It is possible to think of many people while counting the hours in the night. We can think of living people and of dead, particularly of the latter, for the night is the time for spirits.
Hans thought of his dead,—of his mother, of her old black box where she kept her savings, of her kind, faithful eyes and of the morning on which he, returning from his sermon, had found those eyes closed. Hans thought of his father, of the shining glass globe, of his beautiful book of songs. Now, gradually all his narrow, hemmed-in childhood rose before him in the dark, and once the restless dreamer raised himself in bed believing that he heard the voices of Auntie Schlotterbeck and Uncle Grünebaum on the stairs outside. It was a closely circumscribed world, to be sure, that surrounded the candidate that night, but when morning dawned it had made him able to meet with assurance the wider world which now opened before him. Lieutenant Götz did not need to haul "his preceptor" out of bed that morning. He found him fully clothed and ready—as the lieutenant expressed it—"to offer a broad back for everything that might be laid upon it."
Thrice Lieutenant Götz walked round Unwirrsch, candidate for the ministry, and regarded him with favor.
"You look just as they do on the stage," he said as he finished his third circle. "What is theology without black trousers? What is a preceptor without a dress coat? My word!—You're capital! A little out of fashion, but very decent! My friend, if those two beautiful black coat-tails don't please my brother Theodor, it can only be the fault of the blue handkerchief which peeps out from between them perhaps a little too impertinently to suit my fastidious sister-in-law."
Hastily Hans stuffed the handkerchief as far down into the depths of the pocket as he could, but the lieutenant cried:
"Let it hang, let it hang out boldly! That's not why I remarked upon it, upon my word. What do you care for Theodor and Kleophea; if only——"
The old man broke off; Hans did not learn at that time what was to have followed the words "if only." At a quarter past eleven he was on his way with the lieutenant to the house of the Privy Councillor Götz.
Hans had firmly declined the old soldier's advice to strengthen himself for the expedition with a glass of cognac and the lieutenant had said:
"On the whole perhaps you are right; my brother has a pretty keen nose and it might engender unjustified suspicions. Forward!"
Hans had buttoned his clerical coat awry above his beating heart. With joking irony Colonel von Bullau had waved a white handkerchief from the window of the "Green Tree;" the sun looked down from the sky at the preceptor, smiling, but not ironically. The weather left less to be desired that day than the lieutenant's humor. He talked or growled to himself the whole way; he had pulled his cap well down over his forehead and seemed to have clenched his fists in his overcoat pockets. His shortness of temper was far from being delightful and the preceptor gave a positive start when his ill-humored guide suddenly exclaimed: "Confound it, here we are already!"