Colonel Wragge and the doctor recovered themselves long before I did,
and I found myself helping them clumsily and unintelligently to raise
the frail body of the old lady, while John Silence carefully replaced
the covering over the grave and scraped back the sand with his foot,
while he issued brief directions. I heard his voice as in a dream; but the journey back along that
cramped tunnel, weighted by a dead woman, blinded with sand, suffocated
with heat, was in no sense a dream. It took us the best part of half
an hour to reach the open air. And, even then, we had to wait a
considerable time for the appearance of Dr. Silence. We carried her
undiscovered into the house and up to her own room. “The mummy will cause no further disturbance,” I heard Dr. Silence say
to our host later that evening as we prepared to drive for the night
train, “provided always,” he added significantly, “that you, and yours,
cause _it_ no disturbance.”

It was in a dream, too, that we left. “You did not see her face, I know,” he said to me as we wrapped our
rugs about us in the empty compartment. And when I shook my head, quite
unable to explain the instinct that had come to me not to look, he
turned towards me, his face pale, and genuinely sad. “Scorched and blasted,” he whispered. CASE IV

SECRET WORSHIP


Harris, the silk merchant, was in South Germany on his way home from
a business trip when the idea came to him suddenly that he would take
the mountain railway from Strassbourg and run down to revisit his old
school after an interval of something more than thirty years. And it
was to this chance impulse of the junior partner in Harris Brothers of
St. Paul’s Churchyard that John Silence owed one of the most curious
cases of his whole experience, for at that very moment he happened to
be tramping these same mountains with a holiday knapsack, and from
different points of the compass the two men were actually converging
towards the same inn. Now, deep down in the heart that for thirty years had been concerned
chiefly with the profitable buying and selling of silk, this school had
left the imprint of its peculiar influence, and, though perhaps unknown
to Harris, had strongly coloured the whole of his subsequent existence. It belonged to the deeply religious life of a small Protestant
community (which it is unnecessary to specify), and his father had
sent him there at the age of fifteen, partly because he would learn
the German requisite for the conduct of the silk business, and partly
because the discipline was strict, and discipline was what his soul and
body needed just then more than anything else. The life, indeed, had proved exceedingly severe, and young Harris
benefited accordingly; for though corporal punishment was unknown,
there was a system of mental and spiritual correction which somehow
made the soul stand proudly erect to receive it, while it struck at the
very root of the fault and taught the boy that his character was being
cleaned and strengthened, and that he was not merely being tortured in
a kind of personal revenge. That was over thirty years ago, when he was a dreamy and impressionable
youth of fifteen; and now, as the train climbed slowly up the winding
mountain gorges, his mind travelled back somewhat lovingly over the
intervening period, and forgotten details rose vividly again before him
out of the shadows. The life there had been very wonderful, it seemed
to him, in that remote mountain village, protected from the tumults
of the world by the love and worship of the devout Brotherhood that
ministered to the needs of some hundred boys from every country in
Europe. Sharply the scenes came back to him. He smelt again the long
stone corridors, the hot pinewood rooms, where the sultry hours of
summer study were passed with bees droning through open windows in the
sunshine, and German characters struggling in the mind with dreams of
English lawns--and then the sudden awful cry of the master in German--

“Harris, stand up! You sleep!”

And he recalled the dreadful standing motionless for an hour, book in
hand, while the knees felt like wax and the head grew heavier than a
cannon-ball. The very smell of the cooking came back to him--the daily _Sauerkraut_,
the watery chocolate on Sundays, the flavour of the stringy meat
served twice a week at _Mittagessen_; and he smiled to think again of
the half-rations that was the punishment for speaking English. The
very odour of the milk-bowls,--the hot sweet aroma that rose from the
soaking peasant-bread at the six-o’clock breakfast,--came back to him
pungently, and he saw the huge _Speisesaal_ with the hundred boys in
their school uniform, all eating sleepily in silence, gulping down
the coarse bread and scalding milk in terror of the bell that would
presently cut them short--and, at the far end where the masters sat,
he saw the narrow slit windows with the vistas of enticing field and
forest beyond. And this, in turn, made him think of the great barn-like room on the
top floor where all slept together in wooden cots, and he heard in
memory the clamour of the cruel bell that woke them on winter mornings
at five o’clock and summoned them to the stone-flagged _Waschkammer_,
where boys and masters alike, after scanty and icy washing, dressed in
complete silence. From this his mind passed swiftly, with vivid picture-thoughts,
to other things, and with a passing shiver he remembered how
the loneliness of never being alone had eaten into him, and how
everything--work, meals, sleep, walks, leisure--was done with his
“division” of twenty other boys and under the eyes of at least two
masters. The only solitude possible was by asking for half an hour’s
practice in the cell-like music rooms, and Harris smiled to himself as
he recalled the zeal of his violin studies. Then, as the train puffed laboriously through the great pine forests
that cover these mountains with a giant carpet of velvet, he found the
pleasanter layers of memory giving up their dead, and he recalled with
admiration the kindness of the masters, whom all addressed as Brother,
and marvelled afresh at their devotion in burying themselves for years
in such a place, only to leave it, in most cases, for the still rougher
life of missionaries in the wild places of the world. He thought once more of the still, religious atmosphere that hung
over the little forest community like a veil, barring the distressful
world; of the picturesque ceremonies at Easter, Christmas, and New
Year; of the numerous feast-days and charming little festivals. The
_Beschehr-Fest_, in particular, came back to him,--the feast of gifts
at Christmas,--when the entire community paired off and gave presents,
many of which had taken weeks to make or the savings of many days to
purchase.