“I’ve never lost sight of you,” said Becker. “Alexander Wiguniewski
wrote me about you, and told me that you had altered the conditions of
your life. But his hints were equivocal; so I commissioned friends in
Berlin to inquire, and their information was more exact.”
They sat in a wine room in an obscure quarter. They were the only
guests. From the smoky ceiling hung the great antlers of a stag,
to which the electric bulbs had been fastened with an effect of
picturesqueness.
Becker wore a dark litevka buttoned to his chin. He looked poor and
ill; his bearing had a touch of the subtly fugitive. Sometimes a sad
quietude overspread his features, like the quietude of waves where a
ship has gone down. In moments of silence his face seemed to become
larger, and his gaze to be fixed upon an outer emptiness and an inner
flame.
“Are you still in communication with Wiguniewski and the--others?”
Christian asked; and his eyes seemed to express a delicate deprecation
of the level impersonality of his own demeanour.
Becker shook his head. “My old friends have all turned against me,” he
replied. “Inwardly I am still deeply at one with them; but I no longer
share their views.”
“Must one absolutely share the views of one’s friends?” Christian asked.
“Yes, in so far as those views express one’s central aim in life.
The answer depends also on the degree of affection that exists among
people. I’ve tried to win them over, but my strength failed me. They
simply don’t understand. Now I no longer feel the urge to shake men and
awaken them, unless some one flings his folly at me in the form of a
polemic, or unless I feel so close to one that any dissonance between
us robs me of peace or weighs upon my heart.”
Christian paid less attention to the meaning of the words than to
Becker’s enchanting intonation, the gentleness of his voice, the
wandering yet penetrating glance, the morbid, martyred face. And he
thought: “All that they say of him is false.” A great trust filled him.