The oppressive, sultry, rainless summer days followed one after the other; and the night also waited in oppressive expectation of oppressive things, which were to happen and never happened, as though what we expected to happen immediately withdrew and withdrew farther and only hung over houses and people with heavy stormy skies: skies of blazing morning blue, until great grey-white clouds blew up from a mysterious cloudland and drifted past on high; only on the more distant horizons was there any lightning; and that came soundlessly, later in the day; the threat of a thunderstorm drove past; the foliage became scorched in the dust of advancing summer and faded with the approach of decay; and there was, almost, a sort of longing for autumn and for purple death in autumnal storms: a nature, tired with heavy, trailing summer life, that had never finally become anything and was always becoming something, never flashing forth in a bright achievement of summer but dragging her incompleteness from heavy day to heavy day, under the heavy immensity of skies, towards the later bursting delights of autumn: heavy wind, heavy rain, followed by the heavy death-struggle and unwillingness to die of that which had never been the glory of the sun and yet left no golden memory behind. . . .
Often in those oppressive nights Marietje van Saetzema could not get to sleep, or else woke up with a sudden start. She had been dreaming that she was falling down an abyss, or gliding down a staircase, or bumping her head against the ceiling,
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