Chapter II: Part 2

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.