For while other goods, being made valueless by being given away gratis, vanished from the market at once as a natural result, foodstuffs continued to be sold. Of course you had to go out into the country to fetch them. The baker and butcher and retailer had nothing they could give you except brotherly love and pious words. So you took up your knapsack and went a hundred and twenty kilometres out. You went from farm to farm, and in one place you bought a kilo of potatoes in exchange for a gold watch, in another an egg for a pair of opera-glasses, in another a kilo of bran for a harmonium or a typewriter. And so you had something to eat. You see, if the farmer had given it all away, you would have been done for long ago. But the farmer saved even a pound of butter for you—of course only in order to dispose of it for a Persian rug or a costly national costume.

Well, who brought the mad communistic experiments of the Absolute to a halt? Who did not lose his head amid the epidemic of righteousness? Who withstood the disastrous tide of superabundance and saved us from destruction without sparing our persons or our purses?

Who is the man so strong and tall

Whose daily labour feeds us all?

The farmer!

XVI. In the Mountains

CHAPTER XVI

IN THE MOUNTAINS

IT was noon at the Hut in Bear Valley. Rudolf Marek sat curled up on the veranda; he looked at a newspaper, but he soon folded it up again, and gazed out over the far-stretching chain of the Giant Mountains. Stillness, a vast and crystalline stillness, lay upon the mountains, and the man curled up in the chair straightened himself and took a deep breath.

Then the tiny figure of a man appeared from below making towards the Hut.

“How pure the air is here!” thought Marek on his veranda. “Here, Heaven be praised, the Absolute is still latent, it still lies under a spell, hidden in everything, in these mountains and forests, in the sweet grass and the blue sky. Here it does not rush about all over the place, waking terror or working magic; it simply dwells in all matter, a God deeply and quietly present, not even breathing, only in silence watching over all. . . .” Marek clasped his hands in a mute prayer of thankfulness. “Dear God, how pure the air is here!”

The man who had come up from below stopped under the veranda.

“Well, Marek, so I’ve found you at last!”

Marek looked up, not greatly pleased. The man who stood before him was G. H. Bondy.

“So I’ve found you at last!” Bondy said again.

“Come along up, then,” said Marek, with obvious reluctance. “What the deuce has brought you here? Heavens, man, you do look queer!”