He felt once more the old mystical enthusiasm, deeper than
the sea and more wonderful than the stars; he heard again the winds
sighing from leagues of forest over the red roofs in the moonlight; he
heard the Brothers' voices talking of the things beyond this life as
though they had actually experienced them in the body; and, as he sat in
the jolting train, a spirit of unutterable longing passed over his
seared and tired soul, stirring in the depths of him a sea of emotions
that he thought had long since frozen into immobility. And the contrast pained him,--the idealistic dreamer then, the man of
business now,--so that a spirit of unworldly peace and beauty known only
to the soul in meditation laid its feathered finger upon his heart,
moving strangely the surface of the waters. Harris shivered a little and looked out of the window of his empty
carriage. The train had long passed Hornberg, and far below the streams
tumbled in white foam down the limestone rocks. In front of him, dome
upon dome of wooded mountain stood against the sky. It was October, and
the air was cool and sharp, woodsmoke and damp moss exquisitely mingled
in it with the subtle odours of the pines. Overhead, between the tips of
the highest firs, he saw the first stars peeping, and the sky was a
clean, pale amethyst that seemed exactly the colour all these memories
clothed themselves with in his mind. He leaned back in his corner and sighed. He was a heavy man, and he had
not known sentiment for years; he was a big man, and it took much to
move him, literally and figuratively; he was a man in whom the dreams of
God that haunt the soul in youth, though overlaid by the scum that
gathers in the fight for money, had not, as with the majority, utterly
died the death. He came back into this little neglected pocket of the years, where so
much fine gold had collected and lain undisturbed, with all his
semispiritual emotions aquiver; and, as he watched the mountain-tops
come nearer, and smelt the forgotten odours of his boyhood, something
melted on the surface of his soul and left him sensitive to a degree he
had not known since, thirty years before, he had lived here with his
dreams, his conflicts, and his youthful suffering. A thrill ran through him as the train stopped with a jolt at a tiny
station and he saw the name in large black lettering on the grey stone
building, and below it, the number of metres it stood above the level of
the sea. "The highest point on the line!" he exclaimed. "How well I remember
it--Sommerau--Summer Meadow. The very next station is mine!" And, as the train ran downhill with brakes on and steam shut off, he put
his head out of the window and one by one saw the old familiar landmarks
in the dusk. They stared at him like dead faces in a dream. Queer, sharp
feelings, half poignant, half sweet, stirred in his heart. "There's the hot, white road we walked along so often with the two
Brüder always at our heels," he thought; "and there, by Jove, is the
turn through the forest to '_Die Galgen_,' the stone gallows where they
hanged the witches in olden days!" He smiled a little as the train slid past. "And there's the copse where the Lilies of the Valley powdered the
ground in spring; and, I swear,"--he put his head out with a sudden
impulse--"if that's not the very clearing where Calame, the French boy,
chased the swallow-tail with me, and Bruder Pagel gave us half-rations
for leaving the road without permission, and for shouting in our mother
tongues!" And he laughed again as the memories came back with a rush,
flooding his mind with vivid detail. The train stopped, and he stood on the grey gravel platform like a man
in a dream. It seemed half a century since he last waited there with
corded wooden boxes, and got into the train for Strassbourg and home
after the two years' exile. Time dropped from him like an old garment
and he felt a boy again. Only, things looked so much smaller than his
memory of them; shrunk and dwindled they looked, and the distances
seemed on a curiously smaller scale. He made his way across the road to the little Gasthaus, and, as he went,
faces and figures of former schoolfellows,--German, Swiss, Italian,
French, Russian,--slipped out of the shadowy woods and silently
accompanied him. They flitted by his side, raising their eyes
questioningly, sadly, to his. But their names he had forgotten. Some of
the Brothers, too, came with them, and most of these he remembered by
name--Bruder Röst, Bruder Pagel, Bruder Schliemann, and the bearded face
of the old preacher who had seen himself in the haunted gallery of those
about to die--Bruder Gysin. The dark forest lay all about him like a sea
that any moment might rush with velvet waves upon the scene and sweep
all the faces away. The air was cool and wonderfully fragrant, but with
every perfumed breath came also a pallid memory.... Yet, in spite of the underlying sadness inseparable from such an
experience, it was all very interesting, and held a pleasure peculiarly
its own, so that Harris engaged his room and ordered supper feeling well
pleased with himself, and intending to walk up to the old school that
very evening. It stood in the centre of the community's village, some
four miles distant through the forest, and he now recollected for the
first time that this little Protestant settlement dwelt isolated in a
section of the country that was otherwise Catholic. Crucifixes and
shrines surrounded the clearing like the sentries of a beleaguering
army. Once beyond the square of the village, with its few acres of field
and orchard, the forest crowded up in solid phalanxes, and beyond the
rim of trees began the country that was ruled by the priests of another
faith. He vaguely remembered, too, that the Catholics had showed
sometimes a certain hostility towards the little Protestant oasis that
flourished so quietly and benignly in their midst. He had quite
forgotten this. How trumpery it all seemed now with his wide experience
of life and his knowledge of other countries and the great outside
world. It was like stepping back, not thirty years, but three hundred. There were only two others besides himself at supper. One of them, a
bearded, middle-aged man in tweeds, sat by himself at the far end, and
Harris kept out of his way because he was English. He feared he might be
in business, possibly even in the silk business, and that he would
perhaps talk on the subject. The other traveller, however, was a
Catholic priest. He was a little man who ate his salad with a knife, yet
so gently that it was almost inoffensive, and it was the sight of "the
cloth" that recalled his memory of the old antagonism. Harris mentioned
by way of conversation the object of his sentimental journey, and the
priest looked up sharply at him with raised eyebrows and an expression
of surprise and suspicion that somehow piqued him. He ascribed it to his
difference of belief.