They came to Jenbach in the cool of the evening, and again there was an inn. But this time it was different.
“We do not go with you anymore,” said the boy. “We go to Salzburg. But first we drink to our friendship.”
Belinda sat on a wooden bench and recalled the first time she had entered an inn. Then she had been too sick at heart to care whether it was dirty; now she would not have cared for a different reason, though she had learned that the inns were as clean as any room in her own home. Again there was a sunburned laborer sitting in the corner she chose, and the Saint talked with him, and when the serving-girl had distributed a tray-load of tankards she joined them and was chaffed and flirted with. It was the first gasthof over again; the difference was in Belinda herself. Now she sat alert, eyes sparkling and shifting from one face to another in an attempt to follow the weaving shuttle of their voices, and when they laughed she laughed, pretending she understood. And the background of it all she did understand, without knowing how. There was a community of happiness and contentment, a fellowship and a freemasonry of people whose feet were rooted in the same good earth, a shared and implicit enjoyment of the food and drink and challenging seasons, a spontaneous hospitality without self-consciousness, a unity of pagans who had greeted God. Man spoke to man, laughed, jested, holding back none of himself, untroubled by fears and jealousies: having no reason to do otherwise, each took the other immediately for a passing friend. Why not? The world they knew was large enough for them all. Why should not nation and nation meet in the same humanity? And Belinda found she was thinking too much, and she was glad when one man who had carried a mandolin slung across his back took it down and strummed a chord on the wires, and the voices round him rose in unison:
Trink, trink, Brüderlein, trink,
Lass doch die Sorgen zu Hause
—with the others chiming in, beating the tables with their tankards, till they were all singing—
Meide den Kummer und meide den Schmerz,
Dann ist das Leben ein Scherz; and the repetition rattled the glass in the windows:
Meide den Kummer und meide den Schmerz,
Dann ist das Leben ein Scherz!