years and years ago?... When you were a little boy, I often used to think, 'I've got him now ... but one day I shall lose him irrevocably?'

Now it has come. ... I must accept it with resignation...."

"But am I not living with you all? Have I ever been away ... except to college ... and sometimes on business?"

"Dear, it's not that. It's the losing each other, the losing each other ... out of each other's souls...."

"But it's not that."

"That's just what it is.... And it's bound to be so, dear.... Only, because I no longer feel any part of you in my soul, I no longer know anything about you.... I have known nothing about you for ages.... I see you going and coming--it's the patients, it's the children, occupying you ... in turns--but what do I know, what do I know about you?... It has become like that gradually ... and since ... since you got married, it has become irrevocable."

"Mamma...."

"I oughtn't to talk like this, dear. I mustn't. And I should be able to overcome this melancholy, if I knew ... that you were happy in yourself...."

"Why should you doubt it?"

"I don't know. There's something about you...."

"Mother," he said, "how strange it is that you and Father...."

"Well?"

"Have never really found each other! You so often think the same things."

"Did Papa also think ...?"

"Just now ... almost the same as you."

"We have learnt to bear with each other, darling."

"But you have never found each other," he said, faintly; and his voice broke.

She looked at him; she understood that he too had not found his wife.

She saw it: he was not happy in himself. A sword seemed suddenly to cut through her soul; and she was filled with self-reproach as from a well.

Was it not all her fault, that her son was not happy now?... Was it not the result of his childhood, the result of his up-bringing?... The melancholy that had come after the excessive earnestness of his first youth ... was it not her fault?

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....

CHAPTER V

Now at last, after days, he was himself again! Alone, all alone, in the night, in his study, while everyone in the house slept, while only the night itself was awake: the night and the immense wind tormenting itself and struggling, raging and tearing round the house. Now at last he was alone and himself again, after Amsterdam and after Haarlem, after the troubles and comings and goings, the excitement--needy patients, visited by stealth; the Merchants' School; the old man, the old man especially!--and, tired as he was, yet he could not make up his mind for bed. In the study which was now getting dusky-brown to his eyes in the light of the lamp, he sat in the low leather chair; and his head wearily drooped on to his hand. Now that he had no more need for action, waves of indeterminate darkness surged and floated all around and within him, bearing on their crests the mood of self-insufficiency. No one else knew him as he now knew and felt himself: not his parents, not his wife, not one of Uncle Gerrit's children, not one of his needy patients, who only saw him composed and steady of nerve, a little sombre-eyed, but so four-square and firm, so calm and confident in his knowledge, always sure what would be good for all of them, who were ill and wretched....

No one knew him as he was now, weighed down with such despondency in his leather chair; and all who saw him four-square and firm, calm and confident in his knowledge, would never have believed that he knew nothing at all ... for himself. Oh, however much he might know for others, with that almost mystic knowledge which healed as though by a suggestive force deep down within himself, however much he might know what was good for their bodies and souls, for himself he knew nothing, least of all for his soul!... To them his young life seemed to move from one goal to another, always certain of itself through the windings of its course; yet that was all on the surface; and he knew nothing of himself!... His own disease was insufficiency; and of recent years he had felt it swelling within him fuller and fuller, eating into him deeper and deeper....

He saw himself again as a child--his first recollection--between his two parents, his father taking him from his mother's lap, his mother taking him from his father's arms; and amid the unconsciousness of his earliest childhood he had always felt the jarring and jealousy between them. Very soon his blood made him speak, that calm unfevered Dutch blood; and his unfevered Dutch nature could be seen in his serious eyes; from the first his Dutch seriousness and steadying composure had been able to find, if not always words, at least sounds of consoling reconciliation, of riper tenderness for that mother, who hugged him in her arms, for that father, whom he came to regard so soon as a bigger and older brother. And this when he was still a little fellow. It had been like that ever since he could remember; from the time when he was a child in the nursery, stroking Mother's tearful eyes and bringing a laugh to Father's pouting mouth; and, as he grew older and bigger, he remembered, it had always been like that: he knew himself to have been their comfort.... It was small wonder that, when still quite young, he had begun to think of the comfort that he was and had then known for certain that he was their comfort.... He knew it then, as child and boy--no longer in unconsciousness but in a.s.sured, unshakable knowledge--and then it had become his destiny. So very early it had dawned on his consciousness and afterwards glittered before his eyes:

"I must help them, I must be to him and to her what is dear to them and what comforts them."

So naturally had he taken that destiny upon his young shoulders that it never became too heavy for him; and there had grown up with him an inclination to comfort and alleviate those who were not quite so near to him. Quite naturally he had spread his wing over all Uncle Gerrit's children, to care for them, to bring them up. Quite naturally, he sought what he could find to alleviate and comfort, whom he could cure, whom he could care for ... and this farther still from him, not close to his home, but in outlying villages and distant towns.... Thus had his nature grown and thus did he act, naturally, in obedience to his nature.... But the conflict between his parents, coming immediately, in the first, unconscious years of childhood, had made his tender nerves tremble with an incessant thrill, like a stringed instrument that is never silent....

And under the calm, earnest glance, under the laugh of comfort or composure, under the st.u.r.dy breadth of his young and manly strength, the strings had always vibrated and never consented to betray themselves....

They had betrayed themselves once, once only, when his very earliest childish pain had given him a violent shock, in a despair too great to be borne.... But immediately afterwards he had known within himself that he must be strong to overcome the cruelties of life.... Since then the cruelties had blown against him, like piercing winds ... without causing the sensitive strings to vibrate visibly or audibly to others.... Oh, did he not remember that suffering of his childish soul when he fancied that all his childish love had been wasted, because his parents in despite of it were going to separate, each grasping at the happiness that had smiled to him!... no one had seen that suffering and vibration.

After the first suffering, no one had seen anything. And it was as if the too-great sensitiveness of the ever-vibrant strings had hardened in the robust young years of manliness; the G.o.d had stood before him so sharply defined: yonder!... Yonder!...

He had felt young and robust; and that too-sensitive vibration had only developed his soul mystically, so that it should heal, wherever it directed its magic.... It had been very strange to him; but just with the medical studies, which should have made him a materialist, there had developed within him a conscious mysticism, enquiring into the essence of life, which the medical books failed to teach him. When he discussed it with his student friends, they answered with the scoff of growing positivism, the barren philosophy which clings to most men from their medical studies, because they ask only for the visible manifestations of the life which it is their business to tend and not for the invisible source, the holy well of life, whence everything flows in a radiance that grows gradually dim ... until the first radiance is no longer visible....

So it had happened with his student friends; and theirs had become the common materialistic doctor's career. His eyes had always been set on the essence of life, the source of the radiant spring.... And, with his increase in practical science and positive knowledge, the strange, mystic certainty had increased in him, the certainty that he was able to heal if he wished ... that he could heal through sheer force of will.... It was not a matter for discussion, it was in him, a great instinctive knowledge.... Oh, that glorious certainty, which had shone out before him so early, sending its rays abroad.... Since he had felt it, very early, so clear and certain in himself, he no longer spoke about it; at most there was a very rare word to his mother, an occasional word to his father; but for the rest he would not touch his secret power with words: they were breath to dim a mirror's l.u.s.tre!

Oh, why had he not this knowledge for himself! Why, of late years, had he sunk deeper and deeper in the vagueness of that self-insufficiency!

Why was the balance disturbed, why did he feel a consciousness of blame welling within him!

He now sat on wearily; and, though everyone in the house was in bed, though the blowing wind, gigantic and plaintive, moaned up over distant heaths and slid along the walls and windows with its sombre, swelling howl, he could not make up his mind to go to bed, as though he knew that, if he did, he would not sleep. And, as if to know for himself how the discouragement could have overmastered him, he dived back into his memories, saw himself a boy again, healthy, strong and composed, loving his Dutch horizons and Dutch skies, with the deep, growing conviction that he had within himself the secret power which he could pour forth to heal all who suffered in body or in nervous soul.... He saw once more the disappointment of his parents, especially Papa, and of Grandmamma, because he would not enter the diplomatic service, because he wanted to become a doctor.... But he had carried his wish, backed up by Mamma, who seemed to understand him.... His rapid power of study, which allowed him to attain in feverish haste the aim which he saw so close before his eyes: matriculating out of the fifth cla.s.s at school; putting in a short time at Heidelberg before he went to Leiden: he was so very young, only seventeen; pa.s.sing his first examination in a year, his second in eighteen months, taking three intermediate courses in the next five years, during which period he also acquired practical experience with a demonstrator at Vienna; and lastly taking his degree at the age of twenty-six. His parents rejoiced when, after those nine years at the university and abroad, he settled down with them at Driebergen, when they had him back in their house, where, despite the presence of all Uncle Gerrit's children, he had left a feeling of emptiness.... A short spell of the tenderness of living with them all again; and his love for mankind had developed so quickly, making him find his patients inevitably among the poorest of the rural population, or sometimes in the villages, or even at Utrecht or Amsterdam.... He never spoke about them, maintaining an earnest silence about the things which he did, even as he was silent about the secret force which he so certainly knew himself to possess.... Never had he spoken to anybody over that poor little girl, a child of twelve, the daughter of two wretched labourers, a cripple since the age of five, whom, with the veriest trifle of material a.s.sistance, but more particularly through his sure power of will, he had gradually helped to raise herself from her bed of straw, enabled to move herself about, until she could now walk on her frail and yielding little legs.... He might have been ashamed of a cure so incredible, for he had never talked about it, not even to his mother, not even to his father....

Oh, it lasted such a short time, the tenderness of that time when he lived with them all again, with his parents and the others!... When he reflected upon the strange double projection of his soul, when he was meeting the girl, who was now his wife, at the Hague: meeting her just now and again. A strange projection one of them? Perhaps not, after all; but, because of the stormy night wind, sombrely sending its howl over the sombre heaths, he was not able ... to read his own thoughts plainly.... Mathilde! The few meetings, at the Hague; then that feeling, when he chose her, of having been irresistibly compelled; and, combined with a vague wonder within himself, the pride also of introducing that good-looking and healthy young woman into his family.... He was proud that she did not belong to their cla.s.s, especially on her mother's side, because it gave her an opportunity of triumphing over their arbitrary divisions; proud too that she was healthy, with her complexion of milk and roses, and above all did not suffer from "nerves," that all too common complaint among them all.... But they had not shared his pride; and after his marriage, some hint of antagonism seemed inevitably to arise between him and his father; his mother, too, for all the liberalism that had come to her late in life, remained antipathetic to this girl, whose gait and voice, whose movements and utterance all suggested a different environment from that to which Constance was accustomed; it was as if Aunt Adeline, Emilie, Uncle Gerrit's children, all their big household, had been unable to receive Mathilde in their midst without a certain supercilious mistrust.... They could none of them understand why he had married this woman.... And he had not failed to see how they always stirred themselves to be gentle and amiable towards her--because, when all was said and done, she _was_ his wife--stirred themselves especially not to let her see that they all thought her not _quite_, really not _quite_.... Her footfall was heavy, her voice not high-pitched enough; in everything that she did or said they marked that sometimes infinitesimal difference which betrays a difference of station. He had not failed to see it, but his pride had lain low and had never allowed them to notice that he saw it, because he thought it so small of them, so small-souled, that they could not blind themselves to that infinitesimal difference between Mathilde and themselves, yes, because he considered even their a.s.siduous amiability small-souled. They showed it her so graciously sometimes, priding themselves, all of them, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, upon their greater native and acquired distinction, all thinking themselves finer and better and higher than his wife, whom nevertheless they did not wish to wound....

He saw this last even in his mother, in the boys, in Adeletje and in Gerdy--though Gerdy never succeeded--and he really preferred the undisguised aversion of little Klaasje, who clearly showed that she could not bear Mathilde....

And he now saw that, in marrying this woman, who was not quite of their cla.s.s, he had wanted to display pride in particular against the arbitrariness of those whom he called his people--his parents, his family--he had wanted to show that there was no longer any distinction of cla.s.s, especially no distinction in those minor shades of cla.s.s. If they were going to think about distinctions, she had the distinction of health ... while his own people were all sick, in body and soul, not, it might be, suffering severely, but all affected or tainted with those "nerves" of their time.... Perhaps his pride had just contained a desire to place his wife, Mathilde, before them as an example:

"Look here now, here's a woman who is healthy and simple."

For that was how he looked upon her soul and body. Because he looked upon her thus, he had felt for her the love that had driven him towards her, his soul taking that direction of positivism and materialism which, after his student days, had at that moment mastered the mysticism of his soul.... For he had known then, those moments in which he--tired of his text-books or hardened in the operating-room--had felt the mysticism within him temporarily fading; and it was especially during those intervals of materialism that the young doctor had experienced Mathilde's attraction, the attraction of a healthy, pink-and-white woman who would give him healthy children. At such moments he saw the world, all mankind, renewed by careful selection; the vigorous life-force of the future bursting into luxuriant rose-blossoms which would overwhelm the sickly lilies of these days of "nerves...." When, afterwards, the secret forces spoke more loudly within him, then he would suddenly feel himself far removed from his wife, as though he had lost her; and especially in his dark, vague self-insufficiency he lost her entirely, feeling himself nerveless and without power even to return her kisses with any warmth, while his voice in speaking to her remained dull and his grey glance cold, whatever he said and however hard he tried to force himself back into his healthy, positive love for the healthy mother of his two children....

Then he would feel guilty towards her. And the inner conviction of his guilt increased. Was it her fault that he had been able only to give her one half of his soul, that he had it in his power to love her only with the positive half of his nature--however sincere it might be--while he gave her nothing of what worked and moved in him more profoundly and gloriously, the true web and woof of himself? Was it her fault and was he really ent.i.tled to take her, if he could not give her more than half of himself, while all that was higher--and he well knew what was higher in him--escaped her and always would escape her?... But often in his black insufficiency, even as now in his weary nocturnal mood, his consciousness of guilt, though it pained him, became suddenly too dreamy and unreal; and he now comforted himself tranquilly:

"She is a simple woman. She has never thought of other than simple and uncomplicated things, has never lived among them; and she will never miss this, all that I do not give her, she will never know the lack of it, because she is simple, because she is simple: a healthy, normal mother, the handsome, healthy mother of my two dear children...."

Then again, tired and undecided to go to bed, he was p.r.i.c.ked by his consciousness of guilt, he thought of her unhappy in the house that was dear to him, and he knew that he was incapable to-day--and so often, so often!--of giving her that love, that positive half, that one half of himself.... Sinking and sinking in his self-insufficiency, he now listened to the wind howling round the house, the storm that had lasted for days, and he seemed to hear voices that came moaning up over the wide heath, as though the wind were alive, as though the storm were a soul, as though it concealed weeping souls, complaining souls, and were their one manifestation: souls blowing up again and again, souls which now, in the night, tapped with soul-fingers at the trembling panes....

Round about this house, in which his grand-parents had lived so long and in such loneliness, until now life had come to fill all the empty rooms, it suddenly seemed to him as though he heard something of their voices, moaning plaintively through the storm ... accusing him first and then pitying him: the old man's voice, the old woman's voice. But what they moaned he did not understand in the ever shriller howl upon howl that floated despairingly along the swishing trees ... until suddenly the window, fastened only by the latch, blew open with a fierce tug, the Venetian shutter flapped to and slung open again, banging against the wall of the house.... The wind entered and with one breath blew out the lamp. The room now dark, the night luridly visible outside, the window so desperately pulled open took on new outlines.... Adriaan, groping, knocking against the chairs, moved towards the window, seized the flapping, banging shutter, closed it, closed the window, firmly this time, turning the old latch that was stiff with rust.

The rain poured in torrents; the wind moaned and sobbed with sorrowfully entreating voices and tapped its fingers against the trembling panes.