It is ten o'clock upon Sylvester Abend, or New Year's Eve. Herr Buol
sits with his wife at the head of his long table. His family and
serving folk are round him. There is his mother, with little Ursula,
his child, upon her knee. The old lady is the mother of four comely
daughters and nine stalwart sons, the eldest of whom is now a grizzled
man. Besides our host, four of the brothers are here to-night; the
handsome melancholy Georg, who is so gentle in his speech; Simeon,
with his diplomatic face; Florian, the student of medicine; and
my friend, colossal-breasted Christian. Palmy came a little later,
worried with many cares, but happy to his heart's core. No optimist
was ever more convinced of his philosophy than Palmy. After them,
below the salt, were ranged the knechts and porters, the marmiton
from the kitchen, and innumerable maids. The board was tesselated with
plates of birnen-brod and eier-brod, küchli and cheese and butter; and
Georg stirred grampampuli in a mighty metal bowl. For the uninitiated,
it may be needful to explain these Davos delicacies. Birnen-brod
is what the Scotch would call a 'bun,' or massive cake, composed of
sliced pears, almonds, spices, and a little flour. Eier-brod is a
saffron-coloured sweet bread, made with eggs; and küchli is a kind
of pastry, crisp and flimsy, fashioned into various devices of cross,
star, and scroll. Grampampuli is simply brandy burnt with sugar, the
most unsophisticated punch I ever drank from tumblers. The frugal
people of Davos, who live on bread and cheese and dried meat all the
year, indulge themselves but once with these unwonted dainties in the
winter.
The occasion was cheerful, and yet a little solemn. The scene was
feudal. For these Buols are the scions of a warrior race:
A race illustrious for heroic deeds;
Humbled, but not degraded.
During the six centuries through which they have lived nobles in
Davos, they have sent forth scores of fighting men to foreign lands,
ambassadors to France and Venice and the Milanese, governors to
Chiavenna and Bregaglia and the much-contested Valtelline. Members of
their house are Counts of Buol-Schauenstein in Austria, Freiherrs of
Muhlingen and Berenberg in the now German Empire. They keep the patent
of nobility conferred on them by Henri IV. Their ancient coat--parted
per pale azure and argent, with a dame of the fourteenth century
bearing in her hand a rose, all counterchanged--is carved in wood and
monumental marble on the churches and old houses hereabouts. And from
immemorial antiquity the Buol of Davos has sat thus on Sylvester Abend
with family and folk around him, summoned from alp and snowy field to
drink grampampuli and break the birnen-brod.
These rites performed, the men and maids began to sing--brown arms
lounging on the table, and red hands folded in white aprons--serious
at first in hymn-like cadences, then breaking into wilder measures
with a jodel at the close. There is a measured solemnity in the
performance, which strikes the stranger as somewhat comic. But the
singing was good; the voices strong and clear in tone, no hesitation
and no shirking of the melody. It was clear that the singers enjoyed
the music for its own sake, with half-shut eyes, as they take dancing,
solidly, with deep-drawn breath, sustained and indefatigable. But
eleven struck; and the two Christians, my old friend, and Palmy, said
we should be late for church. They had promised to take me with them
to see bell-ringing in the tower. All the young men of the village
meet, and draw lots in the Stube of the Rathhaus. One party tolls the
old year out; the other rings the new year in. He who comes last is
sconced three litres of Veltliner for the company. This jovial fine
was ours to pay to-night.
When we came into the air, we found a bitter frost; the whole sky
clouded over; a north wind whirling snow from alp and forest through
the murky gloom. The benches and broad walnut tables of the Bathhaus
were crowded with men, in shaggy homespun of brown and grey frieze.
Its low wooden roof and walls enclosed an atmosphere of smoke, denser
than the external snow-drift. But our welcome was hearty, and we found
a score of friends. Titanic Fopp, whose limbs are Michelangelesque in
length; spectacled Morosani; the little tailor Kramer, with a French
horn on his knees; the puckered forehead of the Baumeister; the
Troll-shaped postman; peasants and woodmen, known on far excursions
upon pass and upland valley. Not one but carried on his face the
memory of winter strife with avalanche and snow-drift, of horses
struggling through Fluela whirlwinds, and wine-casks tugged across
Bernina, and haystacks guided down precipitous gullies at thundering
speed 'twixt pine and pine, and larches felled in distant glens beside
the frozen watercourses. Here we were, all met together for one hour
from our several homes and occupations, to welcome in the year with
clinked glasses and cries of _Prosit Neujahr!_
The tolling bells above us stopped. Our turn had come. Out into the
snowy air we tumbled, beneath the row of wolves' heads that adorn the
pent-house roof. A few steps brought us to the still God's acre,
where the snow lay deep and cold upon high-mounded graves of many
generations. We crossed it silently, bent our heads to the low Gothic
arch, and stood within the tower. It was thick darkness there. But
far above, the bells began again to clash and jangle confusedly, with
volleys of demonic joy. Successive flights of ladders, each ending in
a giddy platform hung across the gloom, climb to the height of some
hundred and fifty feet; and all their rungs were crusted with frozen
snow, deposited by trampling boots. For up and down these stairs,
ascending and descending, moved other than angels--the friezejacketed
Bürschen, Grisons bears, rejoicing in their exercise, exhilarated with
the tingling noise of beaten metal. We reached the first room safely,
guided by firm-footed Christian, whose one candle just defined the
rough walls and the slippery steps. There we found a band of boys,
pulling ropes that set the bells in motion. But our destination
was not reached. One more aërial ladder, perpendicular in darkness,
brought us swiftly to the home of sound. It is a small square chamber,
where the bells are hung, filled with the interlacement of enormous
beams, and pierced to north and south by open windows, from whose
parapets I saw the village and the valley spread beneath. The fierce
wind hurried through it, charged with snow, and its narrow space was
thronged with men. Men on the platform, men on the window-sills,
men grappling the bells with iron arms, men brushing by to reach the
stairs, crossing, recrossing, shouldering their mates, drinking
red wine from gigantic beakers, exploding crackers, firing squibs,
shouting and yelling in corybantic chorus. They yelled and shouted,
one could see it by their open mouths and glittering eyes; but not
a sound from human lungs could reach our ears. The overwhelming
incessant thunder of the bells drowned all. It thrilled the tympanum,
ran through the marrow of the spine, vibrated in the inmost entrails.
Yet the brain was only steadied and excited by this sea of brazen
noise. After a few moments I knew the place and felt at home in it.
Then I enjoyed a spectacle which sculptors might have envied. For they
ring the bells in Davos after this fashion:--The lads below set them
going with ropes. The men above climb in pairs on ladders to the beams
from which they are suspended. Two mighty pine-trees, roughly squared
and built into the walls, extend from side to side across the belfry.
Another from which the bells hang, connects these massive trunks
at right angles. Just where the central beam is wedged into the
two parallel supports, the ladders reach them from each side of the
belfry, so that, bending from the higher rung of the ladder, and
leaning over, stayed upon the lateral beam, each pair of men can keep
one bell in movement with their hands. Each comrade plants one leg
upon the ladder, and sets the other knee firmly athwart the horizontal
pine. Then round each other's waist they twine left arm and right. The
two have thus become one man. Right arm and left are free to grasp the
bell's horns, sprouting at its crest beneath the beam. With a grave
rhythmic motion, bending sideward in a close embrace, swaying and
returning to their centre from the well-knit loins, they drive the
force of each strong muscle into the vexed bell. The impact is earnest
at first, but soon it becomes frantic. The men take something from
each other of exalted enthusiasm. This efflux of their combined
energies inspires them and exasperates the mighty resonance of metal
which they rule. They are lost in a trance of what approximates to
dervish passion--so thrilling is the surge of sound, so potent are the
rhythms they obey. Men come and tug them by the heels. One grasps
the starting thews upon their calves. Another is impatient for their
place. But they strain still, locked together, and forgetful of the
world. At length they have enough: then slowly, clingingly unclasp,
turn round with gazing eyes, and are resumed, sedately, into the
diurnal round of common life. Another pair is in their room upon the
beam.
The Englishman who saw these things stood looking up, enveloped in his
ulster with the grey cowl thrust upon his forehead, like a monk. One
candle cast a grotesque shadow of him on the plastered wall. And when
his chance came, though he was but a weakling, he too climbed and for
some moments hugged the beam, and felt the madness of the swinging
bell. Descending, he wondered long and strangely whether he
ascribed too much of feeling to the men he watched. But no, that was
impossible. There are emotions deeply seated in the joy of exercise,
when the body is brought into play, and masses move in concert, of
which the subject is but half conscious. Music and dance, and the
delirium of battle or the chase, act thus upon spontaneous natures.
The mystery of rhythm and associated energy and blood tingling
in sympathy is here. It lies at the root of man's most tyrannous
instinctive impulses.
It was past one when we reached home, and now a meditative man might
well have gone to bed. But no one thinks of sleeping on Sylvester
Abend. So there followed bowls of punch in one friend's room, where
English, French, and Germans blent together in convivial Babel; and
flasks of old Montagner in another. Palmy, at this period, wore an
archdeacon's hat, and smoked a churchwarden's pipe; and neither were
his own, nor did he derive anything ecclesiastical or Anglican from
the association. Late in the morning we must sally forth, they said,
and roam the town. For it is the custom here on New Year's night to
greet acquaintances, and ask for hospitality, and no one may
deny these self-invited guests. We turned out again into the grey
snow-swept gloom, a curious Comus--not at all like Greeks, for we had
neither torches in our hands nor rose-wreaths to suspend upon a lady's
door-posts. And yet I could not refrain, at this supreme moment
of jollity, in the zero temperature, amid my Grisons friends, from
humming to myself verses from the Greek Anthology:--
The die is cast! Nay, light the torch!
I'll take the road! Up, courage, ho!
Why linger pondering in the porch?
Upon Love's revel we will go!
Shake off those fumes of wine! Hang care
And caution! What has Love to do
With prudence? Let the torches flare!
Quick, drown the doubts that hampered you!
Cast weary wisdom to the wind!
One thing, but one alone, I know:
Love bent e'en Jove and made him blind
Upon Love's revel we will go!