The Low Lands
I
That easterly gale that had driven Rupert’s ships to Ireland and there melted among the soft west air from the Atlantic had crystallized into an iron frost for the rest of Europe. It lasted several weeks. The later days of February found the little northern town of The Hague still ice-bound, as it had been when the news of King Charles I’s execution had fallen on it like a thunderbolt. Horror of it had shaken not only the English Royalists but all the impartial countries of Europe. It was not merely ‘this horrid murder’, but the pretence of legality in giving the King the form of a trial, that infuriated the nations. English hypocrisy had reached its apotheosis.
In France no Englishman was safe, since he belonged to the nation that had first tried and then killed their King. In Holland the populace howled round the house of the English Parliament’s envoy and would have torn him in pieces if he had dared appear in the streets. Many of the sober Protestant democratic Dutch citizens clamoured that their country should go to war to avenge ‘this barbarous and most inhuman action’.
But though kings died dreadfully, life had to go on all the same, and it would be wicked to waste this frost; righteous anger made the grand universal subject of conversation, but it cut no ice, and winter sports flourished gaily. There were carnivals on the ice at night, with ladies and their cavaliers skating hand-in-hand carrying torches; even the staid stout Dutch matrons were miraculously transformed into swiftly darting fireflies. There were games on the ice by day, curling and ball games and racing in sledges and little iceboats on runners with sails.
The bereaved family of the dead King Charles’ sister, the ex-Queen of Bohemia, could not take part in these pleasures; they wore deep mourning and had kept to the house for days, hearing the gay voices and the clang of bells on the sledges that raced down the Voorhout below their windows, growing paler and crosser as the storm of bewildered and horrified grief was gradually frittered away by the effect of the sheer boredom of inactivity on healthy and vigorous young bodies.
For Queen Elizabeth’s body at fifty-two and after bearing thirteen children was still that of a young woman though her face had grown lined and harsh when in repose, but it never was in repose. It was she who, after gazing into the fire for near an hour with brooding eyes, a crouched sibyl grim and passive as Fate herself, had cried out on a sudden yelp of boredom that it would do no good to have another death in the family, and dead she would be if she sat here another minute with nothing but sallow faces and black clothes all round her; and out she had gone to drive a sledge borrowed from Lord Craven, harnessed to her two fastest horses, at a break-neck pace over the ice.
She had taken her youngest daughter, Sophie, with her. Sophie was the one who amused her mother most at the moment. She was just grown up, and kind Englishmen had promised her she would be the prettiest of the family, a promise that had made her suddenly prettier than she had ever been before. This was something entirely new, for she was well accustomed to being clever, so sharp she’d cut herself if she didn’t take care, her eldest sister Eliza always told her, quoting the homely wisdom of her dead father’s old German mother, the Electress Juliana.
But Sophie always took care. She was not the twelfth child for nothing, and had always been sure that no one would look after her if she didn’t look after herself. She even took care over this unexpected treat, for she wasn’t going to risk her skin to please her mother, who as likely as not would rush out with the horses shod anyhow and never see to it that their shoes were properly cocked for the ice.
So Sophie saw to it and ordered the groom about, while her mother fed the champing and shivering beasts with sugar and told them they’d soon get warm at the rate she’d drive them, and that she’d been pining all this time for the sight and touch of their satin noses.
Eliza came down to the open door and called Sophie to her in a low voice.
‘Can you find out if Lord Craven is really going to Amsterdam tomorrow?’ she asked.
‘If he is not, I can send someone for my new saddle. You have written another letter, I suppose?’
‘Another? I have not written since his last.’
Sophie thought how absurdly touchy Eliza was about her correspondence with that dry old philosopher Descartes. And with all her precautions lest her mother should know when she wrote to him, you might have thought he was a gay young gallant and their letters full of love-messages instead of learned discussions!
She did not see that in that case Eliza might be less self-conscious about them since disapproval is easier to bear than mockery. The Queen, whose own platonic friendships with men were innumerable, could laugh mercilessly at those of her daughters. It specially exasperated her that the most regularly beautiful of them all should waste hours in writing to ‘that desiccated Descartes’. A helpless compunction mingled with the mother’s annoyance. If Eliza had only married, it would not matter how many philosophers she wrote to, – and now the perception of this fell on Sophie like a revelation as her eldest sister turned a diffident and indignant back upon her.
‘She had much better have married the King of Poland years ago, however unhappy it made her,’ the girl decided; ‘then at least she would not feel guilty for not having married at all.’ Religion had prevented her, Eliza had refused to become a Catholic. ‘Ideas matter more to her than facts,’ Sophie added to her mental notes; the keen air and foretaste of new pleasure had put a sharp edge on her thoughts.
In one of those tremendous discoveries that one makes when one is just eighteen, so bright in their importance that it seems no one has ever discovered anything about life before, she had made up her mind at this moment, while discussing ways and means of sending a letter for Eliza to Amsterdam, that she would marry anyone, a Jew, a Turk, an infidel, rather than remain an old maid.
She sprang into the sledge beside her mother, waving her small fur muff, a present from ‘kind little Craven’. Off they drove, their two faces raised laughing, a little shocked with themselves, absurdly alike at this moment, to the windows where Elizabeth and Louise and Henrietta (or Great Eliza and Louey and Etta, or a dozen other nicknames) were now three Cinderellas left behind, though their mother’s action had left them free to go out too.
But Etta had got a cold and a new kind of sweet she was baking in the oven, and Eliza wanted to write her letter while her mother’s satiric eyes were out of the house, and Louey was deep on a new book (which she had lost as soon as she had got it, and only recently discovered). Outside the windows the sky, shut down over the black trees and the huddled roofs, scarred with dirty snow, as heavy and relentless as a coffin-lid pressed down over the dead chill earth. ‘Who wants to go out into that?’ said they to each other, turning back to the bright fire and the sense of comfortable security that they all felt now that those two were out of the house.
Etta went off to the kitchen singing – most reprehensibly at such a time, but she just could not help it:
‘ “Si le roi m’avait donné
Paris sa grande ville,
J’aime mieux ma mie, oh gai!
J’aime mieux ma mie.” ’
Eliza heard her fresh childish voice with wonder. Etta still hoped, still believed that next year everything would be different, still did not understand that while their brothers left home to go out into the world on one fresh adventure after another, they themselves would always stay here and nothing would ever happen to them. Eliza had quarrelled with her mother and left home to stay with an aunt for a year, but she had come back, and everything had gone on as before, would always go on, and it was only because the others were so much younger, Eliza thought, that they did not know this.
She sat at a writing-table of Dutch marquetry inlaid with the scene of a little man with a big gun going out to shoot ducks as big as himself. Her pale carved face was so still, it might have been that of a statue but for the dark melancholy of her eyes.
She wrote: ‘Is it possible that you can really wish to go to Sweden merely because Queen C
hristina has asked you? You are a philosopher. You have lived in Amsterdam for twenty years and have said again and again you would never leave it. Yet you would throw away the comfortable habits of a lifetime, your pleasant house in the Herrengracht, your garden small and exquisite as a jewel shining in the light from the canal below’ (it was Louey who had said that, she remembered, and her scrupulous honesty paused for an instant over using another’s metaphor – but why should not Louey help her all unconsciously?) – ‘you would throw away all this for the flimsy caprice of a silly eccentric young woman who wants to win a vicarious reputation for learning by getting the cleverest men in Europe round her in her barbarous freezing kingdom—’
Here she shivered, for she felt a ghost look over her shoulder, the ghost of her German grandmother, the sad strict religious old Dowager Electress Juliana who had brought up Eliza and had so disapproved of Eliza’s mother, and was now whispering to her, asking was it indeed herself writing to grave courteous elderly ugly little Monsieur Descartes, to whose intellect she had always shown as much respect as he had to her rank?
Her mother might abuse elderly gentlemen in her letters, calling them ‘little ape’ or ‘ugly filthy camel face’, but that was in joke, and that was her mother.
Well, why should she not for once be as free and untrammelled as her mother? She wrote on: ‘Are your old friends nothing to you that you can wish to do this? But you do not wish it, you have said you do not, you have written of the deprivation it will be to you, above even that of your flowers and your housekeeper and that excellent oyster sauce she makes’ (No, no, you cannot send this – well then I cannot, but at least I have written it) – ‘as though you acknowledge that it will mean, as it must, the loss of our friendship. And I am to believe that because Christina of Sweden has asked you to found an academy for her, this is a sacred call which must be placed higher than your personal wishes. Oh my friend, remember your own words, that I have thought as noble as those of Our Lord: “I think, therefore I am.” You are not thinking now, and therefore you are not being yourself.’
Here Eliza’s long grey goose-quill stopped scratching. She looked down at her words, ‘You are a philosopher’. There was venom in them, for Descartes had sought to console her for the shock to her nerves and spirits given by her English uncle’s appalling death, by his opinion that that death ‘would greatly enhance the King’s reputation’. What could one write in answer to such cold-blooded philosophy? ‘Nothing, nothing, nothing,’ she muttered, knowing that all this time she had been writing only to herself. She took up the paper, tore it across and across, and continued to stare in the same direction, though now only at the inlaid golden wood that depicted the little man, his gun and his ducks.
Louey, lounging by the chimney-piece with her book in one hand while she absent-mindedly ran the fingers of the other through her hair, warming first one foot and then the other against the blazing logs, heard the savage rasping of the torn paper and hunched an unwilling shoulder against it, wondering why women must always do things noisily, even in letters, even in thoughts of absent friends - absent enemies more likely.
It was no use reading on to herself. The air was too full of angry bitter unhappy silence. There they were, two sisters in the same room, and Eliza shut up in a fog of despair while she herself had been marching in a blaze of glory; but now the fog had spread outwards and caught the edges of her mood, damping and dimming them; the whole room would be grey if they did not shake it off. But she could not intrude on her sister’s fierce solitude; Eliza must speak first.
Obediently, Eliza spoke, in a strained harsh voice, the first words that came to her as escape from her thoughts: ‘It’s strange to see you reading anything so intently.’
Eliza was the great reader in the family; little Sophie, frivolous as she appeared, was a good runner-up in this, but of the two intervening sisters Etta never read at all and Louey only when at a loose end. Louey never sat down to a book in the businesslike fashion of Eliza and Sophie, and it was really very odd how in pulling some book at random from the shelves and desultorily flicking over the pages as she stood, she yet managed as if by pure chance to tear the heart out of it. It was scarcely fair thus to gain the maximum of pleasure with the minimum of effort. There was therefore a faintly grudging note in the scholarly Eliza’s comment – ‘strange – you reading—’
Louey swung round from the fire.
‘Ah, but it’s a brand-new book,’ she said, ‘and has been selling like the hot cakes on the ice out there.’
Eliza was apt to despise modern literature, particularly when it was as popular as that. ‘The newest French romance, I suppose,’ she said.
‘Not a novel, La Grecque’ (it pleased Eliza to be called by their nickname of La Grecque, a tribute to her grave sculptured beauty). ‘Romance – yes it is, the wildest romance I’ve ever read, and yet, as the author tells you in his preface, he has done nothing but “set down the simple and naked truth”.’
Eliza was tantalized into a smile. ‘Why can’t you tell me what it is?’
‘Wishart’s Deeds of Montrose on his campaigns in Scotland four years ago.’
‘Why write a book about them?’
‘Must books only be about ideas?’
‘If you prefer to read of men, there is history.’
‘But this will be history,’ cried Louey, slamming the book in her impatience.
‘It isn’t now,’ continued the inexorable voice from the writing-table, vigorous and even cheerful in the joy of argument, ‘it is still part of “the vulgar present”.’
‘Is the present day always vulgar?’
‘Always. One is blinded by it, personal, passionate. One cannot see what is happening at the moment.’
‘Some can, de Retz the great Coadjutor of Paris for instance; he has said that Montrose is “le seul homme du monde qui m’ait rappelé l’idée de certains héros que T’on ne voit plus que dans les vies de Plutarque – une grandeur d’âme qui n’en avait point de pareille en ce siècle”.’
So Louey had troubled to learn the compliment by heart, but Eliza did not tease her for it, having suffered too much from teasing herself. If a brilliant and worldly French statesman had to go back to ancient history to find a parallel to a modern general’s greatness of soul, well then it only helped to prove her case, and so she hastened to say, continuing to talk French without noticing it, since Louey had begun to do so, and then relapsing into English in their polyglot fashion: ‘It shows that we know more about Julius Caesar or Brutus today than about Oliver Cromwell.’
‘So you advise me to read Caesar’s Commentaries rather than the Deeds of Montrose?’
‘Certainly. The “history of one’s own day” is an anomaly. It cannot be history until it has undergone the balanced verdict of time.’
‘Balanced verdict be damned!’ cried Louey. The balance will go to the side of the winner and remain there, and that’s all there is in your verdict of time. Cromwell will win it because he won the war.’
‘He’s not won the peace yet,’ said Eliza, and the sudden note of reflective common-sense fell like a splash of cool water on their heated abstractions. But in the same instant her classic nose wrinkled sharply. ‘Your shoe is burning,’ she said, ‘I can smell it from here. Your new black shoes. There’s no money for more. How can you be so careless!’
‘Ough! You’re right. It’s burning my foot now.’
Louey kicked off her shoe so high into the air that it executed a neat parabola and descended in some distant corner behind the furniture, unheeded by her as she nursed her toe, hopping on the other foot. There was a hole too in the stocking, she should have given it to the maid to mend, but it hadn’t shown in the shoe.
There was a clatter of horses below. Were the others back already? Then something must have happened while they were out. Louey flew to the window. Eliza’s interest in ‘the vulgar present’ was too slight to move her from her seat and that long, unseeing contemplation of the little man,
his gun and ducks. But Louey’s stillness at the window became strange, even alarming.
‘What is it?’ she asked, and her sister did not answer. ‘Who is it?’ and she began to rise, though slowly, unwilling to confront any new emergency. Horses brought messengers, bad news; they had brought, not so very many days ago, the unbelievable news of the execution of their uncle, the King of England, by his subjects.
‘I – don’t – know – I – think—’ said Louey, and stopped, unaware that she had not said what she thought.
She saw some horsemen dismounting in the smudgy trodden snow of the courtyard. She saw a man all in black on a great horse, who was obviously their leader. The porter had come out to greet him, bowing very low. Now he too had dismounted, was coming up the steps.
Eliza, peering out behind her sister, said, ‘It isn’t anyone we know. New visitors.’ She sighed, hating the distraction of new visitors, endless talk between visitors and her mother while the rest of them had to play a sort of Greek chorus, speaking their part when required and never quite sure when it was required, sure rather that it never really was required, since nobody wanted to talk to anyone else when their mother was there. Yet their talk disturbed her solitude. Here she was just past thirty. Would she never be free to live her own life? Even her worries were not her own, for now her annoyance was extending beyond the casual interruption of a visit to its inopportune moment.
What would people think of a visit of condolence if they found that its object was out merry-making in a sledge on the ice? Years ago, when the English Puritans had come on a formal visit of condolence to her mother for the death of her German husband, they had been horribly scandalized to find her entire family of sons and daughters engaged in getting up a play and an absurd noisy masque for her amusement, and the palace (so called) a pandemonium of excited, prancing, hallooing boys and girls in every conceivable form of fancy dress. This mummery had taken place several months after her father’s death, but that didn’t shorten the long faces of the Puritan visitors, who were appalled that it should ever take place at all.
The Bride Page 7
