attracted me from time immemorial. Often, in pouring rain, you may see a
cow at pasture and its owner standing dismally near at hand, soaked to
the skin. Why, I used to wonder--why not let the beast graze by itself
and go home and get a _Schnapps_ and a change of clothes? Now I know.
The peasant cannot move from the spot. He dare not leave the cow alone.
He must stay there and keep his eye fixed on hers, lest that symptom
should appear.
OLD ANNA
_Old Anna_
Stood awhile yesterday beside a block of gneiss which projects upon the
right-hand side of the Tiefis path, some two hundred yards above the
petrifying stream, at the foot of a young oak. It has been broken long
ago, and is shaped like a very low and narrow bench. How one
changes--how one looks at things with other eyes! Is it possible that
this stone used to be my _Ultima Thule_ in days of infancy; this, or the
walnut tree a little higher up, whose stump remains to this day, and
from under whose branches you had a broad view over the valley? The
upward path was shadier than now, and here, sure enough, I played
through the morning hours, while the old Anna extracted out of her
pocket that invariable _Frühschoppen_ (she, being Tyrolese, called it
“merenda”)--some salted bread and a quarter of red wine. Sometimes the
same pocket produced also a chocolate for me; in fact, she had a trick
of conjuring chocolate out of the most improbable places. On one
occasion she actually shook a piece down from a tree; a miracle....
Later on, the Gleziska became our favorite haunt. This is a flat green
meadow to the east of the village where stood, at that time, a glorious
barn containing an ante-chamber and two separate compartments full of
delicious hay to swim about in; it has now been replaced by an anæmic
structure of the new type. The first walk I ever took, all by myself,
was from the village church to the Gleziska; that was a proud day. Soon,
when my sister had learnt to toddle, the old thing took us further
afield; once as far as the church of St. Martin at Ludesch (built about
1430; some of its rare Gothic furniture is in the Bregenz Museum), where
we two discovered, in a crypt, an immense accumulation of human skulls;
we dragged four or five into the daylight, and had a game of skittles
with them.
I still own a photograph of the old Anna. She is not old in the least;
about forty, I should say. There she sits at a table, half-profile, her
left arm supporting the head; she does not smile, but looks rather
vacuously into the world, as such photographs are apt to do. A pleasant,
refined face; I can read nothing else out of it. There is a suggestion
of silk about the clothing, and a black ribbon hangs down from the back
of her hair. Such was the _Alte Anna_ who, being a child of nature
herself, was the ideal nurse. Her only drawback was that she had too
great a fondness for ghastly wolf-stories of the Little Red Riding Hood
type. She possessed an endless store of such tales current, no doubt,
in the Tyrol of earlier days. I wish I could still remember them, for
they would now interest me as showing how strongly the popular
imagination must have been impressed with this scourge, at which we can
at last afford to laugh. In those days they frightened me to death; they
haunted my dreams.
Old Anna faded out of sight, and there came a shadowy interregnum of
German governesses, of whom I can recall nothing save that a certain
Fräulein Schubert got the sack because she had a flirtation (this was
doubtless a euphemism) with some young man in the factory offices. It
struck me as unfair that you should be sent away just because you happen
to like your friend.
Herr Som followed. He was master of the boys’ school at Bludesch (there
was no school-house in our village at that time); a Swiss, I fancy, and
a well-groomed, gentlemanly fellow who often lunched at our house. To
his establishment I was now sent every morning--rather a long tramp for
a child, across all those fields, especially through the fresh-fallen
snow of winter. The school-house still exists; it is a conspicuous
three-storied building that overtops all the others in this hither side
of Bludesch; a house of noble lineage which has recently been made to
look quite new and respectable; it was built in the seventeenth century
by the family of Von der Halden zu Haldenegg, who were _Landvogts_ of
Blumenegg.[36] The place was therefore not a school-house at all; only
two rooms had been set apart by the village elders where boys sat at
desks under Herr Som’s supervision writing in endless lines
“Schwimmmmen, Schwimmmen” (it was spelt with four, or at least three,
m’s in those days). Som must have been pleased with my progress, for I
still possess a unique document--a school report with the mark “very
good” in reading, writing and arithmetic; so pleased that, on marrying
soon afterwards, he gave my exotic name to his eldest son, the first and
last time such an honor has been conferred on me. “Schwimmmmen” is all
that sticks in my mind of Bludesch school; that, and the view up the
smiling valley from the window of the water-closet (another euphemism).
It was then and there borne in upon me how needful to such apartments is
a spacious prospect upon which the eye can dwell with pleasure. To this
attraction I should be inclined to add, now, a choice little library
and, for those of musical tastes, a pianola.
Misguided Scotch relatives, in those days, used to send magnificent
dolls to my sister by post. Little they knew what they were doing:
little they knew! A parcel arrived, and somebody would say to her:
“Well, I declare. This looks uncommonly like another doll. _Another_
doll! You are a lucky child, and no mistake.”
My sister pretended to shriek delightedly:
“Oh, let me unpack it, all alone, upstairs,” and snatched away the
parcel and ran. I followed. A glance, a single masonic glance, had been
exchanged between us. It sufficed. I knew the part I was called upon to
play.
Upstairs, in some unused room, we locked the door upon our labors. The
plaything was unpacked in dead silence; a ceremonial had begun. When the
last silk-paper wrapping had been removed, my sister took the splendid
golden-haired creature into her arms and, with many false hugs and
kisses, bore it swiftly towards the garden. I followed. Not a word was
spoken. We were high priests, engaged upon some terrible but necessary
ordinance. At the foot of a certain old tree in a certain
shrubbery--always the same--she paused, and muttered certain mysterious
words into the victim’s ear. Then she handed it solemnly to me. I took
the thing by the legs, swung it through the air once or twice, and
shattered its head to fragments against the trunk. After that, we tore
it limb from limb amid a shower of sawdust and stamped on the remains.
Forthwith the spell was released, the sacrifice at an end; and we
screamed with hysterical joy.
A few days later, somebody might enquire of the child:
“Now where is that lovely doll you got from dear Cousin Annie?”
She would reply, mournfully:
“In bed. Poor little Esmeralda has a tummy-ache this morning.”
This, too, was part of the rite. The words were always the same.
Never a doll escaped assassination, and nobody, I believe, found out
what happened to them. My sister hated dolls with a vindictive,
unreasoning hatred. And I, of course, was only too pleased to smash
anything I was bidden to smash; and still am.
Dear Cousin Annie--this one happened to be no relation at all--turned up
in this country at odd intervals, as did the rest of those stark
grand-aunts and female cousins, to our infinite annoyance. There were
scores of them, and all of a kind; musty and sententious to the last
degree. The present generation has no idea, not the faintest idea, of
what a grand-aunt used to look like in those days. Dear Cousin Annie was
a gaunt, tottering, gray-haired anatomy, who reeked of Macassar oil, and
wore massive jet beads round her neck and a tremulous drop of
rose-water at the end of her nose--just the kind of person whom a little
boy would love to kiss.
“What is my name, dear?” she asked, over and over again, with a sickly
smile.
You were expected to answer:
“Dear--Cousin--Annie.”
It was no use whatever saying, “Don’t know.” We tried it often, but the
question was only repeated with greater persistence, and a sicklier
smile than ever.
Her husband had been a physician and was even more aged than she; he
exhaled an air of unbelievable eld. It occurred to me, years afterwards,
that there was something pre-Victorian and Waterlooish about those white
whiskers. He drank sherry-wine, and dishes of tea. Nevertheless, one
could have learnt much from him had one been a little older, for he was
a character, an original. Later on, in Edinburgh, I got to know him
well; he was then ninety-two, and no longer communicative. An
antiquarian of the old school, he had filled his head with queer
knowledge upon every subject, and his house with queer objects of every
kind. Judging by his pamphlets and letters to newspapers, he seems to
have taken, and rightly taken, all learning to his province. I still
possess a few of these things; who can tell how many he produced
altogether? “Protestantism in Austria” begins thus: “I am desirous of
calling the attention of your readers to this subject, which is not
generally understood in Britain.” It was written here, as well as a
rather incoherent “Notice of a flood at Frastanz in the autumn of
1846.”[37] He gave me another paper written by his own father, who was
Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and died in 1818: “Mistresses
and Servants.” How good it reads!
_B._ My dear Mrs. A., I am glad to see you. All well at home, I hope?
_A._ All well. Mr. A. is going about in his usual way, and the children
are in good health.
_B._ When things are so, a wife and mother may truly say: “He gives all
things richly to enjoy.”
So far _all well_; but Mrs. A. promptly embarks upon her pet subject of
“plaguy servants.” Mrs. B., after an argument of sixteen pages,
recommends her to read a certain verse in St. Paul’s Epistle to the
Ephesians.
Here is a short paper of his own on “Saints” (“When I was student at the
University of Edinburgh, we young fellows were displeased by our
professor, a worthy old man, constantly speaking to us of _Baron_
Haller”), and a strange composition touching the “Life of a domestic
cat”. (“I kept a record of her kittenings. They were twenty-five in
number, comprising seventy-eight individuals.”) The old fellow also
burst into poetry once or twice and perpetrated, among other things,
some flattering lines on our family of Tilquhillie entitled “Feugh and
Dee,” lines which nothing but ingrained modesty now prevents me from
reprinting, seeing that this family, though venerable enough--the oldest
in the county, they tell me--was never yet, to my knowledge, hymned in
verse, but has contrived to live on, from age to age, sufficiently
inconspicuous; inconspicuous, and all of us rather cracked into the
bargain. See, for a recent example, Dean Ramsay’s “Reminiscences.”
Thereafter came an epoch when those in authority seem to have reached a
sensible conclusion, to wit, that English children should not only speak
English, but also learn to read and write it. A governess was required.
In due course of time she arrived; and her name was Miss Prime. We
straightway called her Miss Prim, or “the Prim”; it suited her
admirably. Her hair was parted down the middle; indeed, she was prim all
over, but her pedagogic system proved a failure. Miss Prim must have had
an indifferent time of it here, so far as the children were concerned.
Her disciplinary measures never obtained the desired effect. When my
sister was told to stand on a bench for some misdemeanor, she made such
contortions at me that it was impossible for lessons to proceed; she was
next put into a corner facing the wall, where the contortions continued
more violently than ever, only this time with the back part of her body;
at last she was locked up all by herself in a distant room, whence there
presently issued such a din of crashing furniture that the people
downstairs rushed up, asking whether the end of the world had come. In
this particular room stood an enormous double bed; it inspired her with
a brilliant method of eluding punishment for good and all.
“Crawl under here,” she suggested, “whenever the Prim want us _for
anything_ (euphemism). She can never pull us out.”
She couldn’t. Under that bed we remained for hours, contentedly munching
cakes and crunching sweets which had been stuffed into the mattress to
meet contingencies such as these, until the Prim implored us, almost on
her knees, to come out again. At other times, before or after “lessons,”
we indulged in prolonged and uproarious fights between ourselves. “It
will end in a howl,” my mother was wont to remark on such occasions.
Nobody need tell me what we required: a thorough good spanking. Who was
going to administer it? Had my father not died when I was five, he would
doubtless have attended to the matter. He could hurt confoundedly, he
could. I have bright memories of one of his spankings when, after
performing a war-dance on some bed of newly planted portulacas, I found
myself suddenly seized by the scruff of the neck and carried at arm’s
length rabbit-fashion, dangling and kicking in air, into a conservatory.
_En route_, I had barely time to shout to the old Anna “Wait till I’m
spanked!”--we were going for a walk--before I got it hotter, far hotter,
than usual. That is the way to spank children. Never do it unless you
are really angry yourself. Otherwise they will regard you as a
cold-blooded torturer.
As to the Prim--I should like to have seen her tackling either of us two
seriously. Even my sister, tiny as she was, would have throttled her to
death, and then dropped her out of the window. She was regarded as a
poor joke, and that is why her teaching hardly met with the success it
deserved, and why I was therefore soon to be sent to an English private
school, loathsomest of institutions, and thence to other schools, and
yet other schools--there to be crammed for such a length of time with
such a superfluity of useless learning, and by such a variety of
unwholesome-looking gentlemen of different ages and nationalities, that
I am only now, at the end of all these years, beginning to shake off the
bad effects and discover my true self again. That fetish of education!
Meanwhile Miss Prim, during one of her holiday visits to England, had
succeeded in getting engaged. She imparted the happy news to our family,
with becoming shyness, a few hours after her return; she wondered
whether her fiancé might ever come out here, and proceed with his
courtship on foreign soil, for a week or so? Why, of course he could;
let him come when he pleased, and stay as long as ever he liked! In due
course of time he arrived; and his name was Mr. Clutterbuck.
Clutterbuck. Clutterbuck. The name alone sent us into fits; we thought
it an incomparably funny one, as indeed it is. Mr. Clutterbuck, himself,
was a droll and pertinacious individual. He used to sit, rod in hand,
trying to catch trout in the reservoirs. Everybody told him he would
never get a nibble there--the fish were far too well-fed; why not try a
fly on the Tabalada stream, at the bottom of the valley near Gais, the
fishing of which also belonged to us?
No. Mr. Clutterbuck preferred the reservoirs. He would sit on that stone
margin morning and afternoon, while the Prim hovered lovingly in his
neighborhood. There I see him sitting to this day.
* * * * *
The only way to get these pampered beasts out of the reservoir is by the
prosaic method of draining off the water. Then you have them! Now just
remove your trousers and wade into the mud, if you do not mind looking
like a fool, and pull them out with your hands, which is far more
exciting sport than you might imagine. Only then is it possible to
realize how slippery and muscular a trout can be when taken, not off a
hook after an hour’s playing, but fresh from its element. We used to do
this periodically in later years, and some of the fish were of
respectable size. The largest I remember catching weighed a fraction
over four kilograms and was seventy-six centimeters in length. He kicked
like an electric dynamo.
We happened to be going that afternoon to a friend in Bregenz and
decided to make him a present of this trout, particularly as he had a
far-famed Viennese _chef_ who claimed to be able to make a succulent
ragout out of the Devil himself. As there was no time for a special box
to be built, we requisitioned the newly made coffin of a child that had
died overnight but was happily not yet bestowed therein; our monster was
packed inside, comfortably wrapped up in green nettles. The baby could
wait; the trout was in a hurry....
SCHLINS
_Schlins_
There is a sense of sudden departure in the air.
We shall know the worst, to-morrow, or next day....
Lasko’s well has not moved from its old place. It lies about a hundred
yards west of the “Château aux fenêtres.” The wooden trough into which
the water trickles--one of its many successors--looks the same as ever;
I am glad it has not yet been converted into a basin of cement, like
those in the village below.
The transformation of wood into cement is proceeding relentlessly all
over the country; to my infinite disgust. Those numerous wooden
watertroughs for the use of householders and their cattle, which used to
be quite a feature of the streets, are now all being manufactured out of
this damnably durable material; there is a cement-factory near our
station, and I wish somebody would drop a bomb on it. Cement has invaded
domestic architecture, as was inevitable. Inevitable things are not
always pleasant, and not always pretty. It is hard to imagine anything
more infamous, on a small scale, than the prison-like gray garden walls
which have replaced those delightful wooden palings through whose
meshes a riot of flowers would come tumbling out upon the road; the
spacious wooden houses, so full of charm and individuality, so redolent
of patriarchal well-being, with their shingles and gables burnt to a
glowing umber-brown by years and years of sunshine, are being discarded
in favor of weedy little cement abominations that make one sorry for
people who have to live in them. They look cheap; they are cheap. I wish
they were dear, for cheap things are seldom attractive, and life in
cheap and ugly homes cannot fail to give their inmates a corresponding
bent of mind.
Not a single wooden bridge is left over Lutz or Ill. They were swept
away, every one of them, in the floods of 1910 and 1911 and now, for the
first time, their place is taken by solid but hideous structures of
cement. One is sorry to let the old ones go; one calls to mind the
bridge at Ludesch built as long ago as 1498 and ever since then kept in
repair, with its sloping wooden roof, its sudden twilight within and
odor of hot fir-wood, as of a scented tunnel; one remembers the soft
tread of the horses’ feet on the powdery beams and the sound of creaking
timbers underfoot. They are eyesores, these new things; they will remain
eyesores.
Now a new road is an eyesore too, ruthlessly hacked, as it is, through
the landscape; and nearly every road hereabouts, great or small, has
been cut afresh within the last generation. No great harm in this,
however, since roads have a knack of growing old again; you need only
wait; lichens and grass and brushwood will presently creep up to hide
the scars. There is nothing to be done with palings and bridges and
troughs and houses of cement; nothing, save to stand aside and curse
them. For the æsthetic drawback of cement, that godsend to lazy
builders, lies in its agelessness and lack of character; if it grows old
at all, it grows even more horrible than in youth. But men are becoming
blind to these and other uglifications--the word is not quite ugly
enough for the thing--of the scenery and of their houses. For instance:
forty-one unseemly electric wires converge at the post-office of our
small village; there they are, so repulsive that you cannot but look at
them; the women of the place, instead of feeding chickens or mending the
children’s clothes, spend their lives in gossiping with each other at
long distances, and God alone knows the nonsense they find to chatter
about. Go where you please, in fact, and you cannot fail to perceive
half a dozen decorative telegraph poles staring you in the face. Now why
do people want all this ridiculous electricity rushing up and down the
country? Solidarity. Brotherhood of men....
Lasko’s well----
No; it has not moved from its old place. But we looked in vain for
those “Wasserkälber” which were always to be found lying at its bottom
in olden days. Indeed, I have not seen a single “Wasserkälb” since my
arrival here. Are they extinct?[38]
We called him Lasko; but it was not till many years afterwards, at an
English public school, that I learnt that Lasko really meant anything.
And we called it Lasko’s well, because it was here that Lasko, our black
retriever, lapped up some water on his last walk, the day before his
death. After that, we made it a rule that every one of our dogs, as
often as we passed this place, should drink at the trough in memory of
dear old Lasko, whether he happened to be thirsty or not; if he refused,
his head was held under the water till he had imbibed, willy-nilly,
something like the requisite amount of liquid. To this treatment were
submitted:
(1) Lasko the Second, a worthless yellow brute who, having been altered
in youth, was of so timorous a disposition that it became our greatest
delight to get somebody to fire off a gun in his immediate neighborhood,
and watch him flee for his life.
(2) Sippins, who belonged to my sister and to the “Affenpincher”
breed--that is, to so small and strange-looking a canine variety that
the boys were wont to call him a Chinese rat; all of which did not
prevent him from having fleas. One wonders whether those enthusiasts,
who declare that dogs have no fleas, are in earnest. Have they ever
looked for them? Sippins was flea’d, during the summer, twice a day by a
maid who deposited the insects in a saucer containing alcohol, and in my
boyish journal I record “136 fleas caught from Sippins at a single
time”--Sippins himself, as aforesaid, being about the size of a
full-grown rat. Now Sippins objected strongly to this water-cure at
Lasko’s well. He had been born and educated at Munich; he only touched
water when no beer was procurable; he could drink like a lord, like a
fish; but only beer. It was not long, therefore, before it became one of
our principal pastimes to “make Sippins drunk.” He seldom knew when to
stop.
(3) MacDougall, a Skye-terrier belonging to me, of so pure a breed that
you never knew whether he was walking forwards or backwards. He was an
anomaly among quadrupeds; nothing approaching his style had been seen in
this country before. His talent consisted in enticing cats down from
walls and trees and other inaccessible situations by his mere
appearance; the cats, seemingly, being unable to resist the temptation
of inspecting at close quarters this freak of nature, this animated
hearth-rug. Once on the ground, they were doomed to a violent death,
for they never dreamt it was a dog. Need I say what our chief diversion
with MacDougall used to be? One of his most brilliant exploits took
place in Bludesch at our tailor’s--who was also our haircutter; whence,
for many years, I found it difficult to realize that tailoring and
haircutting were separate professions--where dwelt a family of cats, a
mother and half a dozen kittens. The operation took less than a minute
to perform, while we looked on amazed and, ten to one, amused; two
shakes for the mother, half a shake each for the kittens; the entire
family laid out flat on the grass, dead as doornails, side by side;
whereupon he trotted up to us, right end forward, saying plainly:
“_How’s that?_” And we doubtless replied: “Oh, MacDougall! Do it again.”
Very cruel children, we were....