Good Blood | Page 4

and as his hand played mechanically through his long beard, there seemed to rise before him out of the flood of the years that had rushed behind, forms that were once young when he was young, and which were now--who can say where? The bottle which the waiter had brought and placed at a table before us contained a rare wine. An old Bordeaux, brown and oily, poured into our glasses. I recalled the expression which the old man had used a short time before.
"I must admit, colonel, that this is indeed 'good blood.'"
His flushed eyes came slowly back from the far away, turned upon me, and remained fixed there, as if he would say: "What do you know about it?"
He took a deep draft, wiped his beard, and gazed at his glass. "Strange," he said, "when a man grows old--he recalls the earliest days far easier than those that come later."
I was silent; I felt that I ought neither to speak nor question. When a man is lost in recollections he is making poetry, and one must not question a poet.
A long pause followed. "What an assortment of people one has to meet with," he continued. "When one thinks of it--many who live on and on--it were often better they did not live at all--and others have to go so much too early." He passed the palm of his hand over the surface of the table. "Beneath that lies much."
It seemed as if the table had become to him as the surface of the earth, and that he was thinking of those lying beneath the ground.
"Had to keep thinking of this a little while ago"--his voice sounded hollow--"when I saw that little fellow. With a boy like that nature comes right out, fairly gushes out--thick as your arm. You can see blood in it. Pity, though, that good blood flows so freely--more freely than the other. I once knew a little chap like that."
And there it was.
The waiter had seated himself in a back corner of the room; I kept perfectly quiet; the heavy voice of the old colonel went laboring through the stillness of the room like a gust of wind that precedes a storm or some serious outbreak in nature.
His eyes turned toward me as if to search me, whether I could bear to listen. He did not ask, I did not speak, but I looked at him, and my look eagerly replied: "Go on."
But not yet did he begin; first he drew from the breast pocket of his coat a large cigar-case of hard, brown leather, took out a cigar and slowly lighted it.
"You know Berlin, of course," said he, as he blew out the match and puffed the first cloud of smoke over the table. "No doubt you have traveled before this on the street railway--"
"Oh, yes; often."
"H'm--well, then, as you go along behind the New Friedrich Street from Alexander Square to the Jannowiz Bridge, there stands there on the right-hand side in new Friedrich Street, a great ugly old building; it is the old military school."
I nodded.
"The new one over there in Lichterfelde I do not know, but the old one, that I do know--yes--h'm--was even a cadet there in my time--yes--that one I do know."
This repetition of words gave me the feeling that he knew not only the house, but probably many an event that had taken place in it.
"As you come from Alexander Square," he continued, "there first comes a court with trees. Now grass grows in the court; in my time it was not so, for the drills took place there and the cadets went walking there during the hours of recreation. After that comes the great main building that encloses a square court, which is called the 'Karreehof,' and there, too, the cadets used to walk. Passing by from the outside, you can't see into the court."
I nodded again in confirmation.
"And then comes still a third court; it is smaller, and on it stands a house. Don't know what it is used for now; at that time it was the infirmary. You can still see there the roof of the gymnasium as you pass by; then next to the infirmary was the principal outdoor gymnasium. In it was a jumping ditch and a climbing apparatus and every other possible thing--now it has all gone. From the infirmary a door led out into the gymnasium, but it was always kept locked. When one wanted to go into the infirmary, one had to cross the court and enter in front. The door then, as I said, was always locked; that is, it was opened only on some special occasion, and that, indeed, was always a very mournful occasion. For behind the door was the mortuary, and when a cadet died he was