TOGETHER
BY
NORMAN DOUGLAS
“_And he said unto me, Son of man,
can these bones live? And I answered,
O Lord God, thou knowest._”
EZEKIEL xxxvii. 3.
NEW YORK
ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY
1923
Copyright, 1923, by
ROBERT M. MCBRIDE & CO.
_Printed in the
United States of America_
Published, 1923
TO
ARCHIE AND ROBIN
FROM THEIR FATHER
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
THE BRUNNENMACHER 19
TIEFIS 35
LUTZ FOREST 51
BLUMENEGG 69
FATHER BRUHIN 89
RAIN 105
ANTS 121
GAMSBODEN 141
JORDAN CASTLE 161
ROSENEGG 177
VALDUNA 193
OLD ANNA 211
SCHLINS 227
INDEX 247
INTRODUCTION
_Introduction_
It rains.
It has rained ever since our arrival in this green Alpine village;
rained not heavily but with a grim Scotch persistence--the kind of
drizzle that will tempt some old Aberdonian, sitting unconcernedly in
soaking grass by the wayside, to look up and remark: “The roads is
something saft.” Are we going to have a month of _Landregen_, as they
call it? No matter. Anything for fresh air; anything to escape from the
pitiless blaze of the South, and from those stifling nights when your
bedroom grows into a furnace, its walls exuding inwardly all the fiery
beams they have sucked up during the endless hours of noon. Let it rain!
Little I thought ever to become a guest in this tavern, familiar as it
is to me from olden days. They have made us extremely comfortable.
Nothing is amiss, nothing lacking. Our rooms are large and well
furnished. Certain preliminary operations were of course necessary in
regard to the beds. Away first of all with the _Keilpolster_, that
wedge-shaped horror; away next with the _Plumeau_, another invention of
the devil. And breakfast always up here please, for both of us, in my
room, at half-past seven; seeing that work begins at eight sharp. Not
less than a litre of milk for my friend, and two eggs; he is a
milk-and-egg maniac. I am past his stage, though still young enough to
revel in that delicious raspberry jelly. Why is it almost unknown in
England?
On one side of my room hangs an oleograph which depicts a gay sportsman
aiming at some chamois from behind a tree at twenty-five yards’
distance; such luck never came my way. The picture on the further side
is still more suggestive--three roe-deer, hotly pursued by a dachshund;
a pug-dog would have an equal chance of success. Cheerful pictures of
this kind should hang in every room. I shall look at them whenever I
feel jaundiced. Our tavern by the way is famous for its dachshunds. They
have a couple of thoroughbreds, with faces like orchids, who eat and
sleep most of the day and whose descendants are rapidly stocking the
neighborhood. Their numerous progeny drop in for a visit from the
remotest villages, and are coldly received by the parents. Just now the
gentleman is asleep and his spouse, not for the first time, indulging in
an agitated flirtation with one of her own remote descendants who has
not yet found a home for himself: a very bad example to the rest of
us....
Through the silvery curtain of drizzle I glance eastwards and recognize
the old, old view, the earliest that ever greeted my eyes; for our
nursery windows, up yonder, looked also towards the rising sun, and
once, not in the day but late at night, I was lifted out of bed and
placed on the window-sill to behold a wondrous thing--the sky all
a-glister with livid rays. This aurora borealis is my first memory of
life and the apparition must have been recorded in the newspapers of the
day, since it was the only “Nordlicht” ever seen, to my knowledge, in
the country; the vexed question, therefore, of a man’s earliest memory
could be settled, so far as I am concerned, if one had the energy to
hunt up the files. There, confronting me on its hillock, stands the
church with red-topped steeple. During the war, the authorities carried
off the four bells to be melted down; three new ones have since been
purchased at Innsbruck. They chime pleasantly enough, but not quite the
same as of yore. One would like to hear the old ones again, for memory’s
sake, after all these years. How gayly they used to tremble on the air
at midday, while one roamed about the hills at the back of the house.
And how one rushed down to be in time for luncheon, seated on a
fir-branch; an excellent method of progression on steep, slippery
meadows, provided there be no stones or wasps’ nests on the track. One
day, long ago, we three slid in this fashion and at a breathless speed
down the never-ending slopes of the Furkla alp above Bludenz. Nothing
happened till about half-way, when the eldest felt a jolt, a slight
cavity in the ground, and called out to me to beware. It was too late; I
was pitched in and out again. My sister who followed, carrying less
weight, came to rest there. The cavity was a wasps’ nest. Eight
stings....
And the church is backed by a mountain called Hoher Frassen; even at
this distance one can detect a belt of green stretching across its
middle near the scattered houses of Ludescherberg; wonderful, what
manure will do! Everybody goes up the Hoher Frassen (_vulgo_
Pfannenknecht) on account of the view, which is remarkable considering
its low elevation of not even two thousand meters, though personally, if
one must climb places like this, I should prefer the Mondspitze or
Hochgerach. You can ascend in early morning from Bludenz or anywhere
else, catch a glimpse of the Rhine and Lake Constance and snow peaks
innumerable--of half this small province of Vorarlberg, in fact--and be
home again in time for a late luncheon. Near the top is the now
inevitable hut for the convenience of fat tourists. Cows pasture about
the summit among the Alpine roses and dwarf pines.[1] Here, at the
right season, you may capture as many Apollo butterflies as you please.
A little boy and girl, scrambling homeward one day from this summit,
dislodged with infinite trouble a huge bowlder and, while somebody was
not looking, sent it on a career of delirious leaps down the incline
above Raggal village. Such was its momentum after a couple of hundred
yards that it went clean through a hay-hut, empty but solid, tossing its
wooden blocks into the air as if they were feathers. The destruction of
some poor peasant’s property was considered a great joke. We laughed
over it for weeks and weeks.
On the other side of our valley one can discern, despite the rain, those
peaks of the Rhætikon group. They have been powdered with freshly fallen
snow almost down to the Kloster alp, where cows are grazing at this
moment. The Kloster alp, on which I have passed many nights with no
companion save a rifle, is forever memorable in my annals as being the
spot where, at the age of six, I smoked my first cigar. We were on an
excursion and somebody--the little Dr. Zimmermann, I daresay, the blithe
veterinary surgeon--gave me, doubtless at my repeated and urgent
solicitation, a long black Virginia, a so-called rat’s tail, the
strongest weed manufactured by the Austrian Government. Delighted with
my luck, I puffed through an inch or so. Then, without any warning,
death and darkness compassed me about. Death and darkness! The world was
turned inside out; so was I. Not for several weeks did I try tobacco
again; this time only a cigarette and in a more appropriate locality;
even that made me rather unhappy. Here, on the cliffs just above the
Kloster alp, you used to be able to gather a bouquet of Edelweiss with
your eyes shut, so to speak; here, among the tumbled fragments of rock
further on, was a numerous colony of marmots. Never, in my
bloodthirstiest days, had I the heart to shoot one of these frolicsome
beasts, whose settlements are scattered over most of our mountains at
the proper elevation. They call them “Burmentli” in our dialect--a
pungent variety of alemannic--and their fat is supposed to cure every
ill that flesh is heir to; it is chiefly on account of this fat that
they have been persecuted in all parts of the Alps, and exterminated in
not a few. Their cheery whistle carries half a mile; if you sit
perfectly motionless, they will creep out of their burrows, one by one,
and frisk and gambol around you. Once, at Christmas, a hunter brought me
a hibernating marmot which he had taken, together with its whole family,
out of winter-quarters. I put it, drowsy but half-awake, into a cold
room, where it immediately rolled itself under a
[Illustration: Marmot’s skull with malformed teeth]
bundle of hay. There it slept, week after week. A marmot in this
condition is cold to the touch but not altogether stiff, and Professor
Mangili calculated long ago that during the whole of its six months’
lethargy it respires only 71,000 times (awake, 72,000 times in two
days)--a veritable death-in-life! Mine displayed no resentment at being
aroused now and then in a warm room; indeed, it behaved with exemplary
meekness and allowed itself to be pinched or caressed or carried about;
but preferred sleeping, and always seemed to say, in the words of the
poet’s sluggard, “You have waked me too soon! I must slumber again.”
When summer came round, we took it back to its old home, where it
trotted off without a word of thanks, as if the past experiences in our
valley had been nothing but a silly dream.
One would hardly think that marmots ever fed each other, yet a skull in
my collection makes me wonder how this particular animal, an old beast,
can have survived without receiving nourishment from its fellows. It was
shot near St. Gallenkirch in the Montavon valley on September 12th,
1886; and is remarkable since, in consequence of what looks like the
fracture of a single incisor tooth, the lower jaw has been partially and
slowly displaced, shifted to one side of the upper--at the cost, no
doubt, of incessant pain. What happened? All four incisors therewith
became not only useless but an intolerable hindrance; lacking the
necessary attrition, they grew ever longer in mammoth-like curves, and
sharply pointed; the shortest--the injured one, which is still deprived
of enamel at its extremity--measures six and a half centimeters in
length, the longest all but eight; and one of them, in the course of its
circular development, has actually begun to bore into the bone of the
upper jaw. I am not much of a draftsman, but these two sketches will
suffice to give some idea of the freak specimen. A squirrel with
somewhat similar dentition was described in the “Zoologist” (Vol. IX, p.
220). Here was one marmot, at least, who must have been glad when summer
food-problems were over, and it grew cold enough to scuttle downstairs
again for a six months’ rest. And some of them sleep in this fashion for
eight months on end. What a sleep! Why wake up at all?
Food-problems of our own----
They are non-existent. This region has suffered _relatively_ little from
the effects of war; it is a self-supporting district of
peasant-proprietors where nearly every family possesses its own house
and orchard and fields and cattle; the ideal state of affairs. Nothing
is lacking, save tobacco and coffee. To obtain the first, one plagues
friends in England; instead of the second, we have to put up with cocoa,
a costive and slimy abomination which I, at least, will not be able to
endure much longer. Prolonged and confidential talks with the
innkeeper’s wife--his third one, a lively woman from the Tyrol, full of
fun and capability--have already laid down the broad lines of our bill
of fare. I must devour all the old local specialties, to begin with,
over and over again; items such as _Tiroler Knödel_ and _Saueres Nierle_
and _Rahmschnitzel_ (veal, the lovely Austrian veal, is scarce just now,
but she means to get it) and brook-trout _blau gesotten_ and
_Hasenpfeffer_ and fresh oxtongue with that delicious brown onion sauce,
and _gebaitzter Rehschlegel_ (venison is cheap; three halfpence a pound,
at the present rate of exchange); and, first and foremost,
_Kaiserfleisch_, a dish which alone would repay the trouble of a journey
to this country from the other end of the world, were traveling fifty
times more vexatious than it is. Then: cucumber salad of the only
true--i. e., non-Anglo-Saxon--variety, sprinkled with _paprika_; no soup
without the traditional chives; beetroot with cummin-seed, and beans
with _Bohnenkraut_ (whatever that may be); also things like _Kohlrabi_
and _Kässpätzle_--malodorous but succulent; above all, those ordinary,
those quite ordinary, _geröstete Kartoffeln_ with onions, one of the few
methods by which the potato, the grossly overrated potato, that marvel
of insipidity, can be made palatable. How comes it that other nations
are unable to produce _geröstete Kartoffeln_? Is it a question of
_Schmalz_? If so, the sooner they learn to make _Schmalz_, the better.
_Pommes lyonnaises_ are a miserable imitation, a caricature.
In the matter of sweets, we have arranged for _Schmarrn_ with cranberry
compote, and pancakes worthy of the name--that is, without a grain of
flour in them, and _Apfelstrudel_ and--quick! strawberries down from the
hills, several pounds of the aromatic mountain ones, to form those
wonderful open tarts which are brought in straight from the oven and
eaten then and there, hot--if you know what is good. Should the weather
grow sultry, I will also make a point of consuming a bowl of sour milk,
just for the sake of auld lang syne. It may well ruin my stomach, which
has acquired an alcoholic diathesis since those days.
There! A change of food, at last.
Whether Mr. R. will take to this diet is another matter. I should be in
despair if he were a true Frenchman, for your Gaul, in this and other
matters, is the most provincial creature in the world; like a peasant,
he can eat nothing save what his grandmother has taught him to think
eatable. Mr. R., luckily for him, is French only from political
necessity. And besides, persons of his age should never be encouraged to
express likes and dislikes in the matter of food; it is apt to make them
capricious or even greedy, and what says the learned Dr. Isaac Watts,
from whom I quoted a moment ago? “The appetite of taste is the first
thing that gets the ascendant in our younger years, and a guard should
be set upon it early.” How true! Nobody is entitled to be captious until
he has reached the canonical age. After that, he has acquired the right
of being not only critical, but as gluttonous as ever he pleases.
Here, meanwhile, are the latest statistics of our village. It contains
about seven hundred inhabitants, three hundred cows and calves (most of
them on the mountains just now), five taverns, and three _Dorftrottels_
or idiots, of the genuine Alpine breed. Mr. R. is dying to have a look
at them as soon as the weather clears; and so am I. There is a
fascination about real idiots. They have all the glamour of a
monkey-house, with an additional note of human pathos.
* * * * *
A heated discussion after dinner with Mr. R.--one of our usual ones--as
to the right meaning of the English words “still” and “yet” which, like
“anybody” or “somebody,” he refuses to distinguish from each other. On
such occasions, he complains of the needless ambiguity and prolixity of
my language; I retort by some civil remark about the deplorable poverty
of his own. I should explain that I hold certificates as teacher of
French and English, and am in possession of an infallible coaching
method (a family secret) for backward or forward pupils; and that this
is not the first time I have endeavored to instill a little knowledge of
English into the head of Mr. R. who, for all his faults, is a
companionable young fellow with certain brigand-strains in his ancestry
that go well with those in mine (_vide_ Peter Hinedo’s “Genealogy of the
most Ancient and most Noble Family of the Brigantes, or Douglas,”
London, 1754).
That astonishing French education.... What is one to do with people,
future candidates for government posts, who cannot tell the difference
between an adverb and a conjunction, who, if you ask them to define a
reflexive verb, gaze at you with an air of injured innocence, almost as
if you had asked them to say what is the capital of China, the position
of their own colony of Obok, and whether Chili belongs to Germany or to
Austria? They learn none of these things at school; or if they do, it is
in some infant class where they are forgotten again, promptly and
forever. Instead of this, they are crammed with microscopic details,
under the name of “Littérature,” concerning the lives of all French
writers that ever breathed the air of Heaven, and with a bewildering
mass of worthless physical formulæ, enough to daze the brain of a Gauss.
What Mr. R. does not know about convex lenses and declination needles
and such-like balderdash is not worth knowing; his acquaintance with
every aspect of Molière’s life and works is devastating in its
completeness, and makes me feel positively uncomfortable. Now Molière
was doubtless a fine fellow, but no youngster has any right to know so
much about him. I only wish they had taught him a few elements of
grammar instead.[2]
It is too late now. He laughs at grammar--a frank, derisory laugh. In
other words, my task is rendered none the easier by his serene
self-confidence. He does not share my view that his English is still
rudimentary, though he admits that it may require “a little polish here
and there.” Everything in the nature of a difficulty or exception to the
rules is an _idiom_--not worth bothering about. He conjugates our few
irregular verbs as if they were regular; go, go’ed, go’ed; find, finded,
finded; and gets in a towering passion, not with me but with the
language, whenever I have to set him right. Their mellow auxiliaries of
“should” and “can” and all the rest of them, so useful, so reputable, so
characteristic of the versatile genius of England, are treated as a
perennial joke; indeed, it is a wretched idiosyncrasy of his to discover
fun in the most abstruse and recondite material. (He nearly died of
laughing the other day, because I told him that the Neanderthal race of
man was less hairy than the _Pithecanthropus erectus_ of Java; and
failed to explain why such a bald scientific statement of fact should
provoke even a smile.) Simple phrases like “Est-ce que l’enfant n’aurait
pas dû acheter le chapeau?” give birth to English renderings that would
send any less patient tutor into convulsions; renderings such as you
might expect from the average Englishman when asked to put into French
“If I had not noticed it, you would not have noticed it either (using
_s’en apercevoir_).”
To all my suggestions that it might be well to study this or that more
conscientiously, I receive the stereotyped reply “I know my _vocables_”;
as if the possession of an English vocabulary were synonymous with the
possession of English speech. It is perfectly true; he has a fair stock
of words, and nobody would believe what can be done with our language
until he hears it handled by a person who knows his _vocables_ (and
nothing else) after the manner of my pupil; I often tell him that he
could make his fortune in England, on the music-hall stage, with that
outfit alone. Nevertheless, strange to say, he was nearly always the
first in his English class at school. Vainly one conjectures what may
have been the attainments of the rest of them or, for that matter, of
their teachers.
So he studies two hours a day with me and two hours alone, preparing for
an examination in October; and that is his _raison d’être_ in this
country. He has just given me, to correct, a translation from a book
full of “thèmes et versions,” all of which are too difficult for him;
this one is his English rendering of a stiff piece that describes P. L.
Courier’s disgust at the French Court. It is a noteworthy specimen of my
pupil’s command of _vocables_ and of nothing else; a document which I
should not hesitate to set down here, in full, could I persuade anybody
into the belief that it was authentic. That is out of the question.
People would say I had wasted a good week of my life, trying to
manufacture something comical.
Instead of this “anglais au baccalauréat” we have lately begun a course
of Grimm’s Fairy Tales which are nearer to his level, and I am realizing
once more what this stuff, so-called folk-lore, is worth. A desert! For
downright intellectual nothingness, for misery of invention and
tawdriness of thought, a round half dozen of these tales are not to be
surpassed on earth. They mark the lowest ebb of literature; even the
brothers Grimm, Germans though they were, must have suffered a spasm or
two before allowing them to be printed. Fortunately Mr. R.’s versions of
this drivel are far, far superior to the original; they beat it on its
own ground of sheer inanity; and I am carefully collecting them to be
made up, at some future period, into an attractive little volume for the
linguistic amateur.
THE BRUNNENMACHER
_The Brunnenmacher_
Now what may that old _Brunnenmacher_ have looked like? I never saw him.
I only know that, like my friend his son, he was the official
water-expert of the town of Bludenz, that he was older than my father,
and every bit as incurable a _Bergfex_--mountain-maniac. His nick-name,
“Bühel-Toni,” suffices to prove this. Those two were always doing
impossible things up there at the risk of their lives (it was thus,
indeed, that my father was killed) either together, or alone, secretly,
in emulation of each other. For in those days the whole of this province
was virgin soil, so far as climbing was concerned, and numberless are
the peaks they are supposed to have scaled for the first time. Yet
neither of them, it seems, had ever tackled the Zimba, the noblest of
those pinnacles of the Rhætikon group which I can see from this window,
out there, on the other side of the valley, covered with fresh snow
wherever snow can come to lie among its crags. The Zimba rises to a
height of 2640 meters and was regarded as inaccessible by local chamois
hunters who, for the rest, were under no obligation to scramble up
places of this kind, their game being abundant lower down. Inaccessible!
That annoyed these two _Bergfexes_ all the more.
“Are you never going to try?” my father would ask.
Said the Brunnenmacher:
“I am an old man, and have at least three times as many children
dependent on me as you have. That makes a difference. Besides, you are
rich. Rich people can afford to break their necks. Aren’t you ashamed of
yourself? There it is, staring you in the face all day long. I could
never resist the temptation, if I were in your place. Only think: it
would be quite an unusual kind of honor for you, an Englishman, to have
been the first up there. In fact, I confess I should feel a little
jealous and sore about it, myself.”
So it went on for months or years, and each time they met, the
Brunnenmacher would say:
“So-and-so now thinks of trying the Zimba. Are you going to let him have
it his own way? Is he to get all the glory? Now’s your chance,” or else:
“How about the Zimba? Still afraid? What a scandal. Ah, if I were only a
few years younger!”
At last my father could bear it no longer and slunk out of the house one
afternoon on his usual pretext--when anything risky had to be done--of
going after chamois. He rolled himself in his blanket at the Sarotla
alp, near the foot of the peak, and next day, somehow or other, set foot
on the virgin summit. Imagine his disgust on finding there a
_Steinmandl_, a cairn, containing a bottle with an affectionate letter
to himself from “Bühel-Toni” who had sneaked up ages ago, all by
himself, without saying a word to any one.
That is the history of the Zimba, which is now climbed by numerous
tourists every year. No wonder; since all the difficult places have been
made easy. Even so, the mountain has claimed its victims--three, within
the last few years; one of them a tough old gentleman who, to test his
nerve and muscle, insisted on “doing” the Zimba once a year. It was a
sporting notion; the Zimba did him, in the end; he lies buried in the
new Protestant cemetery at Bludenz. And if you like to scramble up from
the Rellsthal flank, you may still have some fun. Not long ago a tourist
actually died of fright while climbing down here. He had gone up by the
ordinary route to the satisfaction of his guide who, being from the
Montavon valley and anxious to get home as soon as possible (this is my
own assumption) took him down by this almost perpendicular “short cut.”
At a certain point the tourist declared that he could go neither
forwards nor backwards, and was going to die then and there. Which he
straightway proceeded to do, rather foolishly. But there are no limits
to what a real tourist can accomplish. Along the extremely convenient
track which scales the cliff between the Zalim alp and the Strassburger
hut (Scesaplana district) two young men contrived to slip; they were
shattered to fragments. Cleverest of all was the gentleman who lately
achieved the distinction of dying from exposure on the Hoher Frassen. He
ought to have left us word to say how the thing was done.
We do not always realize the difficulties of the pioneers. Among other
matters, there were no shelter huts in those days. That which lies below
the Zimba, on the Sarotla alp, is one of some fifty now scattered about
the hills of this small province. The earliest of them all was the
Lünersee hut which bears the name of my father; he was then president of
our local section of the Alpine Club. Built for the convenience of
visitors to the Scesaplana summit, this hut was swept into the lake long
ago, with all it contained, by an avalanche. It is time another
avalanche came along, for the place has grown into a caravanserai of the
rowdiest description. Altogether, selfish as it may sound, I should not
be sorry to see every one of these structures burnt to the ground, or
otherwise obliterated. Their primary object, to afford shelter to _bona
fide_ climbers, is laudable; what they actually do, is to serve as
hotels--not bad ones, either--to a crowd of summer visitors whose faces
and clothes and manners are an outrage on the surroundings. Abolish the
huts, or cut down their comforts and menus to what a climber might
reasonably expect, and the objectionable “Hüttenwanzen” would evaporate.
What are they doing among these mountains? Let them guzzle and perspire
in Switzerland!...
My friend the younger Brunnenmacher, son of “Bühel-Toni,” was also
official water-specialist and _Bergfex_; he may well have been the image
of his father since, from all I have heard, he had the same character
and therefore, according to a theory of my own, must have resembled him
also in person. If that be so, we may take it for granted that the
father was an unusually hirsute creature. The mere sight of his son, at
the Bludenz swimming baths, used to send us into fits. Nobody had ever
seen such a “Waldmensch.” He might have been a gorilla in this
respect--an uncommon kind of gorilla; for not every gorilla, I fancy,
can afford to wear a regular parting down its back. No gorilla, either,
could climb in better style; or smile, if they smile at all, to better
purpose. The Brunnenmacher’s laughing face charmed away hunger and
fatigue and wet clothes and all the ills of mountaineering. It may seem
far-fetched to apply the terms “ingenuous” or “childlike” to the smile
of a bearded monster of forty, but there are no other epithets available
for that of the Brunnenmacher. It rose to his lips, on seeing you; it
hovered there day and night, waiting for your appearance. Doubtless he
had a peculiar affection for me, as being my father’s son; everybody
found him a lovable person.
His weather-proof good humor must have helped to establish his
reputation as a guide; that, and his jovial blasphemies. They made you
laugh, and a guide who makes you laugh has already gone a long way
towards gaining your friendship. Once you persuaded the Brunnenmacher to
begin some story of his, which was not difficult, you were sure to get
an adequate amount of playful bad language thrown in. An infallible
method of getting more than this adequate amount was to make him
relate his experiences of a trip to America, and of the agonies
of four days’ sea-sickness on an empty stomach. This narrative
bristled with swear words; it ended in a fixed formula: “Jo,
Himmelherrgottsakraméntnochemol, do honni grod gmeint i müest ussm
grosse Zähe uffi kotze!” which might as well be left untranslated ...
There is a curious cave near Bludenz called the _Bährenloch_, the bear’s
cavern; it lies at the foot of the cliffs above the road to Rungalin
village--not the field path, but that which skirts the hills. I say
curious, because it is plainly not a natural cave; it is an artificial
one and has been hacked by human hands out of the limestone; when, by
whom, and for what purpose, no one knows. The chisel-marks are quite
plain, once you are well inside. It is roughly quadrangular in shape and
about the height of a man at the entrance; half way through, it takes a
slight bend to the right and, growing narrower and narrower till you can
hardly turn round, ends abruptly, as though the builder had grown weary
of his toil, or disappointed with its result. The work of a mediæval
anchorite? I doubt it. Such a person would have contented himself with a
domicile less than half its length. Perhaps some crazy enthusiast dug it
long ago, in the hope of discovering gold or what not among the bowels
of those cliffs.
The younger Brunnenmacher first took me there, and how he managed to hit
upon the precise locality of this grotto remains a mystery to me. Not
only was the steep woodland below much thicker in those days--almost
impenetrable, in fact--and without any trace of an upward path, but the
entire base of the cliffs was defended by so dense a mass of brushwood
that we had to crawl through it on hands and knees. How did he contrive
to ascend undeviatingly to the cavern’s mouth? A few yards astray, and
we should have been lost in that jungle where one could barely move, and
had no means of seeing to right or left. All this sounds incredible at
present. Most of the brushwood has been uprooted and the forest thinned
out to such an extent that it has become quite transparent; moreover,
that meritorious “beautification-society” of Bludenz constructed, among
many other things, a convenient zigzag path which will lead you after
fourteen windings to the very entrance of the _Bährenloch_. The
horse-shoe bats, the greater and the lesser, which I used to capture
here and take home as pets, may well have deserted the place; likewise
the young foxes and badgers we unearthed in the neighborhood. One of
these badgers grew so tame that he followed me about everywhere, and
would even take me for rides on his back. I should like to see him do it
nowadays.[3]
This Brunnenmacher seems to have made up his mind that I was to become a
climber like himself. He took me in hand. He made me trot miles and
miles, as it seemed, up the then almost trackless Galgen-tobel and
showed me the _fons et origo_ of the Bludenz water supply, as well as a
spot where you could discover a certain vitriolic mineral by the simple
process of applying your tongue to the rock; and still further afield,
into the upper regions of the Krupsertobel, and down its savage bed.
Then came the turn of the mountains--Scesaplana, to begin with. As
guide, he had already gone up there some seventy times, and even I got
to know it so well in later years that I could have walked up in
blackest midnight. Next the Sulzfluh, famous as a haunt of the
Lämmergeier; and so on. One of the last of these trips was up the
Säntis, the shapely peak across the Swiss frontier, which seems to close
up our valley to the west. We came back with our pockets full of
rock-crystals.
So I pursue the memories, as they rise from the past, of those old days
of the Brunnenmacher. He died a good many years back. But he has left
behind a sturdy brood of children--I know not how many; dozens of them,
let us hope, to inherit his smile....
That Säntis mountain, which I have just mentioned, has a bad name at
this moment. There was a foul murder done here, some months ago; the
married couple in charge of the observatory near the summit were found
killed at their post. Nobody could guess who the assassin was, nor what
his object might have been, till the body of a young man was discovered
in some hut not far away. He had committed suicide; and he was the
murderer. So far as I could gather, this youngster was of decent birth
but, owing to excesses of one kind or another, had lost all balance and
self-respect. One thing, nevertheless, he preserved intact: an intense
love of the Säntis, his native mountain, which he seems to have regarded
as a sort of private domain. He knew its territory inch by inch and
could never bring himself to forsake it; this affection, indeed, was his
undoing, for after the crime he made no attempt to quit the country, as
he easily might have done. The all-absorbing attachment to this piece of
ground kept him chained there, and it was supposed, though nowise
proved, I fancy, that he killed the old people out of an insane envy,
and in the equally insane hope of being thereafter installed at the
observatory as their successor, and having the Säntis all to himself for
the rest of his life. Murders are committed for a considerable variety
of amorous motives, but seldom for one of such a glacially nonsexual and
idealistic tinge; it is the kind of etherealized horror that might be
imagined to take place on some other planet. Altogether, an interesting
problem in psychology, if the facts they gave me are correct. To fall
in love with a mountain is not the common lot of man. And so
disastrously!
It was a tragedy of unreciprocated passion, from beginning to end. The
Säntis is no longer in the first flush of youth; it can be trusted, I
feel sure, to behave with perfect decorum under the most trying and
delicate circumstances. Its reputation, previous to this little affair,
had been of the best; nor is there any reason to suppose that it gave
its brain-sick admirer the slightest encouragement to act as he did, or
to think himself singled out for favors denied to the rest of us. The
locality is doubtless attractive, as such places go, but that is not its
own fault--who ever heard of blame attaching to beauty?--so attractive,
that a man might well be pardoned for growing fond of it, and fonder,
and fonder. Even in the case of superlative fondness, I, at least, would
still try not to feel jealous of other people’s familiarity with its
charms, and would certainly think twice before murdering a respectable
married couple _pour ses beaux yeux_.
* * * * *
I have now seen four generations of these delightful folk who own our
tavern, the latest arrival being a great-grandchild of the first. Though
barely born, it already wears a laughable resemblance to its
grandfather.
He is the present head of the family, a village magnate who knows the
ins and outs of the countryside as well as any one alive; a Nimrod in
his day, and the only marksman, beside my father, to whom they hung up a
diploma of honor in the Ludesch shooting range; he has lived for years
in Milan and traveled, officially, to Vienna, to set forth to the
Government some claim of our district. The face might be that of one of
those good-natured but intelligent Roman emperors like Titus, with round
head and ruddy hair; a face such as you find all over the Roman province
to this day, and all over this province as well. His family came
originally from the Bregenzerwald region, at the back of our hills, and
is connected with that of Angelika Kauffmann who was born there.[4]
Having been friends with him for the last half century, we never lack
subjects of conversation; there is fresh ground to explore as often as
we meet, and old ground to traverse again. What I now want to know is
this: how about the rain? Are we in for a _Landregen_? He thinks not;
the weather is too cold, and snow lies too low; where his own cattle
are, on the alp of Zürs near Lech, it must be lying at this moment.
Unless the weather clears, he will have to go up and look after them;
also on account of the foot-and-mouth disease, which has broken out in
the neighborhood. Lech: who has the chamois shooting there? Nearly all
the shoots in the country, he explains, have been taken by Swiss, and no
wonder; look at their exchange! And what of the projected _Anschluss_
(annexation) to Switzerland? Well, Germany would be better, on the
whole. Besides, the truth of the matter is (laughing) the Swiss won’t
have us; they say we are too Catholic and too lazy and too fond of
drinking. As if our people could afford to pay for wine nowadays! By the
way, just try this _Schnapps_, as a curiosity.
It was juniper-spirit, of the year 1882. With all respect for its
antiquity, I found myself unable to appreciate the stuff. Then he gave
me, as an antidote, some of his own _Obstler_ (made of apples) only
three weeks old. A little crude, but of good promise. So we went through
the lot. His own _Zwetschgenwasser_--excellent! Then Kirsch, from the
neighboring village of Tiefis, which makes a specialty of this
_Schnapps_, distilled from the small mountain cherries; of mighty
pleasant flavor. Next, Enzian; the product of the yellow Alpine
gentian. Whoever likes Enzian--and who can help liking it?--will have
nothing to say against that of our Silberthal, which has a well-deserved
reputation for this brand. _Beerler_, I enquire? No, he says; nobody
makes bilberry-spirit any more.
“Which is a pity.”
“This infernal war----”
“It has shattered all the refinements of life.”
So we discuss the world, and presently the proprietress comes up to
announce that she has discovered coffee. I thought she would! She sent
to Bludenz for it, on the sly. Now what, I ask, is her particular method
of roasting?
“Why, in the oven, of course; and very carefully. Then, when the beans
begin to sweat, and are neither lighter nor darker than a capuchin’s
frock, I take them out and place them, steaming hot, into a glass jar
and cover them at once with a thick layer of powdered sugar. There they
get cold slowly and are obliged, you see, to draw in again all the
fragrance which they would otherwise have lost. Isn’t that your English
way?”
I wish it were....
TIEFIS
_Tiefis_
A really fine morning at last; glorious sunshine.
“Now for those idiots,” says Mr. R., and so do I. We have found out
about them, from the inn-people.
It appears that two, a man and a woman, come from the Walserthal, which
has always been famous for its crop of imbeciles; the third was born at
Raggal, likewise fertile mother of idiots, because everybody marries
into his own family there. These Raggalers are such passionate
agriculturalists and so busy, all the year round, with their fields and
cattle, that they refuse to waste time scouring the province for so
trivial an object as a wife with fresh blood, when you can get a
colorable substitute at home. Our particular idiots live, all three of
them, on the road to St. Anne church, in that workhouse which, so far as
I know, has sheltered from time immemorial the poor of the district, the
aged, the infirm of mind or body. There is always a fine assortment of
wrecks on view here. Sisters of Charity look after them.
Sure enough, the first thing we saw was one of the man-idiots hacking
wood out of doors. He was of the deaf and dumb variety, with misshapen
skull; he took no notice of us, but continued at his task with curious
deliberation, as if each stroke of the ax necessitated the profoundest
thought. Weak in the head, obviously; but not what I call an idiot. If
he could have spoken, he would doubtless have uttered as many witticisms
as one hears in an English public-house at closing time. The woman was
also there, sitting on the bench beside a Sister of Charity.
Under-sized, stupid-looking, with mouth agape; nothing more; I have seen
society ladies not unlike her in appearance. She can sew and knit
stockings and even talk, they had told us. Mediocre specimens, both of
them. And how about the third one, we enquired? He was working in the
fields, said the Sister.
Working in the fields....
These things call themselves idiots. Even idiots, it seems, have
degenerated nowadays. Mr. R. was dreadfully disappointed; and so was I.
He vowed I had led him to expect something on quite another scale; and
so I had. He extracted a promise, then and there, that I should show him
over Valduna, the provincial lunatic asylum near Rankweil, in the hope
of unearthing a few idiots worthy of the name.
Now of course you cannot have everything in this world. You cannot ask,
in a district otherwise so richly endowed by Nature as this one, for the
_fine fleur_ of imbecility--for _crétins_. To see these marvels you must
go further afield, to places like the Valtellina or Val d’Aosta (and
even there, I understand, the race is losing some of its best
characteristics. These doctors!) But one might at least have kept alive
a specimen or two of the old school, just for memory’s sake; idiots such
as my sister and myself used to see, while rambling as children about
these streets with the _Alte Anna_, our nurse. On that very bench, where
the modish lady was reclining to-day, or its predecessor, there used to
sit two skinny old madwomen side by side, with their backs to the wall.
There they sat, always in the same place. They were as mad as could be,
and older than the hills. A terrifying spectacle--these two blank
creatures, staring into vacuity out of pale blue eyes, with white hair
tumbled all about their shoulders. One of them disappeared--died, no
doubt; the survivor went on sitting and staring, in her old place. There
was another idiot whom we liked far better; in fact we loved him. He was
of the joyful and jabbering kind, and he lived near the factory. His
facial contortions used to make us shriek with laughter. Sometimes he
dribbled at the mouth. When he dribbled copiously, which was not every
day, it was our crowning joy.
The old Anna, of course, knew by heart every idiot within miles of our
home. She specialized in such phenomena. What she liked even better was
anything in the nature of an accident, operation, horrible disease, or
childbirth; she knew of it, by some dark instinct, the moment it
occurred: she knew! and, being forbidden to leave the children alone,
dragged us with her into the remotest peasant-houses and hamlets to
enjoy the sight. Above all things, she had a mania for corpses and the
flair of a hyena for discovering their whereabouts. As often as there
was a corpse within walking distance, she donned her seven-league boots
and rushed towards it in the bee-line, carrying my sister, to save time,
while I toddled painfully after. Arrived at the spot where the dead body
lay, she would first cross herself and then begin to gloat. We did the
same. Who knows how many maladies, how many corpses, we inspected at
that tender age! A sound education. For it familiarized us with death
and suffering at a life-period when one cannot yet grasp their full
import; it took away, for good and all, a great part of their terrors.
We were never shocked by such things; only interested--hugely
interested....
After an appetizing luncheon which atoned for the bitter disappointment
of this morning, we strolled upwards in the sunshine, slowly and
comfortably, towards the village of Tiefis. The ancient _Dorfberg_ road
which started opposite the sawmill to climb the height now lies
obliterated and forgotten; it was so steep that coachmen and all the
rest of us--save one or other of those awesome Scotch grand-aunts,
fragile and frowsy--had to get out of the carriage and walk. Here, on
the upper level, stood certain immense walnut trees of ours, in whose
shade I used to crawl about before I could walk. They are gone. But the
distant iron target against the hill-side behind them, which served my
father for rifle-practice, is in its old place; they have not troubled
to pull it down. I glance into the back regions of our old house; no
great change here; some of the present proprietor’s children are bathing
in that fountain which used to be covered with water-lilies. Then, a
couple of hundred yards further on, the ochre-tinted bed of that
wonderful stream which petrified leaves and grasses, a ceaseless marvel
of childhood. There it is as of old, trickling downhill in the same
miniature cascade. Up again, to the next level and beyond, where the
forest begins and where, looking back, you have a fine view upon the
Zimba.
Now these are the things for which I have come here; things for which
you will vainly ransack England and the whole Mediterranean basin. You
are confronted, all of a sudden, by a dusky precipice, a wall of ancient
firs, glittering in the sun; their branches droop earthward in
curtain-like fringes. Here the path enters the forest--an inspiring
portal! To step from those bright meadows into the solemn and friendly
twilight of the trees is like stepping into a vast green cavern, into
another world; involuntarily one lowers one’s voice. I shall be much
surprised if these benign woodlands do not have a chastening influence
upon the character and the whole worldly outlook of Mr. R., to whom this
country and its people and language and customs are so utterly strange
that he has not yet recovered from his first bewilderment; they are what
he needs--what all of us need; one should return to them again and
again, to breathe a cleaner air, to rectify one’s perspective, to escape
from the herd and the contamination of its unsteady brain.
There is a short break in the wood soon afterwards, a steep grassy slope
with a hay-hut at its foot. The place is called _Hirsch-sprung_, because
in olden days a hunted stag took the whole descent at a single leap. Any
one who has seen stags pursued by a hound will admit that they are
remarkable jumpers. They seldom get as good a chance as this, of showing
what they can do. The distance aerially traversed must be about eighty
yards.
Tiefis is a new and prosperous village; the old one was burnt down in
the sixties. We went to my old inn where we discovered, among other
things, a pretty fair-haired child, daughter of the proprietress; she
has the clearest complexion imaginable and the sweetest smile, and her
eyes are not blue, but of a mysterious golden-gray; the very picture of
innocence, and just the kind of person to trouble desperately Mr. R.,
who is of the other color and at an inflammable age, though far more
decent-minded than I used to be. The charm is fleeting; she will lose
some of her looks; already I detect an ever so slight thickening of her
throat. Goitrous throats are none too rare hereabouts and nobody seems
to mind them, but Mr. R. knows nothing about such things as yet. At my
invitation she came and sat down beside him, which disconcerted both of
them at first, while I discussed the price of wine and other commodities
with the mother, whose nervous twitch in one eye must not be mistaken
for a wink. Where would it end, I enquired? Did innkeepers like herself
still stock the better qualities of white, the Nieder-oesterreicher and
so-called Terlaner, or red kinds like Veltliner and Kalterer See and
Magdalener? Would not people, at this rate, soon give up drinking wine
altogether? They were giving it up fast, she said. No peasant cared to
pay 1500 kronen for a quarter of a liter. Only last week it was 800; in
another fortnight it might be 2500 (it is now 4000). And so forth.
“I think it would be polite to shake hands with the little baby,” said
Mr. R., as we rose to depart.
“The little baby? I see. Go ahead. She won’t bite.”
“Of course not. But one ought to say something. What is the German for
_au revoir_?”
“Say nothing to-day. Keep that for next time. Look straight into her
face and smile; put your soul into it.”
“I was going to do that anyhow.”