But she merely answered his words mechanically:
"No," she said, "we have never found each other."
He would have wished to tell her now ... about his journey, about the old man, who had died, over there, near Haarlem. But he could not; a feeling of discouragement prevented him. And they remained sitting without speaking, close together, with her hand in his. After his father, after his mother had both, so soon after each other, spoken to him of his own happiness ... now that feeling of discouragement prevented him, because he saw life enveloping in clouds of darkness at his feet ... black darkness out of an abyss ... so that he did not know whither the first steps would lead him.... Black darkness and emptiness ... because he no longer knew, no longer knew what it would be best to say and do.... He could no longer speak now of the old man who had died yonder, who had sent for him to tell him that he forgave the two of them—his father, his mother—who had once injured him: he could not do it. Whereas, at the time of his father's words, the black darkness had only whirled in front of him, now that his mother, so strangely, was saying the same to him ... it had suddenly become an abyss ... pitch-dark ... because he no longer knew anything.... He no longer possessed the instinctive knowledge by which he must tread his path, which, while still so very young, he thought that he knew how to tread in clear self-consciousness of a clear soul that felt its own vocation. Oh, how often of late years had he no longer known! He no longer knew what was right to do, because, whatever he had done of late years, the heaviness had sunk within him, as an insufficiency, giving him that feeling of discouragement.... He had felt that discouragement by the bedside of his needy patients.... He had felt that discouragement in between his cares for Uncle Gerrit's children.... He had felt that discouragement when he was with his wife, with his own children....
Oh, world of feeling born just of the emptiness of self-insufficiency, because self, alas, was never sufficient, because something was always lacking and he did not know what!... And, when this came over him, this night of sudden chaos, the word died on his lips, the movement on his fingers, the deed on his will.... Oh, world of darkness, which then suddenly spread like the expanse of clouds outside over all the clear sky of himself!... He knew he wanted what was right; and yet the insufficiency swelled up.... He know his powers of alleviation and consolation; and yet it was the night without a smile ... as now, when he sat with his hand in his mother's, with no words after their first, save that she shuddered and said:
"Hark ... hark how the wind is blowing!..."
He drew her to him, until her head sank on his shoulder, and they remained like that, in the night.
The gale outside was like a living immensity, a vast soul raging with world-suffering, thousand-voiced and thousand-winged, and under its raging agony, which filled all the air above the land, the house that contained the life of them all was small as some tiny casket....
And that night he was unable to tell her....