He was sorry for Ruzena, although she reminded him somewhat of a humble little beast of prey in whose throat a dark cry is strangled, dark as the Bohemian forests, and he longed to know whether one could talk to her as one talked to a lady; for all this was so terrifying and yet seductive, and in a way justified his father and his father’s lewd intentions. He was afraid that Ruzena, too, would see through these, and he sought for an answer in her face; she noticed it and smiled to him; yet she let the old man fondle her hand which was hanging languidly over the edge of the table, and the old man did it quite openly, and tried at the same time to summon up his scraps of Polish to erect a lingual hedge round the girl and himself. Of course it was wrong of her to allow him such liberties, and when at Stolpin they maintained that Polish maids were quite unreliable perhaps they were right. Yet perhaps she was only weak, and one’s honour demanded that she should be protected from the old man’s advances. But that would be the duty of her lover; if Bertrand possessed the slightest vestige of chivalry he was in duty bound to appear now to put everything in order with a word. And suddenly Joachim began to talk about Bertrand to his fellow-officers: hadn’t they heard any word of Bertrand lately and of what he was doing; yes, a curiously reserved fellow, Eduard von Bertrand. But his comrades, who had already drunk a good deal of champagne, gave him confused answers and were beyond being surprised at anything, even at the pertinacity with which Joachim harped on the theme of Bertrand; and cunningly and persistently as he brought out the name in a loud and distinct voice, not even the girls twitched an eyelash, and the suspicion mounted within him that Bertrand might have sunk so low as to come here under an assumed name; and so he turned directly to Ruzena and asked whether she didn’t know von Bertrand—until the old man, keen of hearing, and officious as ever in spite of the champagne, asked why Joachim was so hot on the track of this von Bertrand: “You’re as eager about him as if he were hidden somewhere in the place.” Joachim reddened and denied it, but the old man had been set going: yes, he had known the father well, old Colonel von Bertrand. He had departed this life, very likely it was this Eduard who had brought him to his grave. When his waster of a son had chucked the army he had taken it, people said, very much to heart; nobody knew why, or whether there mightn’t have been something shady behind it. Joachim became indignant. “Pardon me, but that’s only empty gossip—and the last thing that Bertrand can be called is a waster!” “Gently, gently,” replied the old man, turning again to Ruzena’s hand, on which he now pressed a long kiss; Ruzena calmly permitted it and regarded Joachim, whose soft fair hair reminded her of the children at the village school in Bohemia. “I not will flatter you,” she said in her staccato voice to the old man, “but nice hair has your son.” Then she seized the head of her friend, held it pressed to Joachim’s, and was delighted to see that the colour of the hair was the same. “Would be beautiful pair,” she declared to the two heads, and ran her hands through their hair. The other girl shrieked, because her coiffure was being disarranged; Joachim felt a soft hand touching the back of his head, he had a slight sensation of dizziness and threw his head back as if he wished to catch the hand between his neck and his collar and force it to remain there; but then the hand slipped of its own accord down to the back of his neck, and stroked it quickly and timorously, and was gone. “Gently, gently!” he heard his father’s dry voice again, and then he noticed that the old man had taken out his pocket-book, had drawn out two large notes, and was on the point of pressing them on the two girls. Yes, that was just how he used to throw marks to the harvest girls when he was in a good mood, and though Joachim wanted to intervene now he could not prevent the fifty-mark note from being pressed into Ruzena’s hand, nor her from sticking it gaily into her pocket. “Thanks, papa,” she said, then she bettered her words, “papa-in-law,” and winked at Joachim. Joachim was pale with rage: the old man would buy a girl for him for fifty marks, would he? Quick of hearing, the old man caught Ruzena’s quip and seized on it: “So! It seems to me that my young rascal has caught your fancy.… Well, you have my blessing.…” Swine, thought Joachim. But now the old man was in full sail: “Ruzena, my sweet child, to-morrow I’ll call on you and fix up the match in proper style, all tip-top. What shall I bring you as a wedding gift? … But you must tell me the address of your castle.…” Joachim looked away like one who at an execution does not wish to see the axe falling, but Ruzena suddenly stiffened, her eyes went blind, her lips quivered, she pushed away a hand that was stretched out in help or concern, and ran away to cry herself out beside the woman who attended to the lavatory.

“Well, well,” said Herr von Pasenow, “but it must be quite late! I’m afraid we must be going, gentlemen.” In the droshky father and son sat side by side, stiff and hostile, their sticks between their knees. At last the old man said: “Well, she accepted the fifty marks, all the same. And then she took to her heels.” What a wretch, thought Joachim.

On the theme of the military uniform Bertrand could have supplied some such theory as this:

Once upon a time it was the Church alone that was exalted as judge over mankind, and every layman knew that he was a sinner. Nowadays it is the layman who has to judge his fellow-sinner if all values are not to fall into anarchy, and instead of weeping with him, brother must say to brother: “You have done wrong.” And as once it was only the garments of the priest that marked a man off from his fellows as something higher, some hint of the layman peeping through even the uniform and the robe of office, so, when the great intolerance of faith was lost, the secular robe of office had to supplant the sacred one, and society had to separate itself into secular hierarchies with secular uniforms and invest these with the absolute authority of a creed. And because, when the secular exalts itself as the absolute, the result is always romanticism, so the real and characteristic romanticism of that age was the cult of the uniform, which implied, as it were, a superterrestrial and supertemporal idea of uniform, an idea which did not really exist and yet was so powerful that it took hold of men far more completely than any secular vocation could, a non-existent and yet so potent idea that it transformed the man in uniform into a property of his uniform, and never into a professional man in the civilian sense; and this perhaps simply because the man who wears the uniform is content to feel that he is fulfilling the most essential function of his age and therefore guaranteeing the security of his own life.

This is what Bertrand might have said; but though it is certain that not every wearer of uniform is conscious of such things, yet it may be maintained that everyone who has worn a uniform for many years finds in it a better organization of life than the man who merely exchanges one civilian suit in the evening for another civilian suit during the day. True, the soldier has no real need to think deeply of these things, for a generic uniform provides its wearer with a definitive line of demarcation between his person and the world; it is like a hard casing against which one’s personality and the world beat sharply and distinctly and are differentiated from each other; for it is the uniform’s true function to manifest and ordain order in the world, to arrest the confusion and flux of life, just as it conceals whatever in the human body is soft and flowing, covering up the soldier’s underclothes and skin, and decreeing that sentries on guard should wear white gloves. So when in the morning a man has fastened up his uniform to the last button, he acquires a second and thicker hide, and feels that he has returned to his more essential and steadfast being. Closed up in his hard casing, braced in with straps and belts, he begins to forget his own undergarments, and the uncertainty of life, yes, life itself, recedes to a distance. Then, after he has finished by pulling down his tunic so that it stretches smooth and without a crease over chest and back,—then even the child whom he sincerely loves, and the woman in whose embrace he begot that child, recede into such a civilian remoteness that the mouths which they present to him in farewell are almost strange to him, and his home becomes something foreign, which in his uniform he dare not enter. Should he next proceed in his uniform to the barracks or to his office, it must not be thought pride that makes him ignore men otherwise clothed; it is simply that he can no longer comprehend that such alien and barbarous raiment can clothe anything even faintly resembling actual humanity as he feels it in himself. Yet this does not mean that the man in uniform has become blind, nor that he is filled with blind prejudices, as is commonly assumed; he remains all the time a man like you and me, dreams of food and love, even reads his newspaper at breakfast; but he is no longer tied to things, and as they scarcely concern him any longer he is able to divide them into the good and the bad, for on intolerance and lack of understanding the security of life is based.

Whenever Joachim von Pasenow was compelled to put on civilian clothes Eduard von Bertrand came into his mind, and he was always glad that mufti did not sit on him with the same assurance as on that man; yet he was very eager to know what Bertrand’s views were on the question of uniform.