If he met his schoolday comrades, he shuddered to see how he was still a John-a-Dreams and how practical these friends had grown. He heard scarcely anything save in mockery of what in days gone by they had fondly dreamt, of what they agreed to recognize as holy, sublime, and the highest good. “We were fools then,” said they, “now we have cooled down.”
They were so prompt and peremptory in their judgments that Vojtech had no time given him to answer them. Something shivered within him, he began to reflect about it and had not gone very far ere he took to flight before the grinning fangs of importunate reality and then he made up his mind to suspend judgment for the present as to his course of life.
He knew well enough that he might have managed like his companions, to flourish a long pen at some office, to turn over the paper in large sheets, to look out of the window, to prudently conform himself to trivial details, from hour to hour to toil at a desk, and by similar exemplary actions to establish his reputation. Only one thing he could not have managed: for the sake of his official chief to give his own opinions the lie, to say “yes” when his opinion said “no” and to acquiesce in anything merely because he was a subordinate. He knew this shortcoming of his own and therefore did not yearn to obtain for it official confirmation.
Yes, in Vojtech, there was in reality something which with feverish timidity struggled to preserve itself intact. If ever he should have to dissever himself from it he thought that he should fail to feel his own identity, that he should lose his self-respect and fall like a drop into that broad stream of indifference which the breeze drives before it withersoever it will. Those maxims which he had hitherto made his own, seemed to him still to form the only substantial portion of his life and he thought that to eradicate them would be to dig up the very roots of his own individuality. His own intuitions were the objects of his love and reverence so that at times he felt determined to preserve them even in misery and never to exchange them for others. Yes it almost allured him—that idea to be great in adversity. That fierce volcano of youthful aims and aspirations—to carry it through the frost of life unchilled—oh! that inspired, that excited him. To warm his shrunken hands in the warmth of his own soul, to pasture the fevered eye of poverty on the flowers of existence—that appeared to him to be a note of greatness. And as we have just seen he was on the high road to this transcendental poverty.
