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"I was thinking how ridiculous we all are," Hugo went on without change of tone or expression, "grovelling here on our stomachs and pretending that we slept when we didn't and that we want to be killed when we don't!" "White feather again!" Pilzer exclaimed. "Oh, shut up!" snapped the doctor's son irritably. "Let Hugo talk. He's only gassing.
"You have the right sort of sang-froid, Peter Kinderling!" whispered Fracasse. "And you, Pilzer, showed a proper spirit, too, if wrongly directed." Under cover of this favor, Peterkin drew a little out of line, making a great pretence of stretching his legs and yawning yawning with a sincerely dropped jaw and a quivering lip. He pressed his chin against the ground and this stopped the quivering.
Even the judge's son, the son of the tribune of law, joined in. Pilzer then ripped up the leather seat of a chair. This introductory havoc whetted his appetite for other worlds of conquest, as the self-chosen leader of the increasing crowd that poured through the doorway. "Maybe there's food!" he shouted. "Maybe there's wine!" "Food and wine!" "Yes, wine! We're thirsty!" "And maybe women!
Essentially a solo violinist, Mr. Pilzer nevertheless has the born teacher's wish to impart, to share, where talent justifies it, his own knowledge. He himself did not have to tell the listener this the lesson he was giving betrayed the fact. It was Kreisler's Tambourin Chinois that the student played. And as Mr.
"Out of the way, you white-livered little rat!" cried Pilzer, "or I'll prick the tummy of mamma's darling!" What happened then was so sudden and unexpected in Hugo that all were vague about details. They saw him in a catapultic lunge, mesmeric in its swiftness, and they saw Pilzer go down, his leg twisted under him and his head banging the floor.
And she realized that a change had come over her a change inexplicable and telling and she was tired oh, so tired! It had been exhausting work, indeed, for one woman, though she had been around the world, making war on two armies. Meanwhile, all too flushed with energy, the energy of movement, to think of the feud between Hugo and Pilzer, Fracasse's men had sped along the castle road.
"Yes, sir," answered Hugo, with the automatic deference of private to officer but with a reserved and studious inquiry that made the captain bite his lip. "I'll have Aronson and Pilzer watch you, too!" Fracasse added. "Yes, sir!" said Pilzer promptly. Then, under the restraint of the captain's presence, there was a silence that endured.
In crossing the threshold of privacy they committed the act that leaves the deepest wound of war's inheritance, to go on from generation to generation in the history of families. "A swell dining-room! I like the chandeliers!" roared Pilzer. With his bayonet he smashed the only globe left intact by the shell fire. There was a laugh as a shower of glass fell on the floor.
Hugo was firing vaguely, like a man in a dream, and thinking that maybe up there on the knoll were the two Browns he had met on the road and perhaps their comrades were as fond of them as he was of Eugene. It is a mistake for a soldier to think much, as Westerling had repeatedly said. Pilzer was shooting to kill.
Oh, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumbshows and noise!..." Maximilian Pilzer is deservedly prominent among younger American concert violinists.