We did not choose just at first to communicate anything of our plans to my father and the rest. They would certainly raise objections, give pieces of advice, express disapprobation, and all that was quite superfluous as yet. Later on we should know how to put ourselves above all that, for, when two people are all in all to each other, all foreign opinion falls off them without making any impression. The certainty for the future thus obtained increased still more the enjoyment of the present, which, even without that, was so heightened and enlarged by the delirium of the bitter past which we had gone through. I can only repeat it was a happy time. My son Rudolf, now a little fellow of seven, was beginning at this time to learn reading and writing, and his instructress was myself. I had never given my bonne the delight—which, besides, would, I daresay, have been none for her—of seeing this little soul slowly expand, and of bringing to it the first surprises of knowledge. The boy was often the companion of our walks, and we were never tired of answering the questions which his growing appetite for knowledge made him address to us. To answer, that is, as well and as far as we could. We never permitted ourselves to tell a falsehood. We never avoided answering such questions as we could not decide—such as no man can decide—with a plain “that no one knows, Rudi”. At first it would happen that Rudolf, not satisfied with such an answer, took his question sometimes to Aunt Mary, or to his grandfather, or to the nurse, and then he always got unhesitating solutions. Then he would come back to us in triumph: “You don’t know how old the moon is? I know now. It’s six thousand years—you remember.” Frederick and I exchanged a silent glance. A whole volume full of pedagogic fault-finding and opinions was contained in that glance and that silence.
Above all things unbearable to me were the soldiers’ games which not only my father but my brother carried on with the boy. The idea of “enemy” and “cutting down” were thus instilled into him, I know not how. One day Frederick and I came up as Rudolf was mercilessly beating two whimpering young dogs with a riding-switch.
“That is a lying Italian,” he said, laying on to one of the poor beasts, “and that,” on to the other, “an impudent Dane.”
Frederick snatched the switch out of the hand of this national corrector.
“And that is a cruel Austrian,” he said, letting one or two good blows fall on Rudolf’s shoulders. The Italian and the Dane gladly ran off, and the whimpering was now done by our little countryman.
“You are not angry with me, Martha, for striking your son? I am not, it is true, in favour generally of corporal punishment, but cruelty to animals provokes me.”
“You did right,” I said.
“Then is it only to men ... that one may ... be cruel?” asked the boy between his sobs.
“Oh no; still less.”
“But you, yourself, have hit Italians and Danes.”