a modern peasant house which I never fail to visit with pleasure and
even respect. It has a suggestive history. Years ago, there was a poor
man who went, with all his family, as a dayworker to the cotton-mill at
Bürs, and there earned what he could. Such people are everlastingly in
want, since for some reason or other all their gains have to be spent
forthwith; this particular family was no exception. The father watched
his children growing thinner and paler from day to day, and stupider and
wastefuller in character, and saw no prospect of any betterment in the
future. “This must end,” he suddenly said, as if an inspiration had come
to him; and, borrowing a little money, bought for next to nothing the
tract of ground here which was then almost a marsh (nobody would
believe, nowadays, that you could pick handfuls of the large single
gentian on the spot), and drained it, and built a small cottage. The
family became agriculturists then and there; not a single member
returned to the factory, not for a day. Every year something new was
done to their domain; a cow purchased, another strip of land bought, a
fresh room added, and so on; with the result that these people, instead
of empty heads and spendthrift habits and weakened constitutions, have
now acquired prosperity and self-respect and decent manners and good
health. Here was one, at least, who refused to be beguiled by the
tomfoolery of industrialism.
We descended to Nüziders down the gentle slope of that deltoid tract
mentioned on p. 148. It had grown late, and my companion was
proportionately hungry after his long walk; he insisted on refreshing
himself at the “Bädle” inn which in olden days used to be an excellent
tavern run by a Swiss--as children, we were once quarantined within its
walls for a week or two, to escape an epidemic of measles, and all in
vain! Immediately overhead are the ruins of Sonnenberg castle, another
of our feudal nests and not the least famous of them; to judge by
prints, it must have been a lordly structure. It was destroyed by fire,
and nothing remains upright save a wall with a couple of trees growing
out of its masonry. The last survivor of this noble family ended in
ignoble fashion; he was murdered by another count whom he had enraged
with some saucy speech.
It was dark and moonless night before Mr. R. could be brought to confess
that he had eaten enough for the time being; none the less, we risked
taking the uphill path which starts at the “Bädle” and traverses the
wooded saddle behind the Hanging Stone, to end near the church of St.
Martin on the other side of that ridge. The now defunct
“beautification-society” of Bludenz did much to improve tracks like this
and those we had followed earlier in the afternoon; their labors were
then lost on us, everything was pitch black before our eyes; there was
no break whatever in the forest, and a man might well go astray here at
a late hour, particularly at a certain point where, instead of turning
to the left, he would be tempted to go straight on, and presently find
himself on the edge of a nasty cliff. The place, however, was still
familiar to me, since it was up here that I used to lie in wait with the
saturnine Mattli, at nightfall ages ago, trying to poach roe-deer. I can
still hear him whispering to me, on such an occasion, in that sepulchral
voice of his:
“You know what happened there?”
“Where?”
“Down in that hollow,” and he pointed with his gun in the direction of a
sunken patch, a dingle, at our feet; it lies in the center of the
saddle.
“What happened?”
“_They killed the last wolf._”
“Oh!”--and I felt a little shudder running down my back.[32]
I was thinking yesterday of Mattli and his last wolf, as we moved
forward through the night, and thereupon began to puzzle over a question
which seems to have puzzled no one else, namely, how it comes about that
this animal is extinct in all the Alpine region, notwithstanding its
enormous area of inaccessible territory, whereas in relatively populous
districts such as the Dordogne it is still common enough to be something
of a nuisance, in spite of ceaseless persecution on the part of man. I
concluded, perhaps wrongly, that the wolf has been extirpated hereabouts
not so much by the human race as by hunger; his natural prey (hares,
wildfowl, etc.) having grown much scarcer of late--scarcer than they are
in Scandinavia or Russia, while sheep and goats and dogs, which he can
still pick up in places like the Vosges or Apennines, are not so easy to
capture during the severe alpine winter, being mostly kept within doors.
If he could go to sleep like the bear, or had the cunning of the fox,
he might have survived to this day.
At last we emerged on the level again and, passing the church of St.
Martin, found ourselves under the lights of Ludesch. Never before had
that village seemed so endlessly long.
* * * * *
Those gray, weather-beaten erratics of which I spoke have been gradually
disappearing from the landscape since my Rosenegg days. They used to be
quite a feature of the countryside. When you crossed our petrifying
stream, for instance, you beheld a horde of them scattered over the
slanting field below the road, and some were of prodigious size, bearing
bushes and little trees on their backs. Not one of those is left; I know
of only a single remaining block which is decorated with timber; you
will never find it, though you may certainly pass a spot, not far from
Jordan castle, where twenty-three can still be counted lying
about--dwarfs, mostly, or half submerged in the earth. The peasant makes
war on these things; he shatters them in pieces with dynamite or splits
them with wedges; for they take up room, they interfere with his mowing
operations, their stone is admirably adapted for building purposes. And
here is another little puzzle. Sometimes, in a thick wood, one may
stumble upon the conscientiously piled-up fragments of what used to be a
block of this kind, all forgotten and overgrown with moss; why go to the
trouble of breaking up this fractious material, and then do nothing with
it? Mystery!
The wall of the road leading up from the Bludesch church of St. Nicholas
towards Tiefis consists largely of the primitive rock of erratics which
formerly strewed the surrounding land; so does that which leaves Tiefis
in the direction of our own village.
Which reminds me of our last, and most disappointing, visit to the
“innkeepress and his beautiful girl.” There was no question, that day,
of the _embrassez-moi_ on which Mr. R. has set his simple heart, for the
baby was absent, having gone for a brief “Sommerfrische”--as if Tiefis
were not fresh enough already--up to Thüringerberg, to stay with a
sister of her mother’s, who comes from there. She would be back in a few
days, we were told. A piece of downright bad luck for him! He seemed to
be really upset; so much so, that I had to promise we should return
again soon. Then he suddenly recalled my undertaking to show him over
the Valduna asylum; it would be an agreeable diversion and fill up the
time; we could run down to Bregenz too, as he had never seen a great
inland water like the Lake of Constance.
My passion for idiots having waned of late, I was hoping he had
forgotten about Valduna. But no. He may forget the past participle of
every one of our irregular verbs; the prospect of an exhibition of three
or four dozen lunatics is the kind of thing he can be trusted to
remember. So be it. After all, there is no harm in going there; no harm
whatever. The sight of those poor wretches may medicine his youthful
bumptiousness and make him more contented with his own lot in life
which, once a week or so, gives occasion for some ludicrously savage
outburst.
VALDUNA
_Valduna_
Valduna was a surfeit of idiots. Mr. R. waxed grave; he has gained, I
think, a definite acquisition of humanity. That is as it should be. Such
sights of anguish are a tonic for the soul; they make us serious about
things that are worth being serious about; they deepen and broaden our
sympathies.
The cheery doctor became still more cheery on hearing my name--he is a
local alpinist--and did not omit a single patient save one or two of the
women who, presumably, were taking sun-baths in _impuris naturalibus_,
as was also one of the males, a robust and pretty boy of sixteen; he had
a clouded, far-away look, and could not be induced to utter a word. We
saw them all; the unclean patients, the unquiet patients, as well as the
simple lunatics, sad or glad. There are no violent ones here just now,
but some of those who suffered from hallucinations of hearing were
sufficiently abusive.
“Hello, Madam,” said the doctor to one of the ladies, “what may you be
doing here? I don’t seem to have seen your face before.”
“I’ve come to visit a poor patient. Didn’t they announce my name? How
unpardonably stupid of them! But I shall have to be leaving in about
half an hour. So good-by, doctor, in case we don’t meet again.”
Quite mad!
There was a poor old fellow in bed, on the brink of G. P. I. He
fascinated Mr. R., casting a hot, delirious glance upon him and pouring
out a flood of turbid megalomania.
“What is he telling me? What? What’s that? Translate, translate!”
Translating was out of the question. The speech contained not a shred of
coherence; nothing but fragmentary pictures, flashing up and swiftly
engulfed again; his brain was in combustion. Moreover, the patient would
have had ten words out of his mouth to every one of mine.
We visited the other establishment as well, a non-official, charitable
one. The director is a priest, native of this province, and one who
knows it well. He told me an interesting thing. We were speaking of the
former wine-production here, and I said it was doubtless the Arlberg
tunnel (I went through with the first train) which had caused the local
plantation of vineyards to cease, or at least to diminish to such an
extent that, for example, of the vineyards once clothing the hillsides
of my particular village--our family, too, had its own--there was only
a single one left; that belonging to the Prior of St. Gerold. And it was
the same with the rest of the province; the reason being, of course,
that the Arlberg railway had immensely reduced the price of wine from
Lower Austria or South Tyrol, which used formerly to be imported by
carrier, at great expense, over the Arlberg pass. Why cultivate bad
wine, when you can buy a better quality for the same money?
The tunnel might have done something, he agreed, and so might the modern
rise of industrialism hereabouts which tempted men from the fields into
the factories; but the real reason was the change of climate. It had
grown not colder, but damper. He was fond of wine; he had paid
particular attention to this matter all his life; there could be no
doubt about it. Feldkirch was a case in point. All its slopes were
covered with vineyards not long ago; the Feldkirchers had grown so
attached to their home product that they preferred it to anything from
abroad. There was now not a vine left at Feldkirch. The grapes refused
to ripen properly there, as they still did in more favored localities
like Sulz-Röthis.[33]
Thereafter we took the train to Bregenz. Hardly were we seated in our
carriage before Mr. R. began:
“Now I want to know exactly what he said. Please repeat it.”
“We were talking about the former production of wine in this province.
He maintains that owing to recent climatic changes----”
“Not your old man! My old man.”
Could anybody have remembered that rigmarole? I had to invent another
one, at the end of which he said:
“So that was it? How sad, and how suggestive. The ravings of a mind
diseased. Poor man! I must have that all down, word for word, in my
diary....”
Despite Adelaide Procter’s sprightly verses and its own illustrious
ancestry, Bregenz remains a repulsive little town on the shore of its
dead lake; and associated in my mind with infantile earaches and
spankings. I went there not for fun, but for a set purpose; firstly, to
consult the Curator of the new Museum, who was described as a
prodigiously amiable person, as to what natural curiosities, if any, had
lately been discovered in our upland regions, to re-inspect a picture, a
sugary-watery Ganymede attributed to Angelika Kauffmann, left to this
institution by my sister’s will, a Roman votive stone found on my
maternal grandfather’s estate and other objects here deposited by
members of my family, and to see whether his library contained any
unknown works by old Theodor (or Thomas) Bruhin; secondly, to apply for
the same object to that venerable convent-school of Mehrerau, where some
homeward-bound Pope expired long ago and where, according to one of
Bruhin’s pamphlets, he was “Professor” and may well have left some
documentary traces; thirdly, to visit the “Archiv” which contains a
goodly collection of books, old and new, dealing with this province, and
therefore, possibly, something of my father’s, and also to refresh my
memory in the matter of local dialects, place-names and so forth, and
inspect early prints of places like Jagdberg, Blumenegg and
Jordan-schloss; lastly, to present myself at the offices of the Alpine
Club in order to go through the files of their “Mitteilungen” and make a
list of my father’s contributions to that journal, and see whether it
contains some “Nachruf” of him, some obituary notice, as is likely
enough, seeing that so tragic an accident to a conspicuous member can
hardly have been left unrecorded.
A reasonable program.
I did none of these things; no, not one. Zeal for such scholarly
investigations seems to be abating; or can it have been the weather? It
happened to be cloudless. Much pleasanter, bathing in the lake and
climbing up, towards evening, to admire the view from St. Gebhard’s
chapel.
We managed to go, none the less, to the Protestant cemetery which lies
on the site of the _thermae_ of old Brigantium, and examined the graves
of no less than ten deceased relatives. Here lies, among the rest, that
maternal grandfather who was responsible for the spankings aforesaid.
His tombstone recounts his glories, and I do not believe in all of them;
he doubtless had the memorial engraved half a century before his death,
in order that posterity should make no mistake as to his merits while
alive. This old feudal monster never did a stroke of work in his endless
life. He was a braggart of the first water, with gray mustache that
looked freshly waxed and curled--quite _à la_ Münchhausen--at whatever
hour of the day you might meet him; he radiated good health, and seemed
everlastingly to have stepped that very moment out of a hot bath and the
hands of a conscientious valet; he had a pink baby-complexion, and the
candid eyes of the born liar. He spanked me as often as I came here in
childhood, even as he had spanked his only son who died in
youth--perhaps from the effects of it. Only once did I score off him
during this earlier period. It was his unvarying habit to begin
breakfast--a huge cup of a certain kind of chocolate, specially imported
from Paris, for himself; tea or coffee for all the rest, and be damned
to them--with a boiled egg. One morning of All Fool’s Day I slipped down
just before the others, devoured his egg, and turned the hollow shell
upside down in its cup. On taking his seat, he had his customary whack
at the seemingly sound egg: empty! He glowered round the table at a
cluster of trembling daughters. At last he caught my eye and grunted:
“H’m. First of April, I presume. H’m. Not bad for a kid. H’m. Let me
advise you to try that on somebody else, next year. H’m.”
Even in later times, he continued to annoy me furiously by calling me a
beetle-collector. This is how he talked:
“At seventeen, my lad, I was already commanding a fortress in Hungary.
And here you are, catching cockroaches. Then we went to Greece with King
Otho and ah! the lovely years we had there; the best of all my life! I
was the first person to make excavations on the Acropolis of Athens, if
you happen to have heard of such a place. Just make a note of that,
young fellow. Meanwhile, here you are, hunting bugs and pinning labels
to them. Afterwards--yes, Windsor! When I was aide-de-camp to your
Prince Consort, he confessed that he could never have handled Victoria
the way he did, unless I had told him (lowering his voice) some of my
own experiences with capricious females of that class. _And here you
are_----”
A fragment of the Greek yarn was true. He was there for long under Otho,
roving about with his soldiers, and that forlorn and devastated country,
as it then was, made an indelible impression on him. Not Odysseus
himself could have been more homesick for Greece than he was. He spoke
of it in tones of wistful yearning, as of a lost Paradise--the identical
tones that I have since discovered, to my surprise, in the writings of a
French contemporary, Edgar Quinet.[34] Never was he so attractive,
during these final years of his life, as when he sat all alone at the
piano in the twilight hour before the lamps were brought in, crooning
the tender Greek folk-songs of his youth to a soft, self-invented
accompaniment. At such moments, he was transported; he had entered into
a fairyland of which he alone possessed the key. You might have taken
him for an angel. Indeed, his voice was the best part of him at all
times. Even when he ramped and raved, it never lost its exquisite
sweetness of timbre; his very curses sounded like a ripple of celestial
laughter. He also painted sunny landscapes in oil, and composed an
amusing valse or two. Such things went well with his exterior childlike
equipment. Primeval ferocity was lurking underneath.
True to his freebooter instincts, he had perched himself here, at
Bregenz, on a height where he could not be overlooked by any one and
whence he obtained an unimpeded view of half the province and lake. The
place boasted of a “flag-tower” from which five countries were visible
(Austria, Bavaria, Wurtemberg, Baden and Switzerland), and he contrived,
somehow or other, to give a mediæval smack of discord and rapine to its
inner regions. Here were bleak stone passages, cold as an ice-cellar in
winter, and hung with matchlocks and lances; gloomy Gothic wardrobes
filling up their ends. The habitable part was full of spoils plundered,
without a doubt, from the rich burghers down below; a haphazard
collection of Persian carpets, harmoniums, lacquer tables, Tiepolo
portraits, glittering chandeliers, marbles: it all wore an authentic air
of loot. Somber paneling, relieved by armorial designs, covered the
walls and ceilings and made the rooms uncommonly dusky.
And here he sat for years and years, terrorizing his family, all
females, into fits. People used to wonder how he managed to look so
absurdly young at eighty. His secret was simplicity itself: Live well,
and hand over everything in the way of worry to your women. He never
spoke to servants at all; the harim were entrusted with that dirty
work, and woe betide them if anything went wrong with the dinner! No one
was surprised when his five daughters got engaged as fast as ever they
could and fled the premises, regardless of whom they were marrying. He
ruled his wife and sister-in-law, dear old ladies, like a slave-driver.
One or the other was always hard at work manufacturing Latakia
cigarettes for the rosy brigand, who lived on their money for seventy
years and called them names to the hour of his death, although they were
children of the premier baron of Scotland. A certain daughter had the
imprudence, one day, to admire a graceful birch-tree that she could see
from her bedroom. Next morning, as usual, she looked out of the window;
the birch was gone. It had been felled overnight. That was his system.
Dominate your women, or they will dominate you. Put the fear of God into
them--no matter how. In his own family, he declared, wives were not
allowed to sit down in the presence of their husbands, unless they had
first obtained permission. It may be true. I fancy one of his ancestors
was the cosmopolitan ruffian who wrote those memoirs; a kind of
fifth-rate Casanova. There he remained, anyhow, like an old cock on his
dunghill, crowing and gobbling; vicious and vigorous past his ninetieth
year. And the strange thing is that I am considered to have inherited a
great deal of his peculiar charm. It was my mother who told me this; she
was his eldest daughter and knew both of us fairly well.
* * * * *
It is time, now, to confess that not all the prints and archives and
natural history collections in the world would have brought me--or ought
to bring any one else--to Bregenz, did the place not offer another and a
greater attraction. I am alluding to the local _Blaufelchen_ whose
English name at this moment escapes me: a kind of fish. They are called,
in Latin, _Coregonus Wartmanni_, which has a harsh flavor. Let nobody,
however, be scared by a mere name, inasmuch as things are apt to taste
different from what they sound. Oriental poets, for example, have sung
with such a depth of feeling about pomegranates that one almost believes
they can be eaten, whereas _Coregoni Wartmanni_, I admit, convey a
suggestion of something unpalatable. Try them none the less, and leave
Hafiz to crack his teeth over the pomegranates.
These fish occur in some Scotch lakes and are considered so great a
delicacy that Mary Queen of Scots has been credited with their
introduction. But I knew one cantankerous countryman of mine (an
angler, and _Coregonus_ will not rise to the fly) who declared that they
were “not to be compared to trout”--which means nothing whatever, seeing
that comparison is not well possible between things so dissimilar; you
might as well say that Sir Joshua Reynolds is not to be compared to a
Bechstein Grand; and that, in fact, they were “hardly worth
eating”--which has the merit, at least, of being a straightforward
expression of opinion. Now it stands to reason that a good many things
are hardly worth eating, until you know how to cook them. The average
English hare is hardly worth eating; the way that quadruped is “dressed”
(hyperbola!) in England is an insult to the hare’s memory and to the
human stomach. As to these _Blaufelchen_--whoever does not approve of
them at the Hotel Weisses Kreuz in Bregenz must be hard to please.[35]
Let him try, as a last resort, those at the Hotel Hecht in Constance; if
still dissatisfied, he should return without delay to his lukewarm
whitebait fried in mutton-grease.
But, first of all, a word for your guidance. Make love neither to the
waitress nor the chamber-maid nor the she-cook. Make love to the
manager. Lure him into some corner, and unbosom yourself freely. Whisper
in his ear that you are an Ainu by birth; that while out there, at Yezo,
you accidentally met a countryman of his (mentioning name and general
appearance) who spoke in such glowing terms of the Bodensee
_Blaufelchen_ that you were unable to sleep either by day or night
until, traveling via the trans-Siberian railway, you should be able to
taste them for yourself under his hospitable roof. Then see whether you
get what is “hardly worth eating.” I blush to record that we had a
veritable surfeit of _Blaufelchen_. I devoured two at a sitting, and the
waitress informed me that she had never seen a tourist--even a
German--perform a similar feat; nor should I, indeed, have been
successful, had I not kept saying to myself all the time: “When shall I
be at Bregenz again? Possibly never!” Mr. R. declared himself satisfied
with one; and small wonder. It was a leviathan....
A timely warning, apropos of surfeits. On arrival at our village, we
found the family in a state of distress. One of their two cows (the rest
are on the alp) had died that afternoon; died of over-eating. She, the
proprietress, had told him, the proprietor, to beware how he left the
beast to itself; he, the proprietor, swore he had known that particular
cow from the day of its birth, and that it was far more sensible than
the rest of its kind. Left to itself, therefore, the cow had “exploded.”
I am so little of a cattle-fancier that this was news to me; troubling
news. I had always regarded the cow as an exemplar of all that is sane
and moderate. Far from it. Give them a chance, especially after the
hay-diet of winter, and they eat till they burst. They graze, and graze,
and graze; at last, stuffed to the brim, they stand there motionless,
wondering what is wrong inside, while a pained and puzzled
look--infallible symptom, this--creeps into their eyes. Now is your
chance, your last chance, of saving their life. If you happen to have an
iron chain in your pocket, thrust it into the beast’s mouth to provoke a
flow of saliva or something else which relieves the oppression; if you
have no chain look in that other pocket, where you may find a Gargantuan
clyster to be applied to its further extremity; failing that, whip out
your butcher’s knife and give the patient a well-directed stab in the
stomach--a kind of Cæsarian section; the gas escapes, the cow survives.
Else, after standing like a pathetic statue for a few moments, it falls
heavily earthwards and “explodes inside”--a cow! Thank God we belong to
another species, else how would it have fared at the Weisses Kreuz? A
gentle cow! The episode has shattered one of my dearest illusions.