Next day, though I pressed him to remain, Stroeve left me. I offered to fetch his things from the studio, but he insisted on going himself; I think he hoped they had not thought of getting them together, so that he would have an opportunity of seeing his wife again and perhaps inducing her to come back to him. But he found his traps waiting for him in the porter’s lodge¹, and the concierge² told him that Blanche had gone out. I do not think he resisted the temptation of giving her an account of his troubles. I found that he was telling them to everyone he knew; he expected sympathy, but only excited ridicule³.

He bore himself most unbecomingly. Knowing at what time his wife did her shopping, one day, unable any longer to bear not seeing her, he waylaid⁴ her in the street. She would not speak to him, but he insisted on speaking to her. He spluttered out words of apology for any wrong he had committed towards her; he told her he loved her devotedly⁵ and begged her to return to him. She would not answer; she walked hurriedly, with averted⁶ face. I imagined him with his fat little legs trying to keep up with her. Panting a little in his haste, he told her how miserable⁷ he was; he besought⁸ her to have mercy on him; he promised, if she would forgive him, to do everything she wanted. He offered to take her for a journey. He told her that Strickland would soon tire of her. When he repeated to me the whole sordid⁹ little scene I was outraged¹⁰. He had shown neither sense nor dignity. He had omitted nothing that could make his wife despise him. There is no cruelty greater than a woman’s to a man who loves her and whom she does not love; she has no kindness then, no tolerance¹¹ even, she has only an insane irritation¹². Blanche Stroeve stopped suddenly, and as hard as she could slapped her husband’s face. She took advantage of his confusion to escape, and ran up the stairs to the studio. No word had passed her lips.

When he told me this he put his hand to his cheek as though he still felt the smart of the blow, and in his eyes was a pain that was heartrending and an amazement¹³ that was ludicrous. He looked like an overblown schoolboy, and though I felt so sorry for him, I could hardly help laughing.

Then he took to walking along the street which she must pass through to get to the shops, and he would stand at the corner, on the other side, as she went along. He dared not speak to her again, but sought to put into his round eyes the appeal that was in his heart. I suppose he had some idea that the sight of his misery¹⁴ would touch her. She never made the smallest sign that she saw him. She never even changed the hour of her errands or sought an alternative route. I have an idea that there was some cruelty in her indifference¹⁵. Perhaps she got enjoyment out of the torture she inflicted¹⁶. I wondered why she hated him so much.

I begged Stroeve to behave more wisely. His want of spirit was exasperating¹⁷.

“You’re doing no good at all by going on like this,” I said. “I think you’d have been wiser if you’d hit her over the head with a stick. She wouldn’t have despised you as she does now.”

I suggested that he should go home for a while. He had often spoken to me of the silent town, somewhere up in the north of Holland, where his parents still lived. They were poor people. His father was a carpenter, and they dwelt in a little old red-brick house, neat and clean, by the side of a sluggish¹⁸ canal. The streets were wide and empty; for two hundred years the place had been dying, but the houses had the homely¹⁹ stateliness of their time. Rich merchants, sending their wares²⁰ to the distant Indies, had lived in them calm and prosperous lives, and in their decent decay they kept still an aroma²¹ of their splendid past. You could wander along the canal till you came to broad green fields, with windmills here and there, in which cattle, black and white, grazed lazily. I thought that among those surroundings, with their recollections of his boyhood, Dirk Stroeve would forget his unhappiness. But he would not go.

“I must be here when she needs me,” he repeated. “It would be dreadful if something terrible happened and I were not at hand.”

“What do you think is going to happen?” I asked.

“I don’t know. But I’m afraid.”

I shrugged²² my shoulders.

For all his pain, Dirk Stroeve remained a ridiculous object. He might have excited sympathy if he had grown worn and thin. He did nothing of the kind. He remained fat, and his round, red cheeks shone like ripe apples. He had great neatness of person, and he continued to wear his spruce black coat and his bowler²³ hat, always a little too small for him, in a dapper, jaunty²⁴ manner. He was getting something of a paunch, and sorrow had no effect on it. He looked more than ever like a prosperous bagman. It is hard that a man’s exterior²⁵ should tally²⁶ so little sometimes with his soul. Dirk Stroeve had the passion of Romeo in the body of Sir Toby Belch²⁷. He had a sweet and generous nature, and yet was always blundering; a real feeling for what was beautiful and the capacity to create only what was commonplace; a peculiar²⁸ delicacy²⁹ of sentiment and gross manners. He could exercise tact³⁰ when dealing³¹ with the affairs of others, but none when dealing with his own. What a cruel practical joke old Nature played when she flung so many contradictory³² elements together, and left the man face to face with the perplexing callousness³³ of the universe.