Small Souls/Chapter XXIII
Adolphine enjoyed showing Cateau Floortje’s trousseau, with its stacks of linen. Adolphine attached more importance to her own house, her own children, her own furniture, her own affairs, matters and things than to anything else in the world. She was never tired of displaying, for the extorted admiration of the sister or friend who came to visit her, the thickness of her carpets, the heaviness of her curtains, the taste with which she had arranged the ornaments in her drawing-room; and she praised all that belonged to her, cried it up as though for a sale, inviting the appreciation of her sister or friend. In her heart of hearts, she was always afraid of being eclipsed and, in order to conceal her fear from the other’s eyes, she bragged and boasted of all her belongings. The fact that she was a Van Lowe appeared in this, that she included her husband and children and puffed them up also in her general self-glorification. And in all her bragging one could easily detect a shade of reproach against her family, her acquaintances, the Hague, because nothing about her was properly valued: not she, nor her husband, nor her house, nor her furniture, nor her ideas, nor the street she lived in. And she explained at great length to the friend or sister her way of thinking, of managing, of calculating, of bringing up children, of furnishing, of giving dinners, of ordering a dress, as though all of this was of such immense interest to the friend or sister that nothing more immense could be imagined. If, thereupon, the friend or sister, for the sake of conversation, in her turn described her own thoughts, or arrangements, or methods of entertaining, Adolphine was unable to listen to a word and showed plainly that the affairs of the sister or friend did not interest her in the least and that, for instance, the quality of the covering of her, Adolphine’s, chairs, or the fresh air of the street in which she, Adolphine, lived, or the velvet of the collar of the great-coat of Van Saetzema, Adolphine’s husband, was of much greater importance. For she wanted the sister or friend to realize, above anything else, that in her, Adolphine’s, life everything was of the best and finest kind: things animate and inanimate, things movable and immovable alike. Adolphine’s cook, the sister or friend was assured, cooked better than any other cook, especially than Bertha’s cook; Adolphine’s dog, a pug, was the sweetest pug of all the pugs in the world. And, while she bragged like this, she was filled with a deep-seated dread, asked herself, almost unconsciously:
“Can my cook really cook? And isn’t my pug, if the truth were told, an ill-tempered little brute?”
But these were deeply-hidden doubts; and, to her family and friends, Adolphine boasted loudly of all and everything that belonged to her and insisted upon an admiring appreciation of her children and furniture. It was part of her nature to want to be high-placed—she was her father’s child—to be rich, to have everything fine and imposing and distinguished about her; and it was as though fate had compelled her, from a child, to have everything a little, a trifle less good than her family and friends. In reality, she was never satisfied, for all her boasting. In reality, she reproached life with its horrible injustice. As a child, she was a plain, unattractive girl, whereas Bertha was at least passable and Constance was decidedly pretty. That Dorine was not pretty either did not console her; she did not even notice it. Both Bertha and Constance had been presented at Court, one as a young woman, the other as a mere girl. After Constance’ marriage, however, her father and mother had conceived a sort of weariness of society; and, whenever Mamma did suggest that it was perhaps time for Adolphine to be presented too, Papa used to say:
“Oh, what good has it done the others?”
And, for one reason or another, Adolphine had never been presented. She never forgave her parents, nor, for that matter, her sisters; but she always said that she did not care in the least for all that fuss about the Court. She was married early, at twenty; she accepted Van Saetzema almost for fear lest life should show itself unjust once more if she refused him. And Van Saetzema had proposed to her, even as hundreds of men propose to hundreds of women, for one or other of those very small reasons of small people which work like tiny wheels in small souls and which others are not able to understand, so that they ask themselves in amazement:
“Why on earth did So-and-so do this or that; why did this or that happen to So-and-so; why did So-and-so marry So-and-so? . . .”
Van Saetzema had a fine-sounding name, was a doctor of laws, had a little money: Adolphine had risked it. But, while Van Naghel, after practising at the bar in India, was making his way through interest, through his political tact, through the influence of Papa van Lowe, who liked him, while Van Naghel was placed on all sorts of committees, each of which raised him one rung higher in the official world of the Hague, until he was elected a member of the Second Chamber and at last entered the Cabinet as colonial secretary, Van Saetzema remained quietly jogging on at the Ministry of Justice, without ever obtaining any special promotion, without ever receiving any special opportunity, without being pushed on much by Papa van Lowe, just as though Papa, with a sort of step-fatherly disdain, had thought this as little worth while as having Adolphine presented at Court. Van Saetzema was now chief clerk, was a respected public servant, performing his work accurately and well and even valued by the secretary-general; but there it ended. And this was the despair of Adolphine, who, ever since Van Naghel had become a minister, wanted to see her husband a minister too, a hope which there was not the least prospect of ever realizing. And so Adolphine had to look on at all Van Naghel and Bertha’s distinction with envious eyes; and, however much she might boast of everything that belonged to her, that distinction, which she would never achieve, remained a torture to her vanity. It had come of itself, in the course of Van Naghel and Bertha’s life—through Papa’s patronage, through Van Naghel’s own connections and his Overijssel family, which had always played a part in the political history of the country—it had come of itself that not only had Van Naghel attained a high level in his career, but his house had become a political and also an aristocratic salon at the Hague, as though, through their respective connections, Van Naghel and Bertha, after Papa van Lowe’s death, had continued the tradition which, after the viceregal period, had prevailed in the Alexanderstraat, where Mamma was now left peacefully leading her after-life as an old woman and a widow. On the other hand, Adolphine’s house, in spite of all her wishes and endeavours, had never been anything more than an omnium-gatherum, a rubbish heap. She lacked tact and the gift of discrimination. She thought that for her too to have a busy house would give her something of Bertha’s importance and distinction; and so she paid visits right and left and had a multitude of incongruous acquaintances, all belonging to different sets: the orthodox set; the Indian set; the official set; the military set; but not, alas, the Court set nor the leaven of aristocracy which, after Papa’s death, at first used to leave a card, once a year or so, but had gradually dropped her. And so it had come of itself, in the course of their, Van Saetzema and Adolphine’s, life, that their house had become an ever-increasing omnium-gatherum: a busy house, it is true, where they “saw people,” but a nondescript house, where one never knew whom one would meet nor what the hostess was really aiming at. There was something maddening about Adolphine’s way of turning her house into a busy house, crammed with people. She would propose, for instance, to give a small dinner five days later; she would ask eight people, but remember, two days before the dinner, that she might as well ask a few more; then she would send round a few quite formal invitations, couched in terms which were out of keeping with the interval between the date of the invitation and the date of the dinner, with the result that, first of all, she utterly put out the hired chef; that sometimes there was a bottle of champagne short; and that her guests invariably appeared in every possible gradation of evening-dress. Or, else, she thought of giving a big dinner, received a number of refusals, did not know whom to invite instead, asked people informally, or even by word of mouth, and found herself entertaining half-a-dozen guests with a superabundance of dishes and wine, while once again the men were dressed, one in a swallow-tail coat and white tie, the other in a morning-coat; the ladies, one in a low-necked bodice, the other in a blouse: a disparity that was constantly giving them fresh shocks of dismay.
It was always a medley; and, even as she lacked the tact to give a successful dinner, she was doomed to lack the tact to achieve the distinction for which she craved. Her very husband thwarted her: a simple man, a little boorish in his ways, who trudged daily to his office and back, conscientious about his work like a schoolboy finishing his exercises and devoid of any particular ability or political adroitness. He approved of what Adolphine did, but could not understand that craving, that vital need of hers for distinction. It was true that he had caught from his wife that exuberant satisfaction with his wife, his house, his children, his furniture and his friends. He too knew how to boast of his coat, his office, even his minister, his secretary-general. But Adolphine might have stood behind him with a whip and would still have urged him to the summits of earthly and Haguish greatness. He was ponderous, fog-brained, a man who worked by rote, who went his way like a draught-ox, year in, year out, with the same heavy tread of a Dutch steer under heavy Dutch skies: he bore within him the natural instinct to be an inferior, an underling, to remain in the background and there to go on working in an accurate, small-souled, worthy fashion, in the little groove in which he had first started.
They had three boys and three girls and they were not bad parents. They, both of them, loved their children and thought of their children’s welfare. But they knew as little of a system of education as of a system of dinner-giving; and such education as existed in their house was as ramshackle as their friends, their rooms, their tables. It was especially where her children were concerned that Adolphine had that mania for having and doing everything in a very imposing fashion, a fashion at least as imposing as that in which Bertha had and did things for hers. As Adolphine, however, was the only one of the Van Lowes who was, by exception, thrifty, her thrift often waged a severe struggle with her yearning for what was imposing. And so, whereas everything relating to the Van Naghels’ household and the education of their children was conducted, as a matter of course, on the most expensive lines, which they both recognized as expensive, but which their tastes and their manner of life made it impossible to alter, everything at Adolphine’s was done cheaply. And so, whereas Louise and Emilie and Marianne had been to expensive boarding-schools near London and Paris—great country-houses, where the daughters of wealthy men received a fashionable education, with dancing-lessons in ball-dresses, drawing-, painting- and music-lessons given by well-known masters—Adolphine, though inwardly eaten up with jealousy, pronounced those boarding-schools simply absurd and quite beyond her means and discovered one near Cleves, to which she sent Floortje and Caroline: a very respectable establishment, but one where German shopkeepers’ daughters were taken in and where a very different tone prevailed from that of the aristocratic schools near Paris and London. This, however, did not prevent Adolphine from extolling her boarding school as far above those silly, frivolous institutions to which Bertha had sent her children. And, as regards the boys, Adolphine magnified her three boys, Piet, Chris and Jaap: the eldest was to enter the East-Indian civil service; the two others were intended for Breda and Willemsoord, which was better than those two spendthrift Leiden students, who were at it again, wanting some thousands of guilders for their approaching masques, and far better than that lazy lout of a Karel.
Also, Adolphine was always drawing comparisons between her Marietje, a gentle, fair, white-skinned little girl, a bit subdued amid the blatancy of the others, and Bertha’s Marietje: comparisons invariably in her own child’s favour; but now, after Emilie’s wedding with Van Raven, she drew comparisons more particularly between Emilie’s wedding-preparations and all that she, Adolphine, was doing for Floortje and Dijkerhof. And brag and boast as she might, she, the exception among the Van Lowes, the thrifty Adolphine, who counted every twopennybit—where did she get those economical ideas from? Mamma van Lowe would sometimes ask herself—was unable to come within hailing-distance of what Van Naghel and Bertha and the Van Ravens and their friends on both sides had done; she thought it absurd, she thought it flinging money away, she grumbled to herself that everything had gone up so terribly in price: a deep-rooted prudence—an atavistic quality, a mysterious throw-back—disapproved of that luxury of parties, trousseaus, presents, flowers with which Emilie’s wedding-days had glittered; she thought it ridiculous, she wanted to do everything more economically and yet she did not like doing everything so economically; and so there was an incessant struggle, both with herself and with Floortje, who also did not wish to be second to Emilie and who gave no thought to money: it was only her parents’ money! But still, with her peculiar gift of self-glorification, Adolphine was now able to praise Floortje’s trousseau to Cateau above all those lace fripperies of Emilie’s.
“Much ni-cer and more last-ing, I think, Adolphine!” whined Cateau.
“Yes; and just look at those chemises, look at those table-cloths and napkins: there’s quality there, you can’t beat it,” said Adolphine, patting the stacks of linen in the cupboard. “And all those silly presents which Emilie had, all that silver, which she can’t use: what do young people, who of course won’t be seeing people for the first few years, want with so much silver? I’m very glad that our friends have been more practical in choosing their presents for Floortje: I shouldn’t have been at all pleased if Floortje had been set up in her silver-cupboard by people whom you may call acquaintances, if you like, but who, after all, are strangers.”
“Ye-e-es,” whined Cateau. “At Emilie-tje’s reception, it looked just like Van Kem-pen’s shop. I thought it so vul-gar and com-mon, didn’t you, Adolph-ine?”
The epithets were not exceptionally well-chosen as applied to Van Naghel and Bertha—even Adolphine could see that—but she admired her own purchases and her friends’ presents too greatly to say so to Cateau.