“Now this was to be observed,” he continued, “that just so much as the brothers differed, one from the other, the more they seemed to cling to each other. In Big L, indeed, one did not notice it so much; he was always sullen and displayed no feeling; but Little L could never conceal anything. And because Little L felt conscious of this, how much better he himself was treated by the other cadets, it made him sorry for his brother. When we took our walks around the courtyard, then one could see how Little L would look at his brother from time to time, to see if he, too, had some one to walk with. That he prompted his brother in class and allowed him to copy from himself when sight-exercises were dictated was all a matter of course; but he also took care that no one teased his brother, and when he observed him quietly from the side, as he often did, without drawing his brother’s attention to it, then his little face was quite noticeably sad, almost as if he were a great care to him—”
The old man pulled hard at his pipe. “All that I put together for myself afterward,” said he, “when everything happened that was to happen; he knew at the time much better than we did how matters stood with Big L, and what was his brother’s character.
“This was, of course, understood among the cadets, and it helped Big L none the more, for he remained disliked after it as before, yet it made Little L all the more popular, and he was generally called ‘Brother Love.’
“Now the two lived together in one room, and Little L, as I said, was very clean and neat; the big one, on the contrary, was very slovenly. And so Little L fairly made himself servant to his brother, and it turned out that he even cleaned the brass buttons on his uniform for him, and just before the ranks formed for roll-call would place himself, with clothes-brush in hand, in front of his brother, and once more regularly brush and scrub him—especially on those days when the ‘cross lieutenant’ was on duty and received roll-call.
“Well, in the morning the cadets had to go down into the court for roll-call, and there the officer on duty went up and down between the lines and inspected their uniforms to see if they were in order.
“And when the ‘cross lieutenant’ attended to this, then there reigned the most woful anxiety throughout the company, for he always found something. He would go behind the cadets and flip at their coats with his finger to make the dust fly, and if none came, then he would lift their coat-pockets and snap at them, and so, beat our coats as much as we would, there was sure to be left some dust lying on them, and as soon as the ‘cross lieutenant’ saw it, he would sing out in a voice like that of an old bleating ram: ‘Write him down for Sunday report,’ and then Sunday’s day off might go to the devil, and then that got to be a very serious matter.”
The old colonel paused, took a vigorous swallow of wine, and with the palm of his hand squeezed the beard from his upper lip into his mouth and sucked off the wine drops that sparkled on the hair. Recollection of the “cross lieutenant” made him plainly furious.
“When one considers what sort of meanness it takes to so deprive a poor little fellow of the Sunday holiday he has been hugging for a whole week, and all for a trifle—bah! it’s downright—whenever I have seen any one annoying my men—in later days that sort of thing didn’t happen in my regiment; they knew this, that I was there and would not tolerate it.—To be rough at times, ay, even to the extreme if necessary, to throw one into the guard-house, that does no harm—but to nag—for that it takes a mean skunk!”
“Very true!” observed the waiter from the back part of the room, and thus made it known that he was following the colonel’s story.
The old man calmed himself and went on with his story.