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.”