A hundred times his brother urged him to waylay her and press his own suit. He exerted all his inventive power to procure him an opportunity of speaking to her alone. Our hero refused to be urged or to accept his offers. After all, it was useless. All that he might accomplish would be to make her still more angry.
"I can't stand by any longer and see you growing thinner and paler all the time," said his brother one evening, after he had reported how unsuccessfully he had spoken for him again that day. "You must go away from here for a while; that will have good results for you in two ways. When I tell her that it is on her account that you have gone out into the world, perhaps she will turn. Believe me, I know the long-haired tribe, and I know how to treat them. You must write her a touching letter for good-by; I will deliver it, and I'll manage to soften her heart. And if it can't be accomplished, it will do you good to be away from here where everything reminds you of her, for a year—or several years. And finally, strange places will make another man of you, who will know better how to get round the apron-wearers. You must learn to dance; that's already half the battle. And anyway, the old Blue-coat has been asked by his cousin in Cologne to send one of us to him; I read it the other day in a letter that had fallen out of his pocket. Just tell him that you have gathered something of the sort from several things he has said lately and that you are ready to go if he wants you to. Or let me do that. You are too honest."
And he really did arrange it. It is a question whether our hero would have been able voluntarily to make up his mind to leave home. He could not understand how any one could live anywhere else but in his home town; to him it had always seemed like a fairy tale that there were other towns and people living in them. He had not imagined the life and doings of these people as real, like those of the inhabitants of his home, but as a kind of shadow-play that existed only for the looker-on, not for the shadows themselves. His brother, who knew how to treat the old man, led the conversation up to the cousin in Cologne as if by chance, and was clever enough to interpret the suggestions that Herr Nettenmair made in his diplomatic way as preliminary hints and connect them with others that referred to our hero. After frequent conversations he seemed to take it as the express desire of the old man that Apollonius should go to his cousin in Cologne. This put the idea into the old man's mind and, as it passed for his own, he brooded over it in his own way. There was little work to do at the time, and there seemed to be no prospect of its increasing materially for some time. A pair of hands could be spared; if they remained in the business all the workers would be condemned to semi-idleness. The old man could stand nothing as little as what he called dawdling. The only thing that was lacking was that our hero should resist. He knew nothing of his brother's plans. The latter had wisely not initiated him into them, because he knew him too well to expect his support in a matter that he would have rejected as both underhand and disrespectful to his father.
"You want to send Apollonius to Cologne," said his brother to the old man one afternoon; "but will he want to go? I don't think so. You will have to send me out on my travels. Apollonius won't go—at least not today, nor tomorrow."
That was enough. That very evening the old man beckoned our hero to follow him into the little garden. He stopped in front of the old pear-tree and, removing a little twig that was growing out of its trunk, said: "Tomorrow you will go to your cousin in Cologne."
With a rapid movement he turned toward his son, and saw with astonishment that Apollonius nodded his head obediently. It seemed almost to displease him that he should have no self-will to break. Did he think that the poor boy was nursing defiant thoughts, even if he did not express them, and did he want to break down even the defiance of thoughts? "You pack your knapsack this very day, do you hear?" he shouted at him.
"Yes, father," said Apollonius.
"You start tomorrow at sunrise." After he had seemed to try almost to force a defiant answer, he may have regretted his anger. He made a gesture of dismissal; Apollonius went obediently. The old man followed him, and several times he came up to the brothers' room with milder sternness to remind his son, who was packing, of this and that which he was not to forget.
And the last of four strokes was just ringing out from the tower of St. George's when the door of the house with the green shutters opened, and our young wanderer stepped out, accompanied by his brother. At the same spot where he now stood looking down on the town lying below him, his brother had taken farewell of him, and he had looked after him a long, long time. "Perhaps I can win her for you after all," his brother had said; "and then I'll write you so at once. And if you can't get her, she isn't the only one in the world. I can tell you, you are as good-looking a fellow as any; and if you'll only lay aside your stupid way you can get on with any of them. Once for all, things are so that the girls can't court us—and I shouldn't even want one that threw herself at my head of her own accord. And what can a lively girl do with a dreamer? Our cousin in Cologne is said to have a couple of pretty daughters. And now, good-by. I will deliver your letter today." With that his brother had left him.
"Yes," said Apollonius to himself as he looked after him. "He is right. Not because of my cousin's daughters, or any other girl, no matter how pretty she might be. If I had been different perhaps I need not have had to go away now. Was it I for whom she laid the flower there at the Whitsuntide shooting? Did she want to meet me then, and before then? Who knows how hard it has become for her! And having done all that in vain must she not have felt ashamed? Oh, she is right not to want to have anything more to do with me. I must learn to be different."