Lorie was able to say and sing all this with her mobile little mouth and her sweet voice—much better than Biter. She was in fact able to do all things better than he, for which he honestly admired her and subordinated himself to her, apart from attacks of rebellion and of choleric combativeness. She often instructed him in a pedagogic sense, explained to him the birds in the picture-book, made them clear to him by vivid names: the cloud-eater, the hail-eater, the raven-eater. She made him repeat these after her. She also gave him pointers about medicine, and illness, such as inflammation of the lungs, inflammation of the blood, “inflammation of the air.” When he did not pay attention or was unable to repeat the words after her, she put him in a corner. Once she even added a box on the ears, but she was so ashamed of this that she went and stood in the corner herself for a long time.
Without a doubt, the children got on splendidly together; they were one heart and one soul. They experienced all things, all adventures, in common. They would come in from a walk and relate in great excitement and as with one voice that they had seen “two moo-moos and a veal” on the country road. With the servants below stairs, with Xavier and with the Hinterhöfers, two once prosperous middle-class sisters who undertook “au pair,” as the expression goes, to fulfil the offices of cook and chambermaid, they were on a most familiar footing—at least they seemed to feel at times a certain likeness between the relation of these subordinates to their parents and their own. Whenever they were scolded, they would go into the kitchen and say: “The master and mistress are real mad!” Nevertheless there was always much more fun playing with those “higher up,” and especially with “Abel,” when he was not obliged to read or write. He always thought of far more wonderful things to do than Xavier or the ladies. They would play at being “four gentlemen,” and go walking. “Abel” would then crook his knees until he was the same height as themselves, and set forth on the walk hand in hand with them, a sport of which they never had enough. They would have been content to go promenading with the diminished “Abel,” five gentlemen all in all, the whole day long, round and round the dining-room.
There was furthermore the extremely exciting cushion game. This consisted of one of the children, usually Lorie, sitting down in a chair at the dining-table, apparently unobserved by “Abel,” and still as a mouse awaiting his coming. Gazing idly about him, amid exclamations which clearly and loudly attested his faith in the comfort of his chair, he would draw near and seat himself on Lorie. “Hello!” he would say, “what’s this?” And then he would squirm back and forth, without hearing the suppressed tittering behind him. “Somebody has put a cushion on my chair! My! what a hard, crooked, awkward cushion it is! How do they expect me to sit comfortably on it?” And then he would begin to slide harder than ever on the strange and awkward cushion, and finally reach behind him right into the midst of all that ecstatic tittering and giggling, until he turned round, and a great climax of discovery and recognition would conclude the drama. This game, too, would lose nothing of its fascinating tension though repeated a hundred times.
Today there was no time for such pleasures. The restlessness of the impending party of the Big Ones hung in the air, and there was also the purchasing to be done beforehand, each enacting his role. Lorie had just finished reciting “Railway-train, railway-train,” and Doctor Cornelius, to her great chagrin, had just discovered that her ears were of different sizes, when Danny, the neighbour’s son, came in to fetch Bert and Ingrid. Xavier had also exchanged his striped livery for an ordinary jacket, which immediately gave him a somewhat bounderish, even though smart and agreeable, air. The Little Ones thereupon ascended to the upper realm, under the wing of Anna. The professor withdrew into his study to read, as was his custom after meals, while his wife, thinking of the anchovy sandwiches and the Italian salad, began to prepare these for guests who would be coming to the dance. She was also obliged to run into town on her wheel before the young people arrived, in order to convert a sum of money which she feared might be suddenly devalued, into table supplies.
Cornelius was reading, leaning far back in his armchair. With his cigar poised between index and middle finger, he was reading in Macaulay about the origin of the English national debt at the close of the seventeenth century, after which he took up a French author and read about the growing indebtedness of Spain towards the close of the sixteenth century—both subjects of his lecture the following morning. He was going to compare England’s surprising commercial prosperity of that time with the fatal results which the national indebtedness had produced in Spain a century before, and analyse the ethical and psychological results of the difference. This would give him an opportunity to proceed from the England of William III, the period actually in question, to the age of Philip II and the Counter-Reformation, which was his particular hobby, and concerning which he had written a book—a much-quoted work, to which he owed his professorship. While his cigar was growing short and somewhat acrid, he revolved in his mind a few sentences tinged with gentle melancholy, intending to visit them upon his students the following morning. These sentences referred to the practically hopeless battle of this slow King Philip against the new era, against the course of history, and the imperially disintegrating force in the Germanic ideal of individual liberty—they dealt
