"I can't very well move," he said. "You see ... I have everything here ... everything here...."
His glance and his gestures became very vague, as though he did not wish to say more. And Addie saw how it was: Uncle Ernst still believed, had always, all those years, believed in the souls that swarmed around him, the souls that had been conjured like spirits out of books, curiosities and old vases. But he never spoke of the souls now, because he remembered only too well how stupid and wicked his people had been in the old days. After that attack twelve years ago, he had gone on believing in these brain-and soul-phantoms of his, but he had learnt to keep silent about them, to talk as the stupid people talked. Or by preference he did not talk at all.... But this very silence had caused his mistrust to develop into a mania that he was being persecuted, a mania that made him constantly look round, timidly.... He would open the door, look into the passage.... And Constance knew that, in the street, he was for ever looking round, attracting the attention of the passers-by with this frightened, suspicious trick of his.
Addie saw it: Ernst believed in the souls which lay crowding around him, which linked themselves with chains to his soul, which he dragged with him through the mud of the streets and the wretchedness of life, the souls that thronged in agony around him, until they weighed down his chest and stifled him so that he longed to run half-naked into the street to cool himself in rain and air, to gulp down the wind. And very deeply bedded in the sick soul Addie saw hypersensitiveness hiding as an adorable tenderness which, instead of turning to a disease, might have developed into the profoundest qualities of sympathetic feeling, not only to feel, but also to know and understand, because of the slumbering spark of intelligence, because of the knowledge so eagerly gleaned.... And now these were wasted gifts, morbid qualities, now it was all useless and sick and had become more sick and more useless as the sick years of shadow drearily dragged on their misty-melancholy introspection and increasing distrustfulness. It was all, all lost. And, in his pity at this fatal waste, at this tenderness which had soured almost into madness and was devoted to shadows while the poor world stood in such real need of tenderness and feeling, Addie remembered how once, years ago, he had felt conscious of a longing with a single word to cure the sick man: but which, which word? It was as though he knew that one word to be hovering in the air around him, while he was still too young and ignorant to catch it as he might have caught a butterfly with his hat! And now, now he knew for certain—after all those years of misty-melancholy introspection and increasing distrustfulness—that it was too late and that the man could not recover and that he would die as he had lived in the almost proud hallucination which brought around him for protection the numberless oppressed, persecuted and martyred souls, suffocating him in the cloud of their frail tortured and complaining bodies. And it was not only the souls: the living who sought him out were also included in his proud illusion; they also needed his support, because he alone was strong and all of them were weak.
It was too late for a cure; but still Addie longed, though he knew for certain that no cure could ever take place, to free that lost and impaired quality of noble feeling from everything that could shock or offend the silent, suffering man; and he swore to himself to get Uncle Ernst out of the Hague, out of these rooms, where he was taking root and at the same time being tortured. He happened that day to feel very restful, very calm, even though, deep down in the subsoil of his soul, black self-insufficiency lowered as usual. He would not know what to do for himself; for this sick man he did know what to do! For himself, he groped around in a dark labyrinth; for the man of stricken brain and soul he knew it all suddenly, with a bright ray of clearest perception, knew with a sacred, instinctive knowledge! And yet there was not a touch of joy, not a touch of ecstasy or fervour in his sombre, melancholy glance, in his deep, sombre voice, when, with his customary earnestness of words and manner, he said to his mother:
"Mamma, you must leave me alone with Uncle Ernst."
She looked at him. And, despite his quietness, his earnestness, his calm and sombreness, she knew her son too well not to feel, suddenly, that he knew.
"Very well," she said, "you stay with Uncle Ernst. I'll go round to Aunt Adolphine and see Marietje. When and where shall I see you? This evening, at the hotel?"
He shook his head:
"No," he said. "You had better go back by yourself to Driebergen, with Marietje. As for me...."
He paused, as though reflecting, passed his hand across his forehead: