TOGETHER

BY NORMAN DOUGLAS

NEW YORK
ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY
1923


Copyright, 1923, by
Robert M. McBride & Co.


Printed in the
United States of America


Published, 1923



TO

ARCHIE and ROBIN

FROM THEIR FATHER

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Little I thought ever to become a guest in this tavern, familiar as it is to me from olden days. They have made us extremely comfortable. Nothing is amiss, nothing lacking. Our rooms are large and well furnished. Certain preliminary operations were of course necessary in regard to the beds. Away first of all with the Keilpolster, that wedge-shaped horror; away next with the Plumeau, another invention of the devil. And breakfast always up here please, for both of us, in my room, at half-past seven; seeing that work begins at eight sharp. Not less than a litre of milk for my friend, and two eggs; he is a milk-and-egg maniac. I am past his stage, though still young enough to revel in that delicious raspberry jelly. Why is it almost unknown in England?

On one side of my room hangs an oleograph which depicts a gay sportsman aiming at some chamois from behind a tree at twenty-five yards’ distance; such luck never came my way. The picture on the further side is still more suggestive—three roe-deer, hotly pursued by a dachshund; a pug-dog would have an equal chance of success. Cheerful pictures of this kind should hang in every room. I shall look at them whenever I feel jaundiced. Our tavern by the way is famous for its dachshunds. They have a couple of thoroughbreds, with faces like orchids, who eat and sleep most of the day and whose descendants are rapidly stocking the neighborhood. Their numerous progeny drop in for a visit from the remotest villages, and are coldly received by the parents. Just now the gentleman is asleep and his spouse, not for the first time, indulging in an agitated flirtation with one of her own remote descendants who has not yet found a home for himself: a very bad example to the rest of us....

Through the silvery curtain of drizzle I glance eastwards and recognize the old, old view, the earliest that ever greeted my eyes; for our nursery windows, up yonder, looked also towards the rising sun, and once, not in the day but late at night, I was lifted out of bed and placed on the window-sill to behold a wondrous thing—the sky all a-glister with livid rays. This aurora borealis is my first memory of life and the apparition must have been recorded in the newspapers of the day, since it was the only “Nordlicht” ever seen, to my knowledge, in the country; the vexed question, therefore, of a man’s earliest memory could be settled, so far as I am concerned, if one had the energy to hunt up the files. There, confronting me on its hillock, stands the church with red-topped steeple. During the war, the authorities carried off the four bells to be melted down; three new ones have since been purchased at Innsbruck. They chime pleasantly enough, but not quite the same as of yore. One would like to hear the old ones again, for memory’s sake, after all these years. How gayly they used to tremble on the air at midday, while one roamed about the hills at the back of the house. And how one rushed down to be in time for luncheon, seated on a fir-branch; an excellent method of progression on steep, slippery meadows, provided there be no stones or wasps’ nests on the track. One day, long ago, we three slid in this fashion and at a breathless speed down the never-ending slopes of the Furkla alp above Bludenz. Nothing happened till about half-way, when the eldest felt a jolt, a slight cavity in the ground, and called out to me to beware. It was too late; I was pitched in and out again. My sister who followed, carrying less weight, came to rest there. The cavity was a wasps’ nest. Eight stings....

And the church is backed by a mountain called Hoher Frassen; even at this distance one can detect a belt of green stretching across its middle near the scattered houses of Ludescherberg; wonderful, what manure will do! Everybody goes up the Hoher Frassen (vulgo Pfannenknecht) on account of the view, which is remarkable considering its low elevation of not even two thousand meters, though personally, if one must climb places like this, I should prefer the Mondspitze or Hochgerach. You can ascend in early morning from Bludenz or anywhere else, catch a glimpse of the Rhine and Lake Constance and snow peaks innumerable—of half this small province of Vorarlberg, in fact—and be home again in time for a late luncheon. Near the top is the now inevitable hut for the convenience of fat tourists. Cows pasture about the summit among the Alpine roses and dwarf pines.[1] Here, at the right season, you may capture as many Apollo butterflies as you please. A little boy and girl, scrambling homeward one day from this summit, dislodged with infinite trouble a huge bowlder and, while somebody was not looking, sent it on a career of delirious leaps down the incline above Raggal village. Such was its momentum after a couple of hundred yards that it went clean through a hay-hut, empty but solid, tossing its wooden blocks into the air as if they were feathers. The destruction of some poor peasant’s property was considered a great joke. We laughed over it for weeks and weeks.

On the other side of our valley one can discern, despite the rain, those peaks of the Rhætikon group. They have been powdered with freshly fallen snow almost down to the Kloster alp, where cows are grazing at this moment. The Kloster alp, on which I have passed many nights with no companion save a rifle, is forever memorable in my annals as being the spot where, at the age of six, I smoked my first cigar. We were on an excursion and somebody—the little Dr. Zimmermann, I daresay, the blithe veterinary surgeon—gave me, doubtless at my repeated and urgent solicitation, a long black Virginia, a so-called rat’s tail, the strongest weed manufactured by the Austrian Government. Delighted with my luck, I puffed through an inch or so. Then, without any warning, death and darkness compassed me about. Death and darkness! The world was turned inside out; so was I. Not for several weeks did I try tobacco again; this time only a cigarette and in a more appropriate locality; even that made me rather unhappy. Here, on the cliffs just above the Kloster alp, you used to be able to gather a bouquet of Edelweiss with your eyes shut, so to speak; here, among the tumbled fragments of rock further on, was a numerous colony of marmots. Never, in my bloodthirstiest days, had I the heart to shoot one of these frolicsome beasts, whose settlements are scattered over most of our mountains at the proper elevation. They call them “Burmentli” in our dialect—a pungent variety of alemannic—and their fat is supposed to cure every ill that flesh is heir to; it is chiefly on account of this fat that they have been persecuted in all parts of the Alps, and exterminated in not a few. Their cheery whistle carries half a mile; if you sit perfectly motionless, they will creep out of their burrows, one by one, and frisk and gambol around you. Once, at Christmas, a hunter brought me a hibernating marmot which he had taken, together with its whole family, out of winter-quarters. I put it, drowsy but half-awake, into a cold room, where it immediately rolled itself under a

bundle of hay. There it slept, week after week. A marmot in this condition is cold to the touch but not altogether stiff, and Professor Mangili calculated long ago that during the whole of its six months’ lethargy it respires only 71,000 times (awake, 72,000 times in two days)—a veritable death-in-life! Mine displayed no resentment at being aroused now and then in a warm room; indeed, it behaved with exemplary meekness and allowed itself to be pinched or caressed or carried about; but preferred sleeping, and always seemed to say, in the words of the poet’s sluggard, “You have waked me too soon! I must slumber again.” When summer came round, we took it back to its old home, where it trotted off without a word of thanks, as if the past experiences in our valley had been nothing but a silly dream.

One would hardly think that marmots ever fed each other, yet a skull in my collection makes me wonder how this particular animal, an old beast, can have survived without receiving nourishment from its fellows. It was shot near St. Gallenkirch in the Montavon valley on September 12th, 1886; and is remarkable since, in consequence of what looks like the fracture of a single incisor tooth, the lower jaw has been partially and slowly displaced, shifted to one side of the upper—at the cost, no doubt, of incessant pain. What happened? All four incisors therewith became not only useless but an intolerable hindrance; lacking the necessary attrition, they grew ever longer in mammoth-like curves, and sharply pointed; the shortest—the injured one, which is still deprived of enamel at its extremity—measures six and a half centimeters in length, the longest all but eight; and one of them, in the course of its circular development, has actually begun to bore into the bone of the upper jaw. I am not much of a draftsman, but these two sketches will suffice to give some idea of the freak specimen. A squirrel with somewhat similar dentition was described in the “Zoologist” (Vol. IX, p. 220). Here was one marmot, at least, who must have been glad when summer food-problems were over, and it grew cold enough to scuttle downstairs again for a six months’ rest. And some of them sleep in this fashion for eight months on end. What a sleep! Why wake up at all?

Food-problems of our own——

They are non-existent. This region has suffered relatively little from the effects of war; it is a self-supporting district of peasant-proprietors where nearly every family possesses its own house and orchard and fields and cattle; the ideal state of affairs. Nothing is lacking, save tobacco and coffee. To obtain the first, one plagues friends in England; instead of the second, we have to put up with cocoa, a costive and slimy abomination which I, at least, will not be able to endure much longer. Prolonged and confidential talks with the innkeeper’s wife—his third one, a lively woman from the Tyrol, full of fun and capability—have already laid down the broad lines of our bill of fare. I must devour all the old local specialties, to begin with, over and over again; items such as Tiroler Knödel and Saueres Nierle and Rahmschnitzel (veal, the lovely Austrian veal, is scarce just now, but she means to get it) and brook-trout blau gesotten and Hasenpfeffer and fresh oxtongue with that delicious brown onion sauce, and gebaitzter Rehschlegel (venison is cheap; three halfpence a pound, at the present rate of exchange); and, first and foremost, Kaiserfleisch, a dish which alone would repay the trouble of a journey to this country from the other end of the world, were traveling fifty times more vexatious than it is. Then: cucumber salad of the only true—i. e., non-Anglo-Saxon—variety, sprinkled with paprika; no soup without the traditional chives; beetroot with cummin-seed, and beans with Bohnenkraut (whatever that may be); also things like Kohlrabi and Kässpätzle—malodorous but succulent; above all, those ordinary, those quite ordinary, geröstete Kartoffeln with onions, one of the few methods by which the potato, the grossly overrated potato, that marvel of insipidity, can be made palatable. How comes it that other nations are unable to produce geröstete Kartoffeln? Is it a question of Schmalz? If so, the sooner they learn to make Schmalz, the better. Pommes lyonnaises are a miserable imitation, a caricature.

In the matter of sweets, we have arranged for Schmarrn with cranberry compote, and pancakes worthy of the name—that is, without a grain of flour in them, and Apfelstrudel and—quick! strawberries down from the hills, several pounds of the aromatic mountain ones, to form those wonderful open tarts which are brought in straight from the oven and eaten then and there, hot—if you know what is good. Should the weather grow sultry, I will also make a point of consuming a bowl of sour milk, just for the sake of auld lang syne. It may well ruin my stomach, which has acquired an alcoholic diathesis since those days.

There! A change of food, at last.

Whether Mr. R. will take to this diet is another matter. I should be in despair if he were a true Frenchman, for your Gaul, in this and other matters, is the most provincial creature in the world; like a peasant, he can eat nothing save what his grandmother has taught him to think eatable. Mr. R., luckily for him, is French only from political necessity. And besides, persons of his age should never be encouraged to express likes and dislikes in the matter of food; it is apt to make them capricious or even greedy, and what says the learned Dr. Isaac Watts, from whom I quoted a moment ago? “The appetite of taste is the first thing that gets the ascendant in our younger years, and a guard should be set upon it early.” How true! Nobody is entitled to be captious until he has reached the canonical age. After that, he has acquired the right of being not only critical, but as gluttonous as ever he pleases.

Here, meanwhile, are the latest statistics of our village. It contains about seven hundred inhabitants, three hundred cows and calves (most of them on the mountains just now), five taverns, and three Dorftrottels or idiots, of the genuine Alpine breed. Mr. R. is dying to have a look at them as soon as the weather clears; and so am I. There is a fascination about real idiots. They have all the glamour of a monkey-house, with an additional note of human pathos.

A heated discussion after dinner with Mr. R.—one of our usual ones—as to the right meaning of the English words “still” and “yet” which, like “anybody” or “somebody,” he refuses to distinguish from each other. On such occasions, he complains of the needless ambiguity and prolixity of my language; I retort by some civil remark about the deplorable poverty of his own. I should explain that I hold certificates as teacher of French and English, and am in possession of an infallible coaching method (a family secret) for backward or forward pupils; and that this is not the first time I have endeavored to instill a little knowledge of English into the head of Mr. R. who, for all his faults, is a companionable young fellow with certain brigand-strains in his ancestry that go well with those in mine (vide Peter Hinedo’s “Genealogy of the most Ancient and most Noble Family of the Brigantes, or Douglas,” London, 1754).

That astonishing French education.... What is one to do with people, future candidates for government posts, who cannot tell the difference between an adverb and a conjunction, who, if you ask them to define a reflexive verb, gaze at you with an air of injured innocence, almost as if you had asked them to say what is the capital of China, the position of their own colony of Obok, and whether Chili belongs to Germany or to Austria? They learn none of these things at school; or if they do, it is in some infant class where they are forgotten again, promptly and forever. Instead of this, they are crammed with microscopic details, under the name of “Littérature,” concerning the lives of all French writers that ever breathed the air of Heaven, and with a bewildering mass of worthless physical formulæ, enough to daze the brain of a Gauss. What Mr. R. does not know about convex lenses and declination needles and such-like balderdash is not worth knowing; his acquaintance with every aspect of Molière’s life and works is devastating in its completeness, and makes me feel positively uncomfortable. Now Molière was doubtless a fine fellow, but no youngster has any right to know so much about him. I only wish they had taught him a few elements of grammar instead.[2]

It is too late now. He laughs at grammar—a frank, derisory laugh. In other words, my task is rendered none the easier by his serene self-confidence. He does not share my view that his English is still rudimentary, though he admits that it may require “a little polish here and there.” Everything in the nature of a difficulty or exception to the rules is an idiom—not worth bothering about. He conjugates our few irregular verbs as if they were regular; go, go’ed, go’ed; find, finded, finded; and gets in a towering passion, not with me but with the language, whenever I have to set him right. Their mellow auxiliaries of “should” and “can” and all the rest of them, so useful, so reputable, so characteristic of the versatile genius of England, are treated as a perennial joke; indeed, it is a wretched idiosyncrasy of his to discover fun in the most abstruse and recondite material. (He nearly died of laughing the other day, because I told him that the Neanderthal race of man was less hairy than the Pithecanthropus erectus of Java; and failed to explain why such a bald scientific statement of fact should provoke even a smile.) Simple phrases like “Est-ce que l’enfant n’aurait pas dû acheter le chapeau?” give birth to English renderings that would send any less patient tutor into convulsions; renderings such as you might expect from the average Englishman when asked to put into French “If I had not noticed it, you would not have noticed it either (using s’en apercevoir).”

To all my suggestions that it might be well to study this or that more conscientiously, I receive the stereotyped reply “I know my vocables”; as if the possession of an English vocabulary were synonymous with the possession of English speech. It is perfectly true; he has a fair stock of words, and nobody would believe what can be done with our language until he hears it handled by a person who knows his vocables (and nothing else) after the manner of my pupil; I often tell him that he could make his fortune in England, on the music-hall stage, with that outfit alone. Nevertheless, strange to say, he was nearly always the first in his English class at school. Vainly one conjectures what may have been the attainments of the rest of them or, for that matter, of their teachers.

So he studies two hours a day with me and two hours alone, preparing for an examination in October; and that is his raison d’être in this country. He has just given me, to correct, a translation from a book full of “thèmes et versions,” all of which are too difficult for him; this one is his English rendering of a stiff piece that describes P. L. Courier’s disgust at the French Court. It is a noteworthy specimen of my pupil’s command of vocables and of nothing else; a document which I should not hesitate to set down here, in full, could I persuade anybody into the belief that it was authentic. That is out of the question. People would say I had wasted a good week of my life, trying to manufacture something comical.

Instead of this “anglais au baccalauréat” we have lately begun a course of Grimm’s Fairy Tales which are nearer to his level, and I am realizing once more what this stuff, so-called folk-lore, is worth. A desert! For downright intellectual nothingness, for misery of invention and tawdriness of thought, a round half dozen of these tales are not to be surpassed on earth. They mark the lowest ebb of literature; even the brothers Grimm, Germans though they were, must have suffered a spasm or two before allowing them to be printed. Fortunately Mr. R.’s versions of this drivel are far, far superior to the original; they beat it on its own ground of sheer inanity; and I am carefully collecting them to be made up, at some future period, into an attractive little volume for the linguistic amateur.

THE BRUNNENMACHER

NOW what may that old Brunnenmacher have looked like? I never saw him. I only know that, like my friend his son, he was the official water-expert of the town of Bludenz, that he was older than my father, and every bit as incurable a Bergfex—mountain-maniac. His nick-name, “Bühel-Toni,” suffices to prove this. Those two were always doing impossible things up there at the risk of their lives (it was thus, indeed, that my father was killed) either together, or alone, secretly, in emulation of each other. For in those days the whole of this province was virgin soil, so far as climbing was concerned, and numberless are the peaks they are supposed to have scaled for the first time. Yet neither of them, it seems, had ever tackled the Zimba, the noblest of those pinnacles of the Rhætikon group which I can see from this window, out there, on the other side of the valley, covered with fresh snow wherever snow can come to lie among its crags. The Zimba rises to a height of 2640 meters and was regarded as inaccessible by local chamois hunters who, for the rest, were under no obligation to scramble up places of this kind, their game being abundant lower down. Inaccessible! That annoyed these two Bergfexes all the more.

“Are you never going to try?” my father would ask.

Said the Brunnenmacher:

“I am an old man, and have at least three times as many children dependent on me as you have. That makes a difference. Besides, you are rich. Rich people can afford to break their necks. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? There it is, staring you in the face all day long. I could never resist the temptation, if I were in your place. Only think: it would be quite an unusual kind of honor for you, an Englishman, to have been the first up there. In fact, I confess I should feel a little jealous and sore about it, myself.”

So it went on for months or years, and each time they met, the Brunnenmacher would say:

“So-and-so now thinks of trying the Zimba. Are you going to let him have it his own way? Is he to get all the glory? Now’s your chance,” or else: “How about the Zimba? Still afraid? What a scandal. Ah, if I were only a few years younger!”

At last my father could bear it no longer and slunk out of the house one afternoon on his usual pretext—when anything risky had to be done—of going after chamois. He rolled himself in his blanket at the Sarotla alp, near the foot of the peak, and next day, somehow or other, set foot on the virgin summit. Imagine his disgust on finding there a Steinmandl, a cairn, containing a bottle with an affectionate letter to himself from “Bühel-Toni” who had sneaked up ages ago, all by himself, without saying a word to any one.

That is the history of the Zimba, which is now climbed by numerous tourists every year. No wonder; since all the difficult places have been made easy. Even so, the mountain has claimed its victims—three, within the last few years; one of them a tough old gentleman who, to test his nerve and muscle, insisted on “doing” the Zimba once a year. It was a sporting notion; the Zimba did him, in the end; he lies buried in the new Protestant cemetery at Bludenz. And if you like to scramble up from the Rellsthal flank, you may still have some fun. Not long ago a tourist actually died of fright while climbing down here. He had gone up by the ordinary route to the satisfaction of his guide who, being from the Montavon valley and anxious to get home as soon as possible (this is my own assumption) took him down by this almost perpendicular “short cut.” At a certain point the tourist declared that he could go neither forwards nor backwards, and was going to die then and there. Which he straightway proceeded to do, rather foolishly. But there are no limits to what a real tourist can accomplish. Along the extremely convenient track which scales the cliff between the Zalim alp and the Strassburger hut (Scesaplana district) two young men contrived to slip; they were shattered to fragments. Cleverest of all was the gentleman who lately achieved the distinction of dying from exposure on the Hoher Frassen. He ought to have left us word to say how the thing was done.

We do not always realize the difficulties of the pioneers. Among other matters, there were no shelter huts in those days. That which lies below the Zimba, on the Sarotla alp, is one of some fifty now scattered about the hills of this small province. The earliest of them all was the Lünersee hut which bears the name of my father; he was then president of our local section of the Alpine Club. Built for the convenience of visitors to the Scesaplana summit, this hut was swept into the lake long ago, with all it contained, by an avalanche. It is time another avalanche came along, for the place has grown into a caravanserai of the rowdiest description. Altogether, selfish as it may sound, I should not be sorry to see every one of these structures burnt to the ground, or otherwise obliterated. Their primary object, to afford shelter to bona fide climbers, is laudable; what they actually do, is to serve as hotels—not bad ones, either—to a crowd of summer visitors whose faces and clothes and manners are an outrage on the surroundings. Abolish the huts, or cut down their comforts and menus to what a climber might reasonably expect, and the objectionable “Hüttenwanzen” would evaporate. What are they doing among these mountains? Let them guzzle and perspire in Switzerland!...

My friend the younger Brunnenmacher, son of “Bühel-Toni,” was also official water-specialist and Bergfex; he may well have been the image of his father since, from all I have heard, he had the same character and therefore, according to a theory of my own, must have resembled him also in person. If that be so, we may take it for granted that the father was an unusually hirsute creature. The mere sight of his son, at the Bludenz swimming baths, used to send us into fits. Nobody had ever seen such a “Waldmensch.” He might have been a gorilla in this respect—an uncommon kind of gorilla; for not every gorilla, I fancy, can afford to wear a regular parting down its back. No gorilla, either, could climb in better style; or smile, if they smile at all, to better purpose. The Brunnenmacher’s laughing face charmed away hunger and fatigue and wet clothes and all the ills of mountaineering. It may seem far-fetched to apply the terms “ingenuous” or “childlike” to the smile of a bearded monster of forty, but there are no other epithets available for that of the Brunnenmacher. It rose to his lips, on seeing you; it hovered there day and night, waiting for your appearance. Doubtless he had a peculiar affection for me, as being my father’s son; everybody found him a lovable person.

His weather-proof good humor must have helped to establish his reputation as a guide; that, and his jovial blasphemies. They made you laugh, and a guide who makes you laugh has already gone a long way towards gaining your friendship. Once you persuaded the Brunnenmacher to begin some story of his, which was not difficult, you were sure to get an adequate amount of playful bad language thrown in. An infallible method of getting more than this adequate amount was to make him relate his experiences of a trip to America, and of the agonies of four days’ sea-sickness on an empty stomach. This narrative bristled with swear words; it ended in a fixed formula: “Jo, Himmelherrgottsakraméntnochemol, do honni grod gmeint i müest ussm grosse Zähe uffi kotze!” which might as well be left untranslated ...

There is a curious cave near Bludenz called the Bährenloch, the bear’s cavern; it lies at the foot of the cliffs above the road to Rungalin village—not the field path, but that which skirts the hills. I say curious, because it is plainly not a natural cave; it is an artificial one and has been hacked by human hands out of the limestone; when, by whom, and for what purpose, no one knows. The chisel-marks are quite plain, once you are well inside. It is roughly quadrangular in shape and about the height of a man at the entrance; half way through, it takes a slight bend to the right and, growing narrower and narrower till you can hardly turn round, ends abruptly, as though the builder had grown weary of his toil, or disappointed with its result. The work of a mediæval anchorite? I doubt it. Such a person would have contented himself with a domicile less than half its length. Perhaps some crazy enthusiast dug it long ago, in the hope of discovering gold or what not among the bowels of those cliffs.

The younger Brunnenmacher first took me there, and how he managed to hit upon the precise locality of this grotto remains a mystery to me. Not only was the steep woodland below much thicker in those days—almost impenetrable, in fact—and without any trace of an upward path, but the entire base of the cliffs was defended by so dense a mass of brushwood that we had to crawl through it on hands and knees. How did he contrive to ascend undeviatingly to the cavern’s mouth? A few yards astray, and we should have been lost in that jungle where one could barely move, and had no means of seeing to right or left. All this sounds incredible at present. Most of the brushwood has been uprooted and the forest thinned out to such an extent that it has become quite transparent; moreover, that meritorious “beautification-society” of Bludenz constructed, among many other things, a convenient zigzag path which will lead you after fourteen windings to the very entrance of the Bährenloch. The horse-shoe bats, the greater and the lesser, which I used to capture here and take home as pets, may well have deserted the place; likewise the young foxes and badgers we unearthed in the neighborhood. One of these badgers grew so tame that he followed me about everywhere, and would even take me for rides on his back. I should like to see him do it nowadays.[3]

This Brunnenmacher seems to have made up his mind that I was to become a climber like himself. He took me in hand. He made me trot miles and miles, as it seemed, up the then almost trackless Galgen-tobel and showed me the fons et origo of the Bludenz water supply, as well as a spot where you could discover a certain vitriolic mineral by the simple process of applying your tongue to the rock; and still further afield, into the upper regions of the Krupsertobel, and down its savage bed. Then came the turn of the mountains—Scesaplana, to begin with. As guide, he had already gone up there some seventy times, and even I got to know it so well in later years that I could have walked up in blackest midnight. Next the Sulzfluh, famous as a haunt of the Lämmergeier; and so on. One of the last of these trips was up the Säntis, the shapely peak across the Swiss frontier, which seems to close up our valley to the west. We came back with our pockets full of rock-crystals.

So I pursue the memories, as they rise from the past, of those old days of the Brunnenmacher. He died a good many years back. But he has left behind a sturdy brood of children—I know not how many; dozens of them, let us hope, to inherit his smile....

That Säntis mountain, which I have just mentioned, has a bad name at this moment. There was a foul murder done here, some months ago; the married couple in charge of the observatory near the summit were found killed at their post. Nobody could guess who the assassin was, nor what his object might have been, till the body of a young man was discovered in some hut not far away. He had committed suicide; and he was the murderer. So far as I could gather, this youngster was of decent birth but, owing to excesses of one kind or another, had lost all balance and self-respect. One thing, nevertheless, he preserved intact: an intense love of the Säntis, his native mountain, which he seems to have regarded as a sort of private domain. He knew its territory inch by inch and could never bring himself to forsake it; this affection, indeed, was his undoing, for after the crime he made no attempt to quit the country, as he easily might have done. The all-absorbing attachment to this piece of ground kept him chained there, and it was supposed, though nowise proved, I fancy, that he killed the old people out of an insane envy, and in the equally insane hope of being thereafter installed at the observatory as their successor, and having the Säntis all to himself for the rest of his life. Murders are committed for a considerable variety of amorous motives, but seldom for one of such a glacially nonsexual and idealistic tinge; it is the kind of etherealized horror that might be imagined to take place on some other planet. Altogether, an interesting problem in psychology, if the facts they gave me are correct. To fall in love with a mountain is not the common lot of man. And so disastrously!

It was a tragedy of unreciprocated passion, from beginning to end. The Säntis is no longer in the first flush of youth; it can be trusted, I feel sure, to behave with perfect decorum under the most trying and delicate circumstances. Its reputation, previous to this little affair, had been of the best; nor is there any reason to suppose that it gave its brain-sick admirer the slightest encouragement to act as he did, or to think himself singled out for favors denied to the rest of us. The locality is doubtless attractive, as such places go, but that is not its own fault—who ever heard of blame attaching to beauty?—so attractive, that a man might well be pardoned for growing fond of it, and fonder, and fonder. Even in the case of superlative fondness, I, at least, would still try not to feel jealous of other people’s familiarity with its charms, and would certainly think twice before murdering a respectable married couple pour ses beaux yeux.

I have now seen four generations of these delightful folk who own our tavern, the latest arrival being a great-grandchild of the first. Though barely born, it already wears a laughable resemblance to its grandfather.

He is the present head of the family, a village magnate who knows the ins and outs of the countryside as well as any one alive; a Nimrod in his day, and the only marksman, beside my father, to whom they hung up a diploma of honor in the Ludesch shooting range; he has lived for years in Milan and traveled, officially, to Vienna, to set forth to the Government some claim of our district. The face might be that of one of those good-natured but intelligent Roman emperors like Titus, with round head and ruddy hair; a face such as you find all over the Roman province to this day, and all over this province as well. His family came originally from the Bregenzerwald region, at the back of our hills, and is connected with that of Angelika Kauffmann who was born there.[4]

Having been friends with him for the last half century, we never lack subjects of conversation; there is fresh ground to explore as often as we meet, and old ground to traverse again. What I now want to know is this: how about the rain? Are we in for a Landregen? He thinks not; the weather is too cold, and snow lies too low; where his own cattle are, on the alp of Zürs near Lech, it must be lying at this moment. Unless the weather clears, he will have to go up and look after them; also on account of the foot-and-mouth disease, which has broken out in the neighborhood. Lech: who has the chamois shooting there? Nearly all the shoots in the country, he explains, have been taken by Swiss, and no wonder; look at their exchange! And what of the projected Anschluss (annexation) to Switzerland? Well, Germany would be better, on the whole. Besides, the truth of the matter is (laughing) the Swiss won’t have us; they say we are too Catholic and too lazy and too fond of drinking. As if our people could afford to pay for wine nowadays! By the way, just try this Schnapps, as a curiosity.

It was juniper-spirit, of the year 1882. With all respect for its antiquity, I found myself unable to appreciate the stuff. Then he gave me, as an antidote, some of his own Obstler (made of apples) only three weeks old. A little crude, but of good promise. So we went through the lot. His own Zwetschgenwasser—excellent! Then Kirsch, from the neighboring village of Tiefis, which makes a specialty of this Schnapps, distilled from the small mountain cherries; of mighty pleasant flavor. Next, Enzian; the product of the yellow Alpine gentian. Whoever likes Enzian—and who can help liking it?—will have nothing to say against that of our Silberthal, which has a well-deserved reputation for this brand. Beerler, I enquire? No, he says; nobody makes bilberry-spirit any more.

“Which is a pity.”

“This infernal war——”

“It has shattered all the refinements of life.”

So we discuss the world, and presently the proprietress comes up to announce that she has discovered coffee. I thought she would! She sent to Bludenz for it, on the sly. Now what, I ask, is her particular method of roasting?

“Why, in the oven, of course; and very carefully. Then, when the beans begin to sweat, and are neither lighter nor darker than a capuchin’s frock, I take them out and place them, steaming hot, into a glass jar and cover them at once with a thick layer of powdered sugar. There they get cold slowly and are obliged, you see, to draw in again all the fragrance which they would otherwise have lost. Isn’t that your English way?”

I wish it were....

TIEFIS

Sure enough, the first thing we saw was one of the man-idiots hacking wood out of doors. He was of the deaf and dumb variety, with misshapen skull; he took no notice of us, but continued at his task with curious deliberation, as if each stroke of the ax necessitated the profoundest thought. Weak in the head, obviously; but not what I call an idiot. If he could have spoken, he would doubtless have uttered as many witticisms as one hears in an English public-house at closing time. The woman was also there, sitting on the bench beside a Sister of Charity. Under-sized, stupid-looking, with mouth agape; nothing more; I have seen society ladies not unlike her in appearance. She can sew and knit stockings and even talk, they had told us. Mediocre specimens, both of them. And how about the third one, we enquired? He was working in the fields, said the Sister.

Working in the fields....

These things call themselves idiots. Even idiots, it seems, have degenerated nowadays. Mr. R. was dreadfully disappointed; and so was I. He vowed I had led him to expect something on quite another scale; and so I had. He extracted a promise, then and there, that I should show him over Valduna, the provincial lunatic asylum near Rankweil, in the hope of unearthing a few idiots worthy of the name.

Now of course you cannot have everything in this world. You cannot ask, in a district otherwise so richly endowed by Nature as this one, for the fine fleur of imbecility—for crétins. To see these marvels you must go further afield, to places like the Valtellina or Val d’Aosta (and even there, I understand, the race is losing some of its best characteristics. These doctors!) But one might at least have kept alive a specimen or two of the old school, just for memory’s sake; idiots such as my sister and myself used to see, while rambling as children about these streets with the Alte Anna, our nurse. On that very bench, where the modish lady was reclining to-day, or its predecessor, there used to sit two skinny old madwomen side by side, with their backs to the wall. There they sat, always in the same place. They were as mad as could be, and older than the hills. A terrifying spectacle—these two blank creatures, staring into vacuity out of pale blue eyes, with white hair tumbled all about their shoulders. One of them disappeared—died, no doubt; the survivor went on sitting and staring, in her old place. There was another idiot whom we liked far better; in fact we loved him. He was of the joyful and jabbering kind, and he lived near the factory. His facial contortions used to make us shriek with laughter. Sometimes he dribbled at the mouth. When he dribbled copiously, which was not every day, it was our crowning joy.

The old Anna, of course, knew by heart every idiot within miles of our home. She specialized in such phenomena. What she liked even better was anything in the nature of an accident, operation, horrible disease, or childbirth; she knew of it, by some dark instinct, the moment it occurred: she knew! and, being forbidden to leave the children alone, dragged us with her into the remotest peasant-houses and hamlets to enjoy the sight. Above all things, she had a mania for corpses and the flair of a hyena for discovering their whereabouts. As often as there was a corpse within walking distance, she donned her seven-league boots and rushed towards it in the bee-line, carrying my sister, to save time, while I toddled painfully after. Arrived at the spot where the dead body lay, she would first cross herself and then begin to gloat. We did the same. Who knows how many maladies, how many corpses, we inspected at that tender age! A sound education. For it familiarized us with death and suffering at a life-period when one cannot yet grasp their full import; it took away, for good and all, a great part of their terrors. We were never shocked by such things; only interested—hugely interested....

After an appetizing luncheon which atoned for the bitter disappointment of this morning, we strolled upwards in the sunshine, slowly and comfortably, towards the village of Tiefis. The ancient Dorfberg road which started opposite the sawmill to climb the height now lies obliterated and forgotten; it was so steep that coachmen and all the rest of us—save one or other of those awesome Scotch grand-aunts, fragile and frowsy—had to get out of the carriage and walk. Here, on the upper level, stood certain immense walnut trees of ours, in whose shade I used to crawl about before I could walk. They are gone. But the distant iron target against the hill-side behind them, which served my father for rifle-practice, is in its old place; they have not troubled to pull it down. I glance into the back regions of our old house; no great change here; some of the present proprietor’s children are bathing in that fountain which used to be covered with water-lilies. Then, a couple of hundred yards further on, the ochre-tinted bed of that wonderful stream which petrified leaves and grasses, a ceaseless marvel of childhood. There it is as of old, trickling downhill in the same miniature cascade. Up again, to the next level and beyond, where the forest begins and where, looking back, you have a fine view upon the Zimba.

Now these are the things for which I have come here; things for which you will vainly ransack England and the whole Mediterranean basin. You are confronted, all of a sudden, by a dusky precipice, a wall of ancient firs, glittering in the sun; their branches droop earthward in curtain-like fringes. Here the path enters the forest—an inspiring portal! To step from those bright meadows into the solemn and friendly twilight of the trees is like stepping into a vast green cavern, into another world; involuntarily one lowers one’s voice. I shall be much surprised if these benign woodlands do not have a chastening influence upon the character and the whole worldly outlook of Mr. R., to whom this country and its people and language and customs are so utterly strange that he has not yet recovered from his first bewilderment; they are what he needs—what all of us need; one should return to them again and again, to breathe a cleaner air, to rectify one’s perspective, to escape from the herd and the contamination of its unsteady brain.

There is a short break in the wood soon afterwards, a steep grassy slope with a hay-hut at its foot. The place is called Hirsch-sprung, because in olden days a hunted stag took the whole descent at a single leap. Any one who has seen stags pursued by a hound will admit that they are remarkable jumpers. They seldom get as good a chance as this, of showing what they can do. The distance aerially traversed must be about eighty yards.

Tiefis is a new and prosperous village; the old one was burnt down in the sixties. We went to my old inn where we discovered, among other things, a pretty fair-haired child, daughter of the proprietress; she has the clearest complexion imaginable and the sweetest smile, and her eyes are not blue, but of a mysterious golden-gray; the very picture of innocence, and just the kind of person to trouble desperately Mr. R., who is of the other color and at an inflammable age, though far more decent-minded than I used to be. The charm is fleeting; she will lose some of her looks; already I detect an ever so slight thickening of her throat. Goitrous throats are none too rare hereabouts and nobody seems to mind them, but Mr. R. knows nothing about such things as yet. At my invitation she came and sat down beside him, which disconcerted both of them at first, while I discussed the price of wine and other commodities with the mother, whose nervous twitch in one eye must not be mistaken for a wink. Where would it end, I enquired? Did innkeepers like herself still stock the better qualities of white, the Nieder-oesterreicher and so-called Terlaner, or red kinds like Veltliner and Kalterer See and Magdalener? Would not people, at this rate, soon give up drinking wine altogether? They were giving it up fast, she said. No peasant cared to pay 1500 kronen for a quarter of a liter. Only last week it was 800; in another fortnight it might be 2500 (it is now 4000). And so forth.

“I think it would be polite to shake hands with the little baby,” said Mr. R., as we rose to depart.

“The little baby? I see. Go ahead. She won’t bite.”

“Of course not. But one ought to say something. What is the German for au revoir?”

“Say nothing to-day. Keep that for next time. Look straight into her face and smile; put your soul into it.”

“I was going to do that anyhow.”

Down again, by that pleasant road which connects the villages of Tiefis and Bludesch. At the foot of the hill we abandoned it and turned to the left, eastwards, up a swampy dell which, I knew, would bring us back once more to the Stag’s Leap—a winding, narrow vale encompassed by woodlands and drenched, just then, in a magical light from the sunset at our back. It is called the “Eulenloch” (owl’s den), and a streamlet runs down its center; the only streamlet in the district which contains crayfish and therefore used to supply us, in former days, with potage bisque. We captured one of these crustaceans; the brook is hereafter to be known as “ruisseau des écrevisses” (its real name is “Riedbach,” from the rushes through which it flows). They dig peat here, as in many of these upland bogs, and the rank vegetation with its pungent odors, sweet and savage, has not yet been mowed down—a maze of tall blue gentians and mint and mare’s-tail, and flame-like pyramids of ruby color, and meadowsweet, and the two yellows, the lusty and the frail, all tenderly confused among the mauve mist of flowering reeds. I am glad I have arrived in time to enjoy such sights; these wood-engirdled marshes have a fascination of their own. How good it is to be at home again, simmering and bubbling with contentment as you recognize the old things in their old places!

On the right flank of this owl’s den there used to be a bare patch famous for its strawberries. It is now afforested and the strawberries are gone; they have strawed—strayed—elsewhere; they follow the clearings. But that hay-hut remains, that hut of the early school, built of massive timbers between which the hay comes leaking out; the roof is green with antique moss, and sulphur-hued lichen decks its beams. The architecture of these huts has undergone a change, not for the better, of late years; they are no longer squat and solid, but lanky, flimsy, and almost ignoble of aspect, though the hay within is more securely sheltered against damp by a covering of wooden boards. It is precisely this covering which spoils their appearance....

And here at last, below the Stag’s Leap, is the source of the ruisseau des écrevisses. I knew what to expect. Those firs were cut down a good while ago, and the rivulet now wells up amid a tangle of young deciduous trees that have profited by their absence to settle down close to the brink for a season. You can hardly discover the spring for this ephemeral luxuriance; it hides itself therein like a “nymphe pudique,” as Mr. R. observed. The scene was otherwise in olden days, when hundreds of mighty firs filled up all the vale. How otherwise! Then water rilled forth among their roots, a liquid joy, in the gloom of multitudinous over-arching boughs. Many are the hours I dreamt away as a lad, all alone, at this richly romantic spot. The firs will doubtless come to their rights again, and stifle in chill and darkness these sun-loving intruders; they are already planted. Would I not wait, if I could, to see the fountain as it used to be?

A short stroll late at night, down the main road towards Bludesch, in order to enjoy the scent of the fields....

I look up at my old home; it is brilliantly illuminated; three different families, they say, are at present living there. I should not care to enter that place again. Then we pass the doctor’s house on our left. I tell Mr. R. of all the different village Æsculaps who have inhabited that abode; chiefly of the first one, the venerable Dr. Geiger with rubicund face and enormous goggles on his nose, who cured all my childish complaints by means of camomile tea. It was his unvarying remedy, his panacea; my mother assured me, long afterwards, that he would prescribe camomile tea, and nothing else, to pregnant women. He also had one grand and mysterious word which recurred forever in his conversation and was pronounced with a solemn face: Abendsexacerbation. I used to take it for abracadabra, a kind of charm, never dreaming that it meant anything. His was an original way of curing infantile headaches.

“That pain is nothing,” he would remark, “I will just take it home with me,” and therewith pretended to snatch up the headache and put it in his pocket. The pain always vanished—or ought to have done. I must have given him a little more trouble one day when, having been forbidden to touch the verdigris on certain copper pipes, I made a square meal of the lovely green stuff. It was a close shave, they told me afterwards; camomile worked wonders on that occasion, and during convalescence he told my mother that my pulse was placid like that of “an old cow,” which it still is.

While talking of close shaves, we had reached the very spot where I had another one. No fun, driving inside that family barouche with a brace of frumpy grand-aunts—no fun at all; I therefore insisted, if one must drive, on being beside the coachman and, on that particular occasion, tumbled down from my exalted perch because the horses shied at something, and landed head first on the stony road. Ah, we are close to Bludesch now, at the ancient church of St. Nicholas; and thereby hangs another tale. It used to have windows of those small, fat, round, greenish panes of hand-made glass which were common hereabouts, till a sentimental and eccentric female relation of ours took it into her head that she would like to build a house with no other glass in its windows than these “runde Scheible”; it would be rather a gloomy sort of place inside, but so picturesque, you know! The church authorities were delighted to exchange their old-fashioned panes for others of transparent glass; so were all the peasants round about; and in briefest space of time there was not a “Butrescheibe” left in the countryside; you may see one specimen of it over the old gate at Bludenz, but this was inserted only a few years ago to give the place a more time-honored appearance. Now here again, I explain, on our return—here, immediately below my old home, stood a shrine dedicated to the Virgin. Twenty years ago, during a terrific nocturnal thunderstorm, one of those gay tumults when the sky is lilac with flashes and the Cosmos seems to be definitely cracking to pieces, it was struck by lightning. Why was it shattered, while all the neighboring houses, and even that of the unbelievers above, were spared? Nobody knows to this day. All we do know is that the priest had the débris of the disaster cleared away in record time, and another and quite insignificant structure built in its stead.

Mr. R. is not greatly moved by these and other impressive memories of my past. He prefers to extract a sort of childish fun, not for the first time, out of the shape and color of my felt hat which, being of the latest London fashion, is unfamiliar to him and therefore, in his opinion, an appropriate and inexhaustible subject for laughter in season and out of season. Young people seem to be engrossed in externals of this kind, and never to realize that a joke has its limits. I can stand as much chaff as most of us, but foresee trouble ahead unless he succeeds in discovering some fresh source of mirth.

He also thinks Tiefis a pretty village, and wants to know when we are going there again.