and Bludesch. At the foot of the hill we abandoned it and turned to the
left, eastwards, up a swampy dell which, I knew, would bring us back
once more to the Stag’s Leap--a winding, narrow vale encompassed by
woodlands and drenched, just then, in a magical light from the sunset at
our back. It is called the “Eulenloch” (owl’s den), and a streamlet runs
down its center; the only streamlet in the district which contains
crayfish and therefore used to supply us, in former days, with _potage
bisque_. We captured one of these crustaceans; the brook is hereafter to
be known as “ruisseau des écrevisses” (its real name is “Riedbach,” from
the rushes through which it flows). They dig peat here, as in many of
these upland bogs, and the rank vegetation with its pungent odors, sweet
and savage, has not yet been mowed down--a maze of tall blue gentians
and mint and mare’s-tail, and flame-like pyramids of ruby color, and
meadowsweet, and the two yellows, the lusty and the frail, all tenderly
confused among the mauve mist of flowering reeds. I am glad I have
arrived in time to enjoy such sights; these wood-engirdled marshes have
a fascination of their own. How good it is to be at home again,
simmering and bubbling with contentment as you recognize the old things
in their old places!
On the right flank of this owl’s den there used to be a bare patch
famous for its strawberries. It is now afforested and the strawberries
are gone; they have strawed--strayed--elsewhere; they follow the
clearings. But that hay-hut remains, that hut of the early school, built
of massive timbers between which the hay comes leaking out; the roof is
green with antique moss, and sulphur-hued lichen decks its beams. The
architecture of these huts has undergone a change, not for the better,
of late years; they are no longer squat and solid, but lanky, flimsy,
and almost ignoble of aspect, though the hay within is more securely
sheltered against damp by a covering of wooden boards. It is precisely
this covering which spoils their appearance....
And here at last, below the Stag’s Leap, is the source of the _ruisseau
des écrevisses_. I knew what to expect. Those firs were cut down a good
while ago, and the rivulet now wells up amid a tangle of young deciduous
trees that have profited by their absence to settle down close to the
brink for a season. You can hardly discover the spring for this
ephemeral luxuriance; it hides itself therein like a “nymphe pudique,”
as Mr. R. observed. The scene was otherwise in olden days, when hundreds
of mighty firs filled up all the vale. How otherwise! Then water rilled
forth among their roots, a liquid joy, in the gloom of multitudinous
over-arching boughs. Many are the hours I dreamt away as a lad, all
alone, at this richly romantic spot. The firs will doubtless come to
their rights again, and stifle in chill and darkness these sun-loving
intruders; they are already planted. Would I not wait, if I could, to
see the fountain as it used to be?
* * * * *
A short stroll late at night, down the main road towards Bludesch, in
order to enjoy the scent of the fields....
I look up at my old home; it is brilliantly illuminated; three different
families, they say, are at present living there. I should not care to
enter that place again. Then we pass the doctor’s house on our left. I
tell Mr. R. of all the different village Æsculaps who have inhabited
that abode; chiefly of the first one, the venerable Dr. Geiger with
rubicund face and enormous goggles on his nose, who cured all my
childish complaints by means of camomile tea. It was his unvarying
remedy, his panacea; my mother assured me, long afterwards, that he
would prescribe camomile tea, and nothing else, to pregnant women.
He also had one grand and mysterious word which recurred forever
in his conversation and was pronounced with a solemn face:
_Abendsexacerbation_. I used to take it for abracadabra, a kind of
charm, never dreaming that it meant anything. His was an original way of
curing infantile headaches.
“That pain is nothing,” he would remark, “I will just take it home with
me,” and therewith pretended to snatch up the headache and put it in his
pocket. The pain always vanished--or ought to have done. I must have
given him a little more trouble one day when, having been forbidden to
touch the verdigris on certain copper pipes, I made a square meal of the
lovely green stuff. It was a close shave, they told me afterwards;
camomile worked wonders on that occasion, and during convalescence he
told my mother that my pulse was placid like that of “an old cow,” which
it still is.
While talking of close shaves, we had reached the very spot where I had
another one. No fun, driving inside that family barouche with a brace of
frumpy grand-aunts--no fun at all; I therefore insisted, if one must
drive, on being beside the coachman and, on that particular occasion,
tumbled down from my exalted perch because the horses shied at
something, and landed head first on the stony road. Ah, we are close to
Bludesch now, at the ancient church of St. Nicholas; and thereby hangs
another tale. It used to have windows of those small, fat, round,
greenish panes of hand-made glass which were common hereabouts, till a
sentimental and eccentric female relation of ours took it into her head
that she would like to build a house with no other glass in its windows
than these “runde Scheible”; it would be rather a gloomy sort of place
inside, but so picturesque, you know! The church authorities were
delighted to exchange their old-fashioned panes for others of
transparent glass; so were all the peasants round about; and in briefest
space of time there was not a “Butrescheibe” left in the countryside;
you may see one specimen of it over the old gate at Bludenz, but this
was inserted only a few years ago to give the place a more time-honored
appearance. Now here again, I explain, on our return--here, immediately
below my old home, stood a shrine dedicated to the Virgin. Twenty years
ago, during a terrific nocturnal thunderstorm, one of those gay tumults
when the sky is lilac with flashes and the Cosmos seems to be definitely
cracking to pieces, it was struck by lightning. Why was it shattered,
while all the neighboring houses, and even that of the unbelievers
above, were spared? Nobody knows to this day. All we do know is that the
priest had the débris of the disaster cleared away in record time, and
another and quite insignificant structure built in its stead.
Mr. R. is not greatly moved by these and other impressive memories of my
past. He prefers to extract a sort of childish fun, not for the first
time, out of the shape and color of my felt hat which, being of the
latest London fashion, is unfamiliar to him and therefore, in his
opinion, an appropriate and inexhaustible subject for laughter in season
and out of season. Young people seem to be engrossed in externals of
this kind, and never to realize that a joke has its limits. I can stand
as much chaff as most of us, but foresee trouble ahead unless he
succeeds in discovering some fresh source of mirth.
He also thinks Tiefis a pretty village, and wants to know when we are
going there again.
LUTZ FOREST
_Lutz Forest_
Out of that side-valley on our east, the Walserthal,[5] issues the
rushing Lutz torrent, almost a river. It joins the Ill, our main stream,
a mile or so after quitting that valley; the Ill flows into the upper
Rhine below Feldkirch; the Rhine into the Lake of Constance not far from
Bregenz, our capital. We therefore drain into the North Sea. At a few
hours’ walk over the hills behind us, however, and again on the other
side of the Arlberg (boundary between this province and the Tyrol), the
waters drop into the Lech or Inn; this as, _via_ Danube, into the Black
Sea. A simple hydrographical system.
Now ever since a recent date which I forget, when the upper Rhine
misbehaved itself so shockingly that the Austrian and Swiss Governments
were forced to undertake some costly works with a view to ensuring
better conduct in the future, our own two rivers, the Lutz and Ill,
which were likewise subject to devastating floods, began to be hemmed in
by stone embankments more systematically and more remorselessly than
they had ever yet been in days of old, when they also gave an infinity
of trouble. For it was obvious that their freakishness, coinciding with
that of the Rhine and due to continued showers in these upper regions,
was responsible for a certain amount of the Rhine’s damage. The
consequence is, that Lutz and Ill have put on new faces and grown
painfully proper; they are no longer the wantons they were. And
therefore all the fascinating wilderness of gray shingle and bowlders
alongside, sparsely dotted with buckthorn, or white willow, or stunted
little ghosts of birches--all that broad sunny desolation of their
banks, where one chased crimson-winged grasshoppers and looked for
garnets in those water-worn blocks of gneiss: all, all a thing of the
past! Our streams now flow, in miserably straight lines, each down its
own narrow channel, and large tracts of the unprofitable soil on either
side have been planted with flourishing young pines and firs--an
excellent investment for such worthless gravel-land hereabouts. Gone
are the garnets and grasshoppers; gone is the charm of those pallid
wastes. The economist gains. The poet, as usual, looks on and counts his
loss.
Our village, lying on the north side of the valley, faces south; the
valley may here be two and a half miles wide, as the crow flies. First
come fields, then a broad stretch of woodland through which runs the Ill
river and the railway Paris-Vienna, then hills once more, in the shape
of the unprepossessing mountain called Tschallenga--popularly “der
Stein.” It is all quite simple.
On our way yesterday into these low-lying forests, we passed through the
meadow beside the church of St. Anne. A large stretch of the adjoining
woodland has recently been extirpated and converted into pasture--the
uprooted trunks are still lying about; those two old lime trees remain
untouched; the little stream has run dry. Here, on this meadow, was a
surprise: a football ground. It wore a neglected air; the boys can only
play on Sundays, since the war. Here the lords of Blumenegg used to be
received in state by the people, their lieges; here, during the Thirty
Years’ War, the fighting men of the countryside were to assemble at a
given signal by day or night, completely armed and furnished with three
days’ provision each. Here also, wholly unconcerned about the Thirty
Years’ War, I used to wait for a youthful companion to whom I was
fondly attached; here we sat and exchanged confidences, and fashioned
rustic pipes out of the twig of some shrub whose bark, in spring, can be
pulled away from its wood like the glove off a finger.
On a certain occasion--an occasion which I regard as a turning-point--I
happened to be all alone under the pines a little further on, near that
former bank of the river which is still marked by huge blocks of
defensive stone-work, now useless and smothered under a tangle of
brushwood. We visited, yesterday, the very spot where, at the callow age
of seven, I formulated, and was promptly appalled by its import, a
far-reaching aphorism: There is no God. For some obscure reason (perhaps
to test the consequences) those awful words were spoken aloud. Nothing
happened. Who can tell what previous internal broodings had led to this
explosive utterance! None at all, very likely. The phenomenon may have
been as natural and easy of birth as the flowering of a plant, the
cutting of a wisdom tooth--which, as every one knows, is nearly always a
painless process. There it was: the thing had been said. Often, later
on, that little incident under the pines recurred to my memory. I used
to ask myself: Why make such earth-convulsing speeches? And then again:
Why not? Which means the periodical relapses into credulity, into a kind
of funk, rather, occurred for the next few years. After that, my
intellect ceased to be clouded by anthropomorphic interpretations of the
universe. Let each think as he pleases. To me, even as a boy, it was
misery to profess credence in any of this Mumbo-Jumbo or to conform to
any of its rites; and a considerable relief, therefore, to escape from
England into a German gymnasium where, although games were not
officially encouraged and work fifty times harder than at
home--theology, among other subjects, being drummed into us with
pestilential persistence--one was at least not asphyxiated by the
noisome atmosphere of mediæval ecclesiasticism which infected English
public schools in those days, and will doubtless infect them in _saecula
saeculorum_. That everlasting “chapel” with its murky Gothic ritual--and
before breakfast too: what a fearsome way of beginning the morning! Let
each think as he pleases. I have better uses for my leisure than to try
to bring others round to any convictions of mine, such as they are; far
better uses. Enough for me to have watched the virus at work; and if I
seem to be sensitive on this one point--why, here are scores of
respectable elderly gentlemen wrangling themselves into hysterics over
sanitation and Zionism and Irish politics and other conundrums that
seldom trouble my dreams.
So it came about that yesterday, at the end of nearly fifty years, I
approached once more, and with a kind of reverence, the sacred spot
under the trees where the Lutz used to flow, and there thanked my genius
for preserving me from not the least formidable of those antediluvian
nightmares which afflict mankind at its most critical period of
life--the nightmare of hopes never to be realized and of torments hardly
worth laughing at; and from all its mischievous and perverse
complications. Well, well! Men in general are brought up so differently
nowadays that they cannot realize what a disheartening trial it was for
some of us youngsters at that particular age and in that particular
environment, where you could heave a Liddell and Scott at your
form-master’s head and only get a caning for it like anybody else,
whereas, if you were suspected of doubting the miracle of the barren
fig-tree, you were forthwith quarantined, isolated, despatched into a
kind of leper-colony, all by yourself. Boys are gregarious; they resent
such treatment. Let each think as he pleases. What I think is that a
grown-up man would be a poor fellow, unless he felt fairly comfortable
in any leper-colony into which these gentle ghost-worshipers may care to
relegate him....
The woods grow thicker and more solemn as you proceed downward in the
direction of Nenzing, tall firs of both varieties, some of them
ivy-wreathed, interspersed with pine-trees whose trunks of rose and
silver, struggling to obtain the same amount of light, shoot up straight
as lances; sunny clearings and stretches of meadowland where the cattle
graze knee-deep in spring; an undergrowth of junipers and other shrubs
just sufficient to diversify the scene and please the eye--never too
dense: noiselessly one treads on that emerald moss!
I had intended to take Mr. R. into a part of the forest which has always
interested me and which I never fail to visit, a region of starved pigmy
pines; and there to give him a little lecture in English on the
formation of forest loam. The Lutz in 1625, or the Ill in 1651--it is
impossible for me to decide which of the two--changed its course in
consequence of a sudden flood and took a turn to the south, abandoning
its former bed. The result was that an area of bleak shingle, far
broader than the present river-bed, was left exposed in the middle of
the forest. Myriads of pine seeds have been scattered upon it ever
since, and the puny trees grow up slowly, dwarfishly; casting down but a
yearly handful of needles each, to form the necessary soil for future
generations. No moss has yet taken root after all these years, nor can
the more fastidious firs draw sustenance; the little pines, rising from
naked pebbles under foot, are in undisputed possession of the territory.
Had there been leafy willows or alders at hand, as in the Scesa-tobel
near Bludenz, the earthy covering would have been produced long ago and
this quasi-sterile tract merged into the forest on either side of it.
There were nothing but conifers on the spot, when the river forsook its
old channel; and it is uphill work for them. The “flourishing” pines and
firs of which I spoke just now have been judiciously planted; these are
self-sown. They are paying for the privilege.
We also intended to visit the _Schnepfenstrich_, a piece of forest
between Bludesch and Nenzing where, in days gone by, one used to lie in
wait for the woodcock at nightfall. What excitement in the dim gloaming
of March--_Oculi: da kommen sie_--among those patches of trees with
their scent of dampness and sprouting leaves, listening for the call of
the male bird and waiting to see him glide past, mysterious as a
phantom! That was sport worthy of the name; though I now find it not
altogether easy to conjure up the first fine rapture of that
bird-massacring epoch. How unimaginative--unpoetic, let us say--are the
English, who put up this apparition of the twilight in the vulgarest
fashion with a dog, and then slaughter him as if he were nothing but a
pheasant or partridge! Such is our manner. It is the same with the
capercailzie, a stupid, worthless fowl--and worse than worthless: is he
not supplanting the finer black game? Why not ennoble him in death, at
least? Why not approach stealthily in the chill dusk of dawn, and espy
him at last, drunk with passion, on his favorite fir? Then, if you can
aim straight, he dies as we may all desire to die--swiftly, painlessly,
and like a lover in his highest moment of exaltation. I know what
Englishmen will say to this. They will say something about cruelty and
breeding-season. Your Anglo-Saxon is always worth listening to, when he
talks about cruel sports.
We had _intended_, I say; but those pests of horse-flies, which Mr. R.
insists upon calling “fly-horses” or “flyses-horse,” became worse and
worse. There must have been cattle in this wood, not long ago. At last,
despite clouds of tobacco-smoke, they drove us fairly out into the
fields, and not long afterwards we found ourselves on the banks of the
“Feldbächle,” a cheery streamlet whose course, from start to finish, has
approximately the shape of a horse-shoe or, better still, of a capital
letter U, resting on its left flank. It rises in a copious and frigid
fountain, soon to be visited, on the uplands behind our village, flows
east through a charming swamp region, feeds the two reservoirs, tumbles
downhill in a spectacular fall--the cataract whose water-power tempted
my paternal grandfather to establish his cotton-mills on this spot, and
which is therefore the _causa causans_ of my presence here at this
moment--babbles fussily through the village, and there turns westwards
through these fields, to merge itself into the Tabalada stream lower
down. A short but lively career.[6]
Sometimes, in dry weather, this rivulet is blocked and allowed to flow
over the parched plain. My first memory of it dates from such an
occasion. There were puddles in the stream-bed here and there, puddles
full of trout; and a number of Italian workmen--we employed a good many
Italians at the factories--were catching these trout with their hands
and eating them alive, as if they were apples. A disgusting sight, now I
come to think of it.
A little later in life, I remember, and on a scorching summer afternoon,
my sister and I bolted into these fields from the house, presumably
after butterflies. How the sun blazed; how hot and sticky we were! And
here was the old Feldbächle full of water, gadding along in its usual
brisk style. An idea occurred to her. What about walking into it,
clothes and all? Then, at last, we should be cool again. No; not paddle
about the water like anybody else, but get right in, get properly in, in
up to the neck, and lie down there as if we were in bed. A great joke.
It was only on scrambling out again that we began to wonder what would
happen at home and what, in fact, might be the correct thing to do under
the circumstances. The problem was solved by an uphill march along the
petrifying brook to far above the needful level, a flank movement
eastwards in the rear of our own house, followed by a rapid descent into
that of our friend the gardener who, with his usual ingenuity, lighted
an immense fire at which our scanty summer garments were dried, one by
one.
* * * * *
Those old cotton-mills of ours at the foot of the cataract of which I
spoke are an ugly blot on the landscape; an eyesore, none the less,
which I can view without resentment, since, indirectly, I owe existence
to them and would not have missed the enjoyment of this life for
anything, nor would I exchange it even now for that of any other
creature on earth.
The paternal grandfather who built and worked them almost to the day of
his death must have been a man of uncommon grit. I know little about
him. A mass of family documents full of the requisite information, as
well as other papers interesting to myself, were lost in one of those
accidents which occur to everybody now and then; a trunk was broken open
on a journey, the clothes stolen and these letters and things scattered
or thrown away by the thieves. Small comfort to receive insurance money
for the clothes! I would have preferred the papers which are now lost
for ever.
I cannot even say when this business was founded. It may have been in
the late thirties, for he died October, 1870, aged sixty-six, at
Banchory, N. B., where he ought to have died, and there lies entombed in
our vault. His object in thus exiling himself and family for a whole
lifetime was to earn enough money to pay back some heavy mortgages on
his ancestral estate, for which he had an idolatrous affection. This
much I happen to know: that in 1856 already, by working these mills, he
was able to repay £36,000 towards the cost of them, and £24,000 towards
redeeming the mortgages. So he set himself to his grim task; and a grim
task it must have been to master the immense technical and commercial
details of such an undertaking, and all in a foreign language; to import
(among other little difficulties) every scrap of machinery from
Lancashire with no railway nearer, I fancy, than Zurich. He worked with
single aim and lived to reap his reward, although the losses due to the
American Civil War, and the Austro-German one, were such that the whole
enterprise nearly came to grief.[7]
His portrait in old age, engraved from a photograph on one of those
shell-cameos which used to be fashionable, wears an air of clean-cut,
thoughtful determination. They told me of his effective way with
beggars. “Work!” he would say, whenever one of them turned up with his
usual tale of misery. “Work! I also work.” The other, naturally enough,
professed himself quite unable to find any work. Whereupon, to the
beggar’s intense disgust, he promptly found it for him. These gentlemen
learnt to avoid our house in his day. I also gathered that his favorite
ode of Horace was “Integer vitæ.” That sounds characteristic. My own
fancy leans towards the Lady of Antium....
His eldest son carried on the business, and to him, with his love of
mountaineering and multiple other activities, it must have been irksome
in the extreme to sit in that office. He also stuck it out, but died
young and, from all accounts, the best-loved man in the province,
despite his Lutheran faith. Having occasion, during my last visit to
Bregenz, to mention my name to an unknown shopkeeper who was to send me
a parcel, I was pleased to hear him say “Your name, dear sir, is eternal
in this country.” It is doubtless gratifying to find yourself in a
district where your family is held in honor. One must try, however, not
to take these things too melodramatically. We live but once; we owe
nothing to posterity; and a man’s own happiness counts before that of
any one else. My father’s tastes happen to have lain in a direction
which commended him to his fellows. Had his nature driven him along
lines that failed to secure their sympathy, or even their approval, I
should have been the last to complain. The world is wide! Instead of
coming here, one would have gone somewhere else.
BLUMENEGG
_Blumenegg_