Page:Dr Adriaan (1918).djvu/67

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
DR. ADRIAAN
61

vibrate visibly or audibly to others. . . . Oh, did he not remember that suffering of his childish soul when he fancied that all his childish love had been wasted, because his parents in despite of it were going to separate, each grasping at the happiness that had smiled to him! . . . no one had seen that suffering and vibration. After the first suffering, no one had seen anything. And it was as if the too-great sensitiveness of the ever-vibrant strings had hardened in the robust young years of manliness; the god had stood before him so sharply defined: yonder! . . . Yonder! . . .

He had felt young and robust; and that too-sensitive vibration had only developed his soul mystically, so that it should heal, wherever it directed its magic. . . . It had been very strange to him; but just with the medical studies, which should have made him a materialist, there had developed within him a conscious mysticism, enquiring into the essence of life, which the medical books failed to teach him. When he discussed it with his student friends, they answered with the scoff of growing positivism, the barren philosophy which clings to most men from their medical studies, because they ask only for the visible manifestations of the life which it is their business to tend and not for the invisible source, the holy well of life, whence everything flows in a radiance that grows gradually dim . . . until the first radiance is no longer visible. . . .

So it had happened with his student friends; and theirs had become the common materialistic doctor's career. His eyes had always been set on the essence of life, the source of the radiant spring. . . . And, with his increase in practical science and positive knowledge, the strange, mystic certainty had increased in him, the certainty that he was able to