road, a little incident was recalled to my mind by the sight of a
certain wayside shrine which stands here. We were once passing along, as
children, when we noticed that its door had been left open and a heap of
coppers laid inside by some pious person or persons for the benefit of
any poor travelers who might care to help themselves. I imagine it was
my sister’s idea. She took a handful, and persuaded me to take one too.
Nobody saw us; the governess was walking on ahead. She behaved even more
flagrantly on another occasion when a plateful of money was being held
aloft, for the same charitable purpose, among a congregation pouring out
of some church. She reached up and swiftly grabbed a number of coins;
perhaps I followed her example. Now what could we children want with
money? The delicacies of the village were only three: sugar-candy in
crystals, dried figs strung together, and black sticks of licorice
(_vulgo_ “Bährendreck”) and we had exhausted their charm long, long ago,
in the days of the old Anna.
This nurse it was, by the way, who first took me to the hamlet of
Thüringerberg, where I now found myself walking with Mr. R. who had
induced me, for reasons which became apparent later on, to abandon the
main road in favor of one that leads due west. It shows how little she
then knew the country--she was a Tyrolese, not a native--that, after
dragging me up here, aged three or four, she had to enquire the name of
the place. I came home with a wonderful tale of having been to
Thüringerberg, which was not believed; old Anna, afterwards, got it hot
for making me walk too far. Up there, meanwhile, the kindly priest
invited us to his house to rest; he gave us coffee and honey, and even
offered me a pinch of his snuff--the first of several I have since
taken.
Two roads descend from Thüringerberg in the direction of the distant
Satteins--the convenient new one down below, and the ancient track on
the higher level. Of course we chose the latter, that old, grass-grown,
abandoned path. Memories lurk about these forsaken places; and memories
have become my hobby during the last week or so. This particular track
reminds me of sundry strolls down here ages ago with a Sempill cousin,
the jovial Jumbo, who turned up in this country at odd intervals to our
infinite delight. He was so utterly different from all the other people
who arrived from those remote regions! The peasants adored him; he could
hold long conversations with them in their own language by imitating the
sound of their voices, which amused them mightily; he knew not a word of
German. He used to sit for hours in their orchards, drinking wine or
playing with the babies; when any one greeted him on the road with the
usual “Grüass Gott,” he would reply “Great Scot”; if they said “Gueta
Tag,” he said “Good dog.” What a relief was Jumbo, after those legions
of unspeakable grand-aunts! They never left us alone; they were always
pulling us about, as if we had no nurses or governesses of our own, to
teach us how to behave. Always interfering! You mustn’t eat this; you
mustn’t do that; little girls don’t climb trees; little boys ought to
know that cows are not made to be ridden about on; never jump down till
the carriage stops; you know what happened to Don’t Care? He was hanged;
have you said your prayers? Children should be seen and not heard; a
fourth helping? Now don’t do yourself any violence, dear; it’s long past
bed-time--how we loathed the entire clan! Nearly everything, in fact,
that hailed from Scotland was fraught with terrors.
But the terror of terrors was our paternal grandmother. If the others of
that family resembled her, their descendants are to be pitied. And to
think that she may have been the best of all of them! I confess that,
looking over some photographs at this distance of time, I fail to see
anything terrible in her appearance; here she is, for instance, at
Llandudno, looking straight at you, grave and serene, with the long
upper lip peculiar to her family and a high forehead; rather a handsome
old woman, and one who evidently knows her mind. That may well be.
Handsome or not, she spanked me as an infant, before I could walk--so
much I remember clearly; what I cannot clearly remember is, whether she
had any plausible reason for doing it. Later on, she punished us in the
stern judicial manner which was agreeable to the taste of her generation
and which is precisely the one way children should never be punished.
Wonderful tales were told us of her methods of subduing her only
daughter, who died in youth--perhaps from the effects of it--and lies
buried under an elaborately inscribed tombstone in the Protestant
cemetery at Rome. No doubt she meant to do right; it is an old pretext
for doing wrong. Children should be “broken”: that was her theory.
She never broke me. Something else happened one day, during the
Christmas holidays in England. I was in my twelfth year, all alone,
perfectly comfortable and perfectly well, delighted to have escaped for
a season out of some absurd school, and reading the “Mysteries of
Udolpho” in the library when the old thing entered with an all-too
familiar silver tray, bearing the abominable mixture known as “Gregory’s
Powder.” It was her universal remedy for every complaint of mine, from a
sprained ankle to a toothache, the principle being that, whatever might
be amiss, Gregory’s Powder, by virtue of its villainous taste alone,
must inevitably do good, if not as a medical preparation, then as an
incitement to humility and obedience. This filthy poison I had hitherto
swallowed like a lamb; and been made duly ill in consequence. On that
particular occasion, however, the sight of the tray stirred me as never
before; all the accumulated bile of similar torments in the past surged
up; it was my first experience of “seeing red.” Guided by a righteous
demon of revolt, I seized a stick which stood in a corner at my
elbow--an elaborate concern of hippopotamus-hide with carved ivory top,
which some good-for-nothing uncle had brought from Natal--and therewith
knocked the tray out of her hand and then went for her with such a dash
that she fled out of the room. It happened in the twinkling of an eye. I
knew not how the thing was done; it was plain, now, what people meant
when they said that So-and-so was “not responsible for his actions.” On
mature deliberation I decided, in the very words of the old lady, that
_all was for the best_. There was an end of Gregory’s Powder. That is
the way to treat grandmothers of this variety. She dared not tackle me;
she was too old and I too tough, being then in the habit of winning most
of the gymnastic prizes at school. As always before, she had tried to
impose upon me by sheer strength of personality, and suddenly, for the
first time, found herself confronted by a new and persuasive
argument--brute force.
Well! To attack your grandmother with a walking-stick is not polite. On
the other hard, there is no reason why boys should be needlessly
tortured; they suffer quite enough, as it is. If I had not acted as I
did, she would have continued to poison me with the stuff to the end of
her long life. Why suffer, when you can avoid it? And there I leave this
ethical problem. For the rest, in her heart of hearts, she was perhaps
not quite so “surprised and grieved” (a favorite phrase of hers, like “I
sincerely hope and trust”) as she professed to be; so strong was her
family sense that she may well have been charmed with this premature
exhibition of ancestral savagery; maybe she was anxiously waiting for it
to appear, and chose Gregory’s Powder as a kind of test or provocative.
If so, it worked. One thing is certain: referring to the episode, she
told another of those old women, who repeated it to me long afterwards,
that I was plainly the son of my father--good news, so far as it
went....
Phantoms!
Meanwhile we wandered along that ancient track towards the sunset, with
the spacious Ill valley at our feet, and on its further side, the
Rhætikon peaks which had grown more imposing in proportion as we
ourselves had mounted upwards. On these slopes they were gathering the
cherries with ladders; diminutive fruit on enormous trees. Here are also
wild maples, those pleasant Alpine growths that clamber down from their
homes overhead and indulge in a tasteful habit of clothing trunk and
branches in a vesture of dusky green moss. The wood is so white that it
is used--the nearest approach to ivory--for fashioning the sculptured
images of the Crucified which one sees everywhere. The fairest maple in
the whole district is that which forms a landmark on the path between
Raggal and Ludescherberg; you can see it from the other side of the
Walserthal, three miles off.
Presently we found ourselves in one of those narrow dells common
hereabouts, dells that run parallel to the main valley, east and west;
they may be due to ice-action in the past. It is curious, in such
places, to observe how the plants select their aspect according to
whether they relish sunshine or not; there are two different floras
growing within twenty yards of each other. Here, on our left, gushes out
a noble spring; it accompanies us, forming a succession of flowery
marshes. They are still there--the bulrushes in the last of its
hill-girdled swamps; this is one of the three places where bulrushes can
be found. Thereafter you pass that peasant’s house, solitary and
prosperous--what winter landscapes must be visible from its
windows!--and enter the wood. Our path, once well trodden, is now hard
to follow. It begins to lose itself----
Ah, and the old woman’s mania against tobacco; I had nearly forgotten
this. It was sincere, like all else in her nature, yet incredible in
its intensity. Somewhere about the fifties she ordered a pair of boots
from the local man, under the condition that he was not to smoke while
making them. They arrived. “That man has smoked!” she declared, and
refused to accept them; she knew from their smell that he had broken his
agreement (of course he had). This legend was still current here in the
nineties. Up in Scotland, despite the visitors, she never allowed a
smoking-room to be built. We were not permitted to smoke even in the
grounds. A military cousin, a distinguished man, was told that if he
wished to smoke after dinner he could walk to the end of the drive, and
indulge his low tastes on the main road. My sister used to shoulder her
rod and go “fly-fishing” at the most improbable hours and seasons of the
year, solely in order to be able to enjoy her cigarette in peace.
She expired in grand style, up there. We were chamois-shooting at Lech,
not far from here,[14] when a message came to the effect that she was
at the point of death. We packed up and rushed to the Highlands, losing
a whole day at Calais because the boats could not run on account of a
storm. On our arrival, the doctor said, “She ought to have been dead
four days ago.” None the less, she had made up her mind not to depart
till everything was in order. She went through her will, clause by
clause. Was there any objection to this or that? Had she done the right
thing by So-and-so? Or had she perhaps forgotten anything? It was all in
perfect order, we assured her. She gave us a fine old-fashioned
blessing, and was dead a few hours later....
And now we were threading our way through a veritable tangle, a
branch-charmed tangle, and the light overhead grew dimmer. A golden
suspense was brooding over the forest. How sweet, how _intimate_, are
these hours of late afternoon under the trees, when all is voiceless and
drowned in mellow radiance; how they conjure up sensations of
other-where, and cleanse the miry places of the mind!
A few years hence, and every trace of this old path will have vanished.
It ended, for us, in a kind of gulley; the gulley ended in the new road
lower down. And where did the new road end?
Where else, but at Tiefis?
* * * * *
The mention of Llandudno reminds me that I may have been unfair to that
old grandmother. For I knew full well that she detested places like
Llandudno or Clifton or Cheltenham, and yet she would take us there for
the Easter holidays at our own request, in order that we might gratify a
taste for fossils; which is surely to her credit. Not every grandmother
would have made such a sacrifice for two objectionable boys. As a
set-off to this, however, I must record that she used to make me play
Wagner to her, much against my will--an inexplicably modern trait of
hers, this love of Wagner, and all the more singular since he, at that
time, was accounted a dangerous lunatic. (Perhaps she only asked me to
play because at such moments, at least, I could not be up to any other
devilry.) She also insisted on our both reading “Marmion” aloud; partly
because it was her dear dead husband’s favorite poem, and partly on
account of a family legend to the effect that certain of its cantos were
composed on our property. Can that have improved its flavor?
“Marmion” we thought dreadful rot. To revenge ourselves, we made a farce
of these recitals, by going through the lines in a toneless voice and
laying stress not where the poet and common sense meant it to lie, but
on that precise syllable where, by the structure of the verse, it came
to lie; let any one read a page of “Marmion” according to this recipe,
and note the rich and unforeseen results! It was only by a miracle that
we managed to keep our countenance; or rather, not by a miracle at all,
but by a systematic education in the art of “not exploding.” The old
lady writhed and squirmed under this outrage upon her divine Sir Walter,
but said never a word; gulping down her discomfort with the same air of
dour determination with which, at dinner, and solely to set us a good
example, she gulped down indigestible fragments of plum-pudding,
roly-poly and other hyperborean horrors glistening with suet, although
well aware that such things are not fit for human consumption. Of course
we were obliged to gulp them down too, with this difference, that she
had Madeira and port to wash the taste out of her mouth, while we only
got claret, which made it worse. What a life!
RAIN
_Rain_
Rain once more....
“Now this is the _comble_,” said Mr. R. this morning, entering my room
with a pair of boots in his hand.
“What’s up?”
“Look!”
They had inserted new laces, without having been asked to do anything of
the kind.
Every day, and all day long, similar little experiences are thrust upon
him; he has lived in a state of chronic amazement since his arrival.
That is not surprising. His acquaintance with the life of taverns has
been confined to those of Italy and of France; the unpunctuality and
brawling of the one, the miserliness and thinly veiled insolence of the
other--the general discomfort of both. “Nobody will believe me,” he
says, “when I tell them how one lives in these villages. Fortunately I
have my diary.”
Our bill of fare has varied with every meal; only once were they obliged
to apologize for giving us the same meat, venison, on two days running,
and even then it was prepared differently. With the exception of
_Hasenpfeffer_--close season for hares till 1st of September--we have
gone through that entire list of local delicacies, and thereto added
several more.
These people really make one feel at home. There is an all-pervading
sense of peace and plenty, of comfort, in a word; not discomfort.
Everything is in order, and the place so clean that you could dine on
the floors. The household works like a well-oiled machine--if you can
imagine a machine that wears throughout its parts a perennial smile.
Kindliness is the tone of this house; of the whole village; of all these
villages. It does one good to live among such folk. It is doing Mr. R.
more good than he imagines. He begins to realize what is hard to realize
in Mediterranean countries: that men can be affable and ample, and yet
nowise simpletons. Match-boxes given away gratis; beefsteaks that you
cannot possibly finish; four vegetables to every course of meat;
electric lights burning night and day; fresh towels all the time; apples
and pears thrown to the pigs; mountains of butter and lakes of honey for
breakfast--in fact, a system of wanton _gaspillage_ that would send a
French house-wife into epileptics. All this, I tell him, is the merest
shadow of what was. And among the numerous visitors to our inn there is
never a harsh word; no sullenness, no raised voices, no complaints. We
hear the house door being shut down below, every night, amid cheery talk
and laughter.
Yet three out of five village taverns are closed--disastrous symptom,
among so convivial a people. The depreciation of the currency.... There
are men, respectable men, who have not tasted a drop of wine for the
last year, which is a shameful state of affairs. Only factory hands and
such-like can afford to pay the present price of 8000 kronen for half a
liter. Less than that sum, namely 7000, was what our tailor gave for his
two-storied house with a garden and field. We watched a pig-auction the
other day (where else, but at Tiefis?). A young one, weighing about
seventy pounds, went for 610,000 kronen. In olden days, they would have
made you a present of him.
The peasants are particularly hard hit this year. Our valley has always
been celebrated for its fertility, the result of age-long tillage and
manuring, and whoever walks to-day about those cultivated fields,
ignorant of their normal condition, might think that these crops of hay,
wheat, maize, tobacco (every one may plant his own tobacco; the trouble
begins, when you try to make it smokable), beans, hemp, flax, potatoes,
cabbage, beetroot, poppies, pumpkins and what not, look sufficiently
thriving. That is a mistake. The fruit-harvest promises well; these
fields are in a bad way. The _Engerlinge_, the larvæ of the cockchafer,
have been unusually active of late. This miserable worm which lives
underground, gnawing away the roots, had hitherto been kept in its place
by the moles. But during the war and afterwards moles were destroyed as
never before, for the sake of their skins. A mole eats one and a half
times its own weight every day; he prefers the _Engerlinge_ to all other
food. So the larvæ now thrive, because the war was responsible for the
death of the moles. One result of the war, so far as this little
economic byway is concerned.
Other results. A favorite method of preventing damage by _Engerlinge_ is
to kill the cockchafer itself. They used to be murdered by myriads,
either while flying about at night, or in the early morning when they
cling, weary and drunk with dew, to the trees. Boys would do this for a
trifling sum, or for the fun of the thing. They are too busy nowadays;
they must do the work of those who were killed. And of those who have
free time on their hands, the decent ones refuse the job because they
are ashamed to ask the prices now ruling (and their fathers will not let
them take less); the others demand so much that the peasant cannot pay
them. Our village elders have done their best to face the mischief. They
have decided that every land-owner must bring in a certain measure of
cockchafers or deposit a certain sum of money; whoever collects more
than this stipulated measure, is paid extra out of the sum deposited by
the others; whoever fails to come up to the standard, is fined in
proportion. The provincial government has also forbidden the destruction
of moles, and to-day’s paper, now lying before me, contains an eloquent
article entitled “Spare the moles!”
It is too late. The village of Bratz (=_pratum_), for example, is so
sorely tried by the plague of these larvæ that a rich peasant owning,
let us say, six cows, will not be able to cut enough fodder to keep them
alive through the winter; his crop of hay is too impoverished. What
shall he do? He is in the dilemma of seeing a couple of his beasts
perish from starvation, or of selling them at their present value,
although fully aware that by the time spring comes round and fodder is
again plentiful, he will not be able, with the same amount of money, to
purchase even a quarter of a cow to eat his grass; so rapid is the
depreciation of the currency.
In this and other matters the peasantry, the backbone of the province,
is being systematically ruined. The blow was undeserved. They were
dragged into this tragic farce through no fault of their own, and are
now paying for the folly of others. True, they revenge themselves on the
rich factory hands and bureaucrats; they charge fantastic prices for
milk and other agricultural products. The others retaliate by burning
their hay-huts. There was a good deal of incendiarism in the Bludenz
district last winter. Mutual ill-will is the result. And their so-called
betters, the _rentiers_ who, after a life of drudgery in office or
elsewhere, laid aside sufficient money to build themselves a house
wherein to end their days, are in still more pitiable plight. Such is
the case of an old gentleman of my acquaintance at Bludenz, who had
worked from the age of fourteen till after seventy, and had been able to
acquire what seemed a considerable fortune. What are even a million
kronen to-day? And how is he to earn more, at the age of eighty-six?
Industrial workmen, no doubt, are doing uncommonly well; that English
eight hours’ nonsense fosters their pretensions, and as often as they
consider their pay insufficient, they go on strike and obtain more. The
bureaucrats also thrive in a lesser degree. There is an employee to
every five men in this country; a scandalous plethora, but who would not
be an employee--one of the few careers whereby a native, under existing
circumstances, may hope to escape starvation? So do we foreigners. For
apartments, lighting, laundry, repairs to clothes and boots, food which
for excellence and variety would be unprocurable, pay what you please,
in any English village five times the size of this one, for as much
wine, beer, _schnapps_ and cider as we can hold we pay a sum which
works out, for both together, at three shillings a day. This includes an
additional 10 per cent on the total, which I insist upon paying for
service, though it cost some little argument before I could make them
accept it. Such are the results of the “Valuta,” so far as Englishmen
are concerned.
Valuta: that is one of three words which you may now for the first time
hear repeated from mouth to mouth. The other two are “Anschluss” and
“Miliz.” These matters have been adequately discussed in our own Press;
I will only say, as regards the last of them, that no government,
however wise and well-intentioned, can enforce its wishes if you take
away its means of doing so: a militia. One does not expect high-priced
inter-allied experts to be equipped with either sympathy or imagination;
that would be asking too much. They should, at least, possess a little
common sense and knowledge of history. Western Europe, scared to death
of bolshevism in Russia, is busily engaged in manufacturing it
elsewhere; and if this once gentlemanly province now exhales, as does
the rest of the country, a strong reek of communistic fumes, it is our
experts who are to blame. Ah, well! When the broth is boiling, the scum
invariably rises to the top and stays there, until some businesslike
_chef_ comes along, to cream off this filthy product and throw it down
the drain.
Valuta: wondrous are its workings. There is hardly an ounce of butter
procurable in Bludenz, which is enclosed in grazing grounds. Where has
it all gone? Over the mountains, into Switzerland. Valuta! Your Austrian
smuggler is delighted; he receives five times the price he would get if
he sold the stuff in his own country, and in Swiss money too, which may
have doubled in worth by the time he reaches home again. Your Swiss
buyer is delighted; he pays less than half the price he would have to
pay for his own product. The local poor suffer, meanwhile, especially
the children; for the nutritive value of butter, in the shape of
_Schmalz_, is great, and this condiment used to figure in all their
principal dishes, and would be doubly needful now that meat is quite
beyond their reach. Altogether, these children--a shadow seems to have
passed over them, witnessing the distresses of their parents. They are
paler than they used to be, and graver of mien; far too many are
insufficiently clad and unshod. An Englishman might think ten shillings
a reasonable price for a pair of sound children’s boots; the native
cannot afford 110,000 kronen, a sum for which formerly he could have
bought half a village. Even the post-boy, a lively youngster who happens
to be a grandson of that old gardener of ours, presents himself up here
every morning without shoes or stockings. He has none.