"He sighed on his mistress's shoulder. She threw his black hair from his forehead."
The book dropped to the floor.
"Ach, Gott im Himmel!" cried Grandfather. "What is then this?"
He explored deeply and still more deeply, till he had at last all the library before him on the floor. Who had carried these books to this spot? To whom did they belong? Together with the agony of which his cramped body suddenly became conscious, there rushed upon him a sickening suspicion of the truth. Only one person beside himself had access to the old buildings.
For a long time he stood staring at the odious books. He did not wish to touch them; he would have liked to press them into a closer heap with his cane and to set fire to them. But they were not his. Nor did he wish to leave them in this clean and holy place. He would carry them down, and when Amos returned he would confront him with them. The dream of his old age was not yet quite destroyed; there would be no restoration of the Kloster; but a repentant sinner might still serve a secular congregation. With him Grandfather would wrestle day and night.
He carried the books to the cottage in five long journeys. Baskets woven by the sisters were at hand, but he did not remember them and a heavily laden basket would have made a perilous burden. Up and down the two flights of stairs which were scarcely more than ladders he journeyed, his knees shaking. Then in his kitchen he placed the books in a row on the table.
Confounded, he sat with his hands clasped on his cane, waiting. The rain continued to fall; the monotonous drip from the eaves changed to the plunge of a miniature waterfall; the shadows of the Saal and Saron and finally the shadows of night fell upon the little house, and still he sat alone.
Amos meanwhile had journeyed through a landscape shrouded in rain and mist. Fields and farmhouses and noble groups of trees were hidden or showed only in ghostly outlines. In the neighborhood of the long line of furnaces and mills the mist produced many strange phenomena. Above the ground was a succession of dull masses, black freight trains, the lower floors of vast and shapeless buildings, and mammoth truncated pyramids of dim red or black or yellow ore. Once, above the layer of mist which enshrouded the upper portion of a towering blast-house, he saw a titanic figure, a man elevated apparently upon the mist itself, raising against heaven a defiant hammer. He felt in his own muscles a sudden tightening—he believed that he could swing a hammer like that and swing it hard.
The city was wrapped in the same dismal blanket. He wandered about the streets; he visited the Capitol and patrolled miles of the muddy river. He could not see the distant bank, and even the islands in midstream had vanished. He walked out beyond the city limits, and there from a little stone pier looked down into a deep, swirling pool. There was nothing in life, he believed, and nothing in death either. The men and women who wrote the books he read made very little allowance for the future; to them he believed the very conception was ludicrous.
Then Amos realized suddenly to what point he had come. He recoiled in horror from the deep pool and from his own wicked thoughts and rapidly retraced his steps. When he reached the city limits, he left the river road in fear and took to the first parallel street.