Chapter 31 three one

The next day, despite my best efforts to keep him, Stroeve left.I suggested that I go home for him to collect his luggage, but he insisted on doing it himself.I think he might have hoped they hadn't packed his things away, so he would have had a chance to see his wife again and maybe persuade her to come back to him.But the facts were not as he expected, some of his odds and ends were waiting for him to be picked up by the porter, and Blanche, as the porter told him, had gone out.I think Stroeve would not fail to confide his troubles to her if he had the opportunity.I found him telling his misfortune to every acquaintance he met; he hoped to be sympathized with him, but he only aroused ridicule.

His behavior was very unseemly.He knew what time his wife was out shopping each day, and one day, impatient to see her, stopped her in the street.Although Blanche ignored him, he talked to her endlessly.He apologized to her for anything he had done to her, told her how he truly loved her, and begged her to come back to him.Blanche did not answer a word, turned his face to one side, and hurried forward. I can imagine how Stroeve, with his short legs, tried to catch up with him.He panted as he ran, and continued to babble.He told her how miserable he was, begged her to have mercy on him; he swore he would do anything for her if she would forgive him.He promised to take her on a trip.He told her that Strickland would soon tire of her.When Stroeve recounted this disgusting scene to me, I was utterly outraged.This man is really brainless and has lost the dignity of a husband.He did everything that his wife despised.A woman can be crueler than any man to a man who still loves her, but she no longer loves;Blanche.Stroeve stopped abruptly and slapped her husband across the face with all his strength.While he was flustered, she hurried away and climbed up the stairs of the studio in three steps at a time.She didn't say a word the whole time.

As he told me this story, he touched his face with his hands, as if the burning pain had not passed by now.His eyes showed pain and bewilderment, his pain made people look sad, and his bewilderment was a little funny.He looked like a schoolboy who had been scolded; and though I felt sorry for him, I couldn't help laughing. After that, he wandered back and forth on Blanche's only way to go to the store to buy things. When he saw Blanche walking by, he stopped at the corner on the opposite side of the street.He didn't dare to talk to her anymore, he just stared at her with a pair of round eyes, trying to express the prayer and sorrow in his heart with his eyes.I suppose he thought Blanche would be impressed by his pathetic appearance.But she never showed any signs of seeing him.She doesn't even change the time of shopping, and she never changes the route.I imagined that there was something cruel in her indifference, that she might have taken pleasure in torturing him in this way.I really don't understand why she hates him so much.

I persuaded Stroeve to be wise.He was so spineless that the onlookers were furious. It's no good for you to go on like this, I said, in my opinion, what you should do is to beat her up, so that she won't look down on you like this now. I suggested asking him to go back to his hometown for a few days.He often mentioned to me his hometown, a sleepy town somewhere in the north of the Netherlands, where his parents still live.They were all poor people, and his father was a carpenter.His family lives in an old small red brick house, which is clean and tidy, and there is a canal with slow flow beside the house.The streets there are very wide and deserted.Over the past two hundred years, this place has become increasingly desolate and desolate, but the houses in the town still maintain the simple and majestic atmosphere of that year.Wealthy merchants who sent their wares to the far East Indies lived a quiet and prosperous life in these houses; these houses are now decayed, but still gleam with the afterglow of the prosperity of the past.You can wander along the canals until you come to wide green fields where black and white cows graze lazily.I think in such an environment full of childhood memories, Dirk.Stroeve could forget his misfortune.But he doesn't want to go back.

I must stay here and she can find me whenever she needs me, he repeated what he had already said to me, it would be terrible if something bad happened and I wasn't there for her. What do you think will happen?I asked him. I have no idea.But I am afraid. I shrugged. Although in such great pain, Dirk.Stroeve's appearance still makes people laugh.If he had been thin and haggard, perhaps people would have sympathized with him.But he didn't lose weight at all.He was still plump, with round, flushed cheeks like two overripe apples.He has always been clean and neat, and now he is still wearing the neat black coat, and a slightly smaller bowler hat is placed on his head very freely.His stomach was growing fat, and he was not affected by this sad incident at all.He looked more like a thriving peddler than ever.It is a wretched thing sometimes that a man's appearance does not match his soul.Such was Stroeve: he had the passion of Romeo in him, but he was Toby.Sir Belch's figure; his disposition benevolent and generous, yet constantly making jokes; his heart fond of beautiful things, but he can only create mediocre things; his sentiments are very delicate, But his manners were rough; he was tactful in other people's affairs, but a mess in his own.What a cruel joke it was that nature had wrought so many contradictory traits into man in creating him, and had confronted him with the cruelty of the world which bewildered him.

【Note】Toby.Sir Belcher: Character in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.