§16
Such was the life I left in 1834, and such I found it in 1840, and such it remained down to my father’s death in 1846. When I returned from exile at the age of thirty, I realised that my father was right in many respects, and that he, to his misfortune, knew the world only too well. But did I deserve that he should preach even the truth in a manner so repulsive to the heart of youth? His intelligence, chilled by a long life spent in a corrupt society, made him suspicious of all the world; his feelings were not warm and did not crave for reconciliation; and therefore he remained at enmity with all his fellow-creatures.
In 1839, and still more in 1842, found him feeble and suffering from symptoms which were not imaginary. My uncle’s death had left him more solitary than ever; even his old valet had gone, but he was just the same; his bodily strength had failed him, but his cruel wit and his memory were unaffected; he still carried on the same petty tyranny, and the same old Sonnenberg still pitched his camp in our old house and ran errands as before.
For the first time, I realised the sadness of that life and watched with an aching heart that solitary deserted existence, fading away in the parched and stony desert which he had created around him by his own actions, but was powerless to change. He knew his powerlessness, and he saw death approaching, and held out jealously and stubbornly. I felt intense pity for the old man, but I could do nothing—he was inaccessible.
I sometimes walked past his study and saw him sitting in his deep armchair, a hard, uncomfortable seat; he had his dogs round him and was playing with my three-year-old son, just the two together. It seemed to me that the sight of this child relaxed the clutching fingers and stiffening nerves of old age, and that, when his dying hand touched the cradle of infancy, he could rest from the anxiety and irritable strife in which his whole life had been spent.