it, were almost members of the family; but they were better
looking than he, and better company. To be sure, long Baumgartner
was an intimate of the house, and he was a gawky boy with big red
hands and patched shoes; but he could at least speak German to
the mother, and he played the piano, and seemed to know a great
deal about music.
Claude didn’t wish to be a bore. Sometimes in the evening, when
he left the Library to smoke a cigar, he walked slowly past the
Erlichs’ house, looking at the lighted windows of the
sitting-room and wondering what was going on inside. Before he
went there to call, he racked his brain for things to talk about.
If there had been a football game, or a good play at the theatre,
that helped, of course.
Almost without realizing what he was doing, he tried to think
things out and to justify his opinions to himself, so that he
would have something to say when the Erlich boys questioned him.
He had grown up with the conviction that it was beneath his
dignity to explain himself, just as it was to dress carefully, or
to be caught taking pains about anything. Ernest was the only
person he knew who tried to state clearly just why he believed
this or that; and people at home thought him very conceited and
foreign. It wasn’t American to explain yourself; you didn’t have
to! On the farm you said you would or you wouldn’t; that
Roosevelt was all right, or that he was crazy. You weren’t
supposed to say more unless you were a stump speaker,—if you
tried to say more, it was because you liked to hear yourself
talk. Since you never said anything, you didn’t form the habit of
thinking. If you got too much bored, you went to town and bought
something new.
But all the people he met at the Erlichs’ talked. If they asked
him about a play or a book and he said it was “no good,” they at
once demanded why. The Erlichs thought him a clam, but Claude
sometimes thought himself amazing. Could it really be he, who was
airing his opinions in this indelicate manner? He caught himself
using words that had never crossed his lips before, that in his
mind were associated only with the printed page. When he suddenly
realized that he was using a word for the first time, and
probably mispronouncing it, he would become as much confused as
if he were trying to pass a lead dollar, would blush and stammer
and let some one finish his sentence for him.
Claude couldn’t resist occasionally dropping in at the Erlichs’
in the afternoon; then the boys were away, and he could have Mrs.
Erlich to himself for half-an-hour. When she talked to him she
taught him so much about life. He loved to hear her sing
sentimental German songs as she worked; “Spinn, spinn, du Tochter
mein.” He didn’t know why, but he simply adored it! Every time he
went away from her he felt happy and full of kindness, and
thought about beech woods and walled towns, or about Carl Schurz
and the Romantic revolution.
