The Twilight of the Souls - Louis Couperus

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spinal system.

      "Ernst," said Paul, "wouldn't you do well to get some sleep?"

      "No," he said, "I won't go to bed again. There are three of them under the bed."

      "Three what?"

      "Three. They're chained up."

      "Chained up? Who's chained up?"

      "Three. Three souls."

      "Three souls?"

      "Yes. The room's full of them. They are all fastened to my soul. They are all riveted to my soul. With chains. Sometimes they break loose. But I was dragging two of them with me for ever so long yesterday, in the street, over the cobble-stones. They were in pain, they were crying. I can hear them now in my ears, crying, crying. … There are three under the bed. They're asleep. When I go to bed, they wake up and rattle their chains. Let them sleep. They are tired, they are unhappy. As long as they're asleep, they don't know about it. … I … I can't sleep. I haven't slept for weeks. They only sleep when I'm awake. They're fastened to me. … Don't you hear them? The room is full of them. They belong to every age and period. I've gathered them around me, collected them from every age and period. They were hiding in the jars, in the old books, in the old charts. I have some belonging to the fourteenth century. They used to hide in the family-papers. The first moment I saw them, they rose up, the poor souls … with all their sins upon them, all their past. They are suffering … they are in purgatory. They chained themselves on to me, because they know that I shall be kind to them … and now they refuse to leave me. I drag them with me wherever I go, wherever I stand, wherever I sit. Their chains pull at my body. They hurt me sometimes, but they can't help it. … Last night … last night, the room was so full of souls that there was a cloud of them all round me; and I was suffocating. I wanted to go out, but the landlady and her brother prevented me. They are a miserable pair: they would have let me die of suffocation. They are a pair of brutes too: they tread on the poor souls. Do you hear … on the stairs? Do you hear their feet? They are treading on the souls. … "

      Paul's face was white; and he said, nervously trying to change the subject:

      "Have you seen Dorine this morning, Ernst?"

      Ernst looked at his brother suspiciously:

      "No," he said, "I have not seen her."

      "She was here, wasn't she?"

      "No, I haven't seen her," he said, suspiciously; and his eyes wandered round, as though he were looking for something in the room.

      The two brothers followed his gaze mechanically. Everything about the large, comfortable sitting-room suggested the man of taste and culture, of quiet and introspective temperament, but acutely sensitive to line and form. The sombreness of the ceiling, wall-paper and carpet stood out against the yet greater sombreness of old oak and old books; and a very strange note of blue and other colours was struck in the midst of it all by the pottery, which was not all old, but included some examples of more recent art. The modern harmonies of line and the very latest discoveries in earthenware suddenly appeared with their weird flourishes in vases, jars, pots, like enamelled flowers, from modern conservatories, that had sprung up in the shadows of some old, dark forest. On the book-shelves too, the brown leather bindings of the ancient folios were relieved by the direct contact of the yellow wrappers of the latest French literature or the art-nouveau covers of the most modern Dutch novels. This lonely, silent man, who walked shyly through the streets, gliding along the walls of the houses; who had no friends, no acquaintances; who only on Sunday evenings—because he dared not stay away, from a last remnant of respect for maternal authority—consented to suffer martyrdom among the assembled members of his family, even to the extent of taking a hand at bridge: this man seemed, hidden from every one of them, to lead a rich, abundant life, a secret, inner life, a life not of one age but of many. Because he never spoke, they looked upon him as a crank; but he had lived his years abundantly. Had he filled his silent, uncompanioned loneliness too full with the ghosts of literature, history and art? Had the ghosts loomed up and come to life around him, in that dark and gloomy room, where the old and modern porcelain and earthenware glowed and rioted around him with the haunting brilliancy of their colours and glazes, of their tortured, gorgeous curves and outlines?

      The two brothers, who had come because they thought their brother mad, looked round the room; and to both of them the room also seemed mad. To the captain of hussars, whose earlier depression had passed off, who suddenly felt himself becoming healthy and normal again as he listened to his eccentric brother's ravings, the room became a demented room, because it lacked a trophy of arms, riding-whips, prints of horses and dogs and the oleograph of a naked woman, bending backwards and laughing. To the other brother the room also seemed demented because here the vase was no longer an ornament, because the vase had become a morbid thing, like a many-coloured weed, growing in rank profusion among the dark shadows of the curtains and oak book-cases. To Paul the room seemed demented because there was dust on the books and because the basket full of torn paper had not been emptied. But to both of them the man Ernst himself seemed more demented than the room: the man Ernst, their brother, an eccentric fellow whom for years they had been compelled to think "queer" because he was different from any of them. When he confessed to them that his room was full of souls, souls that hovered round him like a cloud until he was on the point of suffocating, souls that chained themselves to him and rattled their chains, they thought that he was raving, that he was stammering insane words. It was the view of both of them, the view of normal, healthy men, outwardly sane in their senses, in their gestures, expression and language, because their gestures, expression and language did not clash with those of the people about them, whatever they might sometimes feel deep down in themselves. But to the man himself, to Ernst, his own view was the normal, the very ordinary view; and he thought his two brothers Gerrit and Paul queer and eccentric because he was able, in his furtive way, to see that neither of them noticed anything of the innumerable souls, though these writhed so pitifully and thronged so closely around him, as though he were in purgatory. To him there was nothing mad or insane in his room, in his words, or in any part of him. He looked upon them as mad, he looked upon himself as sensible. When, last night, he tried to go out in his nightshirt, because the souls pressed upon him until he felt as if he were suffocating in the throng, he had simply wanted air, nothing but air, had wanted to breathe without the discomfort of clothes, coat or waistcoat, upon his chest; and he had thought it quite natural that he should go downstairs with a candle and try to open the door with his key. Then the fat landlady and her lout of a brother had heard him and had come upon him, making a great to-do with their silly hands and their loud voices; and the two, the fat landlady and her lout of a brother, had stood there shouting and gesticulating like a pair of lunatics while he had already loosened the chain from the front-door and felt the draught doing him so much good, because it blew upon his bare flesh under his flapping shirt. Then Ernst had become angry, because the fat landlady and her lout of a brother did not listen to what he said: he had a soft voice, which could not cope with the rough, loud, vulgar voices of people without feeling, of people without soul, knowledge or understanding. He had become angry, because the brother, the coarse brute, had locked the door again, dragged him away, hauled him up the stairs; and he had struck the brother. But the brother, who was stronger than he was, had hit him, hit him on the chest, which had been bursting before and at that had become still worse, because all the souls had thronged against him in terror, beseeching him to protect them. And, roughly, rudely, like the unfeeling brutes that they were, the fat landlady and her lout of a brother had dragged him upstairs between them; and, as they dragged him, they had trodden not only on his bare feet but also on the poor souls! Their vulgar slippers, their clumsy, caddish feet had trodden on the poor, poor tender souls, trodden on them in the passage and along the stairs; and he heard them panting and sobbing, so loudly, so loudly, in their mortal anguish, that he could not understand why the whole town had not come running up in sheer alarm, to see the poor souls and help them. Oh, how they had moaned and gnashed their teeth, oh, how they had sobbed and lamented, most terribly!

      And nobody had come. Nobody would hear. They had refused to hear, those townsfolk; no rescue had arrived; and the two brutes, that fat landlady and that wretched cad of a fellow, her brother, had hauled him along, up the stairs, into his room, had flung him in, locked the door behind him

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