The two men ate off wooden platters, and cut up their bread and sausage with their pocket-knives; there was nothing to do afterwards but to gather up the fragments and carry the plates into the kitchen. An old woman came every morning to do the housework and prepare the midday meal, and every afternoon the turnpike keeper waited with repressed impatience till the door had closed behind her. Then he felt better.
When Franz had put the sausage in his box and come downstairs again, he found his father with cap in hand, ready to go out.
"Come, boy," he said, "let's stretch our legs a bit."
They went past the village, and wandered for a while in silence under the starry heavens. Then the old man began to speak less briskly and decidedly than was his wont.
"Look you, my boy, to-morrow you will be standing on your own feet, as it were; you'll be responsible for yourself. For it's like this: before one has served one is a silly youth: but afterwards, a man. Therefore you want something that you can steer by; and I tell you, you must make a rule for yourself that you can look to. The printed ones--they're only just by the way. Always ask yourself: is it right, is it honest, what you're doing? If yes, then fire away! And when you don't know exactly one way or the other, then just think: could you tell your old father about it and look him straight in the eyes?"
He had a heavy load of cares and hopes on his mind for the welfare of this son, the only thing left him to love; but he broke short off. He felt himself incapable of expressing clearly the result of the experience gained during his sixty years of life. He lived himself by that gathered wisdom, and it had passed into his flesh and bone; but the right words failed him when he would have imparted it to his son.
Friedrich August Vogt and his twin sister had been born in 1840, the little-prized children of an unmarried mother, who had vanished one day and left no trace. Probably she had died in a ditch. The children were taken into an orphanage, on leaving which the girl had gone to service, while the boy had become a soldier and climbed the ladder of promotion to the rank of sergeant, receiving the silver medal for bravery, and at St. Privat the iron cross. In command over others he proved strict and just; and though assuming an outwardly harsh, bearish manner, he looked after those who were under him with indefatigable and almost fatherly care. His whole endeavour throughout those fifteen years had been to stand blameless, not only in the eyes of his superiors, but, what was more important still, in his own.
His comrades disliked the quiet, serious man, and Vogt himself was just as little drawn to their frivolous ways; nor had women any attraction for him. He was sufficient unto himself, and looked neither for friend nor wife; but though he had grown up independent of love, he yet craved to win for himself some modest amount of grateful recognition within the narrow limits of the service, and he felt richly rewarded if a reservist when bidding good-bye gripped his hand and muttered a few clumsy words of gratitude. Of such were many good-for-nothings whom he had saved from dangerous follies and their inevitable punishment, not by rough words, but by kindly counsel. When he eventually doffed his uniform he had nothing with which to reproach himself; no neglect and no overstepping of duty, no injustice and no improper leniency; he had good cause for self-satisfaction.
He was given the post of turnpike-keeper in recognition of his good service, and could then carry out a long-cherished wish: he took his sister to live with him. But he did not long enjoy her companionship. She left him after but a few years, during which she succeeded--not without difficulty--in bringing some sort of brightness into the life of her grave brother. She foresaw that he would in all probability lapse into deeper and deeper gloom when she was no longer there; and on her deathbed she joined his hand with that of a girl some years younger than herself, with whom she had struck up a firm friendship. They respected the wishes of the dead, married, and lived together happily, thinking themselves the most fortunate of mortals when a son was born to them. But August Vogt was doomed to loneliness, for his wife died when the boy was just old enough to go to school.
Shortly after this Vogt inherited a small property from his wife's father, and the toll on the highway being at the same time abolished, he bought the now superfluous house cheap from the State, and set up as a peasant proprietor. He had now a new source of pride: that this land, which he watered with his sweat, should bring forth abundantly; that his cattle, whom no strange hand might touch, should be the sleekest and fattest of all. Solitary and unaided he laboured in house and field, as if wishing to defy that fate which had torn from him the only two people he had loved. As he could love them no longer he had rather be quite alone, save for the little chap who trotted after him everywhere, and--looking almost as grave and preoccupied as his father--copied with his tiny gardening tools everything he saw his father do. In course of time the child became a more and more useful helper, till at last the two in equal comradeship spent their entire energies on the land, by whose produce they were almost exclusively nourished, with the addition of the milk from their own cow.