Three More John Silence Stories | Page 5

memories were in full possession once more. The hour of return
was a matter of no consequence whatever.
It was then just after seven o'clock, and the October evening was
drawing in with chill airs from the recesses of the forest. The road
plunged straight from the railway clearing into its depths, and in a very
few minutes the trees engulfed him and the clack of his boots fell dead
and echoless against the serried stems of a million firs. It was very
black; one trunk was hardly distinguishable from another. He walked
smartly, swinging his holly stick. Once or twice he passed a peasant on
his way to bed, and the guttural "Gruss Got," unheard for so long,
emphasised the passage of time, while yet making it seem as nothing. A
fresh group of pictures crowded his mind. Again the figures of former
schoolfellows flitted out of the forest and kept pace by his side,
whispering of the doings of long ago. One reverie stepped hard upon

the heels of another. Every turn in the road, every clearing of the forest,
he knew, and each in turn brought forgotten associations to life. He
enjoyed himself thoroughly.
He marched on and on. There was powdered gold in the sky till the
moon rose, and then a wind of faint silver spread silently between the
earth and stars. He saw the tips of the fir trees shimmer, and heard them
whisper as the breeze turned their needles towards the light. The
mountain air was indescribably sweet. The road shone like the foam of
a river through the gloom. White moths flitted here and there like silent
thoughts across his path, and a hundred smells greeted him from the
forest caverns across the years.
Then, when he least expected it, the trees fell away abruptly on both
sides, and he stood on the edge of the village clearing.
He walked faster. There lay the familiar outlines of the houses, sheeted
with silver; there stood the trees in the little central square with the
fountain and small green lawns; there loomed the shape of the church
next to the Gasthof der Brüdergemeinde; and just beyond, dimly rising
into the sky, he saw with a sudden thrill the mass of the huge school
building, blocked castlelike with deep shadows in the moonlight,
standing square and formidable to face him after the silences of more
than a quarter of a century.
He passed quickly down the deserted village street and stopped close
beneath its shadow, staring up at the walls that had once held him
prisoner for two years--two unbroken years of discipline and
homesickness. Memories and emotions surged through his mind; for
the most vivid sensations of his youth had focused about this spot, and
it was here he had first begun to live and learn values. Not a single
footstep broke the silence, though lights glimmered here and there
through cottage windows; but when he looked up at the high walls of
the school, draped now in shadow, he easily imagined that well-known
faces crowded to the windows to greet him--closed windows that really
reflected only moonlight and the gleam of stars.
This, then, was the old school building, standing foursquare to the

world, with its shuttered windows, its lofty, tiled roof, and the spiked
lightning-conductors pointing like black and taloned fingers from the
corners. For a long time he stood and stared. Then, presently, he came
to himself again, and realised to his joy that a light still shone in the
windows of the Bruderstube.
He turned from the road and passed through the iron railings; then
climbed the twelve stone steps and stood facing the black wooden door
with the heavy bars of iron, a door he had once loathed and dreaded
with the hatred and passion of an imprisoned soul, but now looked
upon tenderly with a sort of boyish delight.
Almost timorously he pulled the rope and listened with a tremor of
excitement to the clanging of the bell deep within the building. And the
long-forgotten sound brought the past before him with such a vivid
sense of reality that he positively shivered. It was like the magic bell in
the fairy-tale that rolls back the curtain of Time and summons the
figures from the shadows of the dead. He had never felt so sentimental
in his life. It was like being young again. And, at the same time, he
began to bulk rather large in his own eyes with a certain spurious
importance. He was a big man from the world of strife and action. In
this little place of peaceful dreams would he, perhaps, not cut
something of a figure?
"I'll try once more," he thought after a long pause, seizing the iron
bell-rope, and was just about to