It had gone very, very still. The tired man had dozed off; it seemed as though his nerve-taut limbs had relaxed and lay loose and slack: the thin legs in the wide, creased trousers; the chest sunk under the rumpled coloured shirt; the narrow shoulders, the lean arms in the old coat, with its tired creases. And the features of his face had also fallen in, now that the nerves were at last resting; they had fallen in like an old man's: queer wrinkles furrowed the forehead and etched lines under the eyes and round the nose and mouth; the short, scanty beard formed a stubble around the long chin; and the hair too was thin and stubby, a little thin behind the ears. Addie looked at the hands of the sleeping man: long, thin fingers, in which a nervous tremor still lingered, a very slight tremor, as though quivers were passing under the skin, over the veins. . . The boy looked curiously at the hands, for he was always interested in hands, judging people more by their hands than by anything else: he did not exactly know why and certainly could not analyze it. And he could see those long, thin hands not only reaching out vaguely and ineffectually after art, but also laying hold of books with a more confident grasp, turning them page by page. He saw too a tremor of pity in the tapering finger-tips, which seemed not to dare to touch things; and those finger-tips struck him particularly because of the short nails, which nevertheless showed breeding, with their almond shape and the little crescent-moon at the quick; only, the nails were bitten short, as though in fits of nervousness. Then, mechanically, as he always did when studying people's hands, he looked at his own: his father's hands, but still boy's hands, though they were already becoming manlier, short and broad, white and strong, hands that would take a close, steady grip of things. He no longer bit the nails, but would cut them swiftly, with a pen-knife, whenever they bothered him. And from his own hands he glanced once more towards his Uncle Ernst's and seemed to read in them a soul highly susceptible to art and of extreme sensitiveness; a soul ready to assimilate the contents of books; a soul evolved out of loneliness, out of lonely life and lonely knowledge and, above all, out of lonely, very lonely feeling; a soul so lonely and shrinking that it had fallen ill of that loneliness and appeared to see and hear actually the thousand reflexions of all that it had read in books, seen in art and felt in its lonely hypersensitiveness. . . .
The tired man slept on. . . . And Addie stretched himself at still fuller length, while around him the white dunes rippled away in the summer haze under those wide, unearthly skies. He felt well and not unhappy, though there was just a streak of sadness running through his reverie, sadness because people and things were what they were. It was a pleasant, benevolent sort of secret reverie; and through it all there was the desire to grasp things, to hold them as with the close, steady grip of his own hands, that close, steady grip, firm but tender, with which he meant to grasp everything in this wavering, uncertain life, earnestly and charitably and above all with a great longing for absolutely understanding, for divine knowledge, for the sake both of others and of himself. . . . And, because he had made up his mind, he ceased dreaming and began to reflect, thinking over how he was going to tell his parents what he knew so well in his own heart. He had loved them with such earnest love from early childhood that he understood them very well, both of them, knew them as thoroughly as it is possible for one being to know another. His father had always remained young, despite what he called the ruin of his life, despite that other thing which had brought great sorrow to him recently. His mother had grown older but more serious and lately, when she talked to him, Addie, had expressed views on all sorts of subjects which he used to think rather . . . or was it because he himself was growing older and understood more and fathomed more of the depths of this deep life? Had Mamma always been like this? Were his childish memories at fault and had she always been the serious woman that she now was? . . . No, that was impossible, he thought; but nevertheless this was more an intuitive feeling than a definite ability to assert it positively and unhesitatingly. . . . And now he reflected—he had admitted it to himself—that, for as far as his love was greater for one than for the other, it was greater for his father, however much he would have liked it to be equally great for both. . . . Still, he would not speak to his father this time: he would speak to his mother. She would understand him more quickly than Papa; and what he had to tell her would hurt Papa more than it would Mamma. He would speak to Mamma first. . . . True, it appeared to him difficult to speak of this matter at all and to destroy in them a thought, an expectation, a hope which they had always cherished. But yet his idea had sprung up with such force from his innermost consciousness that he felt that he could not do otherwise. He would have to speak and tell them what he had resolved to do with his life, whose impenetrable future he saw unfolding before him, clearer every day, as though wide doors were being opened, till he saw what things would be like and where he would go to, a long, long way ahead. . . .
He would tell her that afternoon, would tell his mother first. And, as he made up his mind to this, he felt that in his case it would be a vocation, that the voice was a distinct one, as though it were calling to him and beckoning him, through the wide doors that had opened. The voice that called to him so distinctly he would answer. . . .
But Ernst was stirring and now woke from his sleep.
"Do you feel rested, Uncle?"
Ernst sadly nodded yes.
"Well, then shall we walk a bit? Else the doctor won't be pleased, Uncle."
They rose and walked on, in silence, up and down, down and up the rippling dunes. Ernst was very gloomy and, at last, said:
"You see, it's beyond my powers to help all of you, all of you. . . . There are so many of you, you see, that I can't possibly take care of every one of you . . . however much I should like to. Then again you mustn't forget that there are thousands swarming round me as it is. True, they are no longer alive . . . but they feel, all the same. Those are the souls. They never leave me in peace. And then to look after all of you, who are alive, as well . . . it's beyond me; sometimes it's beyond me. . . . There's Mamma, poor woman. The whole world is at her heels; and, if I didn't see to it, they would hide her away and bury her. . . . Then I have to look after Papa and you and Uncle Gerrit and Uncle Paul and all the rest of them. I have all of you to look after. You never see anything and you know nothing, you live in a dream, you walk blindly . . . to your ruin, all of you. . . . Who would look after you if I wasn't there? Who would look after you if I died to-morrow? . . . If I worried about it, instead of quietly doing my duty, it would send me mad to think of it! . . . And you never stay by me, you keep on running about, with the wretches at your heels, waiting to hide you away and bury you. Why, they had hold of Uncle Gerrit the other day, in chains, under my room! I heard him all through the night and I couldn't release him until . . . until . . ."
He had lost the thread of his thoughts, passed his hand over his hair and said, mournfully:
"Addie, my dear boy, you mustn't come and see me any more. Uncle is in a bad house. It's a bad place, that doctor's house. Terrible things happen there at night. You're too young, Addie, to come to such a bad house. Promise me that you won't come again. . . ."
"Uncle, the doctor's is not a bad house. . . ."
"Of course you would know better than I! You're young; and you don't know and don't see things. There are scandalous goings-on at night, scandalous things in every room in the house. I shall tell Mamma to take you away: I can't look after all of you . . ."
"Uncle, you should stop thinking of such things and enjoy your walk and the air and the woods and the dunes and the clouds . . ."
"Yes, that's what you say: stop thinking . . . and enjoy . . . and enjoy . . ."
"Yes, enjoy nature around you . . ."
"Nature? . . ."
His restless black eyes encountered Addie's clear glance. And suddenly he stopped and said:
"Tell me, do they leave them alone, in my rooms on the Nieuwe Uitleg?"
"Uncle, there's nothing there; and all your books and china are well taken care of. . . ."
"Is there nothing there?"
"No, Uncle, not what you think."
"And in the doctor's house?"
"There's nothing there either, Uncle."
"Here, round about us?"
"There's nothing, Uncle."
"Then what I hear . . ."
"Is an hallucination, Uncle."
"What I see . . ."
"That too."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because it's the truth, Uncle."
"How do you know what is the truth?"
"Through my senses, Uncle. Through my reason."
"Are they healthy? Are they infallible?"
"Perhaps not infallible, but healthy. And yours are ailing."
"Are mine ailing?"
"Yes, Uncle."
"My senses?"
"Yes. And your reason too."
"You know that?"
"Yes, I know it for certain."
It was as though the sick man for one moment doubted himself, while he kept his eyes fixed on the boy's steady, blue eyes and read a strange lucidity in them. But something inside him made him unable or unwilling to overstep a certain boundary which was like a line of suffering in his sick mind, a grievous horizon, an horizon which was too near, which he could not look at from a distance, which had neither light nor darkness behind it, but only mist.
"And what about this?" he asked, pointing with his stick to the dune on which they stood.
"What, Uncle?"
"This, this, underneath us! This moaning and sighing and imploring for help!"
He threw himself flat on the sand; he dug furiously:
"Yes!" he shouted. "Wait! Wait a moment! I'm coming, I'm coming!"
And, rooting with his hands, like an animal, he sent the sand flying around him.
"Oh," thought Addie, "if he would only make one more effort suddenly to see, to hear, to feel that he was dreaming . . . that he was dreaming! Oh, to have him get well . . . to see him get well, all at once, so that one knew it by the brightness in his eyes . . . and the untroubled look on his face! . . ."
Then he put his hand on Ernst's shoulder. The sick man stood up, walked along:
"Come on," he said, beckoning to Addie.