An Old Heart Goes A-Journeying (25 page)

The cheerful little path wound in and out and up and down through a thick undergrowth of blackberries, raspberries, and brambles. The earth beneath his feet was soft and springy and the Professor’s heart rejoiced. “This,” he said to himself, “this is very good. . . .”

He looked about him as he walked. Sometimes he caught a glimpse of the lake, and sometimes of a squirrel, which stopped hunting for beech nuts and looked down at him from a lower branch with beady, curious eyes. Professor Kittguss was in the best of humor, he felt like bursting into song! The missing breakfast was forgotten, and his uncomfortable dream had vanished from his mind.

“They are nice kind children,” he thought, “but they should not have stayed out overnight,” another voice within him objected. “Ah, well, they may be used to it,” said the first voice reassuringly. “Children are allowed more freedom in the country.”

He walked on and on, not feeling at all tired. He expected the children to appear at any moment with the dog, and he was eager to see them all again.

The Professor was feeling so pleased with himself and was so busy looking about him, that he quite forgot to watch the path beneath his feet. It had started as a self-respecting little forest path, but after passing a certain gigantic beech, formed of several intertwined stems, at which the Professor gazed open-mouthed, it dwindled
into a mossy track covered with rustling leaves. For quite a while he had caught no glimpse of the lake, and the path wound here and there, up hill and down dale, sometimes dropping into thickly wooded dingles where it was almost dark.

But—as has been said—the Professor was in too good a humor to notice such matters. He strolled on sedately, quite unwearied. When the forest twilight began to lift, he rejoiced to think he would soon be at Unsadel and with the children. And when it proved not to be Unsadel, but a patch of woodland where the trees grew thinner, he still rejoiced.

And so, for the time being, all went well until he was suddenly confronted by a six-foot fence, which ran as far as the eye could reach, up and down across that richly colored, whispering, autumn solitude. For the first time the Professor hesitated and wondered whether he might not have missed his way.

And then, as though his senses had expected some such hint, he suddenly felt both hungry and tired, and the second voice within him pompously declared: “They had no business to stay away from home overnight. Then you would have no need to wander about in a forest.”

The Professor looked from side to side and all about but the fence rose before him like a wall, and if he meant to get anywhere he must go one way or the other.

The Professor turned to the right, and after a hundred paces or so he observed that there was a means of surmounting the fence, a narrow stairway that ran rather steeply up and over and down the other side. A rather primitive and rustic stairway, of course, for the use of
the foresters, a sort of chicken ladder, made of rough pine logs.

The Professor eyed the ladder doubtfully; he was glad to have found it but he did not like the look of it.

What was to be done? The path beside the fence looked so unsympathetic that he was sure it must be wrong. Well—he must climb the fence.

So the Professor began to climb.

It is something of an ordeal for an old man, who has walked all his life upon the solid earth, to rise up toward heaven in a material sense; and the familiar earth grows very strange and far away. The Professor had not mounted four rungs before he began to feel faint. The ladder was cracking ominously, and the fence, of which the posts were plainly rotten, creaked and swayed. . . .

“I’m going to fall,” the Professor said to himself and closed his eyes. But he went on, feeling his way carefully with each foot.

At last he had to open his eyes, for there were no more rungs. His legs had to be transferred to the top rung on the other side.

This he did slowly and with great deliberation against the brilliant foliage of the beeches. The birds darted very near him and the sunlit blue of Heaven seemed close above his head. With one leg planted on the other side, Professor Kittguss halted. The fence dipped and swayed beneath him, just as the autumn leaves dipped and swayed in the breeze.

And from his point of vantage the Professor could see far over the countryside, over woodland and meadow.

He felt as though he were standing in a pulpit, and though in the distant callow days of youth he had had
great difficulty with texts for his sermons, he at once thought of St. Francis; and he who had spent his life in a gray cavernous stone city stood and listened to the canticles of Sister Stream and Brother Wind and all the community of living things. And though that song of praise was new to him, he could have joined in it with a full heart.

He looked about him. At the far end of a woodland path, he caught a glimpse of red roofs grouped about a church, and thinking that this at last must be Unsadel, he looked on it with something like indifference. Far below the grass shivered, while the splendid panorama of the falling year ringed him around.

“Dear children,” he thought. “Rosemarie was right. I must take charge of them, not in Berlin, but in the quiet of the country. They, too, are touched with the gentle radiance that shines in forest and sky—even Philip—and when in days to come children’s laughter fills my house, perhaps that light will shine upon my work as well.”

Then the scene changed: he was standing at his classroom desk in the Royal Prince Joachim Gymnasium at Berlin-Schöneberg, on the Grünewaldstrasse, faced by an array of eager, youthful faces, and he did his quiet best to make those lads understand the message of the Bible, and practice what they learned. That was a way in which he walked no more. And now, under the shining canopy of autumn, that placid study in the Akazien-strasse seemed to have dwindled to a dismal abode of selfishness and futility.

To every man there comes an hour when he breathes a purer air, when the world seems crystal clear, its problems
and anxieties vanish, and the breast expands with heightened life and power.

The Professor climbed down from the fence, but in spirit he remained atop. He could still feel its swaying beneath him as he walked up the path toward the village.

It was some little while before he emerged from the forest, and saw the village standing in some open fields. And then he realized that the place was neither Unsadel nor Kriwitz; there was no lake and no railway station. But the Professor was in such high good humor that he did not care.

Just outside the village stood a notice board, which bore the legend: “Lüttenhagen village; Parish of Prenzlau; Military Depot—Prenzlau: Kingdom of Prussia.”

The Professor nodded amiably, and marched into the village. He was delighted with all he saw: hens and ducks, a barking dog on a chain and a small, fat, tow-haired child with one finger in its mouth, half-laughing and half-crying, that looked at him with large round eyes.

The village street soon broadened into a little open square, edged with plane trees. That house with a yellow and blue veranda was clearly the inn, the house on the right, overgrown with ivy and honeysuckle, was clearly the parsonage. And the long gray building to the left, with the lower windows whitewashed, must be the school.

Now that he could have his breakfast any time he liked, he felt less hungry; he walked across to the school-house, and stood under the windows listening. Someone was playing a fiddle inside, and suddenly a burst of shrill childish song greeted him. “Ye hills and valleys broad, ye green and lovely woods.”

The old Professor smiled blissfully and beat time with one foot as he too began to hum: “Thou holy refuge of my griefs and joys. Without, the false and busy world doth rage.”

He craned his neck to get a view of the fiddler through an unwhitewashed window and saw a gray-haired old gentleman, with the violin under his chin. He noticed the listener outside, who had now joined in the chorus, and he nodded and smiled, briskly beating time with his foot. The Professor, too, was beating time, and he returned the old man’s greeting with a wave of his hand.

The song died away with a gay and lovely cadence: “And so my heart shall never grow old”—which the children, the fiddler, and the old man under the window had all sung in chorus. And like a man in a blissful dream, the Professor walked across the square to the inn where he ordered coffee and eggs from a young and buxom landlady. Yes, bread and butter, True, some marmalade would be very nice. And he refused to sit in the dark dining room, but established himself on the veranda in the sun.

As he sat in the warm sunshine, the song of the children sounded faint and indistinct like the distant twittering of birds. A gust of wind blew a red vine leaf on to his table where it lay for a moment, quivering like a butterfly. Another gust picked it up and whirled it across the blue and yellow balustrade, to join its fellows dancing across the square.

The landlady brought out a gay checkered cloth, clipped it to the table, and then came coffee, eggs, cream and sugar, butter and bread, marmalade and salt.

The Professor watched their appetizing approach with
gusto, and said genially to the landlady: “A lovely day, madam.”

“We need rain,” said the landlady peevishly. “It’s too dry. But you don’t come from the country, do you?”

The Professor tapped an egg, answered, “No,” adding that as a matter of fact he came from Berlin.

“From Berlin? Think of that, now! Two summers ago some people from Berlin came to Lüttenhagen; they saw the Kaiser every day from where they lived. Do you know the Kaiser?”

“No,” smiled the Professor. He drank his first sip of coffee and ate his first mouthful of bread with the utmost enjoyment. “I have never even seen the Kaiser.”

“You come from Berlin and you haven’t even seen him!—but that isn’t possible.” A puzzled look came over the landlady’s face. “Then you don’t really come from Berlin?”

“Indeed I do,” the Professor reassured her, “but Berlin is much bigger than you perhaps can imagine.”

But the landlady was not to be enlightened; the visitors of two years ago had seen him every day and they hadn’t been people of any particular importance. She eyed her guest appraisingly and did not like the looks of the old gentleman as much as she had at first. Surely there was something not quite straightforward in his expression?

The Professor did not notice that the landlady was disgusted with him owing to his want of acquaintance with the Kaiser. He went on to ask politely how far it was to Unsadel.

“To Unsadel? What do you want to go there for? It’s just a little village.”

“I want to see my godchild,” said the Professor.

“Think of that now! And you’ve come from Berlin through Lüttenhagen to get to Unsadel. Some folks are very odd.”

She sniffed with incredulous scorn, but finally informed him that it was about nine miles through the forest and fifteen by the Kriwitz road. So saying, she departed to the dining room and left the Professor to his breakfast.

The old gentleman felt very much at ease. He ate slowly and with a most unusual appetite, gazing out on the little village square. The prospect of the long journey ahead did not depress him in the least.

When he had finished he sat for a little while before the empty plates feeling as though there were something he still had to do. However, he would ask his way to Unsadel or find a signpost. He then walked slowly down the steps from the veranda, crossed the market square, and was just about to turn down the next street when he was suddenly pulled up short by an outburst of shouting and abuse.

He turned, and saw the landlady rush out of the inn cursing volubly, followed by an old woman and a man with a mustache, brandishing a birch broom. A little white terrier yapped at their heels as they dashed toward him.

The Professor looked about him; the square and the inn seemed just as peaceful as before. But the three yelling, hurrying figures were almost on him, and to his utter surprise he observed that he, Professor Gotthold Kittguss, was the object of all this disturbance.

“Hi! Hi!” screamed the landlady breathlessly, and
grabbed him by the sleeve, though he had not made the slightest attempt to run away. “Hi!” she panted. “What about the money?”

“Money? What money?”

“Listen to him!” she screamed dramatically, with the result that people began to stroll up from various directions. “What money, indeed! The money for the breakfast! Or do you get your breakfast free in Berlin, eh?”

“Look here, sir,” said the mustachioed personage, with a menacing flourish of his broom. “You’ll find you can’t cheat Lüttenhagen folks.”

But now that the Professor understood what was the matter, his newly acquired enjoyment of this world revived. “Why, of course!” he said genially. “The money for the breakfast. It had quite gone out of my mind. Pray forgive me,” he said with a smile to the gathering crowd. “I am so absent-minded sometimes. . . .”

“Absent-minded, indeed!” sneered the landlady.

Just as belligerent powers never negotiate directly with the enemy, she continued to address the Professor as “he.” “I wonder if he’s ever so absent-minded as to pay for his breakfast and not eat it!”

The bystanders muttered a menacing approval.

“And may I ask the amount of the bill?” the Professor asked mildly.

“Very high and mighty gentleman, isn’t he?” cried the young woman, who seemed to be enjoying the scene. “Seventy-five pfennigs. But as he’s given us all this trouble, he ought to pay a mark, I think.”