THE WIRTH’S THEORY
In the evening, while they dined, the landlord came in to see how they
fared, and wish them good appetite: ’tis the custom with distinguished
guests in the Tyrol. The moment he entered, Florian, all agog, attacked
him at once on the subject of their wonderful find that afternoon on the
hillside. “Well, Herr Hausberger,” he cried in his high-flown way,
“we’ve seen and heard your Linnet—heard her warbling her native
wood-notes wild, to the tune of her own cow-bells on her lonely
mountains. Now, what do you mean, sir, by turning out a divine singer
like that—I’m a musical critic myself, and I know what I’m talking
about—what do you mean by turning her out to make butter and cheese in
a solitary hut on an Alpine pasture? It’s sheer desecration, I tell
you—sheer wicked desecration; there’s nothing, almost, that girl
couldn’t do with her voice. She’s a genius—a prodigy; she ought to be
clothed in purple and fine linen, and fare sumptuously every day on
champagne and turtle. And _you_, sir—you send her up to herd cows all
alone, in an inclement clime, on a barren hill-top!”
Andreas Hausberger gazed at him with a self-contained smile that was
extremely characteristic. He bowed a sarcastic bow which Florian
misinterpreted for polite subservience. “Are _you_ running this show or
am I?” he asked, after a fresh pause, with a quaint reminiscence of his
Western experience.
“_You_ are, undoubtedly,” Florian answered, taken aback at this
unexpected assault. “But you ought to run it, all the same, on rational
and humane and intelligent principles. You owe this girl’s voice, as a
delight and a treasure, to US, the enlightened and critical connoisseurs
of two eager continents. Nature produced it that _we_ might enjoy it. It
was intended to give us some of those exquisite moments of artistic
pleasure which are the sole excuse creative caprice can plead for the
manifold defects of the Universe.”
Andreas Hausberger looked down at him with a half-pitying curl on those
stern thin lips of his. Florian had attacked him lightly where his
position was strongest. “That’s all right,” he said, slowly, with a
chilly drawl—’twas his favourite expression. “And do you think then,”
he went on, bursting forth almost scornfully, in spite of his outward
deference, “we Zillerthalers get our fine singing voices and our musical
ears by pure chance and accident? Not so, you may be sure of it. It’s no
mere coincidence that our men and women can almost without exception
sing like birds from their childhood upwards by the light of Nature.
What gives them this power? Why, they live their lives long, in summer
especially, in the thin clear atmosphere of our higher mountains. There
isn’t much sour-stuff in it—what do you call it in English?—oh,
oxygen, don’t you? Wal, there isn’t much oxygen in that thin upper
air—rarefied, I think you say—and therefore they’re obliged to fill
their lungs well and expand their chests”—he swelled himself out as he
spoke, and showed off his own splendid girth to the fullest
advantage—“and that gives them large reservoirs and rich, pure-toned
voices.”
“I never thought of that before,” Will Deverill interposed, much struck
by the landlord’s plausible reasoning. “I suppose that’s why mountain
races, like the Welsh and the Tyrolese, are so often musical. The
rarefied air must tend to strengthen and develop the larynx.”
“No; you never thought of that before,” Andreas Hausberger echoed. “You
haven’t had to think of it. And you haven’t had to select and train a
choir of our Tyrolese peasants. But I have thought of it for years, and
satisfied myself it’s true. Is it for nothing, do you suppose, that on
our cold mountain tops the vocal chords, as they say, are braced up and
tightened? Is it for nothing that in that clear, pure, limpid air the
very nerves of the ear, strained hard to catch quickly at distant
sounds, are exercised and educated? Do you think, if I wanted to pick
out voices for a musical troupe, I would go for them to Holland, or to
Lombardy, or to Hamburg? No, no; I would go right away to the _gründe_
there, the upper forks of the Zillerthal, in the crystal air just below
the glaciers, and pick out my best singers from the cow-boys and the
alp-girls.”
He spoke of what he knew and had long reflected upon. Acquaintance with
his subject supplied in part the unimportant deficiencies of his English
vocabulary; and, besides, he had said the same things before a dozen
times over, to other English travellers.
“Perhaps you may be right,” Florian responded, blandly, as the _wirth_
paused for breath in his eager harangue. It was a way of Florian’s to be
bland when he saw he was getting the worst of an argument.
“Right!” Andreas Hausberger repeated. “Never mind about that! You’d know
I was right if only you’d seen as much of these people as I have. Look
here, Mr Wood, you say it’s desecration to send a girl like Linnet after
butter and cheese in a sennerin’s hut on the lonely mountains. You say I
owe her voice as a treasure to humanity. Wal, I acknowledge the debt,
and I try to discharge it to the best of my ability. I send her to the
hills—the free open hills—where she will breathe fresh air, develop
her throat and lungs, eat wholesome food, grow strong and brown and
hearty. If I clothed her in purple and fine linen, as you wish, and fed
her every day on champagne and turtle, do you really imagine I’d be
doing her a good turn? I’d be ruining her voice for her. In the summer,
she gains breath and good health on the grassy mountains; in the winter,
she gets training and advice and assistance from Lindner and myself, and
whatever other teachers we can find in the Zillerthal.”
“I surrender at discretion,” Florian answered, with a yawn, rising up
and flinging his small person lazily on the home-made sofa. “I admit
your contention. You interest me strangely. Your peasants and your
country girls have finely developed ears and capital voices. No doubt
you’re correct in attributing these splendid gifts to the clearness of
the atmosphere and the wild life of the mountains. I’m a musical critic
in London myself, and I know what a voice is the moment I hear it.
Indeed, after all, what does it matter in the end if these divine
creatures spend a joyless life for years in sordid and squalid
surroundings, provided only, when they burst forth at last in the full
effulgence of their musical prime, they afford _us_, who can appreciate
them, and for whose sake they exist, one vivid thrill of pure artistic
enjoyment?” And he stroked his own smooth and girlish cheek with one
plump hand, lovingly.
“You’re a musical critic, are you?” Andreas Hausberger repeated, with
marked interest, disregarding the last few words of Florian’s flowing
rhapsody. “Then you shall hear Linnet sing. You can say after that
whether I’m right in my system or not.” He opened the door hastily.
“Linnet, Linnet,” he called out in the Tyrolese dialect, “come in here
at once. I want the Herrschaft to hear you singing.”
For a minute after he spoke, there was a flutter and a rustling at the
door outside; somebody seemed to be pushing some unwilling person bit by
bit along the passage. A murmur of whispered voices in the local dialect
floated faintly to Will’s ears. “You must!” “But I can’t.” “You shall!”
“I won’t.” “He says you are to.” “Ah, no; I’m ashamed! Not before those
gentlemen!”
In the end, as it seemed, the first voice had its way. The door opened
brusquely, and Linnet, all trembling, her face in her hands, and crimson
with shame, was pushed bodily forward by unseen arms into the strangers’
presence. For a moment she stood there like a frightened child. Will’s
cheek burned hot with sympathetic tingling. Florian leaned back
philosophically as he lay, and regarded this pretty picture of beauty in
distress with observant complacency. She was charming, so, to be sure!
That red flush became her.
“Sing to the gentlemen,” Andreas Hausberger said, calmly, in a tone of
command. “Take your hands from your face at once; don’t behave like a
baby.”
He spoke in German, but Florian followed him all the same. ’Twas
delicious to watch this pretty little comedy of rustic ingenuousness.
“Oh, I can’t!” Linnet cried, all abashed, removing her hands for a
second from her burning cheeks, and clasping them hard on her throbbing
breast for one fiery moment before she clapped them up hastily again.
“To bid one like this! It’s so hard! It’s so dreadful!”
“Don’t ask her just now,” Will Deverill put in pleadingly. “One can see
she has such a natural shrinking and disinclination at first. Some other
night, perhaps. When we’ve been here a little longer, she may be less
afraid of us.”
Linnet let her hand drop once more, and gave him a grateful glance,
sidling away towards the door like a timid child in her misery. But
Andreas Hausberger, for his part, was not so to be put off. “No, no,” he
said, sternly, fixing his eye with a determined gaze on the poor
shrinking girl; “she must sing if I tell her to. That’s all right. This
shyness is absurd. How can she ever appear on a platform, I should like
to know, before a couple of hundred people, if she won’t sing here when
she’s told before just you two Englishmen? Do as I bid you, Linnet! No
nonsense, my girl! Stand here by the table, and give us ‘The Bride of
Hinter-Dux.’”
Thus authoritatively commanded, poor Linnet took her stand where Andreas
Hausberger motioned her, steadied herself with one trembling little fist
on the edge of the table, raised her eyes to the ceiling away from the
two young men, and, drawing a deep breath, with her throat held out and
her mouth opened tremulously, began to trill forth, in her rich, silvery
voice, a deep bell-like song of her own native mountain. For the first
minute or two she was nervous, and quivered and paused unduly; after
awhile, however, inborn artistic instinct overcame her nervousness: she
let her eyes drop and rest in a flash once or twice on Will Deverill’s.
They were kindly eyes, Will’s; they reassured and encouraged her.
“Bravo!” they seemed to say; “you’re rendering it admirably.” Emboldened
by his friendly glance, she took heart and went through with it. Towards
the end, her courage and self-possession returned, for, like all
Tyrolese, she was brave and self-reliant in her inmost soul, though shy
at first sight, and bashful on the surface. The two last stanzas she
sang to perfection. As she finished, Will looked up and said simply,
“Thank you; that was beautiful, beautiful.” But Florian clapped his
hands in obtrusive applause. “Well done!” he cried; “well done! you have
given us such a treat. We can forgive Herr Hausberger now for insisting
on a performance.”
“And you must accustom yourself to an audience,” the _wirth_ said in
German, with that same quiet air of iron resolution Will had already
marked in him. “If ever you’re to face a whole roomful of people, you
must be able first to come in upon the platform without all this silly
fuss and hang-back nonsense.”
Linnet’s nostrils quivered. She steadied herself with her hand on the
table once more, and made answer boldly, “I think I could more easily
face a roomful of people I’d never seen than sing before two in the
parlour of the inn here; that seems less personal. But,” she added
shyly, with half an appealing glance towards Will, “I’m not so nervous
now. If this gentleman wishes, I—I would sing another song to him?”
And so she did—a second and a third. As she went on, she grew braver,
and sang each time more naturally. At last the _wirth_ dismissed her.
Linnet curtsied, and disappeared. “Well, what do you say to her now?”
the landlord asked in a tone of triumph, turning round to the young men
as the door closed behind her.
Florian assumed his most studiously judicial air. The perfect critic
should, above all things, be critical. Before Linnet’s face, indeed, he
had been enthusiastic enough, as politeness and due respect for her sex
demanded; but behind her back, and in her teacher’s presence, regard for
his reputation compelled him to adopt the severest tone of incorruptible
impartiality. “I think,” he said slowly, fingering his chin in one hand,
and speaking with great deliberation, like a recognised authority, “with
time and training she ought to serve your purpose well for popular
entertainments. Her organ, though undeveloped, is not wholly without
some natural power and compass.”
“And _I_ think,” Will Deverill added, with a glow of generous
enthusiasm, “you’ve lighted on one of the very finest voices in all
Europe.”