Schwartz: A History | Page 8

songs with choruses, moistening and mellowing his
vocal chords with plenteous burgundy. Long after everybody else has
gone to bed, he tramps in chorus along the echoing unclothed corridor,
and he and his chums open bedroom doors to shout Belgian scraps of
facetio 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