contented, and safe in the possession of him, so long as she did not lose him,

and what did he want to talk about now? For he had not spoken yet, but was walking on silently, and all at once she began to be curious, wondering what it could be that he wanted to tell her in that suddenly caressing voice, what he wanted to obtain from her. For she felt that he was going to ask her for something, a favour almost, a gift. Because he was leaning on her like that, she felt that something was weighing on his mind, some oppressive anxiety that he would tell her in order to make it lighter to bear. What could be troubling him? What would it be? It could not be money. He was too sensible. He knew exactly how much she could spare. Was he in love? A boy's love affair. Yes, she was convinced that it was. She had always said that, when Addy fell in love, it would be wanton for all, and she had grown a little afraid for her big son with that serious heart of his.

"'Well, what is it?' she asked, and she added playfully, "'Are you in love?' He only laughed. "'No, I'm not in love. But still I have something very important to say to you, something that will distress you perhaps, because you always pictured it differently. "'What is it, Addie?' she asked,

feeling a little frightened and bewildered. "'It's this, Mama,' he said, "'quietly and very calmly. I can't go into the diplomatic service, because I want to be a doctor. She was silent, walked on with his arm in hers, and it seemed to her that New Vistas suddenly opened out before her. No, she never thought that he was going to speak to her of his future. It had always been so positively settled from the very beginning

that her son should take up the life and the career which she had ruined for his father. She had always looked upon it as a vague form of compensation, which Addy, her son, would pay to her husband, to his father. She had never imagined that it would be otherwise. It could be done. He bore a distinguished name. He would have money later on, and, once he had entered the profession which in their set had always been considered so eminent and honorable and illustrious, the most eminent, honorable and illustrious of all, he would consoling. his father for the ruin of his career, and restored to his mother, something of her old position

in society. She had always, almost unconsciously looked at it like that. And then there was still a grain of vanity in her, dormant it was true of late, but still an eternal, ineradicable germ, the vanity inherent in her, the vanity of thinking that her son would pursue that most eminent, honourable and illustrious career. Now her whole world seemed to be turned upside down, the shock, the surprise, the disappointment made her dizzy. And through it all, there came a sudden impulse to say no, no, no, that it was impossible, quite impossible, that it would give too much pain to Papa, to herself, to poor old grandmama, and certainly to his grandparents as well. and if he insisted to say to him imperiously, almost in a tone of command,

that it was out of the question, out of the question. But for the moment she said nothing, and he said nothing either, and they walked on along the grey ribbon of the road which ran on through the meadows, fleeing on either side to the last streak of light on the horizon, under the great starry skies. He said nothing, as if he had nothing, as if he had, had said all that he had to say, quietly and simply, and she was too much under the influence of that tumult of shock, surprise and disappointment.

"'Does it upset you, Mama?' he asked at last. "'It comes as a blow, Addy. I never expected it. Can't you understand that I—' "'U understand? I don't know, Addy. We always thought. Yes, I know. You and Papa always thought differently. I understand that it must up. upset you, and that it is a disappointment. You had better speak to Papa first. No, he said calmly and quietly. I want to speak to you first, Mama. You know how fond I am of my father, what chums we are, but I can't speak to him first, because he would not understand, and I want to speak to you first, Mama, because you will understand. There was something

soothing to her vanity in his words, but also something deeper underlying them. which was not at once clear to her, for she knew that he loved his father more than her, and yet he wanted to speak to her first. You will understand, Mama, when I tell you, I don't feel in any way cut out for a career, in which, no doubt, one can rise very high if one happened to be one of the four or five great men

who stand out in it. And even so, even if I were one of those four or five, always supposing I had the brains or the genius for it, which I haven't, and never shall have, then there would still be something in me, which would make me feel that I had missed my vocation, that it was all purposeless, that I had got into the wrong path,

into the wrong sort of work. I should always be too simple, Mama, and too natural. You're Dutch boy. He turned towards her with a little laugh, and she suddenly pictured him, falselessly attired, in a white tie and a dress coat, among the young diplomatists whom she remembered in the old days in Rome. No, he did not resemble his father as much as all that.

Whereas the other thing, doctoring, I feel quite different about, it's the only thing which attracts me, and in which I feel I shall do well. Let me just tell you what I do feel about it. First of all, there's nothing that interests me more than people, and studying them, both their outsides and their insides. That's my head, mummy. And as well as that, there's something else, a question of feeling. I feel for nothing so much as for anyone who suffers, physically or mentally,

and then I get a sort of impulse, which comes to me as naturally as sitting or walking or talking, to help as much as I can. That's how I feel, and I can't tell it to you in any other way. It's no use my trying to explain it in a lot of words. I couldn't say more than I have already said. But just telling it you like this, I do hope that you understand it, Mama, and that you get the same feeling as I do.

And then, Mummy, there's something else, something I hardly dare say to you, because you will perhaps think that I am imagining. Say it, dear. It's this, Mama, I feel inside me the power of curing people, and I feel that that power is growing. His great seriousness,

startled her. But I'm only saying this to you, Mama. I won't say it to anyone else, not even to Papa, because I feel that he would not understand. I'm only saying it to you, and I shall never say it to anyone but you, and I am only saying it to you as a sort of justification for what I mean to do. And if I'm wrong, and it doesn't turn out as I think, then you'll forgive me, won't you? For I'm quite in earnest now. My darling, who can tell me for certain that I a mistake of Mama, that I have not that absolute conviction down in my soul. It is a wonderful thing to have an absolute conviction like that about yourself. I would almost say that to be certain about other people is not so wonderful as to be certain

about yourself. But still, but still, I feel that this is my vocation. Who can deny the existence of what I feel so very plainly within me, even though I am sometimes amazed at my own consciousness of it. I know, Mama, that all this sounds very strange, and that I'm not talking like a boy of my age, but that is because I'm being very, very confidential and letting you know my most private thoughts. It is so calm and peaceful out here this evening, Mama,

and the stars are shining so bright, as if they knew everything for quite certain. I do not know for certain. I only feel. and I wish. And I am telling you my most private thoughts, just freely and in the strictest confidence, so that you may not be unhappy. A thrill of tenderness went through her. Darling, I am not unhappy. What I have told you is a disappointment. A disappointment? Is it a disappointment? I don't think so now, dear, not after the first shock

of hearing it. It's not a disappointment any longer. If there is clearly something inside you which tells you what your vocation is, oh, why shouldn't you follow it? So few of us feel clearly about anything. Let's sit here, on the sand under the trees. So few people feel things clearly. Everything was vague with me, until quite late in life, dear. We all cling to small things, to small interests,

both in our own case and in the case of the small people around us. Do you still remember that friend of ours, whom Mama liked so much? Things weren't clear to him. Darling, if they're clear to you already, and if you are almost certain that you are not mistaken, then obey your vocation. No one has the right to hold you back, and why should I hold you back for small reasons, while much greater things perhaps are urging you on, for small reasons, for a touch of vanity perhaps? Ah, you see, darling, I am small.

I should have loved to see you, my own boy in the diplomatic service. Papa would have been satisfied, and you would perhaps have given me back something of the past. Do you understand? It would not be honest of me if I did not confess that I should have been glad to see it, but that is because I still cling to small things, while you were urged on by greater things.

And if it is really so, then I'm proud of you, proud of you. You see, my darling, there's always that about your mother, her little bit of vanity. She is so glad that you did not inherit it, that perhaps she gave you other things, something very small, but the best she had, which may become very great in you, an atom, which in you will grow into a world. No, I am not disappointed any longer. You see, Mama, I feel it.

so clearly when I am alone with Uncle Ernst. Not that I can do anything yet, but I am certain that I shall be able to, later. I feel that if he were to come a fraction of an inch towards me, and if I had the power to go another fraction of an inch towards him, we should get to near to each other, he and I. It doesn't happen now, but I feel ever so clearly that I am looking for something in him,

the secret spots from which I could cure him if, if I was older. more advanced and stronger. But he pulled himself up. Perhaps it's better not to say that. Why not, dear? One shouldn't say those very private things, but I wanted to talk quite frankly to you.

You have, darling, don't force your words if they won't come. Just tell me quietly when talking comes to you more easily. Mama will try to understand you. Mama does understand you. And you forgive me for the disappointment. It has gone. Then what is left? A great sense of peace, dear. It will all be for the very best, I think. Do as you think. Go to what calls you. She lends against him, laid her head on his shoulder. He kissed her. A kindly, health-giving stream seemed to be flowing through her. He knows already. He is certain about himself, she thought, looking up at the understanding stars.

He knows his own mind. Definitely, definitely. Oh God, let him always know his own mind. End of Chapter 8. Chapter 9 of Twilight of the Souls by Louis Cupertus. This Librivox recording is in the public domain. Old Mrs. Van Loa had taken a furnished villa at Noonspeight for a few weeks and gone to stay there with Adeline and her flaxen-haired little tribe. She wanted to be near Ernst, and the doctors had not objected to her going to Noonspeat, and even seeing him once or twice. There was no question of an isolation cure.

On the contrary, the patient had always been too lonely, and something in the way of kindly sympathy which would counteract his shyness might even have a salutary effect. Gerrit ran down once or twice from the Hague, but there was hardly room for him in the villa, which was full up with the children's little beds, and also he was secretly hurt that Ernst had taken a dislike to him, and when he was back at the Hague, alone in his house,

he pondered over it all, over the difference and the resemblance between them. Ernst belonging to the dark Van Luas, Papa's blood, he, like Constance and Paul to the fair ones, Mama's blood, though they all had black or at least very dark brown eyes, with that rather hard, beady glance. But what struck him as very singular was that he more or less understood why Ernst had become as he was,

a little odd he called it, nothing more, whereas Ernst saw nothing in Gerrit, saw nothing but a nature, entirely antipathetic to his own, no doubt his deceptive muscular strength, which was antipathetic to the morbid sensitiveness of the shy, lonely, studious brother.

But did anyone see him, Gerrit, really as he was, and had it not always been so, from the time when he was a child, a boy, a young man? It gave him a melancholy sense of security in these days that he was living by himself, living a life taken up exclusively with his military duties, captain for the week, out very early, in the stables from six to seven, seeing to the grooming of the horses, the cleaning of their boxes, thinking even more of the horses than of the men, and caring more, causear that he was, for a fresh, clean-smelling stable, with a litter of fresh, clean-smelling straw for the animals, than for the details of the troopers' mess.

When the horses had been fed and watered, came the ride with his squadron, drilling, target practice or field duty, then back again, handing in his report, finishing any business in the squadron office. This took up the whole morning, and in the exercise of those minor duties which he loved, he had hardly time for thinking, and the officers for the week saw him, as they had always seen him, the big, strong yellow-haired gothawed goth, brisk in his movements, flicking his whip against his riding boots, broad-chested in his red-frogged uniform,

his voice loud and domineering, with a note of kindliness under the bluster, his step quick and firm, giving an impression of energy. That was all that officers and men saw of him, and he for the time was what he appeared, even to himself. But then he would go home and bolt his sandwich alone

and would ride his second charger, before going back to barracks in the evening to supervise the foddering of the horses again, and it was during this afternoon interval that he was accustomed to pick out lonely roads where he would meet none of his brother officers. It was then, in that afternoon interval when loneliness was all around him,

that he saw himself and knew himself to be different from what he seemed to his acquaintances, different even to himself. He saw himself again, as a child in Java, a small boy playing with his sister Constance on the great boulders in the river behind the palace at Boutenzoch. He could see her still in her white badger with the red flowers at her temples. The thought of it gave him a curious sentimental pang, which made him melancholy. He did not know why. Then he saw himself grown a few years older, and in love, perpetually

in love with the earnest amorousness of East Indian schoolboys for girls of their own age, little nonas who learn so rapidly that they are women, and that they attract the boys who ripen so rapidly into men under the burning sun. He, he, heret, had always been in love, sometimes in romantic fashion, like the fairy princes and the stories which his little sister Constance used to tell him, but more often, in rougher style, longing to satisfy his greedy mouth and greedy hands, the gluttonous senses of his lusty growing body, the body of a schoolboy and of a young man in one. Oh, he still laughed at those recollections. He could see the school distinctly, and at playtime the boys sly looking through the reeds by the ditch side at the schoolgirl's

little carts, the young nunners in their white badges, peeping through the curtain of the rickshaw, the boys throwing them a kiss with quivering fingers. the girls throwing back the kiss to their boyish lovers in the reeds, and the assignations in the great dark gardens, the burning and glowing in the childish breast. Oh, he remembered it all, and he saw as he went on his lonely ride, although he now laughed the laugh of his mature years,

he saw before his eyes all the girls with whom he had been in love as a schoolboy at Boutenzoch. There was one delicate, fair-skinned girl, very pale and very pretty. She soon acquired the purple laughing lips of the child who, by the time that she is 13, becomes a full-grown woman with a ripe bust and riotous black curls. And he also remembered a coffee plantation in the hills, with a young married woman of barely 20, who had taken him, a lad of 15, in her arms, and had not released him until the boy had become a man.

She had taught him the secrets that was seething in his blood, throbbing in his veins, the secrets that flushed his cheeks and took away his breath, the moment he approached anything in the shape of a woman, the secret which the boy knew by hearsay, but not by experience. And ever since she taught it him, there had been in him like a healthy hysteria or vigorous sensual.

a great lustiness of his adolescent body, a surplus of strength, which he must needs dissipate. He never came near a woman now, but he at once swiftly appraised her arms, her swinging gait, her bust, the look in her eyes, the laugh on her lips. If he passed her in the street, a quick glance printed her whole figure like a photograph on his sensual imagination, until the next woman whom he met, he faced it with, with her own later prince. And when he came to Holland as a young man and entered as a cadet at Spreda,

the need for lust had developed into an overpowering obsession, as it were, an unquenchable thirsting of those newfound senses which were fermenting in the young male body. Afterwards, as a young officer, he had known one quick sensual passion after the other,

taking each laughing enjoyment with all the carelessness of a youthful conqueror, His strong constitution and open-air life had enabled him to triumph like that with impunity for years on end, but even at that time he had often suffered from sudden fits of depression, a secret, silent hopelessness, when everything seemed to be going black before him with needless, useless, menacing gloom.

None of his fellow officers saw it, none of his brothers or sisters. If he put in an appearance on one of those days, he was the same blunt, jovial soldier, the fair-haired, burly giant, rough and noisy, with the mock fierceness in his voice, and the love of women in his brown questing eyes that went up and down doing their appraising in a moment.

But secretly, there was within him, so great a discontent with himself, that, as soon as he was alone, he would think, Oh, God, what a rotten, filthy life. Then he would fling himself on a couch under his sword rack and wonder whether it was because he had drunk champagne yesterday or because of something else, something else, a strong feeling of discontent.

He did not know, but he made up his mind on one point that he must knock off champagne. Damned fizzy stuff didn't suit him, and he wouldn't drink it again. indeed he wouldn't drink much at all, no beer, no cocktails, for it all flew straight to his temples, like a wave of blood, and throbbed there madly. And so it came to a secret abstemiousness,

of which he never spoke, at which he calculated so cunningly that his friends, though they knew that he was no great drinker, did not know that he could not support a drink at all. Sometimes he was fierce about it, allowed the drink to be poured out and emptied the glass under the table or broke it deliberately, knocked it over. That beastly drinking drove him mad. The other thing, on the contrary, kept him calm and cool, cleared his blood and his brain. It was after drinking especially that he

felt depressed. After the other thing, he felt as if he was starting a new life. He was like that as a young officer, like that for years at Deventer, Venlo and the Hague, and his sudden rough outbursts of insolent gaiety rather than anger had given him his name as a big blustering, brainless sort of ass. A pane of glass smashed, without the slightest occasion, a quarrel with a friend without occasion, a duel provoked for no reason, and then a reconciliation affected with the greatest difficulty by the other officers.

a need sometimes to go for houses and people like a madman and destroy and break things, more from a sheer animal instinct of wanton gaiety than from anger. When he was angry, he knew what he was doing, a kind of soft-heartedness prevented him from becoming really angry. It was only that madness of his, which allowed him to go really far, letting himself be carried away by a strange intoxication, the same intoxication which he felt on horseback when riding in a steeple chase,

a longing to rave and rage and go too far, and trample on everything under him, not out of malice but out of madness. That again cooled him, made him feel clear and calm. It was only the confounded drink that drove him mad. But, as he grew older, he quieted down and mastered his hot blood, so that he was satisfied with a quiet liaison

with a little woman whom he went to see at regular intervals. And suddenly, in his secret fits of gloom and blackness, it was born in upon him that he must get married, that it was that confounded living alone in rooms which gave him the deep-lying discontent, which he never spoke about, for it would never have done to let the others notice things which they would think queer,

and of which he himself was at heart ashamed. And then, as he lay quietly under his sword-rack, he would think, ah, to get married, to have a dear little wife, and children, heaps of children, and not to dissipate your substance for nothing. But children, Lord, Lord,

how jolly to have a whole tribe of children round you. All that was kindly in him and friendly, not to say very romantic and extremely sentimental, now made him wax enthusiastic under the sword rack, the great strong fellow who made the couch crack under him with his weight. Lord, Lord, how jolly! A whole tribe of children, not two or three, but a tribe, a tribe, a tribe. He smiled at the thought. After his riotous youth, it was a pleasant prospect. A nice little house. a home of his own, a dear little wife, children. He talked to his mother about it, and she was delighted,

because she had long been thinking that he ought to get married. He was thirty-five now. Yes, really, it would be a good thing to get married, and she looked about and found Adeline for him, a good family of French descent, connections in India, which was always nice. No money, but the Van Loas never looked at money, though they hadn't so very much themselves,

comparatively, professing a laughing contempt for the dross which, all the same, they could very well do with. A dear little girl, Adeline, young, she was thirteen years younger than her husband, fair-haired and placid, a regular little mother, even as a girl. And Gerrit, though he had had a brief vision of other women,

other girls, had thought, Oh, well, yes, a bit, bread and buttery, but you want a different sort for your wife than you do for your mistress. And after all, she was round and plump, a little round ball, even as a girl, and nice to hug, even though she was a bit short, and though her figure was badly deficient in the lines that set his blood tingling. He never for a moment fell in love with Adeline, but he saw her for what she was, his wife and the mother of his children, the little tribe for which he longed, because it was such a pity and almost mean to go dissipating your substance for nothing,

especially when you were getting a bit older and sobering down. He would have a healthy little wife in Adeline, she would give him a healthy little tribe. She, in her placid way, had come to love him, very simply, because he was big and good-looking, and because he was offering her, a penniless girl, a modest position. They had got married and were still living in the same little house, quite a small house, but big enough to harbour what Gerrit had looked for from the start, one citizen of the world after the other. He thought it rotten now to be alone,

and when Mama had asked Adeline and the children to the little villa at Noonspeat, he had grumbled that they were leaving him all alone, but gave in. A few weeks in the country would do the wife and the children good, and he ran down once or twice to nunspate on Sundays. But the loneliness was bad for him, and the house that had suddenly become lifeless and silent, oppressed him with a gloom that weighed upon him so heavily that he could not throw it off,

a cursed heavy weight which bore down on his chest. Add to this that, in order not to be alone in the evenings, he allowed the other fellows at whose mess he dined these days to persuade him to go with them and have a drink at the Vita, and it was those confounded drinks which finished him, simply finished him. He was home by one at the latest,

but he felt after those drinks as if he had been up all night. He could not sleep. If he fell asleep at last, he kept on waking up. His heart bounced as if it were trying to reach his temples. He turned about and turned about, dabbed his face and wrists, lay down again, ended by splashing cold water all over his body. Then he crept into bed again, huddling himself up, with his knees drawn up to his chin like a child. He stuffed the sheets into his ears, hid his watch so as not to hear it ticking louder and louder, and at last went to sleep. When he woke in the early morning,

whole landscapes of misty mountains pressed upon his brain as though his poor head were the head of an atlas, supporting the world on his neck. Persistent, slow-rolling, rocky avalanches crumbled all the way down his spine, and with his legs stretched out wide in bed, he was so horribly depressed by that waking nightmare that he felt as if he could never make a move to get up,

as if he could not stir his little finger. Then, at last, with a groan he got up, cursing himself for drinking the damned stuff, took his bath, did his dumbbell exercises, full of wondering admiration for his powerful arms, and ingenuously thinking, if he was so strong in his muscles, why couldn't he carry off a drink or two? Then he would look at his arms with the smiling vanity of a woman, contemplating her beautiful curves, and though his eyelids still hung heavy, and round, too weary to roll up,

the waking nightmare vanished under the influence of the water and the exercises, and the misty mountains rose higher and higher till they vanished out of sight, and the avalanche of rocks just tickled his back with a last gritty hail of pebbles. Then he became himself again, his orderly was waiting outside with his horse. In barracks he was the zealous captain who carefully performed his military duty, none of the officers saw anything the matter with him. But though, of course, there were always the other fellows. Loneliness seemed to envelop him,

an almost tangible loneliness that pressed upon him, something that alarmed him. What was it this time? He would ask himself, Was he ill or had he the blues? Blast those moods which you couldn't understand yourself. Was he ill or had he the blues? Was it that beast?

Worm, rooting away in his carcass with its legs and eating up his marrow, or was he just thinking it's rotten that his wife and children were away? His brain was whirling with it all, first that rotten feeling, and then the beastly worm. Sometimes it became such an obsession with him that during his afternoon rides, when he let his horse gallop wildly, he would see the thing wriggling along in front of him. Then he would think of Ernst, and he felt sorry for the poor chap. What a queer thing it was, a diseased soul, and could he, could he himself be deceased, in his soul, or at any rate, in his body?

If he told people what he suspected, nobody would believe him. Outwardly, he was such a sturdy fellow, such a healthy animal. But if only they could take a peep inside him, that wretched worm thing had been at it again, rooting away in his carcass, with its beastly legs, its hundreds of legs, never leaving him in peace. Was it just a queer feeling? Was it an illusion, like Ernst's hallucination, or could it really be a live thing? Though that was too ridiculous, it wasn't really alive, and yet he remembered stories of people who always had headaches, headaches which nothing could cure, and, after their death, a nest of earwigs had been found swarming in their brains.

Imagine if it could be some beastly insect. But no, it wasn't alive, it wasn't alive. He only called it a worm or centipede, because that's described the beastly sensation. Should he go and see a doctor? Some clever specialist at Amsterdam? But what was he to say? Doctor, there's something crawling about inside my carcass like a beastly centipede. The doctor would tell him to undress, and would look at his carcass, still young and fresh,

notwithstanding his earlier rackety life, with the muscles in good condition, the joints flexible, the chest broad, the lungs expanded, and would stare at him and think, he would think, the specialist would think that he was mad. He would ask questions about his brothers and sisters, and he would want to see airs, and he would draw all sorts of learned conclusions with the clever specialist. No, hanged if he would go to a doctor. He would be ashamed to say, Doctor, there's something crawling about inside my carcass, like a beastly centipede. He would be ashamed, absolutes ashamed. Or to say, Doctor, a gin and bitters upset.

me. Well, Captain, the doctor would say, then you better not take a gin and bitters. What was the use of going to a doctor, or even a specialist? He would not do it. He would not. The best thing was to be abstemious, certainly not take any drinks, and then grapple with that damned sensation. Come, he wasn't a girl. And not think about it, just stop thinking about it. He must have a little distraction. He was leading such a lonely life these days, and in that loneliness without his wife and children, he began to think,

with that incurable sentimentality which lay hidden deep down in him, of the comfort it was to belong to a large family, of the way it cheered you up. There's had been a big family, but how it was scattering now. Bertha's little tribe had all broken up. The others, mamma,

kept together, and that Sunday evening was a capital institution of Mammars. And so he would look in on Carol and Cato towards dinner-time, hoping that they would ask him to stay, and that for once he would not have to dine with the other fellows at the mess. But they did not ask him, and when it was nearly six, Crette, feeling almost uncomfortable, heaved his big body out of his chair, and went and joined the others, reflecting that Carol and Cateau had little by little become utter strangers.

And though he was not awfully keen on Adolphine, he sank his pride, invited himself to her house, and stayed on for the whole evening, and he had to confess to himself that upon his word, Adolphine was at her best in her own house, and that the evening had not been so bad.

Constance was at Barn one day at noonspeate another. Van de Velke was abroad, but Aunt Royvener was at the evening, the Hague. Uncle had gone to India, and Aunt's lot was always jolly. Yes, Herit, you showed a good nose to come here. We are having gassy. You'll stay and lunch.

Take potts luck, eh, Herit, what? He accepted gratefully, felt a sudden radiant to glow inside him, just where loneliness gave him a feeling of icy cold. Yes, he would stay to lunch. He loved the East Indian rice table, the way that Aunt and Tutti made it, and he was secretly glad that Uncle was away, for he didn't like Uncle.

In Aunt's Lot's big, roomy house, there was a sort of genial warmth that gave him a delicious sensation and almost left him weak, as though a smell of Java pervaded everything around, reminding him of his childhood. The house was full of Japanese porcelain, there were stuffed birds of paradise.

Under a big square glass cover Was a whole Passar With tiny dolls as toys Little warongs Little herds of cattle There were Malay weapons on the walls In Ants Conservatory There were mats on the floor

As in Java And Hellerit thought it fun to tease Alima Though she was dressed as a European And he was only sorry that she was not Latta Because that reminded him of the Latta servants Whom he used to tease in Java as a child. Buang, babu, babu, bwang!

And from the Japanese porcelain and the birds of paradise and the passar, there came that same smell, the smell that pervaded the whole house, a smell of akarwangi and sandalwood. And while aunt was making rice table and Alima running from the storeroom to the kitchen with a basket full of bottles of Indian spices, Gerrit felt his mouth water.

Aunt, we're going to have a great... tuck in. Allah! That boy, hemit, chortled Antelot, looking terribly fat, with her vast, pendulous bosom, wearing no stays indoors, but with brilliance the size of turnips in her ears.

Allah, that Helit, he'd murder his own father for Nassi. And ants went into exorcises. Ant turned into a mobile Hindu idol, ran from kitchen to cellar and storeroom, Tutti ran too, Alima ran too. The aromatic fragrance filled the whole house. There would be pettis, black and scented and hot.

Oh, for rice with a dried fish, and pettis! Gerrit rhapsodised, and aunt laughed till the tears came, happy and glad because Geritz was fond of nassi. But there would also be croupuk, golden and crisp, the dried fish which, when heated, swelled up into brittle flakes, flakes that cracked in your fingers as you broke them, had between your teeth as you crunched them. And then there would be ludi,

with a creamy sauce full of floating vegetables and chabe. And to follow on the rice, aunt had made Junkung, the java sugar cake with the icing of white maizener on the top. Only aunt's was sorry that she could get no Santan in Holland, and had to do the best she could with milk and cream. And when at last they sat down to table, Aunt and the three girls and Gerrit,

the enthusiastic Gerrit, Aunt and the little cousins would laugh aloud. Allah, that boy, Heret! And they vied with one another, who should help him very carefully, so that the rice should not make a messy heap on his plate. No, don't mix up your food, Aunt Lot entreated.

"'a dashed to-top way of mixing up everything together. "'I can't stand it. "'Keep your rice clean, as clean as you can.' "'Yes, aunt, as maidenly as a young girl,' cried Gerrit, "'with sparkling eyes.' "'And aunt again laughed, till the tears came, "'too bad, you know. "'And now, your lode in the little saucer.

"'That's it, so, and a sambal, "'neatly at the edge of your plate. "'Don't mix it up, Herrit.' Oh, that boy, Herit. Take a taste now, eat sambal with a spoonful of rice. That's it, so. The croup-book on the tablecloth, that's it, so. And now, hobble away.

Allah, that boy, Herrit, he'd murder his own father for Nassi, Cassian Van Lua. This last exclamation was meant to convey that Van Lua, Gerrit's father, was dead long since. and that Gerrit therefore could not murder his father for Nassi if he wanted to, and this time Aunt's eyes filled with tears of real emotion, not of laughter. Cassian, van lo! Gerrit no longer felt lonely, and ceased thinking of those queer feelings of his. He ate his rice with due respect, ate it slowly so as to spin out the enjoyment as long as he could.

But it was an effort, you know, with Anne. and Tutti and Dutche and Poppy, vying with one another in turns. Gerrit, have some more sambal tomato. Herrit, fill up your lode saucer. Herrit, take some ketimun. That's nice and cool, if your mouth's burning. And though Gerrit's pallets was on fire, though the sambal rose to his temples,

till it congested his brain like a cocktail, Gerrit went on eating, took another spoonful of clean, rice, took another taste of black pettis. Hear it, there's Jejong Kong coming, Aunt warned him. You won't leave me in the lurch with my Jijong-Kong, will you, Herrit? And Gerrit declared that Aunt's was making heavy demands on his stomach, but that he would manage to leave room for the Jijon Kong,

and he banged one fist upon the other to express that he would bang the nassie together in his stomach to make room for the sugar cake. Aunt was radiant with pleasure because Gerrit thought everything so delicious and after the Jejong Kong as Gerrit sat puffing and blowing she suggested Come Herit

nap us a bit now And Gerrit took the liberty of loosing a few buttons of his uniform and dropped with legs wide outstretched into a wickad deck chair while Aunt invited him to be sure and not leave her in the lurch next day with the remnants

The curry lunch at Antslaughts put Gerrit in good spirits for the whole day. He puffed and blew more in fun than reality. He extolled the rice table, which is never heavy, the jabe which clears your blood and your brain, and it was as though aunts aromatic and very strong sambals filled him with the joy of life for that day, and also with a certain tenderness, because it all reminded him of his childhood at Boutenzoch.

He took his afternoon ride quietly and pleasantly, excellent exercise after the generous meal, arrived at the mess in good spirits and did not eat much, gassing about Aunt Lott's nassie. And when he went home at a reasonable hour in the evening, he asked himself, If I can have such good days, why should I have such rotten ones?

I shall tell Lid to give us nassie every day, but Lien can't do it as Aunt Lott does. Another day, Gerrit, with that sentimental longing for his own people, went and looked up Paul. He found him in his sitting room, the place beautifully tidy, Paul lying on the sofa in a silk shirt and a white flannel jacket, reading a modern novel. And Paul was very amiable, even allowed Gerrit to smoke a cigar, one of his own, for Paul did not smoke, only he asked Gerrit not to make a mess with the ash, and to throw the match into the waste paper basket at once,

because he couldn't stand used matches about the place. "'Aren't you going away this summer?' asked Gerrit. "'Not I, my dear fellow,' said Paul decidedly. "'It's such dirty work travelling. Your skin gets black, your nails gets black in the train, your clothes gets creased in your trunk, and you never know what sort of bed awaits you. No, I'm getting too old to go away.

But aren't you even going to nunspate? Oh, my dear, Gerrit, Paul implored, What is the use of my going to noonspeat? Mama has Adeline and the children with her. Constance is devoting herself to Ernst. What earthly use would it be for me to go to noonspeat? All that travelling is such a nuisance, and going to noonspate would make me almost as dirty as

going to Switzerland. No, I shall stay where I am. The landlade is very clean and so is the maid, and, though I have to see to a lot myself, of course, things are fairly well cared for, and not too dirty. But Paul, said Perrits with a sort of, look here, drop it, gesture. That cleanliness of yours is becoming a mania. And why shouldn't I have a mania as well as anyone else? asked Paul in an offended voice. Everyone has a mania. You have a mania for bringing children into the world. Mine is comparatively sterile,

but has just as much right to exist as yours. But Paul, you're becoming an old foge at this rate, never moving, for fear of a speck of dirt. If you go on like this, you'll get rooted in a little selfish circle of your own. You'll cease to take an interest in anything. "'And you're young still. Only just thirty-eight.' "'I've taken an interest in the world for years,' said Paul.

"'But I consider the world such a vile, dirty rubbish heap, "'such a conglomeration of human wretchedness, "'such a rotten, scurvy, stinking, filthy dust-bin.' "'But, Paul, you're absurd.' "'Because I choose at last to retire into my room, "'where at least things are clean,' said Paul, with a gesture of irritation. My dear chap, you don't mean what you say.

I can't tell if you're serious or humbugging. Serious? You say I'm not serious? cried Paul, grinning scornfully and working himself into a real temper. Do you think I'm not serious? Well, if you're serious, then I say that you're simply diseased. Diseased?

Yes, diseased. Just as much as Ernst. is diseased. That tidiness of yours is a mania. That way of looking upon the world as a dustbin is a disease. You are always a humbug, but at least you used to be good company. You used to be a brilliant talker, and nowadays, for some time past, you show yourself nowhere, you shut yourself up. You are becoming impossible, and a bore. I'm becoming older, said Paul soberly. A brilliant talker. I may have been, perhaps. But it's not worthwhile. The moment you fashion a thought into words and try to express it, no one listens to you. People are just as sloppy and messy in their conversation as in

everything else. It's not worthwhile. And yet, he said, with a touch of melancholy, you're right, I used to be different, but it's really not worthwhile, old fellow, in my case. You have your wife and your children. Not that I'm yearning for a wife and children, especially such an antil as you've brought into the world, but what have I? The club bores me. Doing anything bores me. I'm too modern for the old ideas, and not modern enough for the new ones. His eyes lit up as he heard himself beginning to talk. Yes, the old ideas, he repeated, and his voice became fuller and recovered the rather sing-song rhythm of earlier days, when he used to unbosom himself at great length of all sorts of ironical theories

and mock philosophy, very often superficial, but always brilliant. The old ideas. There's rank, for instance. I've been thinking about it lately. I like rank, but do you know how I like it, just as Ernst loves an antique vase. Even so I am sometimes attracted by an old title. I should like to be a countess. I should like to be a countess. or a Marquist, not from snobbery. Don't imagine that I want to be a Count or a Marquis out of snobbery, for that's not the idea at all, but just as Ernst admires an antique of ours, or an old book, or a piece of brocade. I admire a Counts or Marquis's title, and my title, besides, would be much cleaner than the piece of brocade, which is full of microbes. But for goodness

sake. Don't run away with the idea that I want a count or a Marquis out of snobbery. You understand, don't you? I should only care for it from the decorative and traditional point of view. But a modern title of Yonker, Gerrit, dating back to William I wouldn't have if you paid me. To begin with, I think Yonkir an ugly word, and then I think that a title of that sort looks like a modern art signboard, like one of those art-new-posts, us with their everlasting,

stiff, upright, squirmy lines. And those conventional poppies are positively revolting to my mind because they symbolise to me the cant and hypocrisy of our modern world. Yes, there's a great deal of poetry herits in old ideas. We people are crammed full of old ideas. We inherited them.

They're in our blood. And we live in a society in which the new ideas are already putting forth shoots. The real new ideas, the true, the beautiful ideas, the three or four beautiful ideas that already exist. But I, for my part, have my blood so full of old ideas that I can't advance with the rest. New ideas. Look here. One new idea.

A really beautiful new idea. In our time is pity. Gerrit, what could be more beautiful and more delightful and newer than pity, genuine pity, for all human wretchedness. I feel it myself, even though I never leave my sofa, I feel it myself. But even as I feel it and never leave my sofa, so the whole world feels the new idea of pity and never leaves its sofa. Lord, my dear chap, there's blood sticking to everything.

The world is nothing but means selfishness and hypocrisy. There's war, injustice, and all sorts of rottenness, and we know it's there, and we condemn it, and we feel pity for everything that is trampled underfoot, and suck dry. And what do we do? Nothing. I do just as little as the great powers do. The Tsar does nothing. There's not a government, not an individual that does a thing. You don't do anything either. Meanwhile, there is war, there is injustice, Not only in South Africa, but everywhere, Gerrit, everywhere. You've only to go outside, and you'll come upon injustice in the Hoogstrat.

You've only to go travelling and get black with grime and dirt, and you'll find injustice everywhere. And meanwhile, that idea is stirring in this filthy world of ours, the idea of pity, and just as I am powerless, everything and everybody is powerless. Then am I not right to withdraw from the whole. business into my room and to stay on my sofa. He went on talking and at last Gerritz got up, glad that he had been to see Paul and that Paul had talked as usual, long-winded though he might

have been. But he was hardly gone before Paul rose from his sofa. He flung open the shutters to air the room of Gerrit's smoke. He rang the bell to have the ash cleared away. He put the chairs and removed every trace of Gerrit's visit. There, I let myself be persuaded into talking, thought Paul irritably, but do you think the chap grasped it and valued it for a moment? Of course he didn't, not what I said of the old, and not what I said of the new ideas. It's not worth while taking the trouble to be a brilliant talker. The world is dirty and stupid, and Gerrit is stupid also with his nine children,

and dirty with those cigars of his. And besides, he's a melancholy beggar who has his manias, just as Ernst has, and I, and everybody, and he flung himself angrily on his cushions and read his modern novel all day long, without so much as stirring. Translator's note, Badger, shirt, nonas, half-casts,

Nassi, Malay, rice, curry, Passar. Marketplace, Bazaar. Warongs, booths. Lata, attractive, pretty. Buang Babu, Babu, bwang. Put the baby down, nurse. Nurse, put baby down. Akarwangi, cedarwood or any other scented wood. Allah, Lord.

Kruppuk, the dried fish known in British India as Bombay duck. Lode, a sort of coconut. Meisana, Indian cornflower. Santen, coconut milk, Totok, the nickname given by the half-casts to the pure-bred Dutch. Sambal, red pepper, capsicum, sambal tomato capsicum, ketimun, cucumber, gherkin, napas, take breath, Yonker, the lowest title of nobility in Holland,

ranking after the barons and hereditary knights or ridders. The highest title is that of can, There are no Marquises or Dukes in the Northern Netherlands. William I, 1814. End of Chapter 9 Chapter 10 of the Twilight of the Souls by Louis Cooperos. This Librivox recording is in the public domain. Dorin also, Gerrit remembered, had remained in the Hague

and he looked her up at her boarding house where she occupied two small, comfortless rooms. He had not seen her for days, but was it weeks? He called twice without finding her in. The servants didn't know where she had gone, for Miss Van Loa was nearly always out. At last, Geritz caught her at home, at 12 o'clock,

when she was hurriedly having a makeshift lunch on the edge of the table, with her chair askew, taking nervous bites and timid sips. My dear Doreen, where have you been hiding all this time? asked Gerrit, with boisterous geniality. She was out of sorts at being taken by surprise.

Where have I been hiding? Where have I been hiding? I never have a moment to hide anywhere. I'm far too busy for that. But what have you got to do? What have I got to do? The day flies, and I never have time to do what I've got to do. But what have you got to do, Doreen?

"'My dear, Gerrit, I won't bore you with a list of my doings. "'Take it for me that my life is sometimes too busy, "'that I never know a second's rest.' "'He sat down and looked at her lunch. "'I came to take a snack with you, "'and just to have a chat, "'but I see that you're in a great hurry "'and that you haven't a great deal to eat,

"'so I don't expect you want me. "'Do you think I sit down to an elaborate meal all by myself? No, Gerrit, I have no time for that. Have you a mouthful for me? A mouthful, yes. I'll ring and order a couple of eggs for you. She rang, ordered the eggs, and Gerrit was given a plate on the edge of the unlaid table.

I'm glad to see you again, Sissy, said Gerrit. I never see you at all now that we don't meet at Mamas. Well, you don't miss much. I can't say you're very amiable. today? Have you such a thing as a glass of beer for me? No, I haven't any beer. What are you drinking then? Water, as you see. Oh, do you drink nothing but water? Well then, I'll have a glass of water too. I'm not very hungry either, said Gerrit, fibbing, for he was always hungry. And tell me, Doreen, don't you intend to run down to Nansbate? Yes, said Doreen, do you be a

I ought really to go to Nunspate. Mama's written to me, so is Adeline, but I don't know how to fit it in. How do you mean to fit it in? Well, with the things I've got to do here. But what is it you've got to do? Oh, Gerrit, nothing really that would interest you. The point is that I'm good enough for Noonspeat, but then of course they only want me to be nursed to your children.

Why, Doreen? "'That's it, of course,' she said Tarty. "'To be nursed to your children.' "'I don't think you need to be afraid of that. "'Lina has the governess with her.' "'Well, then, why does everybody want to get me down to Noon's Bait? "'Mama, Adeline, you. "'I can't do anything for Ernst,

"'because Ernst upsets me too much. "'But, Doreen, to give you a change, "'as you're so lonely here. "'Lonely, lonely, lonely, echoed Doreen. She drank her last sip of water and said, I don't mind being lonely. Yes, I know that.

But still, it's rather comforts us. I like being lonely. I think it's very cozy and comfortable. You think it's cozy? Yes. Here, in this bare room of yours. Yes, here, in this bare room of mine. But Doreen, that's not possible.

"'But good gracious, Hadit, don't I tell you that it is?' She stamped her foot angrily and gave him a resentful glance. Behind her dark eyes he saw a whole world of secret bitterness, a fierce grudge which smouldered in the depths of her soul, and it suddenly struck him that she looked very old, though he knew that she was only just thirty-nine. Her hair, drawn into a knot at the back, was beginning to go grey, There were deep wrinkles in her forehead, now that she was out of temper,

and the lines of her cheeks and chin and her sharp bitter mouth gave her almost the look of an old woman. Her figure too appeared withered and shrunken, and he suddenly thought her so much to be pitied in her lonely life as an unmarried woman without interests, over whose head the years had passed, bringing none of the sweetness of the changing seasons, for it seemed as if she had never known a spring,

as if she would never know a summer, as if there would only be the dreary autumn, which was now beginning to loom dimly before her, as if there had never been anything for her in life, as if there never would be anything for her, never anything but that weary passing of the monotonous, lonely days, so lonely and monotonous

that she created for herself a bustle and a flurry that did not exist, interests that were not there, an activity which she imagined, running in and out of shop after shop for a box of stationery or a skein of thread, with, in between a casual charitable call, done in a fussy and practical fashion. He suddenly thought her so much to be pitied in her loveless, cheerless life, that he said,

Shall I tell you what would be nice of you, and sensible, to pack up all your traps, say goodbye to your landlady below, and come and live with us. She stared at him with angry eyes and pressed her thin lips together. "'Come and live with you,' she asked in astonishment. "'What do you mean?' "'What I say? The house is small, but we can manage with the children.

You would have a tiny bedroom. That's the best I could do for you. Lena is very fond of you, and so are the children, and then you'd be living with us and have a jolly time. "'Live with you,' she repeated, "'and he saw a shadow of hesitation in her eyes. "'For indeed, it seemed to her that a heavenly warmth "'sudently lapped her round,

"'and she felt her dark, angry eyes grow moist. "'She did not know why. "'Yes, wouldn't you think that jolly? "'But what, put it into your head, ched it? "'Because I don't think it's jolly for you here. "'I'm all right here. "'I'm quite contented.' "'Yes, I know, but surely you would be more comfortable with us.'

She made an effort to force back the tears in her eyes. It was always so, with those tiresome nervous tears, they came for nothing, for no reason at all. It was not sensitiveness in her, it was sheer miserable nervousness, so she herself thought, and she hated herself for it, hated herself for those tears which sparkled so readily. but Gerrit's words had surprised her and touched her,

surprised and touched her to such an extent that she was ashamed to let him see it, and so blazed out purposely in order to hide herself behind that assumption of bitter resentment and ill-temper. More comfortable, more comfortable in your house. I'd be a nurse-maid in your house. That's what I should be. No, I've had enough in the end of living for everybody who wants me, and who can make use of me, I'm going to live for myself at last, for myself and nobody else. But, Doreen, he did not complete his sentence. He did not wish to be cruel and tell her

that she had never lived for anybody but herself. Not because she was selfish, but she was not that at heart, but because she had never found the right path, along which she could have trudged valiantly, urging her lonely steps towards a point which would have formed a centre for her small life, for the small circle of herself and that which she would have loved. Year after year had passed over her head, bringing none of the sweetness of the changing seasons. The illusion of spring she had never known, the fierce heat of summer she had never known, kindly shelter she had never known, nor had she ever known aught of blowing winds and raging storms. All that was sensitive in her had shriveled like flowers which no sun has ever shone upon.

What was feminine in her had withered like flowers which no dew has watered, and everything in her had become soured and embittered into an almost unconscious exasperation at her aimless existence, at her loveless life, which had gone on for years and years. Was it now nothing but autumn in front of her and around her, like twilight in her soul, like twilight around her soul? He stood up, she made him feel sad, he went away, and his parting words were merely, No, Doreen, you would not be a nursemaid in our house.

If you care to think it's over, do, and be sure that Delina and I will think it's very jolly if you do come to us. And he took his afternoon ride, picked out his lonely road. With a horse like that, it was like being with a friend. He patted the animal's neck, and it shivered like a woman under a caressing hand. He talked to it, and it shook its pointed ears, as though it understood, as though it answered with a graceful movement of its neck and head. And while he let the horse go at a footspace, with the reins held loose in his hand, he thought how lonely it had all become,

now that the twilight was deepening around them. In bright flashes, he thought just once more of his childhood, out there, Boutenzoch, the White Palace, the delicious garden, unique of its kind and world famous, with its precious trees,

its clustering palms, its giant ferns, its strange, huge giant creepers with stems as thick as pythons, slung from tree to tree, and behind it, the river where he used to play with Carol and Constance. Oh, how vivid it all was! To think of it, almost brought the tears to his eyes, now that the twilight was gathering round him, and these memories were but the last reflection of those sunny days when they were all children together. It had begun very slowly,

slowly, but irrevocably, the gradual separation and drifting apart, the ties loosened, until they were all detached. Now, just now, in the somber twilight that was drawing die. Slowly, slowly, with every year in which the brothers and sisters grew bigger and older, in which they developed from children into persons who themselves drew a circle around them, their own circle of marriage, their own circle of marriage, their own circle, of children, of which they themselves were now the centre, even as his father and mother had been in their family circle, in their circle of children, and even grandchildren. Slowly, slowly, it had happened year by year, really almost unnoticeably, that all the brothers

and sisters who had been one family in the White Palace over there, which in that garden yonder, so very far away in miles and years, seemed to him part of the family. fairy tale of his boyhood, with Constance's fairy figure, flitting through it, red flowers at her temples, that all the brothers and sisters had drawn a circle round about themselves, a circle of their families, or of themselves alone. And though those circles, for the first few years, had sometimes intersected one another, slowly, slowly they had shifted farther and farther apart, and just as that gloomy twilight drew nigh, they retreated still farther. Had Mama always secretly foreseen it, and was that why she had clung so obstinately

to that one evening a week, the evening at which formerly he had laughed and joked with the others. Always that Sunday evening of Mama's, the family group, that gathering at regular intervals with cards and cakes, which they all sometimes thought extremely. boring, but never neglected, for the sake of the older mother who wished to keep the children together, had Mama always foreseen it? Oh, it still existed the family group with the cards and cakes every Sunday, but was it not really losing its significance more and more, because the circles had shifted so very far apart? The twilight was gathering around them all, somber and menacing, and

felt its chilling influence even now as he rode along on that warm summer's day. The twilight was deepening around Orine and around Paul, growing darker and darker with their growing loneliness. The loneliness of a lonely man and a lonely woman who had not sought, or who had not found the warm light for their later years. The still young, but yet later years of the small soul that just exists, and consciously or unconsciously, is forever asking itself the reason of its small existence. The twilight was perhaps not yet so dark around Adolphine, for she still had her own circle, but even that circle had already shifted far from the original family circle, was moving farther and farther away. And the twilight had fallen black as night,

so suddenly around poor Bertha, thou that she was dozing away in a small house in a village where she knew nobody and did nothing but look out of her window at the garden, while the roar of trains deadened her already dull memories. It seemed too, as if Bertha's circle had broken up, like a ring of lights that breaks up into sparks, which die out in the distance, now that she had no one with her but Marianne,

poor girl, pining away in her unhappy lot, the victim of a destiny too big for her small soul. Carol, his brother, was Carol his brother still, or had not Carol with his wife, who had never been admitted to the family as an intimate, also shifted his circle, far, far away from the circle of them all? And as for poor Ernst, had the twilight not deepened around poor Ernst, his gloomy, solitude, growing ever darker, until he had fallen ill, ill in his soul and in his senses. And now that all those circles were shifting so far away from one another, and becoming ever wider, what consolation would there be for mamma, around whom loneliness and darkness were

closing, closing just around her? Poor Mama, to whom the family circle meant so much, who had always wanted to remain the centre of the love. and warmth of all her children. And it was strange that when he thought of Constance, her circle on the country seemed to be moving closer, as though they were a new light dawning for her and Addy. And strangest of all was when he thought of himself and of his little tribe, which it was true, had left him for the moment,

but still belonged to him and was always, always round him, as if there were no twilight there at all, as if it were always dawn, a radiant dawn, flinging wide its golden beams. Oh, children were everything, had he not done wisely to create his golden dawn? He did not think of his wife, he thought of his children, he was a father more than a husband. Had he not done well? Was it not there that hope smiled upon him, upon all of them, upon poor mamma? upon poor Mama who, at that very moment, was sunning her lonely old age in the light of that golden dawn,

had he not done wisely? But why, if he had done wisely, must he doubt sometimes, and be astonished, and even anxious about all that young radiant's life which he had begotten, and which shed forth a warmth and light in which he now felt his strange soul happily basking. warmer and lighter than the sunlight in which he was riding. Why should he doubt and be astonished and even anxious? Whoa, he saw it suddenly, because later on, the rays of that golden dawn also would shine far away from their centre, and that golden radiance would gradually become dim and dark in its turn.

But suppose it were a law of nature, suppose it were bound to be, that all that was united at first in sunny affection and sunny fellowship should scatter in all directions. Suppose it were bound to circle away and fade into sombre twilight. Suppose it were a law of nature that brothers and sisters should become estranged, as though they had not been born of one mother and begotten of one father. Suppose that had to be. Then why have so many doubts? why feel astonishment and anxiety, and why not enjoy the warmth, as long as the morning sun still shone,

after the first gleams of the cheerful dawn? Oh, how he longed for his dawn, his little tribe of laughing children. He would go to them tomorrow, tomorrow, to see them all around him, to hold them all in one vast embrace, to toss them in his arms, to let them ride on his back, and on his shoulders, to dandle them on his knee, to romp with them till they all rolled in a heap, to press his lips to their soft childish skins, giving himself sheer ecstasy in those simple caresses. Yes, he would go down tomorrow, tomorrow. Yes, the gloom might deepen around all the rest, but light was still dawning before him, as it had shone long years ago before his father and mother.

when they had all, he and his brothers and sisters, been children together, and their sunny radians had been their parents' dawn, yonder in India, in the grand white palace, in the fairy gardens. Yes, light was still dawning in front of him, and, though later that light would surely circle away from him also, though the twilight would gather around his head, around his soul, as it was now beginning to gather with such gloom. darkness around his poor mother, there was still the present, and he had no right to feel doubt or

anxiety. He rode back, and the evening dusked along the wooded roads. But straight before his eyes was a whirl of golden dust, because he had forced his thoughts to be glad and sunny. His fair-haired little tribe at Noonspeat whirled before his eyes. It whirled all radiance light, straight before his eyes. When he was back in town, seated at the officer's mess where he dined these days, not one of them noticed that he had seen that deepening twilight, nor that he had seen the first gleam of dawn, and he was just a big, yellow-haired fellow, a great burly officer, with a jovial, blustering voice and rough movements that made his chair-creak and his glass in constant danger of breaking. And all the time, a stream of noisy oaths came from his mouth, and his joke sets the

whole table ringing with laughter. End of Chapter 10. Chapter 11 of the Twilight of the Souls by Louis Cupertus. This Librivox recording is in the public domain. Months had dragged by when Gerrit, riding out with his squadron, had a meeting that gave him a shock. It was a on the Koning Gnegracht, one dank autumn morning, dull and dark at that early hour, as if it would not get light all day. The whole roadway was taken up by the horses, whose hooves clattered in rhythmical trot over the even cobbles. The maids in their lilac-print dresses hung out of the windows to look at the fine hussars. A closed cab came towards the squadron and had to pull up beside the pavement to let the horses pass, and with a

swift glance, Gerrit saw through the dimmed pains of the carriage, the face of a woman with a pair of laughing eyes, two brown-gold sparks of laughter, lasting scarce two or three seconds, those two gleams of gay gold. The laughing eyes were all that he saw in the vague expanse of face, pale in the shadow of the cab,

under the dark frame of a large hat. But that laughing glance gave him such a shock that he flushed purple, while his blood flew to his temples and set them throbbing as if he had taken a cocktail. He felt a stinging sensation in his neck, and the thought flashed through him.

I'll be hanged, if that wasn't Pauline. I'll be hanged if that wasn't Pauline. Can she be back at the Hague? But he pulled himself together, settled himself stiffly and firmly in the saddle, and tried to forget his shock, and the two brown-gold spark. of those laughing eyes.

Well, suppose it were she. What about it? It was all so long ago. And did he not often come across the live memories of his past, looming up suddenly on his path, just like that in the street, and did he not pass them with hardly a smile of reminiscence lurking under his moustache,

and just lingering in his glance? Suppose it were she? What then? Was he who had brought all his stashire? old madness with irrespectable middle-aged bounds, going to let himself be shocked by a pair of laughing eyes out of the past. No, he felt himself quiet and strong in the soberness of his later years. If his blood went coursing through his veins like that, at the glance of a woman, at a memory looming up on his path, he couldn't help it. Nevertheless, all that autumn day, the day which had

open dull and dark, and which had remained dull and dark, with its heavy, clouded sky, was lighted for him by the two or three seconds gay golden gleam from those eyes. Yes, what eyes that girl Pauline had! Lord, what a pair of eyes! Eyes that laughed, even when her mouth did not. Eyes full of golden mockery, eyes which knew that they sent him raving mad with their glance, as if he were a brand which a spark from them set on fire. And she knew it, she knew well enough that she sent him mad with her eyes. Was she back at the Hague? At the time she had suddenly gone to Paris, and he had not seen her for years, for at least twelve years. He was twelve years older now, she was twelve years older. How rotten that's

getting old, that wearing out of your miserable carcass, of the one body which you got in this world, and which you took to the grave with you, and which you couldn't change as you change into a new uniform. Well, his were still fit and strong, and Pauline's eyes laughed as they used to do. Twelve years. Come, he wouldn't think about it any longer. If he once started remembering everything that had happened years and years ago, the day of the day. day would be too short for his recollections. And in the staidness of his riper years, he forgot the meeting on the Koenig Ingracht,

and even thought so that he might easily have been mistaken, and that it wasn't Pauline at all. He was no longer lonely in his house, now that his wife and the children filled the home once more, and he felt that he must always have it like this in future, the warmth of the snug home around him, that otherwise he would feel unhappy and queer and lonely, as in those months last summer. And the first Sunday evening at Mamma's sent a cheerful glow all through him,

and yet it seemed empty here and there in the once crowded drawing-rooms. For the two old aunts no longer came. Mama, it was true, had not held them accountable for the upset which they had caused with their shrill childish voices on that most unfortunate evening when poor Corpard. Constance had been so excited as it was. Mama had forced herself always to remain nice to them, but gradually they had fallen into their dotage altogether and never went out now,

living in their little villa with a nurse. They had become very badly behaved and fought and quarrelled with each other. They slept in one bed and refused each other a fair share of the sheets. At once, Aunt Rina pushed Aunt Tina on the stairs so that she fell down and hurt her old ribs severely. So they no longer came, and it was strange, but Gellet missed the queer old figures of those two antiquated spinsters, who used to sit each with a great piece of crochet work in her bony hands,

on either side of the conservatory doors, all through the Sunday evening, now and again hissing into each other's ears spiteful observations, which the children heard and understood, and laughed at. Looking with their greedy old eyes, sweet-toothed old ladies that they were, at the cakes and lemonade,

consuming them at last with gloating satisfaction, then getting up suddenly, both at the same time, and going downstairs, under the careful conduct of the little nieces to the four-wheeler with the reliable driver, who always brought them safe home. The Sunday evenings were no longer,

the same, thought Gerrit, without those two characteristic traditional figures, about whom they all cracked a lot of jokes, but who nevertheless had so long retained something of life's immutability and pathetic monotony, until suddenly the change came and the two figures disappeared. They would go on living for years, perhaps, wrangling and quarreling, clinging desperately to the world with their bony hands. For years, as though death couldn't get at them, but they would never sit there again, one by each of the conservatory doors. But a great void had been caused by the dispersal of Bertha's little band, for Bertha never came to the Hague now, and all who had been to see her at Barn were agreed that she was becoming very strange, and sat in a very

strange way at her window, almost without moving, as if, after her busy, stirring life, she, the society woman, had suddenly, upon her husband's death, felt that there was no need to do anything more, and had let's that atmosphere of listlessness and apathy submerge her, and become the element in which she vegetated. She hardly ever spoke, took no interest in anything, just sat and looked out of the window, never going outside. the house. And though she had the full use of her senses, she had lapsed into a sort of staring torpor, submitting to the passing of the years, the unnecessary, sombre years that would glide noiselessly over her soul, bringing with them the dreary twilight, unillumined by a ray of hope,

in which her soul would sit, waiting for the coming darkness. In that house of morning, in her silent, passionless grief, she had kept no one with her but Marian, though Marcia was to come home later. The family knew about Emily and Henry now. For Emily, proud of her new life, had been unable to hold her tongue, had bragged of what they were doing

and how they were making money in Paris. And the whole family had been astounded and shocked at it. Adolphine and Cato had made them all swear, never, whatever they did, to let out that Emily painted fans, or that Henry had become a circus clown. True, they had not been able to hide Emily's fans from Mama Van Lua, because Emily herself had presented her grandmother with one. But that scandal about Henry, the old woman, fortunately, had not heard. It might have given her a shock that would have been fatal.

"'Heret knew that people at the Hague were incessantly telling stories about Emily and Henry, "'and he would rather have told the thing out, so that people should know the truth. "'But the others, even Constance, implored him to hold his tongue, "'and so he would hold his tongue with the rest, as if it concerned a disgraceful family secret. "'East, it is true, had never come regularly to the Sunday evenings. but nonetheless his absence, down at Noonspate, cast a sad shadow. What was even sadder was that Aunt Lott still came with the girls, but was full of bitter lamentation,

saying that things were going altogether wrong with the sugar, and that these were rotten times. And as a matter of fact, suddenly, one Sunday, Aunt came with much emotion and tears, the girls more resigned, good, simple souls that they were, and aunt told in a torrent of words how they were as good as ruined. Uncle had sent cable after cable from Java, as good as ruined. They were leaving their big house at once.

They already had in view a tiny little house at Downard, and they would manage there till better times came. It created great consternation in the family, where money never counted, but had always been very useful. yet Gerrit, in spite of Anselot's tragic attitude and the tearful voice in which she lamented her fate all through the evening, admired a certain keen practical sense in her. In the girls there was also an unruffled calm, a quiet determination to accept the situation sensibly without keeping up the appearance of former luxury and to retire into poverty with a modest resignation that left no room for false shame. "'A tiny little house, one servant, yes, Herit, "'but aunt would ask him to Nassi all the same,

"'but there was no living without Sambal, eh, Herit?' "'And Gerrit admired it all, "'admired that practical notion "'of at once cutting your coat according to your cloth "'in spite of the tragedy of tears and gestures and exclamations of, "'Yes, Cassian!' "'And he said, speaking to Constance, do think that real Dutch people could ever behave like that.

No, to begin with, they wouldn't trumpet it forth. Then they would go quietly abroad, but good old aunt's lot, trumpets its fourth, and started being practical yesterday, and isn't a shame to move into a smaller house. And, as I live, she's already asking me to Nassie. Yes, that was the good old-fashioned East Indian way, the simple soul, the simple views of life, the real thing without show,

the cordial hospitality surviving, even though there was no money left. And all this attracted Gerrit, for all aunt's East Indian accent, for all her look of a Hindu idol with the capacious rolling bosom and the brilliance as big as turnips. And the three girls, no longer young,

why had those good children never married in Holland, so quiet and practical, laughing already at the thought of the one servant. They'd make their own beds, but Alima, of course, was remaining, dressed just like a lady, stays and all splendid, sharing prosperity and misfortune with her nionia, just simply without stopping for a moment to think whether she hadn't better look out for a better place. Yes, Constance, say what you like. It does me good in this cold Dutch air of ours.

a glimpse like that of the simple warm-hearted old Indian way. And in spite of all, there were still cards and cakes on Sunday evenings. But, though Mama stuck to it, though she was still the centre of her circle, though the children left her outside most minor quarrels and difficulties, she still seemed to feel that something was cracking and tearing and breaking. No, she could no longer deny it to herself, and her once bright old face had changed, had lost its cheerfulness, and had come to wear, with those new wrinkles round the mouth,

a melancholy moping look. The family was a grande de chou. And things were no better when Constance, making her voice as gentle and sympathetic as she could, spoke to her about Addie. And on one of those Sunday evenings, the old woman said to Van der Velka, in a harsh voice which was beginning to train,

with the sound of broken harpstrings. So Addy has changed his mind, Constance has told me. It had been a great disappointment to Van der Velka too, so great that he could not forgive Addy and would hardly speak to him, and he also shrugged his shoulders angrily, as if he couldn't help it. What am I to say, Mama?

Addy is such a very determined boy. He spoke to his mother at Noonspate, and his mother agrees with him. I don't. The old woman's head dropped down to her breast and went nodding softly up and down. The old we become, she said, the more disappointment we find in life.

She looked up, there was resentment in her eyes. She beckoned added to her with that imperative gesture which she sometimes employed, even to the oldest of her children. The boy came. What is it, Grandmama? She looked at him, and something within her at once grew softer when she saw him standing before her,

with a grave, gentle smile on his fair boyish face, the face which was at the same time, so virile in its strength. Still, she shook her grey head, as though to say that she knew all about it, and there was reproach in her flickering eyes. "'Well, well,' she said, Mama has been speaking to me, Addy, and Mama tells me that you've changed your mind. But you want to be a doctor?

Yes, Granny. Well, well, and Papa, and Mama and Grandmama, who would so much have liked to see you make your way in the diplomatic service. Granny, really, I don't feel that I have the vocation. And as a doctor? As a doctor, yes, Granny. "'Then I suppose it can't be helped, Adie,' said the old woman, and she suddenly broke down and began to sob quietly.

Van der Velka looked gloomy. The boy looked down upon them where he stood, in front of his father and his grandmother. He liked the old woman, and he adored his father, and had been hurt by his father's fit of sulkiness. But he couldn't help seeing that it was their vanity that was wounded, and without wishing to be cruel, he couldn't help saying, very gently. Granny, Mama understood.

I should be so glad, Granny, if you and Papa could also understand. But Van der Velker's jealousy of Constance stabbed ruthlessly at his heart. He rose and moved to the card table. Mama understood, Addy, the old lady repeated resentfully. Oh, Mama knows that she can't refuse you anything, you see. Papa, too, and now he's upset, poor Papa. Our illusions become fewer and fewer, Addy, as we grow older, and therefore it's so terribly sad, dear, when we have to lose the very last of them.

We had all placed our hopes in you, my boy. But even if I don't go in for the diplomatic service, Granny, That's no reason why I. The old woman raised her hand almost angrily, imposing silence upon him. Diplomacy is the finest profession in the world, she said sharply. There's nothing above it. It's just those new ideas, dear, which Granny can't keep up with, and which make her so sad because she doesn't understand them.

Granny, I can't bear to see you crying like this. He sat down beside her, took her hand, looked into her eyes. She mistook his gentleness. Won't you think it over, Addy? She asked, softly and coaxingly. No, Granny, he said, in a calm, decided tone. I can't do that. You mean you won't.

I can't. I mustn't, Granny. You mustn't. No, Granny, do try to realise, Granny dear, that I mustn't. The old woman's head went up and down, nodding bitter reproaches. Granny, may I promise you to try my hardest, to do you credit one of these days, as a doctor. She gave an angry, contemptuous smile through her tears. He kissed her very tenderly.

Ah, he thought to himself, how we all drag with us, every one of us, that burden of vanity in our souls, which prevents us from living, from really living. Translator's note, Cassian, oh dear, Nogh, mistress. End of chapter 11. Chapter 12 of the Twilight of the Souls by Louis Cooperos. This Librivox recording is in the public domain. Yes, Gerrits had quite forgotten the golden glint of those two laughing eyes which he had seemed to recognize. He had only just reflected, lightly and vaguely that he must have been mistaken,

and great was his surprise a few days later, when, on his way to the Witte at after dinner, a woman came up to him near the club in the dusk of the evening, and as she passed flashed a laughing glance into his eyes, and whispered very tenderly, almost in his ear. Good evening, Gerrit. He knew the voice, even as he had known the eyes, a drowsy, deep-throated note, with a slight roll of the ars.

Yes, she recognised her. It was really Pauline. She was back at the Hague, after twelve years' time. Well, he took no notice of her, walked on, turned the corner and reached the vitter at once. He ran up the steps, almost as though fleeing from something outside, and his face was red, his temples throbbed. He stayed talking to his friends for an hour or so, curious to learn whether they too had happened to see Pauline. But the others, younger officers than himself, he reflected,

did not know her, and he did not hear her name mentioned. He went home early. The impudent wench, to dare to speak to him. He went to bed early, man of regular habits that he had become in the course of years, and, while Adeline was already asleep in the other bed, he saw the golden eyes laughing, heard his name murmured by that drowsy, provocative voice, heard it whispered almost close to his ear. He fell asleep, and in his dreams saw the golden eyes. Well, he thought next morning, if he was to start dreaming of all the eyes into which he had looked, his sleep would be one great firmament of eyes. And as he got up and took his bath, he threw the thing off him, washed those eyes out of his mind.

Then he breakfasted quickly with his pretty children, vigorous and fair-haired around him, and then he rode to the barracks. But, two days later, walking back from barracks, with a couple of officers at six or half-past, he came upon Pauline, under the fading trees beside the Alexander's felt. He repressed a movement of him, impatience and thought, Is she mad?

Is she pursuing me deliberately? But he did not let the others notice anything. One of them said, A fine girl, who is she? But none of them knew, and they went on. Geritz did not look around. The thing began to get on his nerves. What did the damned wench want to come back to Holland for?

And why must she look at him and speak to him? Why must she go on walking past the barracks? Was she mad? Was she bad? He felt angry and uneasy, and a day or two after, as though he had a presentiment, he hung about the barracks so as to go away alone, quite late. He met her, and in the dim light under the fading trees, her eyes laughed towards him through the distance,

like gold, with that gay, wicked glint of mockery. "'Damn it all!' he cursed. And, resolved to take up a firm attitude, he squared his chest, put his shoulders back, apparently wishing to fill the whole lane with his manly determination to force his way through every ambush and snare. But she stopped right in front of him, and said, in that drowsy, seductive voice,

"'Good evening, Gerrit. "'Look here, clear off, will you? "'It'd be damned quick about it,' said Gerrit, angrily. "'It's so nice meeting you again.' "'Yes, but I don't think it's a bit nice, see? So be off.' And he tried to walk on, broad-chested and imposing, the strong man who would trample on every smiling and mocking temptation that blocked his way under the fading trees.

"'Herit, I must speak to you,' she implored. "'Yes, but I don't want to speak to you.' "'Oh, but I must speak to you, Gerrit,' murmured the languorous, maddening voice. "'I must, I must speak to you, not here, but just, just inside the woods.' "'What do you want to speak to me about?' "'Only for a second, I can't tell you here.' "'Well, no, do you see,' said Gerrit roughly, "'I don't want to have anything to do with you.'

you. Yes, yes, Gerrit, please, Gerrit, only for a second. And he walked on. She followed him. Gerrit. I say, if you don't hurry up and clear out. Gerrit, just let me tell you something. Let me speak to you for three minutes, in the woods. The voice coaxed him, and he saw that steep glint of mockery in the laughing eyes. Only for three minutes, and then I shan't worry you any more. Well, go ahead then, said Gerrit. You go on, I'll follow you, but to be quick, I've no time. Where are you going?

Home. Are you married, Gerrit? Yes, go ahead now. And have you any kiddies? Yes, I have. I all. They expect their charming kiddies, Gerrit. Once again the deep glint in those golden mocking eyes leapt out at Gerrit, and then she had turned, walked away quickly, gone down the Timor Strat, disappeared in the woods.

It was quite dark there. Well, what is it? I haven't seen you for twelve years, Gerrit. Is that all you have to say to me? No, listen, she said, swiftly understanding that she must make the most of this precious moment. Listen, I've been 12 years in Paris, Gerrit. I've had a lot of trouble there, I can tell you, but a lot of fun too. I was all the rage.

My photo used to be in the shop windows, between the Tsar and the king of the Belgians, and under Oteros, that shows, doesn't it? But a lot of trouble too, Gerrit. Men are beasts, Gerrit, they're not all like you, so kind, so nice. I often used to think of you. Yes, but I don't care a hang about all this. I often thought of you, how nice you were, and how kind, though you often pretended to be rough

and put on such an angry voice. Well, Gerrit, I had to go back to the hague. You see, it's too long a story to tell you. And now, Gerrit, now, I want to tell you, I'm very hard up, I haven't got a penny just now. Please, Gerrit, can you give me 50 guilders? Look here, if you think I'm well off, you're very much mistaken. I can't give you anything.

Well, Gerrit, couldn't you give me 25 guilders? You'd be doing me a good turn. I haven't got it. Oh, but please, Gerrit, can't you give me something? Gerrit fumbled in his pocket. Here's two Rick's dollars, and a ten. guilder piece. That's all I've got. I'm not rich and I don't go about with sheaves of notes in my pocket. He gave her the fifteen guilders. Oh, Gerrit, thank you ever so much. Oh,

Gedit, how sweet of you. And before he could stop her, she had thrown her arms round his neck and was kissing him wildly on the mouth. He almost flung her from him. Look here, are you mad? "'No, Gerrit, but I love you, and you're such a dear. "'Thank you, Gerrit. Thank you ever so much.' "'He saw the golden eyes jeering. "'And now, clear out,' said Gerrit, shaking with fury, "'while spark seemed to dazzle his eyes. "'And never speak to me again.

"'And don't go thinking that you get any more money out of me, "'for I haven't got it, so it's finished. "'U understand that. "'You look out for a young, rich fellow, and leave me alone.' "'Oh, Gerrit, they're all beasts. All but you. All but you.' "'Well, beast or no beast,' roared Gerrit. "'You go this way now, and I that, see?' And he released himself, panting, snorting, quivering.

He walked as fast as he could, and when he looked around, she was out of sight, must have gone up the Riaustraat. He breathed again, managed to catch a tram, stood on the front platform to get the wind in his face and cool his throwing temples. And all the time he was thinking, The girl's mad, to speak to me, to go kissing me. I'd have done better not to give her any money, twelve years.

She looks older, but she's still a fine girl. She's put on flesh, She was painted, which she never used to be, but she's still a fine girl. Her kiss lingered on his mouth, like a burning pressure, as if she had sealed his lips with wax, the hot melting wax of her kiss. And suddenly he had to admit to himself that, for years and years, for twelve years, no one had kissed him like that, and the admission sent his blood racing through his veins,

and set all sorts of memories like swissive. swift spirals, swarming before his eyes, in curving waving lines, between him and the wet autumn street, down which the horse tram jogged along, toiling slowly on its rails. Memories flashed before his eyes in glowing visions before him, and inside him and around him, until it was as though he was standing there on the platform of the tram car in a blaze of recollections which the wind fanned rather than extinguished. But the tram was passing his house, and he jumped down wildly, almost stumbling over his sword, hampered by his military great-coats which blew between his legs.

He rattled with his latch-key against the door, like a drunken man, could not find the keyhole at once. The door of the dining-room was open, sending forth a soft light of domesticity. The table was laid for dinner. Gerdi and Guy ran out to meet him. Adeline, inside the room, called out, Is that you, Gerrit? How late you are. I missed the tram, he fibbed.

And he thrust the two children away from him, a little roughly. Wait, children, Papa must go upstairs first and wash his hands. He stormed up the stairs, again nearly stumbling. The noise shook the whole house. The door of his bedroom slammed. He feverishly felt in his pockets for matches. couldn't find them. His trembling hands groped all round the room, knocking things over, almost breaking things. At last he found the box,

lit the gas, looked at himself in the glass. He saw his face red with fierce raging blood, which glowed under his cheeks and beat up towards his temples. His eyes started from their sockets and contracted to pinpoints. He looked at his mouth to see if the same. the kiss was visible that still burnt on his lips like a hot seal of purple wax. His uniform felt too tight for him, and he undressed himself savagely. He washed his head in a basin full of water. He rubbed his mouth with a handkerchief

till his lips glowed, went on rubbing them as if they were dirty. He crunched the handkerchief into a ball and flung it on the ground. Then he quickly put on his indoor jacket, and then, then he went downstairs. How late you are, Adeline said again, very gently. He did not answer, made no jokes with the children. He now deliberately let Gerdi kiss him with cool lips, and it was as a cool flower pressed flat on his glowing cheek. It calmed him, and he suddenly felt safe in that small room

under the circle of light from the hanging lamp, with in front of him the great piece. of beef which he began to carve with great art and advised Alex to watch how Papa carved so that he could do it too when he was older. He now gave all his mind to the beef, carved it in clean regular slices, while Adeline and the children looked on.

He ate heartily and, after dinner, fell into a heavy sleep. Translator's note, Iyo, Malay, forward. End of Chapter 12 Chapter 13 of the Twilight of the Souls by Louis Cupertus This Librivox recording is in the public domain No, nobody saw it in him He could admit that now without hesitation

Around him there appeared to be He became more and more conscious of it An opaque sphere, like a materialised phantasm Through which no one could see him, through which no one could penetrate. and know him as he knew himself. This evening as he sat with Constance, Constance did not see that he had met Pauline yesterday

and gone back with her to her room. His wife did not notice it. Van der Velker did not notice it. There was nothing around him but the everyday circumstances of an after-dinner chat in Constance's drawing-room in the soft, cozy light of the lace-shaded lamps, while the wind outside blew from a great,

distance and howled moaning round the little house. In his easy chair, with the glass of grog mixed by Constance at his side, he was just a big burly light-haired fellow in his mufty, and his movements were brisk. His parade voice sounded loud. His wife was sitting there, gentle and placid, the quiet resigned little mother. The children were asleep at home. Oh, his children! How he is. How he loved them. Certainly, of all that existed, it was no phantasm, it was most certainly the truth. But behind that truth lay hidden another truth, and that was why it seemed a phantasm, his outward life as an officer, a husband, a father, while the real truth was what he always kept to himself. His strange gloom, the great worm that gnawed at him, his hot racing blood,

his sentimental and melancholy soul, that wriggling horror in his marrow, that regred essence of sensuality in his blood. The quiet, kindly words fell softly round the room, like small sweet things between a brother and sister, who still have sympathy and affection for each other, amid the inevitable slow-moving a part of the family's spheres. But he, though he talked, though he was lively, though he cracked jokes, though he cracked jokes, he saw Pauline before him, as he had held her in his arms the day before. Heavens, he couldn't help it. Why was he built like that? A handsome woman, standing before his eyes, drove him crazy. Well, for years, all the years of his marriage he had remained sober and sedate,

but he had gradually begun to feel that this sedate-ness did not really suit him. It was no good his thinking it rotten. It was no good his telling himself that he was a husband and a father, the father of such jolly children too, and that he oughtn't to think of those things, that all that sort of thing belonged to his youth, to which he had said goodbye. It had been all very well to say it,

but a thousand memories had gone curling into the air before his eyes, like swarming spirals. And when he met Pauline again, By accident, he had made an appointment with her for the next evening, in her room, cursing himself as he did so, and swearing at her with a torrent of rough words. No, nobody had kissed him like that for years. Besides, he was sentimental. Didn't he himself know, damn it, what a sentimental ass he was? Didn't he know that sometimes when he read a book or saw a play, when Mama and he was,

told him her troubles, as she had now got into the habit of doing, when he saw Doreen and felt sorry for her, didn't he himself know, damn it, that he was a sentimental ass, and that he must pull himself together and not let the tears come to his eyes? And Pauline, whether she did or did not know how sentimental he was, he couldn't see as far as that, not only kissed him as no one else did and knew how to drive him crazy, but she also worked upon his sentimentality. Was she making a fool of him, or did she mean all she said? He had never been able to trust those eyes of hers. They always retained a glint of mockery. But when she said to him, men are all beasts, every one of them, ched it, except you. You are not. You're so nice and gentle,

however rough you may be. Then she had him by his sentimental side, and he did not know how to shake her off. I tell you, Gerrit, that's why I was so glad to see you again. Oh, I was so glad, Gerrit. He had cursed her, asked why she didn't go after a young rich fellow, rather than him, who was neither young nor rich, but her golden eyes had gleamed, and she had merely repeated,

"'Oh, men are all beasts, herrit, beasts, beasts, every one of them.' "'And perhaps that was the stupidest thing of all. "'He had believed her, believe that he was the only one whom she did not think a beast. "'And when a woman got hold of him by his crazy side, "'and his sentimental side as well, "'then he did not find it easy to wrench himself away. "'Oh, he knew himself well enough for that. Not one of them knew it, you see, while he sat talking so quietly with them,

while he sipped his grog with enjoyment, his legs stretched out wide in front of him, and while he heard the raging wind outside, come howling up from the distance. And now Paul came in, rubbing his hands. He had driven up in a cab, declaring that he was too old to walk from the Houtstrat to the Kirkhof-Larn in that weather and through such dirty streets. Why didn't he take the tram? Thank you for nothing. Was there ever such a filthy conveyance as a tram in wind and rain too?

And a volley of sparkling witticisms flashed out for a moment, tirades against his dirty country, where it was always, always raining, against people, against the whole world, all dirty alike. When he sat down, he looked at, round with a glance that had become a second habit, to see that there were no bits of fluff on his chair, and he at once ceased talking, the battery of his words exhausted, sat still, not thinking it's worthwhile to talk, because nobody appreciated what he said.

Gerrit heard Constance chide him in her gentle voice, in a sisterly but serious fashion, because he was growing so elderly, shutting himself up, giving way to his mania for cleanliness and for thinking everything dirty. He answered with a couple of whimsical sallies. Then Constance said that she had asked Doreen also, but that Doreen did not seem to be coming, and that Aunt Roivner was too tired, because she was fixing up the new small house with the girls. And Gerit felt, now that Mama was getting old, very old, how Constance was trying to keep the elements of the family together in her place. Not in such a wide and comprehensive manner as Mama used to do, and still did, but with some measure of sympathy. Ah, she wouldn't succeed, thought Gerrit. The circles were not moving

closer together. Each was just himself. He was no different from the rest, was he not thinking of Pauline? Had he not his silent secret? Had not each of them, perhaps, his silent secret, while they sat talking together with such apparent sympathy. Adi came in, after finishing his schoolwork upstairs, and Chedit noticed the conciliatory smile with which he at once went up to his father, who had been sulking of late because his boy had made a choice of which he altogether disapproved. But for weeks and weeks he had seemed unable to resist the conciliatory smile, and Chedit had noticed that it was Vandevelka himself who suffered,

most from his sulking, which went on because he did not know how to manage a gradual change of attitude, while the boy's calm smile meant, Daddy will have to give in, for what I want is only reasonable. And Gerrit enjoyed looking at Addy, hoping that his own boys would grow up like that. But Paul, as soon as he saw his nephew, flashed forth into chaff, a chaff which had a speculative interest underlying it, and which the boy took quietly, looking at a. at Paul with his serious blue eyes, which gazed so steadily out of his fresh boyish face. Well, learned professor in Ovo, my dear doctor in Spey, how are the patients? Are they keeping you busy just now? Has mankind increased in vitality and primordial vigour since you entered the

therapeutic arena? Oh, great healer, on whom are you going to try your powers first, Isculapius? are members of your family, I suppose. Are you going to make us live forever, Adi? Well, you needn't trouble about me. Can't you manage to make the human body work a little more cleanly in future? That's the thing before which we're expected to kneel in admiration, the creator's masterpiece, the human body, and what is dirtier than the human body?

A nasty house of flesh, with our poor small soul pining away inside it, it. Addy, when you grow very clever later on, just remove all that, entrails, intestines, a whole bag of tricks, and put in its place a little silver machine which a fellow can polish at least. If there must be a machine of some sort. The boy never got annoyed, but stood in front of his uncle and put his hand on Paul's shoulder, and looked at him and said, Why aren't you always so lively, uncle? Lively, do you think me lively?

He thinks I'm lively, while I sit here, cursing human filthiness. Is that your diagnosis, Professor? Well, you're quite out of it, my boy. You'll never get your ten guilders for that. Lively, heaven's boy, I'm far from that. As long as life remains as dirty as it is, I shall be as melancholy as melancholy can be. Cure me if you like, but first clean the Orgian stable.

There's just one little clean spot left in our soul, but all the rest is dirty. Tell me now, whom will you start on? Couldn't you cure Uncle Gerrit? Give him a better appetite. Sound asleep, a healthier complexion. Teach him to buck up that big carcass of his a bit. Just see how wasted. did he looks. There was something in Paul's chaff that grated on Heed it very unpleasantly, but he laughed as though he thought it's the best joke he had ever heard, that Paul should be

wishing him a better appetite and sound asleep. Was Paul getting at him? Did Paul see through his sham's strength? And would Addy do so later? No, nobody saw through it. The centipede rooted in him unseen by them all. And he got up to mix himself another grog, but he mixed it so that it was hardly more than hot water and lemon. End of Chapter 13. Chapter 14 of the Twilight of the Souls by Louis Cupertus. This Librivox recording is in the public domain. He had never quite understood her, not even in the old days. In the old days, as a young officer, he had seen in her a fine girl, a delicious girl, of whom he had been madly enamoured. He had never understood her eyes, never understood her soul, but formerly he had not thought so very much about those eyes and

that soul, because in those days he didn't know much about himself either, did not know what he knew now. In those days, he only now and then had a vague glimpse of his own latent sentimentality. Today, he knew that sentimentality to be there, most positively, as a blue background to his soul. And he was so much afraid of that sentimentality, so much afraid lest he should miss the truth, the naked mocking reality of that courtesan soul, so much afraid lest he should make it out to be finer than it really was, kinder, above all, and gentler and more tender, that he could never speak to her without abusing her or swearing at her, his voice as rough as if he were roaring at one of his huzzars.

I mustn't let myself be put upon by her, or by myself either, he constantly reflected, and he kept on his guard. Add to that, a vague resentment at not having been able to keep away from her, at having gone to see her in her room, a vague resentment at the thought of his home, of his children, of all that he went back to when he left her room. The way you got used to anything, he would reflect. Now when he had been to her,

he would put his latchkey calmly into his front door, without feeling his heart beating with nervousness, would undress calmly, would walk into the room where Adeline lay in bed. The way you got used to everything, and by degrees came to do things, which at first you thought rotten. You did it because you couldn't very well help it, because your ideas about things, day by day, as you did it, slumbered away into a feeling that you weren't responsible,

as it was no use resisting what had got such a hold of you. Nevertheless, when he was with her, he always felt that resentment keenly did not slumber away. At Pauline's, he had a keen apprehension of being still more imposed upon, of seeing kindness and charming tenderness in that girl, whereas, of course, she was nothing but a courtesan who meant to get money out of him. And then, in her small, shabby room, he would roar at her and ask, Look here, why can't you leave me alone?

Her golden eyes gleamed, and he read a secret mockery in them. No, ma'am. you. He'd take jolly good care that his sentimentality didn't make him see her as a chocolate box picture. You only had to look at her eyes. But, Gerrit, she said, nestling at his feet, I never run after you. I met you by accident. Really, by accident, I assure you. Don't you remember? Yes, once when I was driving. That was the first time, then near the Alexander. the barracks. But what were you doing near the barracks, damn it? She looked at him coaxingly, stroked him caressingly. Oh, well, I thought. There, you see, you thought. Yes, you would

believe me. Even towards the end, in Paris, Gerrit. Well, I used to think of you sometimes. Oh, rot, you're lying. Do you think I believe you? No, you don't believe me. You don't believe me. But, Gerrit, I assure you, men are beasts, and you. Oh, yes, you tell everybody that. Do you imagine I don't see through it? Then she laughed merrily, and he laughed too. And laughing, she said, because you're pretending to be so cynical. Tell me, Gerrit, why do you pretend to be so cynical?

I? Yes, you. Why do you do it? You're putting it on, aren't you? On purpose. Purpose be blowed, if you think I'm going to be taken in by all your pretty speeches. If you come to me with pretty speeches, it's because you want money, and I've, I've told you, I haven't any. But, Gerrit, I don't ask you for money, and I'm not getting any from you either.

He flushed, a deep glow overspreading his red, sunburnt face, and the white neck on which the tight collar of his uniform had left a plainly visible line. What she said was quite true. She asked for no money, and he gave her no money. He had none to give her. Now let me tell you, she said, nestling still closer against his knees. You see, in Paris, towards the end, I got the blues badly. You understand, Achedit, don't you?

One has enough of the life sometimes, and a fit like that isn't very cheerful. "'Oh, rot,' he said gruffly, "'and you, who are always laughing?' "'I'm always laughing.' "'Yes, you, with those eyes of yours, "'those eyes which are always laughing.' "'That's my eyes, Gerrit. "'I can't help it if they laugh.'

"'And you want to make me believe "'that you get fits of the blues.' "'Well, why shouldn't I?' "'Very likely, but you're not the sort.' "'To what?' "'To sit moping.' for long. Well, I didn't. I came to Holland. Weren't you doing well in Paris? Not so well, perhaps, she said, hesitating between her vanity and certain strange feelings which she did not clearly

realise. So that's why you came to Holland. I might have gone to London. To London. And from there to Berlin? Berlin. Then to St. Petersburg. Look here. What are you talking about? You? What are you talking about. And next to Constantinople. Oh, shut up. And do you know where we finish? What do you mean finish? At Singapore, you know, that's the regular tour. Oh well, I've heard it, but that's nonsense. So many of us go on that tour, it's not a circular tour, Gerrit. It doesn't bring you back to Paris. What a queer way you have of saying those things, said Gerrit, laughing uncomfortably. You are always a strange girl.

Tell me, your father was a waiter, wasn't he? No, a gentleman. My mother was a laundress, in Brussels. And those twelve years of yours in Paris? Made me into a Parisian, you think. Gerrit, I longed for Holland. I'll never believe that. Yes, Gerrit, I longed for Holland.

You're a great liar, with those eyes of yours. I never believe a word you say. Gerrit, and for you. What's that? I longed for you. Yes, of course. Tell that to the Marines. I remembered the old days.

Oh, drop it. Don't you know? When? Yes, yes, I know everything. Stow all that, you and your recollections. You've taken me in enough as it is. Why don't you look out for a young, rich chap? You're not old, Gerrit.

Oh, I'm not old. No, I am. I've grown older, haven't I, Gerrit? Your eyes haven't. But the rest of me. Yes, of course. You have grown older. Gerrit, I don't want to get old. I think it's terrible to get old. Am I still pretty and... Yes, yes, yes.

But very soon I shall... You'll what? I shall be plain and old. Oh, don't sit there bothering. I'm very fond of you, Gerrit. You're so... Yes, I know what you're going to say. I'm off now. Must you go? I say, Gerrit. You have children, haven't you? I expect their charming children. He seemed to see mockery in the gleaming eyes.

You'd drop it about my children, will you? Means I ask after them? No. I saw them out walking the other day. Shut up! I thought them so charming. He swore at her, roughly and hoarsely, "'Shut up, blast it, can't you?' "'Very well. Are you going?'

"'Yes.' He was outside the door. "'Are you cross with me?' "'No, but this talky-talkie bores me. That's not what I come to you for.' "'No, I know you don't, but still, you can't mind my talking to you sometimes, Gerrit.' "'Very likely, but not such twaddle,

and I won't have you mention my children. I won't do it again. Goodbye, Gerrit. Good night. He looked round in the passage and nodded to her. In the dim light of the room he saw her standing, framed in the half-open doorway. She stood there, a handsome, slender, willowy figure

in a shimmer of dull gold. The lights, the yellow tea gown, the touches of gold lace round the very white neck. the strange gold hair round the powdered white face, and under the sharp line of the eyebrows the golden eyes with a golden gleam. Her voice, all the evening, had sounded very soft and coaxing in his ears, as though crooning a plaintive song, of youth, of memories of the past, of longing for her native country, and for him, all unnatural and impossible things in her, things which he only heard in her voice because of his confounded sentimentality,

a sentimentality which, however deeply it might be hidden from everybody else, was clearly perceptible to himself. And outside he thought, I must be careful with that girl. She is as dangerous as can be, to me. End of Chapter 14. Chapter 15 of The Twilight of the Souls by Louis Couperos. This Librivox recording is in the public domain.

Well, if he treated it like that, he thought, he could reduce the danger to a minimum. He had allowed himself to be taken in, and the only thing now was to disentangle himself, slowly, gradually, and he would certainly succeed in this, for none of them, not even Pauline had ever held him for long. Though she had got him to come and see her, though he had gone back once or twice,

he had shown her that she had no sort of power over him and that he remained his own master. His voice roared hers down, so that he did not even hear the coaxing, brooding tones. His robust cynicism was more than a match for his sentimental tendencies, and so her only hold was on his recrudescent sensuality, glowing with the memories that had been smouldering, in his blood. But that would run its course in time, and meanwhile, as he would never really recapture

those old sensations after twelve years, the charm, the enchantment of it would wear off, and pretty quickly too. Yes, she had grown old, she had not gone through her twelve years in Paris with impunity. All that former freshness, as of a fruit in which he used to bite, had vanished. He could not endure the musty smell of the paint which she smeared on her face. He once roughly rubbed a towel over her cheeks, till she had grown angry and locked herself in, and he had had to go away and apologise next time. And he was struck above all by her timidity in revealing her body,

her artfulness in retaining, even when in his arms, those laces and fripperies which were supposed to create a filmy haze, all around her, a haze through which he was well able to see, that she was no longer the girl of twelve years ago. And when he compared his recollections of that time with what she gave him now, he could not understand that he had allowed himself to be caught like that by her eyes, which had remained the same, though she now smeared black stuff round them. He did not understand how he had gone into the woods with her. He did not understand how he had yew. He did not understand how he had yielded to her entreaties that he should come to see her.

No, he would disentangle himself from this woman, from this faded cortisan, who was complicating his life, his life as a respectable husband and father, especially father. He would disentangle himself. It would not be difficult, now that the present gave him back so little of what had glowed in his memory.

But, just because of that, "'Because it would be so easy, because the presence was such dead ashes, "'a heavy melancholy fell around him like a curtain of twilight. "'Great Lord, how rotten it was, that slow decay, that's getting old, "'that dragging on of the days and years. "'How rotten that you had to pay for everything that life gave you, "'first with your youth and then with your prime, as if your life, were a bank on which you drew bills of exchange, as if your existence were a capital on which you lived,

without ever saving a farthing, so that when you died, you would have squandered every little bit of it. Lord, how rotten, not dying, which was nothing after all, but just that slow decay, that confounded spending of your later years, for which you got nothing in return. If you had everything already, your youth, your strength, your good spirits, and, as the years dragged and dragged along, you just jogged on towards the cheerless end. And there was nothing to do but to go on while every day you spent one more day of your capital of later days and got nothing in return. While nothing remained but your memory of the youth, which you had also squandered,

Lord, Lord, how dark it all grew around you when you thought of such rotten things. Oh, of course, there was one streak of light. He knew it, he saw it, saw the golden dawn, the dawn in his own house, the dawn of his children. Light still shone from them. Their circle was still moving within his circle, just for a time, for so long as their shining sphere touched his own. own sphere, until later it would circle away, ever farther and farther, describing wider and wider revolutions, even as every sphere rolls away, rolls away from the centre. That was how it would be, when he had grown old, very old. It was not so yet, for the present, the bright-haired little tribe

was still in its golden dawn. Yes, for its sake too he would like to disentangle him. It was. himself, to disentangle himself. The thing that had never been able to hold him, would it hold him in his old age? Well, there was no question of old age yet, even though he was getting on for fifty. But still, it wasn't as it used to be. Nothing was as it used to be. No, not even Pauline. No, not even Pauline. When he went to her now, he took a malicious pleasure in telling her so, with rough words, in making her feel it, both in order to make himself appear rougher than he was, and because of the resentment which always kept pricking him sharply.

I say, you're not a bit like those old photographs of yours now? It gave her a shock when he said this. Nothing gave her such a blinding shock as if the shock had plunged her into darkness and made everything go black and menacing as death. She felt that it was cruel of him to throw it in her face like this, and she couldn't understand it in him. But because her eyes were always laughing, even now they laughed their golden laugh. Ah, you don't believe it.

You just think you're exactly as you were, the same young and pretty girl. Well, my beauty, you never made a greater mistake in your life. "'But I see you don't believe me. You grin when I tell you. You think your charms are going to live forever. Everything wears, child. However, you won't believe it. I can see your eyes mocking me now.' Indeed, her eyes were laughing, and the smouldering spark of mockery seemed to leap into flame. And because he spoke like that, she laughed, a loud laugh, with a shrill note which annoyed him, in which he heard mockery, because, after all, though she no longer resembled her old photographs,

she had caught him badly. "'Just come here,' he said roughly. "'Why? "'Just come here!' She went up to him, trembling. He took hold of her, a little more roughly than he intended, took her between his knees, looked her in the face. "'What do you make up for?' he asked.

"'I don't make up.' "'Oh, you don't, don't you? Do think I can't see it?' "'No, I don't make up.' "'Then what's that?' He pointed to her cheek. "'That's only powder which stays on because I use a face cream first.' "'Oh, really? And isn't that making up?' "'No.'

"'And what's that?' he pointed to her eyes. She shrugged her shoulders. "'That's done with a pencil. Just a touch. It's nothing.' That's not a make-up. Make-up is something quite different. Oh, really? Well, I don't like all that's messing. What do you do it for?

She looked at him in dismay, and again the blinding shock, bored and endless, dead-black perspective before her of death, but he saw only the laugh of her golden eyes. What do you do it for? he repeated. You isn't too? No. Then why do it now? She made an effort so as not to cry. She laughed shrilly, and it sounded like a jeer, as though she were saying jeeringly. I make up my face, but I've got you all the same. Give me a towel, he said roughly. No, she said, struggling and releasing herself from his grip.

Give me a towel. No, Gerrit, I won't. Do you hear? eyes just flashed an angry look of dark reproach, but they laughed and mocked immediately afterwards. He snatched a towel from the wash-hand stand. Come here, he said. Her first impulse was a storm of seething rage, a rage, as on the last occasion, when she locked herself in and he had to go away. But there was something so cruel and vindictive in his voice, in his glance, in the abrupt movements of his great body, that she grew frightened and came. "'Hed it!' she implored,

softly, timidly. "'Come here! I don't like all that muck!' He had wetted the towel. He now washed her face, and he became a little gentler in his movements, glance and voice, because she was frightened and meek.

He washed her face all over. "'There,' he said, "'Now at least you're natural.' Something like hatred gripped at her heart, which she could not yield to it. Her nerves had to become too slack for hatred. Besides, she had always, always been very fond of him, just because he was such a strange mixture of roughness and gentleness. She remained standing anxiously in front of him, with her hands in his. Like that, like that, at any rate, she no longer looked like the picture

on a chocolate box. He was safe now, again. against his sentimentality. But, Lord, how old she looked. Her skin was wrinkled, covered with freckles and blotches. Was it possible that a drop of wet stuff out of a bottle and a touch of powder could cover all that? And the golden eyes of mockery, how ghastly they looked without the shadows about the brows and lashes.

And yet she kept on mocking him. But then, suddenly, he felt pity, was sick at having been rough, at pretending to be rougher than he was. He was always like that, always made that pretense, putting on a blustering voice, squaring his broad shoulders, banging his fist on the table, for no reason save to be rough and not sentimental. And seeking for something to say to her, he said in a voice which he at once recognised, A voice of pity, the gentleness now tempering the roughness, that mixture which she had always loved in him. Really, Pauline, you look much prettier like this.

But she saw the dark vista opening out before her, black as night. You're much prettier now. You look like a fresh and pretty woman. Her eyes were laughing. You haven't the least need to smear all that stuff on your face. Her lips were laughing now. Come, and give me a kiss. Come!

He caught her in his arms. He felt her flesh, soft and flabby, as though he were grasping, wadding or lace, not as though he were grasping the woman whom he remembered in his glowing memories, a woman of warm marble. She roused herself in her desire, she strained her muscles, embraced him with force,

with all the science of passion which she had acquired during the years. They embraced each other wholly, and their embrace was full of despair for both of them, as though they were both plunging with their intense happiness into a black abyss, instead of soaring to the stars. She now lay against him like a corpse. Never had he felt so full of heavy melancholy in his heavy, heavy soul. never had his whole whole life passed before him like that.

Suddenly, in a flash, his boyhood, Boutensorg, the river, Constance, his young years as a subaltern, his reckless period, the period of inexhaustible, gay, brutal young life, and after that very youthful period, still many long years of youth, with Pauline herself still young,

warm marble, and then the sobering down, his marriage, and, oh, the golden dawn of his children. He was not old, he was not old, but everything had arrived. Nothing, nothing more would come, but the dragging past of the monotonous years. And with each year, the bright circles would shift farther and farther apart, and the gloom would deepen around him. Never had he felt so full of heavy melancholy.

in his heavy, heavy soul. She, against him, lay like a corpse. He felt her like a bundle of down, of lace, soft and flabby as a pillow, still in his arms. He would have liked to fling her away from him, weary, sick of that tepid flabbiness. But he kept her in his arms,

made her lie against him, suffered the tepid heap of lace and down on his chest. Her eyelids hung closed, as though she would never raise them again. Her mouth hung down, as though she would never laugh again, and yet he continued to hold her like that. It was not because of his sentimentality, for she was anything but a chocolate-box picture now, and it was not out of a sudden recrudescence of rough sensuality

that he now held that flabby bundle in his arms. No, it was from a real, genuine, but heavy and melancholy feeling, a feeling of pity. He had been able to wash the makeup from her face with a towel, but he couldn't fling her from him now, before she herself should raise herself from his arms, and she remained lying like a corpse. God, what a time it's lasted.

Still, he couldn't do it. He continued to suffer her there on his heart. He looked down at her a sky, dance without moving, and his eyes grew moist. Those confounded eyes of his which grew moist. He couldn't help it. They just grew moist. He screwed them up, wiped them with his free hand,

before Pauline could see them moist, and he remained like that. So long, so long. At last he gave a deep sigh, and she drew breath. He could not go on, not to. because of her weight but because of her softness, that soft flabbiness, that stuffiness, that crumpled lace against him. His chest rose high and she awoke from her lethargy. She lifted her heavy eyelids. She pinched her lips into a smile. It was a smile of utter despair.

She released herself from his arms, stood up and he made ready to go. "'Herit,' she said, faintly. "'What is it, child?' "'Herit,' she repeated. "'You don't know how glad I am that I met you again, here, "'that we have seen each other again. "'I used to think of you so often in Paris, "'because I was always a little fond of you,

"'because you are so gentle and rough in one. "'That's how you are, and that's why I was fond of you. "'Oh, it was so very. nice to see you again, after so many, many years, those dirty, dirty years. It has made me so happy, so happy. Thank you, Gerrit, for everything. But I wanted to say, What child, you had better not come back again. You know, you had better not come back. We have seen each other again now, not often, perhaps ten or twelve times, I can't remember. It was such heavenly, such heavenly happiness

that I forgot to count the number of times, but you had better not come back any more. And why not, child? Are you angry? Because I washed your face with that towel. No, Gerrit, it's not that. I'm not angry about that. I'm not angry at all.

Indeed, her eyes were laughing. Then she repeated, But still, you had better not come back. "'I see. So you've had enough of me?' She gave a shrill laugh. "'Yes,' she said. "'Oh, and have you found a young rich chap? "'As I advised you?'

Her laugh sounded still shriller, and her golden eyes were full of mockery. "'Yes,' she said. Under his heavy melancholy, he was angry and jealous. "'So you don't want me any more?' "'Won't you. I shall certainly want you, but—' "'But what?' It's better, for every reason. Better not. You mustn't come back, Gerrit. Very well. And don't be angry, Herit. I'm not angry. So this evening was the last time?

Yes, she said. They both looked at each other and both read in each other's eyes, the memory of their last embrace, the stimulus of despair. Very well, he repeated more gently. "'Good-bye, Gedit. "'Good-bye, child.' "'She kissed him, and he, her. "'He was ready to go. "'Suddenly he remembered "'that he had never given her anything,

"'except on that first evening in the woods, "'a tingled a piece and two Rick Stollers. "'Pauline,' he said, "'I should like to give you something. "'I should like to send you something. "'What may I give you?' "'I don't mind having something. "'But then you might, you might,

mustn't refuse it to me. Unless it's impossible. If it's not possible, then I won't have anything. What is it you like? You're sure to have a photograph, a group of your children. Do you want that? He asked in surprise. Yes.

Why? I don't know. I'd like it. A photograph of my children? Yes, if you haven't won, or if you can't give it to me, then I don't want anything. "'and thank you, Gerrit.' "'I'll see,' he said Dulley.

"'He kissed her once more. "'So, goodbye, Pauline.' "'Good-bye, Gerrit.' She kissed him hurriedly, almost drove him out of the room. It was ten o'clock in the evening. Gerrit in the street outside heaved a great sigh of relief. "'Yes, this was all right. He was rid of her now.

It had not lasted very long, and the best part of it was that none of his brother officers, of his friends, or of his family, had for a moment suspected that connection, for a moment's noticed that the past, his memories, his youth had loomed up before him, haunting him, and mocking him in Pauline, in her body, in her golden eyes. It had remained a secret, and what might have been a great annoyance in his life, as husband and father had been no more than a momentary and unsuspected effort to force back what was long over and done with. It was now over and done with forever. Oh, it was the first time and the last. Never again would he allow himself to be entrapped by the haunting recollections of former years. But how sad it was to reflect that all that passed was really over and done with, and that everything had been.

During the days and weeks that followed, he went about with heavy, heavy melancholy in his heavy soul. Nobody noticed anything in him. At the barracks he blustered as usual. At home he romped with the children. He went with Adeline to take tea at Constances and laughed at. the tirades of Paul, who was daily becoming more and more of an elderly gentleman. Nobody noticed anything in him, and he himself thought it's very strange that the eyes of the world never penetrated to the shuddering soul deep down within him, as though sickening in his great body, with its sham strength. Sick? Was his soul sick? No, perhaps not. It was only shrinking into itself under the heavy, heavy.

melancholy. Shan strength was his body weak? No, not his muscles. But the worm was crawling about in his spine. The centipede was eating up his marrow, and nobody in the wide world saw anything of the centipede, of the worm, of all the horror of his life, even as nobody had seen anything of what had come about during the last few weeks between himself and his past. The last last flare-up of youth, Pauline. Nobody saw anything. Life itself seemed blind. It jogged on in the old plodding way. There were the barracks, always the same, the horses, the men, his brother officers. There were his mother, his brothers and sisters, there were his wife and his children. He saw himself reflected in the blind eyes of plodding life, as a rough kindly fellow.

"'a good officer, a big fair-haired man, "'just a little grey, "'a good sort to his wife, "'a good father to his children. "'Lord, how good he was, "'reflected in the blind eyes of plodding life. "'But there was nothing good about him "'and he was quite different from what he seemed.

"'He had always been different from what he seemed. "'Oh, idiot people! "'Oh, blind! idiot's life. End of chapter 15. Chapter 16 of the Twilight of the Souls by Louis Cuperus. This Librivox recording is in the public domain. It was a steadily grey and rainy winter,

a winter without frost, but with endless, endless rains, with a firmament of everlasting clouds hanging over the small murky town, over the flooded streets, through which the gloomy people hurried under the little roofs of their umbrellas. Clouds so preternaturally big and heavy that everything seemed to cower beneath their menace as though the end of the world were slowly approaching. Black grey were those everlasting clouds, and it seemed as if they cast the shadow of their menace from the first hour of the day. As so short were the days that it was as though it were eternal night,

and as though the sun had lost itself very far away, circled from the small human world, circled very far behind the immeasurable world of the clouds and the endless firmaments. And lashing, ever lashing, the whips of the rain beat down, wielded by the angry winds. Gloom and menace hung over the shuddering town and over the shuddering souls of the people. There were but few days of light around them. The old grandmother sat gloomily at her window, nodding her head understandingly but reproachfully, because old age had not come in the nice and peaceful way

which she had always peacefully hoped. The shadows of old age had gathered around her like a dark, dreary twilight, were already gathering closer and closer because she saw that, however hard she had tried, she had not been able to keep around her all that she loved. Was the supreme sorrow not coming nearer?

Just as the shadows were gathering around her, so they had already gathered around Bertha over at Barn, far away, too far for her, an old woman, to reach her. And in a sudden flash of clairvoyance she saw, though no one had ever told her, Bertha sitting at a window listlessly, with her hands in her lap, saw her sitting and staring, even as she herself stared and sat. In a flash of clairvoyance, she saw Carol and Cato and Adolphine's little tribe,

far, far away from her, even though they lived in the same town and came regularly on Sunday evenings. Far away from her she saw Paul and Doreen, very far away from her she saw her poor Ernst, whom she knew to be mad, and her old head nodded in understanding, but yet in protest against the cruelty of life, which brought old age to her in such a sad guise, and made it gather so darkly and menacingly around her loneliness. Yes, there was Constance, there was Chedit. She felt these two to be closest to her. But though they were closer, it grew black around her, black, under the black skies, with the glimpses of light, the flashes of clairvoyance, in the midst of them. She saw, though no one had told her, a pale thin girl, Marianne, pining away by Bertha's side.

She saw, though no one knew it, Emily and Henry, toiling in Paris, struggling with life which came towards them hideous and horrible, bringing with it poverty which they had never known. She saw it so clearly that she almost felt like speaking of it. But because they would not have believed her, she remained silent, enduring all that gloomy life, even as the town endured the black skies and the lashing of the rain. And yonder, far away, too far for her, she saw a woman, old like herself, dying. She saw her dying, and by her. her bedside, she saw Constance and she saw Addie. She saw it so clearly, between her eyes and the rain

streaks, as though flung upon the screen of the rain, that she felt like speaking of it, like crying it out. But because they would not have believed her, she remained silent, enduring all that gloomy life, even as the town endured the black skies. Then things grew dull around her, and she saw nothing more, and the nodding head fell asleep upon her breast, and she sat sleeping, a black, silent figure, while the rain tapped as though with fingers, which would not tap her awake, at the panes of the conservatory window at which she used to sit. For hours she would sit thus alone in the shadow of her day and the shadow of her soul, and when any of her children or friends called, they would find her in low spirit,

"'Mama, don't you feel lonely like this?' Adolphine asked one afternoon. "'We should all like to see you take a companion.' The old woman shook her head irritably. "'A companion? What for? Certainly not. Or have Doreen to live with you?' "'Dorine, living with me. No, no, I won't have her in the house with me. Why should I? You're so lonely, and though you've had the servants a long time, somebody to sit with you, you know. Somebody's sitting with me all day long?

No, no. We should like to see it, Mama. Well, you won't see it. And the old woman remained obstinate. Another afternoon, Adeline said, My ma, dear, Constance asked me to tell you that she won't be able to see you for a day or two. And why not? What's the matter with Constance? Nothing, Mama, dear, but she's been sent for, to Dribergen.

To driebergen? Yes, dear. Old Mrs. van der Velker hasn't been quite so well lately. Is she dead? No, no, Mama. She's only a little unwell. The old woman nodded her head comprehendingly. She had already seen Constance standing yonder by the dying woman's sickbed, but she did not say so, because Adeline would have refused to believe it. Another afternoon, Cato said,

Mama, it's very sad, but old Mrs. Fraser Stein. Oh, I haven't seen her for ever so long, and yes, and it's very sad, Mama, because she was a friend of yours, and Mama, people are saying that she's ill. that she won't last very long. The old woman nodded knowingly. Yes, I knew about it, she said. Oh, said Cato, round-eyed. Has somebody told you?

No, but... The old lady had seen her, had seen her old friend dying, and she nearly committed herself, nearly betrayed herself to Cato. What? asked Cato. I suspected it, said the old lady.

When you are old, old people die round you. Mama, we should very much like. What? Adolphine would like it, and so would Carol. What, if you would take a companion to live with you? No, no, I don't want a companion. Or Doreen, she is very nice too. No, no, not Doreen.

Rie neither, and the old woman remained obstinate. The old people were dying around her. She was constantly hearing of contemporaries who had gone before her. Her old family doctor was dead, the man who had brought all her children into the world in Java. Now an old friend was gone. The next ago would be Henry's old mother, who had been so unkind to Constance, and nonetheless had sense for Constance to come to her. Who else was gone?

She couldn't remember them all. Her brain was sometimes very hazy, and then she forgot names and people, just as the old sister's always forgotten muddled things. She did not want to muddle things, but she could not help forgetting. So I shard see Constance for quite a long time, she said to Cato.

Constance? Yes, who said she was going to Dreybergen? No, my wife. more, I never mentioned Constance. The old woman nodded her understanding nod. Nevertheless, she no longer remembered who it was that had told her about Constance, but she preferred not to ask, and she thought it over for hours. End of Chapter 16.

Chapter 17 of the Twilight of the Souls by Louis Couperos. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. An icy shudder swept over Constance when she arrived at Dreebergen and saw the carriage waiting outside the station with the coachman and the footman. How is M'frau? she asked as she stepped in, but she hardly heard the answer, although she grasped it. She shuddered, icy cold. She shivered in her fur cloak.

It had rained steadily for days upon the dreary, wintry, wintry trees, out of a sky that hung low, but tremendously wide and heavy, as oppressive as a pitiless darkness. Drearily, the wintry road shot forward as the carriage rattled along them. Drearily in their bare gardens, the houses rose, very sadly, because they were deserted summer dwellings in the ice-cold winter rain. The day was almost black. It was three o'clock, but it was night, and the rain,

Gray over the road and grey over the houses and gardens was black over the misty landscapes, which could be dimly descried through the bare gardens. The dreary trees looked dead and lived only in the despairing gestures of their branches when a wind howling up from the distance blew through them and moved them. The carriage turned into the barefront garden

round the beds with the straw-shrouded rose bushes. Constance had driven in like this only a few times before, with the careful coachman always describing the same accurate curve round the flower beds. The first time when she came back from Brussels, and two or three times since, after the old woman had been to the Hague on one of Henry's birthdays. And suddenly a strange presentiment flashed through the black day right into her, a presentiment that she was destined very often,

so many times that she could not count them, to drive with that curve round those beds. She stepped out of the carriage, and the strange presentiment flashed into her that she would often, very often, stand like that, waiting for that solemn front door of the great gloomy solemn villa to open to her. Then she walked in,

and the long oak entrance hall stretched before her like a strange indoor vista, with at the end a dark door that led to, she did not know quite what, and she felt that she would often, very often, go through that hall and stare at that dark door, knowing full well what it led to. And it was very strange indeed now, but she imagined that she had unconsciously had this presentiment before, really unconsciously, so vaguely that she had not felt it yet, from the first time that she had come and waited in this hall, sitting on the oak's settle with her hand on the shoulder of her boy, the grandchild whom she had come to introduce to his grandparents.

Oh, what a gloomy house it was, with that long hall and that dark door at the end of it, with those portraits and those old engravings, only brightened by the gleam of the Delft on the old oak cabinet, Oh, what a gloomy house it was, and how strange was the presentiment that she was so often becoming here now, that she would have to mingle some part of herself with this gloomy Dutch domestic atmosphere. Shuddering, shivering, still in her fur cloak, she was thrilled with a very swift and fleeting homesickness for her dear, cosy house in the woods at the Hague, and she did not know when she would go back to it now. The old woman was ill. Henry had gone first. Addy had followed him. Then she had asked for Constance,

and Constance had taken the first train. She had asked Pete in the hall how mafrau was, but she had not taken in his answer either. She now went up the stairs, which wound in their ascent, and were quite dark. And because the strange presentiment also forced itself upon her, on the stairs. She resisted it, put it from her. How strange everything seemed around her, and within her, was that the approach of death, skulking along with the wind, as it were tapping at the windows on the staircase, and knocking in the heavy oak presses in the hall.

Was that the approach of death, of the death which she already felt around her, or was it only because the day was black, and the house gloomy? and now everything seemed to make her shudder. A dark door had opened slowly, and she started, and yet it was simply her child, her boy, coming out to meet her. How is Grand Mammar? But again she did not take in the answer, and as though in a shuddering dream in which she already felt the approach of death,

she entered a room. There sat the old man, and Henry sat beside him, like a child with his hand in his father's large, bony hand. She herself did not hear what she said to the old man. She was only conscious that her voice sounded soft and sweet, as with a new music in the gloomy house. She was only conscious that she kissed the old man, but she felt herself growing strange, frightened,

and shuddering in the dark room in the gloomy house, with the vast, low, heavy skies outside. The black rain rattled against the pains. The old man had taken her hand awkwardly. He held only two of her fingers, and they trembled, pinched in his bony grip. He led her in this way to another room, dark with the curtains of the window and the bed,

lighted only by the reflected gleam of an old-fashioned looking-glass wardrobe. The black rain rattled against the pains. Oh, how she felt the approach. of dread death, that great black death, before which small people shudder, even though they do not value their small lives. How she felt it rustling in the rain against the window, how she felt the ghostly flapping of its cloak in the shadows among the heavy furniture, how she felt death reflected in the reflex light of that looking-glass. She shivered in her fur cloak, but in the shadow of the bed curtains. Two eyes smiled at her gently from out of the suffering old face.

The old man had gone. Here I am, Mama. Is that you? Yes, I had to send for you. I thought it would be too much for you. That's why I let Henry and Addy come without me. Are we alone? Yes, Mama. Tell me, you didn't stay away because you were angry. because you still bore a grudge. Oh, no, I was not angry. I thought it would be too much for you. Is that true? Quite true.

The simple truth. The simple truth. Yes, I can tell. You're not angry. But you were angry. Hush, Mama, hush. No, no, let me speak. I sent for you to speak to you.

There was a time. when you were angry, and we could not talk together. Let us talk now, for the first and last time. Mama, there were those long, long years, dear, the years which are now all dead. There was your suffering, but there was also our suffering, fathers and mine. Yes, it was a day like today, gloomy and black, and it was raiding. I was restless. I had such a strange presentiment. I had a presentiment. The Tenry was dead. My child, my boy, in Rome. It was a gloomy day, 17 or 18 years ago, and in the afternoon, about this time, it was quite dark. The lights were not yet lit. A letter came, A letter from Rome, from Henry.

I trembled. I could not find the matches to light the gas. And when I looked for them, the letter dropped from my hands. I thought, he is writing to me that he is very ill. I shall hear presently that he's dead. I lit the gas and read the letter. I read not that he was ill, but that he had had to resign his post.

He wrote to me about a woman who, I did not know, he wrote to me about Judea. I breathed again. I thought to myself, he is not dead. I have not lost my son. But father thought differently, he said, Henry is dead, we have lost our son. Then I knew that my presentiment was right, that he was dead, he was dead, and he stayed dead for years and years. Oh, how I longed for him to come to again. Oh, how I kept on thinking of my child. But year followed upon year, and he remained dead. Then, by degrees, I began to feel that it would not always be like that, that things would be a little brighter one day, that he would come back out of that distant death. He came back. I had my boy back.

I saw you for the first time. Long dead year. lay between us, and when I wished to embrace you, I felt that I could not, that I did not reach you, my words did not reach you, they remained lying between us, they fell between us like hard around things. I knew then that you had suffered much, and also that for long, long years you had been full of grief and resentment, grief and resentment. You brought you. Brought. You brought as your child, who brought him grudgingly. Hush, don't cry, don't cry, it couldn't be helped. There was bound to be that feeling, that grudge inside you.

Oh, I knew how it rankled. People are always like that. They never understand each other, as long as there is no love. And when there is no love and no understanding, there is bitterness. Oh, an often hatred. No, it was not hatred yet. It was bitterness, I knew it. Don't cry.

The bitterness couldn't be helped. We did not reach each other across that bitterness. Also, you were young still, dear, and it was I who had to go to you on Henry's birthday. And yet I do not believe that there was any wrong on my side. Tell me, was there any wrong on my side? Was it not your bitter, implacable youth that refused the reconciliation? Hush, don't cry.

Reconciliation always comes. Sooner or later, all bitterness melts away. If not here, they're there. But with you and me, dear, it is here. With you and me, it is here. I am certain that you gradually felt. the bitter grudge melting away in you, because you learned to understand, learn to understand that old people have different ideas from young people.

You learn to understand their ideas, the ideas of the old people, folk before your time, old-fashioned folk, my dear. You learned to understand them, and your soul became more gently disposed towards them. and you said to yourself, I understand them. They could not be any difference. You can even understand, can't you, dear, that the old man has not yet, has not even now forgiven and forgotten

as completely as I forgave and forgot long, long ago. I am right about that, am I not? You must even learn to understand that he will never forgive and forget. Hush, child, don't cry. I, you must learn to understand that. You do understand it. We must understand that together,

however much we may regret it. But we will not tell anybody, and we will both of us forgive him, dear, for now and for the time to come. For, if he can't do otherwise, then he is not to blame. And once we are there, when we meet again,

Oh, what will all the old bitterness and all the old suffering amount to? Nothing. There, all the old bitterness and the old suffering are lost in love. Then, Father Too will no longer be bitter. That's why I sent for you, you see, to tell you all this, because of the words which I could not keep in, because I long to say to you, My dear child, you have suffered, but we have suffered too.

My dear child, I, I want to forgive you now with my last kiss, but let's my forgiveness count as two. And do you, my dear child, it is my last request. Forgive the old man also, now and always, always. The room was quite dark. the rain clattered in the darkness against the window. Constance had dropped to her knees beside the bed, she was sobbing quietly,

her tears falling upon the old woman's hand, and there was a long silence, interrupted by nothing but the clatter of the rain and the soft heaving sobs. The dark room was full of the past, full of all the things which the old woman's words had brought to life out of the dead years. But through that past, the dying woman saw the morrow breaking as in a radiance dawn.

She saw its breaking in radiance, and she said, Tell me that you forgive him, now and always, always. Yes, yes, Mama, now, now and always. For he will never forgive, he will never forgive. No, no, but I forgive him, I forgive. forgive him. Even if he never forgives. Yes, yes, even if he never forgives. For he will never forgive, he will never forgive. No, but I forgive him. And I, dear, you forgive me, you forgive me. Yes, I forgive you everything, from first to last, your bitterness. Oh, I have long ceased to be bitter. Yes, yes, I forgive you,

everything, from first to last, or bitterness. Oh, I have long ceased to be bitter. Yes, I know that you had learned to understand. We could have become very fond of each other if. Yes, if. But it was not to be. Let us become fond of each other now. Love me, Constance, in your memory.

Yes, just as I shall continue to love you. There, just because we suffered through each other in this life, we shall now love each other. Yes, oh yes. Kiss me, my dear, and, and forgive the old man. Yes, even if he, yes, oh yes, never forgives, but he will never, he will never forgive. I forgive him, I forgive him. and all is well. Let him come in now, him and my child, my son, Henry, and him, the child, our child. Constance rose from her knees. She stumbled, sobbing across the dark room.

She groped for the door, opened it. The light of the lamp streamed in. "'But Mama is asking for you,' she stammered through her tears, for you and Henry and Addy. Death entered the room with them. End of Chapter 17. Chapter 18 of Twilight of the Souls by Louis Couperos. This Librivox recording is in the public domain. Constance and Henry returned to the Hague a week after Mrs. van der Velker's funeral.

Constance went straight to her mother. Oh, you mustn't leave me alone again so long. Mrs. Van Lauer complained, I can't do without you for so long. It's so dark, so gloomy when you're not here, my conny. Yes, yes, they all came to see me regularly, but they are not like you, dear. It seems they no longer understand me.

And when they're gone, I sit here feeling so lonely, so lonely. They're now all bothering me, wanting me to take a companion or to have Doreen to live with me, but I won't have anyone here. It's such a trouble. An extra person in the house means such a lot of trouble. I can't see through everything as I used to. I just sit here at my window.

So the old lady down there is dead. People are dying every day. I can't understand why I need remain. I am no use to any. now. I just sit here, giving all of you trouble. You all worry about me. You all have to come regularly to see how I am. I can't understand why I need go on living. It would be much better if I just died. There is nothing more to come for me. I have no illusions left. Not one. Even your boy, Connie. What an idea to want to be a doctor. How do we know.

if he's suited for it. It's a good thing you're back. I couldn't do without you. Is the old man over there going to remain all alone in that big house, just as I remained all alone here? No, Mama, he won't be alone. There's a cousin coming to live with him, you know, old Frula van der Velka.

No, I don't remember. I often muddled people and names. "'Cousin Betsy van der Velka?' "'No, I don't remember. "'She's coming to live with the old man. "'We would have liked him to have had a companion "'to keep house for him, "'because Cousin Betsy herself is so old.

"'A companion, a companion, "'you want everybody to have a companion, "'so the old man will be all alone.' "'No, Mama, the old cousin's coming. "'Which old cousin?' "'Cousin Betsy van der Velka. "'Who? "'Cousin Betsy, Mama.'

"'Oh, yes, cousin Betsy, and a companion.' "'No, not a companion.' "'Well, then he'll be well-looked after, "'with cousin Betsy and a companion. "'Better than I, I am here all by myself.' "'But that's not right. "'You must have someone with you. "'No companions for me, thank you.'

you. Or Doreen? So you're beginning with Doreen too. No, I won't have Doreen. She's too fidgety and restless for me, but she's out so much. No, she's fidgety and restless. It's not nice of me to say so dear, but really Doreen is too fidgety and restless, child. Oh, child, if you yourself could come and live with me. But, Mama, that would never do. Yes, with your husband and your boy. No, Mama, it really wouldn't do. Yes, it would. Yes, it would. With your husband and your boy, then I would put up with the extra trouble. No, Mama, really, it wouldn't do. Where's Dorine? No, no, I don't want Dorine. I want you. Why? I want you. I want Addy. I want youth around me. It's all so gloomy here. Doreen. Doreen's gloomy too. So will you come? Mama, really? You don't want to. I see you don't want to. You are all of you selfish. Children always are.

Why need I go on living? Dear Mama, do be reasonable. You say you would find Doreen too much trouble, and after all, there are three of us. Yes, three of you. Well, and the rest of the family? What about them? They wouldn't approve. It's none of their business to approve or disapprove. And my husband? Well, my husband. No, really, it wouldn't do. "'Yes, I see you don't want to come. You are all selfish alike.' "'No, it was not feasible.' Constance foresaw all the difficulties. "'The old woman still always moving aimlessly about the house in the mornings "'and coming upon a cigarette of van der Velkas, a book of Addis lying about,

"'a hundred trifles. Adolphine, Cato, Doreen, disapproving, beyond a doubt, that Constance of all people should come to live with her mother, Constance of all people, with Vanda Velka. No, it was not feasible because of all those trifles. And also, because of a strange feeling of delicacy, she did not want to come and live at a mamars with her husband, with Vanda Velka, long as it was since it had all happened. "'Very well, dear, don't,' said the old woman,

bitterly, and she nodded her head repeatedly in sad comprehension of all the disappointments of lonely, melancholy old age. Yes, yes, that's how it is, always, and so the old man, down there, is left all alone. Constance's heart shrank within her. She saw the older woman's dim eyes look vaguely into her own eyes, and she read in the vague glance, the uncertain. memory of things that had just been said. And, while the eyes gazed dimly, the plaintive voice went on lamenting, with that inward sighing,

a broken sound of broken strings, and with a keener note of bitterness through it, so that, with that voice, with that glance, the old woman suddenly aged into a semblance of her older sisters, Antitina, anti-Rena. Constance went home through a dismal, heavy rain, hurrying along under the shelter of her umbrella from which the drops fell in a steady

cataract. She could not shake off the gloomy anxiety that haunted her in these days, through which flashed strange premonitions and presentiments, and since she had been to Dreybergen, in response to the old woman's dying summons, she could no longer free herself from this haunting dread, as though it were all a magic web in which she was caught. Oh, what could be threatening now that the old woman yonder was dead? What sort of change would come looming up, day after day, gloomy day after gloomy day, in her small life, in the small lives around her? For herself, in the late aftermath of life, she had found a tiny grain of true philosophy.

Small, oh, so small, but very precious, and she did not think. of herself, because she believed that what might still come in her own life, she would be able to bear philosophically. Sometimes even, at such times, she would think of the worst that could happen to her if Addy was suddenly to die. In that case, perhaps, in that case alone, the grain would not be sufficient to enable her to bear it with philosophy. But for the rest, for the rest, she was no longer afraid of life. And yet, what were these vague terrors which chilled her soul, which enveloped her nowadays in that magic web of anxious speculation

concerning the future? Would she be involved or would others? Was it illness, money trouble, an accident, a catastrophe, or was it death? Was it to do with Addie or was it to do with her mother? Oh, she wanted to do it. to be prepared for anything. But what? What would it be? And these haunting terrors which gathered around her so menacingly, like a gloomy twilight, with all those ghostly premonitions and presentiments of what was coming, was it because the days themselves were so gloomy, because it was always raining out of

fateful skies? Why should there be a deeper gloom around her soul in these days than around others? perhaps hundreds and thousands of people. Was it not the reflection of that gloomy winter in and around her, and was not that reflection casting its gloom around all the people who were now, like herself, walking under dripping umbrellas, or else, like spectres looking with pallid faces out of their windows at another dark and dreary day? Oh, how vast! How immense it all was!

And how small were they all? To think that, if the sun happened to shine, she would perhaps think and feel quite differently. To think that possibly she was divining with a shudder, something of days and things to come, and went flying off to distant cloudlands, to all, and that possibly she was divining nothing. How ready people were to play with their emotions, their sensitiveness.

How ready they were to delude themselves that they had seen invisible things, that they had foretold the most profound secrets. No, she could foretell nothing. She saw nothing invisible, but still, argue as sensibly as she might. A haunting fear oppressed her. A chill shudder ran through her, as though she had brought something of death back with her from Dreybergen, as though its shadow continued to follow her,

indoors and out of doors, was it only because it was raining? Well, she was glad to be at home, to change her wet things, to slip into a teagown and warm herself by the fire, hark to the wind, howling round the house and down the lane, the wind that came tearing on from afar, that was far, wide and mysterious, wide and mysterious as the heavens, above houses small, as boxes, above people as insects small. How mighty was the wind! How often had she not thus listened to the wind, her mighty Dutch wind,

as though it would carry all sorts of things to her, or, not heeding her smallness, swoop right down upon her! What calamity was there that could happen! Addy brought home unexpectedly, an accident on his bicycle, run over by a motor car, murdered. Henry telling her that they were ruined, that he would have to work for his bread. He, who had never been able to work after his shattered career, the house on fire, at home, or its mamma's,

mamma dying. Oh, what thoughts of shuddering horror they all were, and of sombre misfortune and of death, always death. Something happening to one of the brothers or sisters, or to their children, for, in spite of everything, she was fond of all of them, they were still her brothers and sisters. Despite all the misunderstanding, the lack of harmony, the ill feeling, she was fond of all of them, felt herself to be of one blood with them. Oh, how lonely she was, and perhaps very soon,

she would have to be all alone like that, all her lifelong, without Mama dead, without Henry dead, without Adi, dead. She stared into the fire and shivered in its ruddy glow, while the shuddering horror gripped her in its sharp clutches. But a bell jangled loudly, and she felt a shock of apprehension passing through her. Her breath was almost a scream, with a bringing Addy home dead, Troucher opened the whole door. Thank goodness she heard his voice.

She sank back into her chair. The door of the room opened and he stood on the threshold laughing. I dare to come in, Mommy. I'm dripping wet. I'll go and change first. Did you ever see such weather? She smiled. He shut the door and she couldn't help it.

She began to sob. When he came down a quarter of an hour later, healthy, vigorous, smiling. He found her in tears. What is it, mummy? I don't know, dear. But why are you crying? Surely there must be something. No, it's nothing, it's nothing, I think. She leant against him. She told him how the dread horror was clutching at her. She was very much unstrung, and she felt as if something was going to happen, a great sorrow, a disaster, an accident, she didn't know what. She poured out her anxious soul to him, nestling in his arms.

It's too silly, Addy, I must try to be calmer. She became calmer under his steady gaze. Oh, what delightful eyes he had. As she looked into them, she became calmer. Addie, your eyes. What about them, mummy? They're growing lighter in colour. They are serious as always, but they're becoming lighter.

What's the matter with my eyes now? They've become grey. Oh, nonsense. Yes, they're turning grey, blue grey. He laughed at her a little. She remained with her head on his shoulder, looked into his eyes. She became quite calm now, gave a last deep sigh. Dear, listen, listen to his.

It's blowing. Yes, Mama. I'm afraid of the wind sometimes. And sometimes you love it. Yes, you're a very sensitive little mummy. I wonder, Addy, if I'm so strange because of a presentiment. A presentiment? Don't you believe in them? I don't know. I never have them. Are you awfully matter of fact, Addy? Or, I don't know, Mama. No, you're not matter of fact. It's very strange, but you have a magnetism about you, which matter of fact people never have. You calm one. When I lean against you, I grow calmer.

Listen, listen to it's blowing. Yes, it's very stormy. Let's listen to it together, Mama. Perhaps we shall hear something in the storm. She looked into his eyes. His eyes were smiling. she did not know if he was serious or joking. Yes, she said, nestling closer in his arms,

feeling that she still had him, that she had not yet lost him. Let us listen to the storm and see if we can hear anything, in the wind. And they remained still without speaking. The lamps were not lit, only the fire in the open half cast its glancing gleams and shadows on the walls. The wind tore on from very far away, out of mysterious cloud-laden skies. It shrieked round the house, rushed past the windows, howled in the chimney, spread its wide wings and flapped on through the clattering rain,

leaving its howl like a trail in the air. By the flickering firelight, playing upon their small souls, they listened attentively. He smiled, her eyes were wide and dark. staring. Translator's note, Fruella, the title born by the unmarried daughters of the Dutch noblemen. End of Chapter 18. Chapter 19 of Twilight of the Souls by Louis Cupertos. This Librivox recording is in the public domain. The next day, a Sunday, Constance felt a strange longing for youth and laughter,

for merry voices and sunny faces. Addy and his father had gone out early, trying the bicycles on the sodden roads, and she was so lonely, still obsessed by that unaccountable sense of depression, that she felt she must have laughter around her, that she must watch the romping of children, or she would be perpetually bursting into tears, as she took advantage of a lull in the rain to go to Adeline's in the Bancastrat. As she entered the house, it seemed to her that the sun was shining,

Adeline was sitting downstairs in the living room with the children round her. Marie, the eldest girl, was just 12. All the others followed her at regular intervals of age, like the steps of a staircase. Marie was a sort of little mother to the rest. She was a great help to Adeline with the three youngest, those with the ugly names, Jan, Pete, and Clasher. These were now six years, four and two, and they formed a little group within the three.

the big group, because Jan insisted on ruling over Clarsha and Pete, looking upon them as his vassals, imitating Papa's voice, playing at horses with Pete and Clasha, both very docile, while Jan was the tyrant, trying to impart a roar to his shrill little cock-crow of a voice, until Maricha had to come in between as a supreme referee, giving her decision in all sorts of difficult questions that arose out of the merest trifle. Adelaidec, ten and a half, was a delicate ailing child, mostly sitting very quietly close to Mama,

hiding in her skirts, a puny little thing, a great anxiety to her mother. And Adeline was uneasy too about Clasha, as the child remained very backward and dull. The uncles and aunts called it an idiot. But a merry little couple were hurdy and constant, Nine and eight years old, always together, adoring each other, good little flaxen-haired kiddies that they were.

Very babyish for their age, blending their resemblance to Papa and Mama is a one soft mixture of pink and white and gold, almost like a coloured picture, and seeming a couple of idyllic little figures by the side of the rough, sturdy elder brothers. For while Yan already was turbulent and tyrannical, Alex and Guy, were regular nuts, had become indifferent to Maricha's judicial decisions, no longer even submitted to Adeline's restraint, and had lost all sense of awe, except when the stairs creaked under Gherd's heavy footstep, or when he bellowed at them, though even then they knew secretly, with a knowing glance of mutual understanding that Papa might raise his voice, but never raised his hand, that when Mama decreed a punishment, he would say,

something to her in French, so that the punishment became very slight. And this precocious worldly wisdom had turned them in their little nursery world into two intractable, cheeky, swanking young reprobates, putting on big boy's airs, striking terror into little Kherdy and Constant, who would run away together and hide and play at mothers and fathers behind the sofa, standing a slant in the drawing room, chuckling quietly when Mama or Maricha looked for them and could not find them. But, however intractable, Alex and Guy were two handsome little fellows, with cheeky mouths but gentle eyes, dark eyes, the Van Loa eyes,

not their hard, but their soft eyes. And, when they were impudent and troublesome, with lips stuck out cheekily, but with those eyes full of dark, soft gentleness, Then Constance fell in love with them, spoilt them even more than Gerrit did, put up with everything from the rascals, even allowing the two great boys to hang all over her and ruffle her clothes and hair. This time too they rushed at her the moment she came in, and Constance, glad to see them so radiant, glad that everything became bright around her, as though the sun were shining, flung open her arms. But Adeline cried,

Alex, Guy, take care, Auntie's good cloak, boys, do take care, Auntie's beautiful hat. But neither Alex nor Guy had any regard for Auntie's good cloak or Auntie's beautiful hat, and Constance was so weak in their rather rough and disrespectful embrace, that she only laughed and laughed and laughed. Oh, sunshine, sunshine at last! passionately fond as she was of her own big son, this was what she needed in these days of rain and gloomy skies and gloomy feelings, this almost overwhelming sunshine,

this almost pitiless blaze of radiant youth, this rough gambling around her of what was young and healthy and bright, as if the shock brought her out of her gloomy depression. When the boys after behaving like young dogs jumping up to kiss, her face, were at last satisfied. She and Sober Maricha looked all through the house for Kherdi and Constant, who had purposely hidden themselves, and who, she knew, had crept behind the slanting sofa in the drawing-room. She would not find them too quickly, wished to prolong their enjoyment, called out in the drawing-room, but where can they be? Wherever can they be? Constant,

"'Herdie!' "'Then at last, the giggles of the little brother and sister "'behind the sofa made her look over the back. "'Here they are, here they are!' "'Oh, how young those children were! "'Excepting wise and sedate Maritia, "'mama's help, and perhaps quiet Adelaidea, "'how young they were!

"'Those two rascals! "'What children they were for their eleven and ten years! "'That little father and mother-pe. pair, hurdy and constant, what babies for their nine and eight. And then the nursery proper, Jan, tyrannising over Pete and Clasher, how pink and young and fresh and sunny it all was. Now those were real children, even though Clashire's laugh was very dull and silly. She had never known Addy like that. Addy had never had that sort of youth. No, his childhood had been spent amid the outbursts of temper of his father and mother,

amid their jealouses, amid scenes and tears, so that the child had never been a child. And yet, and yet, though he had grown up early, how well he had taken care of himself, and what kindly powers had watched over him, making him into their one great joy and happiness and consolation. But though this melancholy just passed through her, Still, the morning, that Sunday morning, had begun sunnily for her, with all that golden hair,

all those soft pink cheeks, all that mad, radiant gaiety. Had Constance forgot her gloomy depression, caused by she knew not what, in the glow of childish happiness in that living room? The stairs now groaned under a heavy tread. "'There's had it,' said Adeline. "'How late he is!' said Constance, stood laughing. "'Cerrit, how late you are!' she cried even before he opened the door.

And she was surprised that his step should sound so sluggish and heavy, accustomed as she was to hear him fill the whole house with the brisk noise of his movements. Sluggishly and heavily, his footsteps came down the passage. Then he slowly opened the door of the dining room, which was also the living room. He remained standing in the doorway. Ah, Constance, good morning. Good morning, Gerrit. How late you are, she repeated gaily.

You're in no hurry to get up on a Sunday, I see. But she was startled when she looked at him. Gerrit, dear, what's the matter? I'm feeling rotten, he said gloomily. No, children, don't worry, father. And he pushed aside the playful. rough hands of the two cheeky rascals, Alex and Guy. Gerrit hasn't been at all well for a day or two, said Adeline anxiously.

What is it, Gerrit? asked Constance, smiling her smile of a moment ago, when the sunny warmth of the children had made her smile through her own gloomy depression. I feel beastly rotten, he repeated gloomily. No, thanks. I don't want any breakfast. "'Haven't you been well for the last two days?' asked Constance. He looked at her with dull, glassy eyes. He thought of telling her with bitter irony that all his life he had not been well, but she would not have understood.

She would have believed that he was joking, that he was vexed about something. She would not have known. And besides, he did not want to hurt her either. She was so nice. He always looked at. upon her as the nicest of his sisters, though they had gone years without seeing each other. What a good thing it was that she had come back. She had been back to Holland three years now, his little sister. He was fond of her, his little sister. He had an almost mystic feeling for her,

the sympathy which has its origin in kinship, that sharing of the same blood, the same soul, a portion so mysteriously in the birth of brother and sister out of one and the same mother, by one and the same father. And he felt so clearly that she was his sister, that he loved her as something of himself, a part of himself, something of his own flesh and blood and soul, that he went up to her, laid his hand on her head. She had taken off her hat and her hair was all ruffled with the boy's romping,

and said to her, in a voice which he could not potter, raised to a roar and which broke faintly with emotion, It's good to see you, Sissy, with your dear kind face. I don't know about being unwelled child. I've had a couple of bad nights, that's all. But you sleep well as a rule? Yes, as a rule. And your appetite is good?

Yes, Connie, I have a good appetite as a rule. But I don't feel like breakfast this morning. Your face is so drawn. I shall be all right presently, he said, brightening up, and he struck his chest with his two hands. My old carcass can stand some knocking about. Cheret came home dripping wet two days ago, said Adeline. He had been standing on the front of the tram in a pelting rain

that he was wet to the skin. But, Gerrit, why did you do it? to get the wind in my face, sissy, and to catch cold. He laughed. There, don't worry about me. My old carcass, striking his chest, can stand some knocking about. But you're looking ill. Oh, rot.

Yes, you're looking ill. I want some air. The weather's not bad. It's not raining. It's only blowing fit to blow your head off. Are you a friend? of the wind, or will you come for a walk with your brother? Very well, Gerrit. But first, eat a nice little egg.

He gave a roar of laughter which made the whole room ring again. The children also laughed. They always laughed when Papa laughed like that, and the laughter gave courage to Gerdi, who had looked frightened at first. She crept up on Gerrit's knees, mad on being caressed, clung on to Gerrit, kissed him with tiny little kisses. and Alex and Guy hung, one on his arm, the other on his leg, while his Homeric laughter still rang long and loud. And his laughter never ceased.

He laughed till the servants peeped around the door and disappeared again perplexed. He laughed till all the children, the nine of them were laughing, for his laughter had tempted the three little ones, Jan the tyrant and his two small vassals, from the stairs where they were playing. He laughed till Adeline, the dear quiet little mother, also got a painful fit of giggling, which made her choke silently in herself.

And he could not stop. His laughter roared out and filled the house. Even a street boy out of doors flattened his nose against the window in an attempt to peer in and discover who was laughing like that inside. And at last, Geritz got up,

released himself from the three children, kissed Constance, and with a red face, tears in his eyes, and a mouth still distorted with merriment, he caught her two shoulders in his great hands, and said, looking deep into her eyes, "'Don't be angry, sissy, but I couldn't help it. I couldn't help it. You'll be the death of me with laughing, if you go on like that, and when you put on that kind little voice and order me to eat a nice little egg before you can sense to go for a walk with me. Oh dear, oh dear, I shall never get over it. Very well, all right, just to please you, but then, but then you must boil the nice little egg for me and put it before me.

Put my nice little egg before me. Constance was laughing too. The children all kept on laughing like mad, not really knowing what they were laughing at now that they were all laughing together. And Adeline, Adeline, Look, look, said Gerrit, pointing to his wife. Look!

And while Constance took the egg out of the boiler, she looked round at Adeline. The little little. mother was still overcome with her fit of silence giggling. The tears rolled down her cheeks. The children around her were screaming with the fun of it. I never in all my life, Connie, said Gerrit. Saw Lena laugh as she's laughing at that nice little egg of yours. And he snarted afresh. He roared. But she had put his plate in front of him. He now played the clown, took up his spoon, said in a pretty little voice that sounded

humorously in his great roaring throat. Thank you kindly, Constance, for your nice little egg. It's too sweet of you. And he nipped at his nice little egg with small, careful spoonfuls, pretending to be very weak and very fragile. And the children, seeing their big, burly father nipping at the nice little egg with dainting little movements were wild with delight, thought it's great fun of Papa. He had finished, and was ready for his walk with Constance.

Papa, may we come too? Do let us come too, Papa. No, he said bluntly. No, don't be such limpets. You're just like a pack of octopuses, winding one in their suckers. No, father wants to go out with his sister alone for once. and he went out alone with Constance, after she had managed to conceal the disorder of her hair under her hat and veil. Outside, she said to him, "'Cedit, how bright it all is in your house, how sunny, how happy.'

"'Yes,' he said. "'You have every reason to be thankful, Chedit.' "'Yes. Do you feel better now in the air?' "'Yes, especially after your nice little egg.' No, don't be silly, Gerrit. You don't look half as well as usual. I feel simply rotten, if you really want to know. Still? Yes, but it'll pass off.

Aye, I always sleep very well, and just because of that, a bad night upsets me. But that's an exception, isn't it? Yes, of course, it's an exception. Don't be anxious about me, Sissy. I have a hide like a rome. "'Rinoceros. I'm the Pachyderm of the family. I haven't got your dainty little constitution. "'I'm so glad when I come to see you, Gerrit. I always brighten up in your house.' "'You haven't been gloomy, surely. That's just what I have been, quite lately.'

"'And why, Connie?' "'I don't know, because of the weather.' "'Are you afraid of it? It's beginning to rain again. As long as it doesn't pour, we can go on walking. It does me good, especially the wind blowing about one. Do you like wind? Yes, I do, but... But what?

Sometimes I hear too much in it. My little fanciful sister of old. What do you hear in it? Gloomy things, melancholy things, but always very big things, whereas we ourselves are so small, so very small. People never change. You're just the little sister that you used to be, in the river, with your fairy tales. But what I hear in the wind is not a fairy tale. What do you hear? Life, the whole of life itself, things of the past, things of the future, and all big and tremendous.

When I listen to the wind, the past becomes immense, and the future tremendous, and I remain so small, so small, so small. What you remain, child, is a dreamer. No, I haven't remained so. I may have become one again. Yes, you have become one again. I recognise you like this absolutely, just as you were, as a slim, fair-haired little girl, the same little fairy-like vision. How long ago it all is, Connie, how everything melts away in our lives, how old we grow. But all your children, They keep you young. They all, they all belong to the future. Yes, if only I myself.

What? Nothing. What were you going to say? I was going to own up to something. I was going to confess to you. But why should I? It's better not. It would be very weak of me.

It's better not. It's better that I shouldn't speak. Gerrit. Gerrit, dear. Tell me. It's there. Is there? What? Is there anything? No. Is there anything threatening you? Why, no, child?

Aren't you well? Do you feel unhappy? Have you some big trouble? Tell me, Gerrit, tell me. I'm your sister, after all. Yes, you're my sister, the same flesh and blood, soul of my soul. No, there's nothing, Constance, there's nothing threatening. And there's no secret trouble. No, no secret trouble. Yes, I'm sure there is. No, old girl, it's only that I've slept badly the last night or two, and I feel rotten, that's all. But your health is good, isn't it?

Oh, dear, yes. There's nothing serious the matter. You're not seriously ill. No, no, certainly not. Then what is it? "'Nothing. No, no, I feel that you have a trouble of some kind. "'Heret, aren't you happy? Is there some private worry? Aren't you happy with Adeline?' "'Why, of course I am, Connie. She's awfully sweet. I'm very happy with her.'

"'Then what's wrong?' "'Nothing.' "'Yes, Gerrit, there's something wrong. Do tell me about it. Don't keep it to yourself.' Sorrow chokes us when we keep it in. No, it's not sorrow. It's, I don't know what it is. You don't know. No.

But there's something, you see. What is it? Constance, it's, it's... What? Constance, it's... An overpowering melancholy. An overpowering melancholy? Yes.

What about? About my... Myself. Yourself? Yes, because I'm rotten. Because you haven't felt well the last few days. Because I'm never well. She now thought that he was exaggerating, that he was joking, that he was pessimistical, hypercondriacal. And she said, why, Gerrit. He understood that she did not believe him, that she never would believe him. He laughed. Yes, he said. I've a gay old imagination, haven't I? Yes, I think you're imagining things a bit.

It's this confounded weather, you know. Yes, that makes people out of sorts. It doesn't affect children, fortunately. No, not children. When you see them presently, you'll, but you mustn't let our walk make you gloomy. Chedit, will you try to keep your mind off things and not to be melancholy? I had no idea that you.

you were like this. No, old girl, but what does any one of us know about the other? Not much, I admit. Each of us is a sealed book to the other, and yet you're fond of me and I of you, and you know nothing about me, or I about you. That's true. You know nothing of my secret self, and I know nothing of your secret self. No, she confessed softly, and she blushed and thought of the secret self.

the life that had blossomed late in her, blossomed into spring and summer, the life of which nobody knew. It has to be so, it can't be otherwise. We perceive so little of one another, in the words we exchange. I have often longed for a friend, with whom I could feel his secret self, and I mine. I never had a friend like that. Heard it, I did not know that you were so sensitive. No, I'm saying things to you which I never talk about. And I say them, feeling that it's no use saying them. And yet, you're my sister, you know.

Yes. I shall take you home now. I'm only dragging you through the mud and rain. The roads are soaked through. You'll be home in a minute or two. He brought her home. She rang the bell. Troucher open the door.

Is van der Velke in, do you think? Gerrit asked Constance. Yes, ma'am, Troucher answered. The master's upstairs. I'll just go up and see him. Gerrit ran up the stairs. I was forgetting, ma'am, there's a telegram come, said Troucher. A telegram?

She did not know what came over her, but she felt deadly afraid. The blood seemed to freeze round her heart. She took the telegram from Troucher, went into the drawing. drawing room and closed the door before breaking it open. Gerrit had only run up to say a word to Van der Velka. He had to go back home, for it was twelve o'clock, and getting on for lunchtime. Van der Velka saw him down the stairs.

Well, good-bye, old chap, said Gerrits genially, shaking hands with van der Velka. Constance, he cried, Constance. She did not answer. Constance, it called once more. The kitchen door was open. The mistress is in the drawing room, sir, said the servant.

Constance! He opened the door, but the door stuck, as though pushing against a body. What the devil! Gerritz began in consternation. They rushed in through the dining room, van der Velke, Geritz, the maid. Constance was lying against the door

in a dead feint with the telegram crumming. in her clenched hand. Paris. Henry, you dead. I'm in despair. Emily. End of chapter 19. Chapter 20 of the Twilight of the Souls by Louis Couperos.

This Librivox recording is in the public domain. It was a dismal evening at Mrs. Van Loers that Sunday, and yet Mama knew nothing. Together with Doreen, she had seen that, the maid set out the card tables, had seen, according to her custom, to the sandwiches, the cakes and the wine, which were invariably put out in the boudoir, under the portrait of her husband, the late Governor General. But the old lady was different from usual, and Doreen, looking very pale and apprehensive, gave a start of amazement when she asked,

Doreen, who's been moving papa's portrait? The old woman asked the question testily and peremptorily. But, Mama, it's been there for years. After Papa's death, you said you wouldn't have it always before your eyes in the drawing room, and it was moved in here. Who do you say moved it? Why, you yourself, Mama. I?

Yes, you. Oh, yes, said the old woman, remembering. "'Yes, yes, I remember. "'I only asked because it looks so out of place here, "'in the little room, and it's such a fine portrait.' "'Doreen said nothing more. "'Her leg shrewk beneath her, "'but she went on spreading out the cards.

"'Carroll and Cato arrived. "'How awful!' said Cato, pale in the face. "'We thought we had better come, for Mama's sake, didn't we Carol? Mama knows nothing, said Doreen, but we can't possibly keep it from her. Otto has gone to Barn to break the news to Bertha. The fancatsam has arrived.

No details yet, asked Adolphine. No, Doreen whispered nervously, seeing Mama approaching. How late you all are, grumbled the old woman. Why aren't Uncle Herman and Auntie Lott here, and why haven't Auntie Tina and Auntie Rina come yet? There was a moment's painful pause. But they haven't been coming for some time, Mama, said Adolphine gently. What do you say? Are they ill?

The old aunts haven't been for ever so long on Sunday evenings, said Cateau, with a great deal of. of pitying emphasis. Suddenly, Mrs. Van Loa seemed to remember, Yes, it was true. The sisters had not come on Sunday evenings for a long time. She nodded her head in a sense, with an air of knowing all about the sad things which happen in old age,

and which will happen also in the future that is still hidden from the children. But in her heart, she thought, There's something! and she seemed to be trying to gaze ahead, but she did not see it before her, did not see it before her vague eyes as she had seen the death of Henry's mother, yonder in a dark room at Trebergen, in a dark oak bedstead, behind dark green curtains. She felt that there was something that they had kept from her in order to spare her pain, but she did not see it as she had but lately seen other things which the children did not know.

It was as though her sight were growing dim and uncertain, as though she only guessed, only suspected things, and she would not ask what it was. If there was something, well, then her Sunday family evening could not help being dreary and silent. Adolphine's children no longer sat round the big table in the conservatory, the old lady did not understand why, did not see that they were growing up,

that the round games bored them. Only, as she looked at her empty room, she asked just one question, Where's Bertha? And where's Constance? This time Adolphine and Cato did not even trouble to remind Mama that Bertha was living at a barn. As for Auntie Lott, how could they tell her that the good soul had had a nervous breakdown after being told of Henry's sudden death, about which no one knew any details? Tuti arrived very late and said that Mama had a little headache. As for Constance,

not one of the children would have dared to say that she and van der Velka had gone to Paris by the nightmail at six o'clock, as soon as they could after Emily's telegram. Gerrit wanted to go with them, but he was ill and hardly said a word to Adeline about the telegram when he returned home from the Kerkoff-Larn. He had got into bed, shivered, "'thinking that he had a feverish attack,

"'influencer or something. "'The daughters also thought it's better not to tell mamma "'that Kerit was ill, "'and Mama did not even ask after Heart, "'though she missed him and Adeline, "'and thought that her rooms looked very empty. "'Where could they be?' the old woman wondered. "'None of birth as little tribe.

"'The old sister's not there, Constance not there, "'Hedit's not there. "'Auntilot not there. "'Where were they all?' "'The old woman kept wondering. "'How big her rooms looked. "'What a shivery feeling the card tables gave her. "'With the markers,

"'the card spread out in an S. "'Well, if there were no children left, "'it was not worthwhile having the table put out "'for the round games in the conservatory, "'at least, not until Geditz children were bigger, "'until a new warmth. surrounded her on her poor Sunday evenings. And what was the use of ordering such a lot of cakes

if there was nobody there to eat them? And it was very strange, but this evening, now that her rooms were so empty, she grew very weary of those who were there, Adolphine, Cato, Flotcher and Eichorhoff, very tired. She felt her face becoming drawn and haggard, her drooping eyelids twitching over her dim eyes,

and her heavily vain hands trembling in her lap with utter weariness. She did not speak, only nodded, the wise nod of old age, knowing that old age spells sadness. She only nodded, longing for them to go. They were uncomfortable, they whispered together, their faces were pale. They sat there staring, in such a strange spectral way, as if something dreadful had happened

or was going to happen. Had the servants made up the fires so badly? Was it so bitterly cold, so creepily chilly in her rooms that she felt shivers all down her old bent back? And when the children, at last, earlier than usual, took leave of her, still with that same spectral stare,

as though they were looking at something dreadful that had happened or was going to happen, she felt inclined to say to them that she was getting too old now to keep up her Sunday evenings. She had it on her lips to say as much to flauch her, to cateau, to Adolphine, but to pity for them all, and especially for herself, restrained her, and she did not say it. On the contrary, she said very wearily, "'Well, I hope that you will be more particular about coming next Sunday. "'All of you, all of you. "'I want you all here.

"'I want to have you all around me.' "'Then they left her alone, earlier than usual, "'and the old woman did not ring at once for the servants to put out the lights to go to bed, "'but first wandered for a little while longer through her large, empty, still brightly-lit room, how much had changed in the many, many years that very slowly accumulated about her and seemed to bury her under their grey mounds. Sometimes it seemed to her as if nothing had changed, as if the Sunday evenings always remained the same,

even though this or that one might be absent for one reason or another. But sometimes, as today, it seemed to her as if everything, everything had changed, with hardly perceptible changes. Did she alone remain unchanged? She had now reached the little boudoir. Hardly any of the cakes had been touched. Above them hung the fine portrait of her husband in the gold-laced uniform with the orders.

He was dead, and with him all their grandeur, which she had learnt to love because of him, through him. She wandered back to the other rooms. There were portraits on the walls, photographs in frames on the tables and mantelpieces. Dead was the old family doctor, as good as dead her two old sisters. Dead was Van Narchel,

as good as dead bertha, now so far away. Hunt Lott, she still remained, she still remained, bearing up bravely in spite of financial, disaster. Then the children, they were all dying off, for surely it was tantamount to that, when they were becoming more and more remote from her. Carol, Adolphine, Ernst, even Paul, and Doreen her youngest. There was only Constance, and had it perhaps, and the grandchildren, France in Java, Emily and Henry in Paris.

Oh, God, what were they doing in Paris? Oh, God, what was it? What was the matter with them? For she suddenly saw the boy, white as a corpse, with his clothes open, and a deep gaping wound above his heart, sending a stream of purple blood from his lung, while he lay in the last agonies of death. Why did she see it? This strange vision of a second or two. It couldn't be true, yet it's filled her with anxiety. And in sad understanding, she nodded her old head with the dim eyes which were suddenly seeing visions more clearly than reality, until the time when they would see nothing, numbed by the years which were slowly accumulating about her, why did she see it?

And amid the emptiness of her brightly lit drawing-room, a sort of roar came to her from the distance. from the distance outside the room, the distance outside the house, the distance outside the night, the very distant distance of eternity, the eternity whence all the things of the future come, a roar so overwhelming that it seemed to come from a supernatural sea, in which the poor, trembling old woman was drowned, drowned with all her vanity, and all her unimportant sorrow, a sea in which her very small, small soul was drowned, swallowed up like the various atom in the roaring, roaring waves.

A roar whose voice told her that it was coming, that it was coming, the great sorrow, the thing before which she trembled with fear because she had long foreseen it, and because it would be so heavy for her, her to bear now that she was too old and too weary to bear any more sorrow. And with an unconscious gesture she raised her trembling old hands and prayed mechanically. Oh, God, no more, no more!

Why must fate be like that? So heavy, so ruthless and crushing. Why had it not all come earlier, including the thing which I had, advanced with such a threatening roar, and under which she, too weary now, too weak and too old, would succumb when it passed over her, when it reached her at last out of the roaring, threatening, distant, distant eternity, wherein all the things of the future are born. But the roar of that doom and her knowledge of it lasted no longer than the second, and when the second was passed, there was nothing around her but the empty,

see brightly lit rooms. It was eleven o'clock. The children had all gone home as she rang for the servants to put out the lights. To go to bed, duly observant of the small needs of her very small life, in spite of all those supernatural things

which threatened from afar, out of eternity. Leaving the maids occupied in the empty room where they turned off the gas in the chandelier, The old woman slowly climbed the stairs, nodding her old head in bitter comprehension, knowing too well, alas, that the great sorrow would come, even though, trembling with fear, she prayed, Oh God, oh God, no more, no more!

End of Chapter 20. Chapter 21 of the Twilight of the Souls by Louis Cupertus. This Librivox recording is in the public domain. Are you going out, Gerit? asked Dadaleen. She was surprised to see him come down the stairs, dressed in uniform. He had spent the morning in bed, but he felt better now, and a feverish excitement acted like a spur. He said in answer to his wife's question that he was better,

played for a moment with Gerdi, took his lunch standing. and then hurried out of the house and rushed through a parade at barracks where he was not expected. The fever, which he still felt sending shivers through his great body, drove him out of barracks again, and he walked to the Kirchof Lahn and asked Troucher if there was any news of her master or mistress, if Master Addy had had a telegram from Paris, but Troucher didn't know. Then he tore off like one possessed, first to Otto and Frills. Francis's house, where he found Francis and Louise, both sick with waiting.

Otto had gone to barn, to break the news to Bertha. He could not stay with the two women, Francis wandering from room to room, crying helplessly, Louise, calmer, looking after the children, the entire care of whom she had taken on herself since she had come to live with Otto, and says Francis had become such an invalid. said. Cherit could not possibly stay. With long strides he flew to the Alexander Strat, to Mama, who was glad to see him well again, after his two days' illness. He found Arine with her, Adolphine called, followed by Cato, all obeying an impulse not to leave the old woman alone in these days, when, at any moment Van der Velka, Constance and Emily might arrive from Paris,

bringing home the body of Henry, of whose death no one had telegraphed any details, much to the indignation of Adolphine and Cato. But when Auntie Lott came in, her small eyes red and swollen with weeping, and cried, Oh dear, Cassian! An exclamation had once hushed by the children, an exclamation which Mama, staring dimly into space, failed to understand.

and Gerrit could no longer endure it among all those overwrought women, and, convinced that Mama did not even yet know that Constance and Van de Velka had gone to Paris, convinced that the sisters had not even paved the way by telling her that Henry was seriously ill, he cleared out suddenly, without saying goodbye, had rushed into the open air, down the street, into the woods, gasping for breath. What was it? What could it be? Hanging in the air! The cloud seemed to be bending over the town in pity,

an immense yearning pity, which turned into a desperate melancholy while Chedit hurried along with his great strides. The wintry trees lifted their crowns of branches in melancholy despair, the rooks called and circled in swarms, the bells of the tram cars tinkled as though muffled in black crape. The few pedestrians walked stiffly and unnatural, He met, ague-stricken, black-clad figures with sinister spectral faces.

They passed him like so many ghosts, and all around him, in the vistas of the woods, rose a clammy mist, in which every outline of houses, trees, and people, was blurred into a shadowy unreality. And it seemed to Heer it, as if he alone were real and possessed a body, and he ran and rushed through the spectral landscape, through the hollow avenues of death. What was it in the air? Nothing, nothing extraordinary. It was winter in Holland, and the people, the people had nothing extraordinary about them. They walked in thick coats and cloaks, with their hands in their pockets, because it was cold, and because the mist was cold and raw, their eyes looked fixed, their lips and noses drawn and pinched,

and they bore themselves rigidly and spectrally when they came towards him out of the fog, and passed him with those shadowy and unreal figures. And, with all sorts of fever-borne images whirling before his eyes, like shining willer the wisps in that morning mist, his thoughts touched hastily on every sort of subject. He saw the barracks before him, Pauline, the Paris train and Constance and van der Velka in a compartment with Henry's coffin between them, Auntilotte and Mama, Bertha at Barn.

He saw his boyhood at Boutenzoch, the foaming river, all his bright-haired children. He saw a worm, big as a dragon, with bristles like lances, sticking straight out of its dragon's back. He was still feverish and had been unwise to get up and go out, but he could not have stayed in bed, he could not have done it. His feverish excitement had driven him to the barracks, to his mother, and to, where was he going? Was he going to Schaveningen? And why was he going through the woods like that? What was it that constantly impelled him to keep to the right, to turn up the paths on the right, as though he were making for the newer vague. What did he want on the right?

Suddenly, as a counter-agent to his fever, he turned to the left, but on coming to a crossroad, he wandered off to the right again, helplessly, as if he had forgotten the way. There was the ornamental water, with the newer vague behind it. There lay the ponds, like two dull weather-wornments, under the sullen pity of the skies, and the rather tame landscape of the woods, with its wreath of dunes, became cruel, a tragic pool surrounded by all that avenue of chill death, which seemed to be creeping through the wintry air.

But what was it in the air? Why, there was nothing, nothing but the ornamental water, in a misty haze, the few villas around it, looming vaguely out of the fog, no one of the fog, pedestrians at all, nothing but the familiar, everyday, usual things. Then what impelled him to wander so aimlessly, past the ornamental water, to the newer vague? Why were those ponds like tragic pools? Was it not as though pale faces stared out of them? Out of those tragic pools, pale white faces of women, multiplied a hundredfold by strange reflections, eddies of white faces with dank, plastered hair, and dying eyes which gleamed. Yes, yes, he was in a fever. He had been unwise to go out in that chill morning mist,

but it was rotten to be ill, and he was never ill. He had never said that he was ill. He was a fellow who could stand some knocking about, but for all that he was feverish, Otherwise he would not have seen the ornamental water as a tragic pool with the white faces of mermaids. Lord, how cold and shivery the mermaids must feel down there in those chilly silence pools. Their dying eyes just gleaming up with a single spark. Were they dead or alive the chilly mermaids? Were their eyes dying or were they ogling? How strangely they were all reflected

Until they became as a thousand mermaids Until their faces blossomed Like white flowers of death above the light film of ice Coating the pool How chill and cold they were The poor dead ogling mermaids Dead? Were they dead? Were they ogling and laughing? With eyes of gold?

He shivered as a little bit. though ice-cold water were trickling down his spine, and he wrapped himself closely in his military greatcoat. He felt something hard in his breast pocket, a square piece of cardboard. Yes, he had been carrying that about for ever so long, and yet, and yet he couldn't do it. It was the photograph of his children, the latest group taken from Mama's last birthday. for weeks he had been carrying it about in his pocket, in an envelope with an address on it, and yet, yet he couldn't send it or hand it in at her door, the portrait of all his children. I expect their charming kiddies, Gerrit.

God, how could she have asked it? How could she have asked it, as though to drive him mad? Fy-oh, how cold it was! He looked fearsomely at the mermaids. No, no, there was nothing, nothing but the chilly pool. He was in a high fever, that's what it was. God, how could she ask such a thing? Still, still, still, it was over.

She was no longer the girl she was. She was finished with, done for. She had lain in his arms like a corpse, tired of her own kisses. broken by his embrace, white as a sheet. Done for. Lord, how rotten to be done for, and still so young. A young woman. Done for, like a defective machine.

Lord, how rotten. No, he couldn't give that photograph of all his children, to a lighter love. He couldn't do it. If she had only asked for a necklace or some such gourd, he would have managed somehow out of his poverty to buy her a nice keepsake. How raw and cold it was!

The willer the wisps of all sorts of images shone in front of him and through them through the flames, the flying Paris Express, with the compartment, the coffin, van der Velka, Constance, two motionless figures. And yet it was bitterly, clamily cold, He was chilled to his marrow, and a great hairy dragon split its beastly more to lick that chilled marrow with a fiery tongue. How big the filthy brute had grown! It was no longer inside him. It was all around him now. It filled the air with its wriggling body.

It lifted its tail among the wintry boughs, and its tongue of fire licked and had its marrow, and under that marrow, How strange! He was simply freezing. Brr! Blr! Lord, how he was shivering. What a fever he was in. Home! Home!

To bed. Oh, how good to get into bed. Nice and warm. Nice and warm. Still better to be nice and warm in women's arms. No kissing. Just sleeping. Nice and warm.

Brough. Brough. Lord, Lord, Lord, the water pouring down his back. Never in his life had he shivered like that. How hard that photograph of his children was. He felt it on his heart like a plank. How long had he been carrying it about with him? Br, brr!

He might just as well have let her have it. It was the only thing she had asked him for. Money. He had never given her. Only fifteen gilders. "'Br, B'r, fifth, Bhr, teen, B'r, Gilders.' "'Come, why not do it now? Just hand it in at her door.

"'Br, and then, B'r, and then, "'Br, home to bed, nice and warm in bed.' The thought suddenly took definite shape, and it drove him on along the canal. Here also the mist hung like a haze over the water and the meadows on the other side, and, shivering and shuddering under the fiery lick of the dragon's tongue, Gerrit hurried to the Frederick Strat. That was where she lived. That was where he had been so often lately, until that last time

when she had begged him not to come back again, and to give her as a keepsake the portrait, the portrait of his children. He would leave it now at the door. He had taken it in his hand, because it lay like a plank on his heart, and her name was on the envelope. Br, and it went quickly, and then, brr, nice and warm in bed. The landlady opened the door. Would you please give this to the young lady?

He meant to shove the envelope into the woman's hand, and then, brr, br, br, br, home, to bed, warm, warm. Don't you know then where the young lady is, sir? Where she is? Where she's gone to? Has she gone? She didn't come home yesterday afternoon.

I don't say I'm anxious, but still, she always used to come home of an evening. She owes me some money, but she hasn't run away, for everything's been left as it was upstairs, her clothes, her bits of jewellery. Perhaps she's out of town. Perhaps, only she's taken nothing with her.

Perhaps, all the same. "'Yes, it's possible, so I'm to give her the envelope when she comes.' "'Yes, or, no, no, give it to me. I'll see to it myself. "'Or, no, you'd better give it to her when she comes back. "'No, after all, I'll see to it.' He stuffed the envelope into his pocket, went off. "'Br, it lay on his chest like a plank. "'Where could she be gone to?'

Where was Pauline gone to? Had she got out of town? Why hadn't he simply left the envelope? Well, you never knew. If she didn't come back, it would be there, with the photograph of his children. She'd probably cleared out. Yes, she had probably cleared out, with her rich young fellow.

Well, he, whoever he was, wouldn't remember her as he remembered her. In the old days? "'Brrh! Lord! How he was shivering! "'Oh, to be in bed!' "'When could Constance and van der Vel could be back? "'Oh, the express! Oh, the coffin! "'Oh, the fiery lick of the dragon "'whose great hairy body filled the whole grey sky with its wriggling!'

"'He turned down the Jarvis-thratt. "'He wanted to hurry home. "'His teeth were chattering. He felt as if ice-cold water was dripping from him, while the confounded brute sucked his marrow with long, fiery licks of its tong. Near the Schelpkada, he met a little group of four or five policemen. Rough words sounded loud, their words sounded so loud through the unreality of the mist, that they woke him out of a walking sleep,

out of his dream of the dragon beast with the stiff bristles. She was quart blue! he heard one of them say. They were striding along, talking loudly, as if something startling had happened. Gerrit suddenly stood rooted to the ground. Who is blue? He asked in a horse bellow.

The policeman saluted, Sir, who is blue? Belowed Gerrit. A woman, sir. A woman who drowned herself last night in a canal. A woman? Yes, sir. My mate here was the first to see the body

when it was floating with a face out of the water. Then he came and told me, and we went to fetch the drag. It was a young woman. And she was quite blue, you say? Yes, sir, and all bloated. She'd swallowed a lot of water. We took the body to the cemetery near the woods,

and we're on our way to the commissary. To the cemetery? Yes, sir. The men saluted. Sir. She was quite blue. "'Hedit repeated to himself, and he hurried on at a jog-trot. "'Boh, to be in bed.

"'He wanted to get to bed. "'He was as cold as that woman must have been last night, "'floating in the water, "'until her face blossomed up, "'like a phantom flower of death. "'Boh, icy cold water. "'Wasn't he walking beside icy cold water? "'Twenty minutes ago?

hadn't it seemed to him that the whole tame landscape in its wreath of dunes had melted away into a hazy unreality with those ghostly villas and trees? And the ponds, like tragic pools, in which were mirrored the motionless, low, grey skies, full of the wriggling of his giant worm, until the faces of the mermaids, with wet plastered hair and gold gleaming eyes, had risen up like dead flowers, water-lilies of death, and ogled him with the last quiver of their dying eyes. Oh, the Paris Express, oh, what a fever he was in. He must go quick to bed now, but before he went he would just call in at the Kerkoff-Lahn and ask if there was no telegram from van der Velka and Constance.

But how cold he felt, and how he was shivering. Buh, br-bh. It was as though his legs moved independently of his will, propelled by alien instincts, by energies outside himself. For his legs moved healthily, sturdily and quickly, with the click-clack of his sword knocking against his thigh, while above those sturdy legs his body shivered in the clutch of the monster which licked and licked with fiery dabs of its tongue

and above his body towered his head colossally large with vertigoes whirling like tangible circles around the huge head in which he seemed to be carrying a heavy lump of brains from it they're shot forth the strangest dreams and these dreams, together with the contortions of the monster, filled the whole grey sky until everything became one great dream. All that town of unknown streets, houses, people who bowed and nodded to him, a couple of hussars who saluted, a couple of officers whom he knew and to whom he waved.

"'Bonjour! Bonjour!' And in the singular dreaming and waking and suffering, and walking. He knew things which nobody had told him, knew them for certain, knew that a woman had drowned herself last night in Paris, in the lake in the Bois, knew that van der Velka and Constance had gone to fetch her body, and were now bringing it back to him in a rushing express train, but a train that came rushing through the sky on whirling aerial rails, cutting through the contortions of a huge snake thing, which wriggled round. the clouds and filled the whole sky.

Oh, how full the sky was! For round the snake, wriggled like corkscrews the whirling rails, all a slant and askew, tangled into iron spirals, and the express, in which van der Velka and Constance sat with a coffin between them, containing a woman's blue corpse, had to follow all those turns and came rushing and puffing along them, constantly curving, round its own track and covering them a thousand times, as though the aerial express were climbing and descending, endless wriggling corkscrews.

Then the rails and the dragon coils were all tangled together, and the rails became dragon coils, and the express flew and flew and flew along the twisting dragon thing, flew along every curve of its tail. The train became a toy train. The dragon was enormous, and filled the firmament. The town underneath was a toy town. And Gerrit walked and walked with hurrying legs, and his head towered colossally large, and his brains became like heavy clouds.

He saw his lump of brains massing and curling clouds outside him. Nevertheless, he was propelled by instincts and energies of assured consciousness, for when he turned down the Kirchoflarn and left the Kerkhoff, the cemetery behind him on one side, he knew quite well that there lay in it a blue woman who had been dragged out of the canal by policemen. But he also knew, with equal certainty, that up in the sky above,

the express flew and flew over the body of his dragon and along its every curve. And he also knew that he was now standing outside van der Velka's villa, so small a house, such a toy house, that Heard's head stuck out above the roof of it, and that his own voice sounded to him like a distant thunder, as he asked the person who opened the door, Telegram? From your master and mistress?

Telegram? He did not at once recognise who was at the door, nor at once understand the reply. Telegram, telegram, he repeated, and the thunder of his voice sounded distant and dull, compared with the rattle of the express train right through the sky. What do you say? he now repeated. What do you say? Uncle, are you ill? asked Daddy.

Ill? Ill? No, I'm not ill, my boy, but telegram, telegram? Papa and Mama will be back tomorrow morning. They're bringing Henry's body with them, Uncle, and they're bringing Emily, and I have been to the undertakers to arrange to have. have the body fetched at the station at once. I've seen to everything, and I must go to all the uncles now, to Uncle Carol and Uncle Satsima. I've telegraphed to Otto. I don't know if Aunt Bertha will come or not. It's very sad, uncle, and it'll be very sad for Grandmamma when she knows everything. Henry, Henry was murdered. He was drunk, it seems, and

he drowned himself, and he was quite blue. No, uncle. He was murdered, stabbed with a dagger. Mama is bearing up, Papa writes, but she is terribly overwrought, on Emily's account also. Emily is quite beside herself. Papa fortunately is keeping calm. He's doing all that has to be done. He's been to the legation.

But, Uncle, you're not at all well. You're shivering. You've caught a chill. Wanted you to go home and get into bed? Yes, yes, I'm going home. Then you'll be better in the morning. Yes, of course, of course. I shall be better.

Then will you come to the station too, early tomorrow morning, and meet the train from Paris? Tomorrow morning, early. Yes, certainly, certainly. You oughtn't to have gone out. No, no, but I'm going home now. Going to bed. Goodbye. Tomorrow morning, early.

Goodbye, uncle. "'Herit went away. "'Above the woods on one side, "'the low sky sank lower and lower, "'heavy with grey clouds. "'Such heavy grey clouds "'that they did not seem light enough "'to continue hovering there,

"'seemed bound to fall. "'And to Chedit they were "'in the dim hues of his fevered vision, "'like purple pieces falling from the dragon's body "'which was cut up by the express. "'The whole sky was full, full of purple dragon's blood, and it's now streamed down like pouring rain. The blood streamed in a violence downpour,

had appeared intent upon drowning everything. Kedit had now turned in the direction of the cemetery, and impelled by instincts and forces outside himself, he walked in, and, vaguely, asked the porter some question, he did not know what. The man seemed to understand him, however, and led the way, Gerrit followed. Br, brr!

Nevertheless, it was as though his fever abated, and, in that sudden cooling, he all at once felt and knew the truth. It must be so, it was she, the water, the policeman, she, who else could it be? He walked on, following the porter. On either side the silent-court. graves with their tombstones, the lettering blurred and melancholy in the rain.

Yonder on the left, the family grave. Gerrit recognized it in the purple rain of dragon's blood, a sombre mausoleum of brick, like a small house, and it looked larger to him than the toy villa of just now. What a huge building it was, that family tomb of theirs. It was like a great palace. It would be able to contain all their dead within its walls. For the present, Papa was living alone there, quietly, but he was waiting, waiting for all of them, waiting for all of them, until the shadows had deepened into thick darkness around all of them, and they came to him in that huge, sepulchral palace. Lord, Lord, how small he was now! He was walking like a dwarf

past the tomb, which stuck his steeple into the clouds, high as a cathedral. What was that strangeness in the air? How long had he been walking? Was life no longer ordinary? Were there not, as usual, houses, people, things, the barracks, his children, Adeline? Who was that man who went before and led the way? Was it a real man that water, or was it a dead man walking? Wasn't everything dead here? Was it morning or was it evening? Was it alive or death? Was he alive or was he dead?

Br, how cold he felt again. Was that the cold of death? What was this building which they now entered? What a huge place? Was it a church or was it only a tomb? Where was he? And why was he alone? Alone with that dead man?

That ghost? showing him the way. Where an earth was Constance, and where was Vandavilca? Hadn't they brought it back from Paris, Pauline's blue body? Was that Pauline? The coffin was open, covered only with a sheet. He lifted it, the sheet. Br! Br! Br! How cold he was! He remembered. Paris. Yes, yes. He remembered. Paris. poor fellow, poor Henry. But this wasn't Henry. Who was it? Who could it be? Wasn't it Henry, the policeman found? What had become of those policemen? When was it he met some policeman? It was years since he met those policemen, and her body had turned quite blue. What was the matter now?

What was that porter saying? hovering round him like a ghost? Yes, everything was dead. for the shivering cold he felt could only be the cold shiver of death. Blue? Was she blue? The man lifted a corner of the sheet. Kedit saw a face, pale as that of a mermaid, whose features had blossomed up out of the icy stillness of a tragic pool. The eyes were open. What sad golden eyes those were!

Had they not always laughed? with golden gleams of mockery. Then why did he now for the first time see them weeping? In death? See them mournfully staring. In death? Had they never laughed? Had they always gazed mournfully,

even though they gleamed golden and mocked, or seemed to, seem to? Then what was real? Was everything? Was everything dead then? Did he, dead, want to bring her his gift? What she had asked for so strangely, the portrait, the portrait of his children. He had it here, he felt it lying on his chest, hard and heavy, like a plank.

He had it here. Gerrit, dear, are you coming? Who was calling him from so very far away? Was it his sister, his favourite sister? Come along, Gerrit. Who were those calling him away from that woman? What were those voices which he vaguely recognised? Was it not the voice of his favourite sister?

Was it not the voice of her husband, of the two of them, who had brought Pauline's body back from Paris? Yes, he recognised them. It was. Come on, Gerrit, old man, you're not well. What are you doing here beside this woman, beside this woman, beside this corpse. She's all blue, drowned in the lake in the Bada Bologna.

Did you know the woman? Yes, yes, he had known the woman. Come along, old chap. Gerrit, dear, won't you come? Constance, whispered Gerrit. You brought her from Paris. Beg pardon, sir, asked the porter. Yes, there she lies.

There she lies. dead. Gerrit, come away, Heret, come away, cried the voices. Lay your flowers over her now. Constance, lay your flowers over her. She is lying, so cold and all alone, that it is all so big here, big as a church. She is lying, as if in a cold, damp church.

Lay flowers beside her. What do you say, sir? Yes, lay flowers beside her. Lay flowers beside her, Constance. Won't you come away now? Yes, yes, I'm coming. There she lay, covered all over with the sheet. She was nothing but a blue motionless woman's shape under a sheet.

Now flowers lay over the sheet, all the white flowers of his imagination, now his fingers tore into little pieces the plank which he carried on his heart and strewed them in between the flowers, into such little, little pieces that they were as the petals of flowers, and nothing more, over the woman. The voices called him, Yes, yes, I'm coming, I'm coming!

The voices lured him home to bed, and he jogged on through the streets, reigning with dragon's blood. When he reached home, Adeline at once sent for the doctor. It was typhoid fever. End of Chapter 21. Chapter 22 of the Twilight of the Souls by Louis Cuperus. This Librivox recording is in the public domain.

Next morning, in a mist, a drizzly mist, the relations met at the railway station, Otto van Nakhl, Karel, Van Satsma, Uncle Royvana, just back from India, Paul, Adi. They moved about in the waiting room on the platform with gloomy faces and upturned coat collars, waiting for the train which was late, which would not arrive for another quarter of an hour or 20 minutes. Does Grandmama know about it yet? Uncle Royvina asked Daddy. No, uncle. No one liked to take. Tell her. I believe the uncles and aunts would really prefer to keep it from her altogether.

That's impossible. I think it would be very difficult, uncle. Grandmama might hear it from an outsider. She has friends who call to see her. Is Emily coming? Yes, uncle. She'll stay with us. Is Uncle Gerrit's very ill? Yes, uncle, very ill indeed. Does Grandmama know he's ill? No. The children are now all out of the house, aren't they? We've got Alex and Guy with us. And we have Adelaidecha, Chardy and Constant. The three little ones are at Otto's. Louise came and fetched them.

Marietta is with Aunt Adolphine. Has Aunt Adelene anyone to help her? There are two male nurses, Uncle. Uncle Helet is very violent in his delirium. Orta at the train to be here soon? It's overdue now. It's a very sad affair. and how people will talk.

Yes, how people will talk. Lord, Lord, how they're going to talk. Here comes the train, uncle. The train steamed slowly into the station, like a grey ghost of a train, through the ghostly drizzling mist, and the waiting relations saw Constance Fandervelka and Emily get out,

Emily leaning heavily upon Constance. Then came the dreary, dreary task. of taking possession of the coffin. The hearse was waiting outside, and it all went as in a dream in the ghostly drizzling mist. How people will talk, Uncle Royvenow whispered to Carol and Van Satima,

with whom he was sitting in the second coach. Yes, it's a damned rotten business. It's not over-respectable, having a nephew who becomes a clown. And then, it seems, goes and gets murdered in Paris. For a girl? Yes, some obscure story about a girl in Paris.

I thought he had committed suicide. We really don't know anything. Constance wrote no particulars. In any case, it's not over-respectable. I call it a damned rotten business. Constance has gone on ahead with Emily. Yes, what a sight Emily looked. Very odd that sister and brother.

Yes, and it's a bit. It was because of him that she left her husband, and now, no doubt, through his own imprudence, stabbed, I suppose. Unless he committed suicide. Van Ravan, after all, was a decent fellow. Van Ravan, I believe you. Van Ravon was a very decent fellow. Those young Van Nargel's never had a sensible bringing up.

No, I bring my boys up very differently. Ah, but then they're fine boys. Is Van der Velka in the first coach? Yes, with Otto, Paul and Addie. Then why did they put us in the second coach? Perhaps it was a mistake. I dare say, but it's not the thing. Uncle ought to be in the first coach.

Yes, and you too, Carol. Yes, and you too, Satima, of course. Well, I dare say it's a mistake. The thing wasn't arranged. No, but when van der Velka has to arrange a thing, It was that young bounder who arranged things. Addie? Of course. Oh, so that young bounder arranged things.

Look here, what are we to say to Mama? Well, I don't intend to mention it, for that matter. I know nothing. Nor I, the women had better do it. But they're much too upset. The best thing will be not to say anything. Yes, it's best not to say anything to Mama. Lord, what a doubt.

day. It's half to ride for an hour in this weather. It's a foot space, behind the body of an undergraduate who's been sent down from Leiden, and who must needs run away to Paris with his sister and become a circus clown. And go getting murdered into the bargain. But we mustn't tell anybody that. No, no, we won't speak about it. We'll merely say that he was taken ill. After all, it's a rotten incident for us. Yes, it's very rotten for us. Lord, Lord, how people will jabber. Of course they will.

Of course they will. If things continue like this, I shall have to leave the Hague, said Carol. Cateau said so too. He copied his wife's voice. He always copied her voice unconsciously when he talked about her. Are we nearly there? No such luck. Lord, what a day!

How people will talk! The carriage containing Constance had driven on ahead of the procession. Emily leant against her feebly and listlessly, without speaking or hearing. When they approached the Kerkof-Lahn, Emily said, "'Auntie, it's just stupid chance. What, dear, is this life? My life has never been anything but stupid chance. The little pleasure I had and the sorrow was all stupid chance.

I am now so miserable and it's all, all stupid chance. Oh, Auntie, I shall never be able to live. Not now, when Henry's death will always, will always haunt me like an accusing ghost. Auntie, do other people have so much stupid chance in their lives? If I hadn't gone to Paris, if Henry had not, oh, I can't say it, I can't say it. Auntie, we shall never know. It's too awful what's happened. I can never tell you what I think.

My darling, I suspect it. Oh, it's awful, awful. Uncle suspects it too. So they do it delegation. It's awful, awful. He's disappeared. "'Eduard, I mean, it was a mere accident. "'We were walking together, Henry and I,

"'when we, when we met Edward, "'they looked at each other, they hated each other. "'Then he walked on, "'but we met him again later. "'Then, in the evening, when I came home "'and found Henry lying in his blood.' "'She flung herself back with a scream. "'Auntie, auntie, we know nothing,

but the suspicion will always be with me. I shall always see it like that. Oh, auntie, auntie, help me, and keep me with you always, always. She closed her eyes in Constance's arms, too weak to face her life, which had changed from fantastic humour into tragedy. The carriage suddenly stopped in the Kerkoff-Larn. Troucher opened the door. Constance made a sign to her to ask no questions. She herself, on the other hand, asked, How is Mr. Geritz doing? Not at all, well, ma'am.

Where are the children? They're in the dining room, ma'am, playing. It's easier there for me to keep an eye on them. Constance opened the door of the dining room with her arm round Emily. She saw Gerdi and Constance, but, just as in the drawing room at home, they had hidden behind a sofa standing a slant, where they were quietly playing its father and mother, worshipping each other like a little husband

and wife, two small birds in a little nest. Picaboo, said Constance mechanically. They were quiet at first, and then burst into chuckles, crept out, kissed Auntie and Emily. "'Auntie?' asked Gerdi. Is Papa ill? Yes, darling. Will Papa get better very soon? Oh, yes, dear.

Are we staying with you long? No, not very long, darling. And Constance did not know why, but she suddenly saw the children staying on, and this vision was mingled with a vague impression of the gloomy house at Dreebergen. She thought that her brain must be very tired in her head, that she was sleeping while.

awake, dreaming as she moved about. Everything before her was confused. That terrible day in Paris, Henry's body, the mystery about the whole affair with the dark half-uttered suspicions, the formalities, the legation, the journey back. Oh, she was dead tired, dead tired. Oh, that's coughing, that's coffin, and in the middle of it all, a letter from Addie, Uncle Gerrit, seriously ill, the children ordered out of the house. He was taking Gerdi and Constant and giving them his room. He was sure Mama would approve. Oh, how dead tired, how dead tired she was.

Auntie, said Constant, Troucher has been so kind, she made us a lovely rice pudding. But we'd rather be at home, said Gerdi, and the children suddenly began to cry. Constance took them in her arms, pressed them to her. You would be just a little in Mama's way, she said with a dead voice. Mama must look after Papa, and she dropped almost fainting into a chair. At Constance, Emily sobbed, at Constance, let me, let's me stay with you, let me stay with you.

"'Where? Where could I go?' She sobbed wildly, huddled on the floor against Constance's knees. The children were also crying. Constance had put one arm round Emily and held the children in the other. It was very gloomy out of doors.

Indoors, life's tragedy, they heavy upon them. End of Chapter 22. Chapter 23 of the Twilight of the souls by Louis Cuperus. This Librivox recording is in the public domain. The gigantic beast wriggled through the sky, from end to end of the vast sky.

The beast wobbled the point of its tail slowly up and down over the earth, in the room above the bed which had become a narrow coffin, and, commencing with that wobbling tail, the beast's body wound up and up, filling the room and the house with one mighty contortion of monstrous dragon's scales, and sweeping away with its tangible reality, all the dreamy unreality of the room and the house, the ceilings and the roofs.

With thousands of legs, the beast humped its sinuous body over the chimney-stacks and church-steeples, slung itself wriggling round the church-steeples and chimney-stacks, like a festoon of scales, which then turned into a long, dense chain of clouds, filling the sky with great cloud eddies, which whirled and whirled over the town and through the sky from end to end of the vast sky. And the monstrous beast now lifted its long crocodile's jaws

out of its own winding clouds, and its eyes belched forth fire like volcanoes. And shafts of flame, shots like lightning flashes from its darting tongue, shafts darting to such a length from the very high expanse, right up there, up there from the sky above the clouds, that they shot through the man in one second, and retreated and hid themselves again in the abyss of the dragon's mouth. From such a height indeed that they shot quicker than lightning right down to his marrow,

licking it until it dried up. And, after each burning lick, after each dab of fire, the lightning, quick, darting flame, the miles-long shaft, withdrew to its own source and birthplace in the deep funnel of the fiery jaws. And the martyed man shivered under the dabbing lick,

and in his shivering he raised himself high, as though upon waves of trembling, as though his feet, were a stormy sea that bore him away from his bed, high above the clouds, the clouds that were the windings of the beast's body, and as he rose, as the man rose, the beast set up all its stiff bristles, which stuck out between its scales like trees, stuck them up and drew them in again, until the whole sky, the whole vast stretch of sky, was all the time growing full of tree trunks, Straight forests of dragon's bristles,

which swarmed and vanished, swarmed and vanished, as the beast put them out or drew them in. And the point of the beast's bristly, scaly tail, flicked with such oppressive weight upon the chest of the man who lay in the bed, which was a coffin, that the man moaned and groaned and tried with both hands

to lift that heavy, flicking tail from his crushed heart. But the beast grinned, with its cavernous jaws, shot fire from the volcanoes of its eyes, darted swiftly up and down the mile-long fiery trail of its all-penetrating tong, split into myriad needles of fire, and with long voluptuous licks, sucked away the man's marrow, until the man, all shivering and shaking was scorched and roasted and shriveled within. The beast left him no blood, licked up his marrow and blood, and poured fire into him instead.

When the beast smacked its lips voluptuously, when its greedily swallowed the blood and the marrow, when the man thought that he was dying, then the beast pricked him with a needle of its fiery tongue and goaded him to shivering point. And the man shivered and raised himself high upon the waves with his shivering, as though his fever were a stormy sea. Thus the man lay, twisting and tossing,

till he put out his hands towards the demon, and tried to fight the beast with human hands. And, it seemed to him, as if he were flinging his hands, the hands of a brave man and a martyr and a hero around the beast. And while the stormy sea, the sky which was churned into billows by the contortions of, the beast, bore him up and up and up, he fought and wrestled with the ever more violently writhing and coiling beast, and the beast humped its way through the somber universe of clouds,

shooting out its thousands of feet. Its head was now here, now there, its tail flicked, now high, now low. The beast lashed earth and sky. The beast became one vile, dizzing whirl, with towns, spires, roofs and chimney-stacks, all whirling in it. The bed which was a coffin was now here, now there, now high, now low, and he fought and wrestled and twisted round the beast, and the beast round him, and he would not let himself be conquered by the beast, until the beast from out of the volcano of its eyes, and the abyss of its jaws, belt-shed,

so much fire that the sky was a sea of blood fire, wherein a hell of faces flamed, faces of women and children, naked women with eyes of gold, bright children with flaxen hair, like a sudden flowering of tortured affections, of tortured passions, all blossoming up in the blood fire

into faces of laughing and crying children and ogling siren mermaids. And through it all, and through them all, the man writhed and wrestled with the wrestling, writhing beast, which could not free itself from him, even as he could not free himself from the beast. Gerrit, dear Gerrit, voices sounded, soft murmuring, earthly voices, voices from far below. Geritz, dear, are you coming? And he answered, Yes, yes, I'm coming.

And he, the man, heaving up and down, down and up, on the mighty swaying of the storm, down and up, up and down. He, this heaving, wrestling man, won with the beast, and the beast won with him, saw a woman between the faces of children and women, saw two women, two women belonging to him, his wife and his sister. But in between them crept a third woman, Her eyes mocked like golden eyes of mockery, until suddenly they ceased to mock and died away in sadness, in unutterable sadness, as though really they had always been sad and had never mocked or laughed. Gerrit, dear Gerrit, are you coming?

Yes, yes, I'm coming. He's delirious, whispered Constance. The room around the sick man had now become as glass, but not transparent glass, for he no longer, through the walls of the room, saw the universe and the beast. He saw nothing now save the room, but so brittle was that room,

so brittle all the things which it contained, that it seemed to be all of glass, the room, the bed, and he, all glass, all brittle glass, which a single incocious movement might, shiver into dust. Yes, now that the beast had sucked up all his marrow with that voluptuous licking, it had let him go, left him lying exhausted on his bed, and he lay, his glass body lay powerless to move. And now that, after a long time, he had laboriously opened his eyes,

and saw his room around him as glass, and felt himself as glass, he knew that the beast would no longer dart the fiery shafts of his tongue because it had eaten the whole of him up. His body lay lifeless, like a glass husk, and he asked himself if he wasn't dead. He did not know for certain that he was alive. He saw that the room was very quiet. Beside him, in the glass atmosphere of his room, sat a man who also seemed made of brittle glass, and the man sat motionless. He seemed to be sitting with a book in his hand, reading in the glassy twilight that filtered through the close-drawn window curtains.

The sick man laboriously closed his eyes again, and it seemed to him that he sank away very slowly into a great downy abyss, lower and lower, a very depth of down into which he sank, and went on sinking. Sank and went on sinking. There's less fever now, said the military. doctor. He's asleep. Is he out of danger? asked the pale little wife,

who sat with Constance's arms around her. Yes, who would be wise to take a rest, ma'frau? I can't. I can't. Go and get some sleep, Adeline, said Constance. I'll stay in the room with Chedit, and the nurse will keep a good watch. He looked round for a moment,

very peacefully, before he fell asleep, said the male nurse by Chedithet. its bedside. Go and get some sleep, Adeline. How long the sick man sank and sank and sank into the downy abyss, no one knew. At last he opened his eyes again and looked into the room and saw the quiet attendant sitting on a chair at the foot of his bed where he also saw a woman standing. Constance, the sick man murmured. He tried to smile because he knew her. but he felt too weak to smile. Another woman appeared beside the first.

He knew her too, but it was as though she were dead. Lina, murmured the sick man. He knows us, whispered Constance. End of Chapter 23. Chapter 24 of the Twilight of the Souls by Louis Cupertus. This Librivoct recording is in the public domain. Heertz made progress every day. He was now so much better that he sat in a big chair,

sat dozing until he sank away in the downy abyss and fell asleep in his chair. He was now so much better that he was able to speak a few words to the two women and the doctor and the nurse. And his first question was, The children. He had understood that they were not there

and that he would not see them just yet. He was now so much better that he remembered his recent life and asked, "'Woleen!' And he saw that they did not understand. Why they did not understand he failed to see, for when he asked after the children or mamma, they always understood and answered kindly, telling him that mamma and the children were well.

Then he asked, "'Your husband, Constance, your boy,' and Constance answered that they were well. Then he asked, Pauline, and she gave a gentle, smiling nod. Yes, of course, she understood now, told him that Pauline was well.

Yes, yes, he remembered. Mama, the children, Pauline, they were as ghosts in his empty memory, looming up and making him ask questions of the women around him. But apart from that, his memory was one vast empty, like an empty universe, now that the beast had vanished into space, into nothingness, into nothingness. He had no marrow lived. The beast would not eat him up anymore. There was no centipede rooting at his carcass now. Lord, Lord, how done he felt, how utterly done for. He now recognised his doctor.

Ah, is that you, Alsma? Well, Van Lauer, do you recognise me? Yes, yes. Didn't I recognise you before? No, once or twice you didn't know who I was. Well, you'll soon be all right again now. You're getting better every day. Yes, yes, but...

What? I feel very queer, damned queer. Yes, you're a bit weak still. A bit weak. He gave a grin. He felt his arm, thought it's odd that he couldn't find his biceps. Where's the thing got to? He asked.

Is it gone? No, you'll get your strength back all right. It doesn't take long once you're well again. Oh, it doesn't take long. No, you'd be surprised. I say, Alzheimer. God, I see my children. Just for once.

No, it would tire you a bit. Later on, later on. I say, do you know what's so rotten? I don't know. All sorts of things, whether I've been dreaming or not. Don't worry about it. That'll all come right. Bit by bit, bit, bit.

A lake, full of white-faced mermaids. That's rot, eh? An express train. Was I away shortly before my illness? I wasn't, was I? The body of a girl. Did I see that? A snake thing.

A great wriggling snake thing. Yes, that snake thing was there all right. I'd fought the thing. I believe it was all rot, except the great snake thing, which licked me up with its tongue. You mustn't talk so much. Because I always used to feel that snake thing inside me.

"'Always. Come, Van Lowe, keep very quiet now, and rest, rest.' The sick man sank away, sank away in the downy abyss. Gedditz made progress every day. He was now so much better that he had walked across the room on Constance's arm and just seen his two boys, only for a moment, because he longed for them so. "'The others, too,' he said. The next day they brought Maricha and Kherdi and Constant to him. The day after that, the four others, he had now seen them all.

But for such a short time, he said. He recovered slowly. He had seen van der Velka and Addy, and one pale, wintry sunny day he had been out for a little while, but the outside world made him giddy. Still he couldn't deny it. He was getting better. He saw his mother, and when she saw him, she forgot that he had been ill. Where have you been, headed?

Laid up, Mama. Laid up, the old woman nodded wisely. You haven't been ill, have you? Just a little, Mama. It wasn't very bad. And he got better. He made progress. He went out walking with his wife, with Constance with Van der Velka.

He went out with his nephew Addy. The outside world no longer made him giddy. On his walks he recognised brother officers. One day he met the hussars. Oh, damn it all, he swore, without knowing why. It was as though he suddenly saw that he would never again ride, straight-backed, clear-eyed, at the head of his squadron. But it was all rot seeing that.

Still, he was unable to resume his service. He laced and loafed, as he said. In the evenings, always very early, he sank away into a downy abyss, dropped to sleep heavily, and he no longer remembered things. I say, Constance. What is it, Gerrit?

When I saw that girl, in the cemetery, were you there too, and did you call me? No, Gerrit, you've been dreaming. Oh, did I dream that? Yes. No, no. Yes, Gerrit, you dreamt it. Another time he said to Van der Velka,

I say, Van der Velka. What is it, Gerrit? You don't know, but I was carrying on with a girl, one I knew in the old days. Find out what's become of her, will you? What's her name, and where does she hang out? He reflected, Her name. Her name is Pauline. And where does she live? In the Frederick Strat.

Van der Velka made inquiries, but said nothing next time he came. The sick man remembered, however. I say, van der Velka. Yes, Gerrit. Did you ask about that for me? Yes, Van der Velka answered, hesitatingly. Well, the girl's dead, oh! old chap. Did she drown herself? Yes. They took the body to the cemetery. Yes. Oh, then I wasn't dreaming. You see for yourself, and your wife came and fetched me there. No, no. Yes, she did. No, no, old chap. The sick man reflected, I no longer know, he said. What I've lived and what I've dreamed, the confounded snake thing, that, that was real. It had been eating me up,

eating me up since I was a boy. He grew very gloomy and sat for hours and hours silently in his chair until he sank into the downy abyss. End of Chapter 24 Chapter 25 of the Twilight of the Souls by Louis Cupertos. This Librivox recording is in the public domain. It was time that he became the old heret again. Bits by bits, you know, bit by bits. The weeks dragged past, and the weeks became months,

and it was time that he became the old heret again, bits by bits, you know, bit by bit. His doctor wouldn't hear yet of his resuming his service, but he saw his pals daily. The officers looked him up, fetched him for a walk, and in their company he tried to go back to his breezy jovial tone, his rather broad jokes, all the noisy geniality which had characterised the great yellow-haired giants that he had been. And it was all no use. He had grown thin, his cheeks were hollow, his flesh hung loosely on his bones, and he was soon tired. and, above all, soon giddy. But the rottenest part of it was that he didn't remember things.

No doubt he felt that by degrees with the diet prescribed for him, which Adeline observed so conscientiously, he would be able to strengthen his carcass a bit. He even took up his dumbbells once in his grief at the disappearance of those grand muscles of his, but he very soon put the heavy weights down again, Then he smacked his emaciated thighs, and despite his inner conviction, yielded to a feeling of optimism. Oh, well, he thought, that'll get right again in time. But the rottenest part of it was that he no longer remembered things.

He was ashamed of that above all. He did not want it to notice, and that everybody noticed it. Then he would sit in a chair by the fire. It was a raw, damp January, cold without frost, and his thoughts stared out idly before him with a thousand roaming eyes, his idle thoughts. They hung heavily in his brain, filling it like clouds in a sky.

He would sit like that for hours, with a newspaper or an illustrated weekly, French comic picture papers which Fandervalca brought him to amuse him. He hardly laughed at the jokes, only half understood them, sat reading them stupidly, and, in his turgid brain full of clouds, full of those idle thoughts, an immense worldwide melancholy descended, a leaden twilight. The twilight descended from the sky outside, and it descended from his own brain. Then everything became chilly around him and within him, and, above all, memory was lost.

Since the beast no longer held him in its clutching dragon's claws, since the thousand-legged crawling thing had devoured all his marrow with voluptuous licks, since it had perhaps sucked up his very blood. Since then, it had left him like an empty house with soft muscles and flabby flesh, and he almost longed to have the beastly thing back, because the beast had given him the energy to fight the beast,

for himself in order to conquer, for others in order to hide himself. The beast had conquered, the beast had eaten him up, it wanted no more of him, the great dragonworm had disappeared, it's no longer wound through the skies, and nothing more hung in the skies but twilight's distilling clouds.

Oh, the creepy chilly! twilight. Oh, the all-pervading mist, dunk and clammy all round him. He shivered, and the fire no longer warmed him. He crept up to it. He could have crept into it, and the glowing open fire no longer warmed him. Lean, ring for some wood. I want to see flames. This coke's no use to me. Then heaped up the logs until Adeline feared that he would set up. the chimney on fire. Or else Constance would come to fetch him, wanted him to go for a walk.

No, dear, it's too chilly for me outside. He remained sitting in what to the others was the unendurable heat of the blazing fire. He shivered. He shivered to such an extent that he asked. Lina, send in the children. But, hell it, they'll only tire you. No, no.

I'm longing to see them. They would come in, and when the others came home from school, he would gather them round him and try to play with them, teasing and tickling them now and again. It tired him, but there was something warm around him. More warmth radiated from a single one of them and from his glowing log fire. How many have I? he reflected, groping in his memory,

which fled in front of him with winged irony. and he counted on his fingers. He was not quite certain until he saw them all gathered round him and had counted them on his fingers, silently. Marie, Adelaidea, Alex, Guy. He did not always remember that he had nine.

The children were very sweet. Marie saw to his oatmeal which he had to take at five in the afternoon. The cheeky boys were very attractive, but he suffered because little herding. the child with such a passion for caresses had become afraid of him. She shrank back timidly from him, thinking him strange, that's thin emaciated father,

whom she used to embrace in her little childish arms as a strong father, a great big father who tossed her up in the air and caught her again and romped with her and kissed her. She had become frightened of his long, lean fingers, and looked in dismay at the hands that gripped her with the fingers of a skeleton. He noticed it and no longer asked her to come to his room, now that he saw that she shuddered when she sat on his thin legs, and that she disliked the big fire, which made her frown angrily and draw in her little lips.

But it hurt him, though he said nothing. But what hurt him most was that he did not remember things. It was as though daily the twilight deepened around him, around his soul, which shuddered in his chilly, shuddering body. One day, Constance said, we have good news from Nunspate. But Helit remembered nothing about Noonspeat. Still, he did not wish to show it. Really, he said. Nevertheless, she saw it in his blank look.

Yes, she continued. "'Earns is a great deal better. "'I shall go and see him again tomorrow.' "'He now remembered all about Ernst and Noonspate, "'but yet he was ashamed of his recent lack of memory, "'and his hollow cheeks almost flushed. "'A week later, Ernst came to see him with Constance. "'He was so much improved

"'that the doctor himself had advised him "'to go to the Hague for a few days. "'He was staying with the van der Velkers. His hallucinations had almost vanished, and when Gerrit saw him, it struck Geret that Ernst was looking better, his complexion healthier, probably through the outdoor life. His hair and a beard trimmed, and his eyes were not so restless, while he himself was neatly dressed under his sister's care. Well, old chap, said Gerrit, so you've come to look me up. That's nice of you. I'm a bit off colour, and you're I'm much better, Gerrit. I'm glad of that, and those queer notions of yours, but about them? Ernst gave an embarrassed laugh. Yes, he confessed shyly. I did have queer notions sometimes.

I don't think I have any now, but I am staying on at the doctors. I've only come up for a day or two. I've seen my rooms again. You have, have you? And your vases? Yes, my very very. I've seen my vases. "'Yes, my vases,' said Ernst, greatly embarrassed. "'And all the voices that you used to hear, Ernst, all the souls that used to throng round you, old chap, you don't feel them thronging now. You don't hear them any longer.' Gerrit tried to put on his genial bellow

and to poke fun at Ernst about the vases and the souls as he used to, but it was no good. He lay back in his chair by the big fire, and his idle thoughts stared before him. No, Ernst answered quietly. I only hear the voices now and again, and I no longer feel them thronging so much, Gerrit. And you've been very ill, haven't you?

He added quietly. Yes, old chap, you're getting better, eh? Yes, I'm getting better now. My carcass can stand some knocking about. I'm glad you're better too. Constance made a sign to Ernst. He got up, good and obedient as a child, and they left Gerrit alone. Adeline was sitting in the other room with both doors open,

because Gerrit's big fire was too much for her, and also because she didn't want the children to be running in and worrying him. Ernst is looking well, she said, glancing up at him. Then her hands felt for Constance's hands, and she began to cry, sobbing very quietly, less Chedit should hear. Hush, Adeline, hush. He won't get better? Yes, he will.

He'll get quite well. Erz is better too. But he, he's lost all his strength. He's so weak. He'll get well and strong again. What day of the week is its constance? It's Sunday, Adeline. I'm going with Ere's to mamars for a minute or two.

How glad Mama will be to see him. Are you coming to Mama's this evening, Sissy? Adeline shook her head. No, she said. I can't. I don't leave Gerrits alone yet. End of Chapter 25. Chapter 26 of the Twilight of the Souls by Louis Cupertus.

This Librivox recording is in the public domain. Oh, how the twilight was gathering! Oh, how it was gathering around him. It was dark now, quite dark, and the fire on the hearth was dying out in the dark, shadowy room. But what was the use of making its blaze up? Did the room not always remain shiveringly cold, however much the fire might glow?

What was the use of lighting lamps? Was the twilight not deeper and gloomier, day by day, whether it were morning or evening, did not the pale gold of the dawn shimmer more and more vaguely through the dense mist of twilight? A dull, apathetic, feeble man, had he kept his secret all his life, concealed the real condition of his body and his soul to become like that? And yet was he not Ernst's brother? Had he not always been Ernst's brother, though it had always seemed otherwise? Were they not of the same blood, and had not they the brothers, the same soul, the same darkened soul?

Was the darkness not gathering around all of them now, the sombre twilight of their small lives? Would the darkness one day close in upon his own pale golden dawn, his children, who also shared the same soul? It might be the darkness of old age as it closed in upon Mama. He could see her as she sat, or it might be the darkness of sorrow and weariness and loneliness as yonder round Bertha. Were the shadows not deepening round Paul and Doreen, but all the shadows not deepening round Paul and Doreen, for all their youth. Had it not been as a night round Ernst,

even though he was now stepping out of the dark, back into the twilight that surrounded them all? Was it their fault, or the fault of their life, the small life of small souls? Did the twilight come from their blood, which grew poorer, or from their life which grew smaller? Would they never behold through the twilight, The vistas, far-reaching as the dawn, where life, when all was said, must be spacious.

And would they never strive for that? Would his children never strive for that? Would they never send forth the rays of their golden sunlight towards the greater life, and would they not grow into great souls? Would the twilight afterwards deepen and deepen and deepen around them, too, until perhaps the very great things of life came thundering and lightening, unexpectedly before them, crushing them and blinding them, because they had not learnt to see the light. He tried to remember thoughts of former days, but they shot ahead, like winged ironies.

He knew only that night was falling, one vast night, all around the family, under the gray skies of their winter. He knew only that the light was growing dimmer and dimmer around them, until it became unillumined dusk, the dusk of age, the dusk of sorrow, the dusk of cynical selfishness, the dusk of life without living, all the heavy, sombre twilight that gathered around small souls, until with Ernst the dusk had grown into night and the dark dream from which he was now emerging. They called that recovering. They thought he would recover. Oh, how dark and gloomy were the shadows of the twilight, and how heavy was the fates that hung over their small souls, hung over them like a leaden sky, an immensity of leaden skies.

He, yes, he would get better. It might take months yet, and then he would resume his service as a dull decrepit old man, diseased through and through, from his childhood, under the semblance of muscular strength, until one serious illness was enough to break him and make him dull and old for the rest of his life. Yes, he would get better, but it would no longer be necessary to raise his own. voice to a roar, to make his movements rough and blunt, to make a show of strength and force and roughness, but they would now all see through the sad pretense. He would jog along, through his small shadowed life, until the shadows gathered around him, as they were now

gathering around his mother. And, and, and, his children would never again recognize in him their father of the old days, who used to romp with them and fill the whole house with all the rush of his healthy vitality. It was over, over for the rest of his life. It was over. In the room which had grown chill and dark, the black thought haunted him that it was over. It almost made him calm, to know that it was over, that for his children, his nine, did he not remember their golden number correctly? He could never be other than the shadow of their father of the old days. Oh, would he never again be able to love them, to be a father to them, could he never do that again? Must he, when cured, remain for all the rest of his life, the man conquered by the beast,

the man eaten up by the beast, the man broken in the contest with the dragon beast. Was it so? Was it so? Why did they leave him in the cold and the dark? Shivers ran down his back, his marrowless back, his bloodless body, like a stream of ice-cold water. Why didn't they make up his fire, and why didn't they light his lamp? did they know that nothing could give him warmth and lights? Adeline! His voice sounded faint and weak.

In the next room, which was now dark, nothing stirred. He rose out of his deep chair with difficulty, like an old man. He groped round for the door of the other room. A feeble light still entered from outside. There she sat, there she lay, his wife, She had fallen asleep with weariness and anxiety for him, her arms on the table, her face on her arms. Was it her imagination, or had she really changed? He had not noticed her for weeks, since his illness, had not looked at her, though she had nursed him all the time. Certainly he was very fond of her,

but she was doing her duty as his wife. She had borne him his children, and she was nursing him now that he was ill. Had he been wrong in thinking like that? Yes, perhaps it had not been right of him. God, how she had changed. How different from the young, fresh face that she used to have, the little mother girl, the little child mother. Was it the ghostly effect of the faint light, or was it so?

Was she so pale and thin and tired? with anxiety about him, with nursing and looking after him. He felt his heart swelling. He had never loved her as he did now. He bent down and kissed her, with a fonder kiss than he had ever given her. She just quivered in her sleep. She was sound asleep. Lord, how tired she was!

How pale she was! How thin! She lay broken with worry and weariness. her head in her arms. Adeline! She did not answer, she slept. He would not wake her, he would ring for the fire and the lamp himself.

But what was the good? Lamp and fire would make things no brighter around him now that the great twilight was descending. Oh, the great inexorable, pitiless twilight. Would it fall around him? as it had fallen around Ernst, around whom it was now slowly clearing. Did the twilight clear again, or would the shadows around him gradually deepen into darkness,

the darkness that was now gathering around his mother? Or would it just remain dim around him, with the same one light that glimmered around Paul and Doreen? What, what would there twilight be? The house was very cold and he felt chilly. Was there no fire anywhere? Where were the children? Were Maritia and Adelicha

and the two boys not back from school yet? He now heard Herdie and Constance playing in the room downstairs, the nursery and dining room, heard them talking together with their dear little voices. Oh, his two sunny-haired darlings! But Herdie was afraid of him. him. He was becoming afraid of himself. He was no longer the man he used to be. People now saw him as he was. He could no longer put on that air of brute's strength. His voice had lost its

blustering force. He did not know why, but he roamed through the house. It struck him as lonely, dreary and quiet, though the children were playing below. He stood on the stairs and listened, What was that rushing noise in the distance? No, there was no rushing. Yes, there was. Something came rushing, from outside to where he stood. Something came rushing, a melancholy wind, like a wind out of eternity, an immense eternity, and immense the wind that rushed out of it, and chilly and small and dreary the house. Everything so small. He himself so small. He did not know what was coming over him, but he felt frightened, frightened, as he had sometimes felt when a child. He was so afraid of that rushing sound

that he called out, Adeline, lean! He waited for her to hear and answer, but she did not hear, she slept. Then he roamed on, shuddering, upstairs to his own little room. room, and it was all so dreary and chill and lonely, and the sound of rushing from the immense eternity outside the house was so melancholy that he sank helplessly into a chair and began to

sob. He was done for now. He sobbed. His great emaciated body jolted up and down with his sobs, his lungs panted with his sobs, and in his great lean hands his head sobbed in despair. He was done for now. He knew now that he would not get well. He knew now that he ought really to have died, and that he had gone on living, only because his life had gone on hanging to a thread that had not been broken. Would that last thread soon break, or would his darken life go on for a long time? He, always ill, hanging to that last thread. be able to be a father to his children, or would he, on the contrary, become a burden to his dear ones? Was it growing dark? Was it growing dark? Was not that eternity rushing along? He heaved a deep sigh amid his sobs. His eyes sought along the wall where a rack of swords and malacrisis hung between prints of racehorses and pretty women. He had a whole collection. He had a whole collection. of these weapons. Some of them had belonged to his father, at Papa's death they had been divided

between him and Ernst. Among the Crises and Swords were two revolvers. He stared past the swords and chrises, and his eyes fastened on the revolvers. In among the swords and chrises, in among the racehorses and the pretty women whirled all the heads of his children. He did not know if they were portraits or specters, as they had been, children's heads of six months, one year old, two years old, growing older and bigger, radiating more and more sunlight, his golden dawn of nine bright-haired children. Would he be able to be a father to them, or would he, on the contrary, become a burden? It was as if his imagination were digging in a deep pit, in a deep pit his imagination with hurrying hands, dug up sand.

What was it seeking his rooting imagination? What was it seeking in the deep pit? Why was it flinging the sand around him? Just as Addy once told him that Ernst had dug and flung up sand In the dunes, in the dunes at noon spate. What, what? Was he going mad too?

Was he going mad like Ernst? Was he going mad like Ernst? Was he going mad, like Ernst? A cold sweat broke out over his chilly, shivering body. Was he going mad? Gerrit, cherit! A voice sounded very far away through the house, which has suddenly become very deep, very wide, very big.

Gerrit, Gerrit! He could hear the hurrying footsteps on the creaking stairs, but he was powerless to answer. "'Heret, Gerit, where are you?' The door opened. It was Adeline looking for him in the dark. "'Heret, are you here?' "'Even yet he did not answer.

"'Where are you, Gerrit?' "'Here.' "'Are you here?' "'Yes.' "'Why are you sitting in the dark, in the cold? "'What are you doing here, Gerrit?' "'I was looking for something.' "'For what?'

"'I forget. Gotten? Why didn't you ask me? She had lit the gas. You were asleep. Don't be angry, Gerrit. I was tired. I'm not angry, dear.

I didn't like to disturb you. Why didn't you wake me? You were asleep. You ought to have waked me. He put out his arms to her. Come here, dear. She came. He drew her to his knees.

What is it, Gerrit? Darling, Lena, I believe I'm very, very ill. You've been ill, Gerrit. You're getting better now. Do you think so? Oh, yes. Lina, I believe, I'm very, very ill. Why, do you feel worse? It's so cold in here. Come downstairs. We'll make up the fire. No, stay here. Tell me, Lena. If I died, would you?

you. No, no, Gerrit, I can't bear it. Hush, dear, if I died, would you believe, after I'm dead? Oh, Gerrit, Gerrit, that I have always been very fond of you. Gerrit, don't. That I have always been kind to you, that I have not neglected you. Oh, you're not going to die, Gerrit. You will get better, and you have always, always been kind. "'Lina and all our children.' "'Don't, Gerrit. "'Won't they think, if I die, "'that I had no business to die,

"'because I ought to have lived and been a father to them. "'But, Gerrit, you're not going to die. "'I should like to go unliving, Lena, for you, dear, "'and for the children, but I fear I'm very ill. "'Will you see the doctor, Gerrit?' "'No, no, stay like this, quite, quietly for a minute, on your husband's knees. Lena, Gerdi has become frightened of me.

Tell me, Lena, are you all so frightened of your skeleton of a husband? Gerrit, Gerrit, no, Gerdi isn't frightened, and I, I'm not frightened. Put your arms round me. She put her arms right round him. She hugged him, warmed him against herself, while she sat upon his knees. I'm not frightened, Gerrit. Why should I be frightened of you? Because you've been ill, because you've grown thin.

Aren't you still my husband whom I love, whom I have always loved? Shall I nurse you till you are yourself again, till you are quite well and strong? Oh, Gerrit, even if it should take weeks, months, a year. Gerrit, what is a year? In a year's time you will be yourself again, and well, and strong. and then we shall be happy once more, and then our children will grow up. Yes, dear, if only it doesn't get dark. Gerrit.

If only it doesn't get so dark. Do you know that it's got very dark around Ernst? It's getting lighter around him now, but there's some twilight around him still, even now. Do you know that it's getting dark around Mama, and that it will get dark. and darker. Do you know that the twilight is closing around a bertha, and that there's twilight around the others? Lena, darling, I'm frightened, I'm frightened, when it gets dark.

As a child I remember, I used to be frightened when it grew dark. You've lit the gas now, you see, Lena. Is there only one light burning? The flame of a gas jet, and yet, and yet it's getting dark. Gerit, my herit, is the fever returning? Would you like to go to bed? Yes, Lena, I want to go to bed. Put your baby to bed, Lena.

It's tired. It's not well. Put it to bed, Lena, and tuck the nice warm clothes round its cold back and promise to stay and sit with it till it's asleep, till it's asleep. Put it to bed, Lena. And, Lena, if your baby, baby, if your baby dies, if it dies, will you promise never to think that it did not love you, as much as it ought to? She had gently forced him to rise from his chair, and she opened the partition door.

He stood in the middle of the little room, while she busied herself in the bedroom and lit the gas, and then came back for him and helped him undress. "'It's getting dark, it's getting dark,' he muttered, shivering while his teeth chattered with the cold. And he felt that it was not the cold of fever, but a cold in his veins and his spine, because the beast had sucked all his blood and marrow, with its voluptuous licks, had eaten him up from the days of his childhood, had devoured him until now in the twilight. His soul shrank and withered in his body, which had no more sap to feed it. It's getting dark, he muttered.

End of Chapter 26. Chapter 27 of the Twilight of the Souls by Louis Cupertus. This Librivox recording is in the public domain. It was snowing heavily. For days the great snowflakes had been falling over the small town. out of an infinite skyland, out of infinite skyplains of infinite snow, and after all the gloom of the dark days that had been, the days under grey skies of storm and rain,

it was now snowing whiter and whiter, out of a denser greyness of skyplanes and skylands, flakes falling upon flakes in a soft white shroud of oblivion that enveloped houses and people, and in that ever-falling snow from the great grey infinity above the small town and the small people the town seemed still smaller, with the outline of its houses now scarcely defined against the all-effacing oblivion which fell and fell without ceasing. And the people also seemed still smaller as they moved about the town,

or looked through the windows of their small houses at the white flake descending from the grey infinity overhead. For old Mrs. Van Nuwa, the white days dragged on monotonously from Sunday to Sunday. Only the Sunday gave her a glimpse of light, but the other days had become so white and blank, so white and blank in their twilight emptiness. Even though the children called to see her regularly,

she no longer knew that they had been. It was only on Sundays that she missed them. when she did not see all of those whom she still carried in her mind gathered in her large rooms, rooms which not the largest fires now seemed able to warm, a mournful reproach swelled up in her heart, and her head nodded in sad understanding and protest against the sorrows of old age. "'But here is Ernst, Mama, coming again as he used to,' said Constance, leading Ernst by the hand to her mother.

He came up once a week from Noonspates for the day In order to re-accustomed himself to all the familiar things at the Hague To the houses and the people And though still a little shy as usual He had lost all his nervous restlessness And become quite calm Ernst asked Mama Yes ma'amor

He is coming again as he used to Has he been long away Yes mamma Light seemed to break upon the old woman, and she smiled, becoming younger in her smile, now that she remembered. She took her son's hands and looked at Constance with unclouded eyes. Is he better now? Yes, Mama, said Constance. Are you better now, Ernst? Yes, Mama, they're much better. She looked very glad, as though a flood of light were shining around her.

"'Don't you hear any of those—those strange things?' "'No, Mama,' he answered smiling gently. "'And don't you see? Don't you see any of those strange things? "'No, Mama, that's good.' She said it with grateful shining eyes, the flood of light making everything very clear. "'I have been very strange, I believe,' Ernst admitted, softly in. shyly. That's all cured now, Ernst, said Constance.

But Aunt's lot, asked Mama. What's become of her? And the girls? They've gone to Java, Mama. To Java? Yes, don't you remember? They came and said goodbye last week. They'll be back in twelve months.

Don't you remember? They thought they could live more cheaply in India. Yes, yes, I remember. "'I remember,' said the old woman. "'India, I wish I could go there myself.' She felt as if she must go there to have warmth in and around her, and yet Ernst was back,

and at the card tables were Carol and Cato, Adolphine and her little tribe. Otto and Francis were there, van der Velke, Doreen and Paul, Adi. "'There are a good many.' "'After all,' she said to concede, There are a great many. But I miss.

I miss. Who, Mama? I miss my big lad. I miss Chedit. Where is Chedit? He hasn't been very well lately, Mama. I don't think he'll come. He is ill again.

Not ill, but... Yes, he is. He's ill. He's very seriously ill. Constance. What is it, Mama? You already. only one to whom I dare say it. Constance.

Hedert is very, very ill. Hush, he's, he's dead. No, Mama, he's not dead. He is dead. No, Mama. Yes, child. Look, don't you see in the other room? What, Mama?

That he's dead. No. What do you see in the other room then? Nothing, Mama. I see the two card tables and Carol and Adolphine and Adolphine's two girls playing cards. And that's light. What's light? Oh, that's light.

Don't you see it? No, Mama. He's lying there on the floor. No, no, Mama. Be quiet, child. I can see it plainly. There, now it's gone. Mama, darling.

Constance. Yes, Mama. Go. Go to Gerrit's house. Do you want me to go to him? No, no, stay here. Constance. Yes, Mama.

Send your husband, or your son. Are you feeling anxious? Anxious? No, but send your husband or your son. Send Adi. If you send Addy, that'll be best. Would you like him just to go and find out for you how Heweth is? Yes.

Yes, yes. What's the matter with Mama? asked Van de Velka. Isn't Mama well? asked Adolphine at the card table. Mama is very restless and excited, said Van Satima. How did we better send for the doctor? The doctor, the doctor, the doctor, they repeated irresolutely. Adi, asked Doreen, are you going to the doctors? No, I'm going to Uncle Helitz.

Granny is uneasy. She wants to know how he is. Constance, whispered the old woman with strangely luminous eyes. It's better that you should go to. Addie's gone now, Mama. You go too. With your husband. You and your husband go too. Tell the others that I am tired.

Let them go away. Now, soon. Tell the others that I'm tired, dear. And tell them, tell them. Tell them what, Mama, that I am too tired to. Yes, on Sundays. To have us here on Sundays, Mama. No, dear, no, don't say it, don't say that,

but tell them that this evening, this evening is the last time, the last evening. No, dear, no, not the last, just tell them to go away, dear, and you go with your husband, Has Addy gone? But you go now, you go also, to head its house, and then come back here again. I want to see you. All three of you, here again. Do you understand?

All three of you, do you understand? Yes, Mama. Go now, go. They went, and the children took their leave. Outside it was snowing great flakes. The snowflakes had been falling all through the, night over the small town, out of an infinite land of death, out of infinite skyplains of infinite death. And, after all the gloom of the dark nights that had been, the nights under

the grey skies of storm and rain, it has snowed whiter and whiter out of the dense greyness of skyplanes and skyland, flakes falling upon flakes, in a soft white troughed, and white, of oblivion that enveloped houses and people. End of Chapter 27. Chapter 28 of the Twilight of the Souls by Louis Couperos. This Librivox recording is in the public domain. Outside the snow was falling in great flakes. The parlour maid had opened the door.

But your cab isn't here yet, ma'am. It doesn't matter. We'll walk. I must say, it's a little. absurd of Mama, said Van der Velka on the doorstep. Must we go to Cheditz? In this weather, and has Adi gone too, was Mama as anxious as all that?

It's snowing hard, Constance. It's enough to give one once death to go out in this weather. Well then, you stay, Henry. Do you mean to go in any case? Yes, Mama wants me too. But it's absurd. Perhaps so, but she would like it, and we may not be able to do things.

to please her much longer. Then send the cab on to the banker's thrat when it comes. Very well, sir. They went. Didn't Adigo just now? Yes, a minute or two before we did. I don't see him. He walks very fast.

Was Mama so uneasy? Yes, she was very restless and anxious. Have the others gone away as well? Yes, Mama was tired. All the same, she relies upon us to come back, presently for a moment. Mama is becoming a little exacting. She's growing so old.

We may as well give her that pleasure of just going. How much gentler her tone had become. Once, ah, once she would have flared out at him violently for less than this little difference. Now, ah, now, how much gentler everything about her had become. She stumbled through the snow. Take care, Constance. The pavements are slippery. Take my arm. No, I can manage. Take my arm. She took his arm. She slipped again. He held her up. He felt that she was trembling. Are you cold? No, you've got a thick cloak on. I'm not cold. What are you so nervous about?

I don't know. Your nerves have been all wrong for some time. You often cry about nothing. "'Yes, I don't know why. It's nothing. It's the weather. Yes, our Dutch climate. Now at last it's something like winter. It's freezing like anything. The snow is crisp underfoot.' She slipped again. He held her up, and they walked close together in the driving snow which blinded them. "'I must say, it's absurd of Mama to send us out in this weather.' She did not answer. understood that he thought it absurd. The cold took her breath away, and it seemed to her, as she kept on slipping, that they would never reach the banker-strart. At last, they turned the corner of the Nassau plain, and she calculated not quite ten minutes more, then a moment with

Gerrit and Adeline. The cab would fetch them there, then back to Mama's with Adi to set mamma's mind at ease. And as she reckoned it out, she grew calmer and thought, with Henry, that it was certainly rather absurd of Mama. She planted her feet more firmly. She was now walking more briskly, still holding her husband's arm. Was it the cold or what that made her keep on trembling with an icy shiver? Now, at last, they were nearing the banker-strat and headed's house, and it seemed to her as if she had been walking the whole evening through the thick, crisp snow. Suddenly she stopped. Henry, she stammered.

What? I, I daren't. What, don't you? I daren't ring. Why not? I daren't go in. But what's the matter with you? Nothing.

I'm frightened, I daren't. But, Constance. Henry, I'm trembling all over. Are you feeling ill? No. I'm frightened. Come, Constance, what are you frightened of? Now that we're there, we may as well ring.

What else would you do? Here's the house. He rang the bell. They waited. No one came to the door, and the snow beat in their faces. But there's a light, he said. They haven't gone to bed. And Addy?

Yes, Addy must be there. Ring again, she said. He rang the bell. They waited. The house remained silent in the driving snow. There was a light in nearly every window. Oh, Henry! He rang the bell.

Oh, Henry! She began to sob. I'm frightened. I'm frightened. She felt as if she was sinking into the snow in a fleecy, bottomless abyss. Her knees knocked together, and he saw that she was giving way.

He held her up, and she fell against him, almost swooning. He rang the bell. The door was opened. It was Addy who opened the door. They entered. Constance staggered as she went, and in her half-swooning giddiness, she seemed to see the house full of whirling snowflakes coming through the roof, filling the passage and the rooms, and, amid this strange snow, her son's face appeared to her as the face of a ghost, very white, with the blue flame of his big eyes. At that moment there came from upstairs a wailing cry,

a long, drawn-out shriek, uttered in an agony of despair, and that cry seemed to call to Constance out of Adeline's body through all that night of snow indoors and out. Mamma, papa, hush! Uncle Gerrit! Uncle Gerrit is dead, Uncle Gerrit has... It was snowing. before Constance's giddy eyes as she went up the stairs with her husband and her son.

It was snowing wildly, a whirl of all obliterating white. It was snowing all around her, and through it, for the second time, Adeline's long wail of despair rang out loud and shrill. The rooms upstairs were open. The maids and Maricha in her little nightgown

were peeping round the doors, trembling. Gerrit's little room was open, and on the floor lay the big body, looking bigger still, stretched out like that, and, beside it, beside the big body on her knees, the wife, the small, fair-haired wife, and her wail of despair rang out for the third time.

Adeline! She now looked round, flung up her arms, felt her sister's arms, Constance's arms around her. He's dead. He's dead. No, Adeline, perhaps he's fainted.

He's dead. He's cold. Wet, blood, feel. She uttered a scream of horror, the small fair-haired wife. And suddenly drawing herself up, she looked at the sword rack. Yes, the missing revolver was clutched in his stiff hand. Van der Velka and Addy closed the doors.

The maids were sobbing outside, but the sound of little voices came and small fists banged at the closed door. Mama! Mama! Mama! And Constance! Constance rose, Gideon fainting, not knowing whether to go or stay. Constance! Constance! cried Adeline, calling her back,

holding her in her arms. Mama, Mama! Ah, and Constance, and Constance! Constance rose to her feet, made a vast effort to overcome that dizzy faintness, and now that the body of the small fair-haired woman lay moaning upon the body of the dead man, she opened the door.

Was every light in the house full on? Why were the maids sobbing like that? Was it real, then? Was it real? Was this, Maricha? clasping her so convulsively, trembling in her little nightgown. With these Guy and Alex, sleepy still their gentle eyes, cheeky their little mouths, with ease hurdy, oh so frightened and little constant. And Constance, and Constance!

She overcame her dizziness. She did not faint. Darling's, my darlings, hush, hush. and she led them back to their bedroom. What could she do but embrace them, but press them to her? Darlings, my darlings! The wail of despair rang out once more. Oh, she must go back to that poor woman.

Oh, she had not arms enough, not lives enough. Oh, she must multiply her life, tenfold. Mama, it was Addie speaking. The cab is here. I'm going for Dr. Alstma. One of the maids has gone to another doctor, close by. Yes, dear, and then, and then go to, oh, go to grandmama's, she's expecting us, I know for certain that she's expecting us. Stay in here, darlings, don't leave the room, promise me, and Addy, don't tell her, don't tell her

anything yet, tell her, tell her that. The wail of despair rang out, and there were only two of them now that Addy was gone. There were only two of them. Helpless. She and Henry, in that night of death and snow, as though death was snowing outside, as though death was snowing into the brightly lit house,

with its all-obliterating whiteness, dazzlingly light, dazzlingly white. There were only two of them. End of Chapter 28. Chapter 29 of the Twilight of the Souls. by Louis Cuperus. This Librivox recording is in the public domain. The twilight had passed away in the dazzling white lights.

But yonder, in the big dark chilly house, the old woman sat waiting. She had sent the maids to bed and told them to put out all the lights. But she herself did not go to bed. She waited. She sat in her big dark room, with just a candle flickering on the table, beside her. It seemed to her that she was waiting a long time. She felt very cold, though she had put

her little black shawl round her shoulders, and she peered into the frowning shadow which quivered with dancing black ghosts and with the flickering of the candle. It was a dance of ghosts hovering silently round the room, and they seemed to have come from the distant past to haunt her, to have come out of the things of long ago, a very long ago, far off, forgotten years of childhood and girlhood. The young man whom she had married, their long life together, their children, young around them. Then the rise of their greatness, the rise of the white palaces in tropical climes, the glitter around them and their children of all the glittering vanity of the world. Then the children growing up and moving farther and farther away from her,

and she saw it all looming so darkly and so menacingly in the long dark rooms, while she sat waiting and watching by the flickering flame of the candle. Then her old head nodded very slowly up and down, as if to say that she recognised all the things of long ago, which loomed so darkly and threateningly, that there was not a ghost which she did not recognize, but that she did not understand why they all thronged round her tonight, like a vision of menace, a dance of death.

And while she sat and wondered, it was as if each dancing phantom blacked out something of the room and the present that she still saw faintly gleaming, blacked out, one outline after the other, with dancing phantom after dancing phantom, until at last all was black around her, and not only the room and the present had become black, but also the pale visions of the past,

the years of childhood and girlhood, the young man whom she had married, and the children, and all the life yonder in the white palaces amid the tropical scenery. Black, everything became black, until everything was blotted out, until the dance of all those fleses,

Phantoms was obliterated in shadow, and the old woman, nodding her head, still sat peering into the dark, with the flickering candle beside her. Thus she sat and waited, and with the darkness before her, it was as if she did not see the candle now that everything had become black. Thus she sat and waited and wondered whether many and many nights would still drag their blackness over her. How many black hours! How many black hours! how many black nights could the black future still drag along.

Until at last she heard a bell clanging like a shrill alarm through the livid darkness and mechanically because she was waiting she rose painfully and took her candle.

Through the dark room and the dim passage she went and the faint light went with her so faint that she did not see it that she just groped her way painfully through the passage and down the stairs, still holding high the candle.

The stairs seemed steep to her, and she went cautiously, waiting on each step. At each step the faint light of the candle descended with her, and behind her the night accumulated with each step that she left behind her. She had now reached the foot of the stairs, and slowly and painfully, with the dragging tread of age. She went through the hall to the front door, whence the alarm had rung, and her trembling hand opened the door. Addy entered. Granny, is that you yourself? Yes, child. I came, Granny dear, because Mama said that you expected us. Yes. Were you waiting up first, Granny? Yes. He took the candle out of her hand. I've come to say, Granny, that there's nothing wrong with

Uncle Gerrit. She nodded her head wisely. Now you won't wait any longer for Mama, Granny, and you'll go to bed, won't you? Can I do anything more for you? She nodded her head. Yes, she said. What, Granny dear, shall I hold the candle for you, and will you go to bed then? No, no. What do you want to do then, Granny dear? Wait. Are you still waiting for Mama? Yes, but perhaps she won't come. She nodded. her head again. He gently led her away from where she stood and up the stairs. So you were not going to bed yet. She shook her head. Are you still expecting Mama? She nodded. Shall I light the Gus, Grandmama? She put her hand on his arm to prevent him. No, no, she said, it's dark,

there is no light. But won't you have the gust let, Grandmama? There is no light. You would do better to go to bed. Mama's coming. She will hardly come now, Granny. She's coming. A bell rang, and Addy started. She's coming, repeated the old woman. Addy went downstairs and opened the door.

It was Constance, with a cab, in the driving snow. Mama, I've come. I left the doctor and papa with Aunt Adeline. Grandmamma is expecting you. They went in, and it. It seemed to Constance as though, after the whiteness outside and all the despair yonder, she saw it snowing here, inside the house, snowing black, with dark black snowflakes, inside the hall, inside the rooms, and the face of her mother,

sitting beside the candle stared at her like a ghost with glassy eyes. "'Mama!' Constance, there's nothing wrong with heret. No, oh no, Mama. I'm glad, I'm glad, dear, and there's nothing wrong with Ernst either. No, oh no, Mama, so there's nothing wrong with any of them? No, they're all well, Mama. All well, all well, I'm glad, dear, especially as tonight. What, Mama, it's the last time, the last Sunday.

I am too tired, dear, and they, they are all too far, and if there's nothing wrong with any of them, if they're all well, then, then, no more Sundays. And this house is too big, and the house is so cold, so cold. The house is so cold and so big, and the cold house is so dark, and Mama wants. What do you want, Mama, to come to you, dear, now that you are back, from Brussels. To you, dear. Mama, Mama, Mama wants to come. To you.

Do you want to come to us, Mama? Yes, to you, dear, to you, dear. So, Gerrit is well. Oh, yes, Mama, he's well. Then, then all is well. Suddenly the candle flared up and went out. Then they lit the gas and took the old woman up to bed. She submitted like a child,

for around her, after her last glimmer of light, the twilight had deepened into black nights. End of Chapter 29. End of the Twilight of the Souls by Louis Cuperus. Read by Phil Benson. The story of the small. Souls continues in the final volume of the quartet, Dr Adrian.