Page:Dr Adriaan (1918).djvu/145

Rh "You're always so self-willed."

"Because I mustn't go this morning. . . . Be sensible now and go without me."

She shrugged her shoulders:

"All right, I'll go, I'll go."

It was just after breakfast; and the children were still downstairs. He played with them: Constant toddled to him on shaky legs; Addie held Jetje on his arm and rubbed his moustache against her milk-white little face, to make her laugh and crow. A soft feeling of bliss welled within him, because he was pressing against him a life that was his life, a small shrine of frail and tender child body in which flashed an atom of soul that laughed and crowed and lived. And the baby was so ordinary, a baby just like other babies, when he looked at it as a doctor; and the baby was so mystic when, as a father, he pressed it to himself. What was more mystic than a little child? What was more mysterious and higher in divine incomprehensibility than a little child, a little child born just ordinarily a few months ago? What was more divinely mysterious and mystic than birth and the dawn of life? Where did it come from, the baby with its tiny atom of soul, the baby which his wife had borne him? As a doctor, he laughed at his own naïve question; as a father and man, he grew grave in awe of it. . . . He felt two beings within himself, more and more clearly every day; two beings long maintained in a strange equilibrium, but now trembling, as at a test. He felt two within himself: the ordinary, normal, practical, almost prematurely old, earnest young scientist and doctor; and within that soul his second soul: a soul of mystery, of divine incomprehensibility; a soul full of mysticism; a soul full of unfathomable force, a force which unloosed a magic that was salutary to many. . . . And, when that