There was no quarrel, no scene between us, no rupture. I said to him only a single, really harmless word, but nevertheless it was the moment when an illusion between us fell in colored pieces.
The presentiment had for some time already oppressed me, but one Sunday in his scholarly old room this presentiment changed to a definite feeling. We were lying on the floor before the fire. He was speaking of mysteries and religious forms which he was studying, and on which he was meditating. He occupied himself with trying to picture their possible future. To me all this seemed curious and interesting, but scarcely of vital importance. It smacked of erudition. It was like a fatiguing search among the ruins of former worlds. And all at once I felt an aversion from the whole business, from this cult of mythology, from this sort of piecing together, this mosaic work of religious forms which had been handed down to posterity.
“Pistorius,” I said suddenly, in a malicious outburst which surprised and frightened even myself, “relate a dream, a real dream, one that you have had in the night. What you have just been talking about is so—so cursedly antiquarian!”
He had never heard me speak thus. With shame and terror I realized the very same moment that the arrow I had shot at him, and which had entered his heart, was taken from his own quiver—I realized that I had heard him reproach himself in an ironical tone on this very account, and that now I had maliciously turned one of his own reproaches against him like a resharpened arrow.
He felt it instantly, and was silent. I looked at him with terror in my heart and saw that he had become very pale.
After a long, heavy pause he put some wood on the fire and said quietly: “You are quite right, Sinclair. You’re a wise fellow. I will spare you all this antiquarian business.”
He spoke very quietly, but his tone told me how deeply he had been wounded. What had I done!
I was on the point of tears. I wanted to beg his pardon with all my heart, to assure him of my affection and gratitude. Moving words came into my mind—but I could not utter them. He was silent as well, and so we lay there, while the flames leaped up and then sank, and with each flame that paled fell something beautiful and fervid that ceased to glow and had vanished—never again to come back.
“I fear you have misunderstood me,” I said at last, much crushed, and with a dry, hoarse voice. The silly, senseless words came as if mechanically from my lips, as if I had been reading them out of a news sheet.
“I understood you perfectly,” said Pistorius softly. “You are quite right.” We waited. Then he continued slowly: “So far as one man can be right in his judgment of another.”