And she turned away and thought:
"They were talking about me. … "
The servants came in with the trays:
"Who'll have a sandwich? Uncle, shall I mix you a drink?" asked Dorine, moving restlessly about the rooms.
[6] Rice.
CHAPTER IV
Yes, she had longed for them all, for her home and for Holland! Oh, the passionate longing of those last years, ever and ever more passionate! Oh, how lonely she had been, and how she had pined for Holland, for the Hague, for her relations! During all those years, she had been an outcast from her home, an exile, as it were, during all those long, hungry years. Twenty years she had spent abroad! For five of them she had been married to De Staffelaer, the five years in Rome, and then … oh, the one mistake of her life! Ah, how she had pined since that mistake, incessantly! … And, after the child was born, she had pined incessantly. … Yes, for thirteen years she had pined! During all that time, she had seen her mother twice, for a couple of days, because travelling was such an effort for Mamma, because she herself dared not go to the Hague, which was so near, so near!
Her brothers, her sisters, her whole family had denied her all that time, had never been able to forgive the scandal which she had caused, the blot which she had cast on their name. …
She was a girl of twenty-one when she married De Staffelaer. He was an intimate friend of Papa's: they had been at the University together and belonged to the same club. Now De Staffelaer was Netherlands minister at Rome: a good-looking, hale old man; fairly well-suited to his post: not a political genius, like Papa, she thought; but still full of qualities, as Papa had always said. She was Papa's favourite; and he had thought it so pleasant, was proud that De Staffelaer had just fallen in love with her, like a young man, and been unable to keep away from the Alexanderstraat when he came to Holland, to the Hague, once a year, on leave. She remembered Papa's smile when he talked to her about De Staffelaer, hinting at what might happen. … They had then been living for five years at the Hague, after Papa had been governor-general for five years. … She remembered the viceregal period—three years of her girlhood from twelve to seventeen—remembered the grandeur of it all: the palaces at Batavia and Buitenzorg; their country-house at Tjipanas; the balls at which she danced, young as she was; the races; the aides-de-camp; the great gold pajong:[7] all the tropical grandeur and semi-royalty of a great colonial governorship. … After that, at the Hague, a quieter time, but still their crowded receptions, their great dinners to Indian and home celebrities; Bertha back from India, with Van Naghel; she herself presented at Court. … She loved that life and, from the time when she was quite a young girl, had known nothing but glamour around her. … Papa, too, breathed in that element of grandeur: a man of great political capacity, as she thought, never realizing that Papa had merely risen through tact; through mediocrity; through a certain opportune vagueness in his political creed, which was curved and shaded with every half-curve and half-shade that the needs of the moment might dictate; through good-breeding, through the eloquence of his meaningless, easy-flowing sentences, full of the high-sounding commonplaces of the day; through his suavity and suppleness, his smiling amiability, all the personal charm of him. She had always seen her father important; she saw him so still. And she herself, at that time, longed for importance, for every sort of worldly vanity: she had it in her blood. As a young girl, she loved brilliancy, titles; loved spacious, well-lighted rooms, fine carriages; loved to see men in stars and ribbons, ladies in court-dress; loved to curtsey very low before the King and Queen: the little Princess Wilhelmina was then still a baby. … Thanks to De Staffelaer, their receptions were sometimes attended by members of the corps diplomatique and of that particular set at the Hague which fastens on to the diplomatists: the little band of people who, at the Hague, are stared and gaped at wherever they go, who talk loudly at the opera, swaggering in all the arrogance of their smartness and conceit, looking down upon all and everything that does not form part of their own little set and encouraged in their blatant self-assertion by the Hague public, with its flattering tribute of open-mouthed curiosity. She did not see all this, especially as a young girl: she thought it grand if a Spanish marquis or a German count, a member of one of the legations, showed himself for ten minutes at her parents' receptions; and, if Mrs. This or the Freule[8] That, of "the set," came for only five minutes, Constance would brag about it, with an assumption of indifference, for the next three months. Vanity was born in her blood and had been nourished at Batavia and Buitenzorg, where she was made much of as the young daughter of the governor-general. Now, at the Hague, full-fledged, she struggled, above all, to be invited to the drawing-rooms of "the set." It was very difficult, though Bertha and she had been presented at Court, though her parents still had ever so many connections. She was constantly encountering coldness on the part of "the set," coupled with great incivility, which she had to swallow; but she had some of Papa's tact and she went on struggling: she left cards on Mrs. This to all eternity, with a snobbishness for which she came to blush later; she bowed and talked pleasantly, to all eternity, to the Freule That, receiving nothing in return but a snub. She had found that the Hague was not the same as Batavia; that, though you had been the highest personage at Batavia, you were not so easily admitted into that very high circle of the Hague, "the set." …
Now, she laughed softly at all this, after that first family-evening, sitting in her room at the hotel, while her boy slept. … Yes, Papa had always smiled because De Staffelaer was so much in love with her; and she herself had thought it delicious to be wooed by this diplomatist, with his ribbons and stars, by this smiling, courtly man of sixty, who did not look a day more than fifty. And, when he asked Papa for her hand, she accepted him, very glad and happy, a little flushed and triumphant, rather inclined to preen herself in the delectable atmosphere of congratulation; she was now, thanks to De Staffelaer, decidedly a member of "the set" and, at the same time, did not need "the set" so very much, now that she was going to Rome, to spend her life in circles such as that of the Quirinal and the "white" Roman world. … She had attained her aim. She had a charming husband, not young, but none the less passionately in love with her and vain, in his turn, of his young and pretty wife. She had a title. She had money enough, even though De Staffelaer's affairs were somewhat involved. She found the Court balls at Rome more splendid than the routs at the Hague; she was introduced to all sorts of great names. The Italian aristocracy, it is true, was even more exclusive than that of the Hague; but she moved in a brilliant circle of diplomatists and foreigners. Only, she was struck by the fact that, abroad, the members of the corps diplomatique were not stared at so much as in the opera at the Hague or on the terrace at Scheveningen. It almost annoyed her: she would have liked to be stared at in her turn. But, in the society of a big capital like Rome, the wife of the Netherlands minister, even though she was young and pretty and well-dressed, was not so important a person as the Marquesa This, of the Spanish Legation, or Mrs. This or the Freule That, of "the set," was at the Hague. People did not stare at her, in Rome; and this was almost a disappointment. … Besides, her increasing and often wounded vanity left a certain void within her, a sense of boredom. De Staffelaer, ever courtly, pleasant and in love, with the apprehensive love of an old man for the young wife whom he is afraid lest he should soon cease to attract, ended by irritating her and upsetting her nerves. …
But this, at the time, was nothing more—nor anything more serious—than boredom and vague discontent. … Since then, life had set its mark on Constance. Often now, as a woman of forty-two, she felt a dull melancholy in pondering on her life; she let her life, one woman's life, glide past her gaze once more; she began with her childish years in India; saw once more the splendour and grandeur of Buitenzorg; criticized her own vanity during her girlhood at the Hague; saw her marriage as the great mistake of her life; saw, as the second, irrevocable mistake of her life, all that had happened with Van der Welcke. … Her life had been warped beyond remedy.