Apollonius, on the contrary, had by nature and by virtue of the training that he had received at his cousin's what his brother lacked; he possessed dignity of personality, consistency to the point of obstinacy. His inward sureness made him authoritative; he did not have to exert himself to be so—he was raised above the necessity of demanding respect by visible effort which so seldom attains its purpose, indeed usually defeats it. And so he succeeded in doing what he wanted. Soon the work was being carried on in the most systematic order, and all those concerned seemed to feel contented under the change—all except Fritz Nettenmair. The rapid coöperation that moved as on the track of an invisible necessity made the figure in the blue coat in which he felt himself so big, superfluous. Another reason for uneasiness was that the new system came from his brother; from him whom he already had so much to forgive and whom he wanted less and less to forgive. He did not know, or did not want to know, what charm a self-contained personality exercises, although he himself was obliged to acknowledge it against his will, and still less that he lacked this and that his brother possessed it. He had agreed in his own mind that his brother had used means which he was pleased to feel himself too noble to apply. In that way Apollonius had won the people away from him. The latter had no suspicion of what was going on in his brother's breast; he was on his guard against him, as one must be against cunning persons, for such enemies can only be defeated with their own weapons. The brotherly friendliness and respect with which Apollonius treated him was a mask behind which he thought he could certainly hide his sinister plans; he would pay him back and make him more easily harmless if he hid his watchfulness behind the same mask. Apollonius' good-natured willingness outwardly to subordinate himself to him appeared to his brother like derision in which the workmen, won over by the deceitful one, knowingly took part. In his sensitiveness, he himself resorted to the means that he assumed his brother employed. He was prevented from opposing him openly by the fact that Apollonius impressed him himself, even though he would not have acknowledged this to be the reason. He laid the blue coat of thunder aside and descended to the very lowest rung of his joviality. He began by hints and then gradually by words to show his sympathy with the workmen who groaned beneath the tyranny of a time-serving intruder, as he proved to them; as he had not the courage to incite them to open rebellion he sought to lead them to commit single petty acts of mutiny. He began to treat them to food and drink daily. They ate and drank, but remained as before in the course that Apollonius marked out for them.
The common man has a child's keen eye for the strong points and weaknesses of his superior. This endeavor, which they saw through, lost Fritz Nettenmair the last vestige of the men's respect; it taught them, if they did not already know it, in whose bad books they might safely come, in whose they might not. And if they had been uncertain, the inspector's different behavior toward the two brothers might have determined them. And as they were not so finely organized, and also had not the same reasons as Fritz Nettenmair, their opinion made itself undisguisedly plain. They took liberties with him which showed him that the success of his condescension was entirely different from what he had intended. Then he drew the cloud of the blue coat once more wrathfully about him, whistled more shrilly than ever, so that the big bell on the other side resounded, was doubly bombastic and raised his shoulders as high again toward his black head. The wrath and decision of his former coughing and spitting was child's play to those he displayed now. But the workmen soon knew that this went on only in Apollonius' absence; and his chance appearance, like the rising full moon, disconcerted the heaviest thunder-storms.
Fritz Nettenmair was obliged to despair of reëstablishing his lost importance on the scene of the repairs. Naturally he added also the result of his mistaken measures to Apollonius' ever-growing account. The feeling that he was superfluous seized him as it had his father, but not with quite the same effect. What the little garden was to the old gentleman the slate-shed now became to the elder son; at least as long as he saw Apollonius on the hanging-seat or on the church roof. But now he also brought the blue coat with him into the living room. His children—and this was easy as he himself did not trouble himself about them—had also been won over by his brother, by reprehensible means, of course. The reprehensible means were just those which he himself never applied: unintentional kindness and love that was wise in its severity. But even in his wife he began to see more and more one who was to some extent his brother's ally in the latter's conspiracy against him. He saw this long before he had the slightest real cause to do so, and that was the shadow that his guilt threw across the future of his imagination. Its old law was to compel him, by reason of the wrongness of his means of defense, to make of this shadow a real, living form and to place it in his life as a retributive force.
Vague, premonitory fear that fluttered by in momentary clear intervals, seemed to tell him that his changed behavior toward his wife must hasten this change. At such times he suddenly became doubly pleasant and jovial with her; but even this joviality bore something of the nature of the sultry soil from which it grew.
One cure for such a disease is highly praised; that is diversion, self-forgetfulness. As if the navigator should forget himself at sight of the threatening reef, as if every one should forget himself wherever double foresight is necessary! Fritz Nettenmair took the cure.
From now on he was never missing at a ball or any public amusement; he felt himself to have fled the danger forever if he were absent only for an hour from the place where he saw it threatening. He was more out of his house than in it—and not he alone. He thought the cure still more necessary for his wife than for himself. His vengeful self-consciousness assumed what lay as a mere possibility in the future to be a reality of the present. And his wife was still so much on his side that she was now angry with his brother to whose influence she attributed the change in her husband's behavior—only not in the way in which it really was responsible.
Apollonius, who was oppressed by all this as by a heavy cloud, an uncomprehended intuitive feeling, understood only this: his brother and his sister-in-law avoided him. He kept away from the places to which they went. The inmost need of his nature, the tendency to gather together rather than to dissipate, in itself, would have led him to do so. Solitude became a better cure for him than diversion proved to be for the other two. He saw how different his sister-in-law was from what she had seemed to him to be before. He was obliged to congratulate himself that his dearest hopes had not been fulfilled. His work gave him enough sense of himself; whatever gaps remained the children filled.
And the old man in the blue coat? Has he in his blindness no suspicion of the clouds that are piling up all about his house? Or is it such a suspicion that grips him at times when, meeting Apollonius, he exchanges indifferent words with him? Then two powers strive on his brow which his son, confronted by the shield over his father's eyes, does not see. He wants to ask something but he does not ask. So thick is the cloud that the old man has spun about him like a cocoon that there is no longer any way through it from him out into the world nor any, leading from outside in to him. He behaves as if he knew about everything. If he did not do so, he would show the world his helplessness and himself challenge it to abuse this helplessness. And if he should ask would people tell him the truth? No! He believes the world to be as obdurate toward him as he is toward it. He does not ask. He listens where he knows he is not seen listening, straining feverishly to catch every sound. And in every sound he hears something that is not there; his strained imagination builds boulders of it that crush his breast, but he does not ask. He dreams of nothing but of things that bring disgrace on him and his house.
It is the nature of guilt that it entangles not alone its author in new guilt. It has the magic power of drawing into its fermenting circle all who surround him and of ripening in him whatever is bad to fresh guilt. Well for him who successfully defends his unblemished heart against this magic power! Even if he cannot save the guilty one himself, he may be an angel to the others. Here are these four human beings with all their differences of individuality, held together in one knot of life which is being consumed by the guilt of one! What destiny will they spin for themselves, the people in the house with the green shutters?
Weeks had now passed since Apollonius' return and still he had not realized his sister-in-law's fears. During the first few days Fritz Nettenmair read in her demeanor a convulsive effort to pull herself together, a desperate endeavor to be prepared; now this gave way to something that appeared to be amazement. He, and he alone, saw how she began to observe his brother more and more courageously when he did not suspect that her gaze rested upon him. She seemed to be comparing his personality, his behavior with her expectation. Fritz Nettenmair felt in her soul how little the two agreed. He took pains to nurse his young wife's dislike of her brother-in-law back to its old strength. He did so, feeling all the time how vain his effort was; for a single glance at his brother's gentle, upright countenance must tear down what it had taken him days laboriously to build up. He felt how delicately he ought to go to work and how roughly he really did so; for the same power that sharpened his feeling for the degree carried him beyond it as soon as he came to act. He knew that what he had begun must complete its course to his ruin. He sought forgetfulness and drew his wife ever deeper with him into the whirlpool of diversion.