Page:Dr Adriaan (1918).djvu/119

Rh eagerly gleaned. . . . And now these were wasted gifts, morbid qualities, now it was all useless and sick and had become more sick and more useless as the sick years of shadow drearily dragged on their misty-melancholy introspection and increasing distrustfulness. It was all, all lost. And, in his pity at this fatal waste, at this tenderness which had soured almost into madness and was devoted to shadows while the poor world stood in such real need of tenderness and feeling, Addie remembered how once, years ago, he had felt conscious of a longing with a single word to cure the sick man: but which, which word? It was as though he knew that one word to be hovering in the air around him, while he was still too young and ignorant to catch it as he might have caught a butterfly with his hat! And now, now he knew for certain—after all those years of misty-melancholy introspection and increasing distrustfulness—that it was too late and that the man could not recover and that he would die as he had lived in the almost proud hallucination which brought around him for protection the numberless oppressed, persecuted and martyred souls, suffocating him in the cloud of their frail tortured and complaining bodies. And it was not only the souls: the living who sought him out were also included in his proud illusion; they also needed his support, because he alone was strong and all of them were weak.

It was too late for a cure; but still Addie longed, though he knew for certain that no cure could ever take place, to free that lost and impaired quality of noble feeling from everything that could shock or offend the silent, suffering man; and he swore to himself to get Uncle Ernst out of the Hague, out of these rooms, where he was taking root and at the same time being tortured. He happened that day