Chapter III: Part 3

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.