# Small Souls/Chapter XI

They stepped from the carriage; the hall-door opened. The curtains of the front room shook slightly, as though with the trembling touch of an old hand; but there was no one in the hall to receive them except the butler who had opened the door.
Then Constance said:
“Henri, you go in first. I’ll come presently, with Addie, when you call me. . . ."
He looked at her, hesitating to say that he himself wished to go in with Addie. But she had laid her hand on the boy’s shoulder and looked at Van der Welcke so steadily that he understood that she would not consent. And he went in, staggering like a drunken man, went into the room where the window-curtains had trembled.
The butler retired, not knowing what to do. And Constance sat down on the oak settle and drew Addie beside her. So she was meekly waiting in the hall, waiting the pleasure of her father- and mother-in-law; but it was of her own will that she waited now, after waiting nearly fourteen years for a word that would have called her to them. With a woman’s delicacy, she had let Henri go in first to his parents; but she had set her mind upon taking her boy to his grand-parents herself. It was for her to do that; she insisted on her privilege, her right. . . . Henri’s hesitation had not escaped her; but she had ​laid her hand upon her son’s shoulder, as though taking possession of him.
She did not know how long she waited, but it seemed very long; and she had time to see every detail of the hall: the oak wainscoting; the three or four family-portraits; a couple of old engravings of city-views; the Delft jugs on an antique cabinet; the staircase leading to the floor above; the oak doors of the rooms, which remained silent and closed. She saw the pattern of the tiles in the passage and the colours of the wide strip of Deventer carpet. . . . Then, at last, the door of the front room opened and an old man appeared. Constance rose. The old man had Henri’s features, but more deeply furrowed, and his clean-shaven upper lip fell in; his straight nose was more prominent and his ivory forehead arched high above a scanty fringe of iron-grey hair. His eyes looked out blue and hard, as Henri’s eyes looked out. He was tall, Henri was short; his shoulders were broad and bent in the long, dark coat, Henri was square and straight. His hands were long, wrinkled and bony and they trembled; and Henri’s hands were short and broad. . . . She made her comparison in two or three seconds, standing with her hand on her son’s shoulder. Then the old man said:
“Come in, Constance. . . .”
She went, gently pushing Addie before her, and they entered the room. She saw an old woman, with a large face that in no way reminded her of Henri. The grey hair, parted in the middle, was set severely ​in a silver-stiff frame; her complexion was yellow and waxen; her dark-grey eyes were full of tears and peered painfully through that misty haze. Her figure was bent in the dark stuff dress; her legs seemed to move with difficulty; and her stooping body was almost deformed. She was holding Henri’s hand. . . .
“Constance,” the old woman began; and her trembling hands were raised as though for an embrace.
“Here is your grandson,” said Constance, stiffly.
She pushed Addie a little nearer. The boy looked out of his steady eyes, which were the eyes of Henri and of the old man, and said:
“How do you do, Grandpapa and Grandmamma?”
In the large, sombre room, his voice sounded dull and yet firm. The old woman and the old man looked at the boy; and there was an oppressive silence. They looked at the boy, and they were so struck with amazement that they could not find a word to say. The old woman had taken Henri’s hand again; and the tears flowed from her eyes. Henri’s jaws grated and he shuddered, nervously:
“That’s my boy,” he said.
“So that is Adriaan,” said the old woman, trembling, and her embrace, which had not reached Constance, now closed upon the child. He kissed her in his turn; and then the old man also embraced him and the child kissed him back.
“Hendrik,” said the old woman. “Hendrik, ​how like . . . how like Henri, when he was that age!”
The old man nodded gently. The past was coming back to the old people; and it was as if they saw their own son when he was thirteen. They were so much surprised at this that they could only stare at the boy, as though they did not believe their eyes, as though it were some strange dream.
Constance stood stiffly and said nothing. But the old woman now said:
“It is a great pleasure to us to see you here, Constance.”
Constance tried to smile:
“You are very kind,” she said, pleasantly.
“But do sit down,” said the old woman, trembling, and she pointed to the chairs.
They all sat down; and Henri made an effort to talk naturally, about Driebergen. The past that lay between them was so high-heaped that it seemed as though they were never to approach one another across this obstacle. So many words that should have been spoken had remained unspoken, for the sake of an harmonious silence, that silence itself became a torture; and so many years were piled between the parents and the children that it seemed impossible for them now to reach one another with words. The words fell strangely in the sombre room, which looked out upon the March garden and upon the road paling away in the vague mists; the words fell like things, strangely, like hard, round ​things, material things, and struck against one another like marbles clashing together. . . .
It was the painful talking on indifferent topics that was almost impossible. For the words constantly struck against things of the past, things painful to the touch; and there were no indifferent topics. When Henri said that Driebergen was very much changed, he was referring to his many years of absence. When Constance made a remark about Brussels, she was referring to her long residence there, during which her husband’s parents had refused to see her and looked upon her as a disgrace. When they spoke of Addie’s life as a small child, it was as though they two, the father and the mother, were reproaching the grandparents. There were no indifferent topics; and a despairing gloom hung between the old people and the child, because they could not reach the child across their son and their daughter-in-law. . . . Outside, the wind rose, howling; the heavy grey clouds descended upon them like a damp mist; and the rain clattered down. Henri had thought of asking his father to take him into the garden, to see if he still recognized it, but the pelting rain prevented him; and he saw nothing but his mother’s tears. In his heart, he laid these to his wife’s charge. The past was piled up as a wall between each soul and its neighbour.
The boy felt it. He felt his breathing oppressed with all that gloom; and again and again he wanted to sigh, but he kept back his sighs. He did not know what to say; and he gave his grandparents the ​impression of a quiet, subdued child, who was not happy. They spoke to him too as old people do to a child, with condescending kindness, pointing out the little things in the room. The boy, who was accustomed to be a man standing between his two parents, answered nothing except in shy monosyllables.
Henri and Constance avoided looking at each other; and each of them, even in the same conversation, talked as it were separately to the old people. They were to stay to lunch—the old-fashioned Dutch “coffee-drinking”—and return at five o’clock to the Hague. The butler came to say that luncheon was served and pushed back the sliding doors. The dining-room lay on this side of the great, closed conservatory, a gloomy shadow in the pale daylight that streaked in through the rain; and the mahogany furniture gleamed with reflected lights, the table shone white and glassy. They sat down: difficult words fell now and again and sounded hard in the somewhat chilly room. The old woman with much ceremony offered a soft-boiled egg, or a tongue-sandwich which lay neatly arranged with its fellows on a tray. She herself filled the small china coffee-cups. It all lasted very long, was all very solemn and proper, with much formality about the egg and the sandwich. Addie felt as if he could easily swallow both the egg and sandwich in one gulp; and he had to restrain himself in order to eat the egg slowly and neatly in little spoonfuls and to chew the sandwich with little bites, so as not to finish too soon nor deprive the table of its excuse for being so ​elaborately laid. He was not sure whether he was still hungry or not when Grandmamma offered him a second sandwich; but he took it, because otherwise he would not have known what to do with his hands. He sat like a small, stiff little boy, shyly; and, when he looked up at his father, it seemed to him that he too was sitting as if he had eaten his sandwich too fast. Grandmamma herself buttered his bread for him and offered it to him, ready cut into strips. He ate the narrow fingers with a great effort at self-control.
It lasted endlessly long; and the table remained white, bare and neat, now that the sandwiches were finished; the empty coffee-cups gave the only touch of untidiness: the broken, yellowy egg-shells Grandmamma had put away on the sideboard. When they rose, Grandpapa asked Henri to come and smoke a cigar in his study; Grandmamma stayed in the sitting-room with Constance and Addie. On the road outside, the rain splashed in the puddles.
Constance felt a stranger in this house. Nevertheless, her mood became softer, because the old woman’s eyes, in the stiff, silver-framed face, were still sad and constantly filled with tears. She was very sensitive to any emotion in another; and, though she fought against it, she herself felt moved. She wanted to talk to this grandmother about her grandson; and so she said how clever he was, how good to his parents. Mrs. van der Welcke nodded good-naturedly, but continued to look upon Addie as a ​child, while Constance was talking of him as man. The old woman did not fully grasp the meaning of Constance’ words, but the sound of them increased her emotion. She called Addie to her side, said that he must come and stay with them in the summer: it was delightful in the country then, for games. The boy had it on his lips to say that his parents could not do without him; but he felt that his words would sound strange and elderly and priggish. And he only said, very prettily:
“I should like to, Grandmamma.”
He played at being a little child, because Grandmamma happened to look upon him as one. Really he was thinking of something very different, thinking of the houses which he had seen yesterday with Papa and Mamma and which his parents could not agree upon, in any particular: the neighbourhood, the division of the rooms. Because he knew that the hotel was expensive and that both Papa and Mamma would become less fidgety once they had a house, he thought of cutting the Gordian knot and going by himself to the owner of a nice house near the Woods, not so very far from Granny van Lowe’s. If he didn’t interfere, it would be weeks and weeks before Papa and Mamma made up their minds. He knew that to take a house was a very serious matter, but he also knew that Papa and Mamma would never agree. He must needs, therefore, risk something and he would hope for the best, hope that all would turn out well. ​“A couple of houses farther on, there are two very nice little boys: you shall see them when you come in the summer, Adriaan.”
“Yes, Grandmamma.”
His voice sounded very refined and soft; and Constance had to smile. But, while he sat there stiffly, with his shoulders squared and his legs close together, he was dividing the rooms of the house near the Woods. Mamma, meanwhile, was exchanging toilsome words with Grandmamma. He portioned out the rooms. Downstairs, the drawing-room and the dining-room, more or less as at Uncle Gerrit’s: those two rooms always communicated in Holland, with folding-doors between them. And the little conservatory. And the little garden was quite nice. Upstairs, the large room for Mamma and the smaller one for Papa; and it was jolly that he himself could have that sort of turret-room, with a bow-window, in between their two bedrooms. So he would be between Papa and Mamma. Above that, there was still a sort of attic floor, but that did not concern him: Mamma must manage that. It was rather risky perhaps, to go to that fat man to-morrow—a contractor, Papa called him—and tell him that Papa had sent him to say that he would take the house. . . . Perhaps that house in the something van Nassaustraat was better, bigger. But it was dearer also. . . . Perhaps Papa would be angry, if he acted just like that, off his own bat; but, of course, there would be nothing settled in black and white. Only, if Papa and Mamma once knew that ​he had been to the fat man, well, they might be a little angry at first, might squabble a bit more; and then both of them would look at him and laugh and they would take the house and everything would be all right. . . . If they did not decide a bit quicker, if they went on squabbling, their Brussels furniture would suddenly be there, in front of their noses, and they without a house to put it in. . . . It was true, Granny van Lowe had said, “Be careful about taking a house:” that was all very well when people agreed; but that’s what Papa and Mamma never did. They had come to Holland, because he had said:
“Why, I’m a Dutch boy, aren’t I? Then let’s go!”
Well, they would take the house after he had been to the fat man. There was nothing else to be done, though it was risky.
Papa came downstairs with Grandpapa, looking more cheerful: perhaps he had been talking to his father. They sat on a little longer and Papa took out his watch once or twice. . . .
Then the carriage drove up; the old coachman, who had known Papa as a small boy, drove them to the station, where they arrived twenty minutes too soon.
Quietly, without speaking, they walked up and down, waiting for the train. . . .