# Small Souls/Chapter XXII

Marietje van Saetzema stood at the window and looked out into the street. She looked down the whole street, because the house, a corner-house, stood not in the length of it, but in the width, half-closing the street, making it a sort of courtyard of big houses. The street stretched to some distance; and another house part-closed the farther end, turning it actually into a courtyard, occupied by well-to-do people. The two rows of gables ran along with a fine independence of chimney-stacks, of little cast-iron pinnacles and pointed zinc roofs, little copper weathercocks and little balconies and bow-windows, as though the architects and builders had conspired to produce something artistic and refused to design one long monotonous gable-line. But the new street—it was about twenty years old—had nevertheless retained the Dutch trimness that characterizes the dwellings of the better classes: the well-scrubbed pavements ran into the distance, growing ever narrower to the eye, with their grey hem of kerb-stone, their regularly-recurring lamp-posts; in the middle of the street was a plantation: oval grass-plots surrounded by low railings, in which were chestnut-trees, neatly pruned, and, beneath them, a neat shrubbery of dwarf firs. The fronts of the houses glistened with cleanliness after the spring cleaning; the tidily-laid bricks displayed their rectangular outlines ​clearly, even at a distance; the window-frames were bright with fresh paint, dazzling cream-colour or pale brown; the blinds, neatly lowered in front of the shining plate-glass windows, were let down in each house precisely the same depth, as though mathematically measured; and the houses concealed their inner lives very quietly behind the straight, nicely-balanced lace curtains. And this was very characteristic, that above each gable there jutted a flagstaff, held aslant with iron pins, the staff painted a bright red, white and blue—the national colours—as though wound about with ribbons, with a freshly-gilded knob at the top. All those flagstaffs—a forest of staffs, with their iron pins, for ever aslant on the gables—waited patiently to hoist their colours, to wave their bunting, twice a year, for the Queen and her mother, the Regent.
Marietje looked out. It was May; and the chestnuts in the grass-plots tried to outstretch and unfurl their soft, pale-green fans, now folded and bent back against their stalks. But a mad wind whirled through the street, which was like a courtyard of opulence, and the wind scourged the still furled chestnut-fans. The girl looked at them compassionately as they were whipped to and fro by the wind, the eager young leaves which, full of vernal life and pride of youth, were trying hard to unfold. The tender leaves were full of hope, because yesterday the sun had shone, after the rain, out of a flood-swept sky; and they thought that their leafy days were beginning, their life of leaves budding out from ​stalk and twig. They did not know that the wind was always at work, lashing, as with angry scourges, with stinging whips; they did not know that their leafy parents had been lashed last year, even as they were now; and, though they loved the wind, upon which they dreamt of floating and waving and being merry and happy, they never expected to be lashed with whips even before they had unfurled all the young bravery of their green.
The wind was pitiless. The wind lashed through the air like one possessed, like a madman that had no feeling: strong in his might and blind in his heartlessness. And the girl’s pity went out to the eager leaves, the young, hoping leaves, which she saw shaken and pulled and scourged and driven withered across the street. The blind, all-powerful north-east wind filled the street: the weathercocks spun madly; the iron pins of the flagstaff creaked goutily and painfully; the flagstaffs themselves bent as though they were the masts of a fleet of houses moored in a roadstead of bricks.
The girl looked out into the street. It was a May morning. Standing in front of one house and looking for all the world like sailors on a ship were men dressed in white sailors’-jackets, busy fixing ladders and climbing up them to clean the plate-glass windows. They swarmed up the ladders, carrying pails of water; and, in the midst of the forest of masts, of the red-white-and-blue flagstaffs, they looked like seamen gaily rigging a ship.
Along the street went the brightly-painted carts ​of a laundry, a pastrycook, a butter-factory. Hard behind came loud-voiced hawkers pushing barrows with oranges and the very first purple-stained strawberries. And the whole economy of eating and drinking of those tidy houses, whose life lay hidden behind their lace curtains, filled the morning street. Butcher-boys prevailed. Each house had a different butcher. Broad and sturdy, the boys walked along in their clean, white smocks, carrying their wicker baskets of quivering meat held, with a fist at the handle, firmly on shoulder or hip, bending their bodies a little because of the weight; and they rang at all the doors. Sometimes, a couple bicycled swiftly down the street. At all the houses they delivered loads of meat: beefsteaks and rumpsteaks and fillet-steaks and ribs and sirloins of beef and balls of forced-meat; the maid-servants took the meat in at the front-doors, with an exchange of chaff, and then closed the door again with a bang. The butcher-boys largely prevailed; but the greengrocers, with their barrows arranged with fresh vegetables, were also many in number. The dairy, with its cart filled with polished copper cans, rang at every door; and notable for its ostentatious neatness was a van conveying beer in cans: the driver, who was constantly getting down and ringing, wore a sort of brown shooting-suit, with top-boots and a motor-cap; the cart was painted with earthenware cans swelling out in relief from the panels. A barrel-organ quavered on, playing a very doleful tune: the organ-man ground out a bit of dolefulness, stopped ​and then pushed on again; his old woman rang at every door, put the coppers she received in her pocket, as if she were collecting so many debts. Each time, the maids, in their lilac-print dresses, appeared at the doors, or leant out and looked from the open windows of the bedrooms, or called out and flung down the rich man’s dole of coppers. Domestic economy filled the street, while the wind, the blundering, mighty wind, blew on. A gentleman passed on his way to his office, hugging a portfolio. Two girls flew by on bicycles; a lady hurried along on some urgent errand. But, for the rest, there was nothing but the economy of eating and drinking. It filled the street, it rang and rang and rang until all the houses chimed with the ringing. And the houses took in their supplies, the street grew quiet: only the wind blew the young chestnut-leaves to pieces and the flagstaffs groaned on their creaking, gouty pins. . . .
Marietje turned away. She was a pale, fair-haired little thing of sixteen, with pale-blue eyes and a white, bloodless skin. Her hair, brushed off her forehead, was already done up behind into a knob. She wore a little pinafore to protect her frock. And now she sat down at the piano and began to tap out her scales.
The room in which Marietje was practising was the drawing-room. It was a fairly large room on the first floor, but it was so terribly crammed with furniture, arranged in studied confusion, with an affectation of elegance, that there was hardly space ​to move about or sit. On the backs of all the chairs hung fancy antimacassars, flattened by the pressure of reclining forms, with faded and crumpled ribbons. On all sorts of little tables stood nameless ornaments: little earthenware dogs and china smelling-bottles, set out as in a tenpenny bazaar. The wall-paper displayed big flowers, the carpet more big flowers, of a different species, while on the curtains blossomed a third kind of flower; and the colours of all these flowers yelled at one another like so many screeching parrots. In the corners of the room rose dusty Makart bouquets, which decorated those same corners year in, year out.
Marietje played her scales in the drawing-room, while the wind howled down the chimney, which smelt of soot after the winter fires. Conscientiously Marietje played her scales with her stubborn little fingers, constantly making the same mistake, which she did not hear and therefore did not correct, thinking that it was right as it was. Now and then, she looked up through the window:
“Poor trees!” thought Marietje. “Poor leaves! See how the wind’s killing them; and they’re hardly open yet! . . .”
She played on, conscientiously, but she dearly wished that she could make the wind stop, to save the leaves, the young chestnut-leaves. She remembered, it was just the same thing last spring. The spring before that, it was the same too. And then, when the chestnut-leaves were at last able to unfurl themselves, in a quiet, windless moment, then they were scorched ​and shrivelled for the whole summer, for their whole leafy lives. Poor trees! Poor leaves! . . .
The stubborn fingers went on conscientiously, tapping out the scales and constantly playing that same wrong note with almost comical persistency: ting! The front-door bell was constantly going ting-a-ling, ting-a-ling! All those noises—the wind: whew, boo! The scales: ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta; ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta. The front-door bell: ting-a-ling, ting-a-ling! The barrel-organs in the street, two going at the same time. The colours indoors: the colours of the wall-paper and curtains and carpet, screeching like parrots. The cries of the costermongers outside: “Strawberrees! . . . Fine strawberrees!” The rattle of the greengrocers’ carts, clattering over the noisy cobble-stones—all these noises rang out together and it was as though the wind defined and accentuated each individual sound, blowing away a mist from each sound, leaving only the rough, resonant kernel of each sound to ring out against the glittering plate-glass windows, along the goutily-creaking flagstaffs, into this room, where the parrot-colours jabbered aloud. . . .
It blew and rang and screeched and jabbered; and the girl with her continual false note—ting!—heard none of it, but thought only, “Oh, those poor trees! Oh, those poor leaves!” in her gentle little, hypersensitive soul. Used as she was to the wind, the noises and the colours, she saw nothing but the trees, heard nothing but the rustling of the leaves, nor heard her own persistent little false note: ting! ​Ting-a-ling, ting-a-ling went the bell; and the wind must have rushed through the front-door and up the stairs, for the drawing-room door blew open as lightly as though the great door had been no more than a sheet of note-paper; the maid came pounding up the stairs, the stairs creaked, another door slammed; the maid, at the door, screamed out something loud through the house, loud through the wind, loud through all the sounds and colours; another voice sounded sharply in reply; the maid went pounding down again, the stairs creaked and bang went the door:
“Will you please go upstairs, mevrouw?”
“Come upstairs, Cateau!”
“But am I re-ally not disturb-ing you, Adolphine?”
“No, come up.”
“What a wind, eh, Phi-i-ine? Eh? How it’s blow-ing!”
Ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta; ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta, went Marietje’s scales, as Mamma entered with Aunt Cateau. Whew, boo! blew the wind. C-r-rack, cr-r-rack! went the flagstaff outside the window. . . .
“Good-morn-ing, Marie-tje. And tell me, Phi-i-ine, was it a reg-ular din-ner?”
“Yes, it was a formal dinner.”
“Oh, so they do see peo-ple? And I thought they lived so qui-etly. We are nev-er asked there; are you, Adolph-ine?”
“No, never.”
“I do think she might al-so some-times show a ​little polite-ness to her brothers and sis-ters. We nev-er see peo-ple, as you know, don’t you, Adolphine? Ka-rel doesn’t care for it; he only cares for qui-et. I should rather like it. But it’s Ka-rel, you see, who doesn’t care for it. And who were there, Adolph-ine?”
“Oh, well, they know nobody, so it looked to me rather like a failure. Nobody except that Vreeswijck. No doubt, they’d had one or two refusals, for they’d asked Paul to make up the party.”
“Oh, Paul? No doubt, one or two must have refused!”
“Yes, of course.”
“Well, re-ally, Con-stance is . . . But then I don’t call a din-ner like that a success. Do you, Adolph-ine?”
“No, I thought it ridiculous. A dinner-party of four!”
“Were the men dressed?”
“Yes, dressed.”
“And Con-stance? Low-necked?”
“No, not low-necked, but smart as paint. And champagne!”
“Re-ally! Cham-pagne as we-ell?”
“Yes, a cheap brand. And the rooms so dark: I didn’t think it respectable. Such a dim light, you know. Quite disreputable, I thought, with those three men,” said Adolphine, whispering because of Marietje.
“She can’t hear, she’s play-ing. Oh, re-ally! And what next?” ​“Well, I think, if Constance wants to see people in that sort of way, she could have done so just as well in Brussels. She’s supposed to have come here for the family.”
“But she doesn’t ask the fam-ily. Oh, you mustn’t count us, Phi-i-ine. We al-ways live ve-ry qui-etly. It’s Ka-rel, you see.”
“But I feel sure now that she means to get presented at Court.”
“Yes, by Vrees-wijck, no doubt. Will he present her to the Queen?” asked Cateau, rounding her owl’s eyes.
“Oh, no!” said Adolphine, irritably. “But they mean to push themselves with his assistance.”
“Oh, is that the way it’s done? You see, we know no-thing about the Court. You wouldn’t get Ka-rel to go to Court for any-thing! Not if you paid him! But now it’s quite cert-ain.”
“Yes, I’m convinced of it now.”
“About the Court?”
“Yes.”
“Oh! Well, I al-ways thought that Con-stance would have too much tact for that. And may I have a look at Floortje’s trous-seau now, Adolph-ine? She’ll be mar-ried quite soon now, won’t she? In a week? Ah! And I al-ways think it so nice to be mar-ried in May, don’t you, Adolph-ine?”
The two sisters’ voices whined and snarled, the stairs creaked, the doors slammed. Ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta, went the scales. Whew, boo, whew! went the wind, roaring down the sooty chimney. ​Cr-r-rack! Cr-r-rack! went the gouty flagstaff. “Strawberrees! . . . Fine strawberrees!” shouted the costermonger outside. Ting! went Marietje’s obstinate false note.
The girl looked up through the window.
“Those poor trees!” thought Marietje. “Oh, those poor leaves! . . .”