“You’re very kind; shall we sit down for a moment … I remember your name too … Weren’t you on the committee of the Women’s Conference in London?”
“Yes … I spoke about the upbringing of children … Weren’t you able to come to London?”
“No, I did think about it, but I was in Rome at the time, and I couldn’t.”
“What a shame. The conference was a great step forward. If your pamphlet had been translated for it, and become known, you would have had great success.”
“I’m not really striving for success of that kind …”
“Of course, I quite understand. But the success of your book surely also benefits the great cause.”
“Do you really mean that? Is there something valuable in my pamphlet?”
“Do you doubt it?”
“Very often …”
“Unbelievable … Yet it is written with such assurance.”
“Perhaps for that very reason …”
“I don’t understand you. There is sometimes a vagueness about the Dutch that we English find hard to understand. Something like the reflection of your beautiful skies in your characters.”
“Do you never doubt? Are you sure about your ideas on the upbringing of children?”
“I have studied children in schools, crèches, at home, and I’ve developed very clear ideas. And following those ideas I am working for the people of the future. I’ll send you my pamphlet, the quintessence of my speeches at the conference. Are you working on a new brochure at present?”
“No, unfortunately not …”
“Why not? We must all close ranks in order to triumph.”
“I think I’ve said all I have to say … I wrote on impulse, from my own experience. And then …”
“Then …”
“Then everything changed … All women are different, and I never liked generalising. And do you believe that many women can work for a worldwide goal with the perseverance of a man, if they have found a small goal for themselves, a small happiness, for example, a love for their own self, in which they are happy? Do you not think that in every woman there is a latent egoism for her own love, happiness, and that when she has found that … she loses interest in the world and the future?”
“Perhaps … But how few women find that.”
“I don’t think many do … But that is a different question. And I believe that for most women interest in world affairs is a second best.”
“You have lost the faith. You speak quite differently than you wrote a year ago …”
“Yes. I’ve become very humble, because I am more honest. Of course I believe in a few women, in a few great spirits. But I wonder if the majority are not stuck with their female frailty …”
“No, not with a sensible upbringing.”
“Yes, I think it’s the upbringing …”
“Of the infant, of the young girl …”
“I don’t think I was ever brought up properly, and I expect that’s my weakness.”
“Our girls must be told very young about life’s struggles.”
“You’re right. We, my girlfriends, my sisters and I, were steered as soon as possible towards the safe haven of marriage … Do you know who I feel most sorry for? Our parents! Didn’t they think that they were teaching us everything we needed to know? And now at this point they have to realise that they could not look into the future, and that their upbringing wasn’t an upbringing, since they did not point out to their children the struggle that was being fought out before their very eyes. They are our parents and they deserve our pity. They cannot put anything right at this stage. They see us, girls, young women from twenty to thirty, overwhelmed by life, and they did not give us the strength to deal with it. They kept us safe for as long as possible in the parental niche, and then they thought about marrying us off. In no way in order to get rid of us, but for our happiness, our safety and our future. We may be unhappy, we girls and women, who did not, like our younger sisters, have the struggle close to home pointed out to us, but I believe that we still have the hope of our own youth, and I feel that our poor parents are unhappier and more pitiable than we are, because they have nothing left to hope for, because secretly they must admit to themselves that they went astray in their love for their children. They brought us up by the rules of the past, when the future was already so close at hand. I feel sorry for our parents and it almost makes me love them more than I ever did …”
XLVII
SHE HAD SUDDENLY GONE PALE as if seized by a powerful emotion. She covered her face with her waving fan and her fingers trembled violently; her whole body shuddered.
“That is a beautiful thought,” said Mrs Holt. “It was a pleasure to meet you. I always find a particular charm in Dutch people. There is that vagueness that we find so elusive, and then a sudden light that flashes as if from a cloud … I hope to meet you again. I am at home every Tuesday at five o’clock. Would you drop in sometime with Mrs Uxeley?”
“Certainly, with great pleasure …”
Mrs Holt proffered a hand, which she shook, and disappeared among the other guests. Cornélie had got up, her knees unsteady. She stood there, half turned towards the room, looking in the mirror. Her fingers played with the orchids in a Venetian glass on the console. She was still a little pale, but she controlled herself, though her heart was pounding and her chest heaving. She looked in the mirror and saw first her own figure, her slender beautiful shape in her black and white chantilly outfit, with its white lace train, foaming with flounces; the black lace tunic over it was scalloped and strewn with steel sequins and blue stones with a spray of orchids on her completely sleeveless corsage, which left her neck, arms and shoulders bare. Her hair was held in place by three Greek pearl bands, and her white feather fan — a present from Urania — was as light as foam against her neck. In the mirror she saw first herself and then him. He approached her. She did not move, only her fingers played with the flowers in the glass. She had an impulse to flee, but her knees were shaking and her feet seemed paralysed. She seemed rooted to the spot, as if hypnotised. She could not move. And she saw him coming closer and closer, while her back was half turned to the room. He approached and in so doing seemed to emit a web in which she was trapped. Mechanically she looked up and her eyes met his in the mirror. She thought she would faint. She felt wedged between him and the glass. In the mirror the room revolved, the candles whirled giddily, like a dancing firmament. He still said nothing. Then in the unbearably narrow space between him and the mirror, which did not even protect her as a wall might have done, but reflected him so that he seemed to have caught her twice over, from two directions at one — she slowly turned and looked him in the eye, but did not speak either. They surveyed each other in silence.
“You never thought … you’d ever see me here,” he said at last.
It was over a year since she had heard his voice. But she felt it inside her.
“No,” she said at last, haughty, cold and distant. “Although I saw you a few times, in town, on the Jetée.”
“Yes,” he said. “Should I have said hello, do you think?”
She shrugged her bare shoulders, and he looked at them. She felt for the first time that she was half-naked that evening.
“No,” she replied, still cold and distant. “Just as you needn’t have spoken to me just now.”
He smiled at her. He stood before her like a wall. Like a man. His head, his shoulders, his chest, his legs, his whole figure loomed in front of her in their intense masculinity.