But this comfort was lost on the lonely wanderer in the clouds of dust on the country road; he could pay little attention to it and, deeply depressed and forlorn, he dragged one foot after the other. He had traveled this way so often already that no object that sprang into view on either side of the road was unfamiliar to him. Trees and boulders, houses and huts, sign-posts, church steeples, old boundary stones which no longer marked anything but the transitoriness of even the widest possessions—all had already made various impressions on him in his various moods. He remembered how he had sat thinking on this spot, had slept through an afternoon under the bushes on that one. He thought most of those days when he had passed this way for the first time with his great hunger for knowledge, in the companionship of that comrade of his youth who was now gone. Now he was going back along this way for the last time;—he had learnt much, endured many things and enjoyed many pleasures! What was now the state of his soul?
He was depressed, he was sad and would have been so even without Uncle Grünebaum's letter of ill tidings. With all his strength he had striven to learn all that could be learnt of the high branch of knowledge to which he had devoted himself, and he was obliged to confess that this was little enough. He felt deeply the inadequacy of what the men on the lecture platform had taught him, but he felt something else besides and that was what Professor Vogelsang and most of the other members of the highly laudable, honorable faculty did not want to recognize because they could not teach it.
He was on his way to see one die whom he loved more than any other human being; he stepped out toward darkness and it was darkness that he left behind him. At one time he had preached to the trees and the birds because the world would hear nothing of his feelings, and he had never complained of that. Now, his hunger for knowledge seemed to be dead, but his feelings were still alive, rose insistently and crowded about his heart; they grew to be the bitterest pain that a man can endure. At that moment nothing was distinct in the surging tumult; sorrow about his mother, disappointment, worry and fear were mingled; and, curiously enough, mixed with all these there sounded sharply and cuttingly long forgotten words which Moses Freudenstein had once uttered. During this journey Hans Jakob Unwirrsch was in a similar mood to that of another John James who, long years before, had gone from Annecy to Vevay and had written of that road:
"Combien de fois, m'arrêtant pour pleurer à mon aise, assis sur une grosse pierre, je me suis amusé à voir tomber mes larmes dans l'eau!"
It blew incessantly! All day long the wind drove dark clouds across the gray sky, yet not a drop of rain fell. It burrowed into the hedges about the neglected, untidy gardens where the withered sunflowers and hollyhocks hung their heads plaintively. It rattled the windows of the village inn where Hans ate his dinner, blustered about the house and waited grimly for the wanderer who had escaped it for a short moment. It played its game about the coach that stopped at the toll-gate and flapped the cape of the driver's coat so violently round his ears that he could scarcely get out the toll. Hans threw an indifferent glance at this carriage through the window; but the next moment he regarded it more keenly. The leather flap at the side of the carriage had been drawn back, a young girl looked out and peered down the dreary country road. The wind raised the black veil on her black mourning hat and had no more pity on the pale, sad, girlish face beneath it than on anything else that came in its way. But for that reason the little face only made the greater impression on Hans. Trouble greeted trouble, and the sorrow that went on foot along the country road bowed to the sorrow in the carriage that rolled through the clouds of dust. That childish, careworn face just fitted into the mood that possessed Hans; he would have liked to know more of its owner's life and fate.
But the girl's head drew back and in its place there appeared a gray moustache and an old military cap. A glass of brandy was handed into the carriage, full, and very quickly appeared again, empty; the driver too had found it possible, in spite of his violent struggle with his cape, to refresh himself with a drink that did not come directly from the spring. Get up! Forward! The horses started and, with a cloud of dust the old vehicle rattled off, the wind rushing after it like a bloodhound on the trail and it was more than remarkable that when Hans came out of the Golden Stag Inn it received him too with triumphant animosity and blew him after the carriage.
The people in the Golden Stag had not been able to say who the military old gentleman and the young lady in mourning were; they only knew the driver, the two lean nags and the tumble-down old vehicle, and said that this quartet was often hired by travelers as it was frequently the only means of transport in the neighborhood.
In addition to all his other thoughts Hans now carried with him on his way through the dark afternoon the image of the lovely little face he had seen. Ever anew it presented itself to his mental vision; he could not help it. Thus he went on and did not stop till the dusk had grown denser and he had reached the little town in which he was to spend the night.
To be sure, it had been dusk all day and the evening could make little change in the illumination of the world. But now night fell and made common cause with the wind and if the devil had joined the alliance he could not have made matters much worse.
It was not the wind's fault that the crooked old houses of the little country town which Hans now entered were still standing the next morning. The lights in the rooms, behind the windows, seemed to flicker and the few people who were still in the streets fought their way laboriously against the storm, bending forward or leaning back. Front doors slammed with thundering crashes, window shutters flew open with a rattle and the only glazier in the place listened with singular joy to every shrill clinking and clatter in the distance.