Hartmut, who was just about to leave, came to a standstill. The words recalled to him what he had entirely forgotten in the last half hour: the discipline and severity of the service which was awaiting him. Heretofore he had not dared to betray his aversion to it openly, but this hour which banished the awe of his father broke also the seal from his lips. Obeying a sudden impulse, he turned and put his arms again around the neck of his father.
"I have a request," he whispered, "a great, great request which you must grant me; and I know you will do it as a proof that you love me."
A furrow appeared between the Major's eyebrows as he asked with slight reproach: "Do you require proofs of it? Well, let's hear it."
Hartmut nestled still more closely to him; his voice had again that sweet, coaxing sound which made his prayers so irresistible, and the dark eyes implored intensely, beseechingly.
"Do not let me become a soldier, father. I do not love the calling for which you have decided me. I shall never learn to love it. If I have bowed until now to your will, it has been with aversion, with secret grumbling, and I have been unbearably unhappy, only I did not dare to confess it to you."
The furrow on Falkenried's brow sank deeper, and he released his son slowly from his embrace.
"That means, in other words, that you do not like to obey," he said harshly, "and just that is more important to you than to any one else."
"But I cannot bear any compulsion," Hartmut burst forth passionately, "and the military service is nothing but duty and fetters. To obey always and eternally--never to have a will of your own--to bow day after day to an iron discipline and strict, cold forms by which every individual movement is suppressed. I cannot bear it any longer. Everything in me demands freedom for light and life. Let me go, father; do not keep me any longer in these bonds. I die--I suffocate under them."
To a man, who was heart and soul a soldier, he could not have done his cause greater harm than by these imprudent words. It sounded like a stormy, glowing prayer. His arm yet lay around his father's neck, but Falkenried now straightened himself suddenly and pushed him back.
"I should consider the service an honor and no fetter," he said cuttingly. "It is sad that I should have to recall that to my son's mind. Freedom--light--life! You think perhaps that one can throw himself at seventeen years into life and grasp all its treasures. The longed-for freedom for you would be only recklessness, ruin, destruction."