And heaving and sliding
and rearing and pawing and most vigorously wrestling with the clerical
and hierarchically constraining garment of darkness, and bleating all
the while more and more angrily and loudly, for all the world like the
great goat Baphomet himself when the witches dance about him on
All-hallowe'en. But when the boy suddenly plucked off the cassock
again, the lamb, after sneezing a little and finding his feet, became
quite gentle once more, and looked only a little confused and dazed.
'There, father,' said the boy, 'is proof to you of how the meekest may
be driven to desperation by the shackles I speak of, and which I pray
you never lay upon me again.'
His father finding him so practical and wise made over his whole
fortune and business to him, and thus escaped the very heavy Heriot
and Death Dues of those days, for he was a Socage tenant of St Remi in
Double Burgage. But we stopped all that here in England by the statute
of Uses, and I must be getting back to the road before the dark
catches me.
As I was saying, I came to a gap in the hills, and there was there a
house or two called Gansbrunnen, and one of the houses was an inn.
Just by the inn the road turned away sharply up the valley; the very
last slope of the Jura, the last parallel ridge, lay straight before
me all solemn, dark, and wooded, and making a high feathery line
against the noon. To cross this there was but a vague path rather
misleading, and the name of the mountain was Weissenstein.
So before that last effort which should lead me over those thousands
of feet, and to nourish Instinct (which would be of use to me when I
got into that impenetrable wood), I turned into the inn for wine.
A very old woman having the appearance of a witch sat at a dark table
by the little criss-cross window of the dark room. She was crooning to
herself, and I made the sign of the evil eye and asked her in French
for wine; but French she did not understand. Catching, however, two
words which sounded like the English 'White' and 'Red', I said 'Yaw'
after the last and nodded, and she brought up a glass of exceedingly
good red wine which I drank in silence, she watching me uncannily.
Then I paid her with a five-franc piece, and she gave me a quantity of
small change rapidly, which, as I counted it, I found to contain one
Greek piece of fifty lepta very manifestly of lead. This I held up
angrily before her, and (not without courage, for it is hard to deal
with the darker powers) I recited to her slowly that familiar verse
which the well-known Satyricus Empiricius was for ever using in his
now classical attacks on the grammarians; and without any Alexandrian
twaddle of accents I intoned to her - and so left her astounded to
repentance or to shame.
Then I went out into the sunlight, and crossing over running water put
myself out of her power.
The wood went up darkly and the path branched here and there so that I
was soon uncertain of my way, but I followed generally what seemed to
me the most southerly course, and so came at last up steeply through a
dip or ravine that ended high on the crest of the ridge.
Just as I came to the end of the rise, after perhaps an hour, perhaps
two, of that great curtain of forest which had held the mountain side,
the trees fell away to brushwood, there was a gate, and then the path
was lost upon a fine open sward which was the very top of the Jura and
the coping of that multiple wall which defends the Swiss Plain. I had
crossed it straight from edge to edge, never turning out of my way.
It was too marshy to lie down on it, so I stood a moment to breathe
and look about me.
It was evident that nothing higher remained, for though a new line of
wood - firs and beeches - stood before me, yet nothing appeared above
them, and I knew that they must be the fringe of the descent. I
approached this edge of wood, and saw that it had a rough fence of
post and rails bounding it, and as I was looking for the entry of a
path (for my original path was lost, as such tracks are, in the damp
grass of the little down) there came to me one of those great
revelations which betray to us suddenly the higher things and stand
afterwards firm in our minds.
There, on this upper meadow, where so far I had felt nothing but the
ordinary gladness of The Summit, I had a vision.
What was it I saw? If you think I saw this or that, and if you think I
am inventing the words, you know nothing of men.
I saw between the branches of the trees in front of me a sight in the
sky that made me stop breathing, just as great danger at sea, or great
surprise in love, or a great deliverance will make a man stop
breathing. I saw something I had known in the West as a boy, something
I had never seen so grandly discovered as was this. In between the
branches of the trees was a great promise of unexpected lights beyond.
I pushed left and right along that edge of the forest and along the
fence that bound it, until I found a place where the pine-trees
stopped, leaving a gap, and where on the right, beyond the gap, was a
tree whose leaves had failed; there the ground broke away steeply
below me, and the beeches fell, one below the other, like a vast
cascade, towards the limestone cliffs that dipped down still further,
beyond my sight.
