had agreed in his
own mind that his brother had used means which he was pleased to feel
himself too noble to apply. In that way Apollonius had won the people
away from him. The latter had no suspicion of what was going on in his
brother's breast; he was on his guard against him, as one must be
against cunning persons, for such enemies can only be defeated with
their own weapons. The brotherly friendliness and respect with which
Apollonius treated him was a mask behind which he thought he could
certainly hide his sinister plans; he would pay him back and make him
more easily harmless if he hid his watchfulness behind the same mask.
Apollonius' good-natured willingness outwardly to subordinate himself
to him appeared to his brother like derision in which the workmen, won
over by the deceitful one, knowingly took part. In his sensitiveness,
he himself resorted to the means that he assumed his brother employed.
He was prevented from opposing him openly by the fact that Apollonius
impressed him himself, even though he would not have acknowledged
this to be the reason. He laid the blue coat of thunder aside and
descended to the very lowest rung of his joviality. He began by hints
and then gradually by words to show his sympathy with the workmen who
groaned beneath the tyranny of a time-serving intruder, as he proved
to them; as he had not the courage to incite them to open rebellion he
sought to lead them to commit single petty acts of mutiny. He began to
treat them to food and drink daily. They ate and drank, but remained
as before in the course that Apollonius marked out for them.

The common man has a child's keen eye for the strong points and
weaknesses of his superior. This endeavor, which they saw through,
lost Fritz Nettenmair the last vestige of the men's respect; it taught
them, if they did not already know it, in whose bad books they might
safely come, in whose they might not. And if they had been uncertain,
the inspector's different behavior toward the two brothers might have
determined them. And as they were not so finely organized, and also
had not the same reasons as Fritz Nettenmair, their opinion made
itself undisguisedly plain. They took liberties with him which showed
him that the success of his condescension was entirely different from
what he had intended. Then he drew the cloud of the blue coat once
more wrathfully about him, whistled more shrilly than ever, so that
the big bell on the other side resound