"There is myself!" said Christophe emphatically. Hassler looked at him, shrugged his shoulders, and said wearily:
"You will be like the rest. You will do as the rest have done. You will think of success, of amusing yourself, like the rest…. And you will be right…."
Christophe tried to protest, but Hassler cut him short; he took the music and began bitterly to criticise the works which he had first been praising, Not only did he harshly pick out the real carelessness, the mistakes in writing, the faults of taste or of expression which had escaped the young man, but he made absurd criticisms, criticisms which might have been made by the most narrow and antiquated of musicians, from which he himself, Hassler, had had to suffer all his life. He asked what was the sense of it all. He did not even criticise: he denied; it was as though he were trying desperately to efface the impression that the music had made on him in spite of himself.
Christophe was horrified and made no attempt to reply. How could he reply to absurdities which he blushed to hear on the lips of a man whom he esteemed and loved? Besides, Hassler did not listen to him. He stopped at that, stopped dead, with the book in his hands, shut; no expression in his eyes and his lips drawn down in bitterness. At last he said, as though he had once more forgotten Christophe's presence:
"Ah! the worst misery of all is that there is not a single man who can understand you!"
Christophe was racked with emotion. He turned suddenly, laid his hand on
Hassler's, and with love in his heart he repeated:
"There is myself!"
But Hassler did not move his hand, and if something stirred in his heart for a moment at that boyish cry, no light shone in his dull eyes, as they looked at Christophe. Irony and evasion were in the ascendant. He made a ceremonious and comic little bow in acknowledgment.
"Honored!" he said.
He was thinking: