Axel was in a strange humor; all at once, between his firm, deliberate resolve, to which he had been driven through fierce struggle and conflict, and the dark portal he was about to enter, stood this familiar, yes, in his eyes even vulgar life, as audacious and impertinent as a peasant at a fair, which could be shoved aside, neither to the right hand nor the left. He started up:
"Herr!"
"Herr-rr!" cried Bräsig in return.
"What do you want here?"
"And what do you want here?" asked Bräsig back again.
"You are an impertinent fool!" cried Axel.
"You are the greatest fool!" cried Uncle Bräsig, "you were about to commit the most fearful crime, from a reckless impulse, and you had forgotten everything,--your wife, your child. Hm! just touch a little spring, then we are out of it all! Wasn't it so? Who is the fool now?"
Axel leaned against a tree, with one hand pressed to his heart, and the other shading his eyes from the sun, and before him stood this vulgar man, with a fishing-rod in his hand, and had interposed between him and the dark portal,--it was life, however!
"Do you see!" continued Uncle Bräsig, "if you had come three minutes earlier than I,"--those were the three minutes when he lay praying, on the threshold, for his wife and child,--"then you would be lying here, with a hole in your head, a frightful object; and when you had gone up to the throne of God, our Lord would have said to you: 'Thou fool! Thou didst not know, what, this very night, thy dear gracious Frau was doing for thee, and the Herr Inspector Habermann, and Frau Nüssler, and the Frau Pastorin and Moses, and--and the others,'--and when the Lord had told you, do you know what you would have suffered? Hell torments!"
Axel removed his hand from his eyes, and stared at Bräsig: