The walk to the schoolhouse lay through the woods to the south of the castle; woods of larch and beech and walnut and the graceful Siberian pine, with deep mosses and thick fern-brakes beneath them, and ever and again a watercourse tumbling through their greenery to fall into the Szalrassee below.
'I always fancy I can hear here the echo of the great Krimler torrents,' she said to him as they passed through the trees. 'No doubt it is fancy, and the sound is only from our own falls. But the peasants' tradition is, you may know, that our lake is the water of the Krimler come to us underground from the Pinzgau. Do you know our Sahara of the North? It is monotonous and barren enough, and yet with its vast solitudes of marsh and stones, its flocks of wild fowl, its reedy wastes, its countless streams, it is grand in its own way. And then in the heart of it there are the thunder and the boiling fury of Krimml! You will smile because I am an enthusiast for my country, you who have seen Orinoco and Chimborazo; but even you will own that the old Duchy of Austria, the old Archbishopric of Salzburg, the old Countship of Tirol, have some beauty and glory in them. Here is the schoolhouse. Now you shall see what I think needful for the peasant of the future. Perhaps you will condemn me as a true Austrian: that is, as a Reactionist.'
The schoolhouse was a châlet, or rather a collection of châlets, set one against another on a green pasture belted by pine woods, above which the snows of the distant Venediger were gleaming amidst the clouds. There was a loud hum of childish voices rising through the open lattice, and these did not cease as they entered the foremost house.
'Do not be surprised that they take no notice of our entrance,' she said to him. 'I have taught them not to do so unless I bid them. If they left off their tasks I could never tell how they did them; and is not the truest respect shown in obedience?'
'They are as well disciplined as soldiers,' he said with a smile, as twenty curly heads bent over desks were lifted for a moment to instantly go down again.
'Surely discipline is next to health,' added Wanda. 'If the child do not learn it early he must suffer fearfully when he reaches manhood, since all men, even princes, have to obey some time or other, and the majority of men are not princes, but are soldiers, clerks, porters, guides, labourers, tradesmen, what not; certainly something subject to law if not to a master. How many lives have been lost because a man failed to understand the meaning of immediate and unquestioning obedience! Soldiers are shot for want of it, yet children are not to be taught it!'
Whilst she spoke not a child looked up or left off his lesson: the teacher, a white-haired old man, went on with his recitation.
'Your teachers are not priests?' he said in some surprise.
'No,' she answered; 'I am a faithful daughter of the Church, as you know; but every priest is perforce a specialist, if I may be forgiven the profanity, and the teacher of children should be of perfectly open, simple and unbiassed mind; the priest's can never be that. Besides, his teaching is apart. The love and fear of God are themes too vast and too intimate to be mingled with the pains of the alphabet and the multiplication tables. There alone I agree with your French Radicals, though from a very different reason to theirs. Now in this part of the schools you see the children are learning from books. These children have wished to read, and are taught to do so; but I do not enforce though I recommend it. You think that very barbarous? Oh! reflect for a moment how much more glorious was the world, was literature itself, before printing was invented. Sometimes I think it was a book, not a fruit, that Satan gave. You smile incredulously. Well, no doubt to a Parisian it seems absurd. How should you understand what is wanted in the heart of these hills? Come and see the other houses.'
In the next which they entered there was a group of small sturdy boys, very sunburnt and rough and bright, who were seated in a row listening with rapt attention to a teacher who was talking to them of birds and their uses and ways; there were prints, of birds and birds' nests, and the teacher was making them understand why and how a bird flew.