Rosshalde by Hermann Hesse Page B

want to spend a little time with him.”
    â€œThere’s no point in getting excited. These things happen. Pierre spends plenty of time with you.”
    He bit his lips and left without a word. She was right, there was no point in getting excited, there was no point in being intense and demanding anything of the moment. It was better to sit there patient and indifferent as she did.
    Angrily, he went downstairs and out through the gate to the road. No, that was something he had no desire to learn, he wanted his joy and his anger. What a damper this woman had already put on him, how temperate and old he had become, he who had formerly prolonged happy days boisterously into the night and smashed chairs in anger. All his bitterness and resentment rose up in him, and at the same time an intense longing for his boy, whose voice and glance alone could give him joy.
    With long strides, he started down the road. A sound of wheels was heard, and eagerly he hastened his step. It was nothing. A peasant with a cart full of vegetables. Veraguth called out to him. “Have you passed a coupé with two boys on the box?”
    The peasant shook his head without stopping, and his lumbering farm horse jogged on indifferently into the mild evening.
    As he walked, the painter felt his anger cool and seep away. His step became more relaxed, a soothing weariness came over him, and as he strode easily along, his eyes rested gratefully on the rich quiet countryside, which lay pale and mild in the misty evening light.
    He was hardly thinking of his sons when, after he had been walking for half an hour, their carriage came toward him. It was close to him before it caught his attention. Veraguth stopped under a large pear tree. When he recognized Albert’s face, he stepped back, not wishing them to see him and call out to him.
    Albert was alone on the box. Pierre sat slumped in a corner of the carriage, his bare head had drooped and he seemed to be asleep. The carriage rolled past and the painter looked after it, standing at the side of the dusty road until it disappeared from sight. Then he turned around and started back. He would have liked to see Pierre, but it was almost the child’s bedtime and Veraguth had no desire to show himself at his wife’s house that day.
    And so, passing the park, the house, and the gate, he continued on into town, where he took supper at a tavern and leafed through the papers.
    By then his sons had long been home. Albert sat with his mother, telling her about the expedition. Pierre had been very tired, he had not wanted his supper, and now he was lying asleep in his pretty little bedroom. When his father passed the house on his way home, there was no light to be seen. The balmy starless night surrounded park, house, and lake with black stillness, and fine soft raindrops fell from the motionless air.
    Veraguth put on the light in his living room and sat down at his desk. His craving for sleep was gone. He took a sheet of letter paper and wrote to Otto Burkhardt. Little moths flitted in through the open windows. He wrote:
    My dear friend:
    You were probably not expecting a letter from me so soon. But since I am writing now, you surely expect more than I can give. You think that clarity has come to me and that I now see the damaged mechanism of my life as neatly in cross section as you believe you see it. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Yes, there have been flashes of summer lightning inside me since we spoke of those things, and from time to time an extremely painful revelation stares me in the face; but it is not daylight yet.
    So, you see, I can’t say what I shall or shall not do later on. But we will go away together. I will go to India with you, please get me a berth as soon as you know the date. I can’t leave before the end of the summer, but in the fall the sooner the better.
    I want to give you the painting you saw here, the one with the fishes, but it would please me to have it