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Updated: May 25, 2025
The folks will laugh at me, and I shall curse them, powerless to do them evil. Even Dame Toelast will not want me when she learns all. And yet I must do this thing. So long as Jan's soul is in me, I love Christina better than myself. I must do this for her sake. I love her I cannot help it."
When you are yourself, Nicholas Snyders, you will be crazy with yourself remember that." And Dame Toelast marched out and slammed the door behind her. "Girls for boys, and old women for old men." The phrase kept ringing in his ears. Hitherto his new-found happiness had filled his life, leaving no room for thought. But the old Dame's words had sown the seed of reflection.
And old Nicholas married Dame Toelast, but, happily, lived to do evil only for a few years longer. Long after, Jan told Christina the whole story, but it sounded very improbable, and Christina though, of course, she did not say so did not quite believe it, but thought Jan was trying to explain away that strange month of his life during which he had wooed Dame Toelast.
I went past the little rope shops, where the door-bell sounded loudly through the empty street when a solitary visitor in Sunday attire stepped out of the shop, past the barber shop with the brightly polished brass basins, past the few stately mansions with ancient stone gables representing "Fortune" or "Love," where the daughters of the house, from dark side chambers peeped out, from behind the inevitable Clivia Hower-pot, at the rarely passing stranger, on to the hotel "de Toelast."
I had taken lodgings in "de Toelast," from there to regulate my position as far as was practicable, and to effect the rupture with my superiors and the entire sphere of my activities as correctly as possible. I had been an active, helpful worker, and what made me popular everywhere harmless, impersonal, without any unpleasantly obtrusive originality in actions or opinions.
An old faithful servant from "The Toelast" has, after the death of Jan Baars, gone over into my employ, and she cooks deliciously and cares for me as for her own child. And the long, solemn, solitary evenings in my quiet house with my books, papers, memories and a little music are never too long for me.
But the brain of Nicholas Snyders that remained to him whispered: "Let the little maid think it is all her doing." The news reached the ears of Dame Toelast. The same evening saw her seated in the inglenook opposite Nicholas Snyders, who smoked and seemed bored. "You are making a fool of yourself, Nicholas Snyders," the Dame told him. "Everybody is laughing at you."
Nicholas, to Christina's everlasting gratitude, had cleared their memory it cost but a few hundred florins in consideration that Christina should work for him without wages. Christina formed his entire household, and only one willing visitor ever darkened his door, the widow Toelast. Dame Toelast was rich and almost as great a miser as Nicholas himself. "Why should not we two marry?"
Yet here am I loving Christina, using Nicholas Snyders' brain and gold to thwart Nicholas Snyders' every scheme, doing everything that I know will make him mad when he comes back into his own body; while Jan cares no longer for Christina, would marry Dame Toelast for her broad lands, her many mills. Clearly it is the soul that is the real man.
If the soul of Christina entered into the body of Dame Toelast, should I turn from Christina, from her golden hair, her fathomless eyes, her asking lips, to desire the shrivelled carcass of Dame Toelast? No; I should still shudder at the thought of her. Yet when I had the soul of Nicholas Snyders, I did not loathe her, while Christina was naught to me.
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