"Yes, now I have."
She struck a fir-branch with her riding-whip, scattering flakes on my head. "Would that extinguish it?"
"In the form of an avalanche perhaps it would."
"Then you make your aims a part of your life?"
"I do."
"Then you win! or it is written of you that you never knew failure! So with me. I set my life upon my aim when I feel that the object is of true worth. I win, or death hides from me my missing it.
This I look to; this obtains my Professor"s nod, and the approval of my conscience. Worthiness, however!--the mind must be trained to discern it. We can err very easily in youth; and to find ourselves shooting at a false mark uncontrollably must be a cruel thing. I cannot say it is undeserving the scourge of derision. Do you know yourself? I do not; and I am told by my Professor that it is the sole subject to which you should not give a close attention. I can believe him. For who beguiles so much as Self? Tell her to play, she plays her sweetest. Lurk to surprise her, and what a serpent she becomes! She is not to be aware that you are watching her. You have to review her acts, observe her methods. Always be above her; then by-and-by you catch her hesitating at cross-roads; then she is bare: you catch her bewailing or exulting; then she can no longer pretend she is other than she seems. I make self the feminine, for she is the weaker, and the soul has to purify and raise her. On that point my Professor and I disagree. Dr. Julius, unlike our modern Germans, esteems women over men, or it is a further stroke of his irony. He does not think your English ladies have heads: of us he is proud as a laurelled poet. Have I talked you dumb?"
"Princess, you have given me matter to think upon."
She shook her head, smiling with closed eyelids.
I, now that speech had been summoned to my lips, could not restrain it, and proceeded, scarcely governing the words, quite without ideas; "For you to be indifferent to rank--yes, you may well be; you have intellect; you are high above me in both--" So on, against good taste and common sense.
She cried: "Oh! no compliments from you to me. I will receive them, if you please, by deputy. Let my Professor hear your immense admiration for his pupil"s accomplishments. Hear him then in return! He will beat at me like the rainy West wind on a lily. "See," he will say, when I am broken and bespattered, "she is fair, she is stately, is she not!" And really I feel, at the sound of praise, though I like it, that the opposite, satire, condemnation, has its good right to pelt me. Look; there is the tower, there "s the statue, and under that line of pine-trees the path we ran up;--"dear English boys!" as I remember saying to myself; and what did you say of me?"
Her hand was hanging loose. I grasped it. She drew a sudden long breath, and murmured, without fretting to disengage herself,
"My friend, not that!"
Her voice carried an unmistakeable command. I kissed above the fingers and released them.
"Are you still able to run?" said she, leading with an easy canter, face averted. She put on fresh speed; I was outstripped.
Had she quitted me in anger? Had she parted from me out of view of the villa windows to make it possible for us to meet accidentally again in the shadow of her old protecting Warhead, as we named him from his appearance, gaunt Schwartz?
CHAPTER XXIX. AN EVENING WITH DR. JULIUS VON KARSTEG
In my perplexity, I thought of the Professor"s saying: "A most fortunate or a most unfortunate young man." These words began to strike me as having a prophetic depth that I had not fathomed. I felt myself fast becoming bound in every limb, every branch of my soul. Ottilia met me smiling. She moved free as air. She could pursue her studies, and argue and discuss and quote, keep unclouded eyes, and laugh and play, and be her whole living self, unfettered, as if the pressure of my hand implied nothing. Perhaps for that reason I had her pardon. "My friend, not that!" Her imperishably delicious English rang me awake, and lulled me asleep. Was it not too securely friendly? Or was it not her natural voice to the best beloved, bidding him respect her, that we might meet with the sanction of her trained discretion? The Professor would invite me to his room after the "sleep well" of the ladies, and I sat with him much like his pipe-bowl, which burned bright a moment at one st.u.r.dy puff, but generally gave out smoke in fantastical wreaths. He told me frankly he had a poor idea of my erudition. My fancifulness he commended as something to be turned to use in writing stories. "Give me time, and I"ll do better things," I groaned. He rarely spoke of the princess; with grave affection always when he did. He was evidently observing me comprehensively. The result was beyond my guessing.
One night he asked me what my scheme of life was.
On the point of improvizing one of an impressive character, I stopped and confessed: "I have so many that I may say I have none." Expecting reproof, I begged him not to think the worse of me for that.
"Quite otherwise," said he. "I have never cared to read deliberately in the book you open to me, my good young man."
"The book, Herr Professor?"
"Collect your wits. We will call it Shakespeare"s book; or Gothe"s, in the minor issues. No, not minor, but a narrower volume. You were about to give me the answer of a hypocrite. Was it not so?"
I admitted it, feeling that it was easily to have been perceived. He was elated.
"Good. Then I apprehend that you wait for the shifting of a tide to carry you on?"
"I try to strengthen my mind."
"So I hear," said he dryly.
"Well, as far as your schools of teaching will allow."
"That is, you read and commit to memory, like other young scholars.
Whereunto? Have you no aim? You have, or I am told you are to have, fabulous wealth--a dragon"s heap. You are one of the main drainpipes of English gold. What is your object? To spend it?"
"I shall hope to do good with it."
"To do good! There is hardly a prince or millionaire, in history or alive, who has not in his young days hugged that notion. Pleasure swarms, he has the pick of his market. You English live for pleasure."
"We are the hardest workers in the world."
"That you may live for pleasure! Deny it!"
He puffed his tobacco-smoke zealously, and resumed:
"Yes, you work hard for money. You eat and drink, and boast of your exercises: they sharpen your appet.i.tes. So goes the round. We strive, we fail; you are our frog-chorus of critics, and you suppose that your brekek-koax affects us. I say we strive and fail, but we strive on, while you remain in a past age, and are proud of it. You reproach us with lack of common sense, as if the belly were its seat. Now I ask you whether you have a scheme of life, that I may know whether you are to be another of those huge human pumpkins called rich men, who cover your country and drain its blood and intellect--those impoverishers of nature! Here we have our princes; but they are rulers, they are responsible, they have their tasks, and if they also run to gourds, the scandal punishes them and their order, all in seasonable time.
They stand eminent. Do you mark me? They are not a community, and are not--bad enough! bad enough!--but they are not protected by laws in their right to do nothing for what they receive. That system is an invention of the commercial genius and the English."
"We have our aristocracy, Herr Professor."
"Your n.o.bles are nothing but rich men inflated with empty traditions of insufferable, because unwarrantable, pride, and drawing, substance from alliances with the merchant cla.s.s. Are they your leaders? Do they lead you in Letters? in the Arts? ay, or in Government? No, not, I am informed, not even in military service! and there our t.i.tled witlings do manage to hold up their brainless pates. You are all in one ma.s.s, struggling in the stream to get out and lie and wallow and belch on the banks. You work so hard that you have all but one aim, and that is fatness and ease!"
"Pardon me, Herr Professor," I interposed, "I see your drift. Still I think we are the only people on earth who have shown mankind a representation of freedom. And as to our aristocracy, I must, with due deference to you, maintain that it is widely respected."
I could not conceive why he went on worrying me in this manner with his jealous outburst of Continental bile.
"Widely!" he repeated. "It is widely respected; and you respect it: and why do you respect it?"
"We have ill.u.s.trious names in our aristocracy."
"We beat you in ill.u.s.trious names and in the age of the lines, my good young man."
"But not in a race of n.o.bles who have stood for the country"s liberties."
"So long as it imperilled their own! Any longer?"
"Well, they have known how to yield. They have helped to build our Const.i.tution."
"Reverence their ancestors, then! The worse for such descendants. But you have touched the exact stamp of the English mind:--it is, to accept whatsoever is bequeathed it, without inquiry whether there is any change in the matter. n.o.bles in very fact you would not let them be if they could. n.o.bles in name, with a remote recommendation to posterity--that suits you!"
He sat himself up to stuff a fresh bowl of tobacco, while he pursued: "Yes, yes: you worship your aristocracy. It is notorious. You have a sort of sagacity. I am not prepared to contest the statement that you have a political instinct. Here it is chiefly social. You worship your so-called aristocracy perforce in order to preserve an ideal of contrast to the vulgarity of the nation."
This was downright insolence.