"Ah, now I have caught it, as usual," he cried. "All our life long we have had these scenes. When we were fourth-form boys--well, you know what it used to be. Once when I tore myself from you because I got bored with philosophising in your company about the good of humanity, and preferred to lie under the garden hedge with Rupp and Sydow to bombard the pretty girls as they went by with paper pellets, then I got a note--'You are insincere ... a traitor ... I will do away with myself.' ... Ay, the devil take your confounded heroics."
He stood up and soothed his friend, who sank back again on the sofa-cushions, and caressed comically his bristly hair.
"There, there, little girlie," he laughed. "So long as you live you won't get rid of me, good for nothing that I am. Who would nurse you and stroke your head when the white mice bother you? and who would preach morality to me and cram worn-out wisdom into me when I got into scrapes, if----" He stopped suddenly and cast a side-long glance at the keyhole; then seized an empty bottle and hurled it with a kind of war-whoop at the hinges of the door, so that it smashed to pieces in contact with the iron.
Ulrich sprang up in horror. "What has happened?" he asked.
"Nothing much," Leo explained, perfectly calm again. "Only a worm of a head waiter was sneaking around, probably to listen to us, so I tried to give him his death-blow."
Ulrich looked at him in bewilderment.
"You think I have roughened somewhat out there amongst savages, eh?" Leo asked, with a good-natured laugh. "But never mind, I have come back to you sound and whole. A fellow who has sifted and proved himself, so that at this moment he doubts whether in the whole of God's earthly garden there grows a finer specimen than his lowly self. Sometimes when I have had to go six months without anything to eat, I have been able to subsist on my self-satisfaction, as the bear sucks its paws, and grown fatter. I have a magnificent maxim, which is 'Repent nothing.' And if at one time I was a wild customer, and have my conscience loaded to the utmost capacity, nevertheless I have been able to enjoy myself, and must be content. Only woe to him who reminds me of it. I will pay him out by bringing home to him all the vexation and resentment it has cost me. Then what has a man got faults for, if he mayn't be revenged for them on some one else?"
"A comfortable philosophy," laughed Ulrich.
"I make everything comfortable for myself," Leo replied, stroking his blond beard back over his shoulders; "sins as well as reformation. Now, when I have awakened to full consciousness of my youthful folly, and see that I have squandered the best years of my life, neglected my possessions, sinned against my friends--don't interrupt; I have, more than you think--grieved my mother's heart and made her suffer for my wickedness, if I burst forth in lamentation, or tormented myself with self-reproaches, or sank into a slough of despair, would it do anybody any good? Nobody. What should I undo that has happened in the past? Nothing! On the contrary, I should but complicate matters. And now shall I tell you how I happen to have come home? Your last letter was forwarded from Buenos Ayres to the steppes, where I had been camping for a few months. I had come in from a buffalo-hunt, sweating and tired as a dog, when it was put into my hand. You wrote of my property being in a bad way, of the master's eye being needed in all directions, that you could not stave off ruin much longer--and a good deal more. I knew well enough that it must be on the decline, especially once I played away such monstrous sums in that cursed den of thieves, Monte Carlo; but I had been too easy-going to think about it. Over in Europe was a world full of cares and worries; but here was freedom and sheer living for the joy of living. 'Let the whole fabric crumble,' said I to myself. 'Keep out of the way of the débris and stay here. Why shouldn't I?' Mother and sisters were provided for. I owed no one anything, so I left the camp, and wandered forth into the dusky steppe to reflect further on the matter. I felt that I might hit on the right solution there, for I don't believe there could be a spot more adapted for self-communion than that grassy desert, with the wide grey sky overhead. That is why the people of those parts, too, are so cursedly cute and murder each other without prejudice.
"Well, the long and short of it was that when I was striding along a ploughed path, between wheatears as tall as a man, my foot struck against something. It was the carcass of a horse which had fallen there. One comes across such a sight on the roads every fifty yards, and often it is not one dead horse only, but heaps of them. What struck me about this one was that they hadn't taken off its harness. It was still warm, and could have been dead scarcely twenty-four hours. Apparently it had belonged to the caravan of our expedition, and I resolved to give our guides a reminder for their negligence. Then as I contemplated this poor beast, that looked at me with wide-open, blue-grey eyes as if it were yet alive, there came into my head the saying of a man who endowed our squirearchy with new life, new strength, and new morale, words that he once spoke in the Reichstag--'A good horse dies in harness.' And all of a sudden I saw you before me--you with your miserable skeleton body, who, with colossal energy, have had to wrestle for every inch of what you have become; you whom every half-fledged stripling could knock down, but whom the lowest drunkards among your tenants worship with as much reverence and awe as their God--you who were born to be anything but a country squire, and yet have so trained yourself to it that you have converted the old tumble-down heritage of your ancestors into a modern model estate--you who sit up at night poring over scientific books, and never weary of drinking in new knowledge--you who have given our constituency a name in the Reichstag (don't protest; I know. Even out there people sometimes read German newspapers). Yes, I saw you before me, labouring on without pause or rest, till the weak remnant of flesh that still hung on your bones was demanded as tribute.