Page:Twilight of the Souls (1917).djvu/16

8 And, while he boisterously tickled Gerdy and pretended to eat up Klaasje's bread-and-butter, like the great tease that he was, he thought:

"Now these are all my children and Adeline's children."

And he was filled with wonder as he saw them around him, the pretty, flaxen-haired children: the wonder of an artist at his work, wonder such as a sculptor might feel on contemplating his statue, or a writer reading his book, or a composer listening to his melodies, a simple, wondering astonishment that he should have made all that, a wondering astonishment at his own power and strength.

And then, in the midst of his astonishment, he suddenly grew frightened, frightened at having heedless begotten so much life simply because he had been depressed by the thought that, if he had no children, nothing of him would survive after his death. Yes, they would survive him now, his children, his flaxen-haired little tribe, his nine; life would scatter them, the little brothers and sisters who were now all there together like little birds in the nest of the parental house, sheltered by father and mother; and what would they be like, what would their life be, what their sorrow, what their joy, when he himself, their father, was old or dead? He was afraid; a terror shot through him strangely enough at that breakfast-table where he sat eating