There were huge, vague summits, all wooded,
peering above the field I sat in, but they merged into a confused
horizon.
I was on a high plateau, yet I felt myself to be alone with
the immensity that properly belongs to plains alone. I saw the stars,
and remembered how I had looked up at them on just such a night when I
was close to the Pacific, bereft of friends and possessed with
solitude. There was no noise; it was full darkness. The woods before
and behind me made a square frame of silence, and I was enchased here
in the clearing, thinking of all things.
Then a little wind passed over the vast forests of Lorraine. It seemed
to wake an indefinite sly life proper to this seclusion, a life to
which I was strange, and which thought me an invader. Yet I heard
nothing. There were no adders in the long grass, nor any frogs in that
dry square of land, nor crickets on the high part of the hill; but I
knew that little creatures in league with every nocturnal influence,
enemies of the sun, occupied the air and the land about me; nor will I
deny that I felt a rebel, knowing well that men were made to work in
happy dawns and to sleep in the night, and everything in that short
and sacred darkness multiplied my attentiveness and my illusion.
Perhaps the instincts of the sentry, the necessities of guard, come
back to us out of the ages unawares during such experiments. At any
rate the night oppressed and exalted me. Then I suddenly attributed
such exaltation to the need of food.
'If we must try this bookish plan of sleeping by day and walking by
night,' I thought, 'at least one must arrange night meals to suit it.'
I therefore, with my mind still full of the forest, sat down and lit a
match and peered into my sack, taking out therefrom bread and ham and
chocolate and Brule wine. For seat and table there was a heathery bank
still full of the warmth and savour of the last daylight, for
companions these great inimical influences of the night which I had
met and dreaded, and for occasion or excuse there was hunger. Of the
Many that debate what shall be done with travellers, it was the best
and kindest Spirit that prompted me to this salutary act. For as I
drank the wine and dealt with the ham and bread, I felt more and more
that I had a right to the road; the stars became familiar and the
woods a plaything. It is quite clear that the body must be recognized
and the soul kept in its place, since a little refreshing food and
drink can do so much to make a man.
On this repast I jumped up merrily, lit a pipe, and began singing, and
heard, to my inexpressible joy, some way down the road, the sound of
other voices.
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