The Baron had been attracted to Schwabach by his affection for a certain person there, an affection he had preserved from the days of his childhood. There lived in Schwabach at the time a woman who had been his nurse. Her undivided and resigned love for him was touching. She was as proud of him as she might have been had she been able to say that in him she had been responsible for the childhood training of the noblest specimen of manhood known to human history. And he was fond of her; the stories she told him he could still recall, and he did recall them frequently and with pleasure. She had married the foreman of a tin mill, and had sons and daughters of her own. Eberhard had been planning for years to visit her. This visit had now been paid. But Eberhard could not say that he had derived extraordinary pleasure from it: it had taken an inner figure from his soul. And, on the other hand, whether the nurse felt, on seeing the tall, lank, stiff, and ill-humoured foster son, that enraptured charm she so much liked to conjure up before her imagination, is a question that had better remain unanswered.
When Eberhard became aware of the condition in which Daniel then found himself, his feelings of chivalry were moved. With the dauntless courage of which he was capable, he subdued the apathy he had cherished toward Daniel ever since he first came to know him, and to which actual detestation and disquieting jealousy had been added a few weeks ago. “You have been out in the rain,” said Eberhard courteously, but with a reserve that was rigid if not quite forbidding or impenetrable.
“I look like it, don’t I?” said Daniel with a scowl.
“You will catch cold if you are not careful. May I offer you my top coat?” continued Eberhard more courteously. He felt as if he could see the figure of Eleanore rising up behind Daniel, that she was quite surrounded by flowers, and that she was smiling at him in joy and gratitude. He bit his lips and blushed.
Daniel shook his head: “I am accustomed to all kinds of weather. Thank you.”
“Well, then, at least wrap this around your neck; the water is running down your back.” Thereupon Eberhard reached him a white silk kerchief he drew from the pocket of his coat. Daniel make a wry face, but took the kerchief, threw it about his neck, and tied it in a knot under his chin.
“You are right,” he admitted, and drew his head down between his shoulders: “It all reminds me of a good warm bed.”
Eberhard stared at the locomotive of the in-coming train. “Plebeian,” he thought, with inner contempt.
Nevertheless he joined this same plebeian in the third-class carriage, though he had bought a ticket for first class. Was it the white silk kerchief that so suddenly attracted him to the plebeian? What else could it have been? For during the entire journey they sat opposite each other in absolute silence. It was a remarkable pair: the one in a shabby, wet suit with a hat that looked partly as though it belonged to a cheap sign painter, and partly as though it were the sole head gear of a gypsy bard, and with a big pair of spectacles from which the eyes flashed green and unsteady; the other looking as though he had just stepped out of a bandbox, not a particle of dust on his clothing, in patent leather slippers, English straw hat, and with an American cigarette in his mouth.
Next to them sat a peasant woman with a chicken basket on her lap, a red-headed girl who held the hind part of pig on her knees, and a workman whose face was bandaged.