“Oh—business, my child. I had to sell no very small quantity of grain not very advantageously—or, rather, I had to sell a large quantity very much at a loss.”
“Well, that happens, Tom. You sell at a loss today, and tomorrow you make it good again. To get discouraged over a thing of that kind—”
“Wrong, Tony,” he said, and shook his head. “My courage does not go down to zero because I have a piece of bad luck. It’s the other way on. I believe in that, and events show it.”
“But what is the matter with it, then?” she asked, surprised and alarmed. “One would think you have enough to make you happy, Tom. Clara is alive, and with God’s help she will get better. And as for everything else—here we are, walking about, in your own garden, and it all smells so sweet—and yonder is your house, a dream of a house—Hermann Hagenström’s is a dog-kennel beside it! And you have done all that—”
“Yes, it is almost too beautiful, Tony. I’ll tell you—it is too new. It jars on me a little—perhaps that is what is the matter with me. It may be responsible for the bad mood that comes over me and spoils everything. I looked forward immensely to all this; but the anticipation was the best part of it—it always is. Everything gets done too slowly—so when it is finished the pleasure is already gone.”
“The pleasure is gone, Tom? At your age?”
“A man is as young, or as old, as he feels. And when one gets one’s wish too late, or works too hard for it, it comes already weighted with all sorts of small vexatious drawbacks—with all the dust of reality upon it, that one did not reckon with in fancy. It is so irritating—so irritating—”
“Oh yes.—But what do you mean by ‘as old as you feel’?”
“Why, Tony—it is a mood, certainly. It may pass. But just now I feel older than I am. I have business cares. And at the Directors’ meeting of the Buchen Railway yesterday, Consul Hagenström simply talked me down, refuted my contentions, nearly made me appear ridiculous. I feel that could not have happened to me before. It is as though something had begun to slip—as though I haven’t the firm grip I had on events.—What is success? It is an inner, an indescribable force, resourcefulness, power of vision; a consciousness that I am, by my mere existence, exerting pressure on the movement of life about me. It is my belief in the adaptability of life to my own ends. Fortune and success lie with ourselves. We must hold them firmly—deep within us. For as soon as something begins to slip, to relax, to get tired, within us, then everything without us will rebel and struggle to withdraw from our influence. One thing follows another, blow after blow—and the man is finished. Often and often, in these days, I have thought of a Turkish proverb; it says, ‘When the house is finished, death comes.’ It doesn’t need to be death. But the decline, the falling-off, the beginning of the end. You know, Tony,” he went on, in a still lower voice, putting his arm underneath his sister’s, “when Hanno was christened, you said: ‘It looks as if quite a new life would dawn for us all!’ I can still hear you say it, and I thought then that you were right, for I was elected Senator, and was fortunate in my business, and this house seemed to spring up out of the ground. But the ‘Senator’ and this house are superficial after all. I know, from life and from history, something you have not thought of: often, the outward and visible material signs and symbols of happiness and success only show themselves when the process of decline has already set in. The outer manifestations take time—like the light of that star up there, which may in reality be already quenched, when it looks to us to be shining its brightest.”
He ceased to speak, and they walked for a while in silence, while the fountain gently murmured, and a whispering sounded from the top of the walnut tree. Then Frau Permaneder breathed such a heavy sigh that it sounded like a sob.
“How sadly you talk, Tom. You never spoke so sadly before. But it is good to speak out, and it will help you to put all that kind of thoughts out of your mind.”
“Yes, Tony, I must try to do that, I know, as well as I can. And now give me the enclosures from Clara and the Pastor. It will be best, won’t it, for me to take over the matter, and speak tomorrow morning with Mother? Poor Mother! If it is really tuberculosis, one may as well give up hope.”
VII
“You don’t even ask me? You go right over my head?”
“I have done as I had to do.”
“You have acted like a distracted person, in a perfectly unreasonable way.”
“Reason is not the highest thing on earth.”
“Please don’t make phrases. The question is one of the most ordinary justice, which you have most astonishingly ignored.”
“Let me suggest to you, my son, that you yourself are ignoring the duty and respect which you owe to your mother.”
“And I answer you, my dear Mother, by telling you that I have never for a moment forgotten the respect I owe you; but that my attributes as a son became void when I took my father’s place as head of the family and of the firm.”
“I desire you to be silent, Thomas!”
“No, I will not be silent, so long as you fail to realize the extent of your own weakness and folly.”
“I have a right to dispose of my own property as I choose!”
“Within the limits of justice and reason.”
“I could never have believed you would have the heart to wound me like this!”
“And I could never have believed that my own Mother would slap me
