Then they were silent; and Constance thought: "Every soul must first go through that, must have its dream.... Not until very late does it find the grain ... for itself. What another communicates to it never satisfies its hunger as does its own grain ... the grain it has found for itself...."
CHAPTER VI
Addie was nearly sixteen. He did not grow much in stature, he promised to have the same build as his father, for there was something sturdy and yet delicate, something robust and yet gentle about him: strength and refinement combined. He continued to look older than he was, as though he could never quite catch himself up: his face, carved in firm and yet delicate lines, wore an air of calm serenity that did not belong to his years; his cheeks were covered with a golden down: indeed, his mother would have liked him to start shaving, which however he was not willing to do yet; and so the vague strip of golden velvet above his upper lip had become a decided moustache. His hair, with its soft, short, brown curls, was exactly like his father's; and his eyes also were his father's eyes, but they had grown still more serious, if possible, calm and tender, with a smiling sadness in their depths, and, above all, Addie's eyes were of a clear, untroubled blue, with none of the boyishness which shone in Van der Welcke's. Addie's were northern eyes, as his mother said: Dutch eyes, she called them, as distinguished from the creole eyes of all her family, the Van Lowes.
"Addie, how Dutch you are!" his mother would say, meaning thereby that they all, the Van Lowes, were specimens of the languid, less robust East-Indian type and that his father also had become more or less un-Dutch through his long residence abroad. "Addie, how Dutch you are! For a boy born on the Riviera, brought up in Brussels, who had never been in Holland before his thirteenth year, how is it possible that you should be the most Dutch of us all! You have nothing of the cosmopolitan about you!"
His mother used to tease him like this, especially when she looked into his eyes, his clear, calm, Dutch eyes, as into two blue mirrors, with a smile in them like a reflexion ... and beneath that smile, a vague shadow of sadness. And then he would give a sober nod of assent, laughing quietly, as though to say that she was right, that he felt quite Dutch and neither a languid East-Indian nor a mongrel cosmopolitan. He was a Dutch boy above all things, but here, in this little village of Nunspeet, he felt even more Dutch than at the Hague, especially as he looked out of his window at the hotel and saw the glittering white dunes undulating towards those vast skies, saw the piled-up clouds, the immensities of grey-blue rolling clouds, drifting by in their puissant majesty: all the glory of a small land; grandeur and might and majesty towering above the small lowlands, which bowed humbly beneath their awfulness.... Those clouds, those Dutch clouds: Addie loved them, those awful powers throned high above the gently undulating lands ... and Mamma, who teased him so, loved them too, her Dutch clouds, so vast, so vast, as though they were islands and fields, larger than the fields and islands of Holland itself....
It was early, six o'clock; and he looked out of his window into the pearly morning and, with a characteristic gesture of enthusiasm, flung out his arms towards the clouds. Then he laughed at himself, hoped that no one had seen him from the road. No, the peasants going to their work did not look up at his window; and now he dressed himself quickly, ran downstairs, breakfasted hurriedly on bread-and-butter and a glass of milk and went along the high-road and down a shorter road to Dr. van Heuvel's villa. The house stood some way back, in a large garden, quiet and shady; and, as the house stood high, it looked out over the undulating, sparkling dunes, past the dark-green masses of fir-trees on the moor which shimmered purple in the early morning sunshine, towards low horizons of just a streak of green, broken only by the needle-point of a steeple: just a narrow strip beneath the awful majesties of the vast clouds which drifted calmly by, one after the other, on and on, unceasingly, ever vast and majestic.
The doctor came out to meet Addie.
"Here I am, doctor."
"That's right, Van der Welcke, you're in good time. Would you mind going for a walk with your uncle presently?"