"Why must you always know so little that will help yourself?... At the time, I raised no objection. You were fond of the woman; you always knew your mind with such certainty; I thought that you knew things for yourself; I let you have your way. I was jealous because you were getting married; so was your mother; we should have been jealous of any woman. We didn't like the girl you brought us; we thought, 'It's our jealousy that makes us not like her. She's Addie's wife; she's taking our boy from us.' We had no right to think like that. We tried to stifle our jealousy. We received Mathilde, hoping, almost knowing for certain, that you were finding your own happiness in her, because you always knew your mind.... You didn't know it in your own case.... You knew everything so positively in ours.... You also knew so positively, so plainly, that the profession which I tried to urge upon you was not the thing for you: you found your own vocation. You were a small boy; and you know it all so clearly and positively.... When you grew up and became a man, you no longer knew things. Isn't that so?... Why should your fate be the same as your father's? I was a ne'er-do-well, when I made my mistake; you were a calm, serious man...."
It was as if his father were depriving Addie of all his strength, but he merely said, in his almost cool, even, restrained tones:
"Dear Father, really ... things are all right between Mathilde and me. Even Mamma understood, in the end, that she did not feel happy here, at home; and Mamma agreed that she would feel more at home and happier in her own house, however small...."
"But I'm not speaking of Mathilde's happiness, I'm speaking of yours...."
"That goes with it, that must go with it, Father...."
And so it always remained: he spoke out no more than that, gave no more of himself than that and was outwardly almost cold with chill shuddering and repellant when spoken to about himself. That he had made a mistake, that he had not known things for himself he clearly perceived; but all his efforts were directed towards the attempt to repair what he had managed, through his ignorance where himself was concerned, to spoil or destroy in his wife's life.
Because he knew that she soon forgot things, he thought that he would succeed, if he devoted himself to her entirely, if he lived with a view to her happiness and ceased to live with a view to his own higher instincts, his own sympathies, his own vocation and activities. And, even if she did not forget everything at once, he would hope that, if he persisted, she would end by forgetting entirely.
On days when she was bright and cheerful, he was satisfied, in silence and with a certain inward sombreness, because things were going as he was compelling them to go. On days when she was snappish and locked herself into her room and was evidently unhappy and no longer knew how to explain her melancholy, he suddenly saw his young life before him as a dismal ruin, as a desolate block of masonry in a dark night, as a desperate climbing and climbing in the dusk, with no goal of light ahead. Then he would look at his young, crowing children and wonder whether one day—and that perhaps soon—they would comfort him and her, their parents, even as he had comforted his. He did his work listlessly, visited his patients listlessly, even though no one ever noticed anything in him. He would ride through the streets of the Hague in his smart little brougham; and his eyes looked dully before them and he longed for his bicycle and the Driebergen roads, the silent, gloomy roads, sodden with rain and weighed down under by the heavy skies where his sick poor awaited him in their mean little dwellings, in vain, seeing him only for a single moment once a week. He was filled with bitterness: with a listless sneer at himself he reflected that he might just as well have satisfied his parents' wishes and Grandmamma's wishes, in the old days, and become a diplomatist. It would have been nearly the same as what he was doing now: putting himself forward as a young fashionable doctor who practised hypnotism and who was sought after, especially by the ladies, because he was good-looking and a baron.
He sank into deeper and deeper dejection and felt roused only for a moment when treating a serious patient.