which bids us “Spare the moles!” and observe that it contains, among its
advertisements, an offer by a furrier of two hundred kronen for each
moleskin brought to him. This does not sound as if the provincial
government’s decree were being enforced very drastically. The same
gentleman is ready to pay exactly a thousand times as much for the skin
of pine martens, which can be worth little enough at this warm season of
the year. The animal is of the greatest scarcity in our
neighborhood.[15]
And here is a final, thrilling item. The midwives of Feldkirch,
assembled in conclave, have regretfully decided that the charges for
attendance are to be doubled in future.
Midwives, I suspect, are not the only professional ladies who have
lately been obliged to raise their tariff.
Towards nightfall, a gleam of sunshine after the rain. Out for a stroll,
after dinner....
They have anointed our boots with badger’s fat, in case we traverse any
wet fields. We are only going along the main road towards Ludesch. That
bench on the old Lutz embankment--that bench invariably occupied by a
poor hump-backed woman reading--is sure to be empty at this hour.
It is. We sit down to smoke under the dripping firs, and I go
ghost-hunting all alone, in the dark. The memories that are crowded into
these few hundred yards! They spring up at my feet, from the damp forest
earth. There was once a battle on this site, a sanguinary battle between
two rival gypsy bands who used it for their camping ground and
accidentally arrived both on the same evening; each claimed it for his
own, and several men were killed before the matter was decided; our
people were talking about the fray years afterwards. Further on, past
the bridge, I murdered the first snake of many and found my first piece
of phosphorescent wood. Here, too, stands the rifle-range which is
connected with one of six clear memories of my father; he used to come
out of the place adorned with paper decorations for his marksmanship and
they even hung up a framed diploma of honor to him; the building was
sacked two years ago by some local revolutionaries who disapproved of
shooting in every form and carried off the diploma, but forgot to
efface its mark on the wall where it had hung for fifty years.
Nearly opposite to where we are sitting is a deep incline of grass--I
take it to be the bank of the prehistoric Lutz; my father once made me
rush up and down this terrific slope in preparation, no doubt, for
mountaineering. The quarry close by, in which one hunted vainly for
crystals (it is Eocene, and has nothing but spar) is still there, but
those mysterious black hillocks by the roadside with their unforgettable
smell, where the charcoal-burners plied their trade, are gone and a
thriving house and orchard have stepped into their place. The Madonna
shrine, further on, is quite unchanged; here the old Anna used to lift
me up to gaze at the Mother of God standing, as She does to this day,
upon an earth girt about by the green Serpent of Evil. At the back of
our bench there used to be a deep, square hole in the ground. My sister
and I once informed a newly arrived German governess that it was a
disused elephant trap. She said nothing but, on returning home,
complained bitterly of our untruthful habits. That plantation of young
trees across the road was once a bare, thistle-strewn heath, a _Haide_,
the sole locality where, year after year, one could catch white
admirals. So there were just two well-known places where you might rely
upon a scarlet tiger, and neither more nor less than three, where there
was a chance of seeing, though probably not of catching, a
_Trauermantel_ (Camberwell beauty). Butterflies were dropped, when
stones began.
And all this time Mr. R. has had nothing whatever to say. He has grown
rather silent of late, his superciliousness begins to evaporate: that
augurs well! My theory works--I have observed it for some time past; my
theory of the benign influence of woodland scenery upon the character of
youth. How much more inspiring to live in such a pastoral and sylvan
environment than on the pavements of a town! Instead of troubling about
theaters and girls, his mind may well be occupied with some small
literary or social problem that befits his age; why Racine went back to
antiquity for the subjects of his tragedies, or whether Ronsard really
deserves all the praises bestowed upon him. That is as it should be! At
last I enquire:
“What have you been dreaming about, this last half hour?”
“Dreaming? Not at all. I have been thinking very seriously.”
“What about?”
“What about? About Goethe’s ‘Hermann and Dorothea.’”
“Ah! I thought so. You are getting on famously. Now, to begin with:
where did you become acquainted with that masterpiece?”
“In a French translation, last Christmas. And I was just thinking how
true it is, what the mother tells Hermann--when he is in love, you
know--you remember?--about the night growing to be the better part of
day----”
“Say no more. You are indulging certain thoughts about Tiefis.”
“Why not? Perfectly proper ones.”
“I might have expected this. Very well. It is a little late to-night,
but I suppose we shall have to go there to-morrow. I only hope you share
Hermann’s exalted sentiments and his purity of heart. Because otherwise,
you understand, I could never be an accomplice to such an affair.”
ANTS
_Ants_
That was a monster of an ant-hill. It was the largest, by far the
largest, I ever saw in this country, and the floor of the forest all
around was twinkling with these priggish insects. Anxious to have some
idea of its true size and anxious, at the same time, not to have any of
the nuisances crawling up my own legs, I made Mr. R. pace its
circumference. It took him _sixteen_ good strides. And there they were,
myriads upon myriads of them, hiving up for their own selfish purpose
those dried fir-needles which, left alone, would have yielded a rich
soil to future generations of men.
I have no use for ants, and cannot regard an ant-heap without yearning
to stamp it flat (those made of earth are not difficult to treat in this
fashion); without regretting that I lack the tongue and tastes of an
anteater. And only in the tropics do you realize what a diabolical pest
they may become with their orderly habits; European ants being mere
amateurs in obnoxiousness. To do everything you are supposed to do, and
nothing else at all; never to make a mistake, or, if you do, to be
invariably punished for it in exact proportion to the offense: can
there be a more contemptible state of affairs? That is why, even as a
boy, I used to foster the independent little fellows called _myrmeleon_
(ant-lion) who built their artful, funnel-shaped traps in the dry sand
out of reach of showers, just where our house-walls touched the ground;
foster them, and visit them periodically, and feed them with these
insufferable communists till they were ready to burst. But oh, to be an
authentic anteater on a Gargantuan scale--omnipresent, insatiable of
appetite--and engulf that entire tribe of automata!
One of my countless grievances against the ant family is that a clever
person, long ago, told me that, in order to have the flesh properly
removed from the skull of any bird or beast, you have only to lay it in
an ant-hill; the insects would do the job to a turn and thank you, into
the bargain, for allowing them to do it; work of this kind, he declared,
was quite a specialty of their department. Accordingly, I once deposited
an extremely valuable relic in the center of a prosperous ant-colony,
expecting to find it ready for me, picked clean, after a due lapse of
time. On arriving to call for my property, however, a fortnight or so
later, I was surprised to find it gone; the methodical socialists had
mislaid it, and I never saw it again. One took such losses to heart in
those days. I therefore went all the way home once more, determined to
get my own job done more conscientiously than theirs, and fetched a rake
wherewith this slovenly establishment was leveled to the ground. But oh,
for a rake that would rake every ant-hill off the face of the earth!
That happened in my bird-killing period, when I used to get up at the
improbable hour of 3:30 a.m. and, putting in my _Rucksack_ some bread
and smoked bacon-fat and a flask of Kirsch, vanish into the wilds,
returning home any time after nightfall or not at all: judge if I saw
some ant-hills! So I roved about, and the first thing I ever murdered,
an hour after receiving that single-barreled gun, was a melancholy brown
owl that blinked at me from its perch below the Bährenloch at Bludenz;
the slaughter of this charming bird was taken as a good omen. Soon came
other guns, and other birds, not all of which shared the fate of the
owl. Never shall I forget a certain pratincole. It was the only one I
have yet seen in this province, a great rarity, and it settled down for
a whole summer season in the reservoir region along the upper Montiola
brook, where it relied upon its disconcerting flight and a trick of
rising from the ground at the one and only spot where you could not
possibly expect it to do so, to mock all my attempts at bringing it
down. I was after it so often that we got to know each other perfectly
well, and never bagged it; thereby proving the truth of the local
proverb “Every day is hunting day, but not every day is catching day.”
Queer experiences one had, too. At the age of fourteen I was once
resting on my homeward way in the woods near Gasünd, dead tired but
uncommonly pleased with myself for having just shot a hazel
grouse--again, the only one I ever saw in the province. There came one
of those flocks of titmice--is not titmouses the correct
English?--accompanied, no doubt, by the inevitable tree-creeper. They
amused themselves in the branches overhead and one of them soon struck
me as unfamiliar; its size and shape and movements were those of a great
tit, but there were unmistakable red feathers on the head and neck. I
watched it hopping from twig to twig, annoyed to think that I had shot
away my last cartridge, and wondering what this rare mountain bird could
be, for I never doubted of its actuality; there it was, before my eyes!
Only later did I learn that no such bird exists. Now had the vision been
brought about by my state of bodily exhaustion? And was the dream-bird
created out of one of those present, or out of nothing at all? Illusion,
or hallucination?
Presently certain regions became famous for certain game; in that larch
wood between Bürs and Bürserberg, for instance, which takes on such
wonderful tints in autumn and which you can enter through a natural arch
called the “Kuhloch,” you might count on crossbills and on a woodpecker
of one kind or another (never on the scarce black one; it haunts the
gloomiest forests). Of the lesser spotted species I shot two off the
same tree at an interval of almost exactly a year--30 December in one
year, and 28 December the next; a circumstance all the more singular, as
I never in my life met with another individual of this bird in the whole
country. Or, if you wanted a great gray shrike, you had only to go,
preferably in winter, to the Scesa-tobel, that devastated tract west of
Bürs which was just then beginning to cover itself with vegetation once
more. Here you might also put up a hare; it was in the Scesa-tobel, by
the purest of accidents, that I once shot a hare in full gallop at a
distance of a hundred yards--a mere speck, he was--with a bullet. I
confessed afterwards to Mattli, who was beating another part of this
torrent, that I had missed him at close quarters with the shot barrel,
and soon regretted having made this confession; there are things one
might well keep to oneself.
Mattli, whatever his real name may have been, was often with me on such
excursions, and I know not how he managed to combine these trips with
his official duties as station-master; for station-master he was, at our
own station, which was then called Strassenhaus. To be sure, one could
take things easier in those days (the building itself was less than half
its present size); so easy, that the man who was employed to guard the
line a quarter of a mile lower down, used to put up, for several
consecutive years, a dummy figure of himself standing upright beside his
cabin in the wood, in order to make the night-train people think he was
at his post, while he went to booze in a tavern at Ludesch. Yet Mattli’s
weakness must have been found out in the end; the last time I saw him,
he was degraded from his high rank and working in some subordinate
capacity at Bludenz station.
Mattli never felt comfortable unless tracking birds; and his tales of
how he shot a great white heron here and a bee-eater there, and
something else somewhere else, were enough to make any one’s mouth
water. He took me in hand, during those lean and hungry years; what the
_Brunnenmacher_ had done towards fostering my instincts for climbing,
Mattli did for the more destructive ones; and a greater contrast was
never seen than between these two early mentors of mine. The
_Brunnenmacher_ was short and fat and bearded and fair-haired and
laughing, like many of them hereabouts; Mattli would have struck you at
the first glance as something apart from his fellows, something
primordial. He towered above the average height, he stooped from sheer
tallness; the very scarecrow of a man, dusky, clean-shaven, sallow of
complexion, with a harassed and hunted look in his eye and a voice that
seemed to come from caverns far away. A lonely, wolfish creature! I
never saw him smile. His rarer birds he sold to Mr. Honstetter, the
taxidermist of Bregenz, who doubtless disposed of them elsewhere and
through whose hands passed nearly every curiosity--lämmergeier, eider
duck, cormorant, griffon vulture and what not--which had been obtained
in the province or even further afield. He once offered me the skull and
horns of a genuine Swiss ibex, and a beaver stuffed by himself which had
been killed on the Elbe on the 10 August, 1886; he wanted 175 Swiss
francs for this last. The only thing I ever bought there was the skin of
an _ibis falcinellus_ shot at Hard on the Lake of Constance; it cost me
two and a half florins.[16]
Bregenz, however, seldom kept me for more than half a day, since I
preferred chasing birds to seeing them stuffed. So I scoured these upper
regions over field and forest and rock, covering immeasurable distances
and never following a path unless obliged to do so, up to the snow-line
and down again, sleeping in hay-huts or remote villages; and judge if I
saw some ant-hills by the way; ant-hills in every possible situation;
the strangest, after all, being those of dry sand, fetched from God
knows where and transported God knows how, and reared-up,
Amsterdam-wise, in the middle of watery marshes.
And that particular one, which has led me into this digression--where
was it?
Where else, but near Tiefis?
For it stands to reason that we went to that village again, after our
nocturnal conversation on the Lutz embankment, in order to visit what
Mr. R. calls “the innkeepress and his beautiful girl.”
There we sat, all four of us, in that spotlessly clean room, and my
companion after consuming his usual horrible mixture--two boiled eggs
and a glass of _saft_ (a strong kind of cider, of greenish
tinge)--straightway opened a fusillade of glances from his flashing
black eyes, to which the “baby,” so far as I could see, was not
insensible.
Her mother, meanwhile, told me what she had heard about the cause of
that outbreak of fire which destroyed nearly all the place in 1866. It
seems that a party were sitting up one night, as is the custom, beside
the dead body of some friend who had expired during the day and, as is
also the custom under these mournful circumstances, began to think of
refreshing themselves with coffee. There was no milk in the house and it
was decided to go into the stable and milk the cow; some straw
accidentally took fire from the candle they carried; this started the
mischief. Several people were burnt to death on that occasion. A second
fire took place in 1868. She said there were only two or three of the
old houses left; one of them bearing the date 1678----
“What is she talking about?” enquired Mr. R.
“About a fire they had here.”
“Can’t you two argue outside? And before you go just tell me the German
for _embrassez-moi_, will you?”
“How can I tell you, with the mother in the room?”
“Then get her out. Talk to her about wine, in the cellar or somewhere.”
“Easier said than done. I think she has intercepted your wireless
symbols. They are visible to the naked eye. One could almost catch them
in a butterfly net.”
“Do you suggest that I was winking, or trying to make eyes?”
“Oh, quite involuntarily.”
For one moment, it looked as if his wish were to be gratified. The
mother rose from her seat and, opening the door, made as though to enter
the kitchen; everything, unfortunately, must have been in order there,
for after two paces in the passage she returned to her place beside me
once more. That fire--yes! Nowadays, of course, the danger of
conflagrations on this scale was growing less and less;[17] the villages
were all lighted by electricity, down to the very stables; those
inflammable wooden houses, too, were being supplanted by brick or stone,
“or the abominable cement,” I added----
Meanwhile, that fusillade proceeded without interruption. The “baby” was
brightening up under its friendly glow, smiling her innocent smile and
sometimes glancing at me as if for confirmation of her pleasure; the
mother talked.
“Is the old one never going? Because, for the matter of that, I can do
it without saying anything at all; and I will. I would give fifty years
of my life.... Just one kiss. I don’t want anything more.”
“I should hope not. Listen to me for a moment,” I went on. “Only a
puritan would see any great harm in young people kissing each other,
with or without their parents’ consent; I feel sure that many happy
marriages would never have come about at all but for some such playful
preliminaries, and your Dorothea, I must say, looks as if she would not
object very violently, provided you did it in a laughing, brotherly
fashion. Why should she? Our girls are far too simple-minded to attach
that sacramental importance to a kiss which the southern ones do.
Observe therefore: I do not pose as a puritan. But please observe also
that I am taking for granted that you are serious, both of you, like
Hermann and Dorothea; otherwise, of course, I could never be a
party----”
“Get her out. Get her out.”
“I should like to help you. But you know perfectly well that my
acquaintance with the art of outwitting or circumventing parents is of
the slightest, and that therefore, quite apart from any moral scruples I
might entertain----”
“Get her out.”
The “old one” seemed to have taken root. She explained that the
fire-brigades, too, were more efficient than they used to be; every
village had its own apparatus, and fixed drill on certain days, and
fines for those who failed to attend, unless they could show good cause
for their absence, such as having to cart their hay in at a moment’s
notice on account of some threatening thunderstorm----
At last Mr. R. remarked:
“It is all your fault, for making yourself so infernally polite to her.
I have often noticed that you cannot leave elderly women alone.”
“Excuse me; I make it my business to be civil with everybody, young or
old. For the rest, I should be inclined to blame your marconigrams,
which are enough to scare any mother. I wonder the poor child is not
roasted.”
“Roasted! Old men are always cynics.”
“Young men are generally fools.”
There was that fire at Nüziders as well; how long ago? Fifty years, was
it? Perhaps a little more. A tremendous blaze, from all accounts; far
worse than Tiefis; and the Fön was blowing so fiercely that sparks were
carried right over the Hanging Stone, they said, while people in Ludesch
and Thüringen were kept busy all night throwing water on their wooden
roofs----
“To oblige me,” interposed Mr. R., “just order another quarter liter of
wine for yourself. I have thought of something; it is my last chance.
She may have to go downstairs to fetch it. If she does, run after her
and say you made a mistake; you want a half. Come back as slowly as
possible. Cough, before you enter the door.”
The half-liter happened to be on the spot. Decidedly, Mr. R. was having
no luck that day. After a very long visit, we bade farewell and walked
up past the Bädle inn, Mr. R. complaining grumpily:
“Now what am I to do?”
“Well, you might review the situation, like Hermann did. If I were in
your place, I should have no objection to being ultimately connected, by
marriage, with the management of a tavern; the position strikes me as
offering sundry advantages over the common lot of man. So think it over
and, when you have made up your mind for good and all, confide in me and
rest assured that I shall be only too delighted to act as interpreter
between you and the parents, provided, of course, that your intentions
are as honorable as they ought to be.”
“Is this the time to make fun of me?”
How sensitive they are, these young people of the guileless variety!
The path we were now following, from the Tiefis “Bädle” to the source of
the Montiola brook and thence to the reservoirs, is one of my special
favorites. The ground rises slowly, and soon you reach a miniature
watershed; whatever drains off behind you flows down westwards and finds
its way into the “ruisseau des écrevisses”; the Montiola drops towards
the east, at first. Before reaching its source you traverse a wood which
Mr. R. immediately christened “la forêt nordique”; he has never seen
such a forest save in pictures, yet it certainly recalls them to me,
each of the firs resembling its fellow and all at their most
uninteresting life-period; this tract must have been cut down and
replanted half a century ago, or less.[18]
On issuing from this “forêt nordique” you are already in the Montiola
basin, a luscious dank valley surrounded by wooded heights. Presently,
on your right, at the foot of the hill, you discern the Montiola
fountain. It is an exuberant spring overhung by firs and beeches; almost
the entire volume of the streamlet rises at this one point, and you will
do well to rest awhile on those mossy stones, as I have done many and
many a time, listening to the glad sound of bubbling waters and letting
your eye roam across the narrow sunlit vale into the woodlands on its
other side. From here the Montiola meanders for half a mile or so, icy
cold and full of trout, through a flowery swamp region towards the
reservoirs, where it takes its theatrical plunge into the village below.