Chapter V: Part 5

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

Quite mad!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not your old man! My old man.”

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

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

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

A reasonable program.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

OLD ANNA

_Old Anna_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My sister pretended to shriek delightedly:

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

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

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

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

She would reply, mournfully:

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

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

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

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

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

You were expected to answer:

“Dear--Cousin--Annie.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

SCHLINS

_Schlins_

There is a sense of sudden departure in the air.

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

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

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

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

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

Lasko’s well----

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

We gave our orders.