Fraulein Muller was already up.
She was picking parsley in the garden.
She started when I spoke to her.
Rather awkwardly I tried to apologise if I had perhaps sworn overmuch yesterday.
She started to cry.
"Poor lady.
So beautiful, and so young."
"She's going to live to a hundred," said I, vexed that she should weep as if Pat were going to die.
Pat wasn't going to die.
The cool morning, the quick sea-whipped life in me, told me so; Pat could not die. She could die only if I lost heart.
Koster was here—I was here: Pat's comrades . . . we would die first.
As long as we lived, she would pull through.
It had been before.
While Koster lived, I did not die.
And so while we two lived, Pat could not die.
"One must submit to fate," said the old woman, and looked at me rather reproachfully out of her brown, wrinkled baked-apple face.
She meant my cursing, apparently.
"Submit?" said I. "Why submit?
Small good that will do.
Everything in life has to be paid for, twice, thrice over.
Then why submit?"
"Yes, yes—it is the best."
Submit! thought I. A lot that would help.
Fight, fight, was the only thing in this struggle, where one would go under in the end anyway.
Fight for the little that one loved.
At seventy one might begin to think about submitting.
Koster spoke to her.
Soon she was smiling again and asking him what he would like for lunch.
"You see," said Otto. "That's the gift of age. Tears and laughter—quick changes.
No resentments.
Something one might well learn," he observed meditatively.
We took a turn round the house.
"Every minute she can sleep is to the good," said I.
We came back into the garden.
Fraulein Muller had spread the breakfast.
We drank hot black coffee.
The sun came up, and at once it was warm.
The leaves of the trees glistened with the light and the wet.
From the sea came the cry of the gulls.
Fraulein Muller placed a bunch of roses on the table. "We will give them to her afterwards," said she.
The roses were fragrant of childhood and garden walls.
"Do you know, Otto," said I, "I feel as if I had been ill myself . . .
I'm not the man I used to be.
I ought to have been calmer. Cooler.
The calmer a man is the more help he can be."
"One can't always be so, Bob.
I have had times myself.
The longer one lives the more fearful one gets.
It's like a gambler who is always having new losses."
The door opened.