Schwartz: A History | Page 3

in Janenne, and
contentment dwells with her, sleepy-eyed.
Even in the first week of December, the russet and amber-coloured
leaves still cling to the branches of the huge old lime-trees of Lorette,
and my lonely feet on the thick carpet of dead leaves below made the
sole sound I heard there except the ceaseless musical tinkle of chisel
and stone from the distant granite quarries--a succession of notes
altogether rural in suggestion--like the tinkle of many sheep-bells. Even
in that first week of December I could sit in the open air there, where
the mild winter sunlight flashed the huge crucifix and the colossal
Christ of painted wood, which poise above the toy chapel carved out of
the live rock. The chapel and the crucifix are at one end of a lime-tree

avenue a third of a mile long, and the trees are aged beyond strict local
knowledge, gnarled and warty and bulbous and great of girth. You
climb to Lorette by a gentle ascent, and below the rock-carved chapel
lies a precipice--not an Alpine affair at all, but a reasonable precipice
for Belgium--say, two or even three hundred feet, and away and away
and away, the golden-dimpled hills go changing from the yellowish
green of winter grass to the variously-toned grays of the same grass in
mid-distance, and then to a blue which grows continually hazier until it
melts at the sky-line, and seems half to blend with the dim pallid
sapphire of a December sky.
Here, 'with an ambrosial sense of over-weariness falling into sleep,'
would I often sit at the foot of the great crucifix, and would smoke the
pipe of idleness, a little unmindful, perhaps, of the good London
doctor's caution against the misuse of tobacco. It was here that I awoke
to the fact one day that the man with the axe was absent. He had
slipped away with no good-byes on either side, and I was blissfully
alone again. The sweet peace of it, and the quiet of it no tongue or pen
can tell. The air was balsamic with the odours of the pines which
clothed the hillsides for miles and miles and miles in squares and
oblongs and a hundred irregular forms of blackish green, sometimes
snaking in a thin dark line, sometimes topping a crest with a
close-cropped hog-mane, and sometimes clustering densely over a
whole slope, but always throwing the neighbouring yellows and greens
and grays into a wonderful aerial delicacy of contrast. The scarred lime
trunks had a bluish gray tone in the winter sunlight, and the carpet at
their feet was of Indian red and sienna and brown, of fiercest scarlet
and gold and palest lemon colour, of amber and russet and dead green.
And everywhere, and in my tired mind most of all, was peace.
I had been a fortnight at Janenne when my intrusive phantom left me
on Lorette. I had made no acquaintances, for I was but feeble at the
language, and did not care to encounter the trouble of talking in it. The
first friendship I made--I have since spent three years in the delightful
place, and have made several friendships there--was begun within five
minutes of that exquisite moment at which I awoke to the fact that my
phantom was away.

There was not a living creature in sight, and there was not a sound to be
heard except the distant tinkle of chisel and stone, and the occasional
rustle of a falling leaf, until Schwartz, the subject of this history,
walked pensively round a corner eighty yards down the avenue, and
paused to scratch one ear with a hind foot. He stood for a time with a
thoughtful air, looked up the avenue and down the avenue, and then
with slow deliberation, and an occasional pause for thought, he walked
towards me. When within half a dozen yards he stopped and took good
stock of me, with brown eyes overhung by thick grizzled eyebrows.
Then he offered a short, interrogative, authoritative bark, a mere
monosyllable of inquiry.
'A stranger,' I responded. 'An invalid stranger.' He seemed not only
satisfied, but, for some unknown reason, delighted. He wagged the
cropped stump of a gray tail, and writhed his whole body with a
greeting that had an almost slavish air of charmed propitiation; and
then, without a word on his side or on mine, he mounted the steps
which led to the great crucifix, sate down upon the topmost step beside
me, and nestled his grizzled head in my lap. I confess that he could
have done nothing which would have pleased me more. I have always
thought the unconditional and immediate confidence of a dog or a child
a sort of certificate to character, though I know well that there is a kind
of dog