Van der Welcke, as he told his dream in broken sentences, lay shaking with laughter; his whole bed shook, the sheets rose and fell; he was red in the face, as if on the verge of choking; he wept as though consumed with grief; he gasped for breath, threw the bed-clothes off:
“Just imagine it ... just imagine it ... you never ... you never saw such a stretch of sands as that!”
Addie had begun by listening with his usual serious face; but, when he saw his father crying and gasping for breath, rolling about in the bed, and when the vision of those sands became clearer to his imagination, he also was seized with irresistible laughter. But he had one peculiarity, that he could not laugh outright, but, shaken with internal merriment, would laugh in his stomach without uttering a sound; and he now sat on the edge of his father’s bed, rocking with silent laughter as the bed rocked under him. He tried not to look at his father, for, when he saw his father’s face, distorted and purple with his paroxysms of laughter, lying on the white pillow like the mask of some faun, he had to make agonized clutches at his stomach and, bent double, to try to laugh outright; and he couldn’t, he couldn’t.
“Doesn’t it ... doesn’t it ... strike you as funny?” asked Van der Welcke, hearing no sound of laughter from his son.
And he looked at Addie and, suddenly remembering that Addie could never roar with laughter out loud, he became still merrier at the sight of his poor boy’s silent throes, his noiseless stomach-laugh, until his own laughter rang through the room, echoing back from the walls, filling the whole room with loud Homeric mirth.
“Oh, Father, stop!” said Addie at last, a little relieved by his internal paroxysms, the tears streaming in wet streaks down his face.
And he heaved a sigh of despair that he could not laugh like his father.
“Give me a pencil and paper,” said Van der Welcke, “and I’ll draw you my dream.”
But Addie was very severe and shocked:
“No, Father, that won’t do! That’ll never do.... it’d be a vulgar drawing!”