“I am purposely keeping away from your letter. All this introductory setting is to tantalize myself, to force myself to be calm and see things straight. At the slightest excuse I could gush forth on these pages a quantity and quality of sentiment that would make your six-page outcry seem quite sensible and respectable. (And it is neither, you know, mein Kindschen.) You tell me things here that I know only too well. Maybe that’s why I am in Germany. You hint that I could marry you by crooking my little finger. Down here in Bavaria they often do that sort of thing at exactly your age—fifteen and one-half. But if I should do it, or encourage you to think that I might even want to do it—well! I have read enough Italian literature to know that there is a particularly private pit in Hell reserved for those chaps. So I am going to perform a bit of moral cruelty which makes me ill to think of—and is bound to make me iller as the days and nights go by—I am going to ignore your truthful little confession; act brutally as if you had never penned it; pretend that I never could guess how you would count the days it takes for a letter to cross the ocean, arrive at Hamburg, drift down to Munich; how you would count again the days it takes a reply to come up to Hamburg and sail to New York; how for days and days and months and months you would watch for the postman, trying all the while to look unconcerned, and find each day—silence. You are not the kind of child to grow busy with your playthings and forget. I know how you will suffer—worse now, perhaps, than if you were older. And I make you suffer because there is no other way.
“There is no other way; I may make no explanation. If I told you the truth you would probably take the next steamer for Europe; and if I acted the way I feel, I’d probably meet you half way over. And I can’t write you a lame acknowledgment that I have received your letter, have it on file and will attend to your order in due course. The coldest thing I wrote would burn with the lie that it carried and you would guess and be tempted by me. No. I am like a man in love with his friend’s wife. There is nothing to do. I must keep the faith—which means, in this case, silence.
“It is so horrible, the thing I must do, that I almost forget how you have paid in advance for my necessary brutality. This fragile, badly-spelled, pink-rose-leaf confession of yours, so delicately real, like a half-opened cherry-bud, warm, fragrant, potent with all that is to be! I could send it back to you, mein Kindschen, and say, ‘All that you own here, I confess again to you. Speak; and whatever you say, that will be but the echo of myself.’
“And I shall say nothing. But my heart is full of pity, mein Kindschen.”
They were crossing the river above New York city before she had been able to finish three-quarters of the book; the cars were shifted carefully and tenderly to a flat-bottomed ferry; in a few moments they were being towed down the river to Jersey City. She could look out of her window and see the lights of the river and hear the water lapping the sides of the boat. Much meditation had gone with each page; and she was reluctant to come to the impending end.
Leopold appeared in the letters. “I am playing a losing game, I know,” he wrote. “While I wait and look fatherly (and get called mon père—ugh!) someone else, less scrupulous—and a blamed sight more natural!—will reach out and take you.... Nom d’une pipe!... My word is given, however, and I will not break it. Hier stehe ich, Gott mir helfen, ich kann nicht anders; so said Luther, or something like that, on a matter that seems to me less important!”
Almost immediately after this he was rowing most gloriously with Conscience and bringing the years down to eighteen. “Something ought to be knocked off for good behavior,” he argued; “every decent prison allows that. But there’s the final stand. One step this side—one minute even, and I’d never forgive myself. Seventeen, eighteen! Two years of acting-grandfather, playing the wise old professor, so interested in education! Rats!”
Now he was leaving abruptly for Holden, decamping in the night, fleeing before the attack of the tempter. The devil had got into him; the Old One needed vigorous exorcising.
The Old One came in for a long essay. The devil was God’s ally, he found out; Lucifer tried men out, tested them, showed up the flaws, taught them exactly what to amend, reject or add. Spiritual perfection was not possible without a healthy, vigorous tussle with the Old One.
“I know when he is coming,” he claimed; “first, I hear the cries of the old mystery-play devils, ‘Out haro! Out haro! Out! out! out!’ just like a pack of yelping dogs on a hot scent. Then I find my heart, blood, lungs, vertebræ, stomach, legs, and sympathetic nervous system all going back on me. The flesh and the devils are old cronies, you know. ‘Out! out! Out haro! Out! out!’ he howls, nearer and nearer; my whole physical ‘me’ tugs and yowls and bites at the leash.