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 constanty 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
