Sometimes, he had silently thought of the designation and smiled at it, because he knew himself to be neither a brute nor healthy. Gradually, almost mechanically, he had gone on showing that unreal side, posing successfully as the strong man, with cast-iron muscles and a simple, cast-iron conception of life: to be a good husband, a good father and a good officer; while inwardly he was gnawed by a queer monster that devoured his marrow: he sometimes pictured it as a worm with legs. A great, fat worm, you know; a beastly crawling thing, which rooted with its legs in his carcase, which lived in his back and slowly ate him up, year by year, the damned rotten thing! Of course, it wasn't a worm: he knew that, he knew it wasn't a worm, a worm with legs; but it was just like it, you know, just like a worm, a centipede, rooting away in his back. Then he felt himself all over, proud notwithstanding of his sound limbs, his well-trained, supple muscles, his youthful appearance, though he was no longer so very young; and then it seemed to him incomprehensible that it could be as it was, that that confounded centipede could keep worrying through those limbs, at those muscles, right into the marrow of his strong body. Nothing on earth would ever have induced him to see a doctor about it: he took walking-exercise, horse-exercise, rode at the head of his squadron; and the brazen blare of the trumpets, the dull thud of the horses' hoofs, the sight of his hussars--his lads--would make him really happy, would make him forget the confounded centipede for a morning. As he sat his horse, with head erect, twisting his fair moustache above his curved lip, a burly, straight-backed figure, he would say to himself:
"Come, get rid of all those tom-fool ideas and be a man--d'ye hear?--not a nervy, hypochondriacal girl. You and your centipede! Rot! I just had a peg yesterday; and that, damn it, is what I mustn't do: no peg at all, not one!... Perhaps not even any wine at all ... and then not more than one cigar after dinner.... But, you see, giving up drinking, giving up smoking: that's the difficulty...."
Gerrit had just finished his breakfast and was putting little Gerdy down, when there was a violent ring at the front-door bell. Adeline gave a start; the children shouted and laughed: