Title: Together
Author: Douglas, Norman
Language: English
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                               TOGETHER

                                  BY
                            NORMAN DOUGLAS

                  “_And he said unto me, Son of man,
                 can these bones live? And I answered,
                      O Lord God, thou knowest._”
                          EZEKIEL xxxvii. 3.


                               NEW YORK
                      ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY
                                 1923

                          Copyright, 1923, by
                        ROBERT M. MCBRIDE & CO.


                            _Printed in the
                       United States of America_


                            Published, 1923

                                  TO

                           ARCHIE AND ROBIN

                           FROM THEIR FATHER



CONTENTS


                                                                    PAGE

INTRODUCTION                                                           1

THE BRUNNENMACHER                                                     19

TIEFIS                                                                35

LUTZ FOREST                                                           51

BLUMENEGG                                                             69

FATHER BRUHIN                                                         89

RAIN                                                                 105

ANTS                                                                 121

GAMSBODEN                                                            141

JORDAN CASTLE                                                        161

ROSENEGG                                                             177

VALDUNA                                                              193

OLD ANNA                                                             211

SCHLINS                                                              227

INDEX                                                                247



INTRODUCTION

_Introduction_


It rains.

It has rained ever since our arrival in this green Alpine village;
rained not heavily but with a grim Scotch persistence--the kind of
drizzle that will tempt some old Aberdonian, sitting unconcernedly in
soaking grass by the wayside, to look up and remark: “The roads is
something saft.” Are we going to have a month of _Landregen_, as they
call it? No matter. Anything for fresh air; anything to escape from the
pitiless blaze of the South, and from those stifling nights when your
bedroom grows into a furnace, its walls exuding inwardly all the fiery
beams they have sucked up during the endless hours of noon. Let it rain!

Little I thought ever to become a guest in this tavern, familiar as it
is to me from olden days. They have made us extremely comfortable.
Nothing is amiss, nothing lacking. Our rooms are large and well
furnished. Certain preliminary operations were of course necessary in
regard to the beds. Away first of all with the _Keilpolster_, that
wedge-shaped horror; away next with the _Plumeau_, another invention of
the devil. And breakfast always up here please, for both of us, in my
room, at half-past seven; seeing that work begins at eight sharp. Not
less than a litre of milk for my friend, and two eggs; he is a
milk-and-egg maniac. I am past his stage, though still young enough to
revel in that delicious raspberry jelly. Why is it almost unknown in
England?

On one side of my room hangs an oleograph which depicts a gay sportsman
aiming at some chamois from behind a tree at twenty-five yards’
distance; such luck never came my way. The picture on the further side
is still more suggestive--three roe-deer, hotly pursued by a dachshund;
a pug-dog would have an equal chance of success. Cheerful pictures of
this kind should hang in every room. I shall look at them whenever I
feel jaundiced. Our tavern by the way is famous for its dachshunds. They
have a couple of thoroughbreds, with faces like orchids, who eat and
sleep most of the day and whose descendants are rapidly stocking the
neighborhood. Their numerous progeny drop in for a visit from the
remotest villages, and are coldly received by the parents. Just now the
gentleman is asleep and his spouse, not for the first time, indulging in
an agitated flirtation with one of her own remote descendants who has
not yet found a home for himself: a very bad example to the rest of
us....

Through the silvery curtain of drizzle I glance eastwards and recognize
the old, old view, the earliest that ever greeted my eyes; for our
nursery windows, up yonder, looked also towards the rising sun, and
once, not in the day but late at night, I was lifted out of bed and
placed on the window-sill to behold a wondrous thing--the sky all
a-glister with livid rays. This aurora borealis is my first memory of
life and the apparition must have been recorded in the newspapers of the
day, since it was the only “Nordlicht” ever seen, to my knowledge, in
the country; the vexed question, therefore, of a man’s earliest memory
could be settled, so far as I am concerned, if one had the energy to
hunt up the files. There, confronting me on its hillock, stands the
church with red-topped steeple. During the war, the authorities carried
off the four bells to be melted down; three new ones have since been
purchased at Innsbruck. They chime pleasantly enough, but not quite the
same as of yore. One would like to hear the old ones again, for memory’s
sake, after all these years. How gayly they used to tremble on the air
at midday, while one roamed about the hills at the back of the house.
And how one rushed down to be in time for luncheon, seated on a
fir-branch; an excellent method of progression on steep, slippery
meadows, provided there be no stones or wasps’ nests on the track. One
day, long ago, we three slid in this fashion and at a breathless speed
down the never-ending slopes of the Furkla alp above Bludenz. Nothing
happened till about half-way, when the eldest felt a jolt, a slight
cavity in the ground, and called out to me to beware. It was too late; I
was pitched in and out again. My sister who followed, carrying less
weight, came to rest there. The cavity was a wasps’ nest. Eight
stings....

And the church is backed by a mountain called Hoher Frassen; even at
this distance one can detect a belt of green stretching across its
middle near the scattered houses of Ludescherberg; wonderful, what
manure will do! Everybody goes up the Hoher Frassen (_vulgo_
Pfannenknecht) on account of the view, which is remarkable considering
its low elevation of not even two thousand meters, though personally, if
one must climb places like this, I should prefer the Mondspitze or
Hochgerach. You can ascend in early morning from Bludenz or anywhere
else, catch a glimpse of the Rhine and Lake Constance and snow peaks
innumerable--of half this small province of Vorarlberg, in fact--and be
home again in time for a late luncheon. Near the top is the now
inevitable hut for the convenience of fat tourists. Cows pasture about
the summit among the Alpine roses and dwarf pines.[1] Here, at the
right season, you may capture as many Apollo butterflies as you please.
A little boy and girl, scrambling homeward one day from this summit,
dislodged with infinite trouble a huge bowlder and, while somebody was
not looking, sent it on a career of delirious leaps down the incline
above Raggal village. Such was its momentum after a couple of hundred
yards that it went clean through a hay-hut, empty but solid, tossing its
wooden blocks into the air as if they were feathers. The destruction of
some poor peasant’s property was considered a great joke. We laughed
over it for weeks and weeks.

On the other side of our valley one can discern, despite the rain, those
peaks of the Rhætikon group. They have been powdered with freshly fallen
snow almost down to the Kloster alp, where cows are grazing at this
moment. The Kloster alp, on which I have passed many nights with no
companion save a rifle, is forever memorable in my annals as being the
spot where, at the age of six, I smoked my first cigar. We were on an
excursion and somebody--the little Dr. Zimmermann, I daresay, the blithe
veterinary surgeon--gave me, doubtless at my repeated and urgent
solicitation, a long black Virginia, a so-called rat’s tail, the
strongest weed manufactured by the Austrian Government. Delighted with
my luck, I puffed through an inch or so. Then, without any warning,
death and darkness compassed me about. Death and darkness! The world was
turned inside out; so was I. Not for several weeks did I try tobacco
again; this time only a cigarette and in a more appropriate locality;
even that made me rather unhappy. Here, on the cliffs just above the
Kloster alp, you used to be able to gather a bouquet of Edelweiss with
your eyes shut, so to speak; here, among the tumbled fragments of rock
further on, was a numerous colony of marmots. Never, in my
bloodthirstiest days, had I the heart to shoot one of these frolicsome
beasts, whose settlements are scattered over most of our mountains at
the proper elevation. They call them “Burmentli” in our dialect--a
pungent variety of alemannic--and their fat is supposed to cure every
ill that flesh is heir to; it is chiefly on account of this fat that
they have been persecuted in all parts of the Alps, and exterminated in
not a few. Their cheery whistle carries half a mile; if you sit
perfectly motionless, they will creep out of their burrows, one by one,
and frisk and gambol around you. Once, at Christmas, a hunter brought me
a hibernating marmot which he had taken, together with its whole family,
out of winter-quarters. I put it, drowsy but half-awake, into a cold
room, where it immediately rolled itself under a

[Illustration: Marmot’s skull with malformed teeth]

bundle of hay. There it slept, week after week. A marmot in this
condition is cold to the touch but not altogether stiff, and Professor
Mangili calculated long ago that during the whole of its six months’
lethargy it respires only 71,000 times (awake, 72,000 times in two
days)--a veritable death-in-life! Mine displayed no resentment at being
aroused now and then in a warm room; indeed, it behaved with exemplary
meekness and allowed itself to be pinched or caressed or carried about;
but preferred sleeping, and always seemed to say, in the words of the
poet’s sluggard, “You have waked me too soon! I must slumber again.”
When summer came round, we took it back to its old home, where it
trotted off without a word of thanks, as if the past experiences in our
valley had been nothing but a silly dream.

One would hardly think that marmots ever fed each other, yet a skull in
my collection makes me wonder how this particular animal, an old beast,
can have survived without receiving nourishment from its fellows. It was
shot near St. Gallenkirch in the Montavon valley on September 12th,
1886; and is remarkable since, in consequence of what looks like the
fracture of a single incisor tooth, the lower jaw has been partially and
slowly displaced, shifted to one side of the upper--at the cost, no
doubt, of incessant pain. What happened? All four incisors therewith
became not only useless but an intolerable hindrance; lacking the
necessary attrition, they grew ever longer in mammoth-like curves, and
sharply pointed; the shortest--the injured one, which is still deprived
of enamel at its extremity--measures six and a half centimeters in
length, the longest all but eight; and one of them, in the course of its
circular development, has actually begun to bore into the bone of the
upper jaw. I am not much of a draftsman, but these two sketches will
suffice to give some idea of the freak specimen. A squirrel with
somewhat similar dentition was described in the “Zoologist” (Vol. IX, p.
220). Here was one marmot, at least, who must have been glad when summer
food-problems were over, and it grew cold enough to scuttle downstairs
again for a six months’ rest. And some of them sleep in this fashion for
eight months on end. What a sleep! Why wake up at all?

Food-problems of our own----

They are non-existent. This region has suffered _relatively_ little from
the effects of war; it is a self-supporting district of
peasant-proprietors where nearly every family possesses its own house
and orchard and fields and cattle; the ideal state of affairs. Nothing
is lacking, save tobacco and coffee. To obtain the first, one plagues
friends in England; instead of the second, we have to put up with cocoa,
a costive and slimy abomination which I, at least, will not be able to
endure much longer. Prolonged and confidential talks with the
innkeeper’s wife--his third one, a lively woman from the Tyrol, full of
fun and capability--have already laid down the broad lines of our bill
of fare. I must devour all the old local specialties, to begin with,
over and over again; items such as _Tiroler Knödel_ and _Saueres Nierle_
and _Rahmschnitzel_ (veal, the lovely Austrian veal, is scarce just now,
but she means to get it) and brook-trout _blau gesotten_ and
_Hasenpfeffer_ and fresh oxtongue with that delicious brown onion sauce,
and _gebaitzter Rehschlegel_ (venison is cheap; three halfpence a pound,
at the present rate of exchange); and, first and foremost,
_Kaiserfleisch_, a dish which alone would repay the trouble of a journey
to this country from the other end of the world, were traveling fifty
times more vexatious than it is. Then: cucumber salad of the only
true--i. e., non-Anglo-Saxon--variety, sprinkled with _paprika_; no soup
without the traditional chives; beetroot with cummin-seed, and beans
with _Bohnenkraut_ (whatever that may be); also things like _Kohlrabi_
and _Kässpätzle_--malodorous but succulent; above all, those ordinary,
those quite ordinary, _geröstete Kartoffeln_ with onions, one of the few
methods by which the potato, the grossly overrated potato, that marvel
of insipidity, can be made palatable. How comes it that other nations
are unable to produce _geröstete Kartoffeln_? Is it a question of
_Schmalz_? If so, the sooner they learn to make _Schmalz_, the better.
_Pommes lyonnaises_ are a miserable imitation, a caricature.

In the matter of sweets, we have arranged for _Schmarrn_ with cranberry
compote, and pancakes worthy of the name--that is, without a grain of
flour in them, and _Apfelstrudel_ and--quick! strawberries down from the
hills, several pounds of the aromatic mountain ones, to form those
wonderful open tarts which are brought in straight from the oven and
eaten then and there, hot--if you know what is good. Should the weather
grow sultry, I will also make a point of consuming a bowl of sour milk,
just for the sake of auld lang syne. It may well ruin my stomach, which
has acquired an alcoholic diathesis since those days.

There! A change of food, at last.

Whether Mr. R. will take to this diet is another matter. I should be in
despair if he were a true Frenchman, for your Gaul, in this and other
matters, is the most provincial creature in the world; like a peasant,
he can eat nothing save what his grandmother has taught him to think
eatable. Mr. R., luckily for him, is French only from political
necessity. And besides, persons of his age should never be encouraged to
express likes and dislikes in the matter of food; it is apt to make them
capricious or even greedy, and what says the learned Dr. Isaac Watts,
from whom I quoted a moment ago? “The appetite of taste is the first
thing that gets the ascendant in our younger years, and a guard should
be set upon it early.” How true! Nobody is entitled to be captious until
he has reached the canonical age. After that, he has acquired the right
of being not only critical, but as gluttonous as ever he pleases.

Here, meanwhile, are the latest statistics of our village. It contains
about seven hundred inhabitants, three hundred cows and calves (most of
them on the mountains just now), five taverns, and three _Dorftrottels_
or idiots, of the genuine Alpine breed. Mr. R. is dying to have a look
at them as soon as the weather clears; and so am I. There is a
fascination about real idiots. They have all the glamour of a
monkey-house, with an additional note of human pathos.

       *       *       *       *       *

A heated discussion after dinner with Mr. R.--one of our usual ones--as
to the right meaning of the English words “still” and “yet” which, like
“anybody” or “somebody,” he refuses to distinguish from each other. On
such occasions, he complains of the needless ambiguity and prolixity of
my language; I retort by some civil remark about the deplorable poverty
of his own. I should explain that I hold certificates as teacher of
French and English, and am in possession of an infallible coaching
method (a family secret) for backward or forward pupils; and that this
is not the first time I have endeavored to instill a little knowledge of
English into the head of Mr. R. who, for all his faults, is a
companionable young fellow with certain brigand-strains in his ancestry
that go well with those in mine (_vide_ Peter Hinedo’s “Genealogy of the
most Ancient and most Noble Family of the Brigantes, or Douglas,”
London, 1754).

That astonishing French education.... What is one to do with people,
future candidates for government posts, who cannot tell the difference
between an adverb and a conjunction, who, if you ask them to define a
reflexive verb, gaze at you with an air of injured innocence, almost as
if you had asked them to say what is the capital of China, the position
of their own colony of Obok, and whether Chili belongs to Germany or to
Austria? They learn none of these things at school; or if they do, it is
in some infant class where they are forgotten again, promptly and
forever. Instead of this, they are crammed with microscopic details,
under the name of “Littérature,” concerning the lives of all French
writers that ever breathed the air of Heaven, and with a bewildering
mass of worthless physical formulæ, enough to daze the brain of a Gauss.
What Mr. R. does not know about convex lenses and declination needles
and such-like balderdash is not worth knowing; his acquaintance with
every aspect of Molière’s life and works is devastating in its
completeness, and makes me feel positively uncomfortable. Now Molière
was doubtless a fine fellow, but no youngster has any right to know so
much about him. I only wish they had taught him a few elements of
grammar instead.[2]

It is too late now. He laughs at grammar--a frank, derisory laugh. In
other words, my task is rendered none the easier by his serene
self-confidence. He does not share my view that his English is still
rudimentary, though he admits that it may require “a little polish here
and there.” Everything in the nature of a difficulty or exception to the
rules is an _idiom_--not worth bothering about. He conjugates our few
irregular verbs as if they were regular; go, go’ed, go’ed; find, finded,
finded; and gets in a towering passion, not with me but with the
language, whenever I have to set him right. Their mellow auxiliaries of
“should” and “can” and all the rest of them, so useful, so reputable, so
characteristic of the versatile genius of England, are treated as a
perennial joke; indeed, it is a wretched idiosyncrasy of his to discover
fun in the most abstruse and recondite material. (He nearly died of
laughing the other day, because I told him that the Neanderthal race of
man was less hairy than the _Pithecanthropus erectus_ of Java; and
failed to explain why such a bald scientific statement of fact should
provoke even a smile.) Simple phrases like “Est-ce que l’enfant n’aurait
pas dû acheter le chapeau?” give birth to English renderings that would
send any less patient tutor into convulsions; renderings such as you
might expect from the average Englishman when asked to put into French
“If I had not noticed it, you would not have noticed it either (using
_s’en apercevoir_).”

To all my suggestions that it might be well to study this or that more
conscientiously, I receive the stereotyped reply “I know my _vocables_”;
as if the possession of an English vocabulary were synonymous with the
possession of English speech. It is perfectly true; he has a fair stock
of words, and nobody would believe what can be done with our language
until he hears it handled by a person who knows his _vocables_ (and
nothing else) after the manner of my pupil; I often tell him that he
could make his fortune in England, on the music-hall stage, with that
outfit alone. Nevertheless, strange to say, he was nearly always the
first in his English class at school. Vainly one conjectures what may
have been the attainments of the rest of them or, for that matter, of
their teachers.

So he studies two hours a day with me and two hours alone, preparing for
an examination in October; and that is his _raison d’être_ in this
country. He has just given me, to correct, a translation from a book
full of “thèmes et versions,” all of which are too difficult for him;
this one is his English rendering of a stiff piece that describes P. L.
Courier’s disgust at the French Court. It is a noteworthy specimen of my
pupil’s command of _vocables_ and of nothing else; a document which I
should not hesitate to set down here, in full, could I persuade anybody
into the belief that it was authentic. That is out of the question.
People would say I had wasted a good week of my life, trying to
manufacture something comical.

Instead of this “anglais au baccalauréat” we have lately begun a course
of Grimm’s Fairy Tales which are nearer to his level, and I am realizing
once more what this stuff, so-called folk-lore, is worth. A desert! For
downright intellectual nothingness, for misery of invention and
tawdriness of thought, a round half dozen of these tales are not to be
surpassed on earth. They mark the lowest ebb of literature; even the
brothers Grimm, Germans though they were, must have suffered a spasm or
two before allowing them to be printed. Fortunately Mr. R.’s versions of
this drivel are far, far superior to the original; they beat it on its
own ground of sheer inanity; and I am carefully collecting them to be
made up, at some future period, into an attractive little volume for the
linguistic amateur.



THE BRUNNENMACHER

_The Brunnenmacher_


Now what may that old _Brunnenmacher_ have looked like? I never saw him.
I only know that, like my friend his son, he was the official
water-expert of the town of Bludenz, that he was older than my father,
and every bit as incurable a _Bergfex_--mountain-maniac. His nick-name,
“Bühel-Toni,” suffices to prove this. Those two were always doing
impossible things up there at the risk of their lives (it was thus,
indeed, that my father was killed) either together, or alone, secretly,
in emulation of each other. For in those days the whole of this province
was virgin soil, so far as climbing was concerned, and numberless are
the peaks they are supposed to have scaled for the first time. Yet
neither of them, it seems, had ever tackled the Zimba, the noblest of
those pinnacles of the Rhætikon group which I can see from this window,
out there, on the other side of the valley, covered with fresh snow
wherever snow can come to lie among its crags. The Zimba rises to a
height of 2640 meters and was regarded as inaccessible by local chamois
hunters who, for the rest, were under no obligation to scramble up
places of this kind, their game being abundant lower down. Inaccessible!
That annoyed these two _Bergfexes_ all the more.

“Are you never going to try?” my father would ask.

Said the Brunnenmacher:

“I am an old man, and have at least three times as many children
dependent on me as you have. That makes a difference. Besides, you are
rich. Rich people can afford to break their necks. Aren’t you ashamed of
yourself? There it is, staring you in the face all day long. I could
never resist the temptation, if I were in your place. Only think: it
would be quite an unusual kind of honor for you, an Englishman, to have
been the first up there. In fact, I confess I should feel a little
jealous and sore about it, myself.”

So it went on for months or years, and each time they met, the
Brunnenmacher would say:

“So-and-so now thinks of trying the Zimba. Are you going to let him have
it his own way? Is he to get all the glory? Now’s your chance,” or else:
“How about the Zimba? Still afraid? What a scandal. Ah, if I were only a
few years younger!”

At last my father could bear it no longer and slunk out of the house one
afternoon on his usual pretext--when anything risky had to be done--of
going after chamois. He rolled himself in his blanket at the Sarotla
alp, near the foot of the peak, and next day, somehow or other, set foot
on the virgin summit. Imagine his disgust on finding there a
_Steinmandl_, a cairn, containing a bottle with an affectionate letter
to himself from “Bühel-Toni” who had sneaked up ages ago, all by
himself, without saying a word to any one.

That is the history of the Zimba, which is now climbed by numerous
tourists every year. No wonder; since all the difficult places have been
made easy. Even so, the mountain has claimed its victims--three, within
the last few years; one of them a tough old gentleman who, to test his
nerve and muscle, insisted on “doing” the Zimba once a year. It was a
sporting notion; the Zimba did him, in the end; he lies buried in the
new Protestant cemetery at Bludenz. And if you like to scramble up from
the Rellsthal flank, you may still have some fun. Not long ago a tourist
actually died of fright while climbing down here. He had gone up by the
ordinary route to the satisfaction of his guide who, being from the
Montavon valley and anxious to get home as soon as possible (this is my
own assumption) took him down by this almost perpendicular “short cut.”
At a certain point the tourist declared that he could go neither
forwards nor backwards, and was going to die then and there. Which he
straightway proceeded to do, rather foolishly. But there are no limits
to what a real tourist can accomplish. Along the extremely convenient
track which scales the cliff between the Zalim alp and the Strassburger
hut (Scesaplana district) two young men contrived to slip; they were
shattered to fragments. Cleverest of all was the gentleman who lately
achieved the distinction of dying from exposure on the Hoher Frassen. He
ought to have left us word to say how the thing was done.

We do not always realize the difficulties of the pioneers. Among other
matters, there were no shelter huts in those days. That which lies below
the Zimba, on the Sarotla alp, is one of some fifty now scattered about
the hills of this small province. The earliest of them all was the
Lünersee hut which bears the name of my father; he was then president of
our local section of the Alpine Club. Built for the convenience of
visitors to the Scesaplana summit, this hut was swept into the lake long
ago, with all it contained, by an avalanche. It is time another
avalanche came along, for the place has grown into a caravanserai of the
rowdiest description. Altogether, selfish as it may sound, I should not
be sorry to see every one of these structures burnt to the ground, or
otherwise obliterated. Their primary object, to afford shelter to _bona
fide_ climbers, is laudable; what they actually do, is to serve as
hotels--not bad ones, either--to a crowd of summer visitors whose faces
and clothes and manners are an outrage on the surroundings. Abolish the
huts, or cut down their comforts and menus to what a climber might
reasonably expect, and the objectionable “Hüttenwanzen” would evaporate.
What are they doing among these mountains? Let them guzzle and perspire
in Switzerland!...

My friend the younger Brunnenmacher, son of “Bühel-Toni,” was also
official water-specialist and _Bergfex_; he may well have been the image
of his father since, from all I have heard, he had the same character
and therefore, according to a theory of my own, must have resembled him
also in person. If that be so, we may take it for granted that the
father was an unusually hirsute creature. The mere sight of his son, at
the Bludenz swimming baths, used to send us into fits. Nobody had ever
seen such a “Waldmensch.” He might have been a gorilla in this
respect--an uncommon kind of gorilla; for not every gorilla, I fancy,
can afford to wear a regular parting down its back. No gorilla, either,
could climb in better style; or smile, if they smile at all, to better
purpose. The Brunnenmacher’s laughing face charmed away hunger and
fatigue and wet clothes and all the ills of mountaineering. It may seem
far-fetched to apply the terms “ingenuous” or “childlike” to the smile
of a bearded monster of forty, but there are no other epithets available
for that of the Brunnenmacher. It rose to his lips, on seeing you; it
hovered there day and night, waiting for your appearance. Doubtless he
had a peculiar affection for me, as being my father’s son; everybody
found him a lovable person.

His weather-proof good humor must have helped to establish his
reputation as a guide; that, and his jovial blasphemies. They made you
laugh, and a guide who makes you laugh has already gone a long way
towards gaining your friendship. Once you persuaded the Brunnenmacher to
begin some story of his, which was not difficult, you were sure to get
an adequate amount of playful bad language thrown in. An infallible
method of getting more than this adequate amount was to make him
relate his experiences of a trip to America, and of the agonies
of four days’ sea-sickness on an empty stomach. This narrative
bristled with swear words; it ended in a fixed formula: “Jo,
Himmelherrgottsakraméntnochemol, do honni grod gmeint i müest ussm
grosse Zähe uffi kotze!” which might as well be left untranslated ...

There is a curious cave near Bludenz called the _Bährenloch_, the bear’s
cavern; it lies at the foot of the cliffs above the road to Rungalin
village--not the field path, but that which skirts the hills. I say
curious, because it is plainly not a natural cave; it is an artificial
one and has been hacked by human hands out of the limestone; when, by
whom, and for what purpose, no one knows. The chisel-marks are quite
plain, once you are well inside. It is roughly quadrangular in shape and
about the height of a man at the entrance; half way through, it takes a
slight bend to the right and, growing narrower and narrower till you can
hardly turn round, ends abruptly, as though the builder had grown weary
of his toil, or disappointed with its result. The work of a mediæval
anchorite? I doubt it. Such a person would have contented himself with a
domicile less than half its length. Perhaps some crazy enthusiast dug it
long ago, in the hope of discovering gold or what not among the bowels
of those cliffs.

The younger Brunnenmacher first took me there, and how he managed to hit
upon the precise locality of this grotto remains a mystery to me. Not
only was the steep woodland below much thicker in those days--almost
impenetrable, in fact--and without any trace of an upward path, but the
entire base of the cliffs was defended by so dense a mass of brushwood
that we had to crawl through it on hands and knees. How did he contrive
to ascend undeviatingly to the cavern’s mouth? A few yards astray, and
we should have been lost in that jungle where one could barely move, and
had no means of seeing to right or left. All this sounds incredible at
present. Most of the brushwood has been uprooted and the forest thinned
out to such an extent that it has become quite transparent; moreover,
that meritorious “beautification-society” of Bludenz constructed, among
many other things, a convenient zigzag path which will lead you after
fourteen windings to the very entrance of the _Bährenloch_. The
horse-shoe bats, the greater and the lesser, which I used to capture
here and take home as pets, may well have deserted the place; likewise
the young foxes and badgers we unearthed in the neighborhood. One of
these badgers grew so tame that he followed me about everywhere, and
would even take me for rides on his back. I should like to see him do it
nowadays.[3]

This Brunnenmacher seems to have made up his mind that I was to become a
climber like himself. He took me in hand. He made me trot miles and
miles, as it seemed, up the then almost trackless Galgen-tobel and
showed me the _fons et origo_ of the Bludenz water supply, as well as a
spot where you could discover a certain vitriolic mineral by the simple
process of applying your tongue to the rock; and still further afield,
into the upper regions of the Krupsertobel, and down its savage bed.
Then came the turn of the mountains--Scesaplana, to begin with. As
guide, he had already gone up there some seventy times, and even I got
to know it so well in later years that I could have walked up in
blackest midnight. Next the Sulzfluh, famous as a haunt of the
Lämmergeier; and so on. One of the last of these trips was up the
Säntis, the shapely peak across the Swiss frontier, which seems to close
up our valley to the west. We came back with our pockets full of
rock-crystals.

So I pursue the memories, as they rise from the past, of those old days
of the Brunnenmacher. He died a good many years back. But he has left
behind a sturdy brood of children--I know not how many; dozens of them,
let us hope, to inherit his smile....

That Säntis mountain, which I have just mentioned, has a bad name at
this moment. There was a foul murder done here, some months ago; the
married couple in charge of the observatory near the summit were found
killed at their post. Nobody could guess who the assassin was, nor what
his object might have been, till the body of a young man was discovered
in some hut not far away. He had committed suicide; and he was the
murderer. So far as I could gather, this youngster was of decent birth
but, owing to excesses of one kind or another, had lost all balance and
self-respect. One thing, nevertheless, he preserved intact: an intense
love of the Säntis, his native mountain, which he seems to have regarded
as a sort of private domain. He knew its territory inch by inch and
could never bring himself to forsake it; this affection, indeed, was his
undoing, for after the crime he made no attempt to quit the country, as
he easily might have done. The all-absorbing attachment to this piece of
ground kept him chained there, and it was supposed, though nowise
proved, I fancy, that he killed the old people out of an insane envy,
and in the equally insane hope of being thereafter installed at the
observatory as their successor, and having the Säntis all to himself for
the rest of his life. Murders are committed for a considerable variety
of amorous motives, but seldom for one of such a glacially nonsexual and
idealistic tinge; it is the kind of etherealized horror that might be
imagined to take place on some other planet. Altogether, an interesting
problem in psychology, if the facts they gave me are correct. To fall
in love with a mountain is not the common lot of man. And so
disastrously!

It was a tragedy of unreciprocated passion, from beginning to end. The
Säntis is no longer in the first flush of youth; it can be trusted, I
feel sure, to behave with perfect decorum under the most trying and
delicate circumstances. Its reputation, previous to this little affair,
had been of the best; nor is there any reason to suppose that it gave
its brain-sick admirer the slightest encouragement to act as he did, or
to think himself singled out for favors denied to the rest of us. The
locality is doubtless attractive, as such places go, but that is not its
own fault--who ever heard of blame attaching to beauty?--so attractive,
that a man might well be pardoned for growing fond of it, and fonder,
and fonder. Even in the case of superlative fondness, I, at least, would
still try not to feel jealous of other people’s familiarity with its
charms, and would certainly think twice before murdering a respectable
married couple _pour ses beaux yeux_.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have now seen four generations of these delightful folk who own our
tavern, the latest arrival being a great-grandchild of the first. Though
barely born, it already wears a laughable resemblance to its
grandfather.

He is the present head of the family, a village magnate who knows the
ins and outs of the countryside as well as any one alive; a Nimrod in
his day, and the only marksman, beside my father, to whom they hung up a
diploma of honor in the Ludesch shooting range; he has lived for years
in Milan and traveled, officially, to Vienna, to set forth to the
Government some claim of our district. The face might be that of one of
those good-natured but intelligent Roman emperors like Titus, with round
head and ruddy hair; a face such as you find all over the Roman province
to this day, and all over this province as well. His family came
originally from the Bregenzerwald region, at the back of our hills, and
is connected with that of Angelika Kauffmann who was born there.[4]

Having been friends with him for the last half century, we never lack
subjects of conversation; there is fresh ground to explore as often as
we meet, and old ground to traverse again. What I now want to know is
this: how about the rain? Are we in for a _Landregen_? He thinks not;
the weather is too cold, and snow lies too low; where his own cattle
are, on the alp of Zürs near Lech, it must be lying at this moment.
Unless the weather clears, he will have to go up and look after them;
also on account of the foot-and-mouth disease, which has broken out in
the neighborhood. Lech: who has the chamois shooting there? Nearly all
the shoots in the country, he explains, have been taken by Swiss, and no
wonder; look at their exchange! And what of the projected _Anschluss_
(annexation) to Switzerland? Well, Germany would be better, on the
whole. Besides, the truth of the matter is (laughing) the Swiss won’t
have us; they say we are too Catholic and too lazy and too fond of
drinking. As if our people could afford to pay for wine nowadays! By the
way, just try this _Schnapps_, as a curiosity.

It was juniper-spirit, of the year 1882. With all respect for its
antiquity, I found myself unable to appreciate the stuff. Then he gave
me, as an antidote, some of his own _Obstler_ (made of apples) only
three weeks old. A little crude, but of good promise. So we went through
the lot. His own _Zwetschgenwasser_--excellent! Then Kirsch, from the
neighboring village of Tiefis, which makes a specialty of this
_Schnapps_, distilled from the small mountain cherries; of mighty
pleasant flavor. Next, Enzian; the product of the yellow Alpine
gentian. Whoever likes Enzian--and who can help liking it?--will have
nothing to say against that of our Silberthal, which has a well-deserved
reputation for this brand. _Beerler_, I enquire? No, he says; nobody
makes bilberry-spirit any more.

“Which is a pity.”

“This infernal war----”

“It has shattered all the refinements of life.”

So we discuss the world, and presently the proprietress comes up to
announce that she has discovered coffee. I thought she would! She sent
to Bludenz for it, on the sly. Now what, I ask, is her particular method
of roasting?

“Why, in the oven, of course; and very carefully. Then, when the beans
begin to sweat, and are neither lighter nor darker than a capuchin’s
frock, I take them out and place them, steaming hot, into a glass jar
and cover them at once with a thick layer of powdered sugar. There they
get cold slowly and are obliged, you see, to draw in again all the
fragrance which they would otherwise have lost. Isn’t that your English
way?”

I wish it were....



TIEFIS

_Tiefis_


A really fine morning at last; glorious sunshine.

“Now for those idiots,” says Mr. R., and so do I. We have found out
about them, from the inn-people.

It appears that two, a man and a woman, come from the Walserthal, which
has always been famous for its crop of imbeciles; the third was born at
Raggal, likewise fertile mother of idiots, because everybody marries
into his own family there. These Raggalers are such passionate
agriculturalists and so busy, all the year round, with their fields and
cattle, that they refuse to waste time scouring the province for so
trivial an object as a wife with fresh blood, when you can get a
colorable substitute at home. Our particular idiots live, all three of
them, on the road to St. Anne church, in that workhouse which, so far as
I know, has sheltered from time immemorial the poor of the district, the
aged, the infirm of mind or body. There is always a fine assortment of
wrecks on view here. Sisters of Charity look after them.

Sure enough, the first thing we saw was one of the man-idiots hacking
wood out of doors. He was of the deaf and dumb variety, with misshapen
skull; he took no notice of us, but continued at his task with curious
deliberation, as if each stroke of the ax necessitated the profoundest
thought. Weak in the head, obviously; but not what I call an idiot. If
he could have spoken, he would doubtless have uttered as many witticisms
as one hears in an English public-house at closing time. The woman was
also there, sitting on the bench beside a Sister of Charity.
Under-sized, stupid-looking, with mouth agape; nothing more; I have seen
society ladies not unlike her in appearance. She can sew and knit
stockings and even talk, they had told us. Mediocre specimens, both of
them. And how about the third one, we enquired? He was working in the
fields, said the Sister.

Working in the fields....

These things call themselves idiots. Even idiots, it seems, have
degenerated nowadays. Mr. R. was dreadfully disappointed; and so was I.
He vowed I had led him to expect something on quite another scale; and
so I had. He extracted a promise, then and there, that I should show him
over Valduna, the provincial lunatic asylum near Rankweil, in the hope
of unearthing a few idiots worthy of the name.

Now of course you cannot have everything in this world. You cannot ask,
in a district otherwise so richly endowed by Nature as this one, for the
_fine fleur_ of imbecility--for _crétins_. To see these marvels you must
go further afield, to places like the Valtellina or Val d’Aosta (and
even there, I understand, the race is losing some of its best
characteristics. These doctors!) But one might at least have kept alive
a specimen or two of the old school, just for memory’s sake; idiots such
as my sister and myself used to see, while rambling as children about
these streets with the _Alte Anna_, our nurse. On that very bench, where
the modish lady was reclining to-day, or its predecessor, there used to
sit two skinny old madwomen side by side, with their backs to the wall.
There they sat, always in the same place. They were as mad as could be,
and older than the hills. A terrifying spectacle--these two blank
creatures, staring into vacuity out of pale blue eyes, with white hair
tumbled all about their shoulders. One of them disappeared--died, no
doubt; the survivor went on sitting and staring, in her old place. There
was another idiot whom we liked far better; in fact we loved him. He was
of the joyful and jabbering kind, and he lived near the factory. His
facial contortions used to make us shriek with laughter. Sometimes he
dribbled at the mouth. When he dribbled copiously, which was not every
day, it was our crowning joy.

The old Anna, of course, knew by heart every idiot within miles of our
home. She specialized in such phenomena. What she liked even better was
anything in the nature of an accident, operation, horrible disease, or
childbirth; she knew of it, by some dark instinct, the moment it
occurred: she knew! and, being forbidden to leave the children alone,
dragged us with her into the remotest peasant-houses and hamlets to
enjoy the sight. Above all things, she had a mania for corpses and the
flair of a hyena for discovering their whereabouts. As often as there
was a corpse within walking distance, she donned her seven-league boots
and rushed towards it in the bee-line, carrying my sister, to save time,
while I toddled painfully after. Arrived at the spot where the dead body
lay, she would first cross herself and then begin to gloat. We did the
same. Who knows how many maladies, how many corpses, we inspected at
that tender age! A sound education. For it familiarized us with death
and suffering at a life-period when one cannot yet grasp their full
import; it took away, for good and all, a great part of their terrors.
We were never shocked by such things; only interested--hugely
interested....

After an appetizing luncheon which atoned for the bitter disappointment
of this morning, we strolled upwards in the sunshine, slowly and
comfortably, towards the village of Tiefis. The ancient _Dorfberg_ road
which started opposite the sawmill to climb the height now lies
obliterated and forgotten; it was so steep that coachmen and all the
rest of us--save one or other of those awesome Scotch grand-aunts,
fragile and frowsy--had to get out of the carriage and walk. Here, on
the upper level, stood certain immense walnut trees of ours, in whose
shade I used to crawl about before I could walk. They are gone. But the
distant iron target against the hill-side behind them, which served my
father for rifle-practice, is in its old place; they have not troubled
to pull it down. I glance into the back regions of our old house; no
great change here; some of the present proprietor’s children are bathing
in that fountain which used to be covered with water-lilies. Then, a
couple of hundred yards further on, the ochre-tinted bed of that
wonderful stream which petrified leaves and grasses, a ceaseless marvel
of childhood. There it is as of old, trickling downhill in the same
miniature cascade. Up again, to the next level and beyond, where the
forest begins and where, looking back, you have a fine view upon the
Zimba.

Now these are the things for which I have come here; things for which
you will vainly ransack England and the whole Mediterranean basin. You
are confronted, all of a sudden, by a dusky precipice, a wall of ancient
firs, glittering in the sun; their branches droop earthward in
curtain-like fringes. Here the path enters the forest--an inspiring
portal! To step from those bright meadows into the solemn and friendly
twilight of the trees is like stepping into a vast green cavern, into
another world; involuntarily one lowers one’s voice. I shall be much
surprised if these benign woodlands do not have a chastening influence
upon the character and the whole worldly outlook of Mr. R., to whom this
country and its people and language and customs are so utterly strange
that he has not yet recovered from his first bewilderment; they are what
he needs--what all of us need; one should return to them again and
again, to breathe a cleaner air, to rectify one’s perspective, to escape
from the herd and the contamination of its unsteady brain.

There is a short break in the wood soon afterwards, a steep grassy slope
with a hay-hut at its foot. The place is called _Hirsch-sprung_, because
in olden days a hunted stag took the whole descent at a single leap. Any
one who has seen stags pursued by a hound will admit that they are
remarkable jumpers. They seldom get as good a chance as this, of showing
what they can do. The distance aerially traversed must be about eighty
yards.

Tiefis is a new and prosperous village; the old one was burnt down in
the sixties. We went to my old inn where we discovered, among other
things, a pretty fair-haired child, daughter of the proprietress; she
has the clearest complexion imaginable and the sweetest smile, and her
eyes are not blue, but of a mysterious golden-gray; the very picture of
innocence, and just the kind of person to trouble desperately Mr. R.,
who is of the other color and at an inflammable age, though far more
decent-minded than I used to be. The charm is fleeting; she will lose
some of her looks; already I detect an ever so slight thickening of her
throat. Goitrous throats are none too rare hereabouts and nobody seems
to mind them, but Mr. R. knows nothing about such things as yet. At my
invitation she came and sat down beside him, which disconcerted both of
them at first, while I discussed the price of wine and other commodities
with the mother, whose nervous twitch in one eye must not be mistaken
for a wink. Where would it end, I enquired? Did innkeepers like herself
still stock the better qualities of white, the Nieder-oesterreicher and
so-called Terlaner, or red kinds like Veltliner and Kalterer See and
Magdalener? Would not people, at this rate, soon give up drinking wine
altogether? They were giving it up fast, she said. No peasant cared to
pay 1500 kronen for a quarter of a liter. Only last week it was 800; in
another fortnight it might be 2500 (it is now 4000). And so forth.

“I think it would be polite to shake hands with the little baby,” said
Mr. R., as we rose to depart.

“The little baby? I see. Go ahead. She won’t bite.”

“Of course not. But one ought to say something. What is the German for
_au revoir_?”

“Say nothing to-day. Keep that for next time. Look straight into her
face and smile; put your soul into it.”

“I was going to do that anyhow.”

Down again, by that pleasant road which connects the villages of Tiefis
and Bludesch. At the foot of the hill we abandoned it and turned to the
left, eastwards, up a swampy dell which, I knew, would bring us back
once more to the Stag’s Leap--a winding, narrow vale encompassed by
woodlands and drenched, just then, in a magical light from the sunset at
our back. It is called the “Eulenloch” (owl’s den), and a streamlet runs
down its center; the only streamlet in the district which contains
crayfish and therefore used to supply us, in former days, with _potage
bisque_. We captured one of these crustaceans; the brook is hereafter to
be known as “ruisseau des écrevisses” (its real name is “Riedbach,” from
the rushes through which it flows). They dig peat here, as in many of
these upland bogs, and the rank vegetation with its pungent odors, sweet
and savage, has not yet been mowed down--a maze of tall blue gentians
and mint and mare’s-tail, and flame-like pyramids of ruby color, and
meadowsweet, and the two yellows, the lusty and the frail, all tenderly
confused among the mauve mist of flowering reeds. I am glad I have
arrived in time to enjoy such sights; these wood-engirdled marshes have
a fascination of their own. How good it is to be at home again,
simmering and bubbling with contentment as you recognize the old things
in their old places!

On the right flank of this owl’s den there used to be a bare patch
famous for its strawberries. It is now afforested and the strawberries
are gone; they have strawed--strayed--elsewhere; they follow the
clearings. But that hay-hut remains, that hut of the early school, built
of massive timbers between which the hay comes leaking out; the roof is
green with antique moss, and sulphur-hued lichen decks its beams. The
architecture of these huts has undergone a change, not for the better,
of late years; they are no longer squat and solid, but lanky, flimsy,
and almost ignoble of aspect, though the hay within is more securely
sheltered against damp by a covering of wooden boards. It is precisely
this covering which spoils their appearance....

And here at last, below the Stag’s Leap, is the source of the _ruisseau
des écrevisses_. I knew what to expect. Those firs were cut down a good
while ago, and the rivulet now wells up amid a tangle of young deciduous
trees that have profited by their absence to settle down close to the
brink for a season. You can hardly discover the spring for this
ephemeral luxuriance; it hides itself therein like a “nymphe pudique,”
as Mr. R. observed. The scene was otherwise in olden days, when hundreds
of mighty firs filled up all the vale. How otherwise! Then water rilled
forth among their roots, a liquid joy, in the gloom of multitudinous
over-arching boughs. Many are the hours I dreamt away as a lad, all
alone, at this richly romantic spot. The firs will doubtless come to
their rights again, and stifle in chill and darkness these sun-loving
intruders; they are already planted. Would I not wait, if I could, to
see the fountain as it used to be?

       *       *       *       *       *

A short stroll late at night, down the main road towards Bludesch, in
order to enjoy the scent of the fields....

I look up at my old home; it is brilliantly illuminated; three different
families, they say, are at present living there. I should not care to
enter that place again. Then we pass the doctor’s house on our left. I
tell Mr. R. of all the different village Æsculaps who have inhabited
that abode; chiefly of the first one, the venerable Dr. Geiger with
rubicund face and enormous goggles on his nose, who cured all my
childish complaints by means of camomile tea. It was his unvarying
remedy, his panacea; my mother assured me, long afterwards, that he
would prescribe camomile tea, and nothing else, to pregnant women.
He also had one grand and mysterious word which recurred forever
in his conversation and was pronounced with a solemn face:
_Abendsexacerbation_. I used to take it for abracadabra, a kind of
charm, never dreaming that it meant anything. His was an original way of
curing infantile headaches.

“That pain is nothing,” he would remark, “I will just take it home with
me,” and therewith pretended to snatch up the headache and put it in his
pocket. The pain always vanished--or ought to have done. I must have
given him a little more trouble one day when, having been forbidden to
touch the verdigris on certain copper pipes, I made a square meal of the
lovely green stuff. It was a close shave, they told me afterwards;
camomile worked wonders on that occasion, and during convalescence he
told my mother that my pulse was placid like that of “an old cow,” which
it still is.

While talking of close shaves, we had reached the very spot where I had
another one. No fun, driving inside that family barouche with a brace of
frumpy grand-aunts--no fun at all; I therefore insisted, if one must
drive, on being beside the coachman and, on that particular occasion,
tumbled down from my exalted perch because the horses shied at
something, and landed head first on the stony road. Ah, we are close to
Bludesch now, at the ancient church of St. Nicholas; and thereby hangs
another tale. It used to have windows of those small, fat, round,
greenish panes of hand-made glass which were common hereabouts, till a
sentimental and eccentric female relation of ours took it into her head
that she would like to build a house with no other glass in its windows
than these “runde Scheible”; it would be rather a gloomy sort of place
inside, but so picturesque, you know! The church authorities were
delighted to exchange their old-fashioned panes for others of
transparent glass; so were all the peasants round about; and in briefest
space of time there was not a “Butrescheibe” left in the countryside;
you may see one specimen of it over the old gate at Bludenz, but this
was inserted only a few years ago to give the place a more time-honored
appearance. Now here again, I explain, on our return--here, immediately
below my old home, stood a shrine dedicated to the Virgin. Twenty years
ago, during a terrific nocturnal thunderstorm, one of those gay tumults
when the sky is lilac with flashes and the Cosmos seems to be definitely
cracking to pieces, it was struck by lightning. Why was it shattered,
while all the neighboring houses, and even that of the unbelievers
above, were spared? Nobody knows to this day. All we do know is that the
priest had the débris of the disaster cleared away in record time, and
another and quite insignificant structure built in its stead.

Mr. R. is not greatly moved by these and other impressive memories of my
past. He prefers to extract a sort of childish fun, not for the first
time, out of the shape and color of my felt hat which, being of the
latest London fashion, is unfamiliar to him and therefore, in his
opinion, an appropriate and inexhaustible subject for laughter in season
and out of season. Young people seem to be engrossed in externals of
this kind, and never to realize that a joke has its limits. I can stand
as much chaff as most of us, but foresee trouble ahead unless he
succeeds in discovering some fresh source of mirth.

He also thinks Tiefis a pretty village, and wants to know when we are
going there again.



LUTZ FOREST

_Lutz Forest_


Out of that side-valley on our east, the Walserthal,[5] issues the
rushing Lutz torrent, almost a river. It joins the Ill, our main stream,
a mile or so after quitting that valley; the Ill flows into the upper
Rhine below Feldkirch; the Rhine into the Lake of Constance not far from
Bregenz, our capital. We therefore drain into the North Sea. At a few
hours’ walk over the hills behind us, however, and again on the other
side of the Arlberg (boundary between this province and the Tyrol), the
waters drop into the Lech or Inn; this as, _via_ Danube, into the Black
Sea. A simple hydrographical system.

Now ever since a recent date which I forget, when the upper Rhine
misbehaved itself so shockingly that the Austrian and Swiss Governments
were forced to undertake some costly works with a view to ensuring
better conduct in the future, our own two rivers, the Lutz and Ill,
which were likewise subject to devastating floods, began to be hemmed in
by stone embankments more systematically and more remorselessly than
they had ever yet been in days of old, when they also gave an infinity
of trouble. For it was obvious that their freakishness, coinciding with
that of the Rhine and due to continued showers in these upper regions,
was responsible for a certain amount of the Rhine’s damage. The
consequence is, that Lutz and Ill have put on new faces and grown
painfully proper; they are no longer the wantons they were. And
therefore all the fascinating wilderness of gray shingle and bowlders
alongside, sparsely dotted with buckthorn, or white willow, or stunted
little ghosts of birches--all that broad sunny desolation of their
banks, where one chased crimson-winged grasshoppers and looked for
garnets in those water-worn blocks of gneiss: all, all a thing of the
past! Our streams now flow, in miserably straight lines, each down its
own narrow channel, and large tracts of the unprofitable soil on either
side have been planted with flourishing young pines and firs--an
excellent investment for such worthless gravel-land hereabouts. Gone
are the garnets and grasshoppers; gone is the charm of those pallid
wastes. The economist gains. The poet, as usual, looks on and counts his
loss.

Our village, lying on the north side of the valley, faces south; the
valley may here be two and a half miles wide, as the crow flies. First
come fields, then a broad stretch of woodland through which runs the Ill
river and the railway Paris-Vienna, then hills once more, in the shape
of the unprepossessing mountain called Tschallenga--popularly “der
Stein.” It is all quite simple.

On our way yesterday into these low-lying forests, we passed through the
meadow beside the church of St. Anne. A large stretch of the adjoining
woodland has recently been extirpated and converted into pasture--the
uprooted trunks are still lying about; those two old lime trees remain
untouched; the little stream has run dry. Here, on this meadow, was a
surprise: a football ground. It wore a neglected air; the boys can only
play on Sundays, since the war. Here the lords of Blumenegg used to be
received in state by the people, their lieges; here, during the Thirty
Years’ War, the fighting men of the countryside were to assemble at a
given signal by day or night, completely armed and furnished with three
days’ provision each. Here also, wholly unconcerned about the Thirty
Years’ War, I used to wait for a youthful companion to whom I was
fondly attached; here we sat and exchanged confidences, and fashioned
rustic pipes out of the twig of some shrub whose bark, in spring, can be
pulled away from its wood like the glove off a finger.

On a certain occasion--an occasion which I regard as a turning-point--I
happened to be all alone under the pines a little further on, near that
former bank of the river which is still marked by huge blocks of
defensive stone-work, now useless and smothered under a tangle of
brushwood. We visited, yesterday, the very spot where, at the callow age
of seven, I formulated, and was promptly appalled by its import, a
far-reaching aphorism: There is no God. For some obscure reason (perhaps
to test the consequences) those awful words were spoken aloud. Nothing
happened. Who can tell what previous internal broodings had led to this
explosive utterance! None at all, very likely. The phenomenon may have
been as natural and easy of birth as the flowering of a plant, the
cutting of a wisdom tooth--which, as every one knows, is nearly always a
painless process. There it was: the thing had been said. Often, later
on, that little incident under the pines recurred to my memory. I used
to ask myself: Why make such earth-convulsing speeches? And then again:
Why not? Which means the periodical relapses into credulity, into a kind
of funk, rather, occurred for the next few years. After that, my
intellect ceased to be clouded by anthropomorphic interpretations of the
universe. Let each think as he pleases. To me, even as a boy, it was
misery to profess credence in any of this Mumbo-Jumbo or to conform to
any of its rites; and a considerable relief, therefore, to escape from
England into a German gymnasium where, although games were not
officially encouraged and work fifty times harder than at
home--theology, among other subjects, being drummed into us with
pestilential persistence--one was at least not asphyxiated by the
noisome atmosphere of mediæval ecclesiasticism which infected English
public schools in those days, and will doubtless infect them in _saecula
saeculorum_. That everlasting “chapel” with its murky Gothic ritual--and
before breakfast too: what a fearsome way of beginning the morning! Let
each think as he pleases. I have better uses for my leisure than to try
to bring others round to any convictions of mine, such as they are; far
better uses. Enough for me to have watched the virus at work; and if I
seem to be sensitive on this one point--why, here are scores of
respectable elderly gentlemen wrangling themselves into hysterics over
sanitation and Zionism and Irish politics and other conundrums that
seldom trouble my dreams.

So it came about that yesterday, at the end of nearly fifty years, I
approached once more, and with a kind of reverence, the sacred spot
under the trees where the Lutz used to flow, and there thanked my genius
for preserving me from not the least formidable of those antediluvian
nightmares which afflict mankind at its most critical period of
life--the nightmare of hopes never to be realized and of torments hardly
worth laughing at; and from all its mischievous and perverse
complications. Well, well! Men in general are brought up so differently
nowadays that they cannot realize what a disheartening trial it was for
some of us youngsters at that particular age and in that particular
environment, where you could heave a Liddell and Scott at your
form-master’s head and only get a caning for it like anybody else,
whereas, if you were suspected of doubting the miracle of the barren
fig-tree, you were forthwith quarantined, isolated, despatched into a
kind of leper-colony, all by yourself. Boys are gregarious; they resent
such treatment. Let each think as he pleases. What I think is that a
grown-up man would be a poor fellow, unless he felt fairly comfortable
in any leper-colony into which these gentle ghost-worshipers may care to
relegate him....

The woods grow thicker and more solemn as you proceed downward in the
direction of Nenzing, tall firs of both varieties, some of them
ivy-wreathed, interspersed with pine-trees whose trunks of rose and
silver, struggling to obtain the same amount of light, shoot up straight
as lances; sunny clearings and stretches of meadowland where the cattle
graze knee-deep in spring; an undergrowth of junipers and other shrubs
just sufficient to diversify the scene and please the eye--never too
dense: noiselessly one treads on that emerald moss!

I had intended to take Mr. R. into a part of the forest which has always
interested me and which I never fail to visit, a region of starved pigmy
pines; and there to give him a little lecture in English on the
formation of forest loam. The Lutz in 1625, or the Ill in 1651--it is
impossible for me to decide which of the two--changed its course in
consequence of a sudden flood and took a turn to the south, abandoning
its former bed. The result was that an area of bleak shingle, far
broader than the present river-bed, was left exposed in the middle of
the forest. Myriads of pine seeds have been scattered upon it ever
since, and the puny trees grow up slowly, dwarfishly; casting down but a
yearly handful of needles each, to form the necessary soil for future
generations. No moss has yet taken root after all these years, nor can
the more fastidious firs draw sustenance; the little pines, rising from
naked pebbles under foot, are in undisputed possession of the territory.
Had there been leafy willows or alders at hand, as in the Scesa-tobel
near Bludenz, the earthy covering would have been produced long ago and
this quasi-sterile tract merged into the forest on either side of it.
There were nothing but conifers on the spot, when the river forsook its
old channel; and it is uphill work for them. The “flourishing” pines and
firs of which I spoke just now have been judiciously planted; these are
self-sown. They are paying for the privilege.

We also intended to visit the _Schnepfenstrich_, a piece of forest
between Bludesch and Nenzing where, in days gone by, one used to lie in
wait for the woodcock at nightfall. What excitement in the dim gloaming
of March--_Oculi: da kommen sie_--among those patches of trees with
their scent of dampness and sprouting leaves, listening for the call of
the male bird and waiting to see him glide past, mysterious as a
phantom! That was sport worthy of the name; though I now find it not
altogether easy to conjure up the first fine rapture of that
bird-massacring epoch. How unimaginative--unpoetic, let us say--are the
English, who put up this apparition of the twilight in the vulgarest
fashion with a dog, and then slaughter him as if he were nothing but a
pheasant or partridge! Such is our manner. It is the same with the
capercailzie, a stupid, worthless fowl--and worse than worthless: is he
not supplanting the finer black game? Why not ennoble him in death, at
least? Why not approach stealthily in the chill dusk of dawn, and espy
him at last, drunk with passion, on his favorite fir? Then, if you can
aim straight, he dies as we may all desire to die--swiftly, painlessly,
and like a lover in his highest moment of exaltation. I know what
Englishmen will say to this. They will say something about cruelty and
breeding-season. Your Anglo-Saxon is always worth listening to, when he
talks about cruel sports.

We had _intended_, I say; but those pests of horse-flies, which Mr. R.
insists upon calling “fly-horses” or “flyses-horse,” became worse and
worse. There must have been cattle in this wood, not long ago. At last,
despite clouds of tobacco-smoke, they drove us fairly out into the
fields, and not long afterwards we found ourselves on the banks of the
“Feldbächle,” a cheery streamlet whose course, from start to finish, has
approximately the shape of a horse-shoe or, better still, of a capital
letter U, resting on its left flank. It rises in a copious and frigid
fountain, soon to be visited, on the uplands behind our village, flows
east through a charming swamp region, feeds the two reservoirs, tumbles
downhill in a spectacular fall--the cataract whose water-power tempted
my paternal grandfather to establish his cotton-mills on this spot, and
which is therefore the _causa causans_ of my presence here at this
moment--babbles fussily through the village, and there turns westwards
through these fields, to merge itself into the Tabalada stream lower
down. A short but lively career.[6]

Sometimes, in dry weather, this rivulet is blocked and allowed to flow
over the parched plain. My first memory of it dates from such an
occasion. There were puddles in the stream-bed here and there, puddles
full of trout; and a number of Italian workmen--we employed a good many
Italians at the factories--were catching these trout with their hands
and eating them alive, as if they were apples. A disgusting sight, now I
come to think of it.

A little later in life, I remember, and on a scorching summer afternoon,
my sister and I bolted into these fields from the house, presumably
after butterflies. How the sun blazed; how hot and sticky we were! And
here was the old Feldbächle full of water, gadding along in its usual
brisk style. An idea occurred to her. What about walking into it,
clothes and all? Then, at last, we should be cool again. No; not paddle
about the water like anybody else, but get right in, get properly in, in
up to the neck, and lie down there as if we were in bed. A great joke.
It was only on scrambling out again that we began to wonder what would
happen at home and what, in fact, might be the correct thing to do under
the circumstances. The problem was solved by an uphill march along the
petrifying brook to far above the needful level, a flank movement
eastwards in the rear of our own house, followed by a rapid descent into
that of our friend the gardener who, with his usual ingenuity, lighted
an immense fire at which our scanty summer garments were dried, one by
one.

       *       *       *       *       *

Those old cotton-mills of ours at the foot of the cataract of which I
spoke are an ugly blot on the landscape; an eyesore, none the less,
which I can view without resentment, since, indirectly, I owe existence
to them and would not have missed the enjoyment of this life for
anything, nor would I exchange it even now for that of any other
creature on earth.

The paternal grandfather who built and worked them almost to the day of
his death must have been a man of uncommon grit. I know little about
him. A mass of family documents full of the requisite information, as
well as other papers interesting to myself, were lost in one of those
accidents which occur to everybody now and then; a trunk was broken open
on a journey, the clothes stolen and these letters and things scattered
or thrown away by the thieves. Small comfort to receive insurance money
for the clothes! I would have preferred the papers which are now lost
for ever.

I cannot even say when this business was founded. It may have been in
the late thirties, for he died October, 1870, aged sixty-six, at
Banchory, N. B., where he ought to have died, and there lies entombed in
our vault. His object in thus exiling himself and family for a whole
lifetime was to earn enough money to pay back some heavy mortgages on
his ancestral estate, for which he had an idolatrous affection. This
much I happen to know: that in 1856 already, by working these mills, he
was able to repay £36,000 towards the cost of them, and £24,000 towards
redeeming the mortgages. So he set himself to his grim task; and a grim
task it must have been to master the immense technical and commercial
details of such an undertaking, and all in a foreign language; to import
(among other little difficulties) every scrap of machinery from
Lancashire with no railway nearer, I fancy, than Zurich. He worked with
single aim and lived to reap his reward, although the losses due to the
American Civil War, and the Austro-German one, were such that the whole
enterprise nearly came to grief.[7]

His portrait in old age, engraved from a photograph on one of those
shell-cameos which used to be fashionable, wears an air of clean-cut,
thoughtful determination. They told me of his effective way with
beggars. “Work!” he would say, whenever one of them turned up with his
usual tale of misery. “Work! I also work.” The other, naturally enough,
professed himself quite unable to find any work. Whereupon, to the
beggar’s intense disgust, he promptly found it for him. These gentlemen
learnt to avoid our house in his day. I also gathered that his favorite
ode of Horace was “Integer vitæ.” That sounds characteristic. My own
fancy leans towards the Lady of Antium....

His eldest son carried on the business, and to him, with his love of
mountaineering and multiple other activities, it must have been irksome
in the extreme to sit in that office. He also stuck it out, but died
young and, from all accounts, the best-loved man in the province,
despite his Lutheran faith. Having occasion, during my last visit to
Bregenz, to mention my name to an unknown shopkeeper who was to send me
a parcel, I was pleased to hear him say “Your name, dear sir, is eternal
in this country.” It is doubtless gratifying to find yourself in a
district where your family is held in honor. One must try, however, not
to take these things too melodramatically. We live but once; we owe
nothing to posterity; and a man’s own happiness counts before that of
any one else. My father’s tastes happen to have lain in a direction
which commended him to his fellows. Had his nature driven him along
lines that failed to secure their sympathy, or even their approval, I
should have been the last to complain. The world is wide! Instead of
coming here, one would have gone somewhere else.



BLUMENEGG

_Blumenegg_


Afternoon, and warmer than usual. Fön shifts about in irresolute,
vagrant puffs of heat; the sky, shortly before sunrise, had been flaring
red, copper-colored, from end to end. This is the ardent and wayward but
caressing wind under whose touch everything grows brittle and
inflammable; when in olden days all cooking had to be suspended and
fires extinguished; when whole villages, for some trifling reason, were
burnt to the ground; it was during Fön weather that Tiefis and Nüziders,
and several in the Rhine valley, were annihilated within the memory of
our fathers.[8] The peasants, unfamiliar with real heat, go about
gasping....

While crossing our cemetery to revisit the grave of a little brother of
my father’s, an infant, and the Catholics were kind enough to make room
for him here--it struck me how poetic are the German designations for
such sad spots, _Friedhof_ and _Gottesacker_, when contrasted with our
soul-withering “churchyard” or “graveyard” or “burial-ground.” The
people hereabouts contrive to invest with a halo of romance even that
most unromantic of objects, the common potato, by calling it _Erdapfel_,
or _Grundbirne_. And the names of the ruined castles that strew this
region, Schattenburg, Sonnenberg, Rosenegg, and so forth, were surely
invented by a race that had a fine feeling for such things.

Or Blumenegg--which happens to be nothing but a translation of
Florimont, the Rhaeto-Roman name of this locality.

If you follow the main road to Ludesch, you will pass through a fir wood
and then come to the Lutz bridge. Do not cross the stream; keep on this
side, and walk along the water. After a few hundred yards you will
arrive at the “Schlosstobel” (the old “Falster”; also called
“Storrbach”) which rushes past the foot of Blumenegg castle. Not many
years ago it descended in a wild flood, uprooting trees and covering the
ground with a hideous irruption of shingle, which will remain for some
little time. On the Schlosstobel’s other side you enter a forest called
Gstinswald; part of it used to belong to our family. Here, at the
entrance of this wood, stood a landmark; a picture attached to a tree,
in memory of a man who was drowned at this spot while endeavoring to
cross the rivulet during some spate of olden days. It was a realistic
work of art, depicting both Heaven and earth. This was the subject: down
below, a watery chaos, a black thundercloud out of which buckets of
rain descended upon the victim whom you beheld struggling in the
whirlpool of waves, while his open umbrella floated disconsolately in
the neighborhood; overhead, on the other side of the thundercloud (it
had taken on a golden tinge of sunshine half way through) the Mother of
God with a saint or two, gazing down upon the scene with an air of
detachment which bordered on indifference. The picture is no longer
there; and nothing remains of its tree save a moldy stump.

From this point you can climb direct to the castle. We preferred to
wander awhile up the Gstinswald which clothes the right flank of the
Lutz river, in order to see what has happened to that mysterious and
solitary peasant-house which lay on a grassy slope in the forest. It is
still there, but those skulls of foxes and badgers and other beasts,
nailed by its occupant to a certain wooden door--skulls that held a
fascination for us children--are gone. And what of the snowdrops? This,
and a little hillock near Ludesch, were the only places where they could
be found; tiger-lilies grew elsewhere; _primula auricula_ only at the
Hanging Stone; cyclamen only at Feldkirch (where they were discovered in
the middle of the sixteenth century by Hieronymus Bock); the cypripedium
orchid (_calceolus Divæ Virginis_), the lady’s slipper, at two other
places; stag’s horn moss, _vulgo_ “Fuchsschwanz,” at four or five: we
knew them all! but flowers were dropped, when butterflies began. From
this farmhouse you have an unexpected view upon the summit of the
Scesaplana, and by far the best time to come here is after a summer
shower, when a procession of white mists comes trailing out of the
narrow valley, one after the other, like a troop of ghosts. Now ascend
through the field and the tract of woodland immediately behind this
farm, and you will reach a broad meadow which bears the old name of
Quadera or Quadern; against the huge barn which used to stand there, all
by itself, they have erected a modern house full of people. The castle
is not far off; you must look for it, since the little path that once
led up is half obliterated. And therein lies a great part of its charm;
you must look for it....

When all is said and done, when you have scoured Europe and other
regions in search of the picturesque and admired landscapes and ruins
innumerable, that shattered old fastness of Blumenegg, up there, still
remains one of the fairest places on earth. It is desolation itself, a
harmonious desolation, among its dreamy firs and beeches; firs within,
firs and beeches without. The roof is gone, and so are nearly all the
internal partitions; nothing but the shell survives. This shell, this
massive outer wall of blocks partly hewn and partly in the
rough--water-worn bowlders, dragged up from the Lutz-bed below--is
encrusted with moss wherever moss can grow; out of that moss sprout
little firs and little beeches, drawing what nourishment they can from
the old stones. They garnish the ruin. So Blumenegg is invaded by
nature; and nature, here, has been left untouched. A castle in a tale!
Elsewhere you see bare stretches of this wall, that tower up sadly in
ever-crumbling pinnacles. All is green within the shell; its firs are so
cunningly distributed that you can just see through them from one end to
the other of the ruin and realize, with pleasure, that you are within
some ancient enclosure. They rise out of an uneven floor whereunder, one
suspects, lie buried the roof and interior walls. This floor is thickly
carpeted with moss in every part. No brambles or inconvenient shrubs
grow here; nothing but firs and moss, and creeping ivy, and hepatica,
and daphne and the tender _Waldmeister_ plant, that calls up memories of
May. Once inside that green _enceinte_, a suggestion of remoteness
overcomes you; the world and its jargon are left behind. There is
silence save for the rushing torrent with its waterfall, three hundred
feet below. In former days, this castle must have towered grandly over
Ludesch and the whole valley. Viewed from down there, it now resembles
an agglomeration of spiky gray crags, peering upward through the firs.

Doubtless they have written about this place and, if one took the
trouble, one could learn something of its past either from archives or
out of the histories published by local antiquarians. There has never
been a want of such people hereabouts; the province is rich in
literature of this class. A rather valuable book which has remained in
my possession by a miracle and was printed in “dem Gräfflichem Marckt
Embs” in 1616[9] gives some account of it; but though I know little
enough, I know more than its old author could possibly have recorded,
since Blumenegg “flourished” long after he did. Eight different
dynasties have ruled here; the last being the Austrian Crown, to whom
its rights devolved at the beginning of last century. The castle was
probably built in the twelfth; it is known to have stood in 1265 and is
described as a “Veste” in 1288; its lords had power over the three
neighboring villages and some of the Valentschina (the old name of the
Walserthal). They were answerable for their acts to no township, to no
civil or religious authority whatever; to none save the Emperor himself.
That is the way to live, for it was an undertaking of questionable
profit to complain of such people to the Emperor. They claimed the right
over life and death of their lieges and exercised it freely,
“_because_”--as one of them observed in 1397--“_we possess both stocks
and gallows_”: an adequate reason. That is the way to talk.[10] They
also executed robbers with the sword. Then, together with nearly all our
feudal strongholds, this castle was sacked by the Appenzell people of
Switzerland in 1405. Its outer wall is down, on the east. From this
flank, presumably, the invaders entered for their work of destruction. A
spot is still pointed out by the driving road, on the other side of the
wild torrent, where, during some siege, the horses of a noble coach took
fright at the sound of cannon-shots and threw themselves down the
precipice, carriage and all.

Blumenegg revived. It was rebuilt and, during the Thirty Years’ War,
contained fifty Swedish prisoners in its “Keuthe,” a dungeon which was
pretty full even on ordinary occasions. Then, in 1650, the place was
burnt down with all it contained--priceless treasures among them, such
as the long-hidden manuscript of the _Chronicon Hirsaugiense_ in the
handwriting of its famous author, the Abbot Tritheim, of which,
fortunately, a copy had been taken a little earlier at St. Gallen. The
building was reduced to ashes a second time in 1774, and thereafter
allowed to fall into ruin, for ever. Why, I cannot say. Who would live
at Blumenegg if he could, particularly in that earlier period? The south
part of the castle, facing the valley, bears traces of a clumsy
reconstruction. It lacks the dreaminess of the remaining part; a harsher
element of stones dominates in this quadrangle, and you can discover an
old fire-place with blackened chimney and a few projecting wooden beams.
For the rest, it must have looked well, blazing up there; I can picture
the villagers of Ludesch down below, watching the conflagration and
dancing with joy!

It did not take us long to make ourselves comfortable within the
enclosure, on that soft carpet. The sun was still fairly high; it
percolated through the fir-branches, etching lively patterns all around
us; it drew luscious tints, of unearthly brightness, out of the deep
green moss. And here we stayed, and stayed. We had fallen under the
spell of the place and neither felt inclined to move; some drowsy genius
hovered in our neighborhood. It was so warm and green; so remote. How
one changes! I used to find it irksome to be obliged to show this castle
to friends or relatives. Left to my own devices, I avoided the place;
there were no butterflies, no fossils, no snakes, no birds, worth
mentioning. Ten to one, not even a squirrel....

Since then, castle-ruins galore have been inspected. Europe is studded
with them. I think of those absurd places in England or on the Rhine,
possibly restored and in every case sullied by tourists and their
traces; out of them, the spirit of romance has been driven beyond
recall. The frowning rock-fortresses of the Bavarian Palatinate--Dahn,
Weglenburg, Trifels, Madenburg, Lindelbronn, Fleckenstein: how one used
to know them!--are in better case, or were, thirty odd years ago; even
they have not escaped contamination. Certain southern ruins are no doubt
imposing; but bleak. Bleak! Mere piles of masonry, they have not been
hallowed by lapse of years; they lack the refinement which verdure alone
can give; their ravages will show for all time. Those ravages are healed
here; trees and moss have done their work so well that an exquisite
_tonalité_ pervades the spot. Blumenegg is all in one key. Men have left
it to crumble alone; and alone it crumbles, slowly and graciously, to
earth. Nothing and nobody intrudes, save the wild things of nature; you
must look for it. A much-frequented path--short cut from the Walserthal
to the railway-station--runs close by; who ever steps aside? Resting in
that enchanted penumbra, one gains the impression that Blumenegg is
neither sad nor smiling; a little wistful, a little sleepy, like old
Barbarossa in his cave.

What of the intimate, domestic life of its former occupants? On a night,
say, of December, 1402--of whom did the family consist, what was their
costume, their dinner menu, the sound of their dialect, their theme of
conversation? Does it help us much to know that Count Wolfart,
familiarly termed “the wolflet”--it probably suited him--could bring
five thousand men into battle? (An enormous number; can they have meant
five hundred?) Poke our noses, as we please, into chronicles, and pore
over books like Freytag’s “Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit,”
these men remain crepuscular, elusive shapes. The Romans of the Empire,
the pyramid builders of Egypt, move in comparative daylight before our
eyes....

Meanwhile the mossy floor has ceased to glow. Slanting sunbeams come
filtered, lemon-tinted, through the beech-leaves out there; they spatter
the fir-trunks with moon-like discs and crescents. And still we refuse
to budge. A soft tinkle of cow-bells, inaudible by day, floats up from
the valley; even as we look on, those silvery patches begin to fade from
the trees, and everything trembles in the witchery of dusk. Interplay of
light and shade is ended. We feel no change, while darkness creeps up
stealthily; only the voice of the torrent has grown louder and hoarser.
A flock of crows suddenly arrives, with the evident intention of
roosting above our heads. Something apparently is not in order to-night,
for they rise again with discontented croakings. No wonder. Mr. R. has
been lying flat on his back for the last half hour immediately below
them, playing tunes on that mouth-organ--that talisman which I, in a
moment of inspiration, presented to him. On such occasions he is lost to
the world and in a kind of trance; one arm beats time in the air. The
birds cannot possibly see him, but they can hear the music, and no crow
on earth, not the wisest old raven, could guess the names of the
“morceaux” which have just been performed.

“What were you playing, all this time?” I enquire, during a pause.

“Well, there was the _marche des escargots_, which you must be sick of,
by now--a fine piece, all the same; and the old _vache enragée_----”

“I know. Rather noisy, the old _vache_.”

“What do you expect? Do you want her to go mad in her sleep. Then the
_fantaisie_ of last week, and _pluie dans les bois_, and the duet
between two sea-nymphs, and _rêve d’un papillon_ and a new one, a little
caprice or something, which has not yet got a name. I am thinking of
calling it _coin des fleurs_ (Blumenegg[11]).”

Strange! This instrument appeals, as I expected, to certain primitive
and childlike streaks in his nature. At first, needless to say, it was
thrown aside with contempt; then shyly picked up from time to time. Now
the two are inseparable; it accompanies him everywhere in a specially
built leather case, and I should not be surprised to learn that he takes
it to bed with him. As to these “morceaux”--they have a real interest,
seeing that Mr. R. knows nothing whatever of music, cannot remember a
tune, never whistles or sings, and has only a feeble ear for rhythm in
poetry. None the less, each of these _melodies_ possesses a character of
its own and, once invented, never varies by a note. Their names, I
understand, are recorded in his diary. They are worth it.

Night; and dark night, under these trees. The Fön is over, a chill dew
has fallen. We rise at last, rather stiff, and proceed cautiously
downwards till we reach the path; then across the bridge and into the
open meadow, the so-called fox-meadow, when--our match-box, our only
match-box: where is it gone? Forgotten inside the castle, on the moss.
Back again, to crawl about on hands and knees till the precious object
has been found; then once more to the fox-meadow. So we wander homeward,
in full content. The dew-drenched field sends a pleasant shiver up
through our boots, and a chorus of crickets is chirping lustily in its
damp earth. Stars are out; the Tschallenga hill, confronting us, has
become pitch-black; those Rhætian peaks are like steel, and their
snow-patches have a dead look at this hour. Tawny exhalations, as of
lingering day, flit about the Swiss mountains on our west. Some grass
has been mown up here, during the hot afternoon; the air is full of its
fragrance.

       *       *       *       *       *

Blumenegg and such places--these are the surroundings in which children
ought to grow up. At home, domestic beasts of every kind, and gardens
and orchards; further afield, flowery meadows and forests; the
glittering snow of winter and cloudless summer skies; rock and rivulet;
a smiling patriarchal peasantry all about; these are the surroundings.
Keep them off the street-pavement.

Impermanent things, like pavements and what they stand for, stimulate
the adult; they overstimulate children, who should be in contact with
eternities. In a town you may watch the progress of their warping; how
they grow up precocious and partially atrophied; defrauded of their full
heritage as human beings. Indeed all town-bred persons, with the rarest
exceptions, are incomplete, in a certain small sense of that word. They
show a gap which, unlike other gaps (deficient learning or manners) can
never be filled up in later years. The intelligent countryman does not
take long to appreciate the most complex wonders of civilization,
because his life began at the right end of things; your citizen will
only stare at those other wonders with more or less impatience: he began
at the wrong end. One can tell after five minutes’ conversation whether
a man has been brought up in city or country, for no townsman, be he of
what class he pleases, can hide his native imperfection.

Or go to literature, the surest test, since _scripta manent_. It
happened to be my fate for some years to peruse daily a considerable
mass of the latest so-called lyric poetry, and a melancholy task it was
following these youngsters as they floundered about in a vain search
after new gods, unaware of the fact that the lyrical temper demands a
peculiar environment for its nurture, that gods are shy, and not to be
encountered in music-halls and restaurants, or even during a week-end at
the seaside. There were no eternities for these people, and consequently
no true joy, no true grief; no heights, no depths; they fell into two
categories: the hectic and the drab. The lyrical temper.... One uses
such expressions, without perhaps being clear as to their meaning. What
is the lyrical temper? A capacity to warble about buttercups? I should
describe it as a sympathetic feeling for the myriad processes of nature,
and the application of this gift towards interpreting human phenomena
with concision and poignancy; the sense, in short, of being borne along,
together with all else on earth, in a soft pantheistic commotion.

That is a view of life which generates both tears and smiles, and one
which you will vainly seek in any town-bred writer. Compare Milton, not
with Theocritus or Shakespeare, but with a poet of the caliber of Ovid,
and you will realize how much more individual and authoritative his
utterance would be, had he enjoyed Ovid’s advantages in childhood. He
saw nature through books, say Mr. Tuckwell and Mr. Cotterill and all the
rest of them;[12] his scenery is charmingly manufactured according to
the renaissance prescription, and if you know your Italian poets you can
tell beforehand what Milton will have to say; a master of landscape
arrangement, without a doubt, but--he lacked what Ovid possessed, an
æsthetic personality; he was a moralist, as every one grows to be, who
takes his fellow-creatures at their own estimate. And how avoid doing
this, if you are always among them? For there they live clustered
together, and involuntarily disposed to attach undue significance to
themselves and their works, to lose their sense of proportion, until
some little interference from that despised exterior makes itself felt,
an earthquake or such-like, which gives these posturing ephemerals an
opportunity to straighten out their values again.

Charles Lamb is another street-walker, and one whose relish of man and
his ways, to my taste, never cloys, inasmuch as it remains firm-fixed on
the hither side of lachrymosity. Yet is there not a certain shallowness
in his preoccupation with fellow-creatures? Shallowness suggests want of
depth; want of breadth is what I wish to imply. Zest, temperamental
zest, should be a fountain, scattering playfully in all directions;
Lamb’s comfortable variety is unilateral--a fountain gushing from a
wall. How many avenues of delight are closed to the mere moralist or
immoralist who knows nothing of things extra-human; who remains
absorbed in mankind and its half-dozen motives of conduct, so unstable
and yet forever the same, which we all fathomed before we were twenty!
Well, their permutations and combinations afford a little material for
playwrights and others, and there is no harm in going to the theater now
and then, or reading a novel, provided you have nothing better to do.



FATHER BRUHIN

_Father Bruhin_


This was a pious pilgrimage.

Ages ago there used to come to our house a visitor, a friend of my
father’s, a Benedictine monk of the name of Bruhin. Of him I have, or
till yesterday thought to have, dim, childish memories. He lived in the
neighboring convent of St. Gerold--offshoot of the famous
Einsiedeln--and was a naturalist, a _rara avis_ hereabouts. I still
possess seven of his papers, mostly on the fauna and flora of this
particular province: thoroughly good work. He was a loving and accurate
student both of animals and plants, and of their literature. St. Gerold
is the second of various hamlets and villages in the long verdant
Walserthal on our east, up which now runs a convenient carriage road
ending (the road; not the valley) at the distant Buchboden, five hours’
march away. We went there, because I was anxious to learn, if possible,
a few details of Bruhin’s life and to see whether their library
contained any other works by him.

It is a pleasant, easy walk to St. Gerold, but the pilgrimage proved a
disappointment. In the Prior’s absence, the archives could not be
consulted; a young monk, a stranger who was undergoing a kind of
rest-cure here--he looked a little haggard--accompanied us up to the
library at the top of the building. It was well stored with books such
as one might expect to find there, but contained not a scrap by Bruhin.

At the library our guide left us in charge of that old woman who has
haunted the premises from time immemorial; her hair has grown whiter
since last we met, her eyes are black as ever. She showed the way
through some of those comfortably furnished bedrooms with their fine
seventeenth century wood-carvings; into the church, which has been
tastefully redecorated and where the recent governmental brigandage has
not spared even the greater of the tin organ-pipes; finally down to the
kitchen which, like the organ, is worked by electricity. There she fed
Mr. R. on cider and cheese, saying she hoped they would soon be able to
receive guests again and keep them overnight, if necessary; at present,
everything was upside down, everything!

Had the Prior been visible, our search might have led to something; he
was away on the mountains. Whether he resembles him of olden days? That
one, I remember, used to come down and see us, and could generally be
induced to stay for luncheon or dinner. It was his habit, while eating,
to produce a formidable smacking noise--Germans call it
_Schmatzen_--with his lips, a noise which we were strictly forbidden to
make. One day at mealtime I gave a splendid imitation of the Prior over
his soup, thinking that what was good enough for him would surely be
good enough for me, and hoping, at all events, to gain some little
applause. Instead of that, I was told: “Only His Reverence the Prior may
make that noise. When you are Prior, you shall make it too. Meanwhile,
try to eat like everybody else, unless you want to be sent out of the
room.” A damper....

So much for Bruhin. All we gleaned at St. Gerold was that he served as
“Co-operator” there from 1865 to 1868 and after that, presumably, left
the convent. If so, the monk whom I hazily recall must have been a
different one, unless Bruhin continued his visits to us from some other
quarter after 1868. The Bregenz libraries might contain more of his
writings; I shall look for them, if we go there.[13]

Homewards again. On leaving one of those wooded torrents that seam the
road, a little incident was recalled to my mind by the sight of a
certain wayside shrine which stands here. We were once passing along, as
children, when we noticed that its door had been left open and a heap of
coppers laid inside by some pious person or persons for the benefit of
any poor travelers who might care to help themselves. I imagine it was
my sister’s idea. She took a handful, and persuaded me to take one too.
Nobody saw us; the governess was walking on ahead. She behaved even more
flagrantly on another occasion when a plateful of money was being held
aloft, for the same charitable purpose, among a congregation pouring out
of some church. She reached up and swiftly grabbed a number of coins;
perhaps I followed her example. Now what could we children want with
money? The delicacies of the village were only three: sugar-candy in
crystals, dried figs strung together, and black sticks of licorice
(_vulgo_ “Bährendreck”) and we had exhausted their charm long, long ago,
in the days of the old Anna.

This nurse it was, by the way, who first took me to the hamlet of
Thüringerberg, where I now found myself walking with Mr. R. who had
induced me, for reasons which became apparent later on, to abandon the
main road in favor of one that leads due west. It shows how little she
then knew the country--she was a Tyrolese, not a native--that, after
dragging me up here, aged three or four, she had to enquire the name of
the place. I came home with a wonderful tale of having been to
Thüringerberg, which was not believed; old Anna, afterwards, got it hot
for making me walk too far. Up there, meanwhile, the kindly priest
invited us to his house to rest; he gave us coffee and honey, and even
offered me a pinch of his snuff--the first of several I have since
taken.

Two roads descend from Thüringerberg in the direction of the distant
Satteins--the convenient new one down below, and the ancient track on
the higher level. Of course we chose the latter, that old, grass-grown,
abandoned path. Memories lurk about these forsaken places; and memories
have become my hobby during the last week or so. This particular track
reminds me of sundry strolls down here ages ago with a Sempill cousin,
the jovial Jumbo, who turned up in this country at odd intervals to our
infinite delight. He was so utterly different from all the other people
who arrived from those remote regions! The peasants adored him; he could
hold long conversations with them in their own language by imitating the
sound of their voices, which amused them mightily; he knew not a word of
German. He used to sit for hours in their orchards, drinking wine or
playing with the babies; when any one greeted him on the road with the
usual “Grüass Gott,” he would reply “Great Scot”; if they said “Gueta
Tag,” he said “Good dog.” What a relief was Jumbo, after those legions
of unspeakable grand-aunts! They never left us alone; they were always
pulling us about, as if we had no nurses or governesses of our own, to
teach us how to behave. Always interfering! You mustn’t eat this; you
mustn’t do that; little girls don’t climb trees; little boys ought to
know that cows are not made to be ridden about on; never jump down till
the carriage stops; you know what happened to Don’t Care? He was hanged;
have you said your prayers? Children should be seen and not heard; a
fourth helping? Now don’t do yourself any violence, dear; it’s long past
bed-time--how we loathed the entire clan! Nearly everything, in fact,
that hailed from Scotland was fraught with terrors.

But the terror of terrors was our paternal grandmother. If the others of
that family resembled her, their descendants are to be pitied. And to
think that she may have been the best of all of them! I confess that,
looking over some photographs at this distance of time, I fail to see
anything terrible in her appearance; here she is, for instance, at
Llandudno, looking straight at you, grave and serene, with the long
upper lip peculiar to her family and a high forehead; rather a handsome
old woman, and one who evidently knows her mind. That may well be.
Handsome or not, she spanked me as an infant, before I could walk--so
much I remember clearly; what I cannot clearly remember is, whether she
had any plausible reason for doing it. Later on, she punished us in the
stern judicial manner which was agreeable to the taste of her generation
and which is precisely the one way children should never be punished.
Wonderful tales were told us of her methods of subduing her only
daughter, who died in youth--perhaps from the effects of it--and lies
buried under an elaborately inscribed tombstone in the Protestant
cemetery at Rome. No doubt she meant to do right; it is an old pretext
for doing wrong. Children should be “broken”: that was her theory.

She never broke me. Something else happened one day, during the
Christmas holidays in England. I was in my twelfth year, all alone,
perfectly comfortable and perfectly well, delighted to have escaped for
a season out of some absurd school, and reading the “Mysteries of
Udolpho” in the library when the old thing entered with an all-too
familiar silver tray, bearing the abominable mixture known as “Gregory’s
Powder.” It was her universal remedy for every complaint of mine, from a
sprained ankle to a toothache, the principle being that, whatever might
be amiss, Gregory’s Powder, by virtue of its villainous taste alone,
must inevitably do good, if not as a medical preparation, then as an
incitement to humility and obedience. This filthy poison I had hitherto
swallowed like a lamb; and been made duly ill in consequence. On that
particular occasion, however, the sight of the tray stirred me as never
before; all the accumulated bile of similar torments in the past surged
up; it was my first experience of “seeing red.” Guided by a righteous
demon of revolt, I seized a stick which stood in a corner at my
elbow--an elaborate concern of hippopotamus-hide with carved ivory top,
which some good-for-nothing uncle had brought from Natal--and therewith
knocked the tray out of her hand and then went for her with such a dash
that she fled out of the room. It happened in the twinkling of an eye. I
knew not how the thing was done; it was plain, now, what people meant
when they said that So-and-so was “not responsible for his actions.” On
mature deliberation I decided, in the very words of the old lady, that
_all was for the best_. There was an end of Gregory’s Powder. That is
the way to treat grandmothers of this variety. She dared not tackle me;
she was too old and I too tough, being then in the habit of winning most
of the gymnastic prizes at school. As always before, she had tried to
impose upon me by sheer strength of personality, and suddenly, for the
first time, found herself confronted by a new and persuasive
argument--brute force.

Well! To attack your grandmother with a walking-stick is not polite. On
the other hard, there is no reason why boys should be needlessly
tortured; they suffer quite enough, as it is. If I had not acted as I
did, she would have continued to poison me with the stuff to the end of
her long life. Why suffer, when you can avoid it? And there I leave this
ethical problem. For the rest, in her heart of hearts, she was perhaps
not quite so “surprised and grieved” (a favorite phrase of hers, like “I
sincerely hope and trust”) as she professed to be; so strong was her
family sense that she may well have been charmed with this premature
exhibition of ancestral savagery; maybe she was anxiously waiting for it
to appear, and chose Gregory’s Powder as a kind of test or provocative.
If so, it worked. One thing is certain: referring to the episode, she
told another of those old women, who repeated it to me long afterwards,
that I was plainly the son of my father--good news, so far as it
went....

Phantoms!

Meanwhile we wandered along that ancient track towards the sunset, with
the spacious Ill valley at our feet, and on its further side, the
Rhætikon peaks which had grown more imposing in proportion as we
ourselves had mounted upwards. On these slopes they were gathering the
cherries with ladders; diminutive fruit on enormous trees. Here are also
wild maples, those pleasant Alpine growths that clamber down from their
homes overhead and indulge in a tasteful habit of clothing trunk and
branches in a vesture of dusky green moss. The wood is so white that it
is used--the nearest approach to ivory--for fashioning the sculptured
images of the Crucified which one sees everywhere. The fairest maple in
the whole district is that which forms a landmark on the path between
Raggal and Ludescherberg; you can see it from the other side of the
Walserthal, three miles off.

Presently we found ourselves in one of those narrow dells common
hereabouts, dells that run parallel to the main valley, east and west;
they may be due to ice-action in the past. It is curious, in such
places, to observe how the plants select their aspect according to
whether they relish sunshine or not; there are two different floras
growing within twenty yards of each other. Here, on our left, gushes out
a noble spring; it accompanies us, forming a succession of flowery
marshes. They are still there--the bulrushes in the last of its
hill-girdled swamps; this is one of the three places where bulrushes can
be found. Thereafter you pass that peasant’s house, solitary and
prosperous--what winter landscapes must be visible from its
windows!--and enter the wood. Our path, once well trodden, is now hard
to follow. It begins to lose itself----

Ah, and the old woman’s mania against tobacco; I had nearly forgotten
this. It was sincere, like all else in her nature, yet incredible in
its intensity. Somewhere about the fifties she ordered a pair of boots
from the local man, under the condition that he was not to smoke while
making them. They arrived. “That man has smoked!” she declared, and
refused to accept them; she knew from their smell that he had broken his
agreement (of course he had). This legend was still current here in the
nineties. Up in Scotland, despite the visitors, she never allowed a
smoking-room to be built. We were not permitted to smoke even in the
grounds. A military cousin, a distinguished man, was told that if he
wished to smoke after dinner he could walk to the end of the drive, and
indulge his low tastes on the main road. My sister used to shoulder her
rod and go “fly-fishing” at the most improbable hours and seasons of the
year, solely in order to be able to enjoy her cigarette in peace.

She expired in grand style, up there. We were chamois-shooting at Lech,
not far from here,[14] when a message came to the effect that she was
at the point of death. We packed up and rushed to the Highlands, losing
a whole day at Calais because the boats could not run on account of a
storm. On our arrival, the doctor said, “She ought to have been dead
four days ago.” None the less, she had made up her mind not to depart
till everything was in order. She went through her will, clause by
clause. Was there any objection to this or that? Had she done the right
thing by So-and-so? Or had she perhaps forgotten anything? It was all in
perfect order, we assured her. She gave us a fine old-fashioned
blessing, and was dead a few hours later....

And now we were threading our way through a veritable tangle, a
branch-charmed tangle, and the light overhead grew dimmer. A golden
suspense was brooding over the forest. How sweet, how _intimate_, are
these hours of late afternoon under the trees, when all is voiceless and
drowned in mellow radiance; how they conjure up sensations of
other-where, and cleanse the miry places of the mind!

A few years hence, and every trace of this old path will have vanished.
It ended, for us, in a kind of gulley; the gulley ended in the new road
lower down. And where did the new road end?

Where else, but at Tiefis?

       *       *       *       *       *

The mention of Llandudno reminds me that I may have been unfair to that
old grandmother. For I knew full well that she detested places like
Llandudno or Clifton or Cheltenham, and yet she would take us there for
the Easter holidays at our own request, in order that we might gratify a
taste for fossils; which is surely to her credit. Not every grandmother
would have made such a sacrifice for two objectionable boys. As a
set-off to this, however, I must record that she used to make me play
Wagner to her, much against my will--an inexplicably modern trait of
hers, this love of Wagner, and all the more singular since he, at that
time, was accounted a dangerous lunatic. (Perhaps she only asked me to
play because at such moments, at least, I could not be up to any other
devilry.) She also insisted on our both reading “Marmion” aloud; partly
because it was her dear dead husband’s favorite poem, and partly on
account of a family legend to the effect that certain of its cantos were
composed on our property. Can that have improved its flavor?

“Marmion” we thought dreadful rot. To revenge ourselves, we made a farce
of these recitals, by going through the lines in a toneless voice and
laying stress not where the poet and common sense meant it to lie, but
on that precise syllable where, by the structure of the verse, it came
to lie; let any one read a page of “Marmion” according to this recipe,
and note the rich and unforeseen results! It was only by a miracle that
we managed to keep our countenance; or rather, not by a miracle at all,
but by a systematic education in the art of “not exploding.” The old
lady writhed and squirmed under this outrage upon her divine Sir Walter,
but said never a word; gulping down her discomfort with the same air of
dour determination with which, at dinner, and solely to set us a good
example, she gulped down indigestible fragments of plum-pudding,
roly-poly and other hyperborean horrors glistening with suet, although
well aware that such things are not fit for human consumption. Of course
we were obliged to gulp them down too, with this difference, that she
had Madeira and port to wash the taste out of her mouth, while we only
got claret, which made it worse. What a life!



RAIN

_Rain_


Rain once more....

“Now this is the _comble_,” said Mr. R. this morning, entering my room
with a pair of boots in his hand.

“What’s up?”

“Look!”

They had inserted new laces, without having been asked to do anything of
the kind.

Every day, and all day long, similar little experiences are thrust upon
him; he has lived in a state of chronic amazement since his arrival.
That is not surprising. His acquaintance with the life of taverns has
been confined to those of Italy and of France; the unpunctuality and
brawling of the one, the miserliness and thinly veiled insolence of the
other--the general discomfort of both. “Nobody will believe me,” he
says, “when I tell them how one lives in these villages. Fortunately I
have my diary.”

Our bill of fare has varied with every meal; only once were they obliged
to apologize for giving us the same meat, venison, on two days running,
and even then it was prepared differently. With the exception of
_Hasenpfeffer_--close season for hares till 1st of September--we have
gone through that entire list of local delicacies, and thereto added
several more.

These people really make one feel at home. There is an all-pervading
sense of peace and plenty, of comfort, in a word; not discomfort.
Everything is in order, and the place so clean that you could dine on
the floors. The household works like a well-oiled machine--if you can
imagine a machine that wears throughout its parts a perennial smile.
Kindliness is the tone of this house; of the whole village; of all these
villages. It does one good to live among such folk. It is doing Mr. R.
more good than he imagines. He begins to realize what is hard to realize
in Mediterranean countries: that men can be affable and ample, and yet
nowise simpletons. Match-boxes given away gratis; beefsteaks that you
cannot possibly finish; four vegetables to every course of meat;
electric lights burning night and day; fresh towels all the time; apples
and pears thrown to the pigs; mountains of butter and lakes of honey for
breakfast--in fact, a system of wanton _gaspillage_ that would send a
French house-wife into epileptics. All this, I tell him, is the merest
shadow of what was. And among the numerous visitors to our inn there is
never a harsh word; no sullenness, no raised voices, no complaints. We
hear the house door being shut down below, every night, amid cheery talk
and laughter.

Yet three out of five village taverns are closed--disastrous symptom,
among so convivial a people. The depreciation of the currency.... There
are men, respectable men, who have not tasted a drop of wine for the
last year, which is a shameful state of affairs. Only factory hands and
such-like can afford to pay the present price of 8000 kronen for half a
liter. Less than that sum, namely 7000, was what our tailor gave for his
two-storied house with a garden and field. We watched a pig-auction the
other day (where else, but at Tiefis?). A young one, weighing about
seventy pounds, went for 610,000 kronen. In olden days, they would have
made you a present of him.

The peasants are particularly hard hit this year. Our valley has always
been celebrated for its fertility, the result of age-long tillage and
manuring, and whoever walks to-day about those cultivated fields,
ignorant of their normal condition, might think that these crops of hay,
wheat, maize, tobacco (every one may plant his own tobacco; the trouble
begins, when you try to make it smokable), beans, hemp, flax, potatoes,
cabbage, beetroot, poppies, pumpkins and what not, look sufficiently
thriving. That is a mistake. The fruit-harvest promises well; these
fields are in a bad way. The _Engerlinge_, the larvæ of the cockchafer,
have been unusually active of late. This miserable worm which lives
underground, gnawing away the roots, had hitherto been kept in its place
by the moles. But during the war and afterwards moles were destroyed as
never before, for the sake of their skins. A mole eats one and a half
times its own weight every day; he prefers the _Engerlinge_ to all other
food. So the larvæ now thrive, because the war was responsible for the
death of the moles. One result of the war, so far as this little
economic byway is concerned.

Other results. A favorite method of preventing damage by _Engerlinge_ is
to kill the cockchafer itself. They used to be murdered by myriads,
either while flying about at night, or in the early morning when they
cling, weary and drunk with dew, to the trees. Boys would do this for a
trifling sum, or for the fun of the thing. They are too busy nowadays;
they must do the work of those who were killed. And of those who have
free time on their hands, the decent ones refuse the job because they
are ashamed to ask the prices now ruling (and their fathers will not let
them take less); the others demand so much that the peasant cannot pay
them. Our village elders have done their best to face the mischief. They
have decided that every land-owner must bring in a certain measure of
cockchafers or deposit a certain sum of money; whoever collects more
than this stipulated measure, is paid extra out of the sum deposited by
the others; whoever fails to come up to the standard, is fined in
proportion. The provincial government has also forbidden the destruction
of moles, and to-day’s paper, now lying before me, contains an eloquent
article entitled “Spare the moles!”

It is too late. The village of Bratz (=_pratum_), for example, is so
sorely tried by the plague of these larvæ that a rich peasant owning,
let us say, six cows, will not be able to cut enough fodder to keep them
alive through the winter; his crop of hay is too impoverished. What
shall he do? He is in the dilemma of seeing a couple of his beasts
perish from starvation, or of selling them at their present value,
although fully aware that by the time spring comes round and fodder is
again plentiful, he will not be able, with the same amount of money, to
purchase even a quarter of a cow to eat his grass; so rapid is the
depreciation of the currency.

In this and other matters the peasantry, the backbone of the province,
is being systematically ruined. The blow was undeserved. They were
dragged into this tragic farce through no fault of their own, and are
now paying for the folly of others. True, they revenge themselves on the
rich factory hands and bureaucrats; they charge fantastic prices for
milk and other agricultural products. The others retaliate by burning
their hay-huts. There was a good deal of incendiarism in the Bludenz
district last winter. Mutual ill-will is the result. And their so-called
betters, the _rentiers_ who, after a life of drudgery in office or
elsewhere, laid aside sufficient money to build themselves a house
wherein to end their days, are in still more pitiable plight. Such is
the case of an old gentleman of my acquaintance at Bludenz, who had
worked from the age of fourteen till after seventy, and had been able to
acquire what seemed a considerable fortune. What are even a million
kronen to-day? And how is he to earn more, at the age of eighty-six?

Industrial workmen, no doubt, are doing uncommonly well; that English
eight hours’ nonsense fosters their pretensions, and as often as they
consider their pay insufficient, they go on strike and obtain more. The
bureaucrats also thrive in a lesser degree. There is an employee to
every five men in this country; a scandalous plethora, but who would not
be an employee--one of the few careers whereby a native, under existing
circumstances, may hope to escape starvation? So do we foreigners. For
apartments, lighting, laundry, repairs to clothes and boots, food which
for excellence and variety would be unprocurable, pay what you please,
in any English village five times the size of this one, for as much
wine, beer, _schnapps_ and cider as we can hold we pay a sum which
works out, for both together, at three shillings a day. This includes an
additional 10 per cent on the total, which I insist upon paying for
service, though it cost some little argument before I could make them
accept it. Such are the results of the “Valuta,” so far as Englishmen
are concerned.

Valuta: that is one of three words which you may now for the first time
hear repeated from mouth to mouth. The other two are “Anschluss” and
“Miliz.” These matters have been adequately discussed in our own Press;
I will only say, as regards the last of them, that no government,
however wise and well-intentioned, can enforce its wishes if you take
away its means of doing so: a militia. One does not expect high-priced
inter-allied experts to be equipped with either sympathy or imagination;
that would be asking too much. They should, at least, possess a little
common sense and knowledge of history. Western Europe, scared to death
of bolshevism in Russia, is busily engaged in manufacturing it
elsewhere; and if this once gentlemanly province now exhales, as does
the rest of the country, a strong reek of communistic fumes, it is our
experts who are to blame. Ah, well! When the broth is boiling, the scum
invariably rises to the top and stays there, until some businesslike
_chef_ comes along, to cream off this filthy product and throw it down
the drain.

Valuta: wondrous are its workings. There is hardly an ounce of butter
procurable in Bludenz, which is enclosed in grazing grounds. Where has
it all gone? Over the mountains, into Switzerland. Valuta! Your Austrian
smuggler is delighted; he receives five times the price he would get if
he sold the stuff in his own country, and in Swiss money too, which may
have doubled in worth by the time he reaches home again. Your Swiss
buyer is delighted; he pays less than half the price he would have to
pay for his own product. The local poor suffer, meanwhile, especially
the children; for the nutritive value of butter, in the shape of
_Schmalz_, is great, and this condiment used to figure in all their
principal dishes, and would be doubly needful now that meat is quite
beyond their reach. Altogether, these children--a shadow seems to have
passed over them, witnessing the distresses of their parents. They are
paler than they used to be, and graver of mien; far too many are
insufficiently clad and unshod. An Englishman might think ten shillings
a reasonable price for a pair of sound children’s boots; the native
cannot afford 110,000 kronen, a sum for which formerly he could have
bought half a village. Even the post-boy, a lively youngster who happens
to be a grandson of that old gardener of ours, presents himself up here
every morning without shoes or stockings. He has none.

I glance, for further informative matter, down the columns of that paper
which bids us “Spare the moles!” and observe that it contains, among its
advertisements, an offer by a furrier of two hundred kronen for each
moleskin brought to him. This does not sound as if the provincial
government’s decree were being enforced very drastically. The same
gentleman is ready to pay exactly a thousand times as much for the skin
of pine martens, which can be worth little enough at this warm season of
the year. The animal is of the greatest scarcity in our
neighborhood.[15]

And here is a final, thrilling item. The midwives of Feldkirch,
assembled in conclave, have regretfully decided that the charges for
attendance are to be doubled in future.

Midwives, I suspect, are not the only professional ladies who have
lately been obliged to raise their tariff.

Towards nightfall, a gleam of sunshine after the rain. Out for a stroll,
after dinner....

They have anointed our boots with badger’s fat, in case we traverse any
wet fields. We are only going along the main road towards Ludesch. That
bench on the old Lutz embankment--that bench invariably occupied by a
poor hump-backed woman reading--is sure to be empty at this hour.

It is. We sit down to smoke under the dripping firs, and I go
ghost-hunting all alone, in the dark. The memories that are crowded into
these few hundred yards! They spring up at my feet, from the damp forest
earth. There was once a battle on this site, a sanguinary battle between
two rival gypsy bands who used it for their camping ground and
accidentally arrived both on the same evening; each claimed it for his
own, and several men were killed before the matter was decided; our
people were talking about the fray years afterwards. Further on, past
the bridge, I murdered the first snake of many and found my first piece
of phosphorescent wood. Here, too, stands the rifle-range which is
connected with one of six clear memories of my father; he used to come
out of the place adorned with paper decorations for his marksmanship and
they even hung up a framed diploma of honor to him; the building was
sacked two years ago by some local revolutionaries who disapproved of
shooting in every form and carried off the diploma, but forgot to
efface its mark on the wall where it had hung for fifty years.

Nearly opposite to where we are sitting is a deep incline of grass--I
take it to be the bank of the prehistoric Lutz; my father once made me
rush up and down this terrific slope in preparation, no doubt, for
mountaineering. The quarry close by, in which one hunted vainly for
crystals (it is Eocene, and has nothing but spar) is still there, but
those mysterious black hillocks by the roadside with their unforgettable
smell, where the charcoal-burners plied their trade, are gone and a
thriving house and orchard have stepped into their place. The Madonna
shrine, further on, is quite unchanged; here the old Anna used to lift
me up to gaze at the Mother of God standing, as She does to this day,
upon an earth girt about by the green Serpent of Evil. At the back of
our bench there used to be a deep, square hole in the ground. My sister
and I once informed a newly arrived German governess that it was a
disused elephant trap. She said nothing but, on returning home,
complained bitterly of our untruthful habits. That plantation of young
trees across the road was once a bare, thistle-strewn heath, a _Haide_,
the sole locality where, year after year, one could catch white
admirals. So there were just two well-known places where you might rely
upon a scarlet tiger, and neither more nor less than three, where there
was a chance of seeing, though probably not of catching, a
_Trauermantel_ (Camberwell beauty). Butterflies were dropped, when
stones began.

And all this time Mr. R. has had nothing whatever to say. He has grown
rather silent of late, his superciliousness begins to evaporate: that
augurs well! My theory works--I have observed it for some time past; my
theory of the benign influence of woodland scenery upon the character of
youth. How much more inspiring to live in such a pastoral and sylvan
environment than on the pavements of a town! Instead of troubling about
theaters and girls, his mind may well be occupied with some small
literary or social problem that befits his age; why Racine went back to
antiquity for the subjects of his tragedies, or whether Ronsard really
deserves all the praises bestowed upon him. That is as it should be! At
last I enquire:

“What have you been dreaming about, this last half hour?”

“Dreaming? Not at all. I have been thinking very seriously.”

“What about?”

“What about? About Goethe’s ‘Hermann and Dorothea.’”

“Ah! I thought so. You are getting on famously. Now, to begin with:
where did you become acquainted with that masterpiece?”

“In a French translation, last Christmas. And I was just thinking how
true it is, what the mother tells Hermann--when he is in love, you
know--you remember?--about the night growing to be the better part of
day----”

“Say no more. You are indulging certain thoughts about Tiefis.”

“Why not? Perfectly proper ones.”

“I might have expected this. Very well. It is a little late to-night,
but I suppose we shall have to go there to-morrow. I only hope you share
Hermann’s exalted sentiments and his purity of heart. Because otherwise,
you understand, I could never be an accomplice to such an affair.”



ANTS

_Ants_


That was a monster of an ant-hill. It was the largest, by far the
largest, I ever saw in this country, and the floor of the forest all
around was twinkling with these priggish insects. Anxious to have some
idea of its true size and anxious, at the same time, not to have any of
the nuisances crawling up my own legs, I made Mr. R. pace its
circumference. It took him _sixteen_ good strides. And there they were,
myriads upon myriads of them, hiving up for their own selfish purpose
those dried fir-needles which, left alone, would have yielded a rich
soil to future generations of men.

I have no use for ants, and cannot regard an ant-heap without yearning
to stamp it flat (those made of earth are not difficult to treat in this
fashion); without regretting that I lack the tongue and tastes of an
anteater. And only in the tropics do you realize what a diabolical pest
they may become with their orderly habits; European ants being mere
amateurs in obnoxiousness. To do everything you are supposed to do, and
nothing else at all; never to make a mistake, or, if you do, to be
invariably punished for it in exact proportion to the offense: can
there be a more contemptible state of affairs? That is why, even as a
boy, I used to foster the independent little fellows called _myrmeleon_
(ant-lion) who built their artful, funnel-shaped traps in the dry sand
out of reach of showers, just where our house-walls touched the ground;
foster them, and visit them periodically, and feed them with these
insufferable communists till they were ready to burst. But oh, to be an
authentic anteater on a Gargantuan scale--omnipresent, insatiable of
appetite--and engulf that entire tribe of automata!

One of my countless grievances against the ant family is that a clever
person, long ago, told me that, in order to have the flesh properly
removed from the skull of any bird or beast, you have only to lay it in
an ant-hill; the insects would do the job to a turn and thank you, into
the bargain, for allowing them to do it; work of this kind, he declared,
was quite a specialty of their department. Accordingly, I once deposited
an extremely valuable relic in the center of a prosperous ant-colony,
expecting to find it ready for me, picked clean, after a due lapse of
time. On arriving to call for my property, however, a fortnight or so
later, I was surprised to find it gone; the methodical socialists had
mislaid it, and I never saw it again. One took such losses to heart in
those days. I therefore went all the way home once more, determined to
get my own job done more conscientiously than theirs, and fetched a rake
wherewith this slovenly establishment was leveled to the ground. But oh,
for a rake that would rake every ant-hill off the face of the earth!

That happened in my bird-killing period, when I used to get up at the
improbable hour of 3:30 a.m. and, putting in my _Rucksack_ some bread
and smoked bacon-fat and a flask of Kirsch, vanish into the wilds,
returning home any time after nightfall or not at all: judge if I saw
some ant-hills! So I roved about, and the first thing I ever murdered,
an hour after receiving that single-barreled gun, was a melancholy brown
owl that blinked at me from its perch below the Bährenloch at Bludenz;
the slaughter of this charming bird was taken as a good omen. Soon came
other guns, and other birds, not all of which shared the fate of the
owl. Never shall I forget a certain pratincole. It was the only one I
have yet seen in this province, a great rarity, and it settled down for
a whole summer season in the reservoir region along the upper Montiola
brook, where it relied upon its disconcerting flight and a trick of
rising from the ground at the one and only spot where you could not
possibly expect it to do so, to mock all my attempts at bringing it
down. I was after it so often that we got to know each other perfectly
well, and never bagged it; thereby proving the truth of the local
proverb “Every day is hunting day, but not every day is catching day.”
Queer experiences one had, too. At the age of fourteen I was once
resting on my homeward way in the woods near Gasünd, dead tired but
uncommonly pleased with myself for having just shot a hazel
grouse--again, the only one I ever saw in the province. There came one
of those flocks of titmice--is not titmouses the correct
English?--accompanied, no doubt, by the inevitable tree-creeper. They
amused themselves in the branches overhead and one of them soon struck
me as unfamiliar; its size and shape and movements were those of a great
tit, but there were unmistakable red feathers on the head and neck. I
watched it hopping from twig to twig, annoyed to think that I had shot
away my last cartridge, and wondering what this rare mountain bird could
be, for I never doubted of its actuality; there it was, before my eyes!
Only later did I learn that no such bird exists. Now had the vision been
brought about by my state of bodily exhaustion? And was the dream-bird
created out of one of those present, or out of nothing at all? Illusion,
or hallucination?

Presently certain regions became famous for certain game; in that larch
wood between Bürs and Bürserberg, for instance, which takes on such
wonderful tints in autumn and which you can enter through a natural arch
called the “Kuhloch,” you might count on crossbills and on a woodpecker
of one kind or another (never on the scarce black one; it haunts the
gloomiest forests). Of the lesser spotted species I shot two off the
same tree at an interval of almost exactly a year--30 December in one
year, and 28 December the next; a circumstance all the more singular, as
I never in my life met with another individual of this bird in the whole
country. Or, if you wanted a great gray shrike, you had only to go,
preferably in winter, to the Scesa-tobel, that devastated tract west of
Bürs which was just then beginning to cover itself with vegetation once
more. Here you might also put up a hare; it was in the Scesa-tobel, by
the purest of accidents, that I once shot a hare in full gallop at a
distance of a hundred yards--a mere speck, he was--with a bullet. I
confessed afterwards to Mattli, who was beating another part of this
torrent, that I had missed him at close quarters with the shot barrel,
and soon regretted having made this confession; there are things one
might well keep to oneself.

Mattli, whatever his real name may have been, was often with me on such
excursions, and I know not how he managed to combine these trips with
his official duties as station-master; for station-master he was, at our
own station, which was then called Strassenhaus. To be sure, one could
take things easier in those days (the building itself was less than half
its present size); so easy, that the man who was employed to guard the
line a quarter of a mile lower down, used to put up, for several
consecutive years, a dummy figure of himself standing upright beside his
cabin in the wood, in order to make the night-train people think he was
at his post, while he went to booze in a tavern at Ludesch. Yet Mattli’s
weakness must have been found out in the end; the last time I saw him,
he was degraded from his high rank and working in some subordinate
capacity at Bludenz station.

Mattli never felt comfortable unless tracking birds; and his tales of
how he shot a great white heron here and a bee-eater there, and
something else somewhere else, were enough to make any one’s mouth
water. He took me in hand, during those lean and hungry years; what the
_Brunnenmacher_ had done towards fostering my instincts for climbing,
Mattli did for the more destructive ones; and a greater contrast was
never seen than between these two early mentors of mine. The
_Brunnenmacher_ was short and fat and bearded and fair-haired and
laughing, like many of them hereabouts; Mattli would have struck you at
the first glance as something apart from his fellows, something
primordial. He towered above the average height, he stooped from sheer
tallness; the very scarecrow of a man, dusky, clean-shaven, sallow of
complexion, with a harassed and hunted look in his eye and a voice that
seemed to come from caverns far away. A lonely, wolfish creature! I
never saw him smile. His rarer birds he sold to Mr. Honstetter, the
taxidermist of Bregenz, who doubtless disposed of them elsewhere and
through whose hands passed nearly every curiosity--lämmergeier, eider
duck, cormorant, griffon vulture and what not--which had been obtained
in the province or even further afield. He once offered me the skull and
horns of a genuine Swiss ibex, and a beaver stuffed by himself which had
been killed on the Elbe on the 10 August, 1886; he wanted 175 Swiss
francs for this last. The only thing I ever bought there was the skin of
an _ibis falcinellus_ shot at Hard on the Lake of Constance; it cost me
two and a half florins.[16]

Bregenz, however, seldom kept me for more than half a day, since I
preferred chasing birds to seeing them stuffed. So I scoured these upper
regions over field and forest and rock, covering immeasurable distances
and never following a path unless obliged to do so, up to the snow-line
and down again, sleeping in hay-huts or remote villages; and judge if I
saw some ant-hills by the way; ant-hills in every possible situation;
the strangest, after all, being those of dry sand, fetched from God
knows where and transported God knows how, and reared-up,
Amsterdam-wise, in the middle of watery marshes.

And that particular one, which has led me into this digression--where
was it?

Where else, but near Tiefis?

For it stands to reason that we went to that village again, after our
nocturnal conversation on the Lutz embankment, in order to visit what
Mr. R. calls “the innkeepress and his beautiful girl.”

There we sat, all four of us, in that spotlessly clean room, and my
companion after consuming his usual horrible mixture--two boiled eggs
and a glass of _saft_ (a strong kind of cider, of greenish
tinge)--straightway opened a fusillade of glances from his flashing
black eyes, to which the “baby,” so far as I could see, was not
insensible.

Her mother, meanwhile, told me what she had heard about the cause of
that outbreak of fire which destroyed nearly all the place in 1866. It
seems that a party were sitting up one night, as is the custom, beside
the dead body of some friend who had expired during the day and, as is
also the custom under these mournful circumstances, began to think of
refreshing themselves with coffee. There was no milk in the house and it
was decided to go into the stable and milk the cow; some straw
accidentally took fire from the candle they carried; this started the
mischief. Several people were burnt to death on that occasion. A second
fire took place in 1868. She said there were only two or three of the
old houses left; one of them bearing the date 1678----

“What is she talking about?” enquired Mr. R.

“About a fire they had here.”

“Can’t you two argue outside? And before you go just tell me the German
for _embrassez-moi_, will you?”

“How can I tell you, with the mother in the room?”

“Then get her out. Talk to her about wine, in the cellar or somewhere.”

“Easier said than done. I think she has intercepted your wireless
symbols. They are visible to the naked eye. One could almost catch them
in a butterfly net.”

“Do you suggest that I was winking, or trying to make eyes?”

“Oh, quite involuntarily.”

For one moment, it looked as if his wish were to be gratified. The
mother rose from her seat and, opening the door, made as though to enter
the kitchen; everything, unfortunately, must have been in order there,
for after two paces in the passage she returned to her place beside me
once more. That fire--yes! Nowadays, of course, the danger of
conflagrations on this scale was growing less and less;[17] the villages
were all lighted by electricity, down to the very stables; those
inflammable wooden houses, too, were being supplanted by brick or stone,
“or the abominable cement,” I added----

Meanwhile, that fusillade proceeded without interruption. The “baby” was
brightening up under its friendly glow, smiling her innocent smile and
sometimes glancing at me as if for confirmation of her pleasure; the
mother talked.

“Is the old one never going? Because, for the matter of that, I can do
it without saying anything at all; and I will. I would give fifty years
of my life.... Just one kiss. I don’t want anything more.”

“I should hope not. Listen to me for a moment,” I went on. “Only a
puritan would see any great harm in young people kissing each other,
with or without their parents’ consent; I feel sure that many happy
marriages would never have come about at all but for some such playful
preliminaries, and your Dorothea, I must say, looks as if she would not
object very violently, provided you did it in a laughing, brotherly
fashion. Why should she? Our girls are far too simple-minded to attach
that sacramental importance to a kiss which the southern ones do.
Observe therefore: I do not pose as a puritan. But please observe also
that I am taking for granted that you are serious, both of you, like
Hermann and Dorothea; otherwise, of course, I could never be a
party----”

“Get her out. Get her out.”

“I should like to help you. But you know perfectly well that my
acquaintance with the art of outwitting or circumventing parents is of
the slightest, and that therefore, quite apart from any moral scruples I
might entertain----”

“Get her out.”

The “old one” seemed to have taken root. She explained that the
fire-brigades, too, were more efficient than they used to be; every
village had its own apparatus, and fixed drill on certain days, and
fines for those who failed to attend, unless they could show good cause
for their absence, such as having to cart their hay in at a moment’s
notice on account of some threatening thunderstorm----

At last Mr. R. remarked:

“It is all your fault, for making yourself so infernally polite to her.
I have often noticed that you cannot leave elderly women alone.”

“Excuse me; I make it my business to be civil with everybody, young or
old. For the rest, I should be inclined to blame your marconigrams,
which are enough to scare any mother. I wonder the poor child is not
roasted.”

“Roasted! Old men are always cynics.”

“Young men are generally fools.”

There was that fire at Nüziders as well; how long ago? Fifty years, was
it? Perhaps a little more. A tremendous blaze, from all accounts; far
worse than Tiefis; and the Fön was blowing so fiercely that sparks were
carried right over the Hanging Stone, they said, while people in Ludesch
and Thüringen were kept busy all night throwing water on their wooden
roofs----

“To oblige me,” interposed Mr. R., “just order another quarter liter of
wine for yourself. I have thought of something; it is my last chance.
She may have to go downstairs to fetch it. If she does, run after her
and say you made a mistake; you want a half. Come back as slowly as
possible. Cough, before you enter the door.”

The half-liter happened to be on the spot. Decidedly, Mr. R. was having
no luck that day. After a very long visit, we bade farewell and walked
up past the Bädle inn, Mr. R. complaining grumpily:

“Now what am I to do?”

“Well, you might review the situation, like Hermann did. If I were in
your place, I should have no objection to being ultimately connected, by
marriage, with the management of a tavern; the position strikes me as
offering sundry advantages over the common lot of man. So think it over
and, when you have made up your mind for good and all, confide in me and
rest assured that I shall be only too delighted to act as interpreter
between you and the parents, provided, of course, that your intentions
are as honorable as they ought to be.”

“Is this the time to make fun of me?”

How sensitive they are, these young people of the guileless variety!

The path we were now following, from the Tiefis “Bädle” to the source of
the Montiola brook and thence to the reservoirs, is one of my special
favorites. The ground rises slowly, and soon you reach a miniature
watershed; whatever drains off behind you flows down westwards and finds
its way into the “ruisseau des écrevisses”; the Montiola drops towards
the east, at first. Before reaching its source you traverse a wood which
Mr. R. immediately christened “la forêt nordique”; he has never seen
such a forest save in pictures, yet it certainly recalls them to me,
each of the firs resembling its fellow and all at their most
uninteresting life-period; this tract must have been cut down and
replanted half a century ago, or less.[18]

On issuing from this “forêt nordique” you are already in the Montiola
basin, a luscious dank valley surrounded by wooded heights. Presently,
on your right, at the foot of the hill, you discern the Montiola
fountain. It is an exuberant spring overhung by firs and beeches; almost
the entire volume of the streamlet rises at this one point, and you will
do well to rest awhile on those mossy stones, as I have done many and
many a time, listening to the glad sound of bubbling waters and letting
your eye roam across the narrow sunlit vale into the woodlands on its
other side. From here the Montiola meanders for half a mile or so, icy
cold and full of trout, through a flowery swamp region towards the
reservoirs, where it takes its theatrical plunge into the village below.

A distant rocky peak, just to the left of the Hoher Frassen, confronts
you on stepping out of the _northern forest_. This is the “Rothe Wand”
which, considering its respectable height of 2701 meters, is a decidedly
coy mountain, and more clever at hiding itself than most of them; you
may obtain another clear view of it from the platform of Frastanz
station. It seems incredible that this “Red Wall” which is now climbed
by a hundred tourists every year, should in the days of my father have
been deemed so inaccessible that he thought it worth while to describe
an ascent of it in the transactions of our Alpine Club (1868) in which
he speaks of it as “almost unknown.” The country has indeed changed
since those days, and few pinnacles are left unclimbed; I can mention
one of them, at least, for the benefit of anybody who cares to give it a
trial. This is the so-called “Wildkirchle” or “Hexenthurm,” a fragment
of the Kanisfluh _massif_ near Mellau, a rock-needle; it has the
apparent advantage of being only 140 meters high. All the same, no one
has yet stood on its summit, though many have tried to do so; only a
couple of weeks ago (23 July, 1922) two young men lost their lives while
attempting the feat. My sister, who was the first woman that ever got up
the Zimba--and well I remember the state of her leather knickers when
she came down again--also had a try at the “Hexenthurm,” a little
exploit of which I only learnt after her death. She and a guide, from
all accounts, were roped together and wound themselves aloft somewhat
after the fashion of a nigger climbing a cocoa-palm (I cannot quite
visualize the operation); at a certain moment they were only too happy
to be able to wind themselves down again.

These were the sports she loved; and I marvel to this hour what made her
adopt the married state--she who cared no more for the joys of
domesticity than does a tomcat. Talked into it, I fancy, by some stupid
relation who ought to have known better.

       *       *       *       *       *

While strolling homewards from that Montiola fountain hallowed by many
memories of my past, I took to relating to my companion all I knew
concerning my father’s fatal accident, which occurred as he was chamois
shooting not far from the Rothe Wand; he fell down a ghastly precipice.
Forthwith Mr. R., who has an imaginative and impressionable turn of
mind, besought me to take him up there and show him the exact site on
the condition, of course, that nothing but English was to be spoken
during the trip. Well, why not? No harm in that, no harm whatever; the
excursion may distract him, and he has so far seen nothing of these
upper Alpine regions. I would gladly go there over the Spuller lake, but
cannot bear to see the place again in its changed condition; for this
fair sheet of water is now being mauled about by a legion of navvies for
the purpose of some miserable railway electrification. Instead of that,
we can take the train to Dalaas and mount to the Formarin lake, which
lies even nearer to the scene of the accident.[19]



GAMSBODEN

_Gamsboden_


There is nothing to tell of our walk to the Formarin lake which lies
under the precipitous red crags (a kind of marble called _Adneter Kalk_)
of the Rothe Wand and thence to the summit of the grass-topped
Formaletsch--nothing, save that the Alpine flowers, not so much the
rhododendrons[20] as the yellow violets, were a source of considerable
interest to my companion. I could have shown him the scarcer Edelraute
(_Artemisia mutellina_) which grows on some rocks near the east foot of
that hill, but preferred taking no risks and did not so much as mention
the plant. Here, also, he was able to inspect a flourishing colony of
marmots, a quadruped which, in spite of my assurances to the contrary,
he had hitherto been disposed to regard as mythological or imaginary.

I chose the Formaletsch because it is from thence--from its southern
base; but Mr. R. rightly insisted on going to the top--that, with the
help of a good glass, a distant but clear view can be obtained of the
scene of my father’s accident while chamois shooting. It occurred, when
he was only thirty-six years old, at the Gamsboden heights, so-called
from the frequency of chamois to be found there; the place is about a
mile off as the crow flies, and on one of its pinnacles you may detect a
wooden cross which is perennially renewed by chamois hunters in memory
of him; it stands as near to the actual site as most people would care
to go. He had just returned from an ascent of the Gross Litzner (or
Gross Seehorn)--the second time this peak had ever been climbed (the
first was in 1869), and the thing must have happened soon after 7
September, 1874, for that is the date of his last letter to his wife, in
which he says: “I shall go shooting for a few days to Spuller and
Formarin” (Gamsboden lies midway between these two lakes); “if I delay,
I may not be able to traverse any longer the upper grounds, because snow
falls there so often and so early.” Now hard by that wooden cross is a
black precipice which scars the mountain from top to bottom; this is the
spot; he fell while attempting to cross the scar, or else, while
standing immediately above it on some soil which gave way under his
weight; the former is probably the truth. I enquired, but have never
heard of any one else essaying the same feat; for my own part, nothing
would induce me to proceed more than a couple of yards on that
particular surface. For even at our distance of a mile you may guess
what it consists of: it is the foul sooty shale called _Algäu-Schiefer_,
perfidious and friable stuff, not to be called rock at all save in the
geological sense of the word.

Slopes covered by ice or snow have their dangers, so have those decked
with the innocent-looking dry grass which, for reasons I cannot explain,
is so abhorrent to me that I will make any detour to avoid them; all
three of these can be tackled by firm feet and the help of an ax-head as
grapnel or for step-cutting. Nothing is to be done, either with feet or
with artificial appliances, on an even moderate incline of such Liassic
shale, for it yields to pressure and slides down, and this is where a
chamois has the advantage over us. A man may scramble about honest crags
like a fly on a wall, as securely as any chamois though not so fast; on
precipices of the crumbling _Algäu-Schiefer_ the animal leaps, and leaps
again before the stuff has gathered momentum, and what shall man do?
Avoid them, until he has acquired the capacity of bouncing like a
chamois; in other words, like an indiarubber ball.

Indeed, shifting material of every kind is objectionable and fraught
with peculiar horrors. Up behind Bludenz you may see a row of limestone
cliffs called Elser Schröfen, whose foot is defended by a “talus” of
rubble which has slowly dropped down from the heights above; and a
pretty thing it is, by the way, when you look closely at natural
features like this talus, to observe with what flawless accuracy they
have been constructed; how these fragments of detritus pass in due order
through all gradations of size down the slanting surface, from minute
particles like sand at the top to the mighty blocks that form their
base. Once, long ago, I conceived the playful project of crossing this
rubble-slope from end to end, just below the cliffs. I started on its
inclined plane, but had not gone far before realizing the situation. The
talus reposed, as it naturally would repose if left to accumulate
undisturbed; that is, at the sharpest allowable angle against the
cliffs, its upper barrier. It soon struck me as being rather a steep
gradient, and not only steep but ominously alive--ready to gallop
downhill on a hint from myself; the mere weight of my body could set the
whole mass in movement and hurl me along in a rocky flood. While making
this sweet reflection I found, with dismay, that it was already too late
to turn back; the least additional pressure on one foot might start the
mischief; once started, nothing would arrest that deluge; its beginning,
without a doubt, was going to be my end.

I was in for a ticklish business. Rush down the slope diagonally and
evoke the landslide but anticipate its arrival? Even that was courting
disaster. I preferred to remain in the upper regions and there finished
the long journey, with curious deliberation, on all fours, in order to
distribute my weight; and then only by a miracle. It was one of those
occasions on which one has ample leisure to look into the eye of death,
and I now wish somebody could have taken a photograph of me--a colored
one, by preference; one would like to possess a record of the exact tint
of one’s complexion during half hours of this kind. Whoso, therefore,
intends to traverse the same place would be well-advised to adopt my
method of locomotion; the upright posture is not to be recommended. A
pleasant farewell to all things! Never a button of you to be seen again;
to be caught in a swirl, a deafening cataract of stones and, after
snatching _en passant_ a few grains of scientific comfort at the thought
that your human interference had modified--if only temporarily--the
angle of a talus, which is not everybody’s affair, to be buried alive at
the bottom under an imposing heap of débris.[21] ...

Now boys seem to make a point of doing risky things, whereas a man of my
father’s age and experience should have made a point of not doing them.
What can have induced him to act as he did? He was well acquainted with
this particular shale; in that very paper on the Rothe Wand which is the
origin of our trip to Formarin, he remarks that the only troublesome
part of the ascent was a steep tract of the “soft, crumbling, blackish
_Algäu-Schiefer_, which continually slipped away under our feet,” adding
that “for the rest, no part of the climb could be called dangerous or
even difficult.” (The present route up there is another and really easy
one.) Was it downright bravura? That is not impossible! He had led an
enchanted life among the rocks and ice, and a friend of his, an old
gentleman whom I saw the other day in Bludenz and who was with him once
or twice in the mountains, spoke to me of his contempt of danger; he
said that while climbing he “seemed to tread on air” and could not be
made to understand what people meant by giddiness. Or was he stalking
some particular chamois? In that case the tragedy grows almost
intelligible; there are few things a man will not do under those
circumstances.

Two others accompanied him on this expedition, Dr. Dürr of Satteins and
his own _Jaeger_ Fetzel, a native of our village; both have died long
since and neither, I believe, was actual eye-witness of what happened at
the fatal moment. Many journalistic cuttings and letters relative to
this affair, and doubtless giving adequate accounts, were contained in
that bundle which disappeared together with other literary and family
papers when a certain portmanteau was broken open on its journey; it is
a loss I shall never cease to deplore. The ground is supposed to have
given way under him; certain it is that he fell from the height, as we
were then told, of _many, many church steeples_--a phrase that stuck in
my mind; from the height, I should reckon, of some thousand feet. There
was nothing about him that was not shattered; his gun, his watch, were
broken into fragments. Strangest of all, even his alpenstock was picked
up in several pieces, which gave rise to the conjecture that this
implement had betrayed him and snapped under his weight as he leaned on
it for support; how else explain the splintering of such light and
resilient material? Be that as it may, they carried his remains to
Dalaas down the steep and savage Radona-tobel, and anybody who has been
there will wonder how they achieved this task.[22] He was laid to rest
in the Protestant cemetery of Feldkirch; for the first time in history
the bells of all the countryside were tolled at the funeral of a
“Lutheran”....

His article on the Rothe Wand is one of several which he contributed to
the Journal of our Alpine Club; they can be traced in the files,
together with his presidential addresses to the Vorarlberg section, of
which I also possess four; one of the most interesting of these papers
describes an ascent of the Piz Linard (3416 meters) and Piz Buin and the
crossing of the Silvretta and Sagliain glaciers, the latter of which had
never been traversed before; it presented _no difficulty_. These
writings betray a strong love of nature, and all the exhilaration
consequent upon “living dangerously.” He was also interested in the
scientific aspects of alpinism, as I can see from his marginal
annotations to Forbes’ “Theory of Glaciers.”

More important are two archæological monographs which reveal another
facet of his mind; I wish I knew whether he wrote any other such things
and where they are to be found; does the library at Bregenz perhaps
contain them? The first one (1865, with two diagrams) deals with his
excavations on a strangely shaped eminence near Mauren--a village in
Liechtenstein, just across our frontier--which he held to be a Celtic
hill-fort; his surmise was proved correct by the discovery of certain
bronze relics. The other treats of the Roman occupation of this
province.[23] It is in the shape of an address to the Museum Society of
Bregenz with which he was connected; an exhaustive and conscientiously
written memoir, full of ripe speculations of his own, enriched with
copious footnotes and citations from those authorities, ancient or
modern, who had hitherto touched upon these matters; and defining all
remains of antiquity excavated here up to that day (some noteworthy new
finds have since been incorporated into the Bregenz Museum). It has
given me a feeling difficult to describe, to go through this paper
again; I seem to be reading my own lucubrations, for at the same time of
life I was writing in the same style on subjects of the same kind; a
scholarly digression, for instance, on the Roman roads of the district,
_no trace of which exists_, is done quite in my manner of that period. I
observe that he contradistinguishes between Celts and Rhætians (p. 6
and note to p. 10);[24] that he takes Lindau, and not either of the
other two islands, to have been the one occupied by Tiberius; and holds
the _Vallis Drusiana_, the Walgau, the heart of our province, to be
called not after the Roman general and stepson of Augustus, seeing that
the name Druso is of Celtic or Rhætian

[Illustration: Bronze statue found near Lauterbach]

origin--pre-Roman, in short, and indigenous to this country, whence
localities like Drusenfluh, Drusenthor, Druseralp, Druserthal.[25]

Of peculiar interest to me, among my father’s writings, are forty or
fifty manuscript essays, long and short, on a variety of themes; mere
“asides” written, to please himself, in three different languages:
English, French and German. French he studied at Geneva; German at the
gymnasium of Augsburg, and so successfully, that he learnt to handle
that tongue with more freedom and elegance than many a native writer of
the country. Most of these miscellanies date from the late fifties or
early sixties when he was still young; he doubtless continued to compose
them to the end, and the later ones would have a greater value; they are
lost. The titles testify to considerable intellectual curiosity: On
ambition--The first snowdrop--A woman’s thoughts about women--On a
passage in Pascal--The carnival--To the memory of ancient Rome--On a
comet--Voices of Nature--Friendship--A characteristic of the German
language--Dreaming of sounds--On certain pictures in the National
Gallery of Scotland--The Lake of Geneva by night--Palleske’s Life of
Schiller--Suicide--The thunderstorm--Spiritualism--Sunset in autumn--On
the want of the habit of writing--The study of Natural Science; and so
forth; a heterogeneous collection! One or two, such as a passionate
lament for the death of some little boy-friend, are set in lines as if
they were poetry, but there is no poetry about them save a certain
rhapsodical elevation of sentiment. Those written in English prove that
he had not yet excreted the poison of a German (metaphysical) schooling,
which lays fetters upon our thought and dims the candor of literary
expression. Immature stuff for the most part, heavy in diction and
saturated with the conventional wisdom of youth, although here and there
one alights upon something more esoteric, such as (in a “Fragment on
Style,” 1858): “A noble thought always commands powerful and harmonious
expression.... When a truly great thought is clothed in language
unworthy of it, the mind which dictated the words can have conceived it
only imperfectly”--which strikes me as an unexpected pronouncement, for
a youngster of twenty. Altogether, the perusal of these things is a
groping, twilight adventure into the soul of a dead man; vainly I ask
myself along what lines he would have developed had his life been
spared.

       *       *       *       *       *

Hardly had we reached home again, after a long walk down from Formarin
over Lagutz and Marul and Raggal, before Mr. R., who has a sweet nature
but is apt to be pig-headed at times beyond the common measure of man,
began to complain bitterly that I had shown him no chamois, proceeding
thereafter to hint that all my accounts of such animals might well be
pure inventions; the chamois-race was doubtless as extinct as the ibex I
had shown him at Innsbruck; otherwise, why were they not on the spot,
“where they ought to have been,” like those marmots? As if the country
were a kind of perambulating menagerie! I am all for humoring young
people up to a certain reasonable point, but it was a little more than I
had bargained for, to start off climbing again that moment. Had he
expressed any such wish at Formarin, we might have wandered towards Lech
and entered some side-valley on our left, and possibly espied a beast or
two among the crags. He said not a word about it up there. And now it
was nothing but:

“Show them! Show them! What am I here for?”

“To learn English.”

“And to see the sights of the country. Such was our bargain. All you
talk about chamois--ah, ah! I begin to understand.”

“I showed you a wild roe-deer in the Lutz forest last week, the first
you ever saw in your life; and the devil’s own job it was to get you to
see it. Won’t that do?”

“There you made a mistake. You ought to have called it a chamois. Then I
should have believed that chamois still exist.”

“_Still exist?_ Why, we had chamois only the other day for luncheon.”

“It might have been bad mutton.”

“What next! It was delicious; and no more like mutton than--than----”

“I see what it is. You are afraid of climbing rocks. You have lost your
nerve; I noticed it long ago on the cliffs at Scanno, but there are
certain subjects one does not like to dwell upon between friends.
_Troppo vino._ You comprehend?”

“Nothing of the kind. And if it were _troppo vino_, what object do you
gain by being offensive about it?”

“To shame you into showing them.”

“Well, after that, I suppose you will have to see them. As to climbing
rocks---- I think I can show chamois to people without climbing at all.”

So I did; by a stroke of luck which was surely not undeserved. Knowing
Mr. R.’s character only too well, and how that there would not be
another moment’s peace for me until those legendary creatures had been
proved to exist, I called to mind, after some little thought, a place
where chamois could almost invariably be seen, and we left home then and
there, over Bludenz and Brand and the Zalim alp towards the Strassburger
hut which lies under the Scesaplana, between a precipice and a perennial
snow-field; arriving just as the sun went down.[26] Near the end of our
march we turned a little to the right and glanced about us. There they
were, three young beasts, almost straight below; unmistakable chamois,
and as close at hand as any one could wish. Straightway Mr. R., whose
familiarity with precipices is only surpassed by his familiarity with
English grammar, proposed scrambling down a sheer wall of several
hundred feet, and then throwing stones at them from behind. Who knows? A
chance hit on the head, and we might bag one or the other. What a lark,
if we did! The novelty of the idea was so alluring that I might have
succumbed, if the animals had not scented us--as they would have done
ere this, had we been standing below them--and made off amid a
resounding clatter of stones. Mr. R. formally declared himself to be
satisfied.

“Thank God for that,” I replied. “And, now that we are here, I will be
able to show you something still funnier and more interesting to-morrow.
Butterflies on this snow-field.”

“Why not pelicans?”

“Some folks are hard to please.”

There are nearly always frozen butterflies to be found up here. They
have been wafted from their green meadows into these barren Arctic
regions on the upward-striving blasts of the Fön.

Meanwhile we passed the night in the well-heated Strassburger hut, where
we discovered as objectionable a crowd of Teutons as I have ever seen
gathered together; and I have seen not a few. A fierce argument was
proceeding between two of these bullet-headed ones as to whether the
snowfield was a _Ferner_ or a _Gletscher_. The _Ferner_ man was right
(though the Tyrolese use the word “Fern” for a glacier); but his
opponent also came in for some share of applause. He had the louder
voice of the two.

Up the Scesaplana next morning in time for the sunrise, where Mr. R.
grew silent and respectful. Naturally enough. For there is something
oppressive to the spirit on being thus islanded, for the first time, in
a glittering ocean of Alpine peaks, and breathing the icy air of dawn at
3000 meters. I greeted old friends that arose up round us, and my
glance, turning eastwards, rested at last upon the stainless white dome
of the Ortler, fifty or sixty miles away. I called to mind that short
snow-arête just before you reach the summit, knife-like and not even
level; would I now care to run along it as I did then? Well, that was in
the eighties and perhaps they have built a railway up the Ortler by this
time; in the eighties, while we were touring on old-fashioned high
bicycles over the Stelvio pass--a record, I fancy: there was a notice of
it in the C. T. C. Gazette; over the Stelvio into Italy and back by the
Splügen, riding home in one day from the Post at Splügen over Thusis and
Chur and Ragatz and Feldkirch--which was also something of an
achievement for the wretched machines of those days.

On the way down we stepped for a moment into the Lünersee hut, where Mr.
R. had a look at the large photograph of my father after whom the place
had been named, then followed the Rellsthal towards Vandans under that
formidable flank of the Zimba on which the other tourist had died of
sheer fright. During this descent my companion, unfortunately, began to
relapse into something like his normal frame of mind; that is to say,
our pleasure was nearly marred by persistent jocular allusions to that
London hat of mine which has not yet ceased to provoke his merriment.
Some time ago I was under the impression that he had forgotten this
trivial and well worn theme of mirth. Far from it. Young people never
will realize when a joke has grown threadbare, and he now distilled so
much fresh laughter out of its shape, its color, its brim and other
details of construction, its general fit, its suitability to my
particular style, likening me at one time to his own countryman Napoleon
and at another to a certain old female cousin of whose existence I had
hitherto been unaware, that I was on the verge of getting annoyed when I
hit upon the genial expedient of making him translate his miserable
witticisms into the English tongue.

Then, and not till then, did they become really amusing; it was my turn
to laugh.



JORDAN CASTLE

_Jordan Castle_


We often walk past that decrepit castle of Jordan. Situated on the hill
above Bludesch, it is a landmark visible from afar, and was never a
castle at all but a pretentious kind of villa. My mother told me that
the builder had been a Dutch political refugee, and that the red violets
growing on the inside of its westerly wall were planted by him. Those
violets may be found to this hour--their leaves, at least; and you may
find white ones along the path that leads down eastwards out of the
orchard here--you could, at least.

Since then I have learnt a little more, but not nearly enough, about
this strange-looking ruin. There used to be a small, two-roomed house on
the site in olden days; this was bought, and converted into a splendid
palace--_splendidum exstruxit palatium_--by Georg Ludwig von
Lindenspeur, who lived there till his death in 1673. The plan of the
building is as regular as can be, and thoroughly uninteresting; it has
an artificial terrace in front, supported on massive substructures. The
place continued to remain in good state till 1843 when it changed
hands, and the new proprietor, having no use for it, took off the roof
and carried away everything else that served his purposes. Who
Lindenspeur was, I cannot say; the name does not sound altogether German
or Austrian, and is unknown to me. He it was, I imagine, who for his own
convenience or that of his visitors built or enlarged the path that
leads up, some few hundred yards to the east of the ruin, from the
driving-road in the valley below; this path, then broad enough for a
carriage, with sustaining walls on both sides, has now grown quite
narrow from disuse. He also founded a charity for several villages which
exists to this day. The yearly income, for our particular one, is
twenty-two florins; before the war, one might have helped a few poor
people with this sum. Who is going to pick it up nowadays?

Such is the history of the “Jordanschloss.” I should like to learn more
about the mysterious Lindenspeur; where he came from, and what induced
him to settle in these outlandish regions and there to live to the day
of his death. I have heard of no one else doing such a thing in the
seventeenth century. He may well have been a refugee of some kind; a
recluse, an original, in any case, and a wealthy one. So Jordan has been
a ruin only for the last eighty years. One would never think so; for it
already wears a hopelessly decayed look, as if it had been abandoned
for a couple of centuries at least. That is because it lacks the solid
masonry of our feudal remains. It crumbles away all the time, and I
suspect that the farmhouse near at hand has been built with its stones.

We had a good look at Jordan yesterday afternoon, and agreed that it was
an uncommonly transparent fabric. “The old gentleman must have been fond
of windows,” observed Mr. R. True! There are more open spaces than
stones in its ostentatious front; a row of eleven windows, all exactly
alike, and young trees are sprouting out of them. This is what made Mr.
R. christen the place “Château aux fenêtres.” And this name, in its
turn, gave occasion for a simple question on my part, a question that
led to a prolonged and painful discussion, in the course of which some
little light was thrown on Mr. R.’s progress in the English language. I
enquired as I should have done:

       *       *       *       *       *

_D._ Now what is the English for “Le château aux fenêtres”?

_R._ The castle to the windows.

_D._ Castle to the windows? Try again. I am the most patient teacher in
the world. And we have the whole afternoon before us. So don’t hurry and
don’t disappoint me. Think!

_R._ Let me see.... “Château” may sometimes be rendered by
“country-house.” The country-house to the windows. I know my _vocables_.

_D._ Your stock of words will pass; and such praise as is due to you for
having gotten them by heart should not be withheld. But you will never
learn English. “Castle to the windows” is treating our language in your
usual brigandish fashion; _de haut en bas_. How often have I told you
that a language must be courted, like a lover!

_R._ Never learn English? Are you serious? If so, allow me to say that I
have already learnt more than enough to pass my examination. I know my
_vocables_, as you yourself admit. I am also acquiring a little more
polish, which I confess may still be needful. And latterly--how I have
learnt to converse!

_D._ Yes; how! This is most discouraging, after all my efforts. Castle
to the windows--good God! It might drive a less optimistic tutor crazy.
Let us sit down on this stone for a moment, and I will tell you
something that has just occurred to me. There was once a Greek poet and
grammarian called Palladas, who was favored, like myself, with promising
pupils of your style; who was a teacher, I mean, and nearly committed
suicide in consequence----

_R._ They never do it, those fellows, although one wishes they would. It
is the pupils who sometimes kill themselves. Your Pylades is probably
alive to this day. Well?

_D._ Well, during one of his fits of depression at their extraordinary
intelligence, he wrote a little couplet which still exists to prove the
depth of his despair. Believe me, I can sympathize just now with the
unhappy Palladas. The castle to the windows.... Would you like to
translate his two short lines? They are very easy. And then you will
understand the state of my feelings.

_R._ Not if you write in Greek. Put them into French, and I will
translate anything you please. Here is a scrap of paper.

_D._ ...There now! Go ahead. No, no, no. I must have it in writing. You
are too slippery, _viva voce_. And please try to do it carefully, for a
change.

_R._ Voilà!... _I was ramble nude to the earth, and I will ramble nude
underneath her. And why I dredge in vain, viewing the nude finish?_ So
that is the state of your feelings. You seem to have forgotten to put
your clothes on.

_D._ I was ramble nude----

_R._ You may say “stroll” instead of “ramble”; I am not particular! Or
“saunter.” All these are better words than “walk” or “promenade”; they
are more adapted for poetic uses. That is why I chose “dredge” instead
of “labor”; it sounds less common. You see what come of knowing one’s
_vocables_.

_D._ Drudge; not dredge. I was ramble nude. This is appalling. I mean to
preserve that document as a _pièce justificative_. There may be some
trouble, you know, about the way you have spent your time out here.
Ramble nude--God Almighty! Why, the poet means to say that he walked,
that he was born, naked into this world; don’t you see?

_R._ _Ça se peut bien._ In that case, he was perhaps not the first.
There is nothing very original in baby-poets being born naked. Now if he
had worn a felt hat on that occasion----

_D._ This is hardly the moment, is it? Your English, I must insist on
telling you, leaves a great deal to be desired. And I should like to
ask: what are we going to do about it?

_R._ If the baby-poet had suddenly come to light, wearing that London
hat of yours ... ah, the doctor’s explanations----!

_D._ Laugh away. There will be a nude finish. You will never pass the
test.

_R._ And why not? Only a camel would bother to learn all those useless
idioms. I was always first in our English class at college. I knew more
than the _profs_, and they were high-class people.

_D._ Was you ramble nude there?

_R._ _Allons_; just a little more polish ... ah, ah! The horrified
_sage-femme_ ... her face ... ah, ah, ah!...

From this transparent “castle to the windows” we “rambled” yesterday,
always to the westwards, always along the brow of the hill; crossed the
Tiefis-Bludesch road and, about a quarter of a mile further on, turned
to the right and followed a field path that goes first uphill and then
down. It leads to the village of Schlins.[27]

The meadow region ends in a dank spot, almost a swamp, surrounded by
forest on three sides. We were amazed at the multitude of butterflies
crowded into this narrow space: I have never seen so many swallowtails
gathered together. The mead is henceforward to be known as “pré des
papillons,” and it was here that Mr. R. propounded a puzzling question.
What happens to all the butterflies, he asked, when the grass is cut and
the flowers gone? Where do they go? What do they find to eat? I have no
idea. There are butterflies everywhere just now. In a fortnight or so,
there will be none left, save a few peacocks and red admirals moping
about the fallen fruit in orchards. Have they migrated upwards into
Alpine quarters, where the fields are mown at a later season? Do they
perish?

Here, at the end of the “pré des papillons,” you enter a noble forest
which continues as far as Schlins. We used to call it the wood of
the----. No; I refuse to open up that chapter of infantile
nature-worship. Suffice to say, that the forest was properly dedicated
to this potent but capricious deity, both by reason of its immeasurable
distance from home (nearly an hour’s walk) and consequent unfamiliarity
to us, and of the deep gloom which pervaded it in those days. It has
since been thinned out; even to-day it remains one of the finest in the
district and many of the firs reach a height of forty meters. Lower down
and to the south there runs through the same wood another path, also to
Schlins. It follows the base of one of those waterless east-west vales
which are so contrarious, because, instead of at right angles, they lie
parallel to our main valley. This used to be a terrifying track in those
days; so narrow and deep was the dell, so tall and thick the trees on
either side, that twilight reigned here in bluest noonday; and its
length was interminable! The whole glen has now been reafforested and
sunshine penetrates into all its recesses; but you can still discover
the decaying stumps of those old giants, encrusted, many of them, with
_Elfenbecher_ (fairy goblets)--minute mossy growths, shaped and tinted
like chalices of frosted silver.

As we traversed this lovely wood of the----, we were startled by a
disquieting din on our right. It was only a frolicsome shower, pattering
deliciously among the beeches yonder. Soon it reached us and drove us
under a fir. Here, as the drops were trickling through the branches, my
companion drew from his pocket that talisman, that _vade mecum_ and
_sine qua non_, and performed a selection of pieces grave and gay; I
went to inspect a small cross that stood close at hand--one of four
which are erected in this forest to the memory of woodcutters who have
perished at their trade. It is dated 1867 and records that the victim
was 63 years old. There is another, bearing a naturalistic
representation of the accident; a wife on her knees, the husband lying
dead beside her, with a massive log of timber stretched across his
middle.

Now the loud rain dropped suddenly to a whisper and we went forth again
towards Schlins, inhaling the aromatic odors of those essential oils
which it had wakened out of the damp ground. The way is marked by
colored signs against the trees; they have not been renewed since the
war, and are fast fading away. This is a relic of the activities of the
Blumenegg “beautification-society” which was started in emulation of
that of Bludenz and, like it, expired in consequence of the war. The
society did a good deal in its short life in thus marking tracks and
even building benches here and there, that now molder pleasantly away;
the whole wood from St. Anne church to Nenzing, for instance, is
provided with marks, and whoever does not know the country might well be
grateful for them. They also built the road down to Blumenegg waterfall,
a delightful spot; that along our big waterfall was made by my brother
and inaugurated, amid much speechifying and beer-drinking, on the 31
July, 1898.

Schlins lies prettily tucked away on a green level between the hills and
the projecting woodland ridge of Jadgberg. We soon found ourselves at
the Krone inn, where I have been an habitué for more years than I care
to remember and where Mr. R. devoured his customary two eggs and cider,
while I indulged in a long chat with the proprietress, who is a
particular friend of mine. It does one good to be with such people, so
blithe and natural and intelligent; I could go on talking to her for
ever and ever; and I nearly did.

Then up, at last, through the firs to the venerable ruin of Jagdberg.
Hard by the castle they have erected the so-called “Josefinum”--a kind
of refuge and school for poor children of both sexes, waifs and strays,
the scum of the province. It contains about fifteen girls and fifty
boys, many of questionable parentage or none at all, ailing in body and
mind--squint-eyed and one-legged and tuberculous and mangy and
feeble-minded and depraved. They are sometimes spoken of as the
“Verbrecherle,” the little criminals, and a few may perhaps deserve that
name. One of these, not long ago, certainly displayed a rare tenacity of
purpose. It was a boy-orphan who, at the age of fourteen, left the
establishment where (according to his own account) he had been grossly
and systematically ill-treated. When he was eighteen he considered
himself strong enough to carry out a long-meditated project of revenge,
and stole into the place one night with the intention of setting fire to
it and of murdering the director with a dagger or revolver, both of
which he carried on his person. They caught him before much damage could
be done, and he was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment. The son of a
gypsy, it was said; which may be an _ex post facto_ explanation of his
original conduct. In every case, he cannot but have suffered under an
oppressive sense of injustice to be able to nurse his rage through four
long years. Perhaps, after serving his sentence, he will have another
try at the director....

As at Blumenegg, there is nothing left of Jagdberg save its outer wall,
its shell; and on entering this hoary shell we were amazed to find
therein a modern swimming-bath of cement, surely the most unexpected use
to which a feudal ruin can be put. A handful of boys were splashing
about here, together with some school-children from Schlins, every one
of whom is obliged to learn to swim. This bath and the Josefinum and its
plantations have impaired the charm of Jagdberg, as I knew it long ago;
it was then a slumberous, world-forgotten place. I am glad they have at
least not troubled to tear down its magnificent growth of ivy. True, it
always lacked the seclusion and dreaminess of Blumenegg; on the other
hand, it is more spacious, more solid, more grandiose. Like that ruin,
it dates from about the twelfth century, was destroyed by the
Appenzellers in 1405, and afterwards rebuilt; within its walls stood a
famous chapel dedicated to St. Michael. It must now have lain abandoned
for many long centuries. One would like to know why Herr Georg Ludwig
von Lindenspeur, who seems to have had more money than was good for
him--why he did not settle down in this wonderful place, instead of
erecting his flimsy and pompous barrack at Jordan? Who would not live at
Jagdberg, if he could? Such thoughts occur involuntarily, on visiting
any of these old sites. Who would not live at Jagdberg, especially in
that earlier period? Then down with that warren of rickety and vicious
bastards, and up with the gallows!

Charitable projects....

       *       *       *       *       *

And yet----

And yet these lords of Jagdberg and other men of the past may not have
been altogether the simpletons one used to think them. When they risked
their lives, they did it in their own interests and on their own
responsibility; not, like our warriors of to-day, for the sake of
enriching people of whom they had never even heard. When they robbed,
they robbed to some purpose that was at least seemingly sane and
seemingly profitable. They had not much use for the brotherhood of all
men: “God save us from such brothers!” we can hear them saying. And so
much one may observe without bitterness, that if one dream can be called
more absurd than another, this of universal brotherhood is surely the
absurdest that ever sat in our poor deluded brain, and the present state
of the world a luminous commentary on it. I imagine it would have
puzzled those old feudals--our Oriental preoccupation with other folk,
our craving to lean up against each other for mutual support and
betterment. Flabbiness, they might have called it. We call it
“solidarity.”... A little trick of ours.... We invent such words to
shadow forth a desire more or less vague, more or less reasonable; and
forthwith flatter ourselves that we have succeeded in creating a thing.
Solidarity! Mankind is a jellyfish. How comes a jellyfish to want a
backbone?

Such individualistic ideals may come into fashion again. Meanwhile, they
are out of date. The castles lie in ruins and their occupants, the human
wolves, have been hunted out of the land. Let us be sheep. The loves and
hatreds of these wolfish creatures must have been narrow and limited in
their range. On the other hand, they were doubtless personal, fervent.
They were kept clean. Our loves and hatreds are no longer kept clean.
They have ceased to be personal; we love and hate in the herd, the mass.
Endeavoring to identify our most intimate aspirations with those of
other men, we produce that incongruity of feeling and outlook, that
haziness of moral contour, which is a feature of modern life--to what
end? Solidarity! By all means adopt a fellow-creature’s greatcoat, or
lend him your own. Why adopt his character? Is a bundle of
self-contradictory inhibitions worth adopting? Love your neighbor as
yourself. Now what has that gentleman done, to deserve our love?

Philanthropic musings, engendered by the spectacle of Jagdberg and its
Josefinum....[28]



ROSENEGG

_Rosenegg_


Another of these castle-ruins is the massive old tower of Rosenegg near
Bürs (Rhæto-Roman _Puire_), opposite Bludenz. It also dates from the
twelfth century; like the others, it was sacked by the Appenzellers in
1405; unlike them, it was never rebuilt--not till the other day. For six
long centuries it stood desolate and forlorn. Then, quite lately,
somebody bought the place and converted it into a residence; with good
taste, so far as one can judge from the outside. All the same, it is
annoying to see that he has planted a few exotic conifers in the
grounds; they will doubtless prosper there, but they are out of harmony
with their Alpine surroundings. I must come and pull them out, one of
these nights.

The Rosenegg I knew was a truly “somber pile,” decaying alone up there,
far from the habitations of men, on its sunless hillock under the shadow
of those mighty Rhætian peaks. Nobody ever seemed to go near the place.
There was a shattered window at a good height on the eastern flank, and
you could get in here by climbing a wild cherry tree and then jumping
on to its ledge. The interior was a moldering chaos of stones. Round
about we used to find certain favorite plants: the rose-and-white
immortelles with silvery leaves, and “fox-tail” moss, and the globular
amber-hued ranunculus of spring, deliciously fragrant. Then flowers were
dropped in favor of butterflies; after that, the stone-period began and
Rosenegg was again frequented, for the whole neighborhood happened to be
strewn with crystalline erratics great and small, and in some of them
you might find brown garnets, but not in all; far from it! You had to
look for them pretty closely.

That was long ago.

And now, at the other end of life, one returns anew to Rosenegg on a
sunny afternoon, purged of the mists of middle years and, delving into
memories of that clear dawn and seeking to recapture its spirit, marvels
at the feverish joy which greeted discoveries such as these degenerate
little garnets, not a single one of which had the right color, nor made
the faintest pretense at being the rhombic dodecahedron it should have
been. How one changes!

This was always, alas, a bad country for “stones.”... Silver ore near
Dalaas of questionable worth, and rock crystals in several quarries, and
gypsum beyond St. Anton, and a poor kind of amethyst at the Hanging
Stone; the fossils were likewise meager--corals in the limestone of
Lorüns, univalves under certain rocks at Hohenems, those oysters in the
ruddy Nagelfluh (Middle Miocene) at Bregenz; last, not least, the
fucoids of the Flysch (Eocene) which you could find nearly everywhere,
pretty to look at, but terribly fragile. That was all. There were
legends, mere legends, of ammonites being seen in the local red marble;
we never saw them![29] Ah, if our father had still been alive, he might
have told us where to find this or that; his stone-collection was our
delight, our despair. Not everybody had his luck, we often said, to
stumble in the Scesa-torrent upon a huge writhing mammoth tusk that
required two or three men to carry--how had he done it, and why couldn’t
we do it too?[30]

Stones were dropped when birds and beasts began, and during that
slaughter-epoch Rosenegg became once more famous for producing the first
stoat that ever fell to my gun, and a falcon as well. There was a pair
of them here, and once, resting on that green terrace with my mother, I
saw the male bird dash off the ruin overhead, and swiftly took aim at
him (I refused to be parted from my gun, even during family walks).
Down he fluttered and fell, stone dead, at our feet. I recall that
afternoon as if it were yesterday. My mother said nothing; she suffered
more intensely than did the falcon, but had long since abandoned all
hope of curing my murderous instincts. I remember, too, passing alone
once through the woods below this tower and becoming aware of an unusual
sound at my side. Who could have guessed its origin? It was a putrid
fragment of a stag, so alive with worms as to make itself heard.

At the back of Rosenegg a little path descends through the wood; here,
one morning before sunrise, I came face to face with a fox who was
returning from some nocturnal visit to the poultry yards of Bürs; it was
a question of who should step aside to let the other pass. The fox was
not to be outdone in politeness; he vanished ere I had time to slip the
gun from my shoulder. This is the path we followed yesterday, proceeding
thence always eastwards at the foot of the Rhætikon mountains; at their
roots, one might say, for they rise up straight from the level, as does
a tree. Walking along, Mr. R. encountered a tiny creature that scared
him considerably; indeed, he was transfixed with astonishment and
stepped a pace or two backwards; he had never yet seen anything of the
kind, either on land or in water.

“A crocodile?”

“Not quite; a Quadertatsch. Pick him up and make friends with him.”

“His hands are cold.”

Cold they are, like those of a Hindu; and he himself is blacker than any
Hindu, or any nigger; black as the devil, with a luster as of
patent-leather boots; black but comely. It looks as if his first shape
had been remodeled by some thoughtful craftsman who added a row of
decorative bosses along sides and back, and pinched his tail till it
became slightly quadrangular in form; creating, with these few masterly
touches, something heraldic and distinguished out of quite a commonplace
original. A vast improvement! And his manners are in keeping. He nods
his head sagely on making your acquaintance, and at once begins climbing
up your arm with a comical precision of movement, a deliberate
jauntiness, that reminds one of some retired _maître de ballet_ whose
limbs have grown a little creaky with age and rheumatism, but who is
determined to show off his faded graces to the best advantage.

Perhaps I ought to explain that the Quadertatsch is what the Tyrolese
call a Tattermandl. The last syllable of this word proves that they have
also noticed certain human traits in his demeanor. The Tattermandl is a
universal favorite among Alpine folk. In his home up there, you seldom
see one of them alone; they are social beings, often to be found in
companies of a dozen or more. And what was this one doing here, all by
himself? Like several others I have met, he has been the victim of an
accident; always the same accident! He was swept off his legs in the
recent torrential rains and whirled two or three thousand feet down,
into our tropical regions, along one of the gullies that seam these
mountains. He will have a long walk home again; and all uphill.[31]

Two hours later we had crossed the Ill at Lorüns and found ourselves,
after a good while, walking up the picturesque village of Rungalin; it
leans against the hillside near Bludenz in the shape of the letter Y,
and should be viewed in spring, when its brown houses are all smothered
in creamy apple blossoms. Thence, always uphill, past the little spring
called “Halde Wässerle” and along the summit of those fine cliffs at
whose foot lies the Bährenloch cavern, turning sharp to the right and
emerging finally at Obdorf, beside the upper bridge that spans the
Galgen-tobel.

Just across this torrent, where the path begins to climb to Latz, stands
a modern peasant house which I never fail to visit with pleasure and
even respect. It has a suggestive history. Years ago, there was a poor
man who went, with all his family, as a dayworker to the cotton-mill at
Bürs, and there earned what he could. Such people are everlastingly in
want, since for some reason or other all their gains have to be spent
forthwith; this particular family was no exception. The father watched
his children growing thinner and paler from day to day, and stupider and
wastefuller in character, and saw no prospect of any betterment in the
future. “This must end,” he suddenly said, as if an inspiration had come
to him; and, borrowing a little money, bought for next to nothing the
tract of ground here which was then almost a marsh (nobody would
believe, nowadays, that you could pick handfuls of the large single
gentian on the spot), and drained it, and built a small cottage. The
family became agriculturists then and there; not a single member
returned to the factory, not for a day. Every year something new was
done to their domain; a cow purchased, another strip of land bought, a
fresh room added, and so on; with the result that these people, instead
of empty heads and spendthrift habits and weakened constitutions, have
now acquired prosperity and self-respect and decent manners and good
health. Here was one, at least, who refused to be beguiled by the
tomfoolery of industrialism.

We descended to Nüziders down the gentle slope of that deltoid tract
mentioned on p. 148. It had grown late, and my companion was
proportionately hungry after his long walk; he insisted on refreshing
himself at the “Bädle” inn which in olden days used to be an excellent
tavern run by a Swiss--as children, we were once quarantined within its
walls for a week or two, to escape an epidemic of measles, and all in
vain! Immediately overhead are the ruins of Sonnenberg castle, another
of our feudal nests and not the least famous of them; to judge by
prints, it must have been a lordly structure. It was destroyed by fire,
and nothing remains upright save a wall with a couple of trees growing
out of its masonry. The last survivor of this noble family ended in
ignoble fashion; he was murdered by another count whom he had enraged
with some saucy speech.

It was dark and moonless night before Mr. R. could be brought to confess
that he had eaten enough for the time being; none the less, we risked
taking the uphill path which starts at the “Bädle” and traverses the
wooded saddle behind the Hanging Stone, to end near the church of St.
Martin on the other side of that ridge. The now defunct
“beautification-society” of Bludenz did much to improve tracks like this
and those we had followed earlier in the afternoon; their labors were
then lost on us, everything was pitch black before our eyes; there was
no break whatever in the forest, and a man might well go astray here at
a late hour, particularly at a certain point where, instead of turning
to the left, he would be tempted to go straight on, and presently find
himself on the edge of a nasty cliff. The place, however, was still
familiar to me, since it was up here that I used to lie in wait with the
saturnine Mattli, at nightfall ages ago, trying to poach roe-deer. I can
still hear him whispering to me, on such an occasion, in that sepulchral
voice of his:

“You know what happened there?”

“Where?”

“Down in that hollow,” and he pointed with his gun in the direction of a
sunken patch, a dingle, at our feet; it lies in the center of the
saddle.

“What happened?”

“_They killed the last wolf._”

“Oh!”--and I felt a little shudder running down my back.[32]

I was thinking yesterday of Mattli and his last wolf, as we moved
forward through the night, and thereupon began to puzzle over a question
which seems to have puzzled no one else, namely, how it comes about that
this animal is extinct in all the Alpine region, notwithstanding its
enormous area of inaccessible territory, whereas in relatively populous
districts such as the Dordogne it is still common enough to be something
of a nuisance, in spite of ceaseless persecution on the part of man. I
concluded, perhaps wrongly, that the wolf has been extirpated hereabouts
not so much by the human race as by hunger; his natural prey (hares,
wildfowl, etc.) having grown much scarcer of late--scarcer than they are
in Scandinavia or Russia, while sheep and goats and dogs, which he can
still pick up in places like the Vosges or Apennines, are not so easy to
capture during the severe alpine winter, being mostly kept within doors.
If he could go to sleep like the bear, or had the cunning of the fox,
he might have survived to this day.

At last we emerged on the level again and, passing the church of St.
Martin, found ourselves under the lights of Ludesch. Never before had
that village seemed so endlessly long.

       *       *       *       *       *

Those gray, weather-beaten erratics of which I spoke have been gradually
disappearing from the landscape since my Rosenegg days. They used to be
quite a feature of the countryside. When you crossed our petrifying
stream, for instance, you beheld a horde of them scattered over the
slanting field below the road, and some were of prodigious size, bearing
bushes and little trees on their backs. Not one of those is left; I know
of only a single remaining block which is decorated with timber; you
will never find it, though you may certainly pass a spot, not far from
Jordan castle, where twenty-three can still be counted lying
about--dwarfs, mostly, or half submerged in the earth. The peasant makes
war on these things; he shatters them in pieces with dynamite or splits
them with wedges; for they take up room, they interfere with his mowing
operations, their stone is admirably adapted for building purposes. And
here is another little puzzle. Sometimes, in a thick wood, one may
stumble upon the conscientiously piled-up fragments of what used to be a
block of this kind, all forgotten and overgrown with moss; why go to the
trouble of breaking up this fractious material, and then do nothing with
it? Mystery!

The wall of the road leading up from the Bludesch church of St. Nicholas
towards Tiefis consists largely of the primitive rock of erratics which
formerly strewed the surrounding land; so does that which leaves Tiefis
in the direction of our own village.

Which reminds me of our last, and most disappointing, visit to the
“innkeepress and his beautiful girl.” There was no question, that day,
of the _embrassez-moi_ on which Mr. R. has set his simple heart, for the
baby was absent, having gone for a brief “Sommerfrische”--as if Tiefis
were not fresh enough already--up to Thüringerberg, to stay with a
sister of her mother’s, who comes from there. She would be back in a few
days, we were told. A piece of downright bad luck for him! He seemed to
be really upset; so much so, that I had to promise we should return
again soon. Then he suddenly recalled my undertaking to show him over
the Valduna asylum; it would be an agreeable diversion and fill up the
time; we could run down to Bregenz too, as he had never seen a great
inland water like the Lake of Constance.

My passion for idiots having waned of late, I was hoping he had
forgotten about Valduna. But no. He may forget the past participle of
every one of our irregular verbs; the prospect of an exhibition of three
or four dozen lunatics is the kind of thing he can be trusted to
remember. So be it. After all, there is no harm in going there; no harm
whatever. The sight of those poor wretches may medicine his youthful
bumptiousness and make him more contented with his own lot in life
which, once a week or so, gives occasion for some ludicrously savage
outburst.



VALDUNA

_Valduna_


Valduna was a surfeit of idiots. Mr. R. waxed grave; he has gained, I
think, a definite acquisition of humanity. That is as it should be. Such
sights of anguish are a tonic for the soul; they make us serious about
things that are worth being serious about; they deepen and broaden our
sympathies.

The cheery doctor became still more cheery on hearing my name--he is a
local alpinist--and did not omit a single patient save one or two of the
women who, presumably, were taking sun-baths in _impuris naturalibus_,
as was also one of the males, a robust and pretty boy of sixteen; he had
a clouded, far-away look, and could not be induced to utter a word. We
saw them all; the unclean patients, the unquiet patients, as well as the
simple lunatics, sad or glad. There are no violent ones here just now,
but some of those who suffered from hallucinations of hearing were
sufficiently abusive.

“Hello, Madam,” said the doctor to one of the ladies, “what may you be
doing here? I don’t seem to have seen your face before.”

“I’ve come to visit a poor patient. Didn’t they announce my name? How
unpardonably stupid of them! But I shall have to be leaving in about
half an hour. So good-by, doctor, in case we don’t meet again.”

Quite mad!

There was a poor old fellow in bed, on the brink of G. P. I. He
fascinated Mr. R., casting a hot, delirious glance upon him and pouring
out a flood of turbid megalomania.

“What is he telling me? What? What’s that? Translate, translate!”

Translating was out of the question. The speech contained not a shred of
coherence; nothing but fragmentary pictures, flashing up and swiftly
engulfed again; his brain was in combustion. Moreover, the patient would
have had ten words out of his mouth to every one of mine.

We visited the other establishment as well, a non-official, charitable
one. The director is a priest, native of this province, and one who
knows it well. He told me an interesting thing. We were speaking of the
former wine-production here, and I said it was doubtless the Arlberg
tunnel (I went through with the first train) which had caused the local
plantation of vineyards to cease, or at least to diminish to such an
extent that, for example, of the vineyards once clothing the hillsides
of my particular village--our family, too, had its own--there was only
a single one left; that belonging to the Prior of St. Gerold. And it was
the same with the rest of the province; the reason being, of course,
that the Arlberg railway had immensely reduced the price of wine from
Lower Austria or South Tyrol, which used formerly to be imported by
carrier, at great expense, over the Arlberg pass. Why cultivate bad
wine, when you can buy a better quality for the same money?

The tunnel might have done something, he agreed, and so might the modern
rise of industrialism hereabouts which tempted men from the fields into
the factories; but the real reason was the change of climate. It had
grown not colder, but damper. He was fond of wine; he had paid
particular attention to this matter all his life; there could be no
doubt about it. Feldkirch was a case in point. All its slopes were
covered with vineyards not long ago; the Feldkirchers had grown so
attached to their home product that they preferred it to anything from
abroad. There was now not a vine left at Feldkirch. The grapes refused
to ripen properly there, as they still did in more favored localities
like Sulz-Röthis.[33]

Thereafter we took the train to Bregenz. Hardly were we seated in our
carriage before Mr. R. began:

“Now I want to know exactly what he said. Please repeat it.”

“We were talking about the former production of wine in this province.
He maintains that owing to recent climatic changes----”

“Not your old man! My old man.”

Could anybody have remembered that rigmarole? I had to invent another
one, at the end of which he said:

“So that was it? How sad, and how suggestive. The ravings of a mind
diseased. Poor man! I must have that all down, word for word, in my
diary....”

Despite Adelaide Procter’s sprightly verses and its own illustrious
ancestry, Bregenz remains a repulsive little town on the shore of its
dead lake; and associated in my mind with infantile earaches and
spankings. I went there not for fun, but for a set purpose; firstly, to
consult the Curator of the new Museum, who was described as a
prodigiously amiable person, as to what natural curiosities, if any, had
lately been discovered in our upland regions, to re-inspect a picture, a
sugary-watery Ganymede attributed to Angelika Kauffmann, left to this
institution by my sister’s will, a Roman votive stone found on my
maternal grandfather’s estate and other objects here deposited by
members of my family, and to see whether his library contained any
unknown works by old Theodor (or Thomas) Bruhin; secondly, to apply for
the same object to that venerable convent-school of Mehrerau, where some
homeward-bound Pope expired long ago and where, according to one of
Bruhin’s pamphlets, he was “Professor” and may well have left some
documentary traces; thirdly, to visit the “Archiv” which contains a
goodly collection of books, old and new, dealing with this province, and
therefore, possibly, something of my father’s, and also to refresh my
memory in the matter of local dialects, place-names and so forth, and
inspect early prints of places like Jagdberg, Blumenegg and
Jordan-schloss; lastly, to present myself at the offices of the Alpine
Club in order to go through the files of their “Mitteilungen” and make a
list of my father’s contributions to that journal, and see whether it
contains some “Nachruf” of him, some obituary notice, as is likely
enough, seeing that so tragic an accident to a conspicuous member can
hardly have been left unrecorded.

A reasonable program.

I did none of these things; no, not one. Zeal for such scholarly
investigations seems to be abating; or can it have been the weather? It
happened to be cloudless. Much pleasanter, bathing in the lake and
climbing up, towards evening, to admire the view from St. Gebhard’s
chapel.

We managed to go, none the less, to the Protestant cemetery which lies
on the site of the _thermae_ of old Brigantium, and examined the graves
of no less than ten deceased relatives. Here lies, among the rest, that
maternal grandfather who was responsible for the spankings aforesaid.
His tombstone recounts his glories, and I do not believe in all of them;
he doubtless had the memorial engraved half a century before his death,
in order that posterity should make no mistake as to his merits while
alive. This old feudal monster never did a stroke of work in his endless
life. He was a braggart of the first water, with gray mustache that
looked freshly waxed and curled--quite _à la_ Münchhausen--at whatever
hour of the day you might meet him; he radiated good health, and seemed
everlastingly to have stepped that very moment out of a hot bath and the
hands of a conscientious valet; he had a pink baby-complexion, and the
candid eyes of the born liar. He spanked me as often as I came here in
childhood, even as he had spanked his only son who died in
youth--perhaps from the effects of it. Only once did I score off him
during this earlier period. It was his unvarying habit to begin
breakfast--a huge cup of a certain kind of chocolate, specially imported
from Paris, for himself; tea or coffee for all the rest, and be damned
to them--with a boiled egg. One morning of All Fool’s Day I slipped down
just before the others, devoured his egg, and turned the hollow shell
upside down in its cup. On taking his seat, he had his customary whack
at the seemingly sound egg: empty! He glowered round the table at a
cluster of trembling daughters. At last he caught my eye and grunted:

“H’m. First of April, I presume. H’m. Not bad for a kid. H’m. Let me
advise you to try that on somebody else, next year. H’m.”

Even in later times, he continued to annoy me furiously by calling me a
beetle-collector. This is how he talked:

“At seventeen, my lad, I was already commanding a fortress in Hungary.
And here you are, catching cockroaches. Then we went to Greece with King
Otho and ah! the lovely years we had there; the best of all my life! I
was the first person to make excavations on the Acropolis of Athens, if
you happen to have heard of such a place. Just make a note of that,
young fellow. Meanwhile, here you are, hunting bugs and pinning labels
to them. Afterwards--yes, Windsor! When I was aide-de-camp to your
Prince Consort, he confessed that he could never have handled Victoria
the way he did, unless I had told him (lowering his voice) some of my
own experiences with capricious females of that class. _And here you
are_----”

A fragment of the Greek yarn was true. He was there for long under Otho,
roving about with his soldiers, and that forlorn and devastated country,
as it then was, made an indelible impression on him. Not Odysseus
himself could have been more homesick for Greece than he was. He spoke
of it in tones of wistful yearning, as of a lost Paradise--the identical
tones that I have since discovered, to my surprise, in the writings of a
French contemporary, Edgar Quinet.[34] Never was he so attractive,
during these final years of his life, as when he sat all alone at the
piano in the twilight hour before the lamps were brought in, crooning
the tender Greek folk-songs of his youth to a soft, self-invented
accompaniment. At such moments, he was transported; he had entered into
a fairyland of which he alone possessed the key. You might have taken
him for an angel. Indeed, his voice was the best part of him at all
times. Even when he ramped and raved, it never lost its exquisite
sweetness of timbre; his very curses sounded like a ripple of celestial
laughter. He also painted sunny landscapes in oil, and composed an
amusing valse or two. Such things went well with his exterior childlike
equipment. Primeval ferocity was lurking underneath.

True to his freebooter instincts, he had perched himself here, at
Bregenz, on a height where he could not be overlooked by any one and
whence he obtained an unimpeded view of half the province and lake. The
place boasted of a “flag-tower” from which five countries were visible
(Austria, Bavaria, Wurtemberg, Baden and Switzerland), and he contrived,
somehow or other, to give a mediæval smack of discord and rapine to its
inner regions. Here were bleak stone passages, cold as an ice-cellar in
winter, and hung with matchlocks and lances; gloomy Gothic wardrobes
filling up their ends. The habitable part was full of spoils plundered,
without a doubt, from the rich burghers down below; a haphazard
collection of Persian carpets, harmoniums, lacquer tables, Tiepolo
portraits, glittering chandeliers, marbles: it all wore an authentic air
of loot. Somber paneling, relieved by armorial designs, covered the
walls and ceilings and made the rooms uncommonly dusky.

And here he sat for years and years, terrorizing his family, all
females, into fits. People used to wonder how he managed to look so
absurdly young at eighty. His secret was simplicity itself: Live well,
and hand over everything in the way of worry to your women. He never
spoke to servants at all; the harim were entrusted with that dirty
work, and woe betide them if anything went wrong with the dinner! No one
was surprised when his five daughters got engaged as fast as ever they
could and fled the premises, regardless of whom they were marrying. He
ruled his wife and sister-in-law, dear old ladies, like a slave-driver.
One or the other was always hard at work manufacturing Latakia
cigarettes for the rosy brigand, who lived on their money for seventy
years and called them names to the hour of his death, although they were
children of the premier baron of Scotland. A certain daughter had the
imprudence, one day, to admire a graceful birch-tree that she could see
from her bedroom. Next morning, as usual, she looked out of the window;
the birch was gone. It had been felled overnight. That was his system.
Dominate your women, or they will dominate you. Put the fear of God into
them--no matter how. In his own family, he declared, wives were not
allowed to sit down in the presence of their husbands, unless they had
first obtained permission. It may be true. I fancy one of his ancestors
was the cosmopolitan ruffian who wrote those memoirs; a kind of
fifth-rate Casanova. There he remained, anyhow, like an old cock on his
dunghill, crowing and gobbling; vicious and vigorous past his ninetieth
year. And the strange thing is that I am considered to have inherited a
great deal of his peculiar charm. It was my mother who told me this; she
was his eldest daughter and knew both of us fairly well.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is time, now, to confess that not all the prints and archives and
natural history collections in the world would have brought me--or ought
to bring any one else--to Bregenz, did the place not offer another and a
greater attraction. I am alluding to the local _Blaufelchen_ whose
English name at this moment escapes me: a kind of fish. They are called,
in Latin, _Coregonus Wartmanni_, which has a harsh flavor. Let nobody,
however, be scared by a mere name, inasmuch as things are apt to taste
different from what they sound. Oriental poets, for example, have sung
with such a depth of feeling about pomegranates that one almost believes
they can be eaten, whereas _Coregoni Wartmanni_, I admit, convey a
suggestion of something unpalatable. Try them none the less, and leave
Hafiz to crack his teeth over the pomegranates.

These fish occur in some Scotch lakes and are considered so great a
delicacy that Mary Queen of Scots has been credited with their
introduction. But I knew one cantankerous countryman of mine (an
angler, and _Coregonus_ will not rise to the fly) who declared that they
were “not to be compared to trout”--which means nothing whatever, seeing
that comparison is not well possible between things so dissimilar; you
might as well say that Sir Joshua Reynolds is not to be compared to a
Bechstein Grand; and that, in fact, they were “hardly worth
eating”--which has the merit, at least, of being a straightforward
expression of opinion. Now it stands to reason that a good many things
are hardly worth eating, until you know how to cook them. The average
English hare is hardly worth eating; the way that quadruped is “dressed”
(hyperbola!) in England is an insult to the hare’s memory and to the
human stomach. As to these _Blaufelchen_--whoever does not approve of
them at the Hotel Weisses Kreuz in Bregenz must be hard to please.[35]
Let him try, as a last resort, those at the Hotel Hecht in Constance; if
still dissatisfied, he should return without delay to his lukewarm
whitebait fried in mutton-grease.

But, first of all, a word for your guidance. Make love neither to the
waitress nor the chamber-maid nor the she-cook. Make love to the
manager. Lure him into some corner, and unbosom yourself freely. Whisper
in his ear that you are an Ainu by birth; that while out there, at Yezo,
you accidentally met a countryman of his (mentioning name and general
appearance) who spoke in such glowing terms of the Bodensee
_Blaufelchen_ that you were unable to sleep either by day or night
until, traveling via the trans-Siberian railway, you should be able to
taste them for yourself under his hospitable roof. Then see whether you
get what is “hardly worth eating.” I blush to record that we had a
veritable surfeit of _Blaufelchen_. I devoured two at a sitting, and the
waitress informed me that she had never seen a tourist--even a
German--perform a similar feat; nor should I, indeed, have been
successful, had I not kept saying to myself all the time: “When shall I
be at Bregenz again? Possibly never!” Mr. R. declared himself satisfied
with one; and small wonder. It was a leviathan....

A timely warning, apropos of surfeits. On arrival at our village, we
found the family in a state of distress. One of their two cows (the rest
are on the alp) had died that afternoon; died of over-eating. She, the
proprietress, had told him, the proprietor, to beware how he left the
beast to itself; he, the proprietor, swore he had known that particular
cow from the day of its birth, and that it was far more sensible than
the rest of its kind. Left to itself, therefore, the cow had “exploded.”

I am so little of a cattle-fancier that this was news to me; troubling
news. I had always regarded the cow as an exemplar of all that is sane
and moderate. Far from it. Give them a chance, especially after the
hay-diet of winter, and they eat till they burst. They graze, and graze,
and graze; at last, stuffed to the brim, they stand there motionless,
wondering what is wrong inside, while a pained and puzzled
look--infallible symptom, this--creeps into their eyes. Now is your
chance, your last chance, of saving their life. If you happen to have an
iron chain in your pocket, thrust it into the beast’s mouth to provoke a
flow of saliva or something else which relieves the oppression; if you
have no chain look in that other pocket, where you may find a Gargantuan
clyster to be applied to its further extremity; failing that, whip out
your butcher’s knife and give the patient a well-directed stab in the
stomach--a kind of Cæsarian section; the gas escapes, the cow survives.
Else, after standing like a pathetic statue for a few moments, it falls
heavily earthwards and “explodes inside”--a cow! Thank God we belong to
another species, else how would it have fared at the Weisses Kreuz? A
gentle cow! The episode has shattered one of my dearest illusions.

This, then, must be the explanation of a strange sight which has
attracted me from time immemorial. Often, in pouring rain, you may see a
cow at pasture and its owner standing dismally near at hand, soaked to
the skin. Why, I used to wonder--why not let the beast graze by itself
and go home and get a _Schnapps_ and a change of clothes? Now I know.
The peasant cannot move from the spot. He dare not leave the cow alone.
He must stay there and keep his eye fixed on hers, lest that symptom
should appear.



OLD ANNA

_Old Anna_


Stood awhile yesterday beside a block of gneiss which projects upon the
right-hand side of the Tiefis path, some two hundred yards above the
petrifying stream, at the foot of a young oak. It has been broken long
ago, and is shaped like a very low and narrow bench. How one
changes--how one looks at things with other eyes! Is it possible that
this stone used to be my _Ultima Thule_ in days of infancy; this, or the
walnut tree a little higher up, whose stump remains to this day, and
from under whose branches you had a broad view over the valley? The
upward path was shadier than now, and here, sure enough, I played
through the morning hours, while the old Anna extracted out of her
pocket that invariable _Frühschoppen_ (she, being Tyrolese, called it
“merenda”)--some salted bread and a quarter of red wine. Sometimes the
same pocket produced also a chocolate for me; in fact, she had a trick
of conjuring chocolate out of the most improbable places. On one
occasion she actually shook a piece down from a tree; a miracle....

Later on, the Gleziska became our favorite haunt. This is a flat green
meadow to the east of the village where stood, at that time, a glorious
barn containing an ante-chamber and two separate compartments full of
delicious hay to swim about in; it has now been replaced by an anæmic
structure of the new type. The first walk I ever took, all by myself,
was from the village church to the Gleziska; that was a proud day. Soon,
when my sister had learnt to toddle, the old thing took us further
afield; once as far as the church of St. Martin at Ludesch (built about
1430; some of its rare Gothic furniture is in the Bregenz Museum), where
we two discovered, in a crypt, an immense accumulation of human skulls;
we dragged four or five into the daylight, and had a game of skittles
with them.

I still own a photograph of the old Anna. She is not old in the least;
about forty, I should say. There she sits at a table, half-profile, her
left arm supporting the head; she does not smile, but looks rather
vacuously into the world, as such photographs are apt to do. A pleasant,
refined face; I can read nothing else out of it. There is a suggestion
of silk about the clothing, and a black ribbon hangs down from the back
of her hair. Such was the _Alte Anna_ who, being a child of nature
herself, was the ideal nurse. Her only drawback was that she had too
great a fondness for ghastly wolf-stories of the Little Red Riding Hood
type. She possessed an endless store of such tales current, no doubt,
in the Tyrol of earlier days. I wish I could still remember them, for
they would now interest me as showing how strongly the popular
imagination must have been impressed with this scourge, at which we can
at last afford to laugh. In those days they frightened me to death; they
haunted my dreams.

Old Anna faded out of sight, and there came a shadowy interregnum of
German governesses, of whom I can recall nothing save that a certain
Fräulein Schubert got the sack because she had a flirtation (this was
doubtless a euphemism) with some young man in the factory offices. It
struck me as unfair that you should be sent away just because you happen
to like your friend.

Herr Som followed. He was master of the boys’ school at Bludesch (there
was no school-house in our village at that time); a Swiss, I fancy, and
a well-groomed, gentlemanly fellow who often lunched at our house. To
his establishment I was now sent every morning--rather a long tramp for
a child, across all those fields, especially through the fresh-fallen
snow of winter. The school-house still exists; it is a conspicuous
three-storied building that overtops all the others in this hither side
of Bludesch; a house of noble lineage which has recently been made to
look quite new and respectable; it was built in the seventeenth century
by the family of Von der Halden zu Haldenegg, who were _Landvogts_ of
Blumenegg.[36] The place was therefore not a school-house at all; only
two rooms had been set apart by the village elders where boys sat at
desks under Herr Som’s supervision writing in endless lines
“Schwimmmmen, Schwimmmen” (it was spelt with four, or at least three,
m’s in those days). Som must have been pleased with my progress, for I
still possess a unique document--a school report with the mark “very
good” in reading, writing and arithmetic; so pleased that, on marrying
soon afterwards, he gave my exotic name to his eldest son, the first and
last time such an honor has been conferred on me. “Schwimmmmen” is all
that sticks in my mind of Bludesch school; that, and the view up the
smiling valley from the window of the water-closet (another euphemism).
It was then and there borne in upon me how needful to such apartments is
a spacious prospect upon which the eye can dwell with pleasure. To this
attraction I should be inclined to add, now, a choice little library
and, for those of musical tastes, a pianola.

Misguided Scotch relatives, in those days, used to send magnificent
dolls to my sister by post. Little they knew what they were doing:
little they knew! A parcel arrived, and somebody would say to her:

“Well, I declare. This looks uncommonly like another doll. _Another_
doll! You are a lucky child, and no mistake.”

My sister pretended to shriek delightedly:

“Oh, let me unpack it, all alone, upstairs,” and snatched away the
parcel and ran. I followed. A glance, a single masonic glance, had been
exchanged between us. It sufficed. I knew the part I was called upon to
play.

Upstairs, in some unused room, we locked the door upon our labors. The
plaything was unpacked in dead silence; a ceremonial had begun. When the
last silk-paper wrapping had been removed, my sister took the splendid
golden-haired creature into her arms and, with many false hugs and
kisses, bore it swiftly towards the garden. I followed. Not a word was
spoken. We were high priests, engaged upon some terrible but necessary
ordinance. At the foot of a certain old tree in a certain
shrubbery--always the same--she paused, and muttered certain mysterious
words into the victim’s ear. Then she handed it solemnly to me. I took
the thing by the legs, swung it through the air once or twice, and
shattered its head to fragments against the trunk. After that, we tore
it limb from limb amid a shower of sawdust and stamped on the remains.
Forthwith the spell was released, the sacrifice at an end; and we
screamed with hysterical joy.

A few days later, somebody might enquire of the child:

“Now where is that lovely doll you got from dear Cousin Annie?”

She would reply, mournfully:

“In bed. Poor little Esmeralda has a tummy-ache this morning.”

This, too, was part of the rite. The words were always the same.

Never a doll escaped assassination, and nobody, I believe, found out
what happened to them. My sister hated dolls with a vindictive,
unreasoning hatred. And I, of course, was only too pleased to smash
anything I was bidden to smash; and still am.

Dear Cousin Annie--this one happened to be no relation at all--turned up
in this country at odd intervals, as did the rest of those stark
grand-aunts and female cousins, to our infinite annoyance. There were
scores of them, and all of a kind; musty and sententious to the last
degree. The present generation has no idea, not the faintest idea, of
what a grand-aunt used to look like in those days. Dear Cousin Annie was
a gaunt, tottering, gray-haired anatomy, who reeked of Macassar oil, and
wore massive jet beads round her neck and a tremulous drop of
rose-water at the end of her nose--just the kind of person whom a little
boy would love to kiss.

“What is my name, dear?” she asked, over and over again, with a sickly
smile.

You were expected to answer:

“Dear--Cousin--Annie.”

It was no use whatever saying, “Don’t know.” We tried it often, but the
question was only repeated with greater persistence, and a sicklier
smile than ever.

Her husband had been a physician and was even more aged than she; he
exhaled an air of unbelievable eld. It occurred to me, years afterwards,
that there was something pre-Victorian and Waterlooish about those white
whiskers. He drank sherry-wine, and dishes of tea. Nevertheless, one
could have learnt much from him had one been a little older, for he was
a character, an original. Later on, in Edinburgh, I got to know him
well; he was then ninety-two, and no longer communicative. An
antiquarian of the old school, he had filled his head with queer
knowledge upon every subject, and his house with queer objects of every
kind. Judging by his pamphlets and letters to newspapers, he seems to
have taken, and rightly taken, all learning to his province. I still
possess a few of these things; who can tell how many he produced
altogether? “Protestantism in Austria” begins thus: “I am desirous of
calling the attention of your readers to this subject, which is not
generally understood in Britain.” It was written here, as well as a
rather incoherent “Notice of a flood at Frastanz in the autumn of
1846.”[37] He gave me another paper written by his own father, who was
Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and died in 1818: “Mistresses
and Servants.” How good it reads!

_B._ My dear Mrs. A., I am glad to see you. All well at home, I hope?

_A._ All well. Mr. A. is going about in his usual way, and the children
are in good health.

_B._ When things are so, a wife and mother may truly say: “He gives all
things richly to enjoy.”

So far _all well_; but Mrs. A. promptly embarks upon her pet subject of
“plaguy servants.” Mrs. B., after an argument of sixteen pages,
recommends her to read a certain verse in St. Paul’s Epistle to the
Ephesians.

Here is a short paper of his own on “Saints” (“When I was student at the
University of Edinburgh, we young fellows were displeased by our
professor, a worthy old man, constantly speaking to us of _Baron_
Haller”), and a strange composition touching the “Life of a domestic
cat”. (“I kept a record of her kittenings. They were twenty-five in
number, comprising seventy-eight individuals.”) The old fellow also
burst into poetry once or twice and perpetrated, among other things,
some flattering lines on our family of Tilquhillie entitled “Feugh and
Dee,” lines which nothing but ingrained modesty now prevents me from
reprinting, seeing that this family, though venerable enough--the oldest
in the county, they tell me--was never yet, to my knowledge, hymned in
verse, but has contrived to live on, from age to age, sufficiently
inconspicuous; inconspicuous, and all of us rather cracked into the
bargain. See, for a recent example, Dean Ramsay’s “Reminiscences.”

Thereafter came an epoch when those in authority seem to have reached a
sensible conclusion, to wit, that English children should not only speak
English, but also learn to read and write it. A governess was required.
In due course of time she arrived; and her name was Miss Prime. We
straightway called her Miss Prim, or “the Prim”; it suited her
admirably. Her hair was parted down the middle; indeed, she was prim all
over, but her pedagogic system proved a failure. Miss Prim must have had
an indifferent time of it here, so far as the children were concerned.
Her disciplinary measures never obtained the desired effect. When my
sister was told to stand on a bench for some misdemeanor, she made such
contortions at me that it was impossible for lessons to proceed; she was
next put into a corner facing the wall, where the contortions continued
more violently than ever, only this time with the back part of her body;
at last she was locked up all by herself in a distant room, whence there
presently issued such a din of crashing furniture that the people
downstairs rushed up, asking whether the end of the world had come. In
this particular room stood an enormous double bed; it inspired her with
a brilliant method of eluding punishment for good and all.

“Crawl under here,” she suggested, “whenever the Prim want us _for
anything_ (euphemism). She can never pull us out.”

She couldn’t. Under that bed we remained for hours, contentedly munching
cakes and crunching sweets which had been stuffed into the mattress to
meet contingencies such as these, until the Prim implored us, almost on
her knees, to come out again. At other times, before or after “lessons,”
we indulged in prolonged and uproarious fights between ourselves. “It
will end in a howl,” my mother was wont to remark on such occasions.

Nobody need tell me what we required: a thorough good spanking. Who was
going to administer it? Had my father not died when I was five, he would
doubtless have attended to the matter. He could hurt confoundedly, he
could. I have bright memories of one of his spankings when, after
performing a war-dance on some bed of newly planted portulacas, I found
myself suddenly seized by the scruff of the neck and carried at arm’s
length rabbit-fashion, dangling and kicking in air, into a conservatory.
_En route_, I had barely time to shout to the old Anna “Wait till I’m
spanked!”--we were going for a walk--before I got it hotter, far hotter,
than usual. That is the way to spank children. Never do it unless you
are really angry yourself. Otherwise they will regard you as a
cold-blooded torturer.

As to the Prim--I should like to have seen her tackling either of us two
seriously. Even my sister, tiny as she was, would have throttled her to
death, and then dropped her out of the window. She was regarded as a
poor joke, and that is why her teaching hardly met with the success it
deserved, and why I was therefore soon to be sent to an English private
school, loathsomest of institutions, and thence to other schools, and
yet other schools--there to be crammed for such a length of time with
such a superfluity of useless learning, and by such a variety of
unwholesome-looking gentlemen of different ages and nationalities, that
I am only now, at the end of all these years, beginning to shake off the
bad effects and discover my true self again. That fetish of education!

Meanwhile Miss Prim, during one of her holiday visits to England, had
succeeded in getting engaged. She imparted the happy news to our family,
with becoming shyness, a few hours after her return; she wondered
whether her fiancé might ever come out here, and proceed with his
courtship on foreign soil, for a week or so? Why, of course he could;
let him come when he pleased, and stay as long as ever he liked! In due
course of time he arrived; and his name was Mr. Clutterbuck.
Clutterbuck. Clutterbuck. The name alone sent us into fits; we thought
it an incomparably funny one, as indeed it is. Mr. Clutterbuck, himself,
was a droll and pertinacious individual. He used to sit, rod in hand,
trying to catch trout in the reservoirs. Everybody told him he would
never get a nibble there--the fish were far too well-fed; why not try a
fly on the Tabalada stream, at the bottom of the valley near Gais, the
fishing of which also belonged to us?

No. Mr. Clutterbuck preferred the reservoirs. He would sit on that stone
margin morning and afternoon, while the Prim hovered lovingly in his
neighborhood. There I see him sitting to this day.

       *       *       *       *       *

The only way to get these pampered beasts out of the reservoir is by the
prosaic method of draining off the water. Then you have them! Now just
remove your trousers and wade into the mud, if you do not mind looking
like a fool, and pull them out with your hands, which is far more
exciting sport than you might imagine. Only then is it possible to
realize how slippery and muscular a trout can be when taken, not off a
hook after an hour’s playing, but fresh from its element. We used to do
this periodically in later years, and some of the fish were of
respectable size. The largest I remember catching weighed a fraction
over four kilograms and was seventy-six centimeters in length. He kicked
like an electric dynamo.

We happened to be going that afternoon to a friend in Bregenz and
decided to make him a present of this trout, particularly as he had a
far-famed Viennese _chef_ who claimed to be able to make a succulent
ragout out of the Devil himself. As there was no time for a special box
to be built, we requisitioned the newly made coffin of a child that had
died overnight but was happily not yet bestowed therein; our monster was
packed inside, comfortably wrapped up in green nettles. The baby could
wait; the trout was in a hurry....



SCHLINS

_Schlins_


There is a sense of sudden departure in the air.

We shall know the worst, to-morrow, or next day....

Lasko’s well has not moved from its old place. It lies about a hundred
yards west of the “Château aux fenêtres.” The wooden trough into which
the water trickles--one of its many successors--looks the same as ever;
I am glad it has not yet been converted into a basin of cement, like
those in the village below.

The transformation of wood into cement is proceeding relentlessly all
over the country; to my infinite disgust. Those numerous wooden
watertroughs for the use of householders and their cattle, which used to
be quite a feature of the streets, are now all being manufactured out of
this damnably durable material; there is a cement-factory near our
station, and I wish somebody would drop a bomb on it. Cement has invaded
domestic architecture, as was inevitable. Inevitable things are not
always pleasant, and not always pretty. It is hard to imagine anything
more infamous, on a small scale, than the prison-like gray garden walls
which have replaced those delightful wooden palings through whose
meshes a riot of flowers would come tumbling out upon the road; the
spacious wooden houses, so full of charm and individuality, so redolent
of patriarchal well-being, with their shingles and gables burnt to a
glowing umber-brown by years and years of sunshine, are being discarded
in favor of weedy little cement abominations that make one sorry for
people who have to live in them. They look cheap; they are cheap. I wish
they were dear, for cheap things are seldom attractive, and life in
cheap and ugly homes cannot fail to give their inmates a corresponding
bent of mind.

Not a single wooden bridge is left over Lutz or Ill. They were swept
away, every one of them, in the floods of 1910 and 1911 and now, for the
first time, their place is taken by solid but hideous structures of
cement. One is sorry to let the old ones go; one calls to mind the
bridge at Ludesch built as long ago as 1498 and ever since then kept in
repair, with its sloping wooden roof, its sudden twilight within and
odor of hot fir-wood, as of a scented tunnel; one remembers the soft
tread of the horses’ feet on the powdery beams and the sound of creaking
timbers underfoot. They are eyesores, these new things; they will remain
eyesores.

Now a new road is an eyesore too, ruthlessly hacked, as it is, through
the landscape; and nearly every road hereabouts, great or small, has
been cut afresh within the last generation. No great harm in this,
however, since roads have a knack of growing old again; you need only
wait; lichens and grass and brushwood will presently creep up to hide
the scars. There is nothing to be done with palings and bridges and
troughs and houses of cement; nothing, save to stand aside and curse
them. For the æsthetic drawback of cement, that godsend to lazy
builders, lies in its agelessness and lack of character; if it grows old
at all, it grows even more horrible than in youth. But men are becoming
blind to these and other uglifications--the word is not quite ugly
enough for the thing--of the scenery and of their houses. For instance:
forty-one unseemly electric wires converge at the post-office of our
small village; there they are, so repulsive that you cannot but look at
them; the women of the place, instead of feeding chickens or mending the
children’s clothes, spend their lives in gossiping with each other at
long distances, and God alone knows the nonsense they find to chatter
about. Go where you please, in fact, and you cannot fail to perceive
half a dozen decorative telegraph poles staring you in the face. Now why
do people want all this ridiculous electricity rushing up and down the
country? Solidarity. Brotherhood of men....

Lasko’s well----

No; it has not moved from its old place. But we looked in vain for
those “Wasserkälber” which were always to be found lying at its bottom
in olden days. Indeed, I have not seen a single “Wasserkälb” since my
arrival here. Are they extinct?[38]

We called him Lasko; but it was not till many years afterwards, at an
English public school, that I learnt that Lasko really meant anything.
And we called it Lasko’s well, because it was here that Lasko, our black
retriever, lapped up some water on his last walk, the day before his
death. After that, we made it a rule that every one of our dogs, as
often as we passed this place, should drink at the trough in memory of
dear old Lasko, whether he happened to be thirsty or not; if he refused,
his head was held under the water till he had imbibed, willy-nilly,
something like the requisite amount of liquid. To this treatment were
submitted:

(1) Lasko the Second, a worthless yellow brute who, having been altered
in youth, was of so timorous a disposition that it became our greatest
delight to get somebody to fire off a gun in his immediate neighborhood,
and watch him flee for his life.

(2) Sippins, who belonged to my sister and to the “Affenpincher”
breed--that is, to so small and strange-looking a canine variety that
the boys were wont to call him a Chinese rat; all of which did not
prevent him from having fleas. One wonders whether those enthusiasts,
who declare that dogs have no fleas, are in earnest. Have they ever
looked for them? Sippins was flea’d, during the summer, twice a day by a
maid who deposited the insects in a saucer containing alcohol, and in my
boyish journal I record “136 fleas caught from Sippins at a single
time”--Sippins himself, as aforesaid, being about the size of a
full-grown rat. Now Sippins objected strongly to this water-cure at
Lasko’s well. He had been born and educated at Munich; he only touched
water when no beer was procurable; he could drink like a lord, like a
fish; but only beer. It was not long, therefore, before it became one of
our principal pastimes to “make Sippins drunk.” He seldom knew when to
stop.

(3) MacDougall, a Skye-terrier belonging to me, of so pure a breed that
you never knew whether he was walking forwards or backwards. He was an
anomaly among quadrupeds; nothing approaching his style had been seen in
this country before. His talent consisted in enticing cats down from
walls and trees and other inaccessible situations by his mere
appearance; the cats, seemingly, being unable to resist the temptation
of inspecting at close quarters this freak of nature, this animated
hearth-rug. Once on the ground, they were doomed to a violent death,
for they never dreamt it was a dog. Need I say what our chief diversion
with MacDougall used to be? One of his most brilliant exploits took
place in Bludesch at our tailor’s--who was also our haircutter; whence,
for many years, I found it difficult to realize that tailoring and
haircutting were separate professions--where dwelt a family of cats, a
mother and half a dozen kittens. The operation took less than a minute
to perform, while we looked on amazed and, ten to one, amused; two
shakes for the mother, half a shake each for the kittens; the entire
family laid out flat on the grass, dead as doornails, side by side;
whereupon he trotted up to us, right end forward, saying plainly:
“_How’s that?_” And we doubtless replied: “Oh, MacDougall! Do it again.”
Very cruel children, we were....

Straight up, from Lasko’s well, and once more to that inspiring portal
of green, where the path to Tiefis enters the cavern-like forest. To-day
those curtain-fringes of the dark firs are waving softly to and fro,
stirred by a tepid Fön wind. Now down again, past sundry erratic blocks
and through the newly planted tract to the “nymphe pudique”--the source
of the crayfish stream, which we intend to pursue all the way to
Schlins. A good deal of that fair swamp growth has been cut since our
last visit; enough remains to please the eye. The vale grows wider after
the Tiefis-Bludesch road has been crossed, and the rushes denser; one
realizes why the peasants have called this rivulet “Ried-bach.” It
meanders in desultory fashion about this upper marshy level; then
plunges, all of a sudden, into the wood, and puts on a new character. A
downhill career begins in earnest. Rapids are formed, and islets; all in
the deep shade of those trees through which it glimmers obscurely along.
A kingfisher haunts these dusky reaches (there is another on the upper
Montiola brook); scenery such as this must have been in Poe’s mind when
he wrote “The Island of the Fay.” Soon we pass a small abandoned
reservoir; it is the second spot in the district where bulrushes can be
found--the third is near Bludenz; after that comes a stretch of country
difficult to follow, steep and irregular, a stretch of tortuous windings
and cascades, till the lower level of Schlins is reached, where the
brook enters upon its final phase, gliding demurely, like our own
Feldbächle, through cultivated meadows at the foot of Jagdberg.

It stands to reason that we straightway found ourselves sitting at the
Krone inn, wistful at the thought that this might be our last visit
here. The proprietress is a sweet-natured woman and a stimulating
conversationalist; we talked and talked, while Mr. R. partook of his
traditional two eggs and insisted moreover in drinking “Suser,” freshly
made cider, in spite of my warning about the probable consequences of
such rash behavior, namely, an attack of the “Holde Katarina,” the “Fair
Katherine,” which signifies a loosening of the bowels. The expression is
remarkable as showing the prudishness of these folk in regard to bodily
matters of every kind; alter a letter in that name, and you may divine
its origin. All such things are slurred over, even by grown-up people.
So female dogs are always known as “he”; incredible to relate, our
much-married dachshund-lady is “he.” How different from Mediterranean
countries where sexuality and every other physiological fact is taken
for granted by the smallest children, and emphasized as such; where even
inanimate objects are apt to be invested with the attributes of sex!
Here we stand before a racial divergence of outlook; a gulf.

The cider-harvest promises well. But I have long ago given up pretending
to enjoy this drink, and find it hard to believe that the first time I
ever got tipsy was on such mawkish stuff. Yet so it was. Needless to
say, it was not my own fault; other people were mixed up in the affair;
Jakob, and my sister. Jakob was a smiling, sunburnt villager who looked
after our cows and pigs and also helped at the hay-making; the accident,
therefore, must have occurred at the present season of the year. Now
whatever Jakob did, he did with such peculiar zest that it was a
liberal education to watch him. Nobody could _dengel_ quite like he
could (to _dengel_ is to beat out the blade of a scythe); he threw his
heart and soul into the performance. And nobody could quaff cider with
such infinite gusto; it made you thirsty to look at him. Wherever he
happened to be mowing among the fields, there, close at hand, in the
shade of some tree, stood his jug of blue stoneware out of which he
refreshed himself gloriously, in god-like fashion, from time to time.
When it was empty, he was wont to disappear down the stairs of the
laundry into certain mysterious regions underneath our house and come
back with the jug refilled; and this is where my sister’s rôle begins.
She was three years old at the time; the suggestion, therefore, can only
have come from her; the suggestion, I mean, that we should watch where
Jakob went and then get some cider for ourselves. It was another world
down there, a cool twilight passage running the whole length of the
house, with vaulted chambers on both sides that were lighted by windows
ever so high up. One of them was full of barrels side by side, and one
of those barrels was still dripping. Aha! So that was where Jakob filled
his jug. Now just the least little turn of the tap, and the liquid began
to trickle deliciously down our throats, while we egged each other on to
drink more and more. I have no idea how long we stayed down there. The
countryside was scoured in vain; all traces of the children had
disappeared, and had it not been for Jakob providentially descending to
fetch himself yet another jugful, we might have remained undiscovered
till next morning. As it was, we were picked up senseless and put to
bed.

Seven o’clock--how long one has lingered in this pleasant tavern! Now we
leave, after many farewellings, and wander homewards due east, not
passing the church at all; we cross the streamlet which has accompanied
us hither and immediately enter that wood, familiar by this time, the
once awe-inspiring forest of the----. It is already dark here, under the
firs, but the rich, resinous perfumes of daylight are still hanging in
the air; no dew has fallen to quench them. So we move along the dim path
in silence; we have talked ourselves out, at Schlins.

All those squirrels--what has become of them? In olden days you could
seldom traverse any wood hereabouts without encountering one or more.
Now, during the whole of our stay here, we have seen but two; one black,
one red. Where are they gone? I enquired, and learnt that they had not
been persecuted during the war, as were the moles. To be sure, certain
persons eat squirrels and declare them to be excellent; they did this
already in the days when these animals were numerous. In England, also,
the race seems to be dying out. Has there been some epidemic, or is the
whole squirrel-tribe growing weary of life and contemptuous of the joys
of propagation? Quite lonesome these forests are, without their
squirrels. As to the crested tits--they seem to have vanished
altogether; in fact, the entire titmouse tribe is far less common than
it used to be. Have their nesting-places grown rarer or are they, too,
becoming ascetic? We have wandered leagues and leagues about these
woodlands, and not once have I heard that melodious trill; not once.

Out, into the odorous _pré des papillons_, into a fading, greenish-gray
atmosphere, a kind of elf-land. All is moist here, and mysterious. An
owl sallies forth on our left and circles twice directly overhead, so
close that we can discern her eyes and beak. Then up through misty
fields past a decrepit hay-hut, one of the survivors of the old school
like that near the crayfish-stream, one of those whose planks are
encrusted with sulphur-hued lichen. Now Mr. R. produces his talisman and
plays as we walk in the gloaming; many new _morceaux_ have been “found”
since that day at Blumenegg. Our last concert, possibly! And just when I
was beginning to appreciate, and even understand--which is far more
difficult--this aboriginal music with its up-to-date names!

Marching along I review, in fancy, the many scenes which have lately
flitted before our eyes, and one little memory creeps up among the
throng; I think it will end in submerging them all. It was what we saw
a few days ago during our latest stroll to the ruined Jagdberg. I make a
point, namely, of losing myself on the way there (it is quite easy; you
have only to bear a little to the north in the woods) because, in so
doing, you never fail to see something, however insignificant, which you
never saw before. So it fell out. We duly lost our way and, floundering
down a thickly wooded incline, came to the margin of a small
crescent-shaped bog, surrounded by old firs. It was as solitary a spot
as you might wish to find; for all one knew, the foot of man had never
trodden here. Now I have spoken of the many-tinted vegetation of these
marshy tracts. This one, for reasons which a botanist may expound, was
of another nature. It had been dedicated wholly to gentians.[39] They
shot up from the wet moss--a blaze of the most perfect blue on earth.
Theirs was not a steady light, but shimmering and playful, and of a
luster so intense that no African sky, no sapphire, could have rivaled
it. I plucked one of these portentous flowers. It measured nearly the
length of my walking-stick and was alive with color from end to end.
Conceive a hundred thousand of them, all huddled together among those
somber trees. We seemed to be looking down into a lake of blue fire.

Here, I think, is a memory to cherish; a vision to carry away into other
lands.

       *       *       *       *       *

Sunday, 3 September. Departure! We leave by the 1 a.m. train to-night.

And it would not be hard to guess where we went this afternoon, for a
final stroll.

There, in the well-known room, was the “old one” as well as her husband,
and the baby looking prettier than ever since her holiday at
Thüringerberg; there also were some twenty other people, peasant-folk,
chatting at tables, and smoking and drinking beer. Sunday! We had
overlooked this fact. And there they would sit, till all hours of the
night. “Not much chance of _embrassez-moi_ in here,” I thought, as I
looked round. Mr. R. remained in the open doorway, and his
disappointment took a tragic turn. He said bitterly:

“What are all our pleasant walks and talks worth now? Ah, I shall have
nothing but unhappy memories of your country.”

“That you shall not,” I declared. “Nobody is to have unhappy memories of
my country, if I can help it. Now this is a moment for heroic measures,
and one little thing has just dawned upon me; what cannot be done inside
a room, may be done outside. Let us sit down, while you order your eggs.
I have it. I have it already. Those eggs.... How lucky you are fond of
eggs. How lucky you have a friend who knows why eggs were created!”

We gave our orders.

“What on earth am I to do?” asked Mr. R.

“You will presently leave the room, without turning round to look at
anybody. Go into the orchard at the back of the house, and wait there.
When the baby arrives, I give you thirty seconds together. Employ them
in a laughing and brotherly fashion, as I told you the other day. Then
you, at least, will return straight here. Thirty seconds. If you mean to
obey to the letter, swear it. Else no baby till the crack of doom. Now,
swear.”

Whereupon Mr. R. swore a great oath in the Mediterranean manner, on the
head, or the honor--on both, I fancy--of his own mother, to obey to the
letter.

“Thirty seconds,” I went on. “Imagine otherwise what might happen if the
old one grew suspicious and went into the orchard! And she may well be
suspicious, after those marconigrams of the other day. What would she
think of us two conspirators? How about my reputation here, in the only
country where, by good luck, I have not yet been found out; where my
family name is a byword for all that is upright and honorable; where my
father, my grandfather.... Just let me hear you swear again.”

Whereupon he swore a second great oath, to the same effect as the first,
on the souls of all his dead ancestors, male and female.

“Thirty seconds.... You can go now. And listen! Clasp her firmly if you
get the chance, or you may bungle the whole affair, and these are the
little accidents one never forgives oneself. After all, it would be a
queer baby who objected to being embraced for thirty seconds by such an
affectionate elder brother. Why should she?”

“I was going to do that anyhow.”

He departed; and presently the fateful eggs arrived and remained on the
table one minute, two minutes. I beckoned Dorothea to my side:

“Will you go and fetch my friend? His eggs are getting cold. You may
find him in the orchard; he is fond of orchards. _Run!_” and I gave her
a gentle push. Whether she perceived the strategy or not, she was off
like an arrow.

What happened under those apple-trees I shall learn in due course of
time, by the simple expedient of asking no questions. Up to this moment
I only know that Mr. R. returned alone, and sat down to his eggs with a
not unsuccessful air of _insouciance_. The baby, I suspect, was in the
kitchen, cooling down that wonderful complexion, and her mother would
doubtless have gone to look for her there, had I not meanwhile entangled
her into a complicated discussion anent the manufacture of Kirschwasser,
a specialty of this village. Thirty thousand kronen a liter, she vowed,
was what they were asking for it. Who was going to pay thirty thousand
kronen? Well, it struck me that one shilling and sixpence for a bottle
and a quarter of the finest Kirschwasser on earth was a fairly
reasonable price.

So far good. I came well out of that little episode....

Endless are the other things we have left undone. Why, we have not even
been up the Walserthal, nor so much as an inch in the direction of that
fairest of all our alps, the Gamperdona behind Nenzing, where twelve
hundred cows are munching and mooing day and night. (The Montavon valley
may take care of itself; it is full of tourists). And of hills, real
hills, nothing has been climbed save the poor old Scesaplana. I had
intended to take Mr. R. on some mountain which has more flavor to it,
even though it be not so high--the Drei Schwestern, for instance, above
Frastanz, about which my father also wrote a paper; or the Widderstein,
or the Kanisfluh. There, on the Kanisfluh, he might have satisfied his
craving for edelweiss.

No matter. The mountains can wait for another season.

One is sorry, none the less, not to have witnessed the boisterous
procession of cattle returning from their summer pastures, the woodlands
changing to gold, and that first September hoar-frost which melts at
noon, when drops of moisture glisten on every spider-web; sorry not to
have seen the gay fungus-people starting out of the dank earth. And here
are plums on their trees, almost ripe. Such a crop there never was.
Another week, and they would have been ready to be converted into the
first of those ambrosial tarts which are smothered, at the last moment,
under a deluge of whipped cream and then devoured so dutifully that, on
rising from table, you cannot but feel a kind of bewildered reverence
for the capacity of the human stomach. Only another week: how provoking!

No matter. We have had a breath of fresh air together.


THE END



INDEX

_Index_


_Adneter Kalk_, pink marble, 143, 181

Aldertree, connected with name of province, 153

Alemannic settlement of province, 62;
  specimen of dialect, 139

_Algäu-schiefer_, Liassic shale, 145, 148

Alpila, alp, 62

Alpine rose (rhododendron), 6, 136, 143

Anna, the old nurse, her passion for idiots and corpses, 39-40;
  for wolf-stories, 214;
  gets it hot, 95;
  shakes chocolate from a tree, 213;
  not old at all, 214

Ants, unreliable workmen, 124

Aretius, botanist, 240

Arlberg, mountain pass, boundary of province, 53;
  railway under, 150;
  derivation of name, 153;
  wine transport over, 197

Aurora borealis, 5


Badger, a tame, 28;
  its fat, 116

Bädle inn (Nüziders), 186

Bädle inn (Tiefis), 135

Baedeker, 150

_Bährenloch_, artificial cavern, 26-28, 125, 184

Bats, as pets, 28

Bears, 188

Beautification Society, of Bludenz, 27, 186;
  of Blumenegg, 172

Beaver, shot on the Elbe, 129

Beds, local, their discomforts, 3;
  double, their uses, 222

Bergmann, Prof. Joseph, 53

Berlepsch, H. A., 188

Bernhardt, B. (Velcurio), the first married priest, 169

Birds, various, 125-130, 181, 235, 239

_Blaufelchen_, 206-208.
  _See_ Coregonus.

Bludenz, town, 6, 23, 29, 48, 53, 59, 112, 114, 145, 147, 152, 157, 187, 235;
  destroyed by fire, 132;
  its museum, 139;
  height above sea-level, 184

Bludesch, village, 44, 46, 48, 60, 163, 190, 234;
  derivation of name, 62;
  its former vineyards, 198;
  old school-house, 215;
  Krone inn, 216

Blumenegg, castle-ruin, origin of name, 72;
  its charm and history, 74-80;
  waterfall, 75, 172;
  popular reception of its lords, 55;
  their enactments, 136;
  contrasted with Jagdberg ruin, 174

Boar, wild, 187

Bock, Hieronymus, botanist, 73

Bolshevism, manufacture of, 113

Brand, village, 157

Bratz, village, 111

Bregenz, town, 53, 129, 187;
  museum and libraries, 151, 181, 198, 214, 216;
  Protestant cemetery, 200;
  ostensible reasons for going there, 198;
  real reason, 206

Bregenzerwald, district, 32, 53, 187

Brehm, A. E., 184

Bruhin, Th. A., monk-naturalist, 91-93;
  on woodpecker, 129;
  on _salamandra maculosa_, 184;
  on wild beasts of province, 187, 188;
  Professor at Meherau, 199

_Brunnenmacher_ (father) mountaineer, presumably hirsute, 25;
  (son) mountaineer, indubitably hirsute, 25;
  his smile and his blasphemies, 25, 26;
  takes author in hand, 28, 128

Buchboden, village, 91

Bulrushes, 100, 231

Bürs, village, 126, 127, 179, 185

Bürserberg, village, 126

Butter, smuggled into Switzerland, 114

Butterflies, various, 7, 117, 118, 169;
  frozen on snowfield, 158


Capercailzie, 60-61

Castle-ruins, their charming designations, 72

Celtic inhabitants of province, 62, 151, 152;
  hill-fort, 151;
  place-names, 169

Cement, an abomination, 77, 132, 225

Cemeteries, poetic German names for, 71

Chamois, 101, 144, 145;
  shoots taken by Swiss, 33;
  how to bag, 157

“Château aux fenêtres.” _See_ Jordan

_Chronicon Hirsaugiense_, destroyed by fire, 78

Cider, getting tipsy on, 237

Climate, grows damper, 197

Clutterbuck, Mr., a droll personage, 224

Cocoa, an abomination, 10

Cockchafer. _See_ Engerlinge.

Coffee, how to roast, 34

Constance, lake of, 6, 53, 129, 152, 198

_Coregonus_, a delectable fish, 206

Costumes, local, 53

Cotterill, H. B., 85

Cotton mills, family property, 61, 64

Cows, explode from over-eating, 208

Crayfish, 44

_Crétins_, not discoverable hereabouts, 39

Currency, effects of its depreciation, 109-15


Dachshund, lady-dog, sets a bad example, 4

Dalaas, village, 139, 149, 180

Dalla Torre, Prof. quoted, 93

Dolls, massacre of, 217

_Dorfberg_, an ancient road, 40, 41

Dornbirn, borough, 188

Douglass, John, why he settled in Austria, 62;
  his way with beggars, 64, 66

Douglass, John Sholto, climbs the Zimba, 21-23;
  president of provincial Alpine Club, 24;
  carries on business of his father, 66;
  his paper on Rothe Wand, 137;
  fatal accident, 138, 144, 148-150;
  writings, 150-154;
  Lünersee hut called after him, 159;
  discovers mammoth-tusk, 181;
  his disciplinary measures, 222, 223

Drei Schwestern, mountain, 245

Druso, Drusenfluh, etc., pre-Roman names, 153

Drusus, Roman general, 62, 152

Düns, village, 169


Edelweiss, 8, 245

Edelraute, plant, 143

Education, in France, 14;
  a sound, 40

Elephant-trap, a disused, 117

Elk, discovery of skull and horns of, 139

Els alp, 147

Elser Schröfen, cliffs, crossing their talus, 145-147;
  due to disrupture, 147

_Engerlinge_, cockchafer-larvæ, destructive to crops, 110

Erratic blocks, 180, 189, 190, 234

Eulenloch, dell, 44


Falling in love, with a mountain, 30

Falster, torrent, 72;
  derivation of name, 63

Feldbächle, stream, 61, 235;
  going to bed in, 63.
  _See_ Montiola.

Feldkirch, town, 53, 73, 115, 150, 152, 169;
  former vineyards at, 197

Fire, destruction of villages by 42, 71, 126-128

Fishery regulations of 1690, 136

Florimont. _See_ Blumenegg.

Flowers, favorite, 73, 180

Fön wind, derivation of name, 63;
  responsible for outbreaks of fire, 71, 134;
  transports butterflies, 158

Fontanella, village, 62

Food, local specialties, 11-12

“Forêt nordique,” tract of wood, 135, 136

Forests, their charm, 41, 42, 102

Formaletsch, mountain, 139

Formarin lake, 139, 143, 144, 155, 181;
  derivation of name, 63

Fossils, where found, 181

Fox, as pet, 28;
  civil behavior of a, 182

Frastafeders, castle-ruin, 63

Frastanz, village, 137, 245;
  battle of, 220

Freiburger hut, 181

Freytag, Gustav, 80

Furkla alp, 6, 147


Gais, locality, 62, 66, 224

Galgen-tobel, torrent, 29, 147, 184

Gamperdona, alp, 244;
  derivation of name, 63

Gamsboden, mountain, 143 _seq._

Garnets, hunting for, 54, 180

Gasünd, hamlet, 126

Geiger, Dr., prescribes only camomile, 46

Gentians, 240

Gesner, Conrad, 240

Gleziska, meadow, 213, 214

Gluttony, when to be discouraged, 12;
  when permissible, 13

Goats, legislation regarding, 136

Goitre, 43

Grabherr, Joseph, on Blumenegg rule, 136

Grand-aunts, the delight of childhood, 41, 47, 96, 218

Grandfather, maternal, a feudal monster, always spick-and-span, 200;
  excavates in imagination the Acropolis of Athens, 201, 202;
  tells Prince Consort how to handle Queen Victoria, 202;
  sometimes mistaken for an angel, 203;
  dominates his harim, 204, 205;
  vicious to the last, 205

Grandmother, paternal, applies Gregory’s Powder with unexpected result, 97;
  her attitude towards tobacco, 100;
  insists upon recitations of “Marmion” and gets them, 103;
  devours roly-poly _pour encourager les autres_, 104

Grimm’s Fairy Tales, occasionally inane, 17

Gross Litzner, mountain, 144

Gstinswald, forest, 72, 73


Halde Wässerle, spring, 184

Halden zu Haldenegg, von der, noble family, 216

Haller, A. von, 221, 240

Hanging Stone, cliff, 73, 77, 134, 180, 186, 187

Hard, village, 129

Hare, how to shoot, 127;
  how not to cook, 207

Hay-huts, change in style of building, 45, 214, 239

Hexenthurm, rock-needle, 138

Hinedo, Peter, author, 14

Hirsch-sprung (Stag’s Leap), meadow, 42, 44, 45

Hochgerach, mountain, 6

Hohenems, borough, 181

Hoher Frassen, mountain, 6, 137;
  death on, 24

Honstetter, Karl, taxidermist, 129

Horse-flies, a pest, 61

Hüttenwanzen, not wanted hereabouts, 25


Ibex, a Swiss, 129

Idiots, 13, 37;
  indifferent specimens of, 38;
  types of the old school, 39

Ill, river, 53, 55, 59;
  recently embanked, 54;
  its prehistoric shore, 148;
  new bridges over, 230


Jagdberg, castle-ruin, 172-176, 235, 240

Jakob, a villager worth watching, 236

Jordan, ruined mansion, 163 _seq._, 189

Josefinum, refuge for children, 172 _seq._

Jumbo the jovial, not like the rest of them, 91


Kanisfluh, mountain, 138, 245

Kaufmann, Angelika, 32, 199

Keilpolster, an abomination, 3

Kirschwasser, present price of, 244

Kloster alp, awful experience on, 7

Krupsertobel, torrent, 29

Kuhloch, natural arch, 126


Lämmergeier, 29, 129

Lagutz, alp, 129, 155;
  derivation of name, 63

Lake dwellings, former, destroyed by fire, 71;
  persist into Roman times, 151;
  relics of, 152;
  their grape-cultivation, 198

Lamb, Charles, 86

_Landregen_, a persistent drizzle, 3, 33

Lasko, dog, his well, 229, 230, 231, 234

Lasko the Second, dog, 231

Latz, hamlet, 185

Lauterach, village, 152

Lech, river, 53

Lech, village, 33, 101, 155

Lindau, island, 152

Lindenspeur, G. L. von, builder of Jordan mansion, 163, 174;
  fond of windows, 165

Lorüns, village, 181, 184

Ludesch, village, 72, 73, 78, 115, 189, 239;
  its rifle range, 32, 116;
  derivation of name, 62

Ludescherberg, hamlet, 6, 100

Lünersee, lake, its shelter-hut, 24, 159

Lutz, river, 53, 58, 59, 72, 73;
  recently embanked, 54;
  derivation of name, 62;
  its prehistoric shore, 116;
  old bridge over, 230

Lynx, 187


MacDougal, Skye-terrier, specializes in cats, 233, 234

Mammoth tusk, 181

Mangili, Prof., 9

Maple trees, 99

Marmot, lives in colonies, 8, 143;
  its fat, 8;
  ingratitude of a hibernating, 9;
  freakish dentition of a, 10;
  derivation of popular name, 63

Marshes, their vegetation, 44, 240

Martens, 115

Marul, village, 129, 147, 155

Mattli, sportsman and station-master, 127-128;
  on last wolf, 187

Mauren, village, 151

Mehrerau, convent, 199

Mellau, village, 138

Midwives, raise their tariff, 115

Milton, his botany, 85, 86

Minerals, where found, 180

Moles, destruction of, 110, 115

Mondspitze, Mountain, 6

Montavon, valley, 9, 23, 53, 244

Montiola, brook, 61-64, 125, 135, 137, 235;
  its source, 136, 138.
  _See_ Feldbächle.

Moralists, their limitations, 86

Münster, Sebastian, 169


Nauders, village, 188

Nenzing, village, 53, 58, 60, 172, 188, 244

Nüziders, village, 148, 186;
  destroyed by fire, 71, 134

“Nymphe pudique,” fountain, 46, 234


Oak, a memorable, 77

Obdorf, village, 184

Ortler, mountain, 159

Ovid, blunders in botany, 85


Palladas, grammarian, English rendering of his epigram, 167

Peasants, their grievances, 111;
  catch pneumonia supervising cows at pasture, 209

Petrifying brook, a marvel, 41, 64, 189, 213

Pines, a region of stunted, 59

Pines, dwarf, their local names, 6, 153;
  deserve protection, 7

Piz Buin, mountain, 150

Piz Linard, mountain, 150

_Plumeau_, an abomination, 3

Plum-tarts, how to eat, 245

Poets, should avoid towns, 84;
  generally born naked, 168;
  talk nonsense about pomegranates, 206

Potatoes, how to cook, 11;
  local names of, 72

“Pré des papillons,” meadow, 169, 170, 239

Prime, Miss, her dismal experiences as governess, 221 _seq._

Procter, Adelaide, 198

Prudishness of countryfolk, 236


Quadera, meadow, 62, 74

Quadertatsch, an amiable beast, subject to accidents, 182, 184

Quinet, Edgar, 202


R., Mr., a young brigand, studies the English language, 12 _seq._;
  starts a love affair. 42 _seq._;
  progress of English studies, 165;
  progress of love affair, 130, 190, 241

Radona-tobel, torrent, 149

Raggal, village, 7, 100, 155;
  Eldorado of idiots, 37;
  derivation of name, 63

Ramsay, Dean, 221

Rellsthal, valley, 23, 159

Rhætian inhabitants of province, 62, 151

Rhætikon, mountain-group 7, 21, 99, 182

Rhæto-Roman names, 6, 62-63, 72, 111, 152, 153, 179

Rhine, upper, 6, 53;
  regulating its river-bed, 54, 152

Riedbach, streamlet, 44, 235;
  its source, 45, 234

Roedeer, 156, 187

Röns, village, 169

Romans, occupy province, 60, 62, 151;
  cultivate vine, 198

Romansh names. _See_ Rhæto-Roman.

Rosenegg, castle-ruin, 72, 179-182

Rothe Wand, mountain, 137, 143, 148, 150

Rothenbrunnen, mineral spring, 136

“Ruisseau des écrevisses,” 44, 45, 135.
  _See_ Riedbach.

“Runde Scheible,” how they came to disappear from the landscape, 48

Rungalin village, 26, 184, 188;
  derivation of name, 63


Säntis mountain, tragedy on, 29

Sagliain, glacier, 150

St. Anne, church, 37, 55, 172

St. Anton, village, 180

St. Gallenkirch, village, 9

St. Gebhard, chapel, 200

St. Gerold, hamlet and convent, 91-93;
  its vineyard, 197

St. Martin, church, 186;
  its Gothic ornaments, 214

St. Nicholas, church, 48, 190

St. Peter, convent, 152

Salamander, alpine, 182;
  maculated, 184

Sarotla alp, 23, 24

Satteins, village, 95

Scesaplana, mountain, 24, 29, 62, 74, 244;
  its summit, 158

Scesa-tobel, torrent, 59, 127, 148, 181

Schattenburg, castle-ruin, 72

Schlee, Johann Georg, his _Relation of Rhetia_, 76;
  on wild beasts, 187, 188

Schlehen. _See_ Schlee.

Schlins, village, 169;
  its pleasanttavern, 172, 235

Schlosstobel, torrent, 63, 72

Schmalz, a desirable condiment, 11, 114

Schmatzen, a noise forbidden at dinner, 92-93

Schnapps (spirits), varieties of, 33

Schnepfenstrich, tract of forest, 60

Schreiber, E., _quoted_, 184

Schubert, Fräulein, gets the sack, 215

Shelter-huts in mountains, degenerate into hotels, 24

Silberthal, valley, 34

Silvretta, glacier, 150

Sippins, dog, specializes in fleas and beer, 232

Sister of author, leads him astray, 63, 94, 237

Skittles played with skulls, 214

Sliding on fir-branches, its risks, 5-6

Solidarity, a catchword, 175-176;
  its grotesque results, 231

Som, schoolmaster, 215, 216

Sonnenberg, castle-ruin, 72, 186

Sonntag, village, 136

Sporting pictures, their uses, 4, 176

Spuller lake, 139, 144

Squirrel, with malformed teeth, 10;
  death of a tame, 28;
  declining in numbers, 238

Statuette of bronze, a remarkable, 152

Stelvio pass, crossing on high bicycles, 159

Steub, Ludwig, 101; _quoted_, 153

Storrbach, torrent, 72

Strassburger (now Mannheimer) hut, 24, 157, 158

Strassenhaus, railway-station, 127

Sulzfluh, mountain, 29

Sulz-Röthis, village, 197

Suser, consequences of drinking, 235

Switzerland, projected annexation to, 33


Tabalada, stream, 62, 224

Tattermandl, derivation of name, 184.
  _See_ Quadertatsch.

Tavern, our residence, its food and comforts, 3, 4, 11, 12, 107, 108;
  its proprietors, 31-34;
  prices at, 112

Theocritus, seldom caught napping, 85

Thirty Years’ War, 55, 77

Thüringen, village, 134, 184;
  derivation of name, 169

Thüringerberg, village, 94, 95, 190

Tiberius, Emperor, 62, 152

Tiefis, village, 33, 40, 49, 71, 103;
  visit to its tavern, 42;
  another visit, 130;
  another, 190;
  another, 241;
  destroyed by fire, 130

Tilisuna lake, 63

Tourists, their climbing feats, 23-24, 157, 159

Townbred persons, often incomplete, 83-86

Trout, how to catch, 224

Tschallenga, mountain, 55, 83

Tschudi, F. von, 188

Tschusi, R. von, 129

Tuckwell, Rev. W., 85


Valbona, mountain, 62

Val d’Aosta, 39

Valduna, lunatic asylum, 38;
  interviews at, 190-196

Valentschina (Walserthal), 76

Vallis Drusiana (Walgau), derivation of name, 62, 152, 153

Valtellina, 39

Valuta, its workings, 113

Vandans, village, 159

Verdigris, dining off, 47

Vermunt, Maz, 63

Village, statistics of our, 13

Vineyards, no longer planted, 197

Violets, yellow, 143;
  red and white, 163

Vonbun, Dr. J. F., _quoted_, 139.

Vorarlberg, province, 6, 53, 153;
  projected annexation to Switzerland, 33;
  sends students to Wittenberg, 169

Vorarlbergische Chronik, 132;
  _quoted_, 32


Walchner, H., 129

Walgau, central valley of province. _See_ Vallis Drusiana.

Walserthal, valley, 79, 91, 136, 244;
  famous for idiots, 37;
  when colonized, 53;
  dialect and costume, _ibid._

Wasserkälb (_Gordius_), 232

Watts, Dr. Isaac, _quoted_, 12

Weisses Kreuz, hotel, its manager worth making love to, 207

Widderstein, mountain, 245

Wildkirchle, rock-needle, 137, 138

Wine, qualities and prohibitive price of, 43, 109;
  decline in local production of, 196;
  wine-bibbing in olden days, 198

Wolf, the last, 187;
  why extinct in Alps, 188;
  wolf-stories, 214

Wolfart, Lord of Blumenegg, 80

Wood of the ----, a once awesome forest, 170, 238

Woodcock shooting, 60

Woodlands, administration of, 135, 136


Zalim alp, 24, 157

Zimba, mountain, 41, 138;
  first ascent of, 21-22;
  its victims, 23

Zimmerman, Dr., responsible for cataclysm, 7

“Zoologist,” referred to, 10

Zürich, derivation of name, 169

Zürs, alp, 33


FOOTNOTES:

[1] Called “Latschen” hereabouts, because they are “gelegt”--pressed
earthwards by winter snows; or else by the old Rhætic name of “Zuondra”
which we sometimes twist into “Sonderinen.” They are more generally
known as “Legföhren.” These groves of _Pinus pumilio_ deserve careful
protection; they shield the meadows below from the devastating effects
of cloudbursts in the upper regions, from stone-cataracts and--by
welding all successive snowfalls into that first one which lies
anchored among their twisted limbs--from avalanches.

[2] He has surprised me, of late, by a new acquirement: a considerable
familiarity with Polish history. They only began to teach it quite
recently, he says; and thereby hangs a tale. It would seem that an
ukase has gone forth from educational headquarters in Paris, to the
effect that the youth of the entire country is to be brought up in the
belief that the Poles, the old friends of France, are a prodigy among
nations; every phase of their contemptible politics and degrading
parliamentary wrangles during the last few centuries has to be regarded
as of epoch-making importance--as opposed to the futile history of
their enemies on the East. Nothing, in short, is good enough for
Poland; nothing bad enough for Russia. And all because a misguided pack
of French capitalists, after those Toulon celebrations, lent their
millions to Russia, expecting to receive the usual three hundred per
cent profit which is not yet forthcoming and, let us hope, never will
be. An interesting example by what means “patriotic” convictions are
nurtured, and for what ends.

[3] We walked up to the _Bährenloch_ last week. The path is neglected
and quite overgrown in places; the cave seems to have lost its
popularity since the war. I was glad to see that old yew tree--rather a
rare growth hereabouts--still clinging to the rock near its entrance.
We went in with candles and saw one bat fluttering about; I felt no
great desire to take it home with me. The pets one kept! Guinea-pigs,
first of all, _Meerschweinle_ which, in a burst of infantile humor,
I used to call _Immermehrschweinle_, alluding to their miraculous
fecundity. Not a bad joke, now I think of it. And the last was a
black squirrel, that ended in pitiable fashion. I took it out of its
nest and brought it up on the bottle, like a baby. It grew to be my
companion all the time, free to come and free to go, and there was
nothing I could not do with it; we were really devoted to each other.
Afterwards, having to leave the country, I gave it in charge of a
certain female relative who also loved it. The cage was placed on the
top of one of those enormous stoves of green majolica tiles. Winter
came, and the maid lighted the fire, forgetful of the cage above. Then
she remembered, and rushed back into the room. Too late! The poor beast
had meanwhile been slowly, quite slowly, roasted to death. No more pets
after that.

[4] Here is a local and contemporary appreciation of this glory of art.
“Mit höchstem Rechte verdient hier die aus dieser Landschaft gebürtige
Angelika Kaufmann eine Stelle. Dieses mit den seltensten Vorzügen
des Genies ausgestattete Frauenzimmer macht wirklich in der Malerei
Epoche, und lebt diesmal als eine der berühmtesten Künstlerinnen des
sich neigenden achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, in glücklicher Ehe in Rom, zur
Ehre ihres Vaterlandes, das auf sie stolz seyn darf.” (Vorarlbergische
Chronik. Bregenz, Brentano, 1793, p. 81.)

[5] Professor Joseph Bergmann, in an extremely learned booklet
(“Untersuchungen über die freyen Walliser oder Walser.” Vienna, Carl
Gerold, 1844) has proved that our Walsers, an industrious people of
Burgundian stock, emigrated hitherward from the Swiss Canton Wallis
(Valais) at the end of the thirteenth century and settled in this
wild valley and its surroundings. It is they who brought it to its
present high state of prosperity. They have kept their Swiss accent
to this day, with certain idioms of their own--not every Englishman
can translate “Wie tüschalat’s Bobbe so schö im Pfülfli!”--and their
costume is more strange than beautiful. In olden days nearly every
settlement here (Bludenz, Feldkirch, Nenzing, etc.) had its own
costume. There are only three left now; that of the Walserthal, the
Montavon, and Bregenzerwald.

[6] I cannot suggest what Tabalada means unless it be what I think it
is--a comical perversion of its Romansh name Aulat=_aqua lauta_, a name
appropriate up to a few years ago, for it was the most crystalline
water I ever saw, till we forced some of the discolored Ill to flow
into it, for factory purposes at Gais. And the real name of the
“Feldbächle” is Montiola-bach, which is also Latin; all that hilly
region where it rises used to be called Montiola; indeed, a great
number of the place-names I shall be mentioning have origin in Romansh,
which is such a detestable word that I mean to call it Rhæto-Roman in
future.

Our old Rhætian inhabitants, now held to be Celts and not Etruscans as
certain scholars used to maintain, were defeated by Drusus and Tiberius
in 15 B. C. in this very plain--so tradition says; certainly the Walgau
is marked as “Vallis Drusiana” in old charts and chronicles, though
another derivation is yet more plausible (see p. 152). The province
was thereafter romanized, and traces of this Latin domination can be
found, for instance, in those single personal names like Florentinus,
Seganus, Ursicinus, which persisted hereabouts into the twelfth
century; the present double family ones, of Alemannic origin, became
fixed by the end of the thirteenth. As to our Rhæto-Roman names of
localities--some of them speak for themselves; there is no difficulty
about Scesaplana, Alpila, Fontanella, Quadera and so on, though it is
rather puzzling to find a high rocky summit called “Valbona.” Lutz is
_lutum_, the turbid stream; Ludesch (Lodasco) stands on its banks.
Bludesch was called Pludassis (_paludes_) by reason of its swampy
situation. The Fön, the hot wind, is _Favonius_. Lagutz=_lacus_, a
lake; which it doubtless used to be. Raggal (Roncal in chronicles),
Rungalin and other such sites=_runcare_. Gamperdona=_campus rotundus_,
which you will find most apposite, if you go there. Other place-names
are not so easy to disentangle. Barplons=_Pratum planum_. Vanova=_Via
nova_. The “Schlosstobel” at the foot of Blumenegg castle used to be
called “Falster”=_Vallis torrens_. Trasseraus=_tres suors_ (_sorores_).
Frastafeders is simply “old Frastanz.” One thing strikes me as
suggestive. That Rhætians or Romans should give names to conspicuous
peaks--Vallula, Zimba, Furka, Saladina: there are dozens of them--is
intelligible enough. You can see a mountain from below, without
climbing up. You cannot see a lake from below. Yet the names of some of
our secluded Alpine waters, like Tilisuna and Formarin, whatever their
origin, are not Alemannic and are therefore pre-Alemannic; which proves
that these remote and inhospitable spots were already then frequented
for the sake, no doubt, of their brief summer pasturage. Whence I
deduce that the population of those days must have been denser than one
generally imagines. Formarin, for the rest, is pronounced “Famurin”
which may be “Val Murin,” from the quantities of marmots (_mure
montana_, contracted into our “Burmentli”) up there. If this conjecture
sounds far-fetched, let me hasten to say that it is not mine, but that
of Max Vermunt (“Stille Winkel in Vorarlberg”).

[7] We had our ups and downs in later times. One of the “ups” was
when the factory was partially burnt some thirty years ago, and the
insurance compensation enabled us not only to rebuild it on a far finer
scale, but to purchase the neighboring establishment of Gais which
happened to be in the market.

[8] The Fön, if it then existed, may be responsible for the destruction
by fire of so many of the prehistoric Swiss lake settlements.

[9] “Hystorische Relation,” etc., of Rhetia by Johann Georg Schlehen of
Rottweyl. There is a copy in the British Museum. His name is Schlee;
the Schlehen on the title-page is the accusative.

[10] Justice was dispensed in sight of the gallows, the _signa meri
imperi_, near the Hanging Stone (a conspicuous cliff on the Bludenz
road)--dispensed upon a certain fateful meadow, the path to which used
to be known as the “gallows’ way,” and the meadow itself “Gerichti”
(Court of Justice). These names seem to have faded out of the popular
memory. I like to think that the proceedings took place near that
wide-branching oak, by far the finest in the district, at whose foot
I used to recline in olden days. It stands between the Hanging Stone
and our present railway station, opposite that detestable new cement
factory, on the south side of the line. There is certainly a path
leading to it from the cliff, and perhaps some dim tradition attached
to this oak has saved it from the ax through all these years.

[11] I have just discovered, rummaging among some old papers, a musical
composition by my mother entitled “Blumenegg.” It is dated October,
1861; three years before her marriage.

[12] The former of these speaks of Milton’s “habitually loose botany.”
No great blemish; given the themes he loved, it might be argued that
much of Milton’s peculiar aroma would evaporate, had he been meticulous
in such details like Tennyson or de Tabley. Theocritus is hard to catch
napping; but Ovid, for example, tells us that _buxus_ grows on Mount
Hymettus. There is no box on Hymettus, though it prospers in certain
gardens of Athens (e. g., the Crown Prince’s); Ovid was thinking of the
dwarf holly. It is the worst of writing poetry, that you are apt to be
torn between respect for truth and the exigencies of scansion. What
would the painfully correct Lucretius have done with this _buxus_?

[13] Professor K. W. von Dalla Torre mentions him in his “Zoologische
Literatur von Tirol und Vorarlberg bis inclusive 1885.” He enumerates
eighteen different monographs by him, dealing with the fauna alone of
this province. (His botanical works are more important.) He also notes
that Bruhin is “at present (1886) in Columbus, Ohio, U. S. A.” It is a
far cry to Ohio! If he stayed there any length of time, he is sure to
have made a name for himself. He always signs himself “Th. A.”; Dalla
Torre calls him “Theodor,” which is probably correct; in the list of
subscribers to Heer’s “Urwelt der Schweiz” (1865, p. xviii) he figures
as “Thomas.”

[14] We generally went to Lech in threes. Now the inn at Lech was not a
bad one; so good indeed, that its praises have been sung by no less an
authority than the writer Ludwig Steub, who was also a frequent visitor
at our house in times gone by. But our own cuisine and cellar were
still better, and accordingly we were wont to take up by cart a vast
store of provisions, only sleeping at the inn and occasionally ordering
some little dish or a quarter of wine for the sake of appearances. To
recoup himself, the innkeeper used to charge us so preposterously for
these trifles that on one occasion we had a solemn row with him and
refused to pay. He yielded. Not long afterwards there was printed in
some local paper a spirited poem in the mock-heroic style, with the
refrain:

    Die Heiligen Drei Könige, mit irrendem Stern--
    Die essen und trinken, und zahlen nicht gern!

I wish I had kept a copy.

[15] I knew an old hunter of Ludesch who claimed to have killed
seventy-five pine martens near that village. I have seen only two in my
whole life hereabouts; and not a single one within the last thirty-five
years, despite never-ending rambles among these forests. But we had a
pair of beech martens under the eaves of our house, which they reached
by climbing along the branches of a mighty walnut tree that leaned over
the roof. In the daytime they were never to be found. By night they
made such a din of scuttling and scampering that visitors, sleeping in
rooms below, had to be warned of their existence.

[16] This particular specimen is commemorated by Rudolph von Tschusi
(son of the well-known ornithologist) in “Ornithologisches Jahrbuch,”
IX, 1898, Heft 2. According to H. Walchner’s “Ornithologie des
Bodenseebeckens” (1835) the ibis is of the “greatest rarity” on
this sheet of water, only a single instance of its occurrence being
then known, which is precisely why I bought this one. Apropos of
woodpeckers--Bruhin, in his “Wirbelthiere Vorarlbergs” (1868) also says
that he saw the lesser spotted kind only once; the bird must therefore
be far from common. And this year, for the first time, I had the
pleasure of spying the three-toed one. We were walking down from Lagutz
to Marul (see p. 155) through that magnificent Alpine forest when we
noticed a pair of them. They kept close together, one following the
other and we following both; so tame were they, that we could approach
within a few yards and see the yellow on the head of the male. I
observed that they had the same habit as the middle-spotted woodpecker,
of investigating carefully not only the trunk but the branches of
trees. While watching them I thought: how wise of you to have kept out
of my way till now!

[17] Bludenz itself was twice destroyed by fire. _See_ “Vorarlbergische
Chronik” (Bregenz, Brentano, 1793, p. 108).

[18] Woodlands have always been cherished here. Wood inspectors were
appointed as early as 1626, possibly earlier; they had to traverse the
forests every spring, summer and autumn, and to report the slightest
damage to the trees. Four years later, an excellent rule was framed
to prevent the ever-increasing damage to forest-growth by herds of
goats: whoso has three cows, may keep no goat whatever; the owner of
two cows may keep one goat; the possession of a single cow entitled
you to three goats and no more. This stamped out the goat mischief.
Such were the Lords of Blumenegg, from whom certain modern governments
might well take a lesson; like sensible tyrants, they not only laid
down wise regulations on this and other matters, but saw to it that
they were carried out (those gallows!). In the inhospitable recesses
of the Walserthal, at five hours’ march from their castle, lying
in a caldron of bleak gray crags--an excellent chamois-ground--is
the iron-spring and bathing establishment of Rothenbrunnen, where
the Alpine rhododendrons droop over your bedroom window; it was the
Blumenegg people who erected the first building here in 1650, with
accommodation for forty patients. Twenty-six years later they founded a
school in the remote hamlet of Sonntag. Their fishery regulations were
on the same enlightened scale. As early as 1690 no fishing of any kind
was permitted during the spawning season (21 September to 30 November);
nets, moreover, were to have meshes wide enough to allow the escape of
every fish less than seven inches in length, which happens to be the
precise limit fixed, at this present moment, by the conservators of
the Exe and other English rivers. For these and other details of the
Blumenegg rule _see_ the exhaustive monograph on this subject by one
of our best local antiquarians, the late Joseph Grabherr, priest of
Satteins (Bregenz, 1907).

[19] During these works at the Spuller lake they unearthed, last year,
the skull and horns of an elk; the relic was unfortunately bought
by a Swiss who carried it off to his own country; it ought to have
gone into the newly founded Bludenz Museum. The Spuller lake is the
locality of a strange devil-legend and also of a ghost-story which
have been preserved by Dr. F. J. Vonbun in his “Sagen Vorarlbergs”
(Innsbruck, 1858). I will transcribe a line or two of the former,
omitting his accents and pronounciation marks, in order to give a
sample of our Alemannic dialect: “Es set ama wienicht-obed amol en ma
zum en andera: ‘los nochber, i wetta mi zitgae, du traust di net, mer
min schmalzkübelzolfa hinet vo Spullers z holla.’ Der nochber set ‘woll
frile, d wett gilt’ und nümt en füfspoeriga hund, stahel, fürste und
schwamm und got Spullers zue. Wia-n er an stofel kunnt, bringt em der
butz vo Spullers de zolfa a guets stuck scho etgega, aber der nochber
set zuenem, los gueta fründ,” etc.

[20] The Alpine rose thrives in the climate of Deeside; it grows taller
and greener than on these hills, and loses none of its fragrance. It
should not be planted in the shade.

[21] At the easterly end of these Elser Schröfen there is a convenient
path down between the rocks; it connects Marul, via the Els and Furkla
alps, with Bludenz. Regarding the cliffs themselves--this decorative
ridge seems to be of recent formation; I imagine it is the result of
a rupture, and that the hill formerly trended in a soft curve towards
the Furkla. When the divulsion took place none can tell; but I think I
know where the lost material is to be found, if anybody cares to pick
it up. This broken mountain was carried down the Galgen-tobel, and now
forms the vast southward-sloping triangle of raised ground which is
crossed by the driving-road from Bludenz to Nüziders. On the spot, the
existence of a deltoid tract here is naturally not apparent. If you
mount to any slight eminence on the other side of the Ill, you cannot
fail to perceive its characteristic shape and to divine its origin; it
is the work of an agency similar to that which produced the northward
sloping delta of the Scesa-tobel immediately opposite. The railway
Bludenz-Nüziders skirts at one point a steep grassy bank recalling that
described on p. 117; I take it to have been carved into this deposit by
the old Ill, in its more vigorous days.

[22] At the spot where, in later years, the Arlberg railway came to
stride over this torrent, a memorial tablet has been erected to him.
I was unaware of its existence and only learned the fact two weeks
ago--from Baedeker.

[23] Douglass (John Sholto). “Die Römer in Vorarlberg.” Thüringen. Im
Selbstverlage des Verfassers. 1870. 4to. Paper cover. Title page, two
pages index of contents. One page with half title, 67 pages of text. At
the end 4 photographic plates, one of them in color.

[24] He speaks of our primitive lake-dwellers as being of a different
race and anterior to these--a race that can be proved none the less to
have lingered into the Roman period; which makes him wonder why there
is no mention of them in Latin writers, whereas Herodotus has left us
such an excellent description. (There is a hint of them in Cæsar’s
account of the Britons; and a representation, on Trajan’s Column, of
what might be a Dacian palafitte.) Sundry objects of this epoch have
been found at our end of Lake Constance. To other evidence showing
that the inner Walgau, the Ill valley between Feldkirch and Bludenz,
was at one time also or at least partially a lake, I can add a small
confirmatory fact, namely, the discovery by myself, on the 13 October,
1883, of one of those spindle-whorls of burnt clay--unornamented, this
one--which are characteristic of the lacustrine era. I drew it out of
the earth in the then fresh railway cutting below the convent of St.
Peter at Bludenz, and take some little credit to myself for detecting
it, and realizing its significance, at that tender age. I know not
whether other relics of lake-dwellers have been found up here; this
one specimen is sufficient evidence of their existence for me. It is
worth noting, too, that not a single old village of the inner Walgau
lies in the plain (which may also be due to fear of Ill floods). My
contribution to the antiquities of later periods consists of the
statuette here figured. It was found not far from Lauterach during
those Rhine-regulation works mentioned on p. 54, and I was obliged to
give its owner a diamond scarf-pin which had cost me £65--those were
opulent days--before he could be induced to part with it. The material
is bronze, all except the iron lance-blade and rivetings under the
feet; its height, to the tip of the lance, is 17½ centimeters. Every
detail in this little work of art is challenging, and I will not lose
myself in conjectures as to its age or origin.

[25] Ludwig Steub says that Droussa, Drossa, signifies aldertree or
thicket of alders, that the Rhætian form of this word was probably
_tarusa_ or _trusa_, and that the valley is called _Trusiana_ in
chronicles, “which may be translated as valley of alders.” I have come
across it also marked as _Thrusiana_, and may point out that the dwarf
mountain alder (_alnus viridis_) is to this day called “Droosle” in
our dialect. If Steub be correct, it is an odd circumstance, indeed,
that this identical tree should once more have crept into the modern
designation of this province: Vor_arl_berg, from the German _Erle_, an
elder. “Arlberg”--“Arlenberg” in some old books--has also been derived
from “Arla,” the dwarf pine, which is said to be one of its names in
“German-speaking Rhætia.” It may be so. I have never heard these pines
called “Aria” hereabouts, though they have several other names (_see_
p. 6). They are sometimes called “Adla” in the Bregenxerwald.

[26] This last part is the track from which the two young men, referred
to on p. 24, contrived to fall and kill themselves. I would take any
child up there, though not by night. It may be that they had no nails
to their boots and slipped on some rocks freshly glazed with ice,
dragging each other over the brink.

[27] Nothing is known, I fancy, of the meaning of those old place-names
like Schlins, Düns, Röns, and so forth. The origin of our Thüringen is
held to be different from that of the German province, which has been
derived from Turo, a family name; to be Celtic, and allied to Tours and
Zürich (which is also marked as Türrig in old maps); to this day our
people invariably call the place “z’Türrig.” Schlins is the birthplace
of a remarkable man, Magister Bartholomæus Bernhardt, born 1487. He was
called Velcurio from the neighboring town of Feldkirch, studied (1504)
at the new University of Wittenberg which within twenty years had
received over forty students from Vorarlberg; became a monk and (1519)
rector of that University; thereafter to the end of his life Prior of
Kemberg in Saxony. According to Sebastian Münster (1550) he was the
first priest to take to himself a legitimate wife. He died 1551. His
brother John, who seems to have been also a monk, wrote a commentary on
Aristotle’s “Physics” and was likewise married.

[28] This reads a little jaundiced. I must contemplate my oleographs.

[29] They do not exist in this _Adneter Kalk_. We noticed some fair
specimens the other day at the Freiburger Hut (Formarin).

[30] This tusk has been in the Bregenz Museum since 1859, with a
suitable inscription. A molar, presumably of the same animal, was found
by a peasant in this torrent some twenty years ago; it is now at Invery
House, Banchory, N. B.

[31] “Mounts up to 7000 feet, and probably descends not much below
3000,” says Schreiber, in his _Herpetologia Europea_. Bludenz lies at
half the latter elevation. Brehm draws the word Tattermandl from “toter
Mann,” which is a philologer’s derivation; he is anything but “tot.” It
might be a corruption by popular etymology, of the Latin and Italian
name. Bruhin says that _salamandra maculosa_ occurs at Thüringen. I
have traversed every inch of the Thüringen territory in all seasons and
weathers for the last half century, and never seen one.

[32] Mattli was right. According to Bruhin’s “Wirbelthiere Vorarlbergs”
(1868) the last wolf was shot at the Hanging Stone about 1830, though
he does not mention this fact in his interesting paper on the fauna and
flora of this cliff. The last lynx, he says, was killed about 1820; a
certain Rüf, a well-known chamois hunter of the Bregenzerwald, told me
that when he was a youngster he frequently came across old Lynx-traps
in the woods. There are woodcuts both of lynx and wolf in Schlee’s
“Rhetia”; he speaks of them as being very troublesome in the Bludenz
district (p. 61). The wild boar, long since extinct, he mentions among
the game animals of Bregenz and Dornbirn. I myself found the tusk
of one during some drainage works in the fields between Bludenz and
Rungalin. Bruhin says that a bear was killed near Nenzing in 1828 and
that another one frequented an alp there for a whole summer season in
1867. Bears were passably common when Tschudi wrote his “Thierleben der
Alpenwelt”; Berlepsch (about 1860) says that twelve to twenty of them
were still annually killed in the Alps; soon enough, I shall be one
of the few persons left who have tasted the flesh of a genuine Alpine
bear. This was at Nauders in the Tyrol in May, 1897; the beast had
probably come over from the Grisons.

[33] Since then, the same reason has been given me by two other
natives, both of whom are in a position to know. I call it
“interesting,” because observations of a recent change of climate--and
always in the direction of moisture--have been recorded in other parts
of Europe. In the Shetland Islands, for instance, they will point out
to you stretches of moor and heather once covered with grain which,
owing to increased dampness, could no longer be got to mature. The same
phenomenon has struck me also, but, on thinking it over, I attributed
it to my own imagination; hot summers, I said to myself, and clear
snowy winters, are far more likely to impress a child than rainy
weather; hence we conclude rashly that in the days of our youth the
climate was more continental. Yet how explain a state of affairs like
this: vines were cultivated here by the Romans (even during the Stone
Age, among the pile-dwellers on Lake Constance) and, assiduously, as
early as the eleventh century; in 1615, again, there were no less than
_one hundred vineyards at Bludesch alone_. The site of all of them is
now nothing but grassy slopes. Can hay be more remunerative than wine?
If not, there is perhaps something to be said for the change-of-climate
theory. They seem to have been gay people, by the way, in those
bibulous days. Many are the complaints of illicit dancing and
outrageous swearing, of “Versoffenheit und Tabakfressen”--drunkenness
and tobacco-chewing.

[34] I have just gone through Quinet’s pages again. They are a thing
apart, in French travel-literature. Here is no affectation, no mockery,
no rhetoric, no complaints about this or that, no advice to the Greeks
as to how they should govern themselves; nothing but the impressions
of a blithe and sympathetic traveler. So he wanders through this
country which then possessed “not a single two-wheeled carriage” nor
domestic beasts of any kind; he gives us poignant sketches of its utter
desolation--the fire-blackened villages and their few, half-starved
inhabitants, the putrefying corpses, skeletons by the wayside, leagues
of burnt forest and olive-groves; together with a few brighter
descriptions of life in Arcadia, of those delightful Albanian children,
and of chance meetings with the great Kolokotroni and others. What
strikes me as distinctively non-French in Quinet is his whole-hearted
love of nature, and a certain organic nobility of outlook. One would
gladly quote from those stimulating reflections on the art of ancient
Greece, but as I am on the subject of homesickness, I will merely
transcribe what he says of Sparta (then a mere hovel) which has the
true nostalgic ring. “Je laisse à d’autres à expliquer comment une
ville qui ne vous est rien, bien moins, quelques tertres de cailloux
que vous ne reverrez jamais, peuvent vous manquer plus que votre terre
natale.” Quinet, it will be seen, wrote as citizen of the world, not
of France; and that is why his book is a thing apart. It ends with
a touching farewell to the whole country. “Ni demain, ni après, ne
verrai-je plus mes hôtes de Dhervény ou de Mistra, ni les forêts
brulées, ni les os sur la grève, ni tout ce que les hommes peuvent
souffrir pour une pensée, sans cesser de la mettre à haut prix ...”

There once passed through my hands a copy of these travels marginally
annotated by some Greek reader in faded, yellow ink. One of his
observations ran to this effect: “Ce livre est tout ce qu’il doit être,
admirable de description et de vérité. Moi, Grec, je puis témoigner que
ce livre est plein de vérités et de charmes.”

[35] Avoid the lake salmon.

[36] They are buried at Bludesch--the last one in 1669--in that crypt
below the church which bears the awesome superscription: _Fui non sum.
Estis non critis._ They also built what is now the Krone inn at that
village, one of whose ceilings has taken refuge in the Bregenz Museum,
and whose present proprietor was a schoolfellow of mine at Som’s.

[37] Frastanz is famous for its beer and for its battle, on Saturday,
20 April, 1499, between the Swiss and the Imperial troops, which seems
to have been the bloodiest ever fought in this province. There is a
pretty legend connected with it (_see_ Vonbun’s “Sagen Vorarlbergs,”
Innsbruck, 1858).

[38] These “water-calves” are thin, wire-like worms of the family of
the Gordiidae; they pass through singular stages of development. We
used to be told blood-curdling tales of their effects on the human
stomach if accidentally swallowed with the water.

[39] _G. asclepiadea_, which the Germans briefly call
“Schwalbenwurzblättriger Enzian.” Old Conrad Gesner knew it as
“poison-root,” not because it was poisonous in itself, but because
cattle were said to eat it in order to cure themselves of the stings of
poisonous animals. He learnt this piece of lore, as well as the plant’s
popular name, from the botanist Aretius (Benedikt Marti), and therefore
wished to call the flower “Aretia” in honor of him. Two hundred years
later Haller, the great countryman of Aretius, did give the name Aretia
to a certain genus of plants; and it was retained by Linné.





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