The child Oscar did not like Kahn, yet sometimes he would become extraordinarily excited, talk very fast, almost banteringly, a little malignly, and once when Kahn had taken his hand he drew it away angrily. “Don’t,” he said.
“Because it is dirty,” he retorted maliciously.
“As if you really knew of what I was thinking,” Kahn said, and put his own hands behind him.
Emma liked Kahn, was attached to him. He mentioned her faults without regret or reproval, and this in itself was a divine sort of love.
He would remark: “We cannot be just because we are bewildered; we ought to be proud enough to welcome our enemies as judges, but we hate, and to hate is the act of the incurious. I love with an everlasting but a changing love, because I know I am the wrong sort of man to be good—and because I revere the shadow on the threshold.”
“In one man we called it Christ—it is energy; for most of us it is dead, a phantom. If you have it you _are_ Christ, and if you have only a little of it you are but the promise of the Messiah.”
These seemed great words, and she looked at him with a little admiring smile.
“You make me uneasy for fear that I have not said ‘I love you with an everlasting love,’ often enough to make it an act of fanaticism.”
As for Oscar, he did what he liked, which gave him character, but made him difficult to live with.
He was not one of those “weedy” youths, long of leg, and stringy like “jerked beef, thank God!” as his mother said to visitors. He was rather too full-grown, thick of calf and hip and rather heavy of feature. His hands and feet were not out of proportion as is usually the case with children of his age, but they were too old looking.
He did not smoke surreptitiously. On the contrary he had taken out a pipe one day in front of his mother, and filling it, smoked in silence, not even with a frightened air, and for that matter not even with a particularly bold air;—he did it quite simply, as something he had finally decided to do, and Emma Gonsberg had gone off to Kahn with it, in a rather helpless manner.
Most children swing in circles about a room, clumsily. Oscar on the contrary walked into the four corners placidly and officially, looked at the backs of the books here and a picture there, and even grunted approvingly at one or two in quite a mature manner.