‘How lovely Eline looks! Don’t you agree, De Woude?’ asked Lili.
Since she had been skating with him last winter she had allowed him to call her familiarly by her first name, while she had taken to addressing him simply as ‘De Woude’.
‘Yes, quite so,’ replied Georges indifferently.
‘Well, I think she’s really beautiful!’ said Lili with conviction. ‘How can you not find her beautiful? Your taste is very peculiar!’
He laughed with secret pleasure.
‘It’s not my fault that she leaves me cold, you know. I happen to have a different idea of beauty. But if you absolutely insist that I should find her beautiful, well then, I shall take another look.’
‘Oh no, you needn’t do that,’ she replied, laughing with him. ‘It’s just that every man I know thinks she’s beautiful, so I can’t see why you don’t. And I can’t imagine why Frédérique is not fond of her. If I were a man I’d fall head over heels in love with her.’
‘And fight a duel with Van Erlevoort, I suppose.’
The first part of the programme was at an end and the listeners began to swarm away in all directions. Georges and Lili found themselves hemmed in by a mass of heads and shoulders, all pressing forward.
‘This is hopeless,’ said Lili. ‘I hate being in a crowd like this. You’d think it was Sunday.’
‘What would you say to a stroll on the beach,’ he suggested softly. ‘The exit is just over there.’
‘Is it allowed?’ said Lili, warming to the idea. ‘Do you think Mama would mind?’
‘Of course not, not if you’re with me,’ he said, sounding almost proud.
They passed through the turnstile and hurried down the steps, crossed the road, and then took the broad wooden stairs down to the sand.
The large wicker beach chairs were ranged in clusters for the night. Here and there a Scheveninger could be seen, adjusting his swagger to the slow pace of his ample-skirted wife.
The waves lapping the shore glittered in the bright lights shining from the gas-lit Kurhaus.
‘Phew!’ said Lili. ‘Some space at last!’
The sea, calm and smooth, unfurled in shades of green, azure and violet, capped here and there with glistening white foam all along the beach. It was a starry night, and the Milky Way resembled a sprinkling of pearl dust in the mysterious vastness of the deepblue sky. The air was filled with a steady murmur, as from a single, gigantic seashell.
‘How wonderfully quiet it is here after all that noise! Quite divine,’ gushed Lili.
‘Yes it is,’ said Georges.
She had almost tripped over something, after which he had offered her his arm, and she had taken it. There was so much he wanted to say, but he could not find the words for fear of sounding ridiculous. She too felt a sweet impulse to pour out her feelings, to tell him how awed she was by the beauty of the sea and the starry sky, but she felt a trifle embarrassed about the poetic exaltation in her heart, which was so strangely at odds with the mundaneness of the circles they moved in. So they both kept silent as they strolled along the beach, with the murmur of the sea in their ears and the same tender emotion in their hearts, which each could sense in the other, and which seemed to fill the silence between them with more than words.
They had strolled wordlessly for some distance along the tranquil sea, lost in their shared solitude, when he felt he ought to say something.
‘I could walk with you to the ends of the earth, or anyway all the way to Katwijk!’ he said, jesting to hide his serious intent.
She laughed; it was a joke, after all.
‘In that case I’d probably get very tired.’
‘Then I would carry you.’
‘You couldn’t — I’m too heavy.’
‘If that’s what you think, come here and I’ll show you.’
‘Georges! What a shocking idea! Now I shall have to get cross — unless you beg my pardon properly, that is.’
‘How do you mean, properly?’ he asked humbly.
‘Say after me: I, Georges de Woude van Bergh, humbly apologise to Lili,’ she intoned, and a lot more besides. He dutifully repeated every word, and she kept adding phrases simply because she delighted in the sound of his voice.
Indeed, she was not angry at all. She wished their walk would never end, that they would stroll along the lightly foaming sea for ever, in quest of new horizons.
‘I think we ought to be getting back,’ he said abruptly.
They turned around, and were astonished to see how far they had strayed from the Kurhaus, which was now a ruddy glow in the distance. But Lili’s initial concern promptly gave way to a sense of romantic defiance — what did she care about all those people crowding the terraces? She was with him, by the sea, and that was all she cared about!
‘We’d better hurry,’ Georges said, with a flustered laugh. ‘Your Mama will be wondering what’s keeping us.’
His urgency vexed her. Did he not feel as she did? Was he not utterly absorbed by her as she was by him, did he not feel that the only thing that mattered in the whole world was that they were together, now, by the soft whisper of the waves?
‘I can’t walk so fast in the sand!’ she fretted, tightening her hold on his arm.
‘Then you’ll have to lean on me. Come on,’ he said resolutely. So there was severity, too, under all that sweetness and gallantry!
‘But Georges, I simply can’t go on, I’m exhausted!’ she panted, sounding more plaintive than cross. But he only laughed and, with her arm clasped firmly in his own, swept her up the broad wooden staircase to the road, and in the end she could not help laughing too. It was rather fun, dashing about in the dark like this.
They paused to catch their breath before starting up the steps to the terrace, and while Georges felt in his pockets for the tickets, Lili shook the sand from the hem of her dress.
The interval had come to an end, and the orchestra was sounding the brass fanfares of the Queen of Sheba’s march. The crowd had thinned considerably, and Lili blushed as she and Georges made their way to the table where Madame Verstraeten, Marie and Frédérique were waiting for them. Otto and Eline had left.
‘Good gracious, where have you two been hiding?’ cried Marie, while Georges and Lili occupied the chairs that had been kept vacant for them by draping various items over the backs. ‘You’ve been ages; I went for a stroll with Paul while you were away, and Eline and Otto couldn’t hold your seats for ever.’
‘And it took tremendous effort on our part to keep them for you, I hope you realise,’ added Frédérique.
‘But where on earth have you been?’ demanded Madame Verstraeten. ‘Did you go to the Conversation Room, to watch the dancing?’
Georges proceeded to tell them of their walk along the beach, and Lili secretly admired him for his tactful replies to her mother’s queries.
. .
Henk and Vincent were the sole occupants of a table in the vicinity of the Conversation Room. Betsy, in a coquettish mood, had gone off with young Hijdrecht to take a turn about the terrace, while Eline and Otto had moved to Madame Eekhof’s table in an attempt to make amends for having passed by four times without greeting her, which misdemeanour had been pointed out by Ange.
‘I almost died this afternoon, the heat was so bad!’ muttered Vincent.
‘Eline can’t stand it either,’ rejoined Henk, and downed his glass of Pilsner.
Vincent drank nothing; he was not feeling very well and did not enjoy the mêlée. He rarely went to Scheveningen: in the morning the heat was intolerable on the scorching beach, and in the evening he seldom had the energy. But now and then he went, just for the sake of having been there.
He was pondering how to phrase the question that was uppermost in his thoughts: a request for a loan. The last time Henk had advanced him some money he had not done so in his customary spirit of good-humoured generosity, for he was becoming annoyed at Vere’s constant shortage of funds. This had not escaped Vincent, but it could not be helped, he would have to find some round-about way of raising the subject.