"Why aren't you always so lively, Uncle?"
"Lively? Do you think me lively? He thinks I'm lively, while I sit here cursing human filthiness! Is that your diagnosis, professor? Well, you're quite out of it, my boy! You'll never get your ten guilders for that! Lively? Heavens, boy, I'm far from that!... As long as life remains as dirty as it is, I shall be as melancholy as melancholy can be.... Cure me, if you like, but first clean the Augean stable.... There's just one little clean spot left in our soul; but all the rest is dirty!... Tell me now: whom will you start on? Couldn't you cure Uncle Gerrit? Give him a better appetite? Sounder sleep? A healthier complexion? Teach him to buck up that big carcase of his a bit?... Just see how wasted he looks!..."
There was something in Paul's chaff that grated on Gerrit very unpleasantly; but he laughed, as though he thought it the best joke he had ever heard, that Paul should be wishing him a better appetite and sounder sleep. Was Paul getting at him? Did Paul see through his sham strength? And would Addie do so, later?... No, nobody saw through it: the centipede rooted in him unseen by them all....
And he got up, to mix himself another grog; but he mixed it so that it was hardly more than hot water and lemon.
CHAPTER XIV
He had never quite understood her, not even in the old days. In the old days, as a young officer, he had seen in her a fine girl, a delicious girl, of whom he had been madly enamoured. He had never understood her eyes, never understood her soul; but formerly he had not thought so very much about those eyes and that soul, because in those days he didn't know much about himself either, did not know what he knew now. In those days, he only now and then had a vague glimpse of his own latent sentimentality: to-day, he knew that sentimentality to be there most positively, as a blue background to his soul. And he was so much afraid of that sentimentality, so much afraid lest he should miss the truth, the naked, mocking reality of that courtesan's soul, so much afraid lest he should make it out to be finer than it really was, kinder above all and gentler and more tender, that he could never speak to her without abusing her or swearing at her, his voice as rough as if he were roaring at one of his hussars.
"I mustn't let myself be put upon by her ... or by myself either," he constantly reflected.
And he kept on his guard. Add to that a vague resentment, at not having been able to keep away from her, at having gone to see her in her room; a vague resentment at the thought of his home, of his children, of all that he went back to when he left her room. The way you got used to anything, he would reflect! Now, when he had been to her, he would put his latchkey calmly into his front-door, without feeling his heart beating with nervousness, would undress calmly, would walk into the room where Adeline lay in bed! The way you got used to everything and by degrees came to do things which at first you thought rotten! You did it because you couldn't very well help it ... and also because your ideas about things, day by day, as you did it, slumbered away into a feeling that you weren't responsible, that it was no use resisting what had got such a hold of you.... Nevertheless, when he was with her, he always felt that resentment keenly: it did not slumber away.... At Pauline's, he had a keen apprehension of being still more imposed upon, of seeing kindness and charming tenderness in that girl, whereas of course she was nothing but a courtesan who meant to get money out of him. And then, in her small, shabby room, he would roar at her and ask:
"Look here, why can't you leave me alone?"