III.
On one of the first days of November, I journeyed, in a tremendous storm, to Lübeck, the characteristic buildings of which (the Church of Mary, the Exchange, the Town-hall), together with the remains of the old fortifications, aroused my keen interest. In this Hanse town, with its strongly individual stamp, I found myself carried back three hundred years.
I was amazed at the slave-like dress of the workmen, the pointed hats of the girls, and the wood pavements, which were new to me.
I travelled through Germany with a Portuguese, a little doctor from the University of Coimbra, in whose queer French fifteen was kouss and Goethe Shett. A practical American, wrapped up in a waterproof, took up three places to lie down in one evening, pretended to sleep, and never stirred all night, forcing his inexperienced fellow- travellers to crowd up into the corners of the carriage, and when the day broke, chatted with them as pleasantly as if they and he were the best friends in the world.
At Cologne, where I had stood, reverential, in the noble forest of pillars in the Cathedral, then afterwards, in my simplicity, allowed someone to foist a whole case of Eau de Cologne upon me, I shortened my stay, in my haste to see Paris. But, having by mistake taken a train which would necessitate my waiting several hours at Liège, I decided rather to continue my journey to Brussels and see that city too. The run through Belgium seemed to me heavenly, as for a time I happened to be quite alone in my compartment and I walked up and down, intoxicated with the joy of travelling.
Brussels was the first large French town I saw; it was a foretaste of Paris, and delighted me.
Never having been out in the world on my own account before, I was still as inexperienced and awkward as a child. It was not enough that I had got into the wrong train; I discovered, to my shame, that I had mislaid the key of my box, which made me think anxiously of the customs officials in Paris, and I was also so stupid as to ask the boots in the Brussels hotel for "a little room," so that they gave me a miserable little sleeping-place under the roof.
But at night, after I had rambled about the streets of Brussels, as I sat on a bench somewhere on a broad boulevard, an overwhelming, terrifying, transporting sense of my solitariness came over me. It seemed to me as though now, alone in a foreign land, at night time, in this human swarm, where no one knew me and I knew no one, where no one would look for me if anything were to happen to me, I was for the first time thrown entirely on my own resources, and I recognised in the heavens, with a feeling of reassurance, old friends among the stars.
With a guide, whom in my ignorance I thought necessary, I saw the sights of the town, and afterwards, for the first time, saw a French play. So little experience of the world had I, that, during the interval, I left my overcoat, which I had not given up to the attendant, lying on the seat in the pit, and my neighbour had to explain to me that such great confidence in my fellow-men was out of place.
Everything was new to me, everything fascinated me. I, who only knew "indulgence" from my history lessons at school, saw with keen interest the priest in a Brussels church dispense "indulgence plénière," or, in Flemish, vollen aflaet. I was interested in the curious names of the ecclesiastical orders posted up in the churches, marvelled, for instance, at a brotherhood that was called "St. Andrew Avellin, patron saint against apoplexy, epilepsy and sudden death."
In the carriage from Brussels I had for travelling companion a pretty young Belgian girl named Marie Choteau, who was travelling with her father, but talked all the time to her foreign fellow-traveller, and in the course of conversation showed me a Belgian history and a Belgian geography, from which it appeared that Belgium was the centre of the globe, the world's most densely built over, most religious, and at the same time most enlightened country, the one which, in proportion to its size, had the most and largest industries. I gave her some of my bountiful supply of Eau de Cologne.