Full of wonder, the twins looked at each other, for they guessed that something grand was in preparation; but they did not deem it necessary to bring these tidings to their father, for they remembered that two little letters they had written had to be quickly and secretly taken to the post by the servant-girl.
Paul, however, stood high up on “Black Susy’s” round back, leaning against the slender chimney, and looked longingly towards the moor, like Columbus about to discover a new world.
The first steps on the hazardous road were taken.
In the long, sleepless nights which followed his mother’s death, when grief held his soul in iron claws, he had fled from the melancholy image of the deceased to his books. Like a mole he burrowed his way through the dark theories, and when his head buzzed and his body became exhausted from the exciting brain-work, he would cry out to himself, “Her last hope shall not be disappointed!” Then he stretched his limbs, and a new impulse of energy flashed into his brain, and on and on he went, working restlessly till the iron riddle solved itself harmoniously, till each lever was transformed into a muscle, each tube into an artery, contrived on the wisest plans, like a human body by the spirit of the eternal Creator.
Weeks and months passed. Meantime his mind was so completely absorbed by this thirst for knowledge, this desire to create, that all that which had previously harassed him vanished like a distant shadow. His mother’s image became more and more peaceful, and seemed to smile upon him. The harvest became multiplied in the barn as if carried thither by invisible hands, and on the day when the last bundle of oats was unloaded before the stack he clapped his hand to his forehead and exclaimed, “It seems to me only yesterday since I saw the first car!”
The more his knowledge increased and ripened, so much the more the anxiety to succeed arose in his soul. When he wrote to the blacksmith, his heart beat like that of a student before his examination. He shunned bringing his deeds to the light as though to mention them were a crime, for he feared being laughed at. But the constant hammering proclaimed the news to the world.
The new foreman had to sit at their own table, and the father marked his disapprobation of him by refusing to greet his entrance, and muttering a great deal into his plate about fools and parasites.
But nobody heeded him, and the work quietly proceeded. According to Paul’s directions, the machine was taken to pieces and sounded in every one of its minutest parts. The faults which a professional engineer would have discovered at the first glance, these two men had to search out and explain to each other with the greatest trouble. A dispute between them would often last for hours, like meetings of the senate.
Once the foreman asked, impatiently, “Why the devil do you not send the thing to a workshop to be repaired?”
Paul started. That, indeed, was an idea! It seemed to him quite a new one to—day, and yet it had often come into his mind before. But he had never liked to yield to it, for it seemed to him too daring and absurd; and, besides, he was too much afraid they might return “Susy” as “past mending.” He was like that peasant woman who preferred doctoring her husband to death herself to being told by the doctor “he cannot be saved.”