Dr. Adriaan Part 7

"I'm not being satirical, my dear boy. I accept the inevitable. I've been accepting it now for five days. After dinner I would come up here quietly and smoke my cigarettes in utter resignation. Of those five days, two have been windy and three have been stormy. And I sat here calmly and listened to it all."

"And ...?"

"And ... that's all. Life's an insipid business; and the older I grow the more insipid I find it. I don't philosophize about it very much. I never did, you know.... But I do sometimes think, nowadays, what a rotten thing life is, with all its changes. At least, I should have been glad to let it remain as it was...."

"How, Daddy?"

"As it used to be when you were a small boy. I have gradually come to lose you entirely ... and I have so little, apart from you."

"Oh, nonsense!"

"Yes, I have gradually come to lose you entirely.... In the old days, when you were a schoolboy ... then you belonged to me. Then came your time at college: that took a bit of you from me. Your eighteen months in the hospitals at Amsterdam: I never saw you. Your year, after that, in Vienna: I never saw you. I was lucky if I got a letter now and again.

Then you came back, took your degree. And then ... then you went and got married."

"And we have always remained with you."

"And every year I lost a bit more of you. You no longer belong to me.

There was a time when I used to share you with Mamma; and you remember that I used to find that pretty hard occasionally. But now I share you ... with all the world."

"Not with all the world, Daddy."

"Well, with half the world then. With your wife, with Aunt Adeline and your nine adopted children, with all your outside interests."

"Those are my patients."

"You have a great many of them ... for a young doctor. And...."

"Well, Daddy?"

"Nothing, old boy. I only wanted to give you a piece of advice; but who am _I_ to advise _you_?"

"Why not, Daddy?"

"I don't count."

"Now then!"

"I never have counted. You used to manage me; and I just did what you told me to."

"Give me your advice now. Haven't we always been pals?"

"Yes, but you were the one with the head."

"There's not much head about me just now. Give me your advice, Daddy."

"You won't take it from me."

"Out with it, all the same!"

"Well, my boy, listen to me: keep something of your life for yourself."

"What do you mean?"

"You're giving it all away. I don't believe it can be done. I believe a man to stand as much in need of a healthy egoism as of bread and water."

"I should say that I was egoist enough."

"No, you're not. You keep nothing for yourself. You'll think it funny of me that _I_ should talk to you like this; but, you see, the older I grow and the more cigarettes I smoke the more I notice that...."

"That what?"

"That both your parents have never--considering your character--taken your _own_ happiness into account: Mamma no more than I."

"I don't agree with you."

"It is so, all the same. The years which you spent as a child between your two parents made you an altruist and made your altruism run away with you."

Addie smiled and gazed at his father.

"Well? What are you looking at me for?"

"I'm looking at you, Father ... because I'm amused to see you so utterly wide of the mark."

"Why?"

"I may have had a touch of altruism in me, but of late years...."

"What?"

"I have thought a great deal of myself. When I got married ... I was seeking my own happiness. I wanted to find happiness for myself in my wife and children, for my own self ... and hang the rest!"

"Ah, was that your idea? Well, it was a healthy idea too."

"A healthy idea, wasn't it? So you were wide of the mark, Daddy. I wanted a wife who belonged to me, children who belonged to me: all forming one great happiness for myself."

Van der Welcke wreathed himself in clouds of smoke.

"So you see, Daddy, the advice which you gave me I followed of my own accord."

"Yes, old boy, I see."

"That's so, isn't it?"

"Yes. Well, that's all right, then."

"I'm glad to have had a talk with you. But now I must talk not about myself but about something else."

"Of course. You can never talk for more than two seconds about yourself.

However, you're right, I know now; and you had already followed my advice ... of your own accord. What else did you want to talk about?"