Together

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

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.

A distant rocky peak, just to the left of the Hoher Frassen, confronts you on stepping out of the northern forest. This is the “Rothe Wand” which, considering its respectable height of 2701 meters, is a decidedly coy mountain, and more clever at hiding itself than most of them; you may obtain another clear view of it from the platform of Frastanz station. It seems incredible that this “Red Wall” which is now climbed by a hundred tourists every year, should in the days of my father have been deemed so inaccessible that he thought it worth while to describe an ascent of it in the transactions of our Alpine Club (1868) in which he speaks of it as “almost unknown.” The country has indeed changed since those days, and few pinnacles are left unclimbed; I can mention one of them, at least, for the benefit of anybody who cares to give it a trial. This is the so-called “Wildkirchle” or “Hexenthurm,” a fragment of the Kanisfluh massif near Mellau, a rock-needle; it has the apparent advantage of being only 140 meters high. All the same, no one has yet stood on its summit, though many have tried to do so; only a couple of weeks ago (23 July, 1922) two young men lost their lives while attempting the feat. My sister, who was the first woman that ever got up the Zimba—and well I remember the state of her leather knickers when she came down again—also had a try at the “Hexenthurm,” a little exploit of which I only learnt after her death. She and a guide, from all accounts, were roped together and wound themselves aloft somewhat after the fashion of a nigger climbing a cocoa-palm (I cannot quite visualize the operation); at a certain moment they were only too happy to be able to wind themselves down again.

These were the sports she loved; and I marvel to this hour what made her adopt the married state—she who cared no more for the joys of domesticity than does a tomcat. Talked into it, I fancy, by some stupid relation who ought to have known better.

While strolling homewards from that Montiola fountain hallowed by many memories of my past, I took to relating to my companion all I knew concerning my father’s fatal accident, which occurred as he was chamois shooting not far from the Rothe Wand; he fell down a ghastly precipice. Forthwith Mr. R., who has an imaginative and impressionable turn of mind, besought me to take him up there and show him the exact site on the condition, of course, that nothing but English was to be spoken during the trip. Well, why not? No harm in that, no harm whatever; the excursion may distract him, and he has so far seen nothing of these upper Alpine regions. I would gladly go there over the Spuller lake, but cannot bear to see the place again in its changed condition; for this fair sheet of water is now being mauled about by a legion of navvies for the purpose of some miserable railway electrification. Instead of that, we can take the train to Dalaas and mount to the Formarin lake, which lies even nearer to the scene of the accident. [19]

GAMSBODEN

THERE is nothing to tell of our walk to the Formarin lake which lies under the precipitous red crags (a kind of marble called Adneter Kalk) of the Rothe Wand and thence to the summit of the grass-topped Formaletsch—nothing, save that the Alpine flowers, not so much the rhododendrons[20] as the yellow violets, were a source of considerable interest to my companion. I could have shown him the scarcer Edelraute (Artemisia mutellina) which grows on some rocks near the east foot of that hill, but preferred taking no risks and did not so much as mention the plant. Here, also, he was able to inspect a flourishing colony of marmots, a quadruped which, in spite of my assurances to the contrary, he had hitherto been disposed to regard as mythological or imaginary.

I chose the Formaletsch because it is from thence—from its southern base; but Mr. R. rightly insisted on going to the top—that, with the help of a good glass, a distant but clear view can be obtained of the scene of my father’s accident while chamois shooting. It occurred, when he was only thirty-six years old, at the Gamsboden heights, so-called from the frequency of chamois to be found there; the place is about a mile off as the crow flies, and on one of its pinnacles you may detect a wooden cross which is perennially renewed by chamois hunters in memory of him; it stands as near to the actual site as most people would care to go. He had just returned from an ascent of the Gross Litzner (or Gross Seehorn)—the second time this peak had ever been climbed (the first was in 1869), and the thing must have happened soon after 7 September, 1874, for that is the date of his last letter to his wife, in which he says: “I shall go shooting for a few days to Spuller and Formarin” (Gamsboden lies midway between these two lakes); “if I delay, I may not be able to traverse any longer the upper grounds, because snow falls there so often and so early.” Now hard by that wooden cross is a black precipice which scars the mountain from top to bottom; this is the spot; he fell while attempting to cross the scar, or else, while standing immediately above it on some soil which gave way under his weight; the former is probably the truth. I enquired, but have never heard of any one else essaying the same feat; for my own part, nothing would induce me to proceed more than a couple of yards on that particular surface. For even at our distance of a mile you may guess what it consists of: it is the foul sooty shale called Algäu-Schiefer, perfidious and friable stuff, not to be called rock at all save in the geological sense of the word.

Slopes covered by ice or snow have their dangers, so have those decked with the innocent-looking dry grass which, for reasons I cannot explain, is so abhorrent to me that I will make any detour to avoid them; all three of these can be tackled by firm feet and the help of an ax-head as grapnel or for step-cutting. Nothing is to be done, either with feet or with artificial appliances, on an even moderate incline of such Liassic shale, for it yields to pressure and slides down, and this is where a chamois has the advantage over us. A man may scramble about honest crags like a fly on a wall, as securely as any chamois though not so fast; on precipices of the crumbling Algäu-Schiefer the animal leaps, and leaps again before the stuff has gathered momentum, and what shall man do? Avoid them, until he has acquired the capacity of bouncing like a chamois; in other words, like an indiarubber ball.

Indeed, shifting material of every kind is objectionable and fraught with peculiar horrors. Up behind Bludenz you may see a row of limestone cliffs called Elser Schröfen, whose foot is defended by a “talus” of rubble which has slowly dropped down from the heights above; and a pretty thing it is, by the way, when you look closely at natural features like this talus, to observe with what flawless accuracy they have been constructed; how these fragments of detritus pass in due order through all gradations of size down the slanting surface, from minute particles like sand at the top to the mighty blocks that form their base. Once, long ago, I conceived the playful project of crossing this rubble-slope from end to end, just below the cliffs. I started on its inclined plane, but had not gone far before realizing the situation. The talus reposed, as it naturally would repose if left to accumulate undisturbed; that is, at the sharpest allowable angle against the cliffs, its upper barrier. It soon struck me as being rather a steep gradient, and not only steep but ominously alive—ready to gallop downhill on a hint from myself; the mere weight of my body could set the whole mass in movement and hurl me along in a rocky flood. While making this sweet reflection I found, with dismay, that it was already too late to turn back; the least additional pressure on one foot might start the mischief; once started, nothing would arrest that deluge; its beginning, without a doubt, was going to be my end.

I was in for a ticklish business. Rush down the slope diagonally and evoke the landslide but anticipate its arrival? Even that was courting disaster. I preferred to remain in the upper regions and there finished the long journey, with curious deliberation, on all fours, in order to distribute my weight; and then only by a miracle. It was one of those occasions on which one has ample leisure to look into the eye of death, and I now wish somebody could have taken a photograph of me—a colored one, by preference; one would like to possess a record of the exact tint of one’s complexion during half hours of this kind. Whoso, therefore, intends to traverse the same place would be well-advised to adopt my method of locomotion; the upright posture is not to be recommended. A pleasant farewell to all things! Never a button of you to be seen again; to be caught in a swirl, a deafening cataract of stones and, after snatching en passant a few grains of scientific comfort at the thought that your human interference had modified—if only temporarily—the angle of a talus, which is not everybody’s affair, to be buried alive at the bottom under an imposing heap of débris.[21] ...

Now boys seem to make a point of doing risky things, whereas a man of my father’s age and experience should have made a point of not doing them. What can have induced him to act as he did? He was well acquainted with this particular shale; in that very paper on the Rothe Wand which is the origin of our trip to Formarin, he remarks that the only troublesome part of the ascent was a steep tract of the “soft, crumbling, blackish Algäu-Schiefer, which continually slipped away under our feet,” adding that “for the rest, no part of the climb could be called dangerous or even difficult.” (The present route up there is another and really easy one.) Was it downright bravura? That is not impossible! He had led an enchanted life among the rocks and ice, and a friend of his, an old gentleman whom I saw the other day in Bludenz and who was with him once or twice in the mountains, spoke to me of his contempt of danger; he said that while climbing he “seemed to tread on air” and could not be made to understand what people meant by giddiness. Or was he stalking some particular chamois? In that case the tragedy grows almost intelligible; there are few things a man will not do under those circumstances.

Two others accompanied him on this expedition, Dr. Dürr of Satteins and his own Jaeger Fetzel, a native of our village; both have died long since and neither, I believe, was actual eye-witness of what happened at the fatal moment. Many journalistic cuttings and letters relative to this affair, and doubtless giving adequate accounts, were contained in that bundle which disappeared together with other literary and family papers when a certain portmanteau was broken open on its journey; it is a loss I shall never cease to deplore. The ground is supposed to have given way under him; certain it is that he fell from the height, as we were then told, of many, many church steeples—a phrase that stuck in my mind; from the height, I should reckon, of some thousand feet. There was nothing about him that was not shattered; his gun, his watch, were broken into fragments. Strangest of all, even his alpenstock was picked up in several pieces, which gave rise to the conjecture that this implement had betrayed him and snapped under his weight as he leaned on it for support; how else explain the splintering of such light and resilient material? Be that as it may, they carried his remains to Dalaas down the steep and savage Radona-tobel, and anybody who has been there will wonder how they achieved this task.[22] He was laid to rest in the Protestant cemetery of Feldkirch; for the first time in history the bells of all the countryside were tolled at the funeral of a “Lutheran”....

His article on the Rothe Wand is one of several which he contributed to the Journal of our Alpine Club; they can be traced in the files, together with his presidential addresses to the Vorarlberg section, of which I also possess four; one of the most interesting of these papers describes an ascent of the Piz Linard (3416 meters) and Piz Buin and the crossing of the Silvretta and Sagliain glaciers, the latter of which had never been traversed before; it presented no difficulty. These writings betray a strong love of nature, and all the exhilaration consequent upon “living dangerously.” He was also interested in the scientific aspects of alpinism, as I can see from his marginal annotations to Forbes’ “Theory of Glaciers.”

More important are two archæological monographs which reveal another facet of his mind; I wish I knew whether he wrote any other such things and where they are to be found; does the library at Bregenz perhaps contain them? The first one (1865, with two diagrams) deals with his excavations on a strangely shaped eminence near Mauren—a village in Liechtenstein, just across our frontier—which he held to be a Celtic hill-fort; his surmise was proved correct by the discovery of certain bronze relics. The other treats of the Roman occupation of this province.[23] It is in the shape of an address to the Museum Society of Bregenz with which he was connected; an exhaustive and conscientiously written memoir, full of ripe speculations of his own, enriched with copious footnotes and citations from those authorities, ancient or modern, who had hitherto touched upon these matters; and defining all remains of antiquity excavated here up to that day (some noteworthy new finds have since been incorporated into the Bregenz Museum). It has given me a feeling difficult to describe, to go through this paper again; I seem to be reading my own lucubrations, for at the same time of life I was writing in the same style on subjects of the same kind; a scholarly digression, for instance, on the Roman roads of the district, no trace of which exists, is done quite in my manner of that period. I observe that he contradistinguishes between Celts and Rhætians (p. 6 and note to p. 10);[24] that he takes Lindau, and not either of the other two islands, to have been the one occupied by Tiberius; and holds the Vallis Drusiana, the Walgau, the heart of our province, to be called not after the Roman general and stepson of Augustus, seeing that the name Druso is of Celtic or Rhætian

origin—pre-Roman, in short, and indigenous to this country, whence localities like Drusenfluh, Drusenthor, Druseralp, Druserthal.[25]

Of peculiar interest to me, among my father’s writings, are forty or fifty manuscript essays, long and short, on a variety of themes; mere “asides” written, to please himself, in three different languages: English, French and German. French he studied at Geneva; German at the gymnasium of Augsburg, and so successfully, that he learnt to handle that tongue with more freedom and elegance than many a native writer of the country. Most of these miscellanies date from the late fifties or early sixties when he was still young; he doubtless continued to compose them to the end, and the later ones would have a greater value; they are lost. The titles testify to considerable intellectual curiosity: On ambition—The first snowdrop—A woman’s thoughts about women—On a passage in Pascal—The carnival—To the memory of ancient Rome—On a comet—Voices of Nature—Friendship—A characteristic of the German language—Dreaming of sounds—On certain pictures in the National Gallery of Scotland—The Lake of Geneva by night—Palleske’s Life of Schiller—Suicide—The thunderstorm—Spiritualism—Sunset in autumn—On the want of the habit of writing—The study of Natural Science; and so forth; a heterogeneous collection! One or two, such as a passionate lament for the death of some little boy-friend, are set in lines as if they were poetry, but there is no poetry about them save a certain rhapsodical elevation of sentiment. Those written in English prove that he had not yet excreted the poison of a German (metaphysical) schooling, which lays fetters upon our thought and dims the candor of literary expression. Immature stuff for the most part, heavy in diction and saturated with the conventional wisdom of youth, although here and there one alights upon something more esoteric, such as (in a “Fragment on Style,” 1858): “A noble thought always commands powerful and harmonious expression.... When a truly great thought is clothed in language unworthy of it, the mind which dictated the words can have conceived it only imperfectly”—which strikes me as an unexpected pronouncement, for a youngster of twenty. Altogether, the perusal of these things is a groping, twilight adventure into the soul of a dead man; vainly I ask myself along what lines he would have developed had his life been spared.

Hardly had we reached home again, after a long walk down from Formarin over Lagutz and Marul and Raggal, before Mr. R., who has a sweet nature but is apt to be pig-headed at times beyond the common measure of man, began to complain bitterly that I had shown him no chamois, proceeding thereafter to hint that all my accounts of such animals might well be pure inventions; the chamois-race was doubtless as extinct as the ibex I had shown him at Innsbruck; otherwise, why were they not on the spot, “where they ought to have been,” like those marmots? As if the country were a kind of perambulating menagerie! I am all for humoring young people up to a certain reasonable point, but it was a little more than I had bargained for, to start off climbing again that moment. Had he expressed any such wish at Formarin, we might have wandered towards Lech and entered some side-valley on our left, and possibly espied a beast or two among the crags. He said not a word about it up there. And now it was nothing but:

“Show them! Show them! What am I here for?”

“To learn English.”

“And to see the sights of the country. Such was our bargain. All you talk about chamois—ah, ah! I begin to understand.”

“I showed you a wild roe-deer in the Lutz forest last week, the first you ever saw in your life; and the devil’s own job it was to get you to see it. Won’t that do?”

“There you made a mistake. You ought to have called it a chamois. Then I should have believed that chamois still exist.”

“Still exist? Why, we had chamois only the other day for luncheon.”

“It might have been bad mutton.”

“What next! It was delicious; and no more like mutton than—than——”

“I see what it is. You are afraid of climbing rocks. You have lost your nerve; I noticed it long ago on the cliffs at Scanno, but there are certain subjects one does not like to dwell upon between friends. Troppo vino. You comprehend?”

“Nothing of the kind. And if it were troppo vino, what object do you gain by being offensive about it?”

“To shame you into showing them.”

“Well, after that, I suppose you will have to see them. As to climbing rocks—— I think I can show chamois to people without climbing at all.”

So I did; by a stroke of luck which was surely not undeserved. Knowing Mr. R.’s character only too well, and how that there would not be another moment’s peace for me until those legendary creatures had been proved to exist, I called to mind, after some little thought, a place where chamois could almost invariably be seen, and we left home then and there, over Bludenz and Brand and the Zalim alp towards the Strassburger hut which lies under the Scesaplana, between a precipice and a perennial snow-field; arriving just as the sun went down.[26] Near the end of our march we turned a little to the right and glanced about us. There they were, three young beasts, almost straight below; unmistakable chamois, and as close at hand as any one could wish. Straightway Mr. R., whose familiarity with precipices is only surpassed by his familiarity with English grammar, proposed scrambling down a sheer wall of several hundred feet, and then throwing stones at them from behind. Who knows? A chance hit on the head, and we might bag one or the other. What a lark, if we did! The novelty of the idea was so alluring that I might have succumbed, if the animals had not scented us—as they would have done ere this, had we been standing below them—and made off amid a resounding clatter of stones. Mr. R. formally declared himself to be satisfied.

“Thank God for that,” I replied. “And, now that we are here, I will be able to show you something still funnier and more interesting to-morrow. Butterflies on this snow-field.”

“Why not pelicans?”

“Some folks are hard to please.”

There are nearly always frozen butterflies to be found up here. They have been wafted from their green meadows into these barren Arctic regions on the upward-striving blasts of the Fön.

Meanwhile we passed the night in the well-heated Strassburger hut, where we discovered as objectionable a crowd of Teutons as I have ever seen gathered together; and I have seen not a few. A fierce argument was proceeding between two of these bullet-headed ones as to whether the snowfield was a Ferner or a Gletscher. The Ferner man was right (though the Tyrolese use the word “Fern” for a glacier); but his opponent also came in for some share of applause. He had the louder voice of the two.

Up the Scesaplana next morning in time for the sunrise, where Mr. R. grew silent and respectful. Naturally enough. For there is something oppressive to the spirit on being thus islanded, for the first time, in a glittering ocean of Alpine peaks, and breathing the icy air of dawn at 3000 meters. I greeted old friends that arose up round us, and my glance, turning eastwards, rested at last upon the stainless white dome of the Ortler, fifty or sixty miles away. I called to mind that short snow-arête just before you reach the summit, knife-like and not even level; would I now care to run along it as I did then? Well, that was in the eighties and perhaps they have built a railway up the Ortler by this time; in the eighties, while we were touring on old-fashioned high bicycles over the Stelvio pass—a record, I fancy: there was a notice of it in the C. T. C. Gazette; over the Stelvio into Italy and back by the Splügen, riding home in one day from the Post at Splügen over Thusis and Chur and Ragatz and Feldkirch—which was also something of an achievement for the wretched machines of those days.

On the way down we stepped for a moment into the Lünersee hut, where Mr. R. had a look at the large photograph of my father after whom the place had been named, then followed the Rellsthal towards Vandans under that formidable flank of the Zimba on which the other tourist had died of sheer fright. During this descent my companion, unfortunately, began to relapse into something like his normal frame of mind; that is to say, our pleasure was nearly marred by persistent jocular allusions to that London hat of mine which has not yet ceased to provoke his merriment. Some time ago I was under the impression that he had forgotten this trivial and well worn theme of mirth. Far from it. Young people never will realize when a joke has grown threadbare, and he now distilled so much fresh laughter out of its shape, its color, its brim and other details of construction, its general fit, its suitability to my particular style, likening me at one time to his own countryman Napoleon and at another to a certain old female cousin of whose existence I had hitherto been unaware, that I was on the verge of getting annoyed when I hit upon the genial expedient of making him translate his miserable witticisms into the English tongue.

Then, and not till then, did they become really amusing; it was my turn to laugh.

JORDAN CASTLE

Since then I have learnt a little more, but not nearly enough, about this strange-looking ruin. There used to be a small, two-roomed house on the site in olden days; this was bought, and converted into a splendid palace—splendidum exstruxit palatium—by Georg Ludwig von Lindenspeur, who lived there till his death in 1673. The plan of the building is as regular as can be, and thoroughly uninteresting; it has an artificial terrace in front, supported on massive substructures. The place continued to remain in good state till 1843 when it changed hands, and the new proprietor, having no use for it, took off the roof and carried away everything else that served his purposes. Who Lindenspeur was, I cannot say; the name does not sound altogether German or Austrian, and is unknown to me. He it was, I imagine, who for his own convenience or that of his visitors built or enlarged the path that leads up, some few hundred yards to the east of the ruin, from the driving-road in the valley below; this path, then broad enough for a carriage, with sustaining walls on both sides, has now grown quite narrow from disuse. He also founded a charity for several villages which exists to this day. The yearly income, for our particular one, is twenty-two florins; before the war, one might have helped a few poor people with this sum. Who is going to pick it up nowadays?

Such is the history of the “Jordanschloss.” I should like to learn more about the mysterious Lindenspeur; where he came from, and what induced him to settle in these outlandish regions and there to live to the day of his death. I have heard of no one else doing such a thing in the seventeenth century. He may well have been a refugee of some kind; a recluse, an original, in any case, and a wealthy one. So Jordan has been a ruin only for the last eighty years. One would never think so; for it already wears a hopelessly decayed look, as if it had been abandoned for a couple of centuries at least. That is because it lacks the solid masonry of our feudal remains. It crumbles away all the time, and I suspect that the farmhouse near at hand has been built with its stones.

We had a good look at Jordan yesterday afternoon, and agreed that it was an uncommonly transparent fabric. “The old gentleman must have been fond of windows,” observed Mr. R. True! There are more open spaces than stones in its ostentatious front; a row of eleven windows, all exactly alike, and young trees are sprouting out of them. This is what made Mr. R. christen the place “Château aux fenêtres.” And this name, in its turn, gave occasion for a simple question on my part, a question that led to a prolonged and painful discussion, in the course of which some little light was thrown on Mr. R.’s progress in the English language. I enquired as I should have done:

D. Now what is the English for “Le château aux fenêtres”?

R. The castle to the windows.

D. Castle to the windows? Try again. I am the most patient teacher in the world. And we have the whole afternoon before us. So don’t hurry and don’t disappoint me. Think!

R. Let me see.... “Château” may sometimes be rendered by “country-house.” The country-house to the windows. I know my vocables.

D. Your stock of words will pass; and such praise as is due to you for having gotten them by heart should not be withheld. But you will never learn English. “Castle to the windows” is treating our language in your usual brigandish fashion; de haut en bas. How often have I told you that a language must be courted, like a lover!

R. Never learn English? Are you serious? If so, allow me to say that I have already learnt more than enough to pass my examination. I know my vocables, as you yourself admit. I am also acquiring a little more polish, which I confess may still be needful. And latterly—how I have learnt to converse!

D. Yes; how! This is most discouraging, after all my efforts. Castle to the windows—good God! It might drive a less optimistic tutor crazy. Let us sit down on this stone for a moment, and I will tell you something that has just occurred to me. There was once a Greek poet and grammarian called Palladas, who was favored, like myself, with promising pupils of your style; who was a teacher, I mean, and nearly committed suicide in consequence——

R. They never do it, those fellows, although one wishes they would. It is the pupils who sometimes kill themselves. Your Pylades is probably alive to this day. Well?

D. Well, during one of his fits of depression at their extraordinary intelligence, he wrote a little couplet which still exists to prove the depth of his despair. Believe me, I can sympathize just now with the unhappy Palladas. The castle to the windows.... Would you like to translate his two short lines? They are very easy. And then you will understand the state of my feelings.

R. Not if you write in Greek. Put them into French, and I will translate anything you please. Here is a scrap of paper.

D. ...There now! Go ahead. No, no, no. I must have it in writing. You are too slippery, viva voce. And please try to do it carefully, for a change.

R. Voilà!... I was ramble nude to the earth, and I will ramble nude underneath her. And why I dredge in vain, viewing the nude finish? So that is the state of your feelings. You seem to have forgotten to put your clothes on.

D. I was ramble nude——

R. You may say “stroll” instead of “ramble”; I am not particular! Or “saunter.” All these are better words than “walk” or “promenade”; they are more adapted for poetic uses. That is why I chose “dredge” instead of “labor”; it sounds less common. You see what come of knowing one’s vocables.

D. Drudge; not dredge. I was ramble nude. This is appalling. I mean to preserve that document as a pièce justificative. There may be some trouble, you know, about the way you have spent your time out here. Ramble nude—God Almighty! Why, the poet means to say that he walked, that he was born, naked into this world; don’t you see?

R. Ça se peut bien. In that case, he was perhaps not the first. There is nothing very original in baby-poets being born naked. Now if he had worn a felt hat on that occasion——

D. This is hardly the moment, is it? Your English, I must insist on telling you, leaves a great deal to be desired. And I should like to ask: what are we going to do about it?

R. If the baby-poet had suddenly come to light, wearing that London hat of yours ... ah, the doctor’s explanations——!

D. Laugh away. There will be a nude finish. You will never pass the test.

R. And why not? Only a camel would bother to learn all those useless idioms. I was always first in our English class at college. I knew more than the profs, and they were high-class people.

D. Was you ramble nude there?

R. Allons; just a little more polish ... ah, ah! The horrified sage-femme ... her face ... ah, ah, ah!...

From this transparent “castle to the windows” we “rambled” yesterday, always to the westwards, always along the brow of the hill; crossed the Tiefis-Bludesch road and, about a quarter of a mile further on, turned to the right and followed a field path that goes first uphill and then down. It leads to the village of Schlins.[27]

The meadow region ends in a dank spot, almost a swamp, surrounded by forest on three sides. We were amazed at the multitude of butterflies crowded into this narrow space: I have never seen so many swallowtails gathered together. The mead is henceforward to be known as “pré des papillons,” and it was here that Mr. R. propounded a puzzling question. What happens to all the butterflies, he asked, when the grass is cut and the flowers gone? Where do they go? What do they find to eat? I have no idea. There are butterflies everywhere just now. In a fortnight or so, there will be none left, save a few peacocks and red admirals moping about the fallen fruit in orchards. Have they migrated upwards into Alpine quarters, where the fields are mown at a later season? Do they perish?

Here, at the end of the “pré des papillons,” you enter a noble forest which continues as far as Schlins. We used to call it the wood of the——. No; I refuse to open up that chapter of infantile nature-worship. Suffice to say, that the forest was properly dedicated to this potent but capricious deity, both by reason of its immeasurable distance from home (nearly an hour’s walk) and consequent unfamiliarity to us, and of the deep gloom which pervaded it in those days. It has since been thinned out; even to-day it remains one of the finest in the district and many of the firs reach a height of forty meters. Lower down and to the south there runs through the same wood another path, also to Schlins. It follows the base of one of those waterless east-west vales which are so contrarious, because, instead of at right angles, they lie parallel to our main valley. This used to be a terrifying track in those days; so narrow and deep was the dell, so tall and thick the trees on either side, that twilight reigned here in bluest noonday; and its length was interminable! The whole glen has now been reafforested and sunshine penetrates into all its recesses; but you can still discover the decaying stumps of those old giants, encrusted, many of them, with Elfenbecher (fairy goblets)—minute mossy growths, shaped and tinted like chalices of frosted silver.

As we traversed this lovely wood of the——, we were startled by a disquieting din on our right. It was only a frolicsome shower, pattering deliciously among the beeches yonder. Soon it reached us and drove us under a fir. Here, as the drops were trickling through the branches, my companion drew from his pocket that talisman, that vade mecum and sine qua non, and performed a selection of pieces grave and gay; I went to inspect a small cross that stood close at hand—one of four which are erected in this forest to the memory of woodcutters who have perished at their trade. It is dated 1867 and records that the victim was 63 years old. There is another, bearing a naturalistic representation of the accident; a wife on her knees, the husband lying dead beside her, with a massive log of timber stretched across his middle.

Now the loud rain dropped suddenly to a whisper and we went forth again towards Schlins, inhaling the aromatic odors of those essential oils which it had wakened out of the damp ground. The way is marked by colored signs against the trees; they have not been renewed since the war, and are fast fading away. This is a relic of the activities of the Blumenegg “beautification-society” which was started in emulation of that of Bludenz and, like it, expired in consequence of the war. The society did a good deal in its short life in thus marking tracks and even building benches here and there, that now molder pleasantly away; the whole wood from St. Anne church to Nenzing, for instance, is provided with marks, and whoever does not know the country might well be grateful for them. They also built the road down to Blumenegg waterfall, a delightful spot; that along our big waterfall was made by my brother and inaugurated, amid much speechifying and beer-drinking, on the 31 July, 1898.

Schlins lies prettily tucked away on a green level between the hills and the projecting woodland ridge of Jadgberg. We soon found ourselves at the Krone inn, where I have been an habitué for more years than I care to remember and where Mr. R. devoured his customary two eggs and cider, while I indulged in a long chat with the proprietress, who is a particular friend of mine. It does one good to be with such people, so blithe and natural and intelligent; I could go on talking to her for ever and ever; and I nearly did.

Then up, at last, through the firs to the venerable ruin of Jagdberg. Hard by the castle they have erected the so-called “Josefinum”—a kind of refuge and school for poor children of both sexes, waifs and strays, the scum of the province. It contains about fifteen girls and fifty boys, many of questionable parentage or none at all, ailing in body and mind—squint-eyed and one-legged and tuberculous and mangy and feeble-minded and depraved. They are sometimes spoken of as the “Verbrecherle,” the little criminals, and a few may perhaps deserve that name. One of these, not long ago, certainly displayed a rare tenacity of purpose. It was a boy-orphan who, at the age of fourteen, left the establishment where (according to his own account) he had been grossly and systematically ill-treated. When he was eighteen he considered himself strong enough to carry out a long-meditated project of revenge, and stole into the place one night with the intention of setting fire to it and of murdering the director with a dagger or revolver, both of which he carried on his person. They caught him before much damage could be done, and he was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment. The son of a gypsy, it was said; which may be an ex post facto explanation of his original conduct. In every case, he cannot but have suffered under an oppressive sense of injustice to be able to nurse his rage through four long years. Perhaps, after serving his sentence, he will have another try at the director....

As at Blumenegg, there is nothing left of Jagdberg save its outer wall, its shell; and on entering this hoary shell we were amazed to find therein a modern swimming-bath of cement, surely the most unexpected use to which a feudal ruin can be put. A handful of boys were splashing about here, together with some school-children from Schlins, every one of whom is obliged to learn to swim. This bath and the Josefinum and its plantations have impaired the charm of Jagdberg, as I knew it long ago; it was then a slumberous, world-forgotten place. I am glad they have at least not troubled to tear down its magnificent growth of ivy. True, it always lacked the seclusion and dreaminess of Blumenegg; on the other hand, it is more spacious, more solid, more grandiose. Like that ruin, it dates from about the twelfth century, was destroyed by the Appenzellers in 1405, and afterwards rebuilt; within its walls stood a famous chapel dedicated to St. Michael. It must now have lain abandoned for many long centuries. One would like to know why Herr Georg Ludwig von Lindenspeur, who seems to have had more money than was good for him—why he did not settle down in this wonderful place, instead of erecting his flimsy and pompous barrack at Jordan? Who would not live at Jagdberg, if he could? Such thoughts occur involuntarily, on visiting any of these old sites. Who would not live at Jagdberg, especially in that earlier period? Then down with that warren of rickety and vicious bastards, and up with the gallows!

Charitable projects....

And yet——

And yet these lords of Jagdberg and other men of the past may not have been altogether the simpletons one used to think them. When they risked their lives, they did it in their own interests and on their own responsibility; not, like our warriors of to-day, for the sake of enriching people of whom they had never even heard. When they robbed, they robbed to some purpose that was at least seemingly sane and seemingly profitable. They had not much use for the brotherhood of all men: “God save us from such brothers!” we can hear them saying. And so much one may observe without bitterness, that if one dream can be called more absurd than another, this of universal brotherhood is surely the absurdest that ever sat in our poor deluded brain, and the present state of the world a luminous commentary on it. I imagine it would have puzzled those old feudals—our Oriental preoccupation with other folk, our craving to lean up against each other for mutual support and betterment. Flabbiness, they might have called it. We call it “solidarity.”... A little trick of ours.... We invent such words to shadow forth a desire more or less vague, more or less reasonable; and forthwith flatter ourselves that we have succeeded in creating a thing. Solidarity! Mankind is a jellyfish. How comes a jellyfish to want a backbone?

Such individualistic ideals may come into fashion again. Meanwhile, they are out of date. The castles lie in ruins and their occupants, the human wolves, have been hunted out of the land. Let us be sheep. The loves and hatreds of these wolfish creatures must have been narrow and limited in their range. On the other hand, they were doubtless personal, fervent. They were kept clean. Our loves and hatreds are no longer kept clean. They have ceased to be personal; we love and hate in the herd, the mass. Endeavoring to identify our most intimate aspirations with those of other men, we produce that incongruity of feeling and outlook, that haziness of moral contour, which is a feature of modern life—to what end? Solidarity! By all means adopt a fellow-creature’s greatcoat, or lend him your own. Why adopt his character? Is a bundle of self-contradictory inhibitions worth adopting? Love your neighbor as yourself. Now what has that gentleman done, to deserve our love?

Philanthropic musings, engendered by the spectacle of Jagdberg and its Josefinum....[28]