Schwartz: A History | Page 8

at each other, or to cast prodigious boots upon the sounding boards. Then long before anybody else has a mind to rise, he is up again promenading the corridor like a multiplied copy of the giant in the Castle of Otranto. He rolls away in the darkness with the cracking of whips and jingling of bells, and sleep and silence settle down again. At night he is back to supper with tales of big game multitudinous as Laban's flocks, and a bag unaccountably empty. That same evening he is away to desk or counter or studio in Brussels, Antwerp, or Liège, and Janenne falls back into its normal peace.
It was mid-December, and the snow was falling in powdery flakes, when a sportsman alighted at the Hotel des Postes, and at the first glance I knew him for a countryman. He was a fine, frank, free-hearted young fellow, one of the most easily likable of youngsters, and we were on friendly terms together before the first evening was over. He knew a number of people in the neighbourhood, had received a dozen invitations to shoot, or thereabouts, and meant to put up three weeks at Janenne, so he told me, shooting when sport was to be had, and on other days tramping about the country. He was accompanied by a bull-terrier, who answered to the name of Scraper, a handsome creature of his kind, with one eye in permanent mourning.
'Of course he's no good,' said the young fellow, in answer to an observation of mine, 'but then he's perfectly tamed, and therefore he's no harm. He'll stay where he's told; and I believe the poor beggar would break his heart if I left him behind. Wouldn't you, old chap?'
The young sportsman went away to the chase next morning, taking his bull-terrier with him, and returning at night reported Scraper's perfect good behaviour. In the course of that evening's talk I spoke of certain peculiarities I had noticed in the formation of the country, and my new acquaintance proposed that on an idle day of his next week we should take a walk of exploration. When the day came we started together, and I showed him some of the curiosities of nature I had noticed.
Round and about Janenne the world is hollow. The hills are mere bubbles, and the earth is honeycombed with caverns. By the side of the road which leads to Houssy a river accompanies the traveller's steps, purling and singing, and talking secrets (as shallow pebbly-bedded streams have a way of doing), and on a sudden the traveller misses it. There, before him, is a river bed, wide, white, and stony, but where is the river? If he be a curious traveller he will retrace his steps, and will find the stream racing with some impetuosity towards a bend, where it dwindles by apparent miracle into nothing. The curious traveller, naturally growing more curious than common in the presence of these phenomena, will, at some risk to his neck, descend the bank, and make inquiry into the reason for the disappearance of the stream. He will see nothing to account for it, but he will probably arrive at the conclusion that there are fissures in the river's bed, through which the water falls to feed the subterranean stream, of which he is pretty certain to have heard or read. If he will walk back a mile, against the course of the stream, will cross the main street of Janenne, strike the Montcourtois Road there, and cross the river bridge, he will see a cavern lipped by the flowing water, and in that cavern, only a foot or so below the level of the open-air stream, he will find its subterranean continuation. It has worked back upon itself in this secret way, by what strange courses no man knows or can guess. But that the stream is the same has been proved by a device at once ingenious and simple. Colouring matter of various sorts has from time to time been thrown into the water at its place of disappearance, and the tinted stream has poured, hours and hours afterwards, through the cavern, which is only a mile away, and stands so near the earlier stream that in times of rain the waters mingle there.
On the sides of the hills, and in the brushwood which clothes their feet, one finds all manner of holes and caves and crevices, some of them very shallow, and some of them of unknown depth. In the Bois de Janenne alone there are four or five of them.
All this has strictly to do with the history of Schwartz, as will by and by be seen.
When heavy rains fall the river is so swollen that the underground call upon its resources fails to drain it, and