COMPANIONS OF THE ROAD
The winter did not allow M. Oberlé's ideas about the professional
education of Jean to be carried out exactly. The snow which remained
on the summits of the Vosges, without being thick, made travelling
very difficult. So Jean paid only two or three visits to the
wood-cutting centres situated near Alsheim and in the Vosges
valleys. The excursions to more distant places were put off for a
warmer season. But he learned to cube a pine or a beech without
making a mistake, to value it according to the place it occupied in
the forest, according to the height of the trunk below the branches,
the appearance of the bark, which indicated the health of the tree,
and by other calculations into which a kind of divining quality
enters, which cannot be taught anywhere, and which makes the expert.
His father initiated him into the working of the factory and the
management of the machines, the reading of agreements, and the
traditions of fifty years kept up by the Oberlés regarding sale and
carriage contracts. He put him into relationship with two officials
of the administration of the forests of Strasburg, who showed
themselves very ready to be of service, and proposed to Jean to
explain to him personally the new forest legislation, of which he
still knew but little. "Come," said the younger, "come to see me at
my office, and I will tell you more things you will find it useful
to know than you will learn in books. For the law is the law, but
the administration is another thing."
Jean promised to profit when occasions offered themselves. But
several weeks went by without his having the time to go to the town.
Then March came in mildly and melted the snows. In a week, and much
earlier than usual, the brooks swelled to overflowing, and the high
peaks of the Vosges and Sainte Odile which one could see from
Alsheim, which had had their slopes and paths white with snow,
appeared in their summer robes of dark and pale green.
The walks round Alsheim were going to be exquisite and such as the
young man had pictured to himself in his youthful memories. The
home, without being a model of family unity, had witnessed no
repetition of the painful scene which occurred the day after Jean's
return. In each camp words were noted and deeds observed, which
would one day become arguments and subjects of reproach and
discussion, but just now there was a sort of truce brought about by
different causes.
In M. Joseph Oberlé it was the desire not to be wrong in his son's
eyes; for his son was going to be useful, and he did not wish to be
accused of provocation. In Lucienne it was the diversion which the
presence of her brother had brought into her life, and the interest,
not yet exhausted, that she took in his tales of travel and student
life. In Madame Oberlé it was fear of making her son suffer, and of
alienating him by letting him see the family feuds. Nothing had
really changed. There was only a superficial gaiety, an appearance
of peace, a truce. But although Jean felt that the agreement of the
hearts and minds around him was not real, he enjoyed it because he
had spent long years in moral solitude.
The worries and clashing of interests came from elsewhere, and were
not wanting. Nearly every day Jean had occasion to go through the
village of Alsheim, which was built on each side of three roads
forming a fork, the handle of which was the mountain side, and the
two prongs towards the plain. At the bifurcation was the tavern, the
Swan, which took up a corner of the church square. A little farther
on, on the left road leading to Bernhardsweiler, dwelt the German
workmen engaged by M. Joseph Oberlé, and lodged in little houses all
alike, each with a little garden in front. So that in whatever part
of Alsheim he showed himself, the young man could not help reading,
in the faces and gestures of those he met, different opinions, and
all equally distressing. The Germans and their wives--the workmen,
better disciplined and more tame-spirited than the Alsatians,
fearing all authority without respecting it, quartered in a corner
of Alsheim by the hatred of the population on which they hoped to
take vengeance some day, when they should be the more numerous,
having with the other inhabitants no ties of origin, family,
customs, or religion--could only have indifference or hostility for
the master, which were badly disguised by the salutations of the
men, and the furtive smiles of the women.
But many of the Alsatians were less under restraint. It was enough
that Jean had entered the business and that he was seen constantly
with his father, for their disapproval to extend to him. He saw
himself covered with a prudent contempt, the kind that little people
can always express towards powerful neighbours. The forest workmen,
the labourers, the women, and even the children pretended not to see
him when he passed, others withdrew into their houses; others, the
old ones especially, watched the rich man come and go as if he had
been from another country. Those who showed the most signs of
respect were the tradesmen or the employés, or the relations of the
employés of the house. And Jean found it difficult to bear the
reopening of this wound each time he left the park.
On Sunday, at church, in the whitewashed nave, he waited for the
coming of Odile. To reach the seat reserved for her family for
years, which was the first on the Epistle side, she had to pass near
Jean. She passed, with her father and her mother, without any of
them appearing to know that Jean was there, and M. Oberlé, and
Lucienne. She only smiled at the end of Mass, when she came down the
aisle, but she smiled at whole rows of friendly faces, at women, old
men, at big boys who would have died for her, and at the children of
the choir, the chanters of the "Concordia," who scampered off by the
sacristy door, to be able to salute, surround, and welcome at the
door the daughter of M. Bastian, the Alsatian girl, the friend, the
beloved of all this poor village; she did not give away more money
than Madame Oberlé, but they knew that there was no division in her
house, no treachery, and that the only difference between it and the
other houses in the valleys and mountains of Alsace was its wealth.
What did she think of Jean? She, whose eyes never spoke in vain, did
not look at him. She who used to speak to him in the roads now said
nothing.
The first month of Jean's new life passed away like this in Alsheim.
Then spring was born. M. Joseph Oberlé waited two days and then,
seeing the buds of his birch-trees burst in the sunshine, he said to
his son on the third day:
"You are a good enough apprentice now to go alone and inspect our
timber-yard in the Vosges. You will get ready to start. This year I
have made exceptional purchases. I have cuttings as far as the
Schlucht, and to visit them you will have to visit nearly all the
Vosges. I give you no instructions, only observe, and bring me a
report, in which you will note down your observations of each of our
cuttings."
"When shall I start?"
"To-morrow, if you like--the winter is over." M. Oberlé said that
with the assurance of a man who has had need to know the weather
like a peasant, and who knows it. He had, before speaking, ordered a
list to be prepared of the cuttings of wood bought by the house
either from the German State or from the Communes, or from private
people, with the detailed directions on the position they occupied
in the mountains, and he gave this list to Jean.
There were a dozen cuttings distributed over the whole length of the
Vosges, from the valley of the Bruche on the north to the mouth of
the Schlucht.
The next day Jean put a little linen and a change of shoes in a bag,
and without telling any one of his intention hurried to the
mountain, and up to the lodge of Heidenbruch.
The square house, with green shutters, and the meadow, and the
forest all round the clearing, were smoking as if a fire had
devoured the heath and grass, and left the beech and pines intact.
Long wreaths of mist seemed to emanate from the soil, and to grow
tenuous, and uniting, lose themselves in the low clouds, which
glided along, rising from the valleys and going up the slopes
towards the invisible monastery of Sainte Odile. The humidity
penetrated to the very depths of the forests. It was everywhere.
Drops of water shone on the pine needles, streamed in threads down
the bare trunks of the beeches, polished the pebbles, swelled the
many mosses, and travelling over the land, and flowing on dead
leaves, went to swell the brooks, whose cadenced song could be heard
on all sides--the grasshopper of winter whose song never ceases.
Jean went up to the middle of the wooden palisade painted green,
which surrounded Heidenbruch, passed through the gate, and in the
front of the lodge called out gaily to the windows closed because of
the fog, "Uncle Ulrich."
A cap appeared behind the window panes, the cap of an Alsatian woman
who takes care of her big black ribbons--and under the cap there was
the smile of an old friend.
"Lise, tell uncle!"
This time the last window to the left opened, and the refined face,
the eyes of a watcher, the pointed beard of M. Ulrich Biehler were
framed between two shutters thrown back against the white wall.
"Uncle, I have at least a dozen wood-cutting places to visit. I
begin this morning, and I come to take you for a companion, to-day,
to-morrow, and every day...."
"Twelve journeys in the forest," answered his uncle, who leaned, his
arms crossed, on the window sill, "this is a fine ending to Lent! My
compliments on your mission!" He looked at his nephew in
walking-clothes, his strong, masculine face raised in the fog; he
was thinking that one could have sworn that he was a French officer,
and then, carried away by his imagination, he forgot to say whether
or not he would accompany his morning visitor.
"Come, uncle," continued Jean. "Come! Don't refuse me! We will sleep
in the inns; you will show me Alsace."
"I walked seven leagues yesterday, my friend!"
"We will only do six to-day."
"You really want me to come?"
"An absence of three years, Uncle Ulrich, think of that, and a whole
education to go through!"
"Well! I won't refuse you, Jean; I am too delighted that you should
have thought of me. I have even a second reason for agreeing to the
journey and to thank you for it. I will tell you presently."
He shut the window. In the silence of the woods Jean heard him call
the old valet, who was second in command in Heidenbruch.
"Pierre! Pierre! Ah! there you are! We are going for twelve days
into the mountains. I take you with me. You will pack my bag; put it
on your back with my nephew's bag. Take your shoes with the nails,
your stick, and you will go in front to the halting-place, while
Jean and I go to visit the cuttings. Do not forget my waterproof,
nor my pocket medicine chest."
Going into the house, the young man saw Uncle Ulrich, full of
business and radiant, pass him, open the drawing-room door, go to
the wall, take down a long object in copper on two nails, and go
quickly upstairs again.
"What are you taking away, uncle?"
"My telescope."
"Such an old one."
"I cling to it, my friend; it belonged to my great uncle, General
Biehler. It saw the back of the Prussians at Jena!"
Half an hour later, in the meadow on the slope in front of the house
was M. Ulrich, gaitered like Jean, with a soft hat, the telescope
slung over his shoulder, his dog gambolling round him; old Pierre
very dignified and solemn, carrying on his mountaineer's shoulders a
great pack wrapped in linen and fastened by straps; then Jean
Oberlé, bending over a staff-officer's map, which the others knew by
heart, discussing the two ways to go--the way of the baggage and the
way of the walkers. The discussion was short. The servant went on in
front, bearing to the left to reach the village where they would
sleep, while the uncle and nephew took a path to the middle of the
mountain--in a north-easterly direction.
"So much the better that it is a long way," said M. Ulrich, when
they gained the shade of the wood. "So much the better. I wish it
were for a lifetime. Two people who understand one another and go
through the forest--what a dream!"
He half shut his eyes, as painters do, and breathed in the mist with
pleasure.
"Do you know," he added, in the way he would have confided to him
something delightful, "Do you know that we have had spring here for
three days? There it is--that's my second reason!"
The forester said with enthusiasm what the manufacturer had said
without admiration. By the same signs he recognised that a new
season had begun. With his stick he pointed out to Jean the pine
buds, red like arbutus berries; the bursting bark on the beech
trunks, the shoots of wild strawberries running along the stones. In
the uncovered pathways the north wind still blew, but in the
hollows, the combes, the sheltered spots, one felt, in spite of the
fog, the first warmth of the sun, which goes to the heart and makes
men tremble, that warmth which touches the germ of the plants.
That day, and during those which followed, uncle and nephew lived
under wood. They understood one another perfectly, whether they
spoke fully on any subject or were silent. M. Ulrich knew the forest
and the mountains by heart. He enjoyed this opportunity which had
been given him to explain the Vosges and to discover his nephew.
Jean's ardent youthfulness often amused him and recalled bygone
times. The instincts of the forester and hunter, slumbering in the
young man's heart, were ripening and strengthening. But he had also
his rage, his revolts, his juvenile threatening words, against which
the uncle protested but feebly, because he really approved of them.
The plaint of Alsace rose to his ear for the first time, the
complaining cry the stranger does not hear and the conqueror only
half listens to, but can never understand. For Jean did not only
observe the forest; he also observed the people of the forest, from
the merchants and the officials, feudal lords on whom depend a
multitude almost past numbering, down to woodcutters, jobbers,
fellers, carters, charcoal burners, down even to wanderers,
shepherds, and swineherds, pedlars of dead wood, freebooters,
poachers, myrtle gatherers, who also gather mushrooms and wild
strawberries and raspberries.
Introduced by Uncle Ulrich, or passing by in his shadow, he aroused
no suspicions.
He talked freely with the people--in their words, their silence, and
in the atmosphere in which he lived day and night, he absorbed unto
himself the very soul of his race. Many did not know France, among
the young ones, and could not have said if they loved her, but even
those had France in their veins. They did not get on with the
German. A gesture, a look, an allusion, showed the secret disdain of
the Alsatian peasant for his conqueror. The idea of a yoke was
everywhere, and everywhere there was antipathy against the master
who only knew how to govern by fear. Other young men of the families
with traditions, instructed by their parents in the history of the
past, faithful without any precise hope, complained that the poor of
the mountain and plain were denied justice and subjected to
annoyances if they were suspected of the crime of regretting France.
They spoke of the tricks played by way of revenge on the custom
officers, on the police, on the forest guard--proud of their green
uniform and of their Tyrolese hat--the stories of smuggling and
desertion, of the Marseillaise sung in the taverns with closed
doors, of fêtes on French land, of perquisitions, domiciliary visits
and pursuits, of the comic or tragic duel, useless and exasperating,
between the strength of a great country and the mind of a small
one. When the latter suffered, its thoughts, inherited from
ancestors, through habit and from affection, went over the
mountains.
There were also the old folk, and it was M. Ulrich's delight to make
them talk. When on the roads, and in the villages, he saw a man of
fifty years or more, and he knew him to be an Alsatian, it was
seldom that he himself was not recognised and that a mysterious
smile did not prepare the question for the Master of Heidenbruch:
"Come, is this not another friend--a child of our family?"
If M. Ulrich, by the expression of the face, by the movement of the
eyes, by a little fear sometimes, felt that his conclusion was
justified, he added in a low voice:
"You--you have the face of a French soldier!"
Then there were smiles or tears, sudden shocks to the heart, which
changed the expression of the face pallors, flushings, pipes taken
from the corner of the lips, and often, very often, a hand raised,
turned palm outwards, touching the brim of the felt hat, thus making
the military salute, as long as the two travellers were in sight.
"Do you see him?" said Uncle Ulrich, quite softly; "if he had a
bugle he would play 'La Casquette.'"
Jean Oberlé never ceased talking of France. He asked when he came to
the top of a mountain ridge: "Are we far from the frontier?" He made
the uncle tell him what Alsace was like under the "gentle
rule"--what liberty was enjoyed by each and all, how the towns were
administered? What difference was there between the French
gendarmes--whom M. Ulrich mentioned with a friendly smile as good
fellows, not too hard on the poor--and these German gendarmes,
common informers, brutal, always officious and full of zeal, whom
the whole of the Alsace of to-day hated? What was the name of that
prefect of the First Empire who placed by the roadsides of Lower
Alsace benches of stone of two tiers so that the women going to
market could sit down, and place at the same time their load above
them? "The marquis de Lezay Marnésia, my boy."
"Tell me the story of our artists, of our deputies in the old days,
of our bishops. Tell me what Strasburg was like in your youth, and
what a sight it was when the military band played at Contades?"
M. Ulrich, with the joy of living over again which mingles with all
our memories, remembered and related. While climbing and descending
the intersections of the Vosges he went through the history of
French Alsace. He had only to let his ardent heart speak, and it
made him weep. It also made him sing, with the gaiety of a child,
the songs of Nadaud, of Béranger, La Marseillaise, or the old Noels,
which he sang to the pointed arches of the forest.
Jean took such a passionate interest in these evocations of old
Alsace, and he so naturally entered into the hatreds and revolts of
the present that his uncle, who was at first pleased at it as a sign
of good family, ended by growing uneasy. One evening, when they had
given alms to an old teacher, deprived of the right of teaching
French, and reduced to misery because she was too old to get a
German diploma, Jean's anger had carried him away.
"My dear Jean," said the uncle, "you must be careful not to go too
far. You have to live with Germans."
Since then M. Ulrich had avoided returning so often to the question
of the annexation. But alas! it was the whole of Alsace, it was the
landscape, the descending road, the sign of some shop, the women's
dress, the type of men, the sight of soldiers, the fortifications at
the top of a hill, a finger-post, the different items in a
newspaper bought in the Alsatian inn where they had dined in the
evening--it was every hour of the day which called their minds back
to the condition of Alsace, a nation conquered but not assimilated.
In vain did M. Ulrich answer more carelessly and quickly--he could
not hinder Jean's thought from travelling the road to the unknown.
And when they climbed together a neck of the Vosges, the elder man
saw with pleasure and apprehension Jean's eyes travel to seek the
horizon on the west, and gaze there as at some loved face. Jean did
not look so long at the east or the south.
A fortnight was employed in visiting the forest of the Vosges, and
during this time M. Ulrich came back to Heidenbruch only twice for
some hours. The separation took place only on Palm Sunday, in a
village of the Valley of Münster.
It was evening--the hour when the valleys of the German side of the
mountains were quite blue, and there was only a strip of light on
the last pines which surrounded the shade. M. Ulrich Biehler had
already said good-bye to this nephew, his dearest friend.
The servant had taken the train that same morning for Obernai, M.
Ulrich, the collar of his cloak turned up because the cold was
piercing, had just whistled to Fidèle and was leaving the inn, when
Jean, in his blue hunting-costume, without a hat, came down the
flight of steps.
"Again good-bye," he said.
And as the uncle, very upset, and not wishing to show it, made a
sign with his hand to avoid words which might be tremulous--
"I will go with you to the last house of the village," continued
Jean.
"Why, my boy, it is useless to prolong----"
His head turned towards his uncle, and his uncle, looking down the
road, Jean began to walk. He commenced in his cajoling young voice:
"I am inexpressibly sorry to leave you, Uncle Ulrich, and I must
tell you why. You understand before one says twenty words. You do
not contradict aggressively: when you are not of my opinion, I know
it by your mouth, which makes the point of your white beard
rise--that is all. You are kind. You do not get angry, and I feel
you are very decided. Other people's ideas all seem familiar to
you--you are able to answer them so easily; you are respected by the
weak. I was not accustomed to that on the other side of the Rhine."
"Bah! bah!"
"I even appreciate your fears about me."
"My fears?"
"Yes. Do you think that I did not see that there is another question
which interests me intensely, and of which you have not spoken to me
for six days?"
This time Jean did not see his uncle's profile; he saw his full
face, and its expression was a little anxious.
"My boy, I did that purposely," said M. Ulrich. "When you questioned
me, I told you what we were and what we are. And then I saw that I
must not insist too much, because you would be full of grief. You
see, grief is good for me; but for you, youth, it is better that you
should start off like the horses which have not yet run a race, and
only carry a very slight weight."
The last house was passed. They were in the country, between a
stream strewn with many boulders, and a steep slope which joined the
forest up above.
"Too late," said Jean Oberlé, holding out his hand and stopping,
"too late; you have said too much, Uncle Ulrich. I feel I belong to
the older times, as you do. And so much the worse, as to-morrow I
go up to the Schlucht. I shall see her--I shall say good day to our
country of France!"
He laughed as he uttered these words. M. Ulrich shook his head once
or twice to scold him, but without answering, and he went away into
the mist.