A Foreign Novel

Old People and the Things that Pass. — By Louis Couperus

To those who have read ‘Small Souls’ it will not come as a surprise that ‘Old People’ is a study of a family. For one could not but feel after reading the former novel that the chief gift of the author must lie in his power of presenting a group of individuals each of whom, when seen page 123 apart, has a separate, different life, but all of whom when viewed together are found to be but the parts that go to make up one mysterious creature—the family. He proved indeed that small souls are not really capable of a separate existence; they may rebel against the family, defy it, laugh at it, but they are bound to recognize at the last that they cannot run away without longing to run back and that any step taken without its knowledge and approval is a step in the air.

There is passion in ‘Small Souls,’ but the note is not deep or greatly troubled. It is full of gentle satire. Perhaps its quality is best expressed in the chapter where the little girl sits practising her scales, up and down, up and down the piano, always so carefully sounding the wrong note, on a windy morning. Her back is turned to the window. But outside everything is fresh and flying. Outside, in the sun and wind, life is on the wing, and inside there is the sound of doors shutting, the tinkle of the bell and the grown-up people walking up and down the stairs, talking as they go—and always very carefully sounding the wrong note….

In ‘Old People’ we have again a family, clinging to its houses, visiting, immensely absorbed in its family affairs, a whole little world of its own—but there the resemblance ends. The family in ‘Old People’ is not united by small scandals, little jealousies, wars and spites; through it there flows, like a dark underground river, the memory of a crime…. Sixty years ago, on a pouring wet night in Java, the beautiful Ottilie Dercksz was discovered with Mr. Takma by her husband. The husband had a native knife; Ottilie managed to hold him while Takma got it from him. ‘Give him a stab!’ she cried. ‘Better him than you!’ When it was over, helped by a native, they carried the body out into the storm and flung it into a river. Nobody discovered their crime except the young doctor who signed the death certificate, and Ottilie bought his silence with her beauty. She was mad for love of Takma at the time. Now it is late autumn sixty years page 124 after. The beautiful Ottilie is ninety-three, Mr. Takma is eighty-nine and Doctor Roelofsz is eighty-three—and they are haunted. They have lived freely and fully; they have been successful and important; each of them believes that the secret is safe. It is as though life has purposely waited until they are defenceless, powerless to resist or to seek forgetfulness. They are too old; it is time for them to die; they ought to be at rest, but like dreadfully tired children who are not allowed to go to bed, but must stay downstairs among the hateful, tormenting guests, these old, old people are kept out of their graves and forced to live over and over again that stormy night in Java in all its horror and detail. They are not right in thinking that the secret is kept. One of Ottilie's sons, who was with them at the time, woke up and, standing in his little nightshirt on the verandah, saw what was done; his foot slipped in something horrible; it was his father's blood. But he kept silence. Another son suspected, and a grandchild has a suspicion. Even all those of the family who do not know are tainted; they are marked by the crime, set apart by a dark stream of sensual blood which flows in their veins like the counterpart of that dark river, and will not let them be calm.

In the shadow, on a high chair like a throne, her small brittle body hidden in the folds of her cashmere gown, her fingers, transparent, wand-like in the black mittens, her face a white porcelain mask, sits the old, old woman. She spends her days receiving the visits of her children, her grandchildren, her great-grandchildren, her great-greatgrandchildren—down to little two-weeks-old Netta: ‘a bundle of white and a little pink patch for a face, and two little drops of turquoise eyes, with a moist little munching mouth.’ To her they are all children passing and repassing before her weary old eyes, while all the time, over by the china cabinet, or near the door, or outside the window near the park railings, there is something white … mistily rising.

Mr. Takma comes every afternoon to sit with his old page 125 friend. He too is small and slender, but wonderfully keen for such, an old man, because he is always on his guard. His voice like a breeze, airy, light, rustling: ‘I've no appetite, child, I've no appetite’ is always the same. Only, sometimes in the middle of a conversation, his eyes grow glassy, his head falls and he drops asleep for a moment or two. ‘Nobody sees the inward shock with which he wakes.’ Very often when he is there old Doctor Roelofsz comes stumping up the stair on his stiff leg, his dropsical paunch hanging sideways, his bald pate with its fringe of ‘moth-eaten hair’ shining, and he limps into the room muttering his eternal: ‘Well—well—well. Yes, yes. Well-well!’

These are the three ancient criminals, whom life will not let go. And while they wait and suffer there is a kind of terrible race going on between the desire of the children who know and who long for the old people to die before the secret is discovered, and the curiosity of those who do not know and who burn for the secret to be revealed before the old people die. Never once does the dark river burst above ground, but as the year deepens to winter it seems to grow loud and swollen and dreadful. Then quite suddenly, before the year is out, Mr. Takma dies, and the old doctor, and last of all the old woman—and the river subsides.

‘Old People’ is one of those rare novels which, we feel, enlarge our experience of life. We are richer not only for having studied the marvellously drawn portraits of the three aged beings, but because we have marked their behaviour as they played their parts against this great half-hoop of darkening sky. But it is only when we think over the various members of that strange family that we realize how great is our gain. New people have appeared in that other world of ours, which sometimes seems so much more real and satisfying than this one. That they have a life and being of their own we do not question; even that they ‘go on’ long after the book is finished—this we can believe. What is it then that differentiates page 126 these living characters from the book-bound creatures of even our brilliant modern English writers? Is it not that the former are seen ever, and always in relation to life—not to a part of life, not to a set of society, but to the bounding horizon, life, and the latter are seen in relation to an intellectual idea of life? In this second case life is made to fit them; something is abstracted—something quite unessential—that they wouldn't in the least know what to do with … and they are set in motion. But life cannot be made to ‘fit’ anybody, and the novelist who makes the attempt will find himself cutting something that gets smaller and smaller, finer and finer, until he must begin cutting his characters next to fit the thing he has made.

It is only by accepting life as M. Couperus accepts it that the novelist is free—through his characters—to question it profoundly.