“You? I had no idea of that.”
“Yes. It was one of my adaptations. You know, I have never wanted to appear out of the ordinary, and have rather done too much, in order to be correct, to do the right thing. In eight days, I think, I shall be already in the field.”
“For God’s sake!”
“Look here, old fellow, you mustn’t take things so sentimentally. At bottom it certainly won’t give me pleasure to order machine gunfire to be turned on living creatures, but that is a secondary matter. Now each one of us will be seized by the great wheel of fate. You as well. You will certainly be called up.”
“And your mother, Demian?”
Then for the first time I recollected what I was doing a quarter of an hour before. How the world had changed! I had summoned together all my force in order to conjure up the sweetest picture, and now fate had suddenly put on a new, horrible mask.
“My mother? We need have no cares for her safety. She is safe, safer than anyone else in the world to-day. You love her so very much?”
“You knew it, Demian?” He laughed brightly and without any embarrassment.
“You child! Naturally I knew it. No one has yet called my mother Mother Eve without loving her. By the way, how was that? You have called to either her or myself to-day, haven’t you?”
“Yes, I called—I called to Mother Eve.”