Then I asked him if he were ill, and he said, "No, why should I be ill?"
"Because you're different,—you don't talk," I said.
And he said, "It is only women who always talk."
So then I got on with my playing, and just wondered in silence.
I ran against Frau Kloster in the passage as I was coming out, and asked her if there was anything wrong, and she too said, "No, what should there be wrong?"
"Because the Master's different," I said. "He won't talk."
And she said, "My dear Mees Chrees, these are great days we live in, and one cannot be as usual."
"But the Master—" I said. "Just these great days—you'd think he'd be pouring out streams of all the things that most need saying—"
And she shrugged her shoulders and merely repeated, "One is not as usual."
So I came away, greatly puzzled. I had expected bread, and here I was going off with nothing but an unaccountable stone. Kloster and Bernd are the two solitary sane and wise people I know here in this place of fever, the two I trust, to whom I say what I really think and feel, and I went to Kloster yesterday athirst for wisdom, for that detached, critical picking out one by one of the feathers of the imperial bird, the Prussian eagle, that I find so wholesome, so balance-restoring, so comforting, in what is now a very great isolation of spirit. And he was dumb. I can't get over it.