Three More John Silence Stories | Page 3

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