The First Violin Part 28

"If he must lose one father, let me grow as like another to him as I can."

"Friedhelm--"

"On no other condition," said I. "I will not 'have an eye' to him occasionally. I will not let him go out alone among strangers, and give a look in upon him now and then."

Eugen had covered his face with his hands, but spoke not.

"I will have him with me altogether, or not at all," I finished, with a kind of jerk.

"Impossible!" said he, looking up with a pale face, and eyes full of anguish--the more intense in that he uttered not a word of it.

"Impossible! You are no relation--he has not a claim--there is not a reason--not the wildest reason for such a--"

"Yes, there is; there is the reason that I won't have it otherwise,"

said I, doggedly.

"It is fantastic, like your insane self," he said, with a forced smile, which cut me, somehow, more than if he had groaned.

"Fantastic! I don't know what you mean. What good would it be to me to see him with strangers? I should only make myself miserable with wishing to have him. I don't know what you mean by fantastic."

He drew a long breath. "So be it, then," said he, at last. "And he need know nothing about his father. I may even see him from time to time without his knowing--see him growing into a man like you, Friedel; it would be worth the separation, even if one had not to make a merit of necessity; yes, well worth it."

"Like me? _Nie, mein lieber_; he shall be something rather better than I am, let us hope," said I; "but there is time enough to talk about it."

"Oh, yes! In a year or two from now," said he, almost inaudibly. "The worst of it is that in a case like this, the years go so fast, so cursedly fast."

I could make no answer to this, and he added, "Give me thy hand upon it, Friedel."

I held out my hand. We had risen, and stood looking steadfastly into each other's eyes.

"I wish I were--what I might have been--to pay you for this," he said, hesitatingly, wringing my hand and laying his left for a moment on my shoulder; then, without another word, went into his room, shutting the door after him.

I remained still--sadder, gladder than I had ever been before. Never had I so intensely felt the deep, eternal sorrow of life--that sorrow which can be avoided by none who rightly live; yet never had life towered before me so rich and so well worth living out, so capable of high exultation, pure purpose, full satisfaction, and sufficient reward. My quarrel with existence was made up.

CHAPTER XVII.

"The merely great are, all in all, No more than what the merely small Esteem them. Man's opinion Neither conferred nor can remove _This_ man's dominion."

Three years pa.s.sed--an even way. In three years there happened little of importance--little, that is, of open importance--to either of us. I read that sentence again, and can not help smiling; "to either of us." It shows the progress that our friendship has made. Yes, it had grown every day.

I had no past, painful or otherwise, which I could even wish to conceal; I had no thought that I desired hidden from the man who had become my other self. What there was of good in me, what of evil, he saw. It was laid open to him, and he appeared to consider that the good predominated over the bad; for, from that first day of meeting, our intimacy went on steadily in one direction--increasing, deepening. He was six years older than I was. At the end of this time of which I speak he was one-and-thirty, I five-and-twenty; but we met on equal ground--not that I had anything approaching his capacities in any way. I do not think that had anything to do with it. Our happiness did not depend on mental supremacy. I loved him--because I could not help it; he me, because--upon my word, I can think of no good reason--probably because he did.

And yet we were as unlike as possible. He had habits of reckless extravagance, or what seemed to me reckless extravagance, and a lordly manner (when he forgot himself) of speaking of things, which absolutely appalled my economical burgher soul. I had certain habits, too, the outcomes of my training, and my sparing, middle-cla.s.s way of living, which I saw puzzled him very much. To cite only one insignificant incident. We were both great readers, and, despite our sometimes arduous work, contrived to get through a good amount of books in the year. One evening he came home with a brand-new novel, in three volumes, in his hands.

"Here, Friedel; here is some mental dissipation for to-night. Drop that Schopenhauer, and study Heyse. Here is 'Die Kinder der Welt;' it will suit our case exactly, for it is what we are ourselves."

"How clean it looks!" I observed, innocently.

"So it ought, seeing that I have just paid for it."

"Paid for it!" I almost shouted. "Paid for it! You don't mean that you have bought the book!"

"Calm thy troubled spirit! You don't surely mean that you thought me capable of stealing the book?"

"You are hopeless. You have paid at least eighteen marks for it."

"That's the figure to a pfennig."

"Well," said I, with conscious superiority, "you might have had the whole three volumes from the library for five or six groschen."

"I know. But their copy looked so disgustingly greasy I couldn't have touched it; so I ordered a new one."

"Very well. Your accounts will look well when you come to balance and take stock," I retorted.

"What a fuss about a miserable eighteen marks!" said he, stretching himself out, and opening a volume. "Come, Sig, learn how the children of the world are wiser in their generation than the children of light, and leave that low person to prematurely age himself by beginning to balance his accounts before they are ripe for it."

"I don't know whether you are aware that you are talking the wildest and most utter rubbish that was ever conceived," said I, nettled. "There is simply no sense in it. Given an income of--"

"_Aber, ich bitte Dich!_" he implored, though laughing; and I was silent.

But his three volumes of "Die Kinder der Welt" furnished me with many an opportunity to "point a moral or adorn a tale," and I believe really warned him off one or two other similar extravagances. The idea of men in our position recklessly ordering three-volume novels because the circulating library copy happened to be greasy, was one I could not get over for a long time.

We still inhabited the same rooms at No. 45, in the Wehrhahn. We had outstayed many other tenants; men had come and gone, both from our house and from those rooms over the way whose windows faced ours. We pa.s.sed our time in much the same way--hard work at our profession, and, with Eugen at least, hard work out of it; the education of his boy, whom he made his constant companion in every leisure moment, and taught, with a wisdom that I could hardly believe--it seemed so like inspiration--composition, translation, or writing of his own--incessant employment of some kind. He never seemed able to pa.s.s an idle moment; and yet there were times when, it seemed to me, his work did not satisfy him, but rather seemed to disgust him.

Once when I asked him if it were so, he laid down his pen and said, "Yes."

"Then why do you do it?"

"Because--for no reason that I know; but because I am an unreasonable fool."

"An unreasonable fool to work hard?"

"No; but to go on as if hard work now can ever undo what years of idleness have done."

"Do you believe in work?" I asked.

"I believe it is the very highest and holiest thing there is, and the grandest purifier and cleanser in the world. But it is not a panacea against every ill. I believe that idleness is sometimes as strong as work, and stronger. You may do that in a few years of idleness which a life-time of afterwork won't cover, mend, or improve. You may make holes in your coat from sheer laziness, and then find that no amount of st.i.tching will patch them up again."

I seldom answered these mystic monologues. Love gives a wonderful sharpness even to dull wits; it had sharpened mine so that I often felt he indulged in those speeches out of sheer desire to work off some grief or bitterness from his heart, but that a question might, however innocent, overshoot the mark, and touch a sore spot--the thing I most dreaded. And I did not feel it essential to my regard for him to know every item of his past.

In such cases, however, when there is something behind--when one knows it, only does not know what it is (and Eugen had never tried to conceal from me that something had happened to him which he did not care to tell)--then, even though one accept the fact, as I accepted it, without dispute or resentment, one yet involuntarily builds theories, has ideas, or rather the ideas shape themselves about the object of interest, and take their coloring from him, one can not refrain from conjectures, surmises. Mine were necessarily of the most vague and shadowy description; more negative than active, less theories as to what he had been or done than inferences from what he let fall in talk or conduct as to what he had not been or done.

In our three years' acquaintance, it is true, there had not been much opportunity for any striking display on his part of good or bad qualities; but certainly ample opportunity of testing whether he were, taken all in all, superior, even with, or inferior to the average man of our average acquaintance. And, briefly speaking, to me he had become a standing model of a superior man.

I had by this time learned to know that when there were many ways of looking at a question, that one, if there were such an one, which was less earthily practical, more ideal and less common than the others, would most inevitably be the view taken by Eugen Courvoisier, and advocated by him with warmth, energy, and eloquence to the very last.

The point from which he surveyed the things and the doings of life was, taken all in all, a higher one than that of other men, and was illumined with something of the purple splendor of that "light that never was on sea or land." A less practical conduct, a more ideal view of right and wrong--sometimes a little fantastic even--always imbued with something of the knightliness which sat upon him as a natural attribute.