Next day we started before
dawn, and I never saw him again.
This is the story of the wine of Brule, and it shows that what men
love is never money itself but their own way, and that human beings
love sympathy and pageant above all things. It also teaches us not to
be hard on the rich.
I walked along the valley of the Moselle, and as I walked the long
evening of summer began to fall. The sky was empty and its deeps
infinite; the clearness of the air set me dreaming. I passed the turn
where we used to halt when we were learning how to ride in front of
the guns, past the little house where, on rare holidays, the boys
could eat a matelote, which is fish boiled in wine, and so on to the
place where the river is held by a weir and opens out into a kind of
lake.
Here I waited for a moment by the wooden railing, and looked up into
the hills. So far I had been at home, and I was now poring upon the
last familiar thing before I ventured into the high woods and began my
experience. I therefore took a leisurely farewell, and pondered
instead of walking farther. Everything about me conduced to
reminiscence and to ease. A flock of sheep passed me with their
shepherd, who gave me a good-night. I found myself entering that
pleasant mood in which all books are conceived (but none written); I
was 'smoking the enchanted cigarettes' of Balzac, and if this kind of
reverie is fatal to action, yet it is so much a factor of happiness
that I wasted in the contemplation of that lovely and silent hollow
many miles of marching. I suppose if a man were altogether his own
master and controlled by no necessity, not even the necessity of
expression, all his life would pass away in these sublime imaginings.
This was a place I remembered very well. The rising river of Lorraine
is caught and barred, and it spreads in a great sheet of water that
must be very shallow, but that in its reflections and serenity
resembles rather a profound and silent mere. The steeps surrounding it
are nearly mountainous, and are crowned with deep forests in which the
province reposes, and upon which it depends for its local genius. A
little village, which we used to call 'St Peter of the Quarries', lies
up on the right between the steep and the water, and just where the
hills end a flat that was once marshy and is now half fields, half
ponds, but broken with luxuriant trees, marks the great age of its
civilization. Along this flat runs, bordered with rare poplars, the
road which one can follow on and on into the heart of the Vosges. I
took from this silence and this vast plain of still water the repose
that introduces night. It was all consonant with what the peasants
were about: the return from labour, the bleating folds, and the
lighting of lamps under the eaves. In such a spirit I passed along the
upper valley to the spring of the hills.
In St Pierre it was just that passing of daylight when a man thinks he
can still read; when the buildings and the bridges are great masses of
purple that deceive one, recalling the details of daylight, but when
the night birds, surer than men and less troubled by this illusion of
memory, have discovered that their darkness has conquered.
The peasants sat outside their houses in the twilight accepting the
cool air; every one spoke to me as I marched through, and I answered
them all, nor was there in any of their salutations the omission of
good fellowship or of the name of God. Saving with one man, who was a
sergeant of artillery on leave, and who cried out to me in an accent
that was very familiar and asked me to drink; but I told him I had to
go up into the forest to take advantage of the night, since the days
were so warm for walking. As I left the last house of the village I
was not secure from loneliness, and when the road began to climb up
the hill into the wild and the trees I was wondering how the night
would pass.
With every step upward a greater mystery surrounded me. A few stars
were out, and the brown night mist was creeping along the water below,
but there was still light enough to see the road, and even to
distinguish the bracken in the deserted hollows. The highway became
little better than a lane; at the top of the hill it plunged under
tall pines, and was vaulted over with darkness. The kingdoms that have
no walls, and are built up of shadows, began to oppress me as the
night hardened. Had I had companions, still we would only have spoken
in a whisper, and in that dungeon of trees even my own self would not
raise its voice within me.
It was full night when I had reached a vague clearing in the woods,
right up on the height of that flat hill. This clearing was called
'The Fountain of Magdalen'. I was so far relieved by the broader sky
of the open field that I could wait and rest a little, and there, at
last, separate from men, I thought of a thousand things. The air was
full of midsummer, and its mixture of exaltation and fear cut me off
from ordinary living. I now understood why our religion has made
sacred this season of the year; why we have, a little later, the night
of St John, the fires in the villages, and the old perception of
fairies dancing in the rings of the summer grass.
